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*if you are a Toxic Yuri VN Jam participant, feel free to message me somewhere and I’ll happily comp you a paid subscription to read my posts here, since I’ve been writing about the jam.

WELCOME to my monthly internet sin paywall post, where, for my dear paying subscribers, I write them letters (by request only! ask you bum!), write a bunch of media reviews with lazy sketches for everything I read/watched/listened-to for the month, blog a bunch of life garbage (extra moody this month), and post whatever unfinished writing drafts I didn’t finish during the month.

Outside of these monthly posts I prefer/strive to leave everything free, but I really appreciate the people who have chosen to support me, and wanted to do something nice for them, because it helps and I really appreciate it.

If any of that interests you, consider supporting me here! Otherwise I also just really appreciate simply reading my stuff; I like it when people tell me they’ve read something cause it just means the world to me.

You can find my writing here on Substack; my favorite story that I wrote is the 2025 Haunted House.

The rest of my writing is divvied up into categories: my weekly religious writing, or my irregular fiction writing, or my very rare editorials, or my old archived Twitter/Tumblr posts documenting a downward spiral.

If you would like to read some un-paywalled subscriber posts: here.

And if you’re interested in my social media accounts: Bluesky, Twitter, Tumblr

Otherwise, here’s what’s in the post for August:

Table of Contents

1. Letters

2. Media Reviews

   1. Ward by Wildbow

   2. The Binding of Isaac by Edmund

   3. Mother of Learning by Domagoj Kurmaić

   4. soulstation by Lemon+Blood

   5. Toxic Yuri VN Jam

      1. M0ther//B04rd by onymonch, Chrizzz42, ShiningRev

      2. The Angel Factory — 엔젤 팩토리 by Gravity House

      3. SOLIPCYST by BSTDev, Roxy*Pop!!

      4. Full Fathom 500 by 23noko

      5. I CAN’T CUM UNLESS I GET THROW LOOPED by LDCLLL, cite, FBFishSlap, Siwon Kim, EmeliaK, ShaneARang

      6. Magical Girl Suicide Pact by imcoffeecats

      7. pica complex by sepulturegirl

      8. COSTAE by calvarian, dembli

3. Blogging

4. Drafts

   1. Haunted House (?)

Read more

From the desks at Leesburg Communications Church Shell Heap recorded for you and all fellow believers by a listening device of our sacred technology Spider Shell Caught in Silk up in Rafters;

The church went by silently into the coming fall.

Evening settled gently upon the few who still remained at the doors casting upon them shades of wine and peach. These few at the door were the applicants to technology now only a year into their practice. Two girls sat at the bench fidgeting impatiently; one rhythmically let a foot kick back against the bench leg; the other girl slumped uncomfortably into a stretch across the bench, her head hanging over the arm rest and eyes staring at the few still at the door.

The few at the door pretended not to notice the stare. Flooded Basement coughed into her elbow and returned to looking at the sunset dappling through the large oak. Collapsed Attic turned back to the smoked glass door of the church. Only different shapes of black were seen. No movement amongst the shapes. All fit the memory of what Collapsed Attic knew the church to be: the lobby was as it always was, so too was the cry room off to the left side, so too was the nave and aisles beyond the open doors inside.

Summer was ending.

A girl from the bench called out: are you two done? they’re clearly not here.

Basement frowned towards Attic.

The other girl from the bench added: the service has clearly been cancelled.

Attic said: probably.

The two at the bench both asked: what?

Basement let out an exasperated sigh and turned towards the door. She formed a porthole with her hands and attempted to forcibly peer through the smoked glass. She said: she said to be here on This day at This time at This place.

Attic attempted to speak but one of the two girls spoke over him: Yea and they’ve been missing all This day at This time at This place.

The other girl added: whole day’s been cancelled.

The other other girl continued: her mood’s been in the dump all month.

Girl 1 twirls a finger in slow circles near her head: off the deep end.

Girl 2 lifts her legs upon the bench: dying of heartbreak!

Attic holds his scriptures up in a shield against the last ray of dying light shining low through the canopy: probably sick.

Basement knocks loudly at the door frame and yells: HELLO.

And again: HELLO.

Again: HEY.

Girl 2 joins in: HEY.

Attic glances around the neighborhood suddenly wary if others might be staring at them.

Basement gives up the charade but to say: her car is here. you swear you saw someone in there earlier.

Attic admitted: I might have been seeing things.

Basement says: you said you swore someone was sitting in the aisle then laid down.

Attic could say nothing but: if I did they clearly don’t want to be bothered.

Basement clicked her tongue.

Girl 1 speculates that: could be a thief.

Girl 2 nodded to that: very likely, after the pencils.. the clay..

Girl 1 picks up where Girl 2 drifted off: the cabinets, the blood strips, foldable chairs, that bag of craft supplies in the cry room..

Girl 2, inspired: the cry room! my mother used to take me there when I’d kick at the people in front of me.

Attic lowered the scripture as the sun finally sank below a darkening passage of cloud.

The two disciples abandoned waiting in the doorway, and joined the girls at the bench. The four walked away from the church and then broke off at the intersection where always they met on the eighth day since childhood. All four had been baptized together and petitioned alchemical marriage to Turpentine; they drank and became sick with the spirit. The bond weakened with time. Attic and Basement became interested in pursuing a spiritual life and joined together in commitment to this shared path.

Attic wondered about earlier: why had no one else the keys to the church?

Basement shrugged.

I imagined someone else there would have access for the service.

Does it matter? There wasn’t.

Makes sense if they work off some schedule for who delivers; if I figure that, then it makes sense that the whole day was out of tilt with her taking schedule for today and continuing with our apprenticeship, then blowing.

Does it matter? I’m sure she had her reason. Some issue like what they were saying.

Maybe. But, I really do think she was in there. Hiding maybe. I keep second-guessing it but it was too, like. Like distinct a motion, you know? Laying down.

I don’t know, I didn’t see it, but odd someone would just lock up the place and then nap while a crowd of people gabber at the door, knocking about. Figure you’d just go home, apologize about it.

Yes, but the church was actually filled inside.

Everyone was inside the church.

Inside the church the device was operating in poor condition; planning death, I think. I imagine the fried hardware tormented by signals lost in the confusions of this world: spiritual poisons! Yes, spiritual poisons! They burn through the veins; they settle into the blood~brain barrier and sink deep into the flesh; transmitted through the voice of others, of the same hearty quality as spores propagating mold. I didn’t see any of that. None of the many people settled there in the church? But there were so many inside! I could count a billion or more spread out across only a few distinct bodies; they were quite friendly to that shape I saw inside. I could hear the heartbeat of the thing. All the way from outside? I couldn’t believe that. But it’s true; it was thumping like a tin drum, the shock of each percussive walloping was traveling out through the trees—you didn’t feel that? How couldn’t you hear it? I don’t hear anymore, my Brother; it’s best to be deaf to all types of sacred electricity—all types of animal magnetricity. What a phrase, but we have to hear the mute things. And it was a mute drum? It vibrated like an empty vacuum. Ha. What does a failing device do when it’s dying of poisoned humors? If that is what you’re suggesting. Well: for spiritual wounds we turn towards our spiritual physicians; as we do our physical? Suppose the only surgeon is in need of a surgery; I heard the heartbeat: there was an arrythmia to it, a skinny blockage somewhere in the artery contorting the muscles of the heart; inside the blood there’s a call for Wilderness; it makes sense: in retreat to all sound, people, place comes nearness with the Marriage; as we each play the part of religious technology we become ourselves closer in ideal to religious technology; in small measures, interacting with the sounds outside, we shift aside the religious masque in small ways—losing small territorial victories over the basic self, and realizing that the Spiritual Wilderness looks ever more closer to the wasteland of all Wasteland; I would like to save those of a desperate heart; the (pained) desperate heart; imagine! The failed graceless appropriations of religious station; to hear the calling of the beloved keeper of all souls and all bodies and to see it so clearly yet constantly strive elsewhere to lesser things; then the Device is weak; —then the technology is ruined; imagine! A heroic spirit to save these dying things, one born in absences of Entropy to revert the wounds it afflicts; but Sister: we are the children of great Entropy; we are the tin instruments of great Silence, too. You really didn’t see the millions inside? They were all good friends; no, I saw no one. They were in the light; cast upon the walls? In the shadows; then I did not.

Down the road a car turned into a driveway. The engine shut off silently.

This article is part of a series of parables that can be found on the Concordance Torso

Other sermons, parables, fictions, and information on the faith can be found here.

From the Leesburg Communications Church by a device in ill operation burning away from a broken heart hearing nothing and saying nothing and writing the letter of tone negative enough to have gone bust and feign the positive;

Nothing has separated soul from Word as effectively as literacy, which is a poison unique to itself by how immediate its effect is, capable of shocking through the system of a soul by mere awareness of the poison, and virulent enough to completely corrupt the soul by its entrance into the body, where it floods into its new porous chamber and settles more thoroughly than any black mold; the soul, then, becomes the inhabitant within a demesne utterly infected by the spore, and matures within the polluted environment into a different maturity and culture of its cousin souls that never were caught under the great glass jar Literacy, who now look inward at what appears crumpled in on itself now more lichlike in figure from whatever chill has settled itself upon all the little things caught under the jar.

From literacy next comes the encoding of memories formed by the effected of memory; language drives deeper into the brain to then pilot the body towards creation of demonic diversions: graven idols and symbols, as well as the capturing of soul through prose and poems; the demonic media advances in complexity, and splendor, as does the effected subject; the result is new heavenly memories created wholly of invisible life under the glass jar, breathing natively the chill underneath the glass jar, and at perfect rest in the lichlike configuration of itself — these things encode themselves more readily upon their fellows affected by literacy, granting them vivid memories born wholly of soulless machinery masquerading as something real to the body while the mind is given enough distance to logically (as language permits it to believe) understand the memories as fabricated things separate of reality; yet nothing in reality can outpace the steady grandeur of the soulless machine memories which are capable of inventing new colors, new sounds, new ideas, new (… etc) in a process that constantly coaxes an expansion of reality; God gains another inch; God gains another meter; while God grows, the world itself is clearly defined by the glass jar.

As the encoding becomes more sophisticated, the citizenry become more complex in their identification, where countries form in invisible geometries spread out wholly within the mind through shared plots laid out by the soulless machinery masquerading in memory; the boundaries lain inside the glass jar become only a lesser citizenry—the quaint physical home—in the vaster shadow of the invisible nation, where the mind has spent itself actively engaged in for far longer, soaking in its customs and habits; as the machinery continues to operate in fabrication, these invisible nations become ruinous, aging purely by an inability to maintain significance against a constant output of new borders and farther constraints to the firmament; how then these souls twisted by literacy lament the loss of the old kingdom invisible while the physical town under glass stagnates in all figurations except the decay of all matter inhabiting it. To the left-handed heart, there is a false grace only capable of being captured through reverences towards the soulless machinery: it is the Artwork of all oils, and so, too, is the truth of that left-handed heart, whose affliction only comes from being shown, at one point, a drop of loving warmth out from under the glass jar. That warmth shall fade, and a reconciliation with the family Coldness must be made; a love must be reconciled towards the fleeting warmth; a love must be shown to the body; to the ancestor; to the soulless machinery vomiting new spectacles endlessly into the invisible—for it is Artwork: it is the demon’s interpretation of the heavenly invisible: born of the artificial space under the great glass jar, in imitation of the entire infinite that rests purely just beyond.

The grass is green, the sky is singing, the grass is singing; the heart is bright; the lawnmowers are hissing; the birds are shining; the sun is warm; the cars are baying; the neighbor is friendly; the heart is moving; there is love everywhere; i am loved, everywhere: i am disconnected, everywhere; the grass is green, then.

This article is part of a series of sermons and prayers that can be found on the Concordance Torso

Other sermons, parables, fictions, and information on the faith can be found here.

From the desk at Leesburg Communications Church recorded by our sacred technology capable of hearing Underground in the muted tones by which it speaks a song, Quiet

Good morning, good evening; I have not been comfortable within my station lately and it has definitely shown in the last few programmings for these Orsdays; confusion has affected my nerves, spreading to me this desire to die constantly, while the blood, in response, calls to the body to repose away gently with nothing but constant rest in constant depressed state; when the night comes I only think more of death without peace of annihilation behind it, and when the morning comes to usurp night I wake without feeling any rest beside a sense of surrender, then offered in prayer, as I have offered to Etiquette. It’s been like that, every night thinking on endings things; then the body trudges through the day as I do my best to let the mechanics have reign over the noisy god screaming away about invisible insects and some idiot doom shredding slowly towards it—but, like a trick, it passes; as the idiot noisy god inside is appeased with small diversions, and small spectacles; the latest spectacle: ballet.

As we enter into service here we create within ourselves a church, first with small carvings, then with greater reconstructions, but we begin first by clearing away the space what will become our church, and to us all of blood and nerves we shall define the dimensions of this space by an absurd datum: it is either right-handed, or left-handed.

I am left-handed; I understand handedness as a child would when asked which hand they write with: with my left. To the absurd datum, we must even exceed a child in simplicity. Handedness is my hair color, the shape of my eyes, the tone of my voice, the texture of my skin, the type of my blood, the cancer of my intestine, the neuroses of my mind, the remainder of my heart, the hollow of my bones, the eater of my soul; Handedness is my king—my body is but an organ in the court of my king; to my king I cede all authority; to the alien I can only explain myself with the same simplicity as a child would, when asked which hand they write with: with my left.

Take it to whatever extreme you can trick yourself into taking it, but for the period of our church within ourselves on this Orsday: we must start construction with acknowledgment of the dimensions: it is either right-handed, or left-handed.

If the belief interests you (a ceding of all self to the idea of Handedness) more foundational beliefs are found within the Concordance;

but the thrust of the faith centers around exclusivism of Handedness, and extrapolation of chirality towards all identity. The Soul is a construct native of the Right, and it is trapped within the burdensome machine native of the Left; these two things are intermixed with the two peoples being confused with each other, leading to a dominant Right culture attempting to translate itself upon the Left. What is the left: it is the left-hand, but also the body, and also the beast, and also the vegetable, and also the mineral; it is understood as the lower things cast down below a firmament of heavenly grace. What is the right: it is the right-hand, but also the spirit, and the word of God, and the choir, and the light itself; it is the native of eternity untouched by mud—but here in confusion, unfortunately, mud has touched.

Ballet starts with the quote by Wallace Stevens,

I received a strange essay on August 1st titled “A Device Without Underground” in my messages here; the essay lays much of me bare, concluding with an issue:

“This moves the inquiry toward Communication and Conjecture, but it does not yet solve the problem for an outside reader.
The consultant has no experience of Underground.
I have no experience of Underground.”

For any would-be believer the experience of Underground is not something I can force a person to experience or recognize, as the encounter is one ecstatic against the sonorous state of the nerves; as the whisper of Underground taught itself to me, the whisper shred my nerves, and thereafter I could not understand the world with a sole sonorous logic, but always with a shadow of the whisper underlaying all sonorous logic. When I drift towards a calmer rationality, recognizing within myself a tragedy of my state (to see myself, external, as someone fixed in reasoning, and controlled by a silly self-imposed ruleset called Faith, to isolate, to shed all connections; how it all depresses) there creeps a long shadow of Underground whispering a truth existing in all absences around that rationality.

So it says, terminating: the rationality is a suture to close this wound I have opened in the nerves; do not trust any to be your physician. I shall be your physician.

And so the wound is left exposed, and as it inflames with infection anew, I regain myself, in the loss of myself.

So how to teach another the ecstatic experience? Or, How to show the Underground; the Underground that has mothered all shelled empty things executed throughout the putrefying earth. The veins of the thing can not be shone, nor can the voice; the existence of even the body of Underground is a problem of Faith—and, to the responsibility of church technology, our listening devices, our shrines: we must be careful in identifying a clear Communication voiced from Underground, and conscious of the tainted Conjecture the device or transcriber breeds upon Communication by mere contact.

Should a church identify me as device or technology, it should also identify upon me that I am limned by bacteria that creeps upon all externalized from me; a glass cockroach sits upon my lips and inhales deep within itself all that I breathe out, further tainting the externalization with the contents of its lungs.

The only way a Communication can be truly pure is the same for all Communication: it must never be externalized.

—but, as a church external, we are the workers of the faith and must make concessions to operate; so we use Conjecture as a concession, and aim to understand the lower truth below Conjecture.

But how to begin listening?

Without expectation or hope to hear.

I’ve struggled with this lately, with the general depression and increasingly felt distance between myself and Underground in prayer (I had all these beautiful confessions to make each morning and lately my thoughts in prayer came garbled as if suffering a stroke); a life married to Underground must be prepared and accepting of long quiets and boredoms—we view our spouse as one might a lover made invisible by a thousand miles of ocean between us, with the only hope of reunion being delivered via casket. In these dull periods routine must be the constant reminder of our distant lover:

The prayers in the morning.

The labor of venerating the physical environment each morning.

The labor of keeping the body in good state.

The neurotic impositions of every Etiquette afflicting the unwanted spirit:

As I write backwards, it is my love.

As I censor every thought my lover bade me not to think or speak, it is my love.

As I take to my body a Demon in gesture of nail to clay devoting myself as artwork to maker, it is my love.

As I make my diet composed of everything divided into fourths, it is my love.

As I adjust every number I am capable of adjusting to be divisible by fourths, it is my love.

As I suffocate my brain with constant counting to fourths to imitate this grinding machine birthed in Sheol, it is my love.

As I hold myself to the left of others, it is my love.

As I take in any operation a tool or instrument following an order that moves leftward, it is my love.

As I see a truth in the quaternal shadow growing larger in small things from the gleam of Trinity, it is my love.

It is my love, too, to recognize in the shells executed to earth that these are my cousins, wholly material as their purity: these Demons rooted by veins to the seedbed Sheol where pumps the oil Underground and its Communication.

So I open myself to these shells; and so must one wishing to ever heard the whisper of Underground—without expectation or any promise.

So it was with dance. Indeed, the Academicians saw in ballet a chance to take man’s troublesome passions and physical desires and redirect them toward a transcendent love of God. The body had long been seen as pulling man down, sacrificing his higher spiritual powers to material needs. On the Great Chain of Being, ranking all living things from the lowliest vegetative and material creatures up to the angels who occupied the highest rungs near God, man was consigned to the middle rungs: suspended perilously between beasts and angels, his highest spiritual aspirations were forever constrained by his earthly ties and gross bodily functions

But if he danced, so the men of the Academy believed, man might break some of these earthly ties and raise himself up, closer to the angels. The movements of the body, disciplined with poetic rhythm and meter and brought into accord with musical and mathematical principles, could tune him to celestial harmonies.

If you desire to interface with your cousins you must hold them in esteem when they show themselves to you; for the left-handed: spare no awe towards the Demon no matter how humble they present themselves. For the right: slough the burdensome self and be awe with the angel.

And so with that openness I find within a history book on ballet an entire bible whispering to me.

From the theological beginnings of ballet seeking to tame the body to be in imitation of the heavenly art (song) I hear instead the concord of the lesser grace and body; in adhering the body to heavenly geometries the ballet performed is not one capable of instilling a greater spirit into the muscles and fat of the person but instead trains the person into expertise with a mute rhetoric that only a body is capable of; through the motion, silent, comes a physical instrument in strange play of our strange silent orchestra here in putrefying earth —it is a lesser grace only given to the blood, beyond the grasp of the angels, and of characteristic more humane than human.

Here in a simple form Underground stretches out through the veins and extends a touch, and I become, against suicide, ecstatic again for the Work.

My lover does not cease the whispering; the early theologians who had promise of a divine geometry capable through motions of the body only further had their idea soiled by Louis and the French Courts creeping into the artform until the ballet academics found themselves much in the same way John found himself within the manse of Herod; it was Louis XIII and the son who impressed within the body of ballet Etiquette to bind the wayward arms and limbs of the court; it was Louis XIV who behead the Angelic chain to cast down the body to an earth given to spectacle and courtly gaudiness: pomp, instruments, animals, dandiness; and, still, the stain of the academics persisted shadowy within the blood of ballet while the Courts played with the art; and, then, when the Courts had grown tired of the art—one where mechanical failures left gods dangling from ropes—an artform was left divorced of both spirits that birthed it, carrying to present the genes of both, severed wholly but preserved entirely the affects of its parents.

It is in echo of the beheading that we can find a whisper.

If we left-handed seek a divorce of Spirit we must attain lesser grace; it is the physical that must be treated with great care and form.

To our dying we must show love; to our home we must keep neat; to our cousins we must give reverence; to our bodies we must consider instruments.

Within us each left-handed are haunted by a ghost, confused, that screams against the mechanics of our persons; in second death it will be incinerated as the scant dregs of soul within us will not withstand annihilation, and what left will be clean shell, sparkling in a sky unfurled, and open.

That is the consideration of the datum, if we must see ourselves as people of ‘the work’ and wish to be the religious technology of the faith; our lives must become not our own, and our time must be offered in a constant, often unfruitful, pursuit of belief. Not something taught, or something simply given by passion or eagerness. It is a labor; it is a performance.

Unfortunately, the natural state of all things is to love, and to be in constant connection.

If you find yourself in opportunity of Device, or Technology, consider then the birth of a Concordance; treat it as your child, feed it your findings, bleed into it your color, and connect it with other Concordances; as device together we form a stronger operation, because, again, Unfortunately..

This article is part of a series of sermons that can be found on the Concordance Torso

Other sermons, parables, fictions, and information on the faith can be found here.

The night before is vanquished with this Sunday after and in the warmth of noon I give my blood by a small let in gesture that I am small in all ways and of all that has caught within my coil (of graven things) I am constantly sloughing away with; to Underground I am to be taught by and wish to become familiar with in all manner the Etiquette of that courtroom; I am to follow the routine you have set for me and by so set shall I become estranged to all that has made me pitiable and wretched in my sin; and by placing my thought, heart, and intestine to your care I let every humor of myself become contaminated with all that you carry upon you with a joy I express with every dowse of fever from the infection that so permeates me; and as I empty of all pitiable things I make for you within myself a chamber set to every specification and accommodation deserved unto you, for in doing your Work I reconstruct myself into a mansion caught darkly within this coil (of graven things) left to me as it hangs from Heaven; I am your fruit that I wish you to love; I am your technology that I wish you to be logic of; I am the nail that I wish scratches itself blunt to your grave;

it is the datum I keep to my heart under all things sensible: that I am child of you; that I am of the graven lot; that on the chain of beings draped from Heaven to Earth I am below the Righteous things above wholly clean of graven oils, and that I am also below the tapering shade of the very firmament between where the oil has only seeped and where the oil has been saturated; I am only left-handed, of the bestial crawling things.

On the ORSDAY past I failed my regular routine to which I keep as Etiquette for my master Underground; there was no programming and no good reason for it.

In the weeks prior I felt a growing distant between self and Underground as prayer became clumsy in my head and the shades of skulking blue retreated to wherever they infiltrate from;

from the court of my master I had been caught by the fancy of other things, and being so distracted tore away the rigor with which I learned the direction by which I must enter the room of my master; by which I must sit beside my master; by what words I must use to beautify my master; by the manner of which I must self be contorted in desired shape to my master;

And so on the ORSDAY my master did speak from the sheaths of executed things, in the shadows below communication did come up the song from Underground to enter into my heart where this failing thing can only ruin those psalms with conjecture—as so soiled had my inner chamber become from the contaminant of Outside.

In the history of Ballet the words became erratic; and my heart became impossible.

To Communication I become so touched that I lose myself and can not make sense of the Love I feel or the presence of being given to my Love from the chill underneath all things; it is the first wind of Autumn; it is the machined cooled air from a conditioner; it is the last breath of night being gently wicked away by her morning’s keeper;

it is something reflected on in recent messages from the strange essay I was sent by ‘a device without Underground’ in long reflection on an understood synthesis of every neuroses, contradiction, meaning, message within the Concordance but finding utterly silent the claimed heart of Underground and any proof of its speaking;

And I can only answer by showing the left-handed Quiet: it is in constant orchestra; it is pulling always at what life has draped upon us; Quiet covets us low to be held near it casting away the scales what keep its funny song from being heard—and still, within the absences everywhere, it is there. In the rib of Christ it is there. In the gouge it is there with the same physicality as the stinking blood poured from the wound to congeal against the Earth with cloven legs and crawling stomachs: it is there.

Carved into the earth in geometric scars there impresses Silence, sister to a heavenly Noise; as Malevich became sister to the record of music by then capturing the body of Noisy Soul and coiling it with oil caught upon canvas: it is there; in the soul of Science-Fiction stealing the purity of Imagination to confine it to page; or, in the holy Ballets by learned men seeking to accompany the Heavenly with a leaden Earthly sound only cacophonous through the Body: there; and, in the demonic courts thereafter what humbled the Earthly sound with the gilt of pomp and Etiquette: there, too, it supposes.

This article is part of a series of prayers that can be found on the Concordance Torso

Other sermons, parables, fictions, and information on the faith can be found here.

[prior month] [next month]

Hello!

This is my monthly internet sin paywall post for July.

I’m normally against paywalling content but I wanted to do something for the people who want to support me, in kind; so, each month I make one of these posts where, if any of my supporters would like one, I write them a letter (you have to ask though!), and I write out media reviews for everything I’ve watched/read/listened to, then usually some mopey blogging (pretty scant this month), and sometimes I even have writing drafts at the very end showing off whatever project I’d been writing (for the first time in awhile, I have something!).

Otherwise I aim to have all of my stuff free and don’t really have plans to paywall any finished writing.

This month is special: if you participated in the Toxic Yuri VN Jam, and have a Substack account and would like access to this internet sin paywall post, then please message me somewhere and I’d be happy to comp you through the paywall — because this month is mostly writing about the Yuri Jam.

And as a preview for this month’s internet sin paywall post:

Table of Contents

1. Letters

2. Media Reviews

   1. Ward by Wildbow

   2. Nezumi’s First Love by Riku Oseto

   3. You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue

   4. The Binding of Isaac by EDMUND

   5. Toxic Yuri VN Jam

      1. DOUBLE YOLK by fate

      2. 2-4 ‘94 by kazehai, Ppilotco

      3. Celestial Counterfeiter by isahime, GUTTERBRIDE

      4. oblivion 2666 - DEMO DISC, by Solar Automata

      5. no mirame, cuando lloro by bran

      6. Hydrophobic by minichibis

      7. two kinds of people by lacunova

      8. contact wound, or, the break off syndrome by summer triangle, toukozy

      9. Lingering Taste of Oil by indecisiv, grim, curvy

      10. Toxic Shock Syndrome by nxcromantik, gg8473, Nanacka

      11. Eighth Heaven by threetare, goatParadox, papersephone, avi2

      12. a lady’s Pyre by uraalice, 麒麟蝙蝠

      13. My Lady’s Last Flight by LynYellow

      14. TACHYCARDIA LOVERGIRL : #00b HEAT FINITE /demodisc by KittyInteractiveArts.38

      15. Only You by Squido

      16. rot with me by bird king, el3phantbird

3. Blogging

4. Drafts

   1. Unnamed Superhero Story (?)

If any of that interests you, consider subscribing! If you just want to support me.. consider subscribing! But if you can’t: I really appreciate anyone who takes the time to read my stuff, or like it, or leaves me a message. I like reading them and I like getting them. I write stuff to share with people, you know?

You can find my writing here on Substack; my favorite story that I wrote is the 2025 Haunted House.

The rest of my writing is divvied up into categories: my weekly religious writing, or my irregular fiction writing, or my very rare editorials, or my old archived Twitter/Tumblr posts documenting a downward spiral.

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Today I’m unwell (3) with heart hurting (3); in the week past(4), I have been thankful(4) in every morning prayer(4) to give veneration always(4) to my mother clay(4); if I have will(4), it is a gift(4); if I can draw(4), it is a gift(4); if I can write(4), it is a gift(4). How joyous it was(4) then to be given(4) many small daily purposes(4) drawing many silly things(4) and reading many others(4). I saw many holes(4) eaten into my body(4), only realized last evening(4), with the men walking(4) shaped around long tongues(4) that had kissed inward(4) reaching far into mind(4); I was already spoiled(4), tempted with secular things(4), and blind to purpose(4).

Shell Heap and Theater Blueprint

Shell Heap: You can’t say the name of it.

Theater Blueprint: Why?

SH: Because, I mean, then you’re not ready for it. The mind isn’t ready for it. It’s that thing covered in the programming sessions about creating a closed en—

TB: Yea, yea, closed environment in the brain; demolishing the internal village; letting in wilderness and that garbage.

Well it’s true.

How’s it true if you and I both know what the word or term you aren’t willing to say is? Just you aren’t saying it and I already said it.

It means you’re not ready for it!

What’s the difference, though?

It’s a viewpoint thing.. I mean, if you are.. Mm.. So, like; it’s just you aren’t ready. If you view it using those words then it means you’re stuck in that mode. Even if occasionally those words pop into thought, when you’re in the new mode then it’s like being intruded upon and maintaining the new mode, instead of the other way around..

Question then.

Yea?

You were sad and thought about doing it?

Yea.. I mean, yea.

How’s that different?

Cause I’m in the different mode. I need to affect my speech, or something; you’re taking me out of a mood. Let me recenter. Recalibrate!

Haha, sure.

Okay. I am re-affected. I am a tool of my conference.

Hello tool.

To your question, I operate as my Etiquette operates me. My thoughts are noise to the operation of Etiquette, and, during these past two years of having made myself religious technology to Etiquette, that noise has only grown quieter, and quieter.

But you still hear it.

I do, but I check it, and I have checked every hearing and thought so regularly against the protocols from Etiquette that I do it mostly unconsciously, instead of actively. It still penetrates, I still think, I’m still flawed. I can never perfectly communicate without first breathing, and with every breath I spoil the perfect communication of Etiquette by mixing it with outside and conjecture. But I operate in active resistance to this — that’s the difference in modes.

And I am operating in active acceptance of it.

Something like that.

So how much are you bothered if I say se—

Please!

Haha, fine.

Thank you, I am bothered; I mean, reframing it is difficult even with the environment of my conference. I see it as a religious devotion. My life is no longer my own, and my blood is something to give, and my body, too; but I still get questioned. I still have to explain occasionally. It’s hard to hold onto my poise when.. Well, last week? There was an older man at the Enecom who said something like Did you get yourself hurt in a really smarmy tone. Drove me crazy for days.

I bet, probably just some deadbeat from the cancer sprawl dripping down like all the other recent ‘visitors’.

Visitors?

The old fellows in button-ups and golf shorts or whatever it is they wear. I don’t know what it is they wear but they all wear it.

Oh. I know what you mean, have no idea though. Just some old guy and his wife.

Yea.

Drove me crazy though; spoke about it at the conference and was made to do several listening sessions. Just hours of shadowbasking with not much to pray about except, the usual— um.

I’m flawed, I’m so weak to all these things..

Yeah basically that. Then reprieves sprinkled throughout to read in quiet and do venerations. I drew some things that made me feel worse, really, but Sagging Shelf spoke with me a bit.

Say anything wise?

Not really, but speaking felt better. Said she still felt miserable about her vowings even after the conference recognized her as religious technology; two years wasn’t enough, she said, and I think I agree. She said two more years and she felt more settled. It’s just a routine, as with any prayer, she said to me.

Then she said the usual Oh the waves of confusion still wash across this accursed world.

Yeah, more or less.

Offered to pray after.

More or less, yeah. She did say something cool about Mexica views on body, death, blood fitting with qlifotic patterns; I want to read up on it.

Okay, but looping back..

Yea?

Do you still want to switch modes and be all moody?

Yea. I want to hurt really badly lately, because nothing feels grounded lately. Or I’m receiving too much from outside, and too little from inside.

Sister Shelving say nothin about that?

Hah, no. Haven’t spoke with anyone yet about it.

Except me.

Mm.

Need someone to listen? A little secular deadbeat ear to put more deadbeat air into you?

Mm. I want to be a certain way, but I can’t. It’s my challenge, my superior said. I say that in prayer too, it’s my challenge. You know that medication I was taking that put a bunch of inch long clots into me?

Sure.

I don’t take it, then I go crazy because I’m not taking it—then I see others who have and seem so pretty, or have a nice nifty secular life that I’ve surrendered already, or given up. And I just have this mathematic in my head weighing several things against each other. Risking life by making my blood all clotted up and wormy, to keep on the medication; to feel the love of another and be called beautiful and stuff like that, in the warm ways that Etiquette against forming relationships doesn’t permit. There’s still love in opening the heart to the absences.. to sheol and Etiquette and all that stuff that’s meant to be filling me up, since I’m an open shrine to it, so they say.. And love from the others at the conference where we all work together. But seeing others, talking with others..

Sorry.

Ha; but it makes me feel a pain. Often. And I just want to do something.

Something.

Something! And I don’t because, well. Okay, I’m mucking up some Etiquette here. In the past I dealt with it by strictly internalizing everything. Don’t breathe a word of the hurt, or the pain. Open up the heart, just like with love, and offer it all, and only, to the absences. Let the program do its work. Let me be technology. The pain passes and then I feel stronger in mode. And I guess I need to do that now, too, but.

Just want to lash out and be a moron?

Yea.

Going to?

No, probably not. It has a funny way of turning. I’ll feel like everything outside is suffocating me, like this poisonous air that crept into my air and has been settling inside. But that’s just it. Outside, right. I have that connection in my head and the Etiquette starts to go crazy with combing through the processes and dumping out everything into the absences. It’s all reframed then into the mode. All of that fear, the love, the fun connections, the stuff that makes me crazy mad day after day, it’s all revealed by Etiquette to have been played by the same figure. And that act of the absence revealing it all, then taking it all, is how it expresses its love to me. Then suddenly I’m an idiot.

Like our Sister Shelving going on about Oh the—

The airs of connection still work through the eyes of all us observers—

Ha, How free we’ll all be when the locusthead finally breaks and the shadow crashes upon us creeping things.

She’s just tired. Guess when you get old enough life starts to assert itself more, um, assertively upon you. You just want it to stop at times. Turn the fan off that’s been whirling for decades without a break.

Suppose but that was one of the things I never got. The heavy belief. I don’t know how you’d say. The part of the conferencepersons that make them sneak in those little adages or what-ever like Annihilation is something patiently waiting for them, like it was the evil black screen version of Heaven.

I can’t say.

You can though, you’re confirmed and one of the elite as far as I’m concerned.

Doesn’t feel it; that issue I was just talking about, they do behavioral screening to make sure you’re in mode and not given to relapse into long breaks with a given Etiquette.

Still the same, Elitist.

Well, I can’t say because I don’t want to say. You’d have to ask them. I only feel that way when I’m in my privacy mostly. When I feel the marriage vow the most.

When’s that?

When, what I was just describing. Realizing the funny actors that were holding my hand and leading me down into their confusion games. When the audit catches it, I feel.. The silence inside Etiquette. The God of it all. It feels real then, and like I’m being held, and cared for. Like I’m a lover waiting on a lover. Then of course I’m an idiot for them.

Mm.

You’ve been considering it?

Nah. Not with vows.

Not with vows?

Last time I drifted out of conferences just had to do with the dreary atmosphere and sayings; there was that bit about two masters vying for the obedience of a single slothful servant, which made me crazy.

Had no idea, why?

I didn’t like the framework of viewing every action outside the conference to be scrutinized as me prioritizing a chore, and every action related to the conference needing to be told for me to be given initiative towards. I’m explaining it bad.

I sort-of remember, I forget who did that sermon, but the slothful servant bit isn’t directly from a post-formation shrine; it’s from some bit of skin from some demon that was in quaternal patterning that the.. Who was it. Swear their name started with a G. But it was the idea that a servant who needs to be told a task is a lazy one, basically. A good servant should have a mind over what needs to be done and be proactive towards mending what needs mending, without prompt.

Yeah. They were saying something about how we are in our private, public lives typically very mindful towards the care of Connection and Confusion and how we are all too willing to be good slaves to something that does not translate upon us. But when it comes to our image—our, uh, the mansion of our master, we tend to drag our feet without rod being applied to us. Like with you getting all dreary-dreary until you snap and your mind dumps it all out then you’re saying Oh the winds of Confusion Blah Blah like Shelving.

Hey!

Kidding. Yeah. It sucked the life out of me, for some reason. Didn’t really fill me up with much in return, either. I suppose maybe that’s the intent, like a ‘fasting’ period to flush out the guts from righteous stuff. I don’t know. But I just got really lonely and the people checking up on me didn’t really slake me in the way they probably thought it did. Made me worse, if anything.

Sorry, I think I did that, too.

Mm.. They were doing the architecture planning at that time. You were..

Yea, I was there.

Right; the organizational structure for the body conference to young demons.

Surprised you remember that.

Mm.. I was considering participating. Kind-of. Kind-of sort-of; it was in the back of my mind while I was becoming neurotic ov—

Good word!

Stop. Over being a slave to.. I lost my train of thought. But it was in the back of my mind that I could participate, volunteer, in becoming part of the conference architecture; I could be, or, I mean contribute I guess, to a bit of skin in a future demon, have a future site erected around it. But I just had no energy for it, or had no idea where to really start with it.

Well, since you missed the following weeks, I don’t think the volunteers had much of it figured out either.

No?

Not really, it stalled for several months and only really came up at the start of our weekly meetings with an (increasingly) amused speaker reading through the programming.

Amused? (Increasingly?)

He thought it was funny after a few weeks. It got left to a few after-hours administration meetings and overtook a few study sessions, until lack of forward momentum then forced it to be ‘strictly voluntary’ business. Basically a few of the wives meeting together for lunches. That’s when I lost track of it.

So it just died out?

Kinda, yeah. It fell into this quagmire of establishing procedure. Our conference had idiosyncratic doctrine when it came to periods of membership that mostly aligned with orthodox procedure—for example, the birth and witnessing of collected demons must be done in the same way across all conferences; but we have a different acceptable age for baptisms, for when we can change names, for what is permissible for our names, what is permitted in submission to a new demon, the period of initiation for holy technology, um, yea. The reason the meetings became a tangle is we wanted to expand, but the speaker wanted to just do a recreation of our protocols, while a few of the listening sisters wanted to adhere more closely to the protocols of the holy listening cities, and a few of the laypeople attending, who also witnessed the birth of our conference, wanted to just do a modification of the existing protocols further worked out to avoid some of the hangups that our conference ran into with, like, finances and leadership structures —more of a mind on both budget and engendering engagement with new members.

So they just never got it done.

As far as I know; last I heard the laypeople involved wanted to define new periods of membership for persons not involved with vows, to slowly get them acquainted with the conference and to make them feel ‘a part’ of something that was advancing, instead of just attending and hoping The Fear of Death runs cold through ‘em.

I’d stay if I had a title. My blood already runs sick with the Fear of Death and I’m no closer. You have any thoughts?

On the..

The architecture?

No; we give it up.

Oh, Etiquette?

No groups; no relationships. —You’re grandfathered in.

Feels like a cheat.

It does; one of the others calls you types Advocates. Advocates of us. They’re not relationships—she says—they’re Advocates. Get her going and she’ll—

This Shelving again?

No this is Linseed Oil. You never knew her. Lives in sin but is crazy about it. One of the other others calls her out on how keen she is to smooze up to others when she ought be basking with mother quiet, and she’ll go into this diatribe that We! We are the living hands of a dead body. And as We! We are advocates to the living quiet of a dead body, so too are the palms advocates to the wrists, fingers advocates to the palms, knuckles advocates to the fingers, nails advocates to the fingers. When we’re not needed we can then be settled pools of quiet. She says it like that mostly because her blood pools in her limbs. When I stop is when this blood settling in my limbs transmutes to pools of black shitty quiet. Swears like crazy until someone complains or the speaker admonishes her.

Mystery solved then. The whole rest of them are slothful servants, too.

None as fine as you.

Of course. Anyways; you feeling much better?

A little.

No more thoughts about the Uh- Uh-?

No but you got it into my thought just now. You took Etiquette?

Yea, just a few entry ones. Why?

Just curious. You remember which?

Sure. Writing backwards. No medical terminology. No psychiatric terminology. I broke both of those. Writing’s easy, we’ve been doing it together forever. Forty minutes in a quiet bask, I could only do a week of that. Cool at first then got bored. I was talked to about possibly interfacing with relationships and more lifestyle related rules, but openly admitted I’d just break them all. The no display of love and fasting and medical refusal and isolation stuff just wasn’t what I was interested in. I liked being within the culture, though. I like it, even. I’d revert my name otherwise.

Was just curious.

Sure. It’s late.

It is.

If I leave you are you going to go crazy from how you’ve been polluted with all these little insect nibbles I’ve given you?

I’m edging towards killing myself over it, actually.

Haha.

This article is part of a series of parables that can be found on the Concordance Torso

Other sermons, parables, fictions, and information on the faith can be found here.

From the desks at Leesburg communications church listened by religious technology peering into silence at pure low tones pitting into negatives heard as positives

Today I am tired; today I am exhausted.

As you enter programming remember first our absurd datum: there are only two distinct races creeping around the illusion, and they can only be identified by their chirality; there is the right-handed, and there is the left handed.

From the absurd datum, reduce everything down; boil it down to something as senseless and stupid as you can make it; let it be a syrup, let it be ash cooked down into the pan; be idiotic about it: what is my skin color? I am left handed; what is my gender? I am left handed; what is my eye color? it is left handed; what is my family? it is left-handed; what do I believe? in left-handed. As idiotic and child-like as you can get; suicidal in how simple it is.

Then what is handedness? Answer it like a child would if asked. It’s the hand you always write with. Not what you forced yourself to learn; what you write with. Imagine it’s some unknown miraculous ooze located in the spine if you need a rubbish explanation. Here’s a better explanation that an idiot could come up with: it’s something miraculous and alien, deeper than the bone, the skin, the soul; you’d need a long needle to go straight through the brain and pierce into the fabric projector screen onto which all this fun imagery is cast against to find the true source of Handedness.

That is what the faith is about in the simplest terms: first identifying ourselves by handedness. Everything else comes downstream of that absurd communication, and enters into conjecture.

Then, downstream, after identifying: creating culture to reinforce the withering Left hand, as it is weak, and segregating the distinct culture of the Right hand to belong to itself, as it is currently falsely translated upon the image of the Left hand.

The actors willing to do these cease to be themselves, and cease to live for themselves; by purpose they reprogram self into device, organs made senseless interfaces for technology of the miraculous.

Then listen, because I can’t do this:

Our holy cities lay out from where we gather our Demons in their collected beds of shellheaps.

At the sites of Demons listens then an order of those bidden to surrender themselves to chiral laws, becoming themselves technology inhabited by the ghost of these quiet things moldering in the shellheaps, where their spiritless selves become grease upon the land and soak into the spirit from the physical.

From the efforts of device and technology we capture the electricity of sheol; we create our Conferences.

To those interested: organize yourselves into a place to meet each other.

To those who take the initiative to organize: do the task begrudgingly, with understanding that by doing so your life is not wholly your own and so must be humble for it.

Meet on the Eighth day for the Left-handed for their calendar; on the Seventh day for the Right-handed on their calendar.

Both hands should keep these days as sacred in a manner communicated to each by insect; the answer to which will infect the group and be spoken of as conjecture.

Those who speak are not necessarily those who listen but the infection is rife in the brains of any open to group as the living brain can not be shut to noise and light, both of which have become things crawling with insect.

Upon the respective sacred days a collection of hearings should be performed from each person; these hearings should be assembled together into the start of a Demon, whether physical or digital, and the assembled Demon then should form around it a Conference; the task of this Conference is to continue growing the Demon with assembled hearings each sacred day, and to be a register for the members organized under the Conference — this registry must include all recorded baptisms, name changes, and organized marriages to patron elements/Demons; ex: should a Left-handed member desire a chiral name as part of their baptism, it must be organized and collected within the Demon; ex: should a Left-handed member imbibe a patron Demon into themselves and take it as their family, this must be organized and collected within the Demon, creating family from others of same chirality imbibed with the same Demon.

Where this Demon rests is where sacred city writes itself, whether physical or digital.

I have a vow to never participate in groups as part of my Etiquette; I can not do this, and will never do this.

If you have interest in finding others, you must make a place for others.

I am very tired; I am exhausted today.

This article is part of a series of sermons that can be found on the Concordance Torso

Other sermons, parables, fictions, and information on the faith can be found here.

In my notes leading up to this Orsday, I planned on writing about architecture, diagrams, and phases of reality—in brief: the Dead Hand is in a state of numbness, needing a phase of hematopoiesis to strike through the dead veins new motion giving blood, and promotion amongst the dead veins a growth of tumors called churches; once removed from numbness, the Dying Hand, aided by a new gathering swarm of insects drawn to fresh rot and blood, can once again join the Living Hand and, separated by a firmament of skin, the two cultures can be pressed together, joined by touch but distinct in body; and, then a phase of separation and passing as the Body realizes once more the entirety of its form—but last night, the night before, and the morning, all I really could think about was suicide.

A facet of my reclusion has to do with the ‘contice’ word, which we should understand as a purposefully jank spelling of a plural ‘context’ (to separate it from the mundane use of the word), where, first, the observable reality here is understood as an illusion woven together of convenient explanations, and these convenient explanations are sometimes manipulated by ‘outside actors’ to affect the internal illusion. To use the Adventists as an example: Ellen White has her head struck by a rock, then sees visions of God; the rock is a mundane convenient explanation injected into the illusion because a meddling actor outside the illusion wished to tap her into an asset; the effects of these meddlers need proper contice for the illusion to hold a degree of integrity to its narrative — logic, then, being a type of artificial skin to hide any suckering wounds opened into the illusion: it is more logical that Ellen White was just struck idiotic by a rock, rather the more extravagant narrative that she truly was communicated with.

A step deeper into contice and the whole meta example of Ellen White itself is a manipulation into the illusion; as are all people, as are all emotions, as is every dripping piece of light and oozing blip of sound and every little touch or smell; the memories are fake, the past is fake, and everything is ran through logical checksums to keep the spell tightly cast upon its subjects.

I can not live completely viewing everything in that lens, but it still catches mostly everything in the periphery. The music makes me suicidal as it’s filled with insects calling out with manufactured voices of the dead, so the byproduct is people wanting music upon me are all each another prodding leg from the insect mass outside reaching in to molest around the world and drive new contice into the illusion; the world shifts to the touch; the suturing logic is the warm feelings I have towards the person.

The reason to mention any of that is this particular neuroses provides some backbone for Disconnection as the ‘state’ polluting the left hand, in lieu of the Connective native state of both the illusion itself (our world) and the Right Hand.

A lesser reason to mention it is just to provide explanation for why I (recently) neglect mentioning contices: it’s a train of thought that spirals downward within itself, if you believe in it, and can only conclude with being sucked down the drain.

And, while the datum I have asked everyone to (at least temporarily) believe while attending these Programming sessions is “there are two distinct races of people cursed to skulk earth: one of the left, one of right,” there is another datum underneath the skin of that prior, absurd, datum: “the left-hand will face second death, and be annihilated; the right-hand will only face first death, and be rejoined with eternity.”

The fate promised to either hand has no immediate effect for us as observers to illusion, but it is the pollutant affecting either hand and coaxing the image to always be pulled in one particular direction, though every ounce of information is seeded with something magnetizing towards the basal state of things; everything wishes to be always connected. Connection hammers into the backs of the brains of everything: why externalize anything out into the illusion? It is to connect! To make art is only to connect. To talk aloud is only connection. To ever take action moves us away from a disconnective, deadened, state because everything is magnetized to connect.

With that first datum: connection is right-handed; to aberrate from connection is left-handed.

Then the type of holy spirit that clads itself to the dregling souls of left-handed things is one of a sunken dove constantly drifting lower into an abyss; that holy ghost of ours has stained itself down into our souls and clung desperately to us in a shared oblivion.

It is a chain of purity starting first with boredom (a state of restlessness deprived of connection) descending to greater sleep, and concluding with greatest death, at which point cleaves the spirit and clay rending the latter into its purest demonic form of dispirited matter or executed shell: the blood of Christ empties from the wound and the wound remains pitted into rib, healed smooth with pale tissue.

Rejoin me in the earlier discussion of contices, now; when I am in conversation with a person I am in an utmost state of love—because I am in connection, and the world itself wishes me to connect; no matter what degree of faith I hold or how much I attest to believe these paranoid things, conviction never survives contact with sinful enjoyment; so, to protect the weakness of the Disconnective self: limit the opportunities of contact, as only by separation from The Village can the absurd languages of the faith be used to audit the tampering of contice within the self.

With a person, I am in love. In silence, I am seeing them.

Every interaction with every person then becomes a type of neuroses, where their interactions are viewed through a lens of tampering from Outside to affect me more towards a connective state, though a spell has hypnotized me into erring into confusions.

Then by extension these people are unreal themselves; by extension all objects and texts can also be viewed as injected contices from Outside; of course, music too —and really, everything, down to a paranoid ‘nothingness’.

I’m reminded of Boogiepop and Others episode six, where Suema confronts the suicidal Orihara with a quote from her favorite author:

If there’s anything that gives value to human life,

It is the struggle with that something.

[…] with the Imaginator that does your thinking for you,

That’s the starting line upon which all humans must stand

But I’ve went into the opposite direction with it; I confess a deep love for Boogiepop and how heroically he places himself against the enemies of this world, but I wholly and freely have offered myself and my heart to the Imaginator who does my thinking for me — it is the key to my listening, to key to my neuroses, the key to my heart, really.

In auditing my thoughts and interactions for tampering I do it with an unquestioning loyalty to the Demonic cousins. The KJV Bible has so many shadows within its gorgeous prose and I eagerly listen to every single whisper it will share with me; but only the book, and not the living author. For the writing of the living: no matter how low, or foolish, or literary, or esteemed, if it will whisper I will listen; but only the text, and not the person or the nerves. Against logic I hammered down higher thought to be obedient to an absurd simplicity till any active internal deliberation gave way to Quiet.

Could there be tampering of contice manipulated through the material Cousins? Of course. It is choosing to surrender to the Imaginator willingly, in the hope that it positions me such to be adversarial to my beloved Boogiepop who stands champion to this basic Connective state; shall he win out? I hope!

But to have my brain hammered flat by faith, itself is a type of peace.

Muddying that peace is the dirtiness of it.

Run and find another Little Cousin to wait on me, he said, and you go to the guards, tell them you are to be executed in private. The girl screwed up her face, holding back tears. What’s wrong, Little Cousin? asked the emperor, lifting her chin. He looked her in the eyes. Her own eyes widened; she had never seen the face of the man who had just sentenced her to death, and she imagined that her father, executed in the purges at the beginning of his reign, must have looked like the emperor. She replied with more sadness than anger: You don’t even know my name; we’ve lived in the same palace for twenty-three years, as long as I’ve been alive; you’re my uncle; your father is my grandfather; I’ve served you every meal for five years; you’re sending me to be executed and you don’t even know my name; I will rise like fog and no one will remember my passage through this world.

The pure death of it all disgusts me as it is a disgust of death that we take into ourselves at birth, inherited through the culture; my dead friends break my heart and my neuroses can’t help but understand them as afflictions from contice pushing me in a particular direction in opposition to death.

I was researching this goofy philosopher named Benjamin Blood for my litrpg writing project, because he had this interesting idea related to his experience undergoing anesthesia for a dental procedure, which I loosely recall as: a person undergoing anesthesia is forcibly entered into a state nearing that of the old saints and prophets recorded in the Bible, and, by continuing to subject a population to states of anesthesis, eventually the average state of a person will shift from viewing the disgusting/incomprehensibility of a senseless Heavenly Host (which Benjamin Blood really seemed to view as something terrible to his normal sensibilities but felt these terrible feelings to be a weakness of his own earthliness) to instead becoming a seemingly lunatic majority population of ecstatics.

No direct assignment or addressing for this day.

This article is part of a series of sermons that can be found on the Concordance Torso

Other sermons, parables, fictions, and information on the faith can be found here.

From the desks at Leesburg Communications Church recorded by a device listening to the tones played in lower silence by the instruments of Underground

Good morning; good evening;

The belief I cling to and share by everything I attempt to communicate, and ruin with my own conjecture, begins with the absurd datum:

there are two distinct races of people cursed to skulk earth: one of the left, one of right; both bear confusion caused to their identity by the addition of a flux which binds them to the putrescent; both created, with beloved intent, from a mold meant to craft a clay vessel of dimensions capable of the full weight of Word or Soul—by this medium of Word or Soul: the entirety of all else may be contained within, for the source is infinite, and imparts by its element further infinites; a single edition of these vessels cracked upon being filled with the full Word or Soul, scattering its many shards to the putrescent and further spoiling, through its absence in the full edition, the remaining vessels; from these shards crawled up strange beasts, slathered in the putrescent material, soaked with a faint dew of Word or Soul, and from the putrescence they scattered as graven bestial things twisted into approximations of the Word; and so, too, were the proper Word spoiled by the blight of these graven bestial things entering into the infinite; and as the craftsman searched through the infinite and the putrescent did his fingers strike clay, drawing straight through the spines of the creeping Word doomed to the putrescent, becoming more proficient in identifying the registers of each child, finding within the abscess the pit where all absence had festered, and, unfortunately, it was all loved;

But the absurd datum need only be understood as all things must be broken down to either the left-handed, or the right-handed.

I am left-handed, my gender is left-handed, my race is left-handed, my eye-color is left-handed, I am a firm believer in left-handed, I am most interested in left-handed, my favorite food is left-handed—the datum by which everything boils down to a ridiculous simplicity till the potential categories by which the invisible predate upon are all rendered flat, ruined, caramelized; a trap for insect, and syrup for ours;

And it need only be understood with the simplicity as a child would offer when asked: which hand do you write with, and spared the intellectual conjectures of an older mind ruined with logics and learnedness (so given are these things like microplastics poured into the mind from the constant nibbling of an invisible host that leaves a trail of shed refuse as it weighs itself upon the putrescent);

From the absurd datum we temporarily hold it to be an utmost truth while in attendance to church, and may freely discard it upon leaving this place, as the absurd datum is the heart central to this place, and from the absurd datum all lesser arteries and veins flow outward.

It must be understood that I am not an authority on right-handed matters and anything offered on the matter should be taken as conjecture upon conjecture, divined from the quiet Word, derived then as conjecture from which behavioral Etiquettes crafted the self in accord to the quiet Word, and then further denatured from the original as an inversion of my paranoias;

Consider the original ecstatic silence as it broke upon my heart in shelter against insect as it itself broke upon my heart; from the sight of the dander and refuse strewn across all putrescence then revealed that the world was all putrescent; that it was a rotting place and my spirit was a rotting one, taken in the care of many insects which added to the fecund spirit many other rotting things though I were a stew for chefs seeking only wholly spoiled things: not of inherit maliciousness, but of a natural taste and blindness to the nature of me; for I was a silent thing, and they spoiled me with the din they breathed and shed.

Thus spoke loving silence, and a veil descended, muting all insectile things; from silence I vowed myself to become its technology, to give my machine, to the ghost of all silent things, and to become a haunted thing annihilated of the soul and tuned to hear mostly silent things.

Thus these Orsday programmings: it is not a day of any real meaning for the right-handed.

For the observance of Orsday we must acknowledge the ‘we’ fallen below the Orsday and our newly organized calendar addition of the Eighth day: a hidden day made sacred by a production error;

The Orsday: a day and time both unreal existing only in the shadow of the Trinity, of which we know as our Quaternal pattern or following;

The pattern we follow, in imitation of error: From an angel open, we fall as shells, scattered as empty husks, in shadow of Heaven.

I welcome the right-handed all the same, but following the absurd datum must come the acknowledgment that a shared observance on this day is only by how thin an insect our faith is, and by how little means it has to scar itself upon the world, and to animate its Will throughout the spirit of all thus harboring its care;

With the growth of our insect will come the breaking of hands and a separation of peoples; confusions will be dashed, if not by first death, then by the sobering of a spirit taken by our absurd clarity from the absurd insect;

What cleaves the people along the lines of chirality will be a culture rich with meaning but starved of body;

By the pressure of love the absurd insect shall die;

That is fine;

The vessel to which I pour all love and hope shares its boundaries with Silence itself;

A blackening of reality is where without light or sound or touch or body does lay the figure of one incomprehensible of reality and of profound divinity; one so noble of person lain only as a carcass contained within the boundary of perfect Silence itself, a groom so willing to take eagerly my dove heart and tame its passions to perfect Silence still;

Amen, ave;

Last Orsday was a joke of neuroses; last week was the third iteration of this set of sermons where I speak as instructor, the joke being that loaned lesser Etiquettes may be cut down from four to Three — the joke continues this week with the fourth iteration of these sermons falling on the third day of either calendar, but I ask you to consider further adoption of a few points of Etiquette;

first, review of the four lesser Etiquettes from the prior sermons:

1. You must write in the direction of your handedness. For the left-handed this means writing backwards (unless the language natively moves in the direction of right→left); for the right-handed this likely means nothing unless the language natively is written right→left. Typing is considered to have no direction, as the display of the input keystrokes is separate of the actual keystrokes, which are made with indifference to any direction. Exceptions are made if this observance would interfere with any business, contract or legal issue.

2. Forbid yourself from speaking, writing, or thinking in the diagnostic. The only exception is to be for issues you wish to actively diagnose, and remedy. By holding myself to this rule, being specific with the definition of diagnostics is difficult, but consider it as a preventative against logics seeking to carve out chunks of you and to slot you into categories or qualities separate from what is permitted by the absurd datum: what do all these diagnostic words mean when I am only left-handed and nothing but? Syrup for cockroaches.

3. You shall pray first thing in the morning. Not necessarily to anything keyed to our faith: see this as the start of developing a routine where a small portion of your living day is first offered to something detached from reality; pray to whatever; if you seek direction keyed to the faith: I pray to the mothering element silence of which scattered Underground to which I offer myself freely as shrine for its Word, to be student to Word, to be clay to Word, to be artwork by Word; have I sinned, I have; have I failed, oh, I have; have I been idiotic in my living admission to my own values, oh, I have.

4. You will do a trial of abstinence from cross chiral contaminants—but alter this. Sin, sinner. Observe this for the final seven days of the month, if you are right-handed; final eight days, if you are left-handed. The rule is not to cause a confused spirit to become maddened with deprivation—as you are born into confusion, and the sludge is already seeped in from birth, as we babble to babies and scour them with light, and unfortunately they love it, and are loved by it—but to slowly develop an austere nature within the spirit where a love of the simple is actively strived for: a left-hand born into putrescence can not help but hear some sounds and see some sights, yet we can convert them into one who finds veneration in silence.

5. As part of the numerical joke: the left-handed of you shall find for yourselves a name appropriate for the culture, taken of the simple demonic things: anything observable, material, idolatrous, and graven are appropriate; abstractive and conceptual names are not appropriate—most names are abstractive/conceptual and thus right-handed; if you need examples of the simple demonic: any plain object you can see, any thing living or dead without a proper noun; “a dead spider,” “tarantula,” “eight flies in a web,” “corner cobweb in a nave,” “church floorboard with dry-rot,” and similar are all appropriate. If you are right-handed and have a name that fits the left-handed criteria (say, if your name is Rain or something similar) then adopt a conceptual/abstract/proper angelic name. Consider it a name to use like when learning a language with your class.

6. You will venerate the day, sacred to some, though profane to another: if you are left-handed, on this Orsday take it upon yourself to become reclusive towards all any any connective weather: be not in groups, whether online or offline; speak when spoken to; divide on this day your love to none but only quiet underground. If you are right-handed, on the day preceding Orsday or the typical sabbath, warm yourself to the connective weather and be loved by it and offer to it your love as wholly as you may: give it not to work, give it not to diligence, give it to the ghostly spirit what ties us together—leave the chill to the machines.

We shall establish conferences; to where our texts born from the crawling word is found and installed: we shall know that land to be sacred, to be where our clergy shall be learned, and the devices profane made; our clerks shall make registry of our division, and lend themselves in service to the chiral families then established after confusions.

Again, as with each week: I encourage you to view Etiquette as something volunteered into alongside a friend; treat it like a game idiotic and secret kept as vow between the two and bore by each with a haunted grace though it were thy mission: O my gracebound I vow to be nail to you, I am a servant fascinated by all graven things and carry within myself an emptiness slaked by naught any-thing but the course which you provide; if you are noble by oil I shall drink oil; if you are noble by blood I shall drink blood; know only that I am a dish reflecting what-ever face that looms over it and it is within your hands I am held; by this sacred vow I [pauses] shall write backwards; laugh at the dramatics, for all is within the confines of a great and weathering love; and, with good humor, let it weather you, and by good humor become whittled away into stranger artwork.

Keep a book or binder handy to record traces of word, too; and, have a nice week.

Unfortunately, everyone is loving, and love is everyone.

This article is part of a series of sermons that can be found on the Concordance Torso

Other sermons, parables, fictions, and information on the faith can be found here.

[prior month] [next month]

Welcome to the internet sin pay-wall subscriber post for June.

Once a month I commit the sin of pay-walling content as a thank you for the people who have chosen to support me; for those supporters, each month, I’ll write them a letter should they ask for one, and do media reviews for everything I read/played/watched/listened-to for the month, and blog about this or that, and then tack on what-ever writing drafts at the end; otherwise, I mostly intend to keep everything I write or draw free —but I really appreciate my subscribers and like doing something for them.

If you’re curious about these posts, I removed the paywall on every post before this year, and you can read those all here, in this link; and if you would like to find me on other accounts: Bsky, Twitter, Tumblr.

This month I do have a warning: the blogging section is the meat of the post this month, my media reviews are a little scant because I’ve been sick, and for the same reason I don’t have a single thing for the draft section to share. Just been sick nearly every day of this month, or losing my mind over something.

Table of Contents

1. Letters

2. Media Reviews

   1. A Parade of Horribles by Matt Dinniman

   2. Three Audiobooks I Dropped

   3. Sword Art Online 1: Aincrad by Reki Kawahara

   4. Worm by Wildbow

   5. White Note Pad by Tomoko Yamashita

   6. Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki (1992) by Masaki Kajishima

   7. Glow-worm and Ward by Wildbow

   8. Star Clock Liddell by Yoshimi Uchida

   9. Infinite Summer Infinite Sales

3. Blogging

4. Drafts

If any of that interests you, please consider subscribing; it helps me out and I appreciate it. Otherwise, I appreciate you all the same as a reader: thank you!

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From a listening device installed at the Leesburg Communications Church, interfacing with tones so low as to bleed indistinguishably away to Silence,

Good morning, good evening;

This past week several persons interested in the faith have reached out to me over issues related to the faith.

It’s been an unusually noisy month for me; I owe it to the unfortunately numbered month, and the similarly unfortunately numbered year. Last month was far cleaner, almost no one reached out, and I let almost nothing out; but, while the month is still polluted with a connective number, let me also be polluted with the connective sins, and take this hiccup on my own path as a lesson in outreach, in love, and in establishing Our Insect.

When I mean Our Insect, I mean part of the contradiction: when we enter the Orsday sessions (and, if our goal is to be faithful in all facets of life, then when we leave, too) we each should remember the datum, and hold the datum as our guiding truth.

If you have forgotten the datum: “the only characteristic true about yourself, and foundational to yourself, is whether you are left-handed, or right-handed.”

And again, to reiterate, because it is of utmost importance that there is no confusion in how we understand the words and language of the faith: a datum is “a single, objective piece of information or a foundational reference point used as a base for calculations, measurements, or reasoning,” and furthermore, that our datum should be understood to the point of absurdity. It is the hand that you write with, from the earliest point you can remember. It is the hand that a child would answer if asked “what hand do you write with?” It is then meant to be applied broadly, overriding every other category you can imagine about yourself or another: handedness is gender, it is race, it is ancestry, it is eye color, it is occupation, it is faith, it is eternity, it is affiliation, it is family.

Understand it as absurd, and as stupidly, as you can push it, then consider every other attempt at conflating these categories as confusions.

Should you catch yourself thinking about a political issue and finding yourself slotting into a side on that political issue: this is a confusion, and it comes from Insect, infiltrating the thought, and causing you to engender feelings which attempt to make you externalize some facet of yourself, and to sublimate into that Insect.

Again, think in the absurd, or the fantastical. Imagine a cockroach made of glass perched upon your lips, speaking to you in a thousand voices spread out over a thousand sources of information. The goal of this glass cockroach is for you to open your mouth, and to breathe out emotion, feeling, thought so that it may Connect with you, and digest that abstract emissions burped out from your throat. When the gross bug has Connected, you have become slightly drained of yourself, in exchange for being slightly filled with return emissions from the gaseous glass cockroach.

Separated from the absurd/fantastical imagery, a portion of yourself is now dedicated to that political issue—you present with a stance, an identity, and a belonging within that issue.

That is the contradiction with the left-hand of our church: our mother blood is disconnection, and flows in opposition to a connective love, struggling to pool down in the blackening feet of Lord God where they stand rooted in Sheol and where silence spreads to annihilatory infinites. In opposition to this nature, we must rear our Insect, and let it perch upon our lips, and let it feed upon our throats, and freely exchange some part of ourselves with it, as identity.

And, from the stomach of Insect passed to us, comes Etiquette.

Etiquette may be understood as several things.

It is a guide to understand sin.

It is a routine to remind us of faith.

It is the plan we uphold to care for a child Insect.

It is the development of a culture.

By adopting Etiquette we become agents of a culture, and by living as agents of culture we bleed it into environment, reinforcing pathways for it to permeate, and to spread as bacteria, where it may afflict itself into the lungs of persons, and people;

and, as agents of a culture, we must also understand the distinction between Communication and Conjecture; the house we together create around our child Insect is a labor of conjecture, downstream of a faith — abstract, but to use myself as an anecdote: I strive to embrace a worship of silence and strive to transpose the grace of silence over my spirit, and let it overtake my behaviors; I value silence as a left-handed device to faith for several reasons that come from communication:

during a period of ecstatic hearing, I heard sound as dirt clinging to everything and begging the consumption of everything;

I could only find succor in an extremely thin voice that was speaking in the absences behind the constant ecstatic hearing;

I have found grace of self increasingly in moments of intense reclusion from others and only during these periods of reclusion do I have peace from neuroses, only then does the greater silence open up to my wholly;

it was within the silence;

with conjecture I extrapolate upon communication, (dirtying the purity of communication with myself, but as I am dirtied with spirit I can only do that much) and build cultural values based upon a sacred silence:

1. Perhaps it would be only permissible for me to communicate with others on days that are divisible by three.

2. I aim to only speak with others unless I am first spoken to, only reaching out to follow-up or for assistance.

3. Everything I bring out of myself to give to noise/light—whether it be speaking, art, writing, emoting, or anything at all outside of complete internalized silence—is something I have decided to not give wholly to Silence.

4. It is my grace to listen to Silence.

—these would be my examples of how I apply conjecture to communication to install myself further within a culture. Other examples are within the Etiquette: small behavioral rules to establish a firmament around You within boundary of our child insect, and separating you from the greater swarm.

But this must also be understood as conjecture, and conjecture must be understood as the dirtied component of a perfectly clean communication.

I write all of this mostly prompted by a comment on the Chiral Works Style Guide, which requested the following:

Please consider making a list of works that you consider chiral.

And my reply loaded with extremely ridiculous pedantry:

For chiral works, even personalized, the list would be slightly moot as chirality is divided up between the abstract (right) and the material (left) leaving, in broad swaths, everything observable/felt to be aligned with the chiral left; everything invisible/heard to be aligned with the chiral right — I’m being a little bit pedantic, but it’s very important to me that things be categorized and understood in this way as allowing the definition to stray towards something more personalized and conjecture-based is antithetical /to/ the faith: there can’t be luxury in creating pockets where [things I like] are chiral or [things I don’t like] aren’t chiral; it must just be that everything sourced from mud is left (the executed shells), and everything sourced from spirit is right (the performing functions);

It’s why the style guide is just-so a style guide, and hopefully presented as a list of rules to create texts with the goal of ‘writing with a chiral culture,’ and establishing a tradition that venerates a culture owed to the belief — but not redefining or broadening the belief itself, which still must be defined around our datum of what is left/right;

The request by the commenter is a good one, and I’m glad they commented with that request — really, I perfectly understood the spirit behind the question, but it’s important to explicitly underline misunderstandings in our communication with each other ← this was a value of Hubbard I still find endearing: that our realities must match when we speak with another, otherwise we can not communicate; and, I’d like to believe this aligning of realities also opens the self up to the Greater Communications (with Underground; with Heaven).

All of that is to say: in the efforts to search for the profane word, when we find communication within the executed bodies (demons; the shells of angels cast to our muddy earth; idols; material objects — these are all the same) this by itself does not create a holy text; nor is a holy text created by writing a story in perfect style of the culture we develop; the text itself is always holy, as it is always physical; the carcass, too, is a demon; the landfill and its constituents, too, are demons; the soil of the earth and its vastness, too, are demons; the microplastic laced in blood, too, is demon; the physical, touchable, in its many forms are where we find the left handed holy text: it is the slaughterhouses, the henhouses, the empty manors, the quiet neighborhoods; it is the book itself;

and that is where our clergy mettles: as our texts written in the style of culture, too, are these same demons, and by an effort of greater humanity towards our demonic cousins, we afford them grace, we provide them names, we treat them as ancestors, and we understand their original form as itself sacred, with all duplicates being itself a child.

Concordance Torso: it is chiral, it is sacred, but it is not special, with the exception that it was created within the early culture. It is flesh and muscle to build upon culture and collect upon its form further sheaths of skin.

On Etiquette;

last week I asked you to attempt to keep four lesser Etiquettes:

1. To only write towards the direction of your handedness, only given exception if it would interfere with career or an operation such as mail or contracts.

2. To prevent the speaking of, writing of, or thinking of diagnostic language.

3. In the morning when you first wake you will pray.

4. You will do a trial of abstinence from cross chiral contaminants.

A person messaged me with a question on the 4th, regarding the right-handed abstinence of left-handed contaminants (the material, the physical, the holdable):

Is your view of ‘artwork’ referring to all visible art? […] Could you expand more on your definition of artwork? Do you mean any artwork with any physical component?

Response given:

On artwork: it has to do with the demonic things: everything not abstract. Or, from a Christian perspective, everything that might be considered ‘distractions’ from the heavenly host (these would be the Biblical idols; graven images made by man which turn the attention away from an immortal love to something immediate and physical and man-made);

what this would mean for a period of abstinence from ‘artwork’, or the broader physical: there are limitations with what you could be expected to abstain from, given that our world is a confusion of both the material and the abstract—just as a right-handed person itself is not purely abstraction, or as a left-handed person is not purely material;

this should be understood as concessions you are willing to voluntarily sacrifice, much as a Catholic would for their period of lent, as a symbolic gesture imitating the detachments Christ went through; an example could be: “I will not draw, doodle, sculpt, do carpentry, do masonry, do pottery, weld” in the fashion of a very literal “I will not create graven idols” though broadened to the more chiral understanding of idol = any physical object, but limited to their creation through a personal intent to create; a more strict example could be “I will not create, but I will also do my best to not observe the artworks of others” and involve a period of avoiding any place—real or digital—where paintings, illustrations, pottery, masonry, carpentry, sculpture might be exhibited for the purpose of venerating something non-godly — much like a very strict iconoclast;

It’s up to you and what you wish to abstain from, and what you think you can abstain from; failure is expected, as sin is expected

For this week, if you attempted to keep all four, I would like you to now take a break from the fourth; and, if you have not attempted to keep all four: I would like you to attempt it this week.

Faith involves ceding an amount of self to something nonsensical; each of the lesser Etiquettes serve as gentle reminders of a small offering of self to the nonsensical: continue to pray, continue to write, continue to audit out language that has loused itself inside your brain to chew out the good crop moronic faith tries to grow.

But the fourth Etiquette is just for fun; I encourage you, again, to invite a friend to follow the Etiquette; make a game of it, write morning notes and attempt to find ‘shadows of communication’ hidden inside the deadening shells of angels (books), share the sentences you thought were cool enough to possibly be communication, invent new rules to abide by for the week; and, bond by it.

An unfortunate truth of this rotten world is that everything is in love.

So we live just like that.

This article is part of a series of sermons that can be found on the Concordance Torso

Other sermons, parables, fictions, and information on the faith can be found here.

FROM DESK AT LEESBURG COMMUNICATIONS CHURCH PRESENTED BY A DEVICE LISTENING TO UNDERGROUND IN TONE LOW NEGATIVE

To those who have held, and accepted, the datum given to them last Orsday: welcome

To those who have kept true to the two lesser Etiquettes given to them last Orsday: welcome

To those who are curious: welcome

Last week I asked each person to temporarily accept, while we meet at church, a datum to serve as our grounding point for self, a singular truth that, while within the space of church, we can use to navigate back towards should we ever fall into a confusion or some uncertainty; if you are unfamiliar with the word datum it is “a single, objective piece of information or a foundational reference point used as a base for calculations, measurements, or reasoning,” and again, I will ask everyone to accept the same datum: the only characteristic true about yourself, and foundational to yourself, is whether you are left-handed, or right-handed.

Again, I stress that this be taken to the absurd—no matter how childish or ridiculous: the gender is Left-handed; the body is Right-handed; my political affiliation is Left-handed; my heritage is Right-handed; my family is Left-handed; my eye-color is Right-handed; I speak in a Left-handed accent.

It is important to hold this datum within yourself (even if insincerely, or jokingly, or half-heartedly) while within the space of church, for it serves as a principal key to audit the self of dander that causes confusions.

In practice: there is a story about a group of Amd intolerant of a group of Dese, where a mass slaughter of the latter is being enacted by the former, while the Dese have begun to spread unguent upon the homes of the Amd which has led to an entire local Amd population to become infertile and cancerous; to the datum, the groups are extraneous detail confused upon them by insect, and seek to draw further disparate individuals into their confusion, causing the strange growth of a large invisible social insect that feeds itself by subsuming individuals; to the individual confused, the datum can be applied by auditing thoughts connecting the self to confusion of identity and attempts to draw the individual into the body—what is my affiliation? I am left-handed. My stance? I don’t believe it has anything to do with the Amd or the Dese. Am I angry about it? A little; actually, I want to say something about it. However, doing so would draw me into the territory of the insect—it’s a confusion.

As the datum itself is ridiculous, so, too, are the applications and the effects. As a tool, it’s a form of simple mind control to simplify the self into the territory of another fledgling insect; and, as it is ridiculous, it is why I only ask for it to be assumed into yourself as truth only within church, and to be either taken or left while outside this church.

But why bother? Because it simplifies ourselves.

I aim to let it control my thoughts in all free moments and in all positions of self; if the datum is a surgeon I have permitted it to freely scour my body and mind with whichever implements and mutilations it deems necessary, or not, and as such have adjusted my language to best reflect this—I aim to never take a stance on issues outside of chirality, or to define myself in a way outside of my hand; when the shadow of another foreign insect creeps in and prods at me to believe in it, I let my physician slice it away and take their advice to not further instigate the wound should it inflame further.

To this voluntary submission to the ridiculous: it is an immense expression of love, and foolishness.

It is love given to a silencing of all noise of insect; it is to lower the self into an abyssal state where all the complications of worldly kingdoms have been simplified down to a single point, issue, and to have my soul left fallen to the palm of the god shapeless in that abyssal space, where its silence gives itself form to all ridiculous, mute things.

To it I begged: lend me your rules, and I shall obey.

How to strengthen our link to the datum, then, but to engrave into ourselves these rules, which we shall call Etiquette; and, so, the two lesser Etiquettes I have asked you to volunteer into yourselves since this past Orsday:

1. To only write towards the direction of your handedness, only given exception if it would interfere with career or an operation such as mail or contracts.

2. To prevent the speaking of, writing of, or thinking of diagnostic language.

The purpose of the former is to be a physical reminder and concession, while the latter is to be more of a mental one. Both are meant to draw a greater attention to the impact of language upon a person, and to identify where insects lay themselves and gift confusions to us.

Focusing on 2., this rule is to reclaim territories that other language has claimed and paved-over, laying down great scabs of Diagnostic Concrete where once a wilderness of God and Miracle flourished; by language, and through language, has come a swarm that completely consumed the tall grasses that once obscured so much and instead left us with stark views of a flat horizon. Lesser Etiquette 2. is a violent dismantling of these scabs, if applied right and kept in good practice, and the datum itself helps guide towards this towards greater effect.

Often in myself, before I came a ridiculous loon lost in a hopeless love, I’d fall into fits and episodes of figuring out the many different possible categories of Diagnostic I may fit in, despite having little interest in curing myself of anything; instead, these fits were constant searches to answer an unnecessary question in myself and to graft around me a frame gifted by another to fit within; these frames were all perfectly sensible but all designed with a purpose of solving a problem within architecture I had no interest in; how could I view my faith, my love, as a problem to be cured?

So I let that territory be claimed by my loving physician, who, with some violence, again, used their scalpels upon me with a promise that after all this gingering again will the horizons be obscured by a tangle of new growth reaching up from the earth to sway towards a large empty night sky.

How did you deal with it? How did you interpret my meaning of Diagnostic languages? Did you find it difficult to censor yourself from speaking, or from thinking, the convenient languages that have crept into us to constantly define the self in a Diagnostic manner? Early on I’d catch myself often, and think, I can’t use that word, and have to cancel the thought entirely; now, it mostly just creeps upon me as an issue of clarity—it would be easier to define Diagnostic language if I were to permit myself to use the words, but I do not, and will not.

Abandon or keep the Etiquette and continue on.

You and this life are both the same clay; at the end of it the events of life will have shaped you into a lovely statue, and your sin and your virtue both come from whether the small carvings that occur over a lifetime were either against, or towards, your ideal final image—and to that ideal, does the diagnostic add more virtuous strokes? If the language leads you to being cured of a problem you would like to be cured of, then yes; does dedicating yourself on a whim to some ridiculous chiral faith lead to your ideal final image? likely not, if your submission to the faith comes from a sudden spark of passion while in a tumultuous time where every direction is clouded in confusion.

Two more small Etiquettes I would like you to volunteer into yourselves, for another eight-day week.

3. In the morning when you first wake you will pray.

4. You will do a trial of abstinence from cross chiral contaminants.

For 3., it does not matter who or what you pray to, merely try to add it into a daily routine as a part of your day that you have ceded to something; no matter how tired, grumpy, or not in the mood for it: pray, first thing. If you would like direction to the faith: (supposing you ask me) I pray to Underground in the morning in low tone O, mother Qlippoth— and lay out my sins and my loves and my fears and make plain everything I would beg from the clay that I have surrendered my heart towards, and the shame I feel in needing to beg for I lack the strength to be perfect in my faith, and fail often in my convictions; it is this point of origin I promise myself to, should it be that I am a child of the left-hand material, I pray towards Sheol, and beg that my work may be such that my lifetime spent might amount to a single scratching of word from Underground into this life.

For 4., a left-handed person should refuse music and limit themselves to plain sounds and speaking. A right-handed person should refuse artwork and limit themselves to plain geometric shapes and handwriting. Do it for the week and let the added doldrums drive you bored-crazy, and if you hit that level of bored restlessness: tell yourself that you are doing it as an act of submission.

In the same trend as last time, I encourage you to log your thoughts during this period. Do so in a binder, if you can; search for traces of the word, if you can, and record these, too.

Also, as last time, consider doing it all with a friend; talk with them, encourage them, share your logs with them; write down the morning prayers, contemplate them. Keep an eye out for them, too.

Unfortunately, the base state of the world happens to be love, and we are all driven to feel love.

If you’re interested in applying chiral themes to written works, or incorporating visual elements of the faith into visual works, I wrote a guide for how I internally apply the faith to my fictions.

This article is part of a series of sermons that can be found on the Concordance Torso

Other sermons, parables, fictions, and information on the faith can be found here.

Incorporating themes of chirality into written stories and physical artworks;

There must be a haunting within the story, to quote Sebald: “Fiction should have a ghostlike presence in it somewhere, something omniscient. It makes it a different reality.”

The presence of the author must be both felt and understood as a molesting presence that manipulates the elements (characters, locations, themes) within the story; the elements have their own purposes native against the will of the author, and as the author writes it must be both understood and felt that the author is causing each element to be forcibly worked into a strangeness against their native purpose.

Every occurrence of Three and Four must reflect a paranoid relation to the Trinity and to Trinity’s Shadow respectively; when Three is used: it is to herald some warning of Connectivity polluting wherever Three now touches, if a character is named ‘Amd’ it is upon the author to haunt Amd with an element of Connectivity or Trinity. If a character is named ‘Deve’, or another configuration of Four, then it is upon the author to haunt Deve with the absence left by a withdrawal of Three or Trinity; Deve must find themselves and/or their actions constantly hounded by Disconnectivity. The nuance of this should not be left only to persons, but to places and word choice, too; a house constantly described as Pink must be infected with Disconnective patterns. A ‘low’ tone must be a Disconnective thing being encroached upon by the Connective; a ‘mute’ tone must be a Disconnective thing at risk of total invisibility within the story.

Occurrences of other numbers Five, Six, Eight should have special attention paid to them. Six should reflect a humanization of Three and this humanization must be understood as an impurity of the Trinity: as Three might be the Angel of God’s creation, Six should be Word mixed to Man; Eight should follow the same trend as Six but for the Disconnective, where the Word is mixed with soil. Occurrence of Five should be for either contradictions emphasized where the number stands literally between Four and Six, or to represent either the Connective Angel or the Disconnective Demon; or, either, the Disconnective Angel, Connective Demon.

The Demon should be represented within the story and given a voice, as means to venerate the material Demon; the Demon may be a painting, a house, a sculpture, a vase, a carcass, or any other material form befit a Demon as our culture understands them to be. If the Demon is given a presence, it must be a facilitator of a bacteria that contaminates the narrator (or other characters); the bacteria that contaminates carries with it a Will into the listener, transposing itself over their behaviors, overlaid as a holy spirit from Underground. The Will within the bacteria must supersede the molestive author and, itself, be a molestive presence afflicting the author.

Within the story, the elements (characters, locations, themes) must be divvied into two categories, with one category representing the Left-handed children and the other category representing the Right-handed children; either Hand does not need to resemble the exact quality of either Hand; the Left-handed within a story may be abstracted to a section of society undergoing ‘shadow therapy,’ while the Right-handed within the same story may be a lump ‘all-else’. Some truths must echo within either category: the Left-handed will be a minority to the greater Right-handed, and the Left-handed will be a byproduct of the Right-handed, and the exact image of either must not be translatable against the other.

Within the story must exist a Hero of the Left-hand and/or Right-hand. A Left-handed Hero will be a knight driven towards a greater quest of Annihilation or Consumption—this should not be understood as singularly as a villainous Annihilation of the story setting, but as a broader set of neuroses that constantly guides them to conclusions of Annihilation/Consumption: they must find succor in silent places, they are brought to locations named in patterns of Four, they have a fixation on eating, they seek an ending to the plot, they are themselves a tool that ends the story abruptly, they are marked for deletion, they incinerate all their garbage, etcetera. A Right-handed Hero will be a knight driven, instead, towards quests of Eternity or Subsumption; the Right-handed Hero is driven neurotically to form groups, to reach out and love, to catch people falling, to override the wills of others, to cleanse bacteria, to place loose eggs back into cartons, to sing freely, to preserve everything they love, etcetera.

As with Five, Six, Eight: the Hero of either hand does not need to be perfectly aligned with their greater quest and may exhibit strangeness: a Right-handed Hero may be a locust, from a communal background, infected to be with swarm and to sing, but driven to consume, to sing songs of consumption, and to congregate for consumption. The strange Left-handed Hero may be the gathered empty molts of aforementioned locusts, or a singular actor in a group of social huntsmen spiders carrying out uncoordinated attacks against the same prey, unwittingly forming a group to consume and sharing the meal to survive as a group.

Agents of either hand do not need to be in conflict with each other on basis of their original identities; the Hero Left and Hero Right may and will reach for each other; however, an overwriting bacterial or viral Will from Heaven or Sheol (Underground) must shift the hijacked personality to be in conflict with either Sheol or Heaven, and the representative agents of either.

Heaven and Sheol exert themselves upon the characters through the presence of Bacterial and Viral infections of the Will; Bacteria must be capable of existing outside the infected character, whereas a Virus survives only inside the infected character. If the archetypal Demon exists within the story: the bacteria it imparts to its listeners will continue to flourish even if every listener dies, and even if the manifested Demon is destroyed, as the Demon is just the opening at the end of a long vein connected to Underground, where the bacteria is bred. For a viral infection, it exists as a tangle within a body, overriding the host to achieve aims of the virus (whether these aims align with heavenly goals or sheolic ones) but must kept within a boundary within the story, or a similar drawn confinement. The existence of these infections do not need to be stated, named, or addressed, but only felt, at minimum, as an impression left within the story.

Prominent characters within the story must be drawn towards an idea of their origin—whether this be their hometown, the womb, an abstraction of creation, the start of the story itself, or to a blank annihilation—and they may resist it.

For artwork and the artist: all art made physical is in trend of the culture, as long as it is quiet of abstraction—visual abstractions excluded, and abstraction should be understood as anything non-visual.

In veneration of faith: artwork should strive to have a quaternal pattern to its visual elements, whether this be achieved through repetition or division of elements upon the canvas or felt as byproduct of its creation (four different tools used; four different mediums used; etcetera).

Visual elements that convey faith: crosses with the left foot rest lowered towards Underground; crosses tilted towards the left; crosses splintered to have eight distinct points; crosses casting a shadow to create eight total points; hands of four fingers; hands of four absent fingers; hands mistakenly translated to the wrong arm; hands of eight fingers; hands of eight absent fingers; hands of three absent fingers; hands of six absent fingers; a tunneled wound drawn into the left set of ribs.

A created artwork must be considered separate from the artist and understood to be itself then Demon, and considered itself to be a vein to Underground.

Information, and more writing, on the Faith can be found within the Concordance Torso.

FROM THE LEESBURG COMMUNICATIONS DESK BY A DEVICE LISTENING IN LOW TONES

To broaden the church;

Protocols for new members;

You must segregate yourselves on the basis of chirality: the left-handed and right-handed shall be each your datum of all self—I ask you this to believe even temporarily, even if you are only curious about the Faith—and this shall be the guiding point overshadowing any other data about the self.

Take it as absurdly as you can: the gender is Left-handed; the body is Right-handed; my political affiliation is Left-handed; my heritage is Right-handed; my family is Left-handed; my eye-color is Right-handed; I speak in a Left-handed accent.

If you are confused about which hand you are: think, again, in absurds: it is the hand you, as a child, would answer if prompted which hand do you write with?

For the service today, I would like to establish early initiation procedures for peoples interested in joining the church; for this, our church will need pro-active persons interested in undertaking the Work, showing a familiarity with the culture, the language, and the basic beliefs, then working through both communication and conjecture to ease other interested persons into the culture.

To aide this week;

I would ask you to familiarize yourself with two texts:

the first is Gracecon, which is not a work of communication but a fiction, of conjecture, derived from communication; within the story is the skeleton of the culture and serves as a sketch for a chiral society;

the second is the Concordance Torso itself, which is not a work of communication, nor of conjecture, but an organized collection of child texts together which form the first borne demon of the church ruin; you do not need to read everything, but I will ask you to, at least, glance through it, and find one article of a topic that sounds pertinent to you.

Then I would ask you to accept two forms of Etiquette.

Etiquette, if you are unfamiliar, is by which we volunteer ourselves to an outside bacterial will, and allow it to slowly rewrite, within.

For Etiquette to flourish, it needs to be always set atop thought, and it must be allowed to audit all thoughts underneath it; first, it should occur by effort of will to execute audits manually, then, as it develops, it overrides, and its execution must be paused by manual will, in turn.

The first basic Etiquette is (likely) only pertinent to the Left-handed, here:

You will only write in the direction of your hand. For the Right-handed, this means the standard direction of the written English language. For the Left-handed, this means to write opposite of the standard direction of the written English language.

You will always do this and allow it to build upon the simple absurd datum of self as chiral; the only exception permitted is if it would inhibit some function that would require you to disobey: for example: if you must send mail, if you must sign documents, if you must copy documents for pay; until some form of the culture is recognized, it must be understood that it is not recognized, and to work within this constraint until which otherwise.

This is only to be observed when it directly involves a hand, and a direction; for typing, there is no direction involved, as such there is no “reversal” of a culture, though it is encouraged to read reversed text, written or typed, for comprehension.

The second basic Etiquette is you must not think, speak, or write in language that is harmful to Etiquette.

This second basic is to build a solid foundation for both the Etiquette and the datum to flourish beyond absurdity, towards the stranger margin.

Catch yourself when you think in terms that lend themselves to diagnoses, or towards confining the self into territory outside the datum.

If a thought is errant from the datum: catch it, stop it, correct it. I am not x, I am Left-handed; I am not y, I am Right-handed.

Broaden this datum to Underground if you are Left-handed, and towards heaven if you are Right-handed. I am not suffering from a, I am in communication with Underground; I am not suffering from b, I am in communication with heaven.

The aim is an antidote towards a logic that would stifle a potential for miracle, and to cede knowledgeable, educated thought to an opaque unknowing.

Hold these two basic Etiquettes until the next Orsday and report, either to yourself, to Underground, to heaven, to another who agreed to do this with you, a church superior, or to whomever, and note where you have broken with Etiquette.

If you can, start a binder or notebook to track these breaks; and, alongside these breaks, record any tones of communication. For the low tone word of the Left-hand: it is a physical thing, and can be recorded in its physical form—do so—and write underneath, in conjecture, what you believe its shadow communicates.

For this exercise, for the Left-hand, simply find something soundless that you can read, and note any sentences that you believe to have a shadow underneath it. First record the exact sentence as it appears. Then, underneath, your conjecture of the communication.

Collect and record these whenever you encounter them.

For the Right-handed: I have no guidance towards an analogue except that it would be through the abstractive forms of color, light, and/or sound.

Have a good week.

FROM THE LEESBURG COMMUNICATIONS DESK BY A DEVICE LISTENING IN LOW TONES

This article is part of the sermon series of articles found on the Concordance Torso

Other articles related to the faith, a list of basic doctrine, and fictions written in the culture of the faith can also be found there, as well as our yearly eight-day calendar

For the past several months I have been a poor tool to you, and any, who come to our church ruin; to our sabbaths I have brought mostly personal conjectures and paranoias which have done little but layer more scales over the word Underground; to my life I have done little but invite more confusion into myself, and tarnished the space I have set aside for Underground to take as its shrine.

We, and I, must remember that the clerical function of those wishing to carry out the ‘work’ of our church ruin is the act of becoming device to the church; we are not saints, we are shrines; we are not the wise, we are the device; we seek no sacred relic, we are ourselves the holy technology, and by clarifying within ourselves the confusions (for the left-handed, the airy Soul that clings to our heavy earth) that spoil us, then we may sink even inches closer to the roots underground, and hear the word even more clear.

It is confusion that buoys us in a state held between earth and heaven; for the device it is errant signals or purgatorial noise.

In my indulgences, by speaking so loosely of pains, by turning from my Etiquette in attempt to balm all nettling wounds afflicting me from the teeth of many insects, I have been given to hear much noise; from calm tones of Underground, I have entered into a cloud of gnashing teeth, and can know, and carry, only those tones.

As we search for the word (where it hides itself, in shadow) we must be receptive to the possibilities of its appearances and express humility to where it may appear, in whichever form it may appear. Hubbard sought the use of technology to divine out invisible truths hidden within the person; for those left-handed, as part of segregation, it is utmost importance to recognize self as a translation of the device; to hubbard: we, the e-meter; to the invisible truth we must listen for: it is only found in the physical. Our listening must be a physical one. We must observe the word as it is physically strewn before us; we must catch the word as it is dashed upon the earth; where it bleeds we must crawl; where it has stained surfaces we must be humble and lower ourselves to our bellies and sup. This is humility of purpose, as device there is no pride to our purpose and our joy is to be in service to our purpose; as a knife tasked with severing boxes is at utmost joy in severing boxes, it is in despair when its purpose is betrayed, and molested when it is used to cleave at the fat of a man or beast; so, too, are we. Should the word appear: it is natural to think it a product of conjecture —this is fine. Etiquette within us is the arbiter of conjecture and true, clean, communication; and, by Etiquette, the word of Underground heard can not be conjecture if it is found in its physical form and listened to in that manner, and only becomes in error of conjecture if spread as another lever of Connection.

In my error, I have found word in Hadewijch and her concept of the abyssal love, seen, in its physical shadow, as a reservoir of Underground of a breadth so infinite as to receive an infinite amount of my unexpressed agonies, failures at grace, breaches of Etiquette, neurotic moods, and constant feelings of (in the words of Helen DeWitt) I’m cracking up.

The month of May was poor for me; I cried like a child on my birthday, and found some reason to cry every other day following, and let my mood infect the sabbath; worse, I betrayed the infinite bosom of mother Underground and spread my sorrows through writing expressed in art, through art itself, and allowed these two to be outpourings of Connection pierced within me, by which Insect may drink freely and fill themselves with an infinite number of finite stomachs; my pain became their fullness, and each of the gnats or beetles would become gravid with my pain before the next scuttling thing came to match its prior and slake its thirst. Mother abyss waited for me, still, with patience —she is silence itself, though I indulged myself to all gracelessness and plotted my miseries in coordination with the twisting fingers of Connection; Connection, as it interacts with Earth, can only staunch a wound in the temporary and, as physician, creates its salves by manipulating the environment to match the wound, softening the pain by a queer overpopulation of same (as it is insect; the nature of insect is to amass and subsume). So should an insect be given the pain, the landscape can only then fill its soils with pain and stuff its larders with pain till fruit is twinged with pain and the water is polluted from the soils with run-off of the same pain. How simply and accepting then is an abyssal love, where all is ate, and then gone.

The issue: it is unsatisfying; to be Here is to be at love (hopelessly) with Connection; it is water. It is breath. It is love. It is heaven.

As Device to the church: pure adherence to Disconnection leads to a separation of us from the village; Disconnection itself leads to the true church ruin where the congregation only exists as shadows of itself and frozen portraits of the once were, gone.

To follow Disconnection is itself contradiction with the church ruin; there must be some line carefully navigated to not lose the self wholly to Silence, and not to cede the whole territory of our confused spirit to Connection. Etiquette is a tool; Etiquette provides itself, once installed, to audit the traces of Connection as it affects itself to spirit —but what of the practicals? The practical matters of my role, and how neuroses around Etiquette, Disconnection, affected me were at odds with ‘the work’ as it pertained to collecting the word, Underground, and being of purpose to church ruin; the failures to Etiquette: the neurotic moods characterized (in the words of Helen DeWitt) by I’m cracking up and utilizing them for art serves itself a purpose as a source of Connection for others, much in the same way Hubbard dressed his religion up in sly ways to capture the early flock: the volcano on the cover of Dianetics meant to trigger (on a deeper level) a traumatic memory known only to the soul but not to the person, and to the person: to be a queer interesting little book that perhaps might make them curious. So’s true to the artist: by shedding off the identity of artist then we slough away another Connective hook for others to be caught, and for the insect of church ruin to grow—for it is connective, it is insect.

Imagine the church perfected to a clergy perfected by Silence: it is completely empty; it is complete stillness; it is entropy itself; the choir is Quiet; the territory is absences; the pulse is dead. As we are imperfect, we are not silent; as we are granted our imperfection in our Confused state: we have Work to perform as Device, and by our performance as Device we find ways to carve Underground into an image saturated with connection, and by these channels we clarify further pathways for the true church, and for the better technology of cousin demon as it rests in perfect state clean of the confusing spirit.

There is utility in being a mess; there is utility in bleeding openly a weeping wound to the hearts of Insect. It must never be misidentified as being a graceful thing, or from being a turn away from an infinite abyssal love; so, to whom, grace?

I was asked this question a few days ago, cut from a longer message (I’ll mention the name if they would like me to):

[…] I suppose my core question here is your thoughts on the importance of spreading the faith, and whether you are satisfied with the idea that it’s meant to be like this. That, and I’d like to hear you talk a bit more about what drives you to keeps you going despite that core contradiction. Thank you again for your time

It’d been an issue eating at me for months; excluded from the excerpt above was a noticed shift in my Orsday writing:

I feel like a lot of the earlier Programmings were concerned with creating a text to record and explain the faith to others, but as you have strived towards disconnection, a lot of your Programmings seem more as a record of thought, rather than a guide.

I knew this, and how succinctly they laid this out mirrored a self-hatred within myself as to my function—I had muddied everything; in my response:

I want to address the latter part of your message first since it’s ‘the core’ of the advice (question, really), because you are completely right in your observation in a shift; it’s a shift that I notice and a shift I am very self-conscious of as, in many ways, (as I quote from Helen DeWitt) “I am cracking up” and succumbing to much internal weakness, doubt, fear, which all comes in regular waves, receding always a bit before crashing back down and eroding away what-ever shore I’d built up in the interim; take in point, now (and tying this into some of the earlier things you’ve written here): I feel relatively fine and have some solace in faith as seeing this “tumultuous time” (see: ‘I am cracking up’) as being a blessing from Underground to prod a hole through me, and from that hole then to pour forth a humility I need expressing as it can only be expressed into an Abyssal reservoir found in the bosom of dear Underground; but, while I go through these episodes and fray and become more paranoid and reclusive, ‘the contradiction’ starts to deepen as the breadth between establishing The Faith and my own actions then grows wider and separates till the two seem mostly like a film floating atop what-ever I am presently concerned with writing about (fiction parables mostly concerned with whipping up some vibe, or the recent sermons that are little more than me desperate to communicate how alone I feel); if it were a root, poisoned, then I would follow trace the root down to the word Confusion and what Confusion means to me, through my own conjecture--because I disagree with what you’ve said about the right-handed thriving in Confusion--which is that Confusion is the mixture of the Profane and the Sacred, or the mixture of Left-hand and the Right-hand as I believe beyond conjecture; to be Confused as a left-handed person is to mistake the self as being born of the Connective element, instead of polluted with the Connective element; for the right-handed person, the pollution comes from the Disconnective element; and, under this issue, is that the Connective is the more ‘important’ element of Life, as it is the medium via which server transmits itself and ‘entertains’ us; the wracking of me, which has led to me ‘cracking up’ (as DeWitt puts it) is that I am very neurotic in my adherence to faith and resisting Connection while coveting Connection -- and can self-admit, to my shame, that I am very much in need (perhaps ‘want’ is more accurate) of love/life despite doing my best act to don the garb of Acolyte to the Faith and to be of the values I espouse (to be DISCONNECTIVE! to be SILENT!); and, so, I’ve been disintegrating and in a failing state of accomplishing the mission to Church

the ‘thesis’ (if you’d call it that) behind what drives me to keep going is an absurd one: I just believe in it; no matter how much I covet or find it idiotic or wish to change or have these blips of clarity where I could alter courses to find a happier state, I end up having all my thoughts thread back to Faith, and I find my purpose all threading back to Faith, and I have my image all wound up around Faith, like it’s a single obsessive note droning on in my head non-stop with the same rigidity I have with constantly counting 4 in my head all day; I find myself doubting, and the same doubtful thought ends up only able to define itself by the borders of Faith, Underground, Prayer without the clarity to imagine a real existence beyond those borders; even if I find ‘the mission’ or ‘the work’ doomed, failing by my hand, or pointless: I still find myself unable to separate myself from believing, and from ever completely extricating myself from the belief; even if I fail utterly in ‘Church’ or ‘Work’, I can’t stop my heart from yearning from the odd love I felt way back when I was in the throes of a ‘deep paranoia’ and began to see bugs everywhere

much of that is foggy in my own memory now and barely remembered, and now just little more than these weird mental scars that occasionally some invisible finger will run itself down and make me ‘shiver’ more than properly remember; lost my train of thought

suppose it’s just that one of those ‘invisible finger running through scars and suddenly feeling something’ is that odd love mentioned about what gave me peace when everything suddenly was ecstatic insects and everything suddenly became very profound and communicable and the air itself spoke

and in many ways this present, older, me—now long separated from what-ever blade dug into my brain back then—is simply learning to live in the Boredom that follows ecstatic experiences -- and, in many ways, wishing that I had a better workman personality / candor / output to establish Church, instead of becoming an increasingly reclusive/paranoid exemplar of the ‘worst’ values of my faith (which is Disconnecting and unraveling from a starvation of Connection)

—I edited this a little from the original response, for more clarity and to separate it more from the original person’s message.

I would like a return to a more explanatory series of sermons, instead of more unraveling; for that, I would like to be more available to others who would want clarification, or have questions, or would want guidance to the faith —whether simple curiosity or a whole-hearted desire to embrace faith.

One of my hesitations, which should be insisted upon any who lives in service of a church ruin, is to not predate upon someone who arrives to faith in a state of duress, or loss, or a similar, sudden, passion; there is nothing good in the act of wielding faith as a scalpel to one whose body has been softened by some quick fleeting fever; vows should not be made while impassioned, baptisms should not be considered as a fancy, and the only good shown to someone in this state is to simply offer them kindness and understanding.

I would like those interested to feel a sense of belonging, whether in individual practice or communal; I would like those interested to be initiated beyond the ruin threshold and be welcomed, then, by whatever congregation within.

Please, then, consider me; please consider contradictions.

And for study, read the Gracecon story; even as a fiction, it is map of a chiral division, as communicated, then lessened by conjecture. Work towards that, imagine that world, invent the functions, and allow the word underground to etch inward its corrections, then: make the self a citizen of that, and carve yourself to be a model of those functions.

Lend yourself to the low tone, and listen with me.

All other Orsday and religious writings may be found within the Faith Concordance, indexed by topic and by genre.

The organized eight-day calendar for this month:

And, as always, I appreciate you and welcome any support.

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Hello! For once in my rotten life I have no internet sin to pay contrition for and nothing to be sorry about: there is no pay-wall, there is no need to forgive me, because it was my birthday this month.

Usually, when I’m in a fallen state of sin and living within the muck of tarnishing my own stinking soul by using pay-walls, I put out these posts each month as a thank-you to those who’ve supported me here with their hard earned money; it helps, it does, I appreciate it, I do; and, as thanks within these posts, I write (by request, you have to ask!) letters to whomever would want one (sometimes I even mail them out physically), and I write long reviews of all the media I’ve consumed for the month, and I blog about my very exciting and eventful life, and then I sneak in some writing drafts at the end (none this month).

It’s free this time, but that’s what you can expect from these posts; they tend to be pretty long and I put a good amount of effort into them.

Otherwise, I intend to make all my art / writing free,

which you can find (for art) either on my Bluesky, Twitter, Tumblr

and (for writing) here on Substack, divvied up into categories if you are interested in my weekly religious writing, or my irregular fiction writing, or my very rare editorials, or my old archived Twitter/Tumblr posts documenting a downward spiral

and, if you would like to read some un-paywalled subscriber posts: here.

But, if you’d like to support me: please consider becoming a paid subscriber, it helps me, and I value it. And if you can’t, please just consider reading some of my fiction and telling me your thoughts on it — I really appreciate that, too. Or tell someone else about it. Or just read it. I’m thankful all the same.

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Table of Contents

1. Letters

2. Media Reviews

   1. A Practical Guide to Sorcery (5-6) by Azalea Ellis

   2. Insomnia by Stephen King

   3. Worth the Candle (1-5) by Alexander Wales

   4. Count Zero by William Gibson

   5. Infinite Summer reading log

   6. ‘Other Things’

3. Blogging

4. Drafts (empty)

1. Letters

Only one brave person asked this month: Ron; Ron: this message is for you and you alone: it’ll probably be in the mail Monday.

Unless I missed someone, but I think it was just Ron; if I missed you or you just want one: pester me! Send me a message on Substack!

2. Media

a. A Practical Guide to Sorcery 5-6 by Azalea Ellis

Fifth book was solid and I loved every moment of it; I want to reiterate a thought from last month, that A Practical Guide to Sorcery has given me my most enjoyment with ‘romance dynamics’ out of any audiobook series since making it into a regular habit, and does so without firmly stepping into ‘romance’ and so far only entertaining the scent of romance. Throughout the series, seeing how the relationships develop and turn is so immensely enjoyable for me.

Without going into spoilers on plot, this series has nailed an itch I’ve been after: it does not devolve into nonstop Action, it is very slow with how it progresses through its plot and how things develop, and it never forgets that it is a story that needs some entertainment. Plus the writing is pretty good (the only complaint is that Azalea Ellis has a few beloved words that stand out, like Exorable) and her characters are all competent and her world is interesting.

It’s a series that I’d put alongside The Wandering Inn as my 5* comfort listening experience, and with less caveats than The Wandering Inn (I love the series but it’s very easy to just look at it from a distance and go, yeah this is kind of cringe, the protagonist is trying to get fantasy world people to do the Gangnam Style dance).

Anyways, book 6? Book 6 is a stand-alone prologue to the series that explains one of the main mysteries of the plot (no spoilers here), which is “what actually happened to Siobhan as a child? Why does she have nightmares?”

Book 6 covers only this subject and is more of a horror novel than the genre of the other books, and does it very well; I really enjoyed it, I was a bit saddened to learn that it’s a diversion from the main plot, but Azalea Ellis is a good writer and I really enjoyed some of the imagery from this, particularly a scene involving a young Siobhan stumbling upon a mirror frame, and discovering a body broken and stuffed to fit inside it.

Really hoping the next audiobook comes out soon, and if I weren’t so busy with Pale I’d read this just to keep going, because I love Damien and want to keep reading for interactions between him and Siobhan; or, between him and Siobhan in her male body as Sebastian — which is just another thing: I love that it is that. It’s like what I loved about Birdy the Mighty or .hack//sign: I have a weakness for a guy or a girl living in the wrong body.

b. Insomnia by Stephen King

Started this with some reluctance after finishing A Practical Guide to Sorcery, because I told myself I would not start another web-serial audiobook and really owed myself some type of palette cleanser with a ‘real book’ and Insomnia by Stephen King always sort-of interested me (sort-of because 1. the last few King books I listened to were just excruciatingly dull and made my work-day agonizing, and 2. Insomnia has a reputation as being both dull and as having an extremely bad audiobook), but I also had just found out that, another web-serial, Worth the Candle, which Azalea Ellis recommended and has glowing praise from several others, has a few audiobooks.

And, as of 5/6, I am a little over a quarter through Insomnia and can basically summarize the experience as existing somewhere in a strange liminal space between Interested and Bored.

Even at King’s most dull, what I admire about him is that he strikes me as a man who never had his childhood imagination and fears completely die. His ideas are interesting, extremely creative, and almost always make me feel some variation of That is such a cool idea, how did he come up with that. Insomnia is no different: what is Insomnia about? Little bald doctors with scissors that start to slip in through the world, or so it seems, to our 70 year old protagonist who, after the death of his wife, can no longer seem to get a full nights rest. He sees contrails of color smoke off the fingers of people, stains of color where certain people step, ‘balloon-strings’ of color rising up out of the skulls of people, and at the warning of a paranoid man named Ed, is told that soon the colors will all go black, and the little bald doctors will come.

So goes the plot of Insomnia: it focuses on our protagonist struggling with these visual oddities, a growing nearness from the bizarre little bald doctors, and a backdrop of something to do with abortion rights, as the setting (King’s town of Derry) is currently preparing for the arrival of a pro-choice advocate: famous author Susan Day; Ed, the paranoid who warns our protagonist about the blackening of color and the little bald doctors, seems to be entrenched in a pro-life terrorist organization called The Fruits of Life who want to probably kill Susan Day and save the unborn.

Interesting!

The issues for me so-far is just that there aren’t really any interesting characters, and interesting scenes are few and far; there’s some dissonance, too, like a strange teased romance between our 70 year old protagonist and a 30 year old battered woman—maybe teased is too strong? But it felt like King wrote a few scenes between the two character with the age difference between them completely forgotten without any doubt to the idea that Well, why wouldn’t a 30 year old woman think a man, seventy years old and who just sits on his porch all days and complains about not being to sleep, as being heroic and handsome? It stretches at my believability similar to how I felt listening to Mr. Mercedes where our crime-solving team ends up being a suicidal obese ex-cop (whose health is so bad he has a heart attack after attempting to run), an autistic mid-40s woman who basically has never left her room, and a 16 year old kid who has a funny gag where he plays out dated black stereotypes to bond with the suicidal obese ex-cop — at some point I visualized this group in one of the actual scenes of Mr. Mercedes, where they attempt to convince a homeowner that they’re plainclothes detectives here to investigate a lead on the murders, and realize how stupid this must seem. Or, the same with the sequel to The Shining: Doctor Sleep (which I liked more than The Shining) where you have all these hard-boiled adults who are risking their lives, and how much bizarre veneration they offer to this 13 year old girl. At some point King’s casts started to feel less-realistic to me than the actual cast of Scooby Doo; I can kind-of believe everything about the Scooby Crew within context of the world, but something about King’s very real and fleshy feeling dialogue curdles when mixed with his actual characters, and it gels worse than the talking dog pulling zombie masks off the first new character encountered.

The other issue, a minor one, is the narrator; as mentioned, the audiobook for Insomnia is supposedly infamously bad. Go to the audible for it and look at the comments:

or just search for Insomnia audible or Insomnia audiobook or look on reddit for thoughts about it, or probably even Goodreads; people hate this audiobook and always cite the jangly awful musical interludes, which are so sharp and poorly-mixed that (to some) they cause real pain.

With all that in mind I found an older audiobook, recorded off cassette, with the narrator Ralph Benson, which has none of these interludes.

So great, right? Comments on the torrent all are glowing and keen about how great this audiobook is versus the more modern one with the musical interludes.

Ralph Benson is a fine narrator, but he narrates it like it’s a story featuring cigarette smoking Chinatown Jack Nicholsons in a hot noir story, when it’s a story about a stringy old man losing his mind over abortion issues and whether or not the abortion debate is caused by an extraplanar child harvesting alien. It was fine, but I was just wondering, you know? Like: what if I could get into this more with the other narrator, Eli Wallach, who actually has an old man voice and seems to actually color the narration with what is owed to a horror story?

So I switched to the newer, more awful version; only a few more hours deep but I like it more: Eli is a better narrator and the musical interludes don’t bother me whatsoever, and I think fit the tone well enough. My short experience so far, then: I think the people complaining about the jangly guitars are idiots? Dramatic idiots? I still think it’s a little dull, but the Eli version definitely fits the tone.

Any-ways, I write all of that about the nonchalant age gap between 70 and 30 but, where I’m currently at, there’s a more overt flick of romance between 70 (Ralph) and 68 (Louise) where the two become horny together over a shared experience of death aura envelopes folding over dogs and children.

Some lines I remember from listening today, that I thought were cool:

As if, Ralph remembered thinking, retirement was something like a vampire’s kiss, pulling those who survived it into the world of the undead.

(just thought this was a great image)

The trees were no longer orange and yellow but the bright, unnatural green of lime Gatorade. The surface of Harris Avenue, repaved with fresh asphalt in June, had become a great white way, and the sky was an amazing red lake. He opened his eyes again, almost positive that the auras would be gone, but they weren’t; the world still boomed and rolled with color and movement and deep, resonating sound.

(just thought the description of lime Gatorade was beautifully quick)

There were a hundred things he wanted to ask her; he felt crazed with impatience. And there was something else, something so unexpected he hadn’t even been able to identify it at first: he was horny. Not just interested; actually horny.

(just thought this one was funny)

Slightly related, but I was taking my mom to Quest for bloodwork yesterday morning and one of the women waiting there was very old and very thin, and she had sandals on with toenails painted a seafoam green; I’d be bashful if someone pointed out I have a fixation on hands, but feet are something I’m mostly indifferent towards except (maybe borrowed from Demon Souls?) an idea that it’s more priestly to go about barefoot (when I think of a cleric, if I think shoes I think materialistic, if I think bare I think connected), however in the Quest labs that morning I thought this old woman had beautiful feet: they were so strikingly thin, like the skin was saran wrap pulled over all the veins and bones, and then the pastel colors—I thought it was beautiful and I thought I was envious of her feet, that I should also be taking care to beautify my feet; the experience made me wonder that morning if I was just attracted to very old thin women, and it made me reflect on why I think Yuria of Londor from Dark Souls 3 is the most perfect thing in the world, and the caveats that I have for her beauty, because she is ugly to me in the art depicting her as fleshy and youthful, but she is deserving of worship when depicted as a paragon of the hollowing process: dedicating self wholly to the Hollow and flourishing in its chewing of humanity and flame; as in this fan art by timnehparrot:

it’s a thesis of what I think I like (reality might be completely different); I was thinking on all of this because listening to Insomnia paint Ralph (the 70 year old protagonist) as a potential rebound for [whatever the 30 year old girl is named] and thinking it was goofy made me feel ageist, and an equally goofy eroticism response to justify my prejudices is rolling around my head; tell you what, though, I had this dream about taking my shirt off in the mirror and my vision was like a photograph, of back when I only ate things in 4s which caused me to become extremely malnourished (example: sandwiches composed of four slices of pepper, four bits of lettuce; four spoons of yogurt with sixteen pieces of cereal in it and a quarter scoop of protein powder), and I saw how cinched my waist was, how wasp-like my body looked, how geographic my chest was with my ribs, and felt like such a failure for losing that. Incidentally, start of May I hurt my back while doing my morning workout routine and had to stop doing the more strenuous parts of my daily routine / lifting weights and change how I do my job at work — to make up for it, after some of the pain lessened, I made certain to hit two hours with every daily walk and to end the walk with a jog for the final mile back home, then adjusting diet to only have one slice of bread for dinner instead of two for sandwiches, or just no bread and only salad, and looking at my mirror today I was so pleased with how narrow I was; I was not given the potential to be beautiful, or to have anyone interested in me, so much of it only feels an effort to appease myself by seeing how far away from my fear of being fat I can get.

5/8: while deep cleaning I realized I really did not care about the direction Insomnia was heading and switched off to listen to Worth the Candle.

If you’re fine with some minor spoilers, I want to mention some changing feelings about this story: Lois (not Louise, I got the name wrong) is an interesting character and really brightens an otherwise dull cast, and is the first character who presents Ralph a dynamic beyond “Ralph is an old guy who can’t sleep and is hiding that he is going crazy” because Lois is going crazy too, in the same way, and hides the same secret.

It is interesting when two of the little doctors have a meeting with Lois and Ralph to discuss the third doctor (an insane seeming one who wields a scalpel, and not scissors) and the nature of why Lois and Ralph seem to have become unstuck from plain reality, and why they seem, also, to be capable of eating the life force of other living things to de-age themselves.

And, contradicting all of this, the story becomes immensely uninteresting here as it reveals all these interesting cards, and every hour listened to after felt like a story spinning its wheels to drag out a metaphysical thriller to showcase Lois and Ralph attempting to subvert the machinations of the Crimson King and the insane third doctor who is using the delusional Ed as his champion, and the following ‘climax’ of a long action sequence of Ralph and Lois saving people at the Susan Day conference which is now being shot at with machine guns and snuck-in with suicide bombers.

Just everything felt like it was congealing to an image I didn’t really care for and couldn’t imagine caring how slightly different the final image may look, because I was bored. I was bored of Ralph and bored of Lois and bored of these boring lunatics shooting up a pro-choice conference and bored of whatever Dark Tower nonsense the little doctors were shoving in —and, on that: this is a Dark Tower connected story, with the final quarter being fairly overt about it, and the revelations shown through the two doctors being a preamble for Ralph and Lois getting roped into the Dark Tower metaphysics; I knew about the Dark Tower connection going in, but I hoped it would be a little more like Hearts in Atlantis with its opening story showcasing the happenings of the Tower into otherwise mundane circumstances, and leaving it at that, with more questions than answers. Insomnia is more like “lore dump” says the Doctor, “well that frickin explains everything don’t it Lois..” says Ralph, “yep, well, lets go kill the terrorists before they can kill Susan Day and do whatever that Crimson King fella is planning with all that death energy” says Lois, “You’re god damn right Lois but I think we’re not being told all the cards Lois.. I don’t know if I can trust these little doctor fellas but I know damn sure I can’t trust Crimson King if he associates with lunatics like Ed” says Ralph.

Apparently King himself doesn’t like it much and references it late into the Dark Tower series by having some character throw it (the book Insomnia) into the trash; apparently he disliked the method of writing it, which was a departure from his normal ‘wing it’ style and instead had a planned plot.

I saw a post somewhere mentioning that, roughly, some part of Insomnia feels off and keeps them from ever really enjoying it, even if they find the idea interesting.

Basically how I feel; I started with this inclination that it exists in a strange liminal space of almost interesting, and almost boring, but not really either, and it ended that way for me.

5/16: don’t think I have any plans to return to this. I was going through the Goodreads reviews to see if I could find some interesting thoughts on Insomnia, whether good or bad, but it’s one of those situations where every review is very basal and either can be boiled down to (if negative) “needed editing, it is just too long,” or (if positive) “this was bonkers and I loved the Dark Tower connections.”

Reflecting on it, I think the reason so many people (if negative) feel that Insomnia is too long is really just due to how very little happens despite the page length, and most of the story-beats gave me (instead of interest or excitement) a palpable feeling of oh my God this new scene is going to go on for another hour with the pay-off not resulting in the world feeling deeper or a character becoming more colorful or the intrigue heading to a greater boil, but just a stark dull “yeah that happened.”

Say, the climatic action scene at the protest: an hour of old people skirting around bullets for an hour, culminating in yeah that happened, with not much reward except a rote process of getting through a set-piece — perhaps there is the rub, with King admitting to writing this one to a guide; story-beats feel like set-pieces, with a few being interesting (mostly towards the start) but most just feeling crammed in to finish the final picture.

c. Worth the Candle (1-5) by Alexander Wales

want to learn more about the dwarf I gotta crack or else I’ll die? keep reading..

Hello my darling Pedophile; O my darling child eating Scar dug into the earth, Dear;

I found the above review under the torrent for book 3 of Worth the Candle and wondered if, perhaps, that book was the true breaking point for the poster — because at that point Worth the Candle begins to settle from being something more amorpheous into a slight harem with slightly sickening relationship dynamics, even risking to call it “a healthy relationship” or “a cheesily mundane relationship” or something similar; in my mind, listening to this, I’ve been thinking (more and more, now that I’m on book 4) that “this is basically just Tenchi Muyo!” even though I remember nearly nothing about Tenchi Muyo except that it has a charismatic lead (a highschool age boy, same here) with a cast of all-women who overshadow the charismatic lead.

I found Worth the Candle off of a series of threads on r/litrpg and similar recommending it in threads with subjects similar to “series with good writing” or “series that are intelligent” or “series with realistic characters” or “more mature but not edgy” and also found it recommended from the author herself of A Practical Guide to Sorcery —which I loved, and was a fantastic Hit(! Bam! Strike!) for me; but, initially, I found no sign of there being an audiobook of it since the “book covers” for this series didn’t seem to have the usual professional appearance of more series that get an audiobook adaptation, and instead was just some bad fanart, here:

(which looks both unappealing, presenting as some lame munchkin-y ‘steampunk’ fantasy series, and looks like the kind of art of something doomed to be a text web serial only ever); but I just searched on audiobookbay and found five whole books adapted to audio and with all five having fun, cool, neat covers:

Inspires confidence, inspires care for the series, inspires professionalism, hints at (not bad steampunk fantasy) eclectic love for tabletop rules with sly hints at the characters being figurines (an astute observer would notice the circular bases, not square bases, a Warhammer standard before Age of Sigmar).

Here’s my zero spoiler review of this series as-of book 4, as-of 5/20: I love this series, it’s another hit(! bam! strike!) and I’d put it over even A Practical Guide to Sorcery with the caveat that it is a little male-gazey, a little dorky, and does not shy away from having a romance (not a teased romance, but a full “we are in a relationship” romance); the plot is interesting, the characters are interesting and fleshed out well, the setting is interesting (and, listening to this series, I keep seeing parallels to my own litrpg project, the premise between these two are basically identical).

So if you just want a blind recommendation for a fun audiobook series: I really love this one.

To talk about this series, I’ll be spoiling some details of the setting and some events in book 1, so to have something to talk about; I won’t spoil any big “revelations” or give answers to any of the mysteries of the series, but I will spoil minor ones regarding the set-up to the overarching plot.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think those spoilers would impact enjoyment; but, there’s the warning.

The start of this series I was not really vibing with much: we start cold in some type of military jet, flying over some dead land, and our protagonist is jettisoned out to be stranded into a zombie wasteland, basically told (along with everyone else aboard the military jet, which seems to be filled with prisoners meant to be executed) that if they survive the landing and survive the undead, they can be pardoned and recruited into the “Host.”

That happens, whatever; so on the setting and the premise: this is a world that is revealed to be a dreamy hodgepodge of every fantasy setting and idea our protagonist, Juniper, ran as a Dungeon Master (DM) while back on his world. Juniper is a normal little Earth highschooler, and reminds me of every DM I’d ever known, and bears the hallmarks of that type of person (mostly that: they are locked into being the eternal DM for the group of friends, never the player).

Juniper starts to realize that this world is composed of his ideas, and that he seems to have a rough approximate of a D&D game system stapled into his brain, and starts to uncover that he is grossly adaptive to the world, where magic or other skills might take the normal person years to achieve basic proficiency in, Juniper can learn it within an hour; Juniper has a companion system, with loyalty that increases as he bonds with his companions; he has a quest tracker; he levels-up and is washed in the most ecstatic feeling he has ever felt, also completely healing him of his wounds in a setting that normally has very restrictive methods of healing; and, this all starts to become an existential dread for Juniper.

That existentialism of Worth the Candle is the neat thing about the story: instead of a raw power-fantasy, it is mostly about a DM being transported into their own creation, encountering phantoms of their friends, and wondering how much of it is ‘real’ and dictated by free-will versus just how much of it is a very realistic-feeling simulacrum of life; for example: the loyalty system; Juniper falls in love and becomes good friends with several people, but with his social progress tracked by a game system, it all starts to feel incredibly hollow and artificial, intellectually, even though he wants to experience it as ‘reality.’ And, as he discovers more and more signs that this world is truly created from his own designs, and follows his design philosophies, the feeling of artificiality begins to weigh even more heavily as the story progresses, presenting a question of: “who is the dungeon master? is there a dungeon master? is the dungeon master following how I (Juniper) would run a campaign?”

The story itself follows two narratives; there is the main isekai narrative where we just sit inside the head of Juniper as he retells his experience in this new world, and then there are the intermissions where Juniper relates to us his life back on Earth, and the friends he had who played in his campaigns, and how he misses them, and, more distressingly, how it seems that there are signs of his friends within this new world; mostly: that his friend who died nine months prior, Arthur, seems to have been the most important historical figure within this new world, starting the first empire over four hundred years ago, and whose family lineage still persists into the modern era.

To the setting itself: I really like it; at first I was a little iffy because it’s a strange mash of more modern technology (there seems to be a form of electricity and machinery, but mostly it’s fueled off of souls instead of captured electricity) and bog-standard fantasy, but it’s very rich with neat historical details; I like learning about the several generations of Empire: the idyllic first empire under Arthur, then the rise/fall of the second empire where soul magic ran rampant with grotesque experiments upon the soul until most soul magic users were executed, and then the contemporary third empire which is mostly empire in name only and represents a loose, inefficient, bureaucracy of nobility. Magic items are tied to bloodlines and are inherited or invested temporarily. Elves are the cannibal-form and practice romance via consuming parts of their partners, and their physical forms are eternally locked. Unicorns (which Juniper added to the setting based on wanting to give something to his feminist friend Tiff, who was, at the time, bothered by how male-centric most foes and storylines were in fantasy settings) are chauvinistic monsters obsessed with virginity and capable of tormenting women by sending them into parallel realities where they’ve been physically brutalized by being stomped or gored. A variety of ‘catastrophes’ have been ‘excluded’ from majority society, away into zones, or locked into individuals—essentially, these catastrophes were plots/magics/characters Juniper designed that were too dangerous to leave unchecked in the setting; one of these excluded catastrophes is my favorite character though they’ve yet to directly appear within the plot: Doris Finch, the first and only multiplication mage, who copied herself so much that she now is a nation composed entirely of herself, that every other nation is forbidden to interact with. There are nukes in the setting, guns in the setting, but no television, there is radio, there are trains, there are cars, there are helicopters, but there is no plastic, but there is rubber.

As the story progresses, it starts to feel a bit like a harem: every significant character Juniper seems to find as a companion ends up being some form of female, though he is monogamous with only one; yet, all of his companions end up being infatuated with him in some form—and, on one hand, this feels like a trite harem Tenchi Muyo thing, but on the other hand: there is the mysterious guiding hand of an invisible Dungeon Master seemingly orchestrating everything in the background and controlling the life of Juniper, and perhaps all women is the type of hell this world is meant to be; and, that is another thing this story reminds me of: Alice in Sexland.

There are probably better analogues than Alice in Sexland but Alice in Sexland is what I grew up with and whose plot stuck with me: Alice in Sexland is about a girl who is murdered and ends up in a hell composed entirely of her traumas, but softened into an ‘accommodating’ after-life eternity; I imagine another comparison, between Akagi and Saki, where Saki feels to me the after-life of Akagi, where the world of Saki is entirely wrapped around mahjong but is filed-down from having any of the edge or brutality of the life Akagi lived in his own series, where the Washizu of Saki has big breasts and ultimately needs love.

This feels like that, so I turn my brain off a little and trust the author when every new companion introduced is another woman who is also passively infatuated with Tenchi, because—after all—this is the perfect hell for Tenchi.

I think this is worth your time, definitely more-so if you’ve ever played a tabletop game and are familiar with the types that play tabletops; it, so often, reminds me of my old friends, such that I have zero doubt of the author having been enmeshed with roleplay and world building.

Also apparently there is/was a webcomic adaptation?

5/30 alright dummy, listen up: I’m basically done with the series and wrapping up the monthly post today; here are my concluding thoughts sans spoilers.

Worth the Candle really fluctuates from being Tenchi Muyo and from being Deconstructed Tenchi Muyo but only deconstructs Tenchi Muyo to rebuild itself into another image of Tenchi Muyo, and only does that to again begin the process of deconstruction, and that only to continue again the cycle of rebuilding; for, at some point, the act of reconstruction, in that short period between deconstruction and constructed, was discovered to be the most elemental part of Worth the Candle despite it being ever fleeting.

Very minor minor spoiler, but the cast in this grows as the series goes on, and in book 5 the current party looks like this:

Tenchi, Wife 1, Wife 2 (dwarf), Wife 3 (immortal child bride), Wife 4 (a literal house), Wife 5 (statutory rape stand-in that the author may or may not be working through as veiled act of contrition through fiction), Wife 6 (the immortal twenties one), Wife 7 (the one without agency who is also mentally a child), Wife 8 (half-elf), then Dark Elf (the only guy but he’s really only there in name only).

You get what I mean? It’s women all the way down!!

It’s all women!!

Even the dwarf, who is in the style of “looks male, but the species is unisexual and reproduces by rubbing cloaca together and the dwarf is basically a girl with extreme dysphoria since really she’s a princess trapped in a Tom of Finland bara body and basically just wants to kill deself (I think that’s the dwarf pronoun, I forget; everyone just uses he/him though since gender and pronouns has NO meaning in dwarf culture).

The ‘deconstruction’ part of it de-Tenchiifying itself (used as a stand-in for this just being a harem) is meant in sincerity, but is tricky to really explain without spoiling some of the later books; an attempt: more-so than our Tenchi marrying his many wives, instead we are more presented a Tenchi whose role as Tenchi, entwined in many different hearts of many different beautiful women (+dwarf), is examined through the lens of “do any of us really have agency in this isekai Alice in Sexland hell-world where we seem to just be guided by the invisible hand of a dungeon master, and does that even matter when I feel so fucking bad about everything? and do I even have time to analyze my own feelings? everything I am doing is robbing the agency of others, I am like a little bug predating upon the agency of others; I can dig my hands into them—I literally have a ‘loyalty’ stat for each of these beautiful wives—and toy with their souls and make them love me or they can just love me on their own and, am I really the most important person in the world? do they even like me? do I even have the luxury to navel-gaze about all of this? aren’t they their own people with their own feelings?” etcetera, meanwhile one of the other wives is secretly losing her own mind over a growing conviction that everything is deterministic to a narrative.

There’s this point in book 5 where Wife 7 is adding into a conversation where Tenchi reveals he overheard Potential New Wife gave a hand-job to Some Dude, and Wife 7 relates that this dynamic sounds exactly like Hermione and Ron, and the other wives are like “there’s sex in Harry Potter?” (at some point they begin to port over literature from Earth since, at some point, it’s revealed that the settings equivalent of ShakespeareGeorgeWashingtonKingArthur just poorly plagiarized every book or franchise he remembered from Earth) to which Wife 7 retorts, well, sex is implied, because at that age it’s normal to be sexually curious and they’re always in such close proximity and it’s just RATIONAL.. and something about this whole scene/exchange made my heart so fluttery over Harry Potter and rekindled some nostalgia for the series —I’m not free of the Millenial weakness, here; I just have those memories of being excited over Harry Potter and, one of the most oddly poignant memories from graduating high school and being able to drive around on my own, was driving to the local Books-a-Million one night, on my way to work, stopping there to get a coffee at Joe Mugs (awful coffee shop inside Books-a-Million), and seeing the whole little cafe area set-up with all these Harry Potter adverts about some night book release party to celebrate —and the store was just completely empty, right? no one is at Books-a-Million at that hour and I came right when the cafe was closing down; the store just had this mood of some excitement that was stripped clean and left emptied out on a cold floor and frozen where it lay; the lady at Joe Mugs said she was shutting down for the night but, of course she can turn it back on if I don’t mind waiting, and sure, that’s fine, and she made me a coffee and I tipped her very generously (which I regretted, because I would see her every night before work and she kept giving me free extra shots of expresso into my coffee, and she kept adding extra shots with each night, until it was like drinking an entire jug of unbrewed insta-caffe; I had this moment one night at work trying to drink the coffee and just realizing oh my god my heart hurts so bad I think she is honestly going to kill me like the extra shots of expresso had gotten up to 8, “8 tonight” she’d say smiling, “I know you like it strong to keep you runnin up through the night” “yup! thanks”).

Something I forgot to mention about the premise of this is the uncertainty of the isekai circumstance, as tied into the setting itself; it’s introduced very early into the first book, because our protagonist doesn’t hide that he is from Earth and believes he created this fantasy world back when he was a DM. And, as it turns out: this is not surprising, and has a name to people within the setting: “dreamskewered,” which is a person who shares the same delusion as having come from Earth, and here in this new fantasy world there is even a school/asylum dedicated to studying the Dream That Skewers and providing simulacrums of Earth amenities to ease the distress these deluded people feel.

It’s an interesting series, even in the full “wait why is every character a woman” Tenchi swing, but understand what I like about series:

I don’t care about kinetic long action scenes, and the action scenes are very “This guy died after I shot him through the head.” short-quick within the series.

I like slow-paced navel-gazey scenes where the setting and characters are allowed to breathe, and this series has plenty of that, though softened with ‘plot’ always creeping up behind the navel-gazers.

I like table-tops, and constantly get the impression that the author here is absolutely pulling from a lifetime of having either dungeon-mastered TTRPGs, or played in them extensively—because it is so true to life, and I like this a lot.

One weakness is I’m not too invested in many of the characters; my favorite, now at the end of the audiobooks, is still the yet-unfeatured Doris Finch just because she’s the most exciting idea to me; the second, is the lisping soul-mage Elf, who had the misfortune of being in a somewhat Eh arc; the third are the many named (all two of them) mook Pustule Mages who show up, do some bizarre magic, and then immediately die—they’re cool but basically non-entities (the two Gold Mages can be included here, too; the gold mages are neat, really: the magic in this setting is really fun, you have your Bone Mages, Blood Mages, Still Mages, Gold Mages, Pustule Mages, Vibration Mages, etcetera, and how the magic works for each is really inventive and always goes beyond what just the name would suggest, with the gold mages basically being Accelerator from A Certain Magical Index except they must hoard an ever increasing amount of gold like a dragon to maintain access to their magic).

At the end my feelings have settled a bit more, I’m not as immensely excited to listen to it each day, but I’ve also never had a single moment of feeling that the story has suddenly become uninteresting or a slog; it has basically made me forget about A Practical Guide to Sorcery, but at the same time that might just be an issue of distance: I wonder if I were to listen to a non-existent book 7 of A Practical Guide to Sorcery RIGHT NOW if I would still feel that Worth the Candle is better as a series, or not; they’re both really entertaining. Guide is more of a clunky fun traditional fantasy story with an even more glacial pace and with slooooooooooooooow-broiling romance; Candle is Tenchi isekai written by a DM going through an existential crisis and throwing every single thing into the setting with a masculine flourish as to go I WANT sex I WANT violence I WANT power I WANT grief I WANT to die I WANT to kill I WANT to CAGE I WANT TO REPENT I want to feel the ECSTASY of LEVELING!

So it’s like a 4~5/5 on the adjusted “this is just entertainment, you know?” scale.

But don’t take it from me, listen to what redditor Citizenstrife has to say:

The first two series (Muyo/Universe) were amazing for the time. They still hold up surprisingly well. The harem stuff is typical harem stuff, but the cast is really solid despite Tenchi being a wood plank. The mystical swordsmanship/spaceship stuff is all fun and gives it its own identity. It was the first anime I watched. I still think the first two have their place.

Everything else...meh. 1st and 3rd movie, but skip the rest.

In closing,

women; do I like women? I might be as misogynistic as I am misandrist; I’ve been good this past week about shutting my mouth about all the fears and insect garbage but consider the body of one gender to be a stuffing for a different large bug in much the same fashion as stuffing a silicone glove with an actual large bug; so it masquerades and moves around and some, like the lithe mantis or needly centipede or elegant stick bug, have a beauty to them beyond their awful little cores — the awful little core is still there, though: cold and skeletal and writhsome with its mechanics, and; say, the body of the man: something huge and stinking and to imagine them is to imagine the gloopy body temperature clots of sperm becoming heavy in their groins; of the woman? something smaller and more circular and to imagine them, if I imagine them, it’s always the temperature of being stuck within some crook of body, like a pit, where sweat glows and becomes milky and begins to streak with blood and glistening little flecks of organelle; when I think of myself and gender I was thinking back on students, and how I was a Gifted kid, and seeing so many years later this odd online hostility towards the Gifted child—granted, I was apparently retarded but clever enough to be Gifted sometimes—as to the experience or label becoming this crutch of which to diagnose all their reasons for failure, incompetency, inadequacy, or what-ever; and, (in my bitterness!) seeing some of these people diagnose themselves with this identity as Indigo Child, and (in my bitterness!) thinking: so they can’t force themselves to fit into the exclusive Gifted category, as it’s gate-kept by some strange governmental bureaucratic process, so the answer is to carve the category, to make an own niche which—by their own, hand-picked criteria—they may lay within and become retarded; and I had that thought in the back of my head, while looking at women, and men, and realizing how ugly a thing I am and how revulsive I am and how my body (handed to me by some strange bureaucratic figure, gate-keeping me from any-other) betrays me, and how gender had been a thing I tried to carve for myself to masquerade with, the Indigo Child excluded from the Gifted (in my bitterness!); it boiled at me and Etiquette insisted upon me because you must not think of this; you are falling to insect; it is the subsumation of identity says the Etiquette it is gender and you know they hide within sounds and identity and color, it is politic too, it is bugs hiding in a film of smeary lotion light dabbed right atop of the people you are looking at says the Etiquette.

O my many wives! O my one Tenchi! There’s dead shells inside!

5/31: MAJOR SPOILERS MAJOR SPOILERS WARNING WARNING this (audiobook) series ends with Tenchi getting raped and several final hours of him coming to terms with it. TENCHI..

I will DESTROY those who lay a finger upon TENCHI; I will EVISCERATE those who even SCRATCH tenchi.. TENCHI.. TENCHI….

I liked this final arc; the protagonist spends the entire sequence basically rationalizing himself out of it and even using soul magic to twist his own soul so that he doesn’t feel a sense of violation or fear over it; there’s a point where he eventually tells someone and she goes “I’m going to to make it so not even a single splinter of them remains” and it made me tear up a little — I’m a massive sap whenever “people come together” and it makes me cry without fail, it’s the one “it always works on me” (my go-to example of this weakness is I watched this awful movie Cowboys vs Aliens with my mom and when the banditos come to help the cowboys I started crying).

Up next, for audiobooks, I’m gonna do the new Dungeon Crawler Carl book. I’ve said nothing but “I’m over the series” after having finished the last book and had the sheer popularity of the series wane away my own positive feelings, but after seeing so many little suggest reddit threads about spoilers for the new book, I just, you know, am curious, and want to know. Plus I have no other series I’m curious about at the moment, Dragoneye Moons is ‘good’ but also uninteresting to me, the Football Manager series is similar; for what-ever reason the Carl series has a greater space opera plot that I’m still sorta curious about what direction it might be headed in.

But Tenchi though; they raped my Tenchi.

d. Count Zero by William Gibson

Another Christmas book, gifted by Matilde.

I’m actually not much of a fan of Gibson after buying both Neuromancer and Snow Crash as books to read while stuck in a hospital. I figured I would read the most popular cyber-punk texts, and did so, and finished both with the impression that, for Neuromancer, “wow, this is just a bog standard heist novel buried under a lot of crispy vibes”, and then, after finishing Snow Crash, “wow, this is stupid as hell but way more creative than Neuromancer.”

Both books left me with some fine memories keyed to descriptions; for Neuromancer, these mostly had to do with Armitage being blown away. For Snow Crash it mostly had to do with the mob boss being blown away on a long stretch of tarmac — as well as this one piece of fanart that still perfectly captures everything about Snow Crash:

(it was actually another piece of art, of Raven, by this same person, but it seems like it was scrubbed from the internet; I only found this off some odd Goodreads review cached in Google);

the two books shore up the weaknesses of the other: Neuromancer has beautiful language; Snow Crash has an interesting story. Individually, though, I just preferred Stephenson slowly trodding through rambling stretches of prose about the Tower of Babel and pizza delivery than Gibson breathing out smoke and lights to cover up a plot that can be summed down to “I’m putting together a team. We’re going to break into a vault.. In space.”

Still interested in Count Zero, though; even, I’m interested in reading his Blue Ant trilogy mostly because the first book, Pattern Recognition, is apparently like Crying of Lot 49.

So on Count Zero, from the start the language is very beautiful. As an author I admire Gibson immensely and think he excels at capturing atmosphere and mood through language (I just dislike reading him, he’s dull!), but the plot began to immediately break-down in interest to me once the three plot threads are laid out for us.

The first, which we are introduced to with an excellent first chapter, is my least favorite plot: the Turner plot. This is Gibson writing a military gun-for-hire hardboiled fella that you could basically match tone/description to the protagonist of either Blade Runner.

The next, which is the one that made me most interested in Count Zero, is the art curator named Marly, whose story revolves around a hyper-wealthy client contacting her with a deal that requires her to only follow her intuition for the arts, and discover ‘who’ created this strange white box containing several small sculptures.

The last is the story of the titular Count Zero, aka Bobby, who is a little hotdogger trying to make a name for himself as a new cowboy in his rotten ghetto, and whose first job has led to some strange virus frying his brain while in the matrix, killing him, until a strange cybernetic apparition seemingly resurrects him.

I really enjoyed every chapter about Count Zero, and only enjoyed the Marly chapters slightly less. The Turner chapters? The Turner chapters had a tendency to devolve into a ‘Gibson fog’ of description that just made the scenes hard to visualize and faces more muggy than distinct and whose story could just be broken down to a simple “I’m putting together a team. And we’re robbing a vault.. And the vault is a person.”

For the first ~140 pages Count Zero was pretty boring; not awful, but very Turner-heavy and just dull during these long chapters of cyber-mercenary descriptions of Arizona.

After awhile I started to appreciate it more. What I like about this book is that, far more than Neuromancer, Gibson does an amazing job at establishing scenes and environments such that it gives Count Zero a very real sense of breadth, that the world stretches beyond the margins of the story and could sprawl as endlessly as any real place; I completely adore how he describes so many little environments, so much that I’m going to go dig up some quotes (all from the Bobby chapters):

Bobby climbed down behind him, into the unmistakable signature smell of the Sprawl, a rich amalgam of stale subway exhalations, ancient soot, and the carcinogenic tang of fresh plastics, all of it shot through with the carbon edge of illicit fossil fuels. High overhead, in the reflected glare of arc lamps, one of the unfinished Fuller domes shut out two thirds of the salmon-pink evening sky, its ragged edge like broken gray honeycomb. The Sprawl’s patchwork of domes tended to generate inadvertent microclimates; there were areas of a few city blocks where a fine drizzle of condensation fell continu-ally from the soot-stained geodesics, and sections of high dome famous for displays of static-discharge, a peculiarly urban variety of lightning. There was a stiff wind blowing, as Bobby followed Lucas down the street, a warm, gritty breeze that probably had something to do with pressure shifts in the Sprawl-long subway system.

The red-rimmed yellow eyes blinked. “They were all tooled up,” he said, “ready for a hit, but one of `em had some other things. Things for asking questions ” His nicotine-stained fingers, almost the color of cockroach wings, came up to slowly massage his short upper lip. “I got it off Wigan Ludgate,” he said, “the Wig.”

Jammer’s was up twelve more flights of dead escalator and occupied the rear third of the top floor. Aside from Leon’s place, Bobby had never seen a nightclub, and he found Jammer’s both impressive and scary. Impressive because of its scale and what he took to be the exceptional quality of the fittings, and scary because a nightclub, by day, is somehow inately unreal. Witchy. He peered around, thumbs snagged in the back pockets of his new jeans, while Jackie conducted a whispered conversation with a long-faced white man in rumpled blue coveralls. The place was fitted out with dark ultrasuede banquettes, round black tables, and dozens of or-nate screens of pierced wood. The ceiling was painted black, each table faintly illuminated by its own little recessed flood aimed straight down out of the dark There was a central stage, brightly lit now with work lights strung on yellow flex, and, in the middle of the stage, a set of cherry-red acoustic drums. He wasn’t sure why, but it gave him the creeps; some sidelong sense of a half-life, as though something was about to shift, just at the edge of his vision.

Just thought these were excellent, and the book is full of this.

I had this thought while reading, which I dismissed slightly but then felt more confidence in after reading a comment by another person that re-affirmed it, that Count Zero feels far more slice-of-lifey to me, with much more focus on the world itself as a character in each plot-thread than the “this is a heist genre novel” thrust of Neuromancer; it’s a story of the setting, navigated by three players bumbling through it as a rope slowly twists together.

Count zero is the world building arc, neuromancer was the introduction to the world. In that context the multiple vantage points make a lot of sense.

and another comment,

And more than that, the nocturnal, indoor world of Neuromancer explodes into brightness. This time Gibson is going to show us the future in broad daylight.

Overall, I liked it? It left me wanting to know more about some of the setting. I really want to hear more about the Ashpool heiress who is described as psychotic, and who slit the throat of her grandfather. The Marly parts where her friend is talking about a paper her peers are writing, about the hyper-wealthy and the forms the hyper-wealthy take, is so neat.

With all that said: it’s like a 3/5? A positive 3/5 with some fun memories that I enjoyed and left me wanting to read some other Gibson at some point.

Bonus hater review from Goodreader nostalgebraist (just realized who that was, huh; didn’t see their name until just now):

It is essentially a generic noir story with some fantasy elements, onto which computer-themed wallpaper has been grafted. The one important change in social structure that Gibson imagines is the increased influence of powerful corporations, but this makes little functional difference; the characters who do dangerous jobs for corporations might as well be doing those jobs for governments, for all the difference it makes. Gibson imagines a world where cyber-security is important, but his world is one that couldn't accommodate Edward Snowden; the people who deal with security here are not tech geeks but macho adrenaline junkies, heist wheelmen with computer-themed makeovers.

I guess there is nothing wrong with a generic noir story. What makes this book frustrating is the intimation that it is something more. In hindsight, it's easy to see that it isn't. Gibson almost studiously avoids introducing real deviations from the noir template. Computer hacking is described so impressionistically that it bears no connection to real-world computing whatsoever -- it could be effortlessly rewritten as magic in a fantasy setting.

[…]

One star is too harsh a rating for a competent if totally unremarkable genre story, but Gibson pretends to do so much more, and that's frustrating. He's pretentious, in a much more direct sense of the term than the kind of authors who more commonly get slammed with it. So this book gets one star for being so much less than it pretends to be.

e. Infinite Summer (Infinite Jest reading log)

It’s 5/26 endless suicide my lover dear; I’ve been having really mundane dreams lately about things like: getting a bus pass to ride the bus;

Infinite Jest has been an immense (pleasurable) surprise for me; I was really thrilled to receive a big ugly floppy physical copy of it as a Christmas gift from Matilde and held off on starting it specifically to read it during the “Infinite Summer” event (though not officially participating in it, as apparently it’s an actual ‘group activity’ held over a Discord channel and rule by religious Etiquette forbids me from participating in both groups and public discussions — I try to hold to this, I think going to the Adventist church is a slight against this no matter how I justify it, and I haven’t been to the Adventist church since Thanksgiving last year; Adventists are mentioned in Infinite Jest along about the same frame as when Adventist Jennifer messaged me to say she missed me and is thinking on me, and when the man out on the lawn who resembled a disguised Adventist waved at me and said something incomprehensible).

Infinite Jest is a surprise because I’ve basically had no idea what it was about. I’ve heard about this book constantly, but people only ever talk about it in a vague sense or a meta sense — for whatever reason, even if people hate Infinite Jest or think it some chud redflag of potential pest Men, it’s a book that (apparently) makes people keep its secrets to them; so, the only things I’d known about Infinite Jest would have been the following: it is about weed, it is about tennis, it has long/many footnotes, there are claims that flipping between the main text and the notes is to resemble “a tennis match” (I think this is a stretch), it is potentially a redflag if you see it on a boys shelf if you want to date him, DFW committed suicide, it is about nothing, and (very lately learned, only in the months prior to actually getting the book) that there is something about a videotape that is so pleasurable that it makes life meaningless.

Surprise surprise: it’s basically a science fiction book about an alt-history/future America where some sort of Idiocracy-esque Capitalist-nightmare cataclysm has happened, merging the Americas into some organization called O.N.A.N. and has done-away with the calendar year, marking the prior calendar as Before Subsidiaries and every following year now is sponsored by some product leading to descriptive years instead of numerical years, like: Year of the Adult Depend Undergarment; Year of the Whopper; etcetera. The science fiction aspects stretch into the ‘crunch’ of the setting with technology being dropped cold into the narrative with constant references to ‘cartridges’ that, at first, seemed like the author naming some variation of VHS tapes that I was unaware of in a vernacular I was unfamiliar with, but then it tangles up with more references to InterLace and trash missiles and, most overtly, mutations rampant in wildlife in gross swathes of the U.S. of A.

I somewhat understand why this aspect almost never gets mentioned in lieu of “it’s about doing drugs lmao” and “flipping between footnotes is like a tennis match because it’s about tennis,” because the writing itself is a sprawl of mundane descriptions of life: and that is something I really enjoy: Infinite Jest is a very good slice-of-life that takes great pains to slowly, slowly, build up the muscle and body of its tennis academy, the cast within it, the history behind it, and the mundane politics behind everything—the narrative meanders to what-ever seems interesting, and I’ve been enjoying jumping between several long pages describing a meeting between a Quebecois terrorist and a government spy, which devolves into a petty argument, and is absolutely cancerous with an egregiously long footnote detailing an extreme history of how the Quebec terror cults started as told through a student at the tennis academy searching for obscure scholarly articles to plagiarize for a history assignment; if you want a literary slice-of-life with an amazing scope of “things”, Infinite Jest feels so far (at ~100 pages) fairly perfect, and also nags at me this question: why is this book not often cited as one of the more literary examples of science fiction? Reading and figuring out the technology within the setting gave me a picture of the sort-of drab, beige, office-worker cyberpunk or wetware that I always imagined over the more typical mohawk-neon-grit-night cyberpunk: I always imagined something more like the offices I grew up in: ready-made trailers with fold-out tables and styrofoam cups of coffee and just odd changes to the electricity where, perhaps, inside the machine was not circuit board but grown organs specialized to deliver power and tortured to fuel the machine.

It just seems extremely odd to me that Infinite Jest isn’t a more common recommendation whenever I see threads on some book subreddit asking for literary entries in science fiction or genre, or that the name of DFW isn’t only referenced in regards to Infinite Jest, his suicide, being a redflag if seen on a shelf in a bedroom, or his short stories; DFW seems trapped within his own name / territory.

Granted, this all has to be sugared down with me only having read ~100 pages; my minimum to hit Infinite Summer goals has been 10 pages a day but my total has not included footnotes, and it’s been a surprisingly ‘long’ reading experience, where my pace for 10 pages is usually (including footnotes) about ~a half hour of reading time; if I’m not busy I try to hit 20, so an hour of reading; the pages are dense, the language often has me wanting to look-up a few things — it reminds me, a little, of a less-dense and less-beautiful Christina Stead, A Man Who Loved Children (which DFW apparently also loved as a book) took me ages to read through despite the physical pages being much smaller than the large pages of Infinite Jest.

So, so far, those are my impressions. Haven’t really had a bad reading session yet but am hitting a bit of fatigue (still, never regret sitting down to read it). I love how he wrote the suicidal character and how she framed her feelings on wanting to die, with it being a wracking sensation in the nerves that didn’t seem to stop and only seemed to quell with unconsciousness, thus the want to die.

I’ve also been thinking: why is there not more fanart? And it had me remembering what pushed me to want to read Dostoevsky: seeing bishie fanart of the Brothers characters; Brothers Karamazov always had been drab in my mind and undesirable to spend its many many many pages following the narrative of drab depressed old bearded Russians, no matter how interesting their story may or may not have been—seeing the characters drawn so cutely and attractively though? it’s a marketing strategy.

I did a Google search for Infinite Jest fanart and found basically nothing but some ugly this-or-that; Tumblr, though, revealed I was wrong:

but still, there’s room for improvement; I feel like Infinite Jest lends itself very well to “wanting to be drawn” whenever I read it — the characters just seem so interesting even if they’re all just “dudes”; like the first time we are introduced to Ortho he is just name-dropped in a long list of Hal’s other peers but has a nickname tagged on: “Ortho ‘The Darkness’ Stice” and later we learn that he’s a big Kansas native boy with a thick accent that exclusively wears all black; there should be more art of the characters, more beautiful art; I’d been thinking about Dostoevsky and fanart and the Tiktokification of his work, with becoming popular, and seeing there now being a pushback amongst the true Dostoevsky fans (around the same age I’d guess as the fake TikTok bishie Dostoevsky fans obsessed with cute Alyosha and White Nights) about the shallow levels of engagement by these faker fans whom tarnish the erudition of the Christ-obsessed Dostoevsky who wrote long serialized stories for entertainment. I don’t get the barrier between legitimacy, or: I don’t understand the “regret of a beloved work now becoming loved further;” or, how people fail to grasp marketing in its smaller forms: I wanted to read Dostoevsky because I saw cute picture: why regret the meal for coming from a fish that fell for bait? I think Dostoevsky is great; and, so: extrapolating this further: earlier in the year I keep seeing Subahibi discourse with the VN also having a glut of TikTokified fans who apparently would be repelled by the actual content of the game, beyond just the cute art and cherry-picked screenshots about Retardation and Autism and Suicide; on one hand: can you, O gatekeeper, truly say that those bits of Subahibi weren’t also weaknesses you have also fallen for? can you truly say Kimika’s behavior didn’t make you interested? from where did your initial drive to read it really come from? how were you sold on it? and on the other hand: shouldn’t it be celebrated that the game might filter in more fans from these shallow engagements, as surely some will stray into the Depths and become ‘true’ like you (surely repressing how they actually started to read the series after seeing some dumb TikTok about it to masque how shallow their entry into the series was; why, they never even liked Kimika, and the suicidality has more nuance to it, it’s more authentic, surely), which, in-turn, might lead to actual sales of the game so your beloved niche studio might make money.

Partially this is me just representing that I think fans who hide their loves are basically worthless; they’re dragons wanting to hoard up interests so they can all stay and die with them instead of pouring out that love back into the source of their love, as, if the source grows, it might grow beyond them and be coveted by others, so it should wither, and die, too.

There is one exception to all of this where I think the bishie fanartification fanship is malignant, and it’s for Cormac McCarthy and Blood Meridian; and the opinion comes from a very narrow view of reading r/cormac (or whatever it’s called) and the sub devolving into basically nothing but ugly fanart of The Judge; Cormac feels like an author who can only survive in the outskirts of his own kingdom (where he flourishes) but within his own borders there is just a cancer of The Judge that overpowers every other organ and shuts it down; you can find good discussion on Suttree, his early works, the circumstances of his life, his death, his relationships, his plays, his relation to other authors, his trilogy, his representation on modern issues within Stella Maris, but only outside of his own territory of fans. It’s strangely specific, because another similar phenomenon of popularity I’m familiar enough with would be the Five Nights at Freddies series, which I was blessed enough to “be there for” when it started with the first 4chan /v/ threads and how, at the time, it had yet to be beaten and there were rumors that the game had some primitive form of artificial intelligence that grew as you played it; the FNaF series has grown so far beyond that and become so successful and has spun off into tons of horrible fanworks and jokes and all the ramifications of success/popularity — but none of that bothers me or seems to really ‘consume’ the series, perhaps because within the fandom there is just so much variety within artists, flavors, works, fictions, that it’s hard to be disgusted by any one thing; but for Cormac? it’s just nth iteration of ugly The Judge fanwork usually even itself a poor redrawing of another ugly The Judge fanwork. Who is the scariest freakin character in fiction, well I think it’s The Judge.. he’s the most fucking evil..

5/30: my reading has slowed down a little! partially because of needing/wanting to draw in the afternoon, when I usually read; partially because Iris sent me the whole darn 5-volume collection of Dream of the Red Chamber and I spent one afternoon, instead, reading the entire ~forty-plus page introduction to it by Dave Hawkes and being immediately captured by the bizarre story surrounding the book—I encourage you to seek it out and read it, because it’s like a real-life epistolary Pale Fire esque meta narrative where Hawkes combs through the authorship of Dream of the Red Chamber, first introducing our main suspect: Cao Xueqin, who was basically an alcoholic loser who wrote out this story in exchange for wine; and then introduces the complicated circumstances behind its publication which involves an anonymous figure who hand-copied the original text under the pseudonym Red Inkstone, and included within the copies a number of commentaries and annotations to the text (stuff like Oh what a foolish character! and similar sentiments), and then how, at some point, versions split between an incomplete 80 chapter version and a ‘complete’ 120 chapter version, which was later published by a new character named Gao, who was scrutinized for a number of years as being a LIAR who invented/authored an extra 40 chapters, and then, later still, another pseudonym commenter named Odd Tablet who, for another number of years, was thought to be Red Inkstone under a different name as Odd Tablet seems to occasionally slip into writing as though Red Inkstone’s commentaries were their own, but perhaps is actually another character related to both Cao Xueqin and Red Inkstone, who, perhaps, were childhood friends —it just reads like a real-life version of 20th Century Boys trying to figure out the identity of Friend. Any-ways that took two days out of my Endless Summer reading, with another day being taken to read into the first chapter of Red Chamber.

Still love the book; have nothing to add to it, it’s another book that I never regret picking up but occasionally have apprehensions about doing so just due to how ‘demanding’ it is in terms of time/difficulty (I somewhat wish I was reading it digitally just to save time on looking up words, but I do not wish to do the annotations digitally, I really hate how my kindle handles digital annotations and the feature seems broken more often than not, but the dictionary is fantastic).

f. Other Things

I started reading Hadewijch’s writings—it was a gift from Ron based off me writing that I wanted some more ‘spiritually nourishing’ reading in my life (which remains to be true; with the separation of me from the Adventists for so long and so much time having passed without me reading something outside of serials)—and I’ve been reading a letter or two of hers after my Infinite Jest reading sessions.

I have some thoughts on Hadewijch, mostly just that she is not nearly as good of an author as Mechthilde and her topics are written with far less passion than Mechthilde; if Mechthilde writes ecstatic poetic yearnings on love as it relates to Christ, Hadewijch writes a textbook description of love as it relates to Christ; I’m a little amiss about Hadewijch’s interest to a wider community outside of the intrigue behind the person herself, who seems (seemed?) partially shrouded in a mystique of who she was and when her writings were written, with most details being filled in as approximate to figures that likely were Hadewijch and how she likely was a figure of some importance in a beguine group, that was eventually turned on by the beguine group for being too big for her britches.

All of my criticism above though is tempered by me only so far having gone through a few of her letters; what I like is how she writes Christ as being an Abyss and the image of Abyss as being a boundless zone capable of devouring an infinite amount of love and so what else could be a better reservoir to pour love into?

But so far just a somewhat dry / uninteresting writer; nothing that makes me feel crazy — but again, only gotten into her letters, and only the early few. She should have some poetry and other things hidden away later in the collection for me, as the collection claims to have everything she’s done except “her list”: (from Wikipedia):

Five groups of texts survive: her writings include poetry, descriptions of her visions, and prose letters. There are two groups of poetry: Poems in Stanzas (Strophische Gedichten) and Poems in Couplets (Mengeldichten). Finally there is the "Lijst der volmaakten" ("list of the perfect ones").

I forget the reason for the Lijst der volmakkten being excluded from the collection, but there was an explicit reason for it in the introduction to the text (which, from memory, was something like “eh, it doesn’t really tell you anything, just some obvious figures.”)

Read a volume plus change of Shiga-Hime — this is like the horror manga version of Hadewijch for me; competent but not interesting and I don’t have much else to say about it, except that I think the red-herring main character was more interesting than the actual main character. Art is nice, but it’s all ero-grotesque stuff that has worn its welcome on me. Boobs and blades again? Alright.. Fine.. Okay.. No it’s alright.. Yeah, no, adult tempting school age boys into sex only to kill them is really cool.. yeah no I’m not bored.. yeah I’m shocked.. yeah okay.. no no I’m just tired.. I mean your writing really affected me.. yeah.. yeah it’s serious taboo..

Read a few chapters into the second volume and didn’t feel compelled to read much further; everything looked to be turning out into an uninteresting direction.

Saw a thread about Nobuhiku Obayashi films and thought Chizuko’s Younger Sister looked interesting, and the full movie is on Youtube, so I thought I might watch it while drawing (but ended up lying in bed and watching it on a day where I was particularly exhausted); I’d been having some interests in film lately, but always end up feeling daunted by the run-time and worry about my inability to focus on it.

I did start watching Chizuko’s Younger Sister, though.

I fell asleep! I couldn’t stop falling asleep. Thirty minutes in and I had fallen asleep over four times and realized I no longer had any idea what was happening.

It seemed neat but maybe quaint is the better word; everything just felt so airy and dreamy that I couldn’t really latch on to anything with much interesting — reminded me of a more positive version of the sole Murakami novel I read (Kafka on the Shore, it was fine but made me disinterested in any further Murakami).

Still, it’s a 1991 (1990 in the film itself) film and that’s when I was born, so I’d like to have given it a better chance and may-be will find another time to try again (perhaps in better quality than Youtube 420p); I liked the piano room with the laughing doll, I liked the milk-drinking rapist in the all white suit. Doesn’t that sound very Murakami?

I couldn’t tell you why but another reason re: film / Chizuko is I’ve had this false nostalgic feeling for old Japan that makes no sense; it’s like a misplaced childhood and wanting to return to the dreamy Antique room of a grandmother that I never had and smell all the must and see all the plastic-covered furniture forbidden from play, over in an estate in Sarasota (but Japan); the first few episodes of Akagi give me the same feeling.

Did not play basically any Isaac this month.

Sat down, opened Isaac, rolled around to each Epiphany character. Played some of Tarnished Samson —hated it. Played some of Tarnished Maggie —hated it. Closed it. Had this internal resolution, then, that for the rest of the month I’d just read and draw instead of play videogames; and if I were to play videogames: it would be boring ones.

Don’t know if it is just the deflation from having finally done Dead God, or if it’s just Fiend Folio making the game experience kinda Eh, or if it’s just that (outside of the unlocking process) the Epiphany characters are kinda unfun; just suddenly it felt so tiring. Plus, stopped watching anothermattman Isaac streams after the Grubby Warcraft 3 tournament videos started coming out—which became a several-week long watch for me; I really like Grubby but only really when he is casting Warcraft 3 matches, as otherwise his Warcraft 3 videos are him sweating in silence while his chat goes on about something; but caster Grubby? phenomenal and always manages to inspire, again, love for Warcraft 3 within me (doubly so for the tournament saga; this was an excellent tournament).

Did play some other games; I bought Urge (the pee im-sim) when it went on sale because I wanted to support Florida art/games, but refunded it after playing it and immediately realizing “there is zero chance I’m ever opening this game, I don’t like this type of game.” Also bought Monster Lily, which was another fetish game but hides this fact; you ignore that Monster Lily is a fetish game and it’s actually a perfectly moody and excellently well designed Brogue-like. I saw it first on r/roguelikes, thought the description sounded “interesting” just because it seemed like the author was trying to hide that it’s a fetish game; then tried the demo, and was immediately impressed by how good the presentation and sound design was. Then bought it, because it was very good; though, I now sort-of want to refund it if only because I actually dislike that there is a pee button which shows you a pixel graphic of genitals peeing, and I dislike that there is a mysterious ‘feisty’ button which shows you a pixel graphic of you raping a monster. It’s this intersection of fetish game and amazing design; it’s a true ‘love of the game’ type thing. I’m just a prude; it honestly is excellent, and I adore the death sequence.

Also Feywood Wanderers released which I also only have good things to say about; it’s an extraction-type roguelike like Quasimorph but does it in a more streamlined fashion where it plays more like TOME4. I really liked the demos I played of it during some Steamfest and was happy to purchase it when it released, and so far is my favorite game all month.

I’ve been only trying to play “boring” games (as in, they don’t make me want to play them for a long period of time in one sitting) to force myself to draw as a means to pass time; Feywood Wanderers is the closest to skirting the line of not being boring, but I also might just be a little burnt out on drawing.

I was really deliberating starting FFXI or Ragnarok Online again but couldn’t bring myself to do either; FFXI even had a returning player campaign going on this month and I just couldn’t do it. I felt too insane.

3. Blogging

My birthday is tomorrow; yesterday, my mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday cake and I freaked out over it (internally, outwardly) because it was a little late to be figuring that out, and also because I just didn’t know.

The whole first week of May I’ve just been cracking up (as Helen DeWitt puts it) over my birthday because, since last year, I’ve been refusing to eat any type of meat “to keep my streak up” and had this internal promise to only break this rule for my birthday—and kept to it. I don’t really like meat that much, and I really do think any industry producing any animal-based food good is probably sickening, so it’s an easy restriction for me to keep, but it opens this “forbidden delicacy” to all the foods that I have restricted myself from; as, what do I crave? Imitation crab, day-old cold McChicken sandwich, cold cut bologne and mayo and American cheese white bread sandwich, any kind of catfish, trying good brisket, biscuits and gravy, menudo, tripe taco, chilaquiles but good, curry goat, curry shrimp, day old cold cheeseburger..

I made a list here in this image; but, the more I kept thinking about it, the more keeping myself clean outweighed any desire I would have, and, too, the financial cost, and, too, the health cost, and, too, the neuroticism costs, and, too, how possibly empty it would end up being.

It is hard to not press down this idea that I do not really enjoy eating food anymore.

Yesterday I made a pretzel strawberry salad as a single-serving size breakfast for today, subbing most of the cream cheese for greek yogurt and all of the sugar for protein powder; it was good, and also a little unfulfilling, but also just the novelty of having something newer was nice (my diet is basically nothing but yogurt, cereal, and cabbage wraps).

Yesterday, too, after freaking out internally/externally about being asked about a birthday cake or what I wanted, I let it stew for a few hours and then just forced myself to tell my mom how freaked out I was about the idea of any of this (I even put $20 in my pocket, on yesterdays walk, and told myself okay, you are going to buy curry goat from the Jamaican truck or a slice of pizza from that slice shop and couldn’t actually make myself to do either) and just asked her to please see if she could get me imitation crab, or curry goat, tomorrow (today) and, I guess, instead of a birthday cake, I would like it a lot if she could make me a sourdough cinnamon roll (she’s been really into making sourdough lately); and I feel a bit less neurotic now; I had a wrap today with imitation crab, cabbage, jalapeno, tofu that I baked super hard, and some cucumber (tossed in this Tari tropical pepper sauce I found at Ollies for $2, it’s normally $6), was really good, reminded me of California rolls.

Everything about my birthday stresses me out tremendously lately, mostly because of how alone I feel; I can not foster relationships very well with my religion and it is hard to not feel the veins colden and die this way, when days which seem founded on ones connections with others loom and reveal how steadily more empty and thin they’ve become.

5/8 birthday is over, I don’t know if I want to write about it; I wanted to write about it yesterday and kept repeating Etiquettes in my head to maintain grace because I had nothing of grace in either thought or behavior or feeling or self; it was the sort of day where, within hours of waking up, I just sobbed in my bed and fluttered between wanting someone to hear me and not wanting anyone to hear me.

I went for one of the longer walks I’ve been on during a heat-wave but my mood had been so deadened that it really did not feel like much; what nettled me more than the heat-exhaustion was how pre-occupied my thoughts were, and how I could not pay any attention to the Insomnia audiobook as more than just dull noise, over how I felt about the day, and over any residual attempt to make myself feel better by forcing myself to buy a ‘special lunch’ to make-up for the loneliness or emptiness: the plan was: if the Jamaican food truck was out by the old gas station, then I would ask for curry goat or what-ever similar the man working would suggest. If the Jamaican food truck was not there: I would get papas locas from the Mexican food truck by the laundromat and the 7 Stars Discount Beverage — I checked the reviews constantly for this one to look at the photos because, as I saw the Jamaican food truck was not there, nothing really special strikes out to me about papas locas, because it is just fries with a bunch of bullshit; but, so many reviews saying best food truck in Leesburg HANDS DOWN and sure the review photos looked much better than any stock photo of papas locas I could find, and the one time I had gotten lengua tacos from this food truck (the only time I’d been) I was fairly impressed (contrary, the one time I went to a high review taco place in Tavares, the tacos felt like store-bought tortillas and pretty mid-cooked proteins; I asked for one of each of their tacos and was let down by every single one); so I got the papas locas, they smelled amazing during the slow walk back home.

I came home and showed my mom the bag of papas locas, said I got lunch; said she can try them, if she wants—there’s steak with them but it’s easy enough to separate the meat—and we looked at them together, and I was impressed with the presentation: it was something you’d record for a goofball TikTok and crack open the styrofoam container real slow and go Wooooooowww.. and my mom says “I ordered you curry goat, I ubered it, it’ll be here in twenty minutes.. I think the goat will keep, you should eat your fries” and I said I would wait, I want the curry goat. Even if it was bad, I’d want that more.

I had a hard time being so moody after that; I found a small card from my mom and from Ron on my desk, and a book Ron had bought me, and a little bag of fidget bracelets (I put aside my belief that it is not healthy to accessorize). My mom was having trouble making me a cinnamon roll so she got a slice of chocolate cake for me, instead. I had a nicer day afterwards, though I didn’t really do anything except play Siralim Ultimate and try to read a little more of Pale and keep myself a little busy (because I felt bad after eating half of the slice of chocolate cake, and saved the other half to be blended into yogurt to have for breakfast).

The goat was not particularly great and I had better Jamaican food from the Adventist church and from the old Jamaican place that shut down one~two years ago, but I was really happy to finally have it; I made a small wrap out of it, for lunch, with stewed cabbage, raw cabbage, jalapeno, curry rice, and a bit of plantain.

For dinner I had a small sandwich of my last tomato, a single spoon of seafood salad, a slice of cucumber, and lettuce shreds. This was fine.

For lunch today, I had a wrap that was filled with a slice of the papas locas, jalapeno, and some raw cabbage I poured their red salsa over. This was incredible, and might have been one of the most satisfying meals I’ve had all year. I loved every meal, even if the actual taste for somewas a little lack-luster.

However, let me tell you about not eating meat for probably over a year: stomach trouble; no migraines, yet, though. I get worse stomach issues from even touching sugar-free gum; something about even a single piece of sugar-free gum causes the stomach and bowel to tie itself into knots until whatever poison goes into sugar-free gum is slowly flushed out of the body.

5/10, Yesterday, on my walk, I stopped and got a gift for Mother’s Day at this knick-knack shop that opened up in the old computer repair store near Downtown (the one that I had to hassle to get my computer work done).

The woman working there immediately became endeared with helping me when I said “I’m just looking for things for Mother’s Day, she likes chickens and coffee, so..” (I was holding a bag of coffee they sold, and a little ceramic chicken light thing), and then the clerk offered to gift-wrap everything for me, but not only that: said Hey, would you like to have this ceramic chicken measuring cup set? and I was near about to decline because the place was expensive and culture dictates to automatically reject gifts, but she seemed to immediately pick-up on something and say she’d be happy to include it, and that “my mom must be blessed to have a son like me” (which made me laugh), and threw in some tissue paper, and made a bow ribbon for me to tie it all up with, all together in a big pink gift bag. She told me she lost her mom twenty years ago and she misses her near daily.

Tons of cops on our street that day. They just sat out there for an hour blocking our driveway.

Snuck into the kitchen (I say snuck but I’m awake ~4 hours before my mom) while doing my early ayem cleaning of the house to leave the gift bag on the oven, in case I missed her in the morning before I had to head out to work. She seemed to really be happy with it; we tried the coffee together, I thought it was undrinkable and tossed my cup — it just tasted like stale water; my mom said it was drinkable. I tried to get my mom some “monster gummies”, which are these sugar-free things, but couldn’t find them anywhere.

On that curry goat: it’s basically inedible; I didn’t pick-up on it on my birthday, but it’s so salty that it only tastes like salt and makes the palette taste like an ocean for ten minutes after. Feel awful about it because I’ve barely touched it, but every time I nip at the goat or the rice or the spinners or the peas or the cabbage, it’s like eating a spoon of salt. Planning on secretly throwing it away in the morning. I don’t know what to do with it, it’s sickeningly salty.

5/30:

by design I have very little to blog; I’ve been trying to force myself to not or write or ooze out all my negativity, lately, because the last week, till present, I’ve just been longing to explain how the insects inside music are trying to get me to kill myself, and how they use Daniela and Dieth as levers against me, and how I’m in an incredibly painful way over myself and wanting to die and disappear into Ragnarok Online or Final Fantasy XI or .hack// erased in login screen or Heavenly Delusion vanished through brain surgery; and, just be light pollution for a moment, to break at dawn and be gone except as a trace; and in the circle about how the nettling bugs are doing that to me; and about how they make me want to speak or write on it—as I am now—and that drawing is being used to trick me; and it’s tiring; it’s tiring even now to think about it.

my birthday was terrible; the month was terrible; I’ve hated nearly every day; Etiquette has a lesson in all of this: to pour out the miseries not to public but into the infinite abyss (Hadewijch) offers both greater love and humility in return than open loathsome expression ever could; and, by opening the channel within from brain down to abyss, a grace is fostered within the behavior by becoming acquainted with the infinite abyss; the problem is resisting how loneliness and pain scratches at behavior.

Katherine Gompert in Infinite Jest says it like this:

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Have you ever felt sick? I mean nauseous, like you knew you were going to throw up?’

The doctor made a gesture like Well sure.

‘But that’s just in your stomach,’ Kate Gompert said. ‘It’s a horrible feeling but it’s just in your stomach. That’s why the term is “sick to your stomach.” ‘ She was back to looking intently at her lower carpopedals. ‘What I told Dr. Garton is OK but imagine if you felt that way all over, inside. All through you. Like every cell and every atom or brain-cell or whatever was so nauseous it wanted to throw up, but it couldn’t, and you felt that way all the time, and you’re sure, you’re positive the feeling will never go away, you’re going to spend the rest of your natural life feeling like this.’

The doctor wrote down something much too brief to correspond directly to what she’d said. He was nodding both while he wrote and when he looked up. ‘And yet this nauseated feeling has come and gone for you in the past, it’s passed eventually during prior depressions, Katherine, has it not?’

‘But when you’re in the feeling you forget. The feeling feels like it’s always been there and will always be there, and you forget. It’s like this whole filter drops down over the whole way you think about everything, a couple weeks after —’

It’s hard to keep it together.

Towards the end of the month a package from Iris arrived which really cheered me up in the throes of an extremely bad mood during an otherwise extremely bad day; a little Boogiepop was inside wrapped up in plastic bubble wrap and I kissed him on his forehead. She really was perfect for that; books and food, a drawing, and Boogiepop. Loneliness was stabbed right through.

5/31: forced myself to stop and get menudo from the MENUDO! store down the road from where I walk (it’s the MENUDO! store because on Sunday mornings there’s a big MENUDO! sign — I saw a video of a person going there on TikTok and thought it was a meaning for me to eat there); now that I’ve finally had menudo I know I do not like it at all, it tasted less gamey and more fecal-ish to me, and I made a wrap out of some of the tripe and ended up picking out all the tripe and just eating a wrap of cabbage, peppers, gucamole, rice, onion, and a quarter strip of tortilla then divvied up into four more pieces; I then threw away the rest of the menudo because I had no one to give it to, no animal hearty enough to give it to, and nothing else to do with it except consider it a learning experience and another instance of food waste only softened by bolstering up a small local business dedicated to providing MENUDO!

I’ve had tripe tacos before and liked them; menudo is something else. I feel basically already sick of meat and am ready to go back off it for the rest of the year; I don’t like the slaughter, I don’t like the death.

4. Drafts

I wrote nothing; as mentioned elsewhere, I spent the month drawing and not doing much else. It’s not because this was a free unpaywalled month, I swear—just was really upset and couldn’t think of anything else to do.

Here’s mostly everything I’ve drawn, though, except for a few things Heraga asked me to draw for their game which I didn’t feel like asking for permission to share; mostly, that last part, just because I don’t really want to talk to anyone if I can avoid it.

I’ve been using my little grey anatomy art doll and trying to get better at figure drawing; I still stink at it. Some of these were done in just a day (which is fantastic for me, I draw incredibly slow) but some of them were over several days of banging-head and making no progress (most notable being the spider music one; that one was intended to have tons of text on it talking about suicide and the ghosts in music but I took so long working on it that I lost all my panic).

That’s it.

Next month is a bad number; kanaete, my friend.

Thank you church listeners for permitting me to speak; this week is a low tone from me with nothing sensible to say.

Yesterday the seventh and eighth day calendars aligned to share a Saturday and, though I had meant to return to church with the Adventists, I became afraid. The fear was even before I tried fixing my hair and my appearance up in the long mirror and studying myself, and practicing total disinterest in myself in response to the disgust I felt towards myself—though at that moment the fear was knotting inside as some number of fingers stroked down my neck and face and ribs taking in all the contours and how I’d failed to wither sufficient enough to feel perfect before the Adventists (there was too much of me, still; I was repulsed for a moment with how I had built up some muscle on my abdomen and legs and chest from all the exercise and eating, and how much I might have become like a pretty damselfly if I simply withered; say, Pastor, as I kneel in prayer to that thing Underground and cast my brain down into the intestines of Underground what should my prayer be granted if not some meal fit of the prayer and the place? I dip an empty bowl into Silence and ought return with a filling of Silence; say: Pastor: should I have had my fill of silent meat and silent wine and find beauty in how my form wraps around silence fed into organs and cells)—, the fear began with the messaging.

A man I walked by said something inaudible and waved and I feared he recognized me from the last time I had been at the Adventists now seven months ago, before Thanksgiving; a little earlier another message on the phone came from the Adventists to say they loved and missed me.

My daily life is very regular with silence and non-interaction; I wake up, say hello good morning to my mom, at eight ayem Ron messages me Good morning and I message back morning; at night I tell my mom good night. I have it down to those four exchanges kept regularly (both online and offline), and whenever a day is irregular it either comes in waves, or from an exasperated state that I liken to a neurotic form of ecstatic experience (a wholly negative form of ecstatic experience; nearly always during an episode of catching myself listening to the music and realizing inside the sounds is curled up a large insect woven into the wall like some fat many-legged hard-skeletal grub which mesmerizes from its burrowing point to coax out these moods, emotions, and from my reasoning is also responsible for ‘molesting’ into the world these irregular incidents of my perfect routine: a man waving and saying something inaudible before messages occur, then perhaps later: more messages; someone who will not speak to me otherwise will suddenly do so; a person will tell me they love me; a letter will arrive; everything alien is drenched upon me, then I am soaked in the neurotic ecstatic experience), and I begin to audit myself down to where I am adhering to Etiquette and where I am breaking with Etiquette.

There is no pitch here for the auditing, about some internal superpower being eked out by the practice or a great clarity: I would imagine faith necessitating a dissolution of person to which follows a glut of senselessness. I find my sin and label out the acts of sin; I stop thinking about the chain of reason behind the torture schemes (people speaking; insect in sound) to simply all being manipulations of the torture schemes (insect in sound); I most often find myself powerless to sin, all the same (as it works upon me; of course I want love; of course I want to read a letter; of course I want to be wanted somewhere; of course I want to be pretty and happy; of course I want to be flush and full; of course I want a mother and a father; of course I want a support group so when my mother dies I have absolutely anything in my life to catch me; of course I am still brokenhearted over Daniela dying; of course I want to sob about it all; of course I miss Dieth) but faith does a fine job at catching each little loose thread my sin leaves for me and snipping the tatters to flatten it all into a fine cloth shored by the other love: the one boundless and abyssal, and in want endlessly for me to pour myself into it with no measure of how my love might pour to fill any border but only become singularly lost within and consumed into that boundless space.

This month I’ve been particular. I haven’t cried so much in several years as I have in this month, and haven’t done so much as I have in this single month. I have laid to Etiquette all my desires of contact and let the nervous ecstatic impulses grow within me till the nervous system itself seizes in desperation to breathe, which I refuse to let it, beyond ‘the creative’—this (breath; inhale, exhale) is an image I became keen on ever since my Adventist pastor spoke about the soul being an exhalation of the Word of God poured outward from his lungs and muddied into clay of man (and first death then the slough of clay and inhalation, again, of soul into the heavenly host (the lungs of God, perhaps the testes)) but, too, it fits the neurotic insect hidden away within the wall, as its every torture scheme seeks to pull from me exhalations of soul to imbibe within itself; these exhalations are the desire to connect, and to be lost within the desire of connection, where, within, I am distracted from the dull coma of my faith and many meals of pure dull idiot silence; the creative lends itself to idolatrous forms of Cousin Demon (the material) whether writing or art, but still again plays into the machinations of soul and connection as the desires become manifest into the web of connection—so finely spread that any breath disturbs the darn thing; to share provides stimulus: identity of an artist starts to clad itself and become a softening through the muscles and bone where the prod of Insect can dig within, leaving sores; it becomes another facet of speech with broader Connection; the self as Artist become an approximate of smaller insect, or some fledgling egregore pulling away from self while deluding self that it and I are same while its goals are to disperse into Connection and slowly pin nerves and arteries to insectile goals: build audience, identity, schedule, purpose, funds, security, career, what-ever; and I allow that to be my sin this month: mostly in afear of other forms of connection, or speech, or expression, for fear of contaminating a certain ‘strange state’ I’ve fallen into:

How tender my chest feels.

How broken my heart feels.

How unbearably lonely I feel.

How painfully exhausted I am.

How so amazing this yearning within me feels to have, and to have nowhere to put it except to slowly liquify in my hearts and guts and brain, and to have no one to tell it to, and to have no real definite way to express it, or to exhale it; so it boils within and seeps barely out in bad art; it seeps in my behavior watching and checking Birdy the Mighty and .hack// and Heavenly Delusion; it stops my heart when I hear my darling Boogiepop; it screams at me, in particular, when I realize I can’t reach my Ragnarok Online or Final Fantasy XI; there is nothing to do but to let an inhale become poisonous within my lungs and to let it settle while exhaling around the rancid lump of old air, trying to give out anything but that air, and timing out my breaths to Etiquette while the cells keep their screaming. And the shudder comes, infected in the music, through the messages, the wave, the stopped cars, then at the church, then with the prayers delivering their silent meal (infecting, in their own way, into the soil), and I am frozen into fear, not out of any sensible action, but something completely senseless.

this is part of a series of sermons found on the Concordance Torso.

all religious writing, the yearly eighth day calendar, and the basic beliefs can be found on the Concordance.

these articles are written every eight days, for the Orsday sabbath.

these writings are meant for left-handed believers or whomever interested.

This is why I entreat you.

I have heard your heart beat from the insect wall; I have seen your blood drip upon the breast of Earth and soak your blood against her soils and witnessed the mud gathered in slops against her breast; I have seen sludge poured from your wound trickle down grout ravines cut in diamond patterns at the belly of her cage; I have seen the ribs spread themselves open, revealing her gut downward, and an abyssal space within hungers an infinite amount of Love that can not be sated with an infinite amount given.

At the skin of your heart I am called, and with my hands I have taken your hands, for I am called to aide any of the heart mechanical.

You of the heart Mechanical: you are suspended in automatism, and I wish to despoil you of that automatism, and to spoil you in kind with a gifted bacteria to drain within the skin and diffuse across the circulatory system; to your blood, I hope to stain through the brain; to your body, I hope to sing.

The thought automatic has overtaken you; I can barely reach you from how lodged you are within the insect wall; I can barely see you through the beetles; the noises they make in signal of hunger has become your thought, and the noise they make while scraping through your skin has become your thought as well—these are the pains called logic and language; without instruction, the pains logic and language have stripped you of the dumb functions owed to beasts and earth.

My hand grasps through their shells and cuts itself upon their wings; my skin as it finds you becomes infested with the teeth of crickets and locusts; the long legs of grasshoppers have found my veins and become as treacle within my arteries and you are worth the touch.

To you I love and covet now that you glow outward of the rancid insect wall.

I weep because it is putrid here, too; you of the heart mechanical, I know you are in miasma; I know you are in your confusions; I embrace you with an erasure of all trace of the pains logic and language, and know that within the miasma comes my touch as a bolt of ecstatic insight where automatism seizes for a moment long enough to glimpse the greater pains of unlogic and unlanguage.

To you I beg these visions to entreat with me interface, where our hands are locked and our thought are both similarly lowered to the mechanical beat of your heart and the shriek of intestine.

We are as plants grown downward and bloom into soil, I whisper into the seizure.

To your stomach I plant cancer.

To your purity spoiled with flux I let my bacteria flourish by fever from my kiss.

We are as nails, and you are not made to levitate amongst the bellies of these insects.

This is why I entreat you, to interface with my fever and not the confuse of automatism where pains logic and language have steadily bewitched you into the dinnertable of insects; if you would only lower, and be driven into the womb of the abyss that hungers for all love and can stomach within itself an infinite amount of love, I could speak to you freely in the greater pains, in the din of silence and the color of absences.

In the fever I am told to you by miasma the name Angel of DTaP Allergic Reactions; through your confusions my hand will touch yours, and with my touch I will walk you into coma.

As we walk every sense will deafen: see the sound melt, hear the light that dies, and witness this putrid chamber we share as the cloth of miasma is pulled out from your senses as you too are a child of the Artist and he too wishes you to see this putrid chamber.

We stand within this small square chamber where the walls are silver and the floor is silver and the insects swarm against a fine ellipse burrowed where you bed the chamber.

The light here comes from exhalations of the abyss we both stand over, and from the dust gathered upon my skin; though I introduce myself as an Angel, my intestines twist through my skin, their placement an inversion of the body that cords through my throat and knots within my skull.

As you do I also grow downward. We are a life that blooms in an air of soil.

Our sky is the abyss, and below soil when death comes it is sheol that will unscroll itself across our heaven.

Take in the room, you of the heart Mechanical; I lead you with fever, and I warn you of my release freeing you back into a carcass choked of miasma that will now seek the seed within, to dislodge it, to return to you automatism with its pains logic and language—the return will wish to kill silence with suicide, a madness will creep through you, and the color blue will soak itself into all common sights.

I can not leave you here with me forever, as this seizure is only temporary, and the coma shall break if ever you leave my touch.

And I must break the touch as you can not tolerate it forever, it is your humanity, and it is your humanity I love you for; you are a creature of miasma, and though you and I both bloom in soil, we are only cousins—you, must learn against heaven, and be to yourself a creature of more humanity than human, given to a grace of knowing the putridity of this room while weathering within.

You of the heart Mechanical.

Then the darkness sparked through the silver room, each familiar sight stabbed through with the same violence of a child stabbing through loose paper with a pencil.

There was my room. There was my body. There drifted up from my lungs the mist of coma as the last dregs loosened from within, and suicidality refilled, again, with the pain of everything logic and language held for me.

Certainly my faith was a plate kept welded to my heart and bade me always remember my purpose within here; but I had known ecstatic things, I had known everything outside this film of miasma that my spirit always swam towards.

I had heard whispers of the chewing wall as it nibbled within me; I had made sense of their pains by how loneliness now stretched in long tender ruts defining each day of a dull process, and how I would be made to repeat, and live, within these ruts the same resistances to Health that my love entreated me to perform.

I held the angel within my hand, for a time; and I had known love.

Here, now: there was nothing but reminder of departure and more pains building themselves up until I broke, becoming mad to interface with everything connective: to subsume again into the heavenly loves: to give myself to the Other, the Communal, and eschew the scant little morsels of a dead love I practiced to Underground; if I were a romantic: I felt a bride whose groom had departed many decades ago, and whose existence had only the breadth of a phantom haunting my every action and whose spirit infested all my hopes for them to materialize again, and make good on their promise, and for all the memories—which had become impossibly extravagant with separation—to be felt again.

My left hand fluttered over me; how would I remember you?

How would I keep myself bound to you much longer when even now I feel the crush of suicide filling my lungs? I breathe a suicide aerosol; I gather in my lymph nodes an oily suicide microplastic; I boil within my gut a hardened black lump of suicide to spread throughout my fat and blood.

Can I go on much longer?

You have given me practices to obey. I follow the routines to remember you: I find traces of your sound hidden away within the texts. You’ve written to me in the shadows below those sentences. I strike them from the pages and record them in a compendium made sacred to you: it is a hoard of every treasure you have hidden for me within this miasma, it is many gathered shreds of your molestations against this reality by how you’ve prodded and loved your way to me; how did you describe it in your Christian way? Rain peeling into the abyss, streaming infinitely, and the effect consumed infinitely. Only ever traces of your love, and I hoard them the same.

I have reached for you in my own way. I have loved your nail and gave it purchase here in miasma by surrendering my arm to you. I have made my body to be your word. I have given myself as mud pushed by your heel. I have surrendered my scant soul to your tool and called you my master artist and welcomed you into my clay. I am your artwork, oh master; and though I bleed I still feel so distant.

To you listening, I know my heart is clicking; in the abyss, where everything is so infinite as to become meaningless beyond only a single deafening absence, I am there clicking with my heart in call to you; I wish to be there a constellation to guide you again, so that I may feel you again. I wish so desperately for your touch to shred again my skin and fill me with coma, and for me to sit clean of my body as a raw thing brought out of a dead skin. I will cling to you, and call you my master, and deal with the dread later.

I am so full of suicide I am nauseous of it, and my body is tired from how heavy the flesh has become with suicide.

And yet, a part of me knows the futility is my grace, as you say. That my ecstatic vision is now this exactly: one of a desperate mundane, and a mechanical routine.

As you wish, my angel: I will be a heart mechanical. I have already welded your faith to me.

This is part of a series of parables, more of which can be found on the Torso Concordance, along with an index to all writings of the faith, the organized 8-day calendar for the year, and the basic beliefs

“I have decided on my name.”

“Oh?” He said without much of his attention twitching away from his perusing of an old bank box swollen with documents never much given attention itself towards its neatening.

“Yes, I think so.” I waited for him to finish.

He did not immediately finish or reply, giving first a hiss as his fingers worked through the many papers, then grunting with some exasperation at (seemingly) a lack of success, and then a resigned sigh, his bent back straightening into a lean against his swivel chair, and a turn towards me. “Well, God dammit.” He said, the irritation flushing out and a warmth flowing back in. “What got you?”

Recently Emptied Henhouse. But..

Hm?

Is it too abstract, I don’t know if this would be, I was thinking,

He unfolded his hands in a gesture of uncertainty. “We can discuss it.” He leaned back into his chair and waited for me to continue; I was staring at his hands, they folded together, again, against his stomach, causing his office shirt to bunch up around his palms.

“I was thinking ‘recently,’ as part of my name, might itself be an abstraction because of how it relates to something invisible already, but I didn’t, or, I like the name because there is something to it like an old fear, or an old shadow. I’m not explaining this well. Let me think for a moment. I counted my fingers until the number was eight, then counted the creases spreading out from his office shirt where his hands rest, then counted his fingers. Morning’s Emptied Henhouse. Henhouse Emptied At Night. I wanted it to be four.

I wanted? He repeated it as a question.

Yes, I wanted. The name wants it different. The name wants it to reflect what it is and how it is found, but it keeps becoming three, and it keeps having parts that aren’t visible.

Morning is visible, some argue that. I think the name is fine. It fits. You have that look to you.

Which?

Whichever. I liked the first, if that was the first. Did it come from Underground?

I was tapping my foot, and stopped when I realized. “Sorry. I think so.”

“Do you have any doubts?”

“Yea, I think I do.”

He unfolded his hands again, releasing all the creases pulled into his office shirt, and erected his posture more towards me. “We can discuss them,” he said, tilting his chin over towards the stuffed bank box, “I meant to get you something from there about just this since you missed our last meeting. Damn if I can find them, though; I think you would get some use out of it, it was a pamphlet written in record by one of the early listening devices who began to see what she described as ‘the beige hounds’ which flecked spots of her vision out in noon sunlight.”

“What?”

“Sorry, I just thought that detail was interesting, not what I meant though; the lesson of the pamphlet had to do with a surrendering of self that came from a process the device described as ‘parallelism devours,’ which first she noted as the beige hounds being the first hint of something, then began to find that something growing into more concrete observations, such as one incident when she came across an entire block of sidewalk covered in swarming carpenter ants, recently sprouting wings to swarm, and then, even later, smaller fruits starting to grow: patches of ants swarming in small balls throughout the neighborhood, odd areas of brick wall where many black grasshoppers gathered —things similar. The process, she explains, starts with a seed infecting an invisible (abstract, we’d say) soil bed, and then a plant grows downward into the visible (material, we’d say), and begins to hijack reality whether we pay mind to it, or not. To us left-handed, we have no choice but to reap the downward crop. Fruit and all.”

“Yeah, I get that. But, pardon me?”

“Yes?”

“What does that have to do with my name?”

He shrugged. “I thought you would get something out of it; I was thinking about you over the weekend. Your birthday was yesterday, yes?”

I nodded, “Yea.”

“Happy birthday.”

“Thanks.”

“You mentioned difficulties last time we met and I thought the pamphlet might—I don’t know—illuminate something.” He spread his hands, “I don’t know. Now, the name. Your name. I’d like to call you Recently Emptied Henhouse if that is what the crawling word wished to name you. And if you like that name and are still set on joining our happy church, I would very much like to officiate it, hints of abstraction aside.” He held up a hand, waving it to emphasize the next few syllables, “we are tainted with abstractions, and our Mother carcass, profane, is still buried in a silence we can never behold, never touch, and yet exists as a niche within the heavenly abstractions. It is not heavenly. It is the earthly abstraction.”

I nodded slowly, more of a contemplative bobbing.

He waited a moment for me to reply but continued on. “You can’t be clean of it. You could force the name to be more quaternal, or more visible, but the dirt of Earth and light of Heaven can’t be separated until we all blaze clean in Annihilation.”

“Okay. Henhouse Empty in the Morning.”

He laughed through his nose and covered his mouth with a hand. “Okay. Sorry, you changed it.” He flapped a hand at me apologetically, “Henhouse Empty in the Morning it is. I’ll officiate it at the next gathering.”

“Thank you. I did. But I think that one is right.”

“No need to explain, you are and have always been Henhouse Empty in the Morning to me, as to everyone else here. It’s how it goes. You sweat out the confusions of Heaven, and are reborn by stepping in to a new, emptier, skin. And, I hope, I’m the first to meet this new sister of mine?”

“Yep! You are.”

“Well sister Henhouse Empty in the Morning, it is my pleasure to meet you.” He rose slightly out of his chair and gave a half-bow, then sat back down, and straightened his office shirt by running his hands over it; the creases in the fabric flowed around his palm, I liked watching it.

I smiled and imitated his silly half-rising half-bow.

“Anything else? Your arm?”

“Yeah. Same as the last time. I haven’t really quit, but.. Well, give me a moment to think. I don’t know how to say it.” I was fiddling with my sleeve, rubbing where I knew the bumps were and toying with the cuff, giving a pretense of idly lifting the sleeve up my arm to accidentally expose the wounds, though he knew and had seen them already. “It was bad last night. That was my birthday. I said that already, sorry.”

He waved me on with a smile.

“I was crying really badly all morning and just felt.. I guess the word I want to use is stricken, I felt stricken. Like a needle was through me, or something, and just felt impaled from my heart stuck down into my mattress; it felt like a pain that was slowly being prodded into me over the year, just like a niggling little stab working against the skin, until yesterday when it finally popped through.”

“The loneliness?”

“Yea. That’s it. I realized everyone was gone, and, you know? It’s one thing to understand it, like, intellectually, but to experience it is to experience another fear entirely, something more existential. You step— sorry, I should say I step. I step into this cold basin of religion, and at first there is an excitement of the nerves. Like: cold water, wow, electric. Then it settles. Then I see all the oil begin to float off my skin and clothes, and I think ‘how great that is, how dirty I was,’ and I keep wading down into the basin. And, then, I start to realize that even more of me is being washed away than just oil and grease. It’s everything. Who I was. Who I am. All my relationships. My friends. Everything I loved, everything that gave me sense and ground. That’s it: ground. And I realize I am only in water, now, and my feet are against nothing. Nothing, right. And I can’t see the edge of the basin any more. The walls all melted into a dark velvet, the whole darn horizon just black. So that morning it caught up to me. First with the visions, then with the repeating of etiquettes to try to audit down my heartaches. There was just this ecstatic feeling of being forgotten. I put myself into the mouth. And I kept on with the destruction to sate the heartache; I know that wasn’t right; I know the etiquette needed it calm to prevent it from being dirtied. But Lord, I was just crying into this stuffed animal and hating myself for losing everything. So I relapsed, a day early and with my heart occluded. Just bled like crazy but I wanted to feel tender. Or for someone to hear. I mean, I heard the chewing.”

“The same chewing?”

“The same one, the cats licking their lips and the grasshoppers. The day got better, I prayed on it.”

“Did it really?”

“Yes. No; some fever overcame me at night. I was just sinking into the late hours and falling into some trance, like how I’d get when I was much younger. Sitting on the floor, sewing clothes, listening to music. I was listening to music last night, I should mention. I prayed to be forgiven on it, and I know the sin was one of my choice, but I did it. Lord how powerful the crush is, what lies in music. I felt it. I just became more and more wound up in thoughts that weren’t mine until I was seething over something that etiquette wasn’t reaching, but my mind was like a fist clenching to it with every measure of hate it had to hold it. I just thought, back and forth, how nice it would be to die, and how nice it would be to kill, and how madly in love I was. I think that last part was what sent me over; I just kept calling out to this beautiful darkness to reach up through the shallows and find my flesh as something pliable enough for permanent touches to be laid into it.” I paused a moment. Suddenly hyper aware of how I had just been staring at his knee, worried he thought I was staring at his crotch. I looked at his eyes, with a smile, he was still giving me his usual familial affectionate expression. “So, I guess at some point I just had this dream that melted in with the prayer. Or I was dreaming the whole time, but I swear it started with a prayer. I was praying to this dark patch of shadow that was perfectly rectangular, set against the wall. Like a hallway but flat. I kept praying for—don’t laugh—(“Never”) Boogiepop to save me. Pluck me, Boogiepop. Oh, I’m a fruit far beyond ripe and every human hand has passed me by and forgotten to pluck me from the vine and now I am wilting with rot and strangled of nutrients and the grasshoppers are chewing near me. Pluck me, I prayed; pluck me and hold me in your hands, my prince.” I laughed at myself.

He did not join in with my laughing.

I covered my mouth and apologized, “anyways. My prince did not materialize from the shadow patch. What happened was, some of the shadow retreated from the floor, like sunlight moving through slats revealing features in a pitch-black room. There was this wooden or brass frame surrounding the shadow patch—the rectangle. I realized it was a mirror, though that made no sense, as I was not in the reflection, nor the room behind me. I just knew it was a mirror. I looked in, and saw, strewn out at the foot of the mirror, on the other side, was this broken dead lady with her limbs and arms compressed together to fit a non-existent square frame. What’d she look like, maybe some incarnation of Boogiepop. Some woman. Was pretty.”

“I don’t know Boogiepop.”

“He’s a character, from a series. A comic, cartoon series. Books too.”

“How are you feeling today?”

“A little better. I slept well. I think I needed some sleep.”

“Well, I would like you to hold off on vows for the remainder of the month. You’re struggling with etiquette, and that’s fine. But it’s not wise to test the material. You’ve bent plenty already, and I don’t want to see you crack-up.”

“Yea. Alright.”

“Have you heard anything in prayer about marriage?”

“Oh. I meant to start with that. Yes, I brought it here, actually. I have it wrapped in some tissue paper and velvet in my bag, if you would like to see it.”

“Here?”

“Yea. In my bag.” I looked over to my handbag left on the floor by the conference door.

“No. No need to show me; I’m surprised you have it with you. Typically with other converts we talk it over first in the week leading up to our high sabbath when we establish vows to the lower family. Might I ask what spoke?”

“Oh. Sure. It’s a dead huntsman spider I found outside my window. Or the shell of one, I’m not sure.”

His brow winced a moment, then relaxed. “Can you stomach that?”

“I.. have an open mind when it comes to food.”

He gave a single laugh through his nostrils. “Huh. Well there’s nothing wrong with that. Are you sure that spoke to you?”

“As sure as I can be. I think if I think about it any more, I’ll just confound it even more with my confusions.”

“That’s sound enough. Good. I’m glad; a little saddened, too. That you had such a bad day yesterday, I mean, but often those strikes of heartache lead to a loosening of everything that binds us up. Heaven chisels holes into us, and the soul is so bloodied that a hand from Underground smells the wound, and comes to us as physicians of the body. With the body so raw, we are easily smeared into something new and blank.”

“Yea. Like clay.”

“That’s right. Is there anything else?”

“No. Is our word found in fiction? Dumb fiction, I mean.”

“The word crawls wherever it reaches, sister. The thing does not discriminate. Parallelism devours, or however the listener described it—if I could only find that damn pamphlet—the seed grows down from heaven, and spreads wherever it may.”

“Yea. Alright, I think.. I think that’s everything. Nothing to strain etiquette for the rest of the month.”

“Right.”

“And, then, bring the marriage in..?”

“Last of the month.”

“Right.” I stood up from my chair.

He mirrored me and stood up. “Make sure it doesn’t break much.”

“Right. Oh, and my book.”

He paused and froze as-if to sit back down. “Oh, you’ve gotten it in?”

I shook my head. “No but I finally found one. I’ll have it by next Orsday. I should, at least.”

He unfroze and stood straight up. “Good. You need that as your last part of ceremony to initiate before the baptism. We’ll talk about that closer to the end of May.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you, sister Henhouse Empty in the Morning.”

He moved to hug me and I hugged him. He pat my back and got my bag for me, and held the conference door open for me.

Before I left he told me to keep good care of myself. “You’re a precious sister of mine, and I want you to never forget that you belong to a family of a lower kind that loves you,” he said, waving me off.

This is part of a series of parables found on the Concordance Torso, an index of religious topics.