When Life Gives You Lemons - BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD

So my first idea was to write about something I don't usually write about, because I'm a big fan of Tzeentch lately.

I was sick for a day. I managed to combat it by stuffing myself with hot food and sleeping for 18 hours. I went out and bought cumin. I read books. Read Neil Gaiman. Read some more Neil Gaiman. In fact, I read four Neil Gaiman books.

So now I'm hyperaware of fog and wary of shadows.

And more importantly, shedding mucus nasally at a prodigious rate. This is the one thing that has stuck with me, after the body aches and head full of hot cotton fade, vanquished by cumin.
And it is vexing.

Which is what I want to concentrate on.

There. There. I just did it fast, quickly, in this new stream of drunkenness style I am trying to cultivate without the use of booze itself.

I intentionally made myself vexed, by playing a videogame that has been frustrating for the past days or so.
Just now. Took an hour, and it's 1:30, and now I have shit like class to deal with but that is the price I pay for retaining a fragment of myself. Verbiage. Vexed. Excess.

I did so because I wanted to do so, because I hadn't in a long time. And I'm realizing that it's healthy, or at least necessary (many things necessary to survival are in fact detrimental to your immediate health, but hey, that's how life works. sort of.) to get pissed off at a regular rate.

Most people do it silently, or at least quietly enough that it never grows up and spreads to other people, or erupts into real honest-to-god anger, or unleash it upon the actual cause of the vexation, turning it to rage.

This is unhealthy. And, required. Deal with it. That's the point.

But, every now and then, you are entitled to a good sulk. And you should throw yourself into these "vacations" with as much verve and fervor and other action words with V's in them as you can muster. Because your body will produce them anyway.

In this respect, it is like menstruation.

Also, it is an unspoken rule that you're allowed to be pissy like this.

In this respect also, it is like menstruation.

Girls, you are smarter than we think. Who We is in this sentence, I have yet to quantify. Obviously we are people who don't give credit where credit is due in the conniving department.

The point is, you have to learn to identify and seize these opportunities to work up a mental (and sometimes physical) sweat just being sullen and sulky.

Justification is key. Nobody likes an asshole.

An asshole is somebody who behaves this way all the time.

So lets say you're feeling a cold coming on, and it's still only the second week of school. You've got work, where there was no work before. Things like chores and to-do lists swim around your head, competing sperm scuffling for the ovum of your brain.

What is it with me and gameto-metaphors lately. I will tell you what. It is Zoology.

ZooLOLogy. FLOLmingo. GorilLOL. AxoLOLtl.

You're hungry, and you know you can't just eat whatever's in the fridge because the only things in the fridge are raw ingredients you bought yourself, and you can't go to the store and buy more because you're sick and life is conspiring against you just to make you miserable.
Any attempts to alleviate the suffering are met with resistance provided by the great Sulk Spirits, oily and diaphanous, hovering above your house, your head, your biosphere. Waiting until you succumb to the inevitable. Hoping you'll embrace them, become one of them.

Which you should. It's a quick and painful release, like squeezing out a deep pimple.

Quite like that, actually. A bit of strain for instant satisfaction, coupled with eye-watering leftover pain and a lingering sensation that this was a bad choice and you've just made yourself look that little bit uglier come morningtime.

Do it anyway. It's human nature. And that way, if everyone does it, I can justify it much, much more easily.

TED, I? (Wordscramble!): I've been far too busy to listen to music. Which is odd, because I stuff my headphones into my ear canals twice daily as I walk to and fro school. Mostly fro. I take the bus in the to direction. I fro back on foot. Perambulation in the Fro direction. Vehicular transportation upon embarking towards things labeled To.

So no new music lately. Not even any new youtubes. Can't listen to music when you're playing videogames that require sound, and since they're all so fancy these days they use stuff like auditory cues for enemies or powerups. You are required in order to participate. And contrary to popular opinion of teenagers everywhere, music does not in fact help you study, or learn, a damn thing.

That behind said, have some more D'Angelo.
You can skip to when the music starts, at 1:00 or so. Excuse it. It's the start of an album.

WAT

WHAT IS THIS SHIT. WHAT IS THAT.
A FLAMING FROGMOUTH OWL? SOME STUPID LIZARD? AN AXOLOTL?
TOO FAR THIS TIME. just kidding, I'm totally getting it

except the legendaries look retardrilliculous.

http://pokemonpotal.22web.net/onam/


Editoritos: Also, gayyyyyyyy (true)

1:04 AM. L H N V W B A A.

Listen to that jazz again.

Drink that drink again.

Onomotopoeia that again.

There is a fantastic.....aspect.
To being drunk.

And, as a writer, I must capture it.

What a beautiful sentiment. As a writer.

I can proclaim myself as a writer.

I am drunk, currently, which means at the same time I am horribly muddled and I am horribly accurate in matters involving both Truth and Beauty.

I have forgotten how to make strikeout text. This is probably for the best. It is a relic of my past.

The time has come to change. Evolve. Cast all previous things out, begin anew. Build a new exoskeleton that will allow me to survive in this new environment.

Avoid looking like a lobster.

Avoid thinking about the Red Hot Chili Peppers with sentimental undertones.

They were before our times.

What a wonderful concept, to be able to claim yourself to be a Writer.

It is diplomatic immunity.

As a writer, you are an impartial *or partial* observer.

Music is improved by alcohol.

Feeling pretentious is improved by alcohol.

The two are the same, here in these modern times, as a 21st century dont make me kill you male.

Old friends become old strangers, so my current song lyrics tell me.

My mouse allows me to flick through songs with a speed that is unknown to me.

As I was saying.

There is an inherent and ugly beauty allowed in declaring yourself as a writer.

It means you are, by your very nature, allowed to form opinions - indeed, it is your job, allowed because you do it so beautifully; artfully deconstructing and cruelly the entire sentence has fallen apart by that point but that is okay.

It is post-partial 17th century neo-deconstructionism.

Where are you going, have I not gotten you sufficiently impressed?

Let us talk for a while about your cat.

I swear I think you are worth talking to. Or at least talking at. Let us stand for a moment, observing the world move around us.

Then let me go home and talk about you to the world, to the internet, to the small subculture of people I have gathered around me, the enablers the dealers the small woodland creatures, the gamers the Golums the grim the alliterative the dangerously cheesy.

I appear to be falling to the left.

Staring at Australia.

I have wrote. Written. Writing. A note. For myself. In the morning.

Kanye West.

Stream of consciousness is overrrated Have I told you I never made it fully through the original scroll of On The Road Again by Jack Kerouac? It is a terrible shame because you aren't allowed to use the writing style of a famous bastard unless you have read his art his version his brilliance the thing people put in museums.

They were all on drugs.

Why cant I be?

You keep it going.

You keep those books rolling.

I shall become a conduit.

I am already a conduit.

How many other words can I fit vowels in to, before I arrive at the point I wanted to arrive at hours ago? Minutes ago?

Time is warped. Start closing your eyes more.

A girl you don't have.

Wrote my former self, minutes ago, in anticipation.

I wonder if this is why people drink drugs.

And/Or slice open cows on stones, statues, art, altars, altair.

Arabic for Eagle.

Altair rotates rapidly, with a velocity at the equator of around 286 km/s.

الطائر.

Late Night Visitations From The Very Agitated Ghost Of J Dilla

Have a soundtrack.


I, no more WoW currently. Which was my plan all this time, I just assumed that I wouldn't have any time to fritter away and now that classes are starting and I am driven to socialization and it is all coming true, those things, future headache moving pictures.

So I got this new videogame, thanks to Caleb.
It is called Heroes of Newerth and I am in the BETA. TESTING.
It is a complete intentional revamp and copy of the WCIII DotA mod.

I guess I'm a little late in the game, since DotA came out in 2003 and has been played steadily by Koreans since then. I have never played it. The french twins would sit, shirtless, in their house and play DotA. The Allens play it still.
My roommate at UW played it constantly, and I developed a deep deep hatred for it.

A completely pointless hatred for it, since it turns out those darn Koreans know their shit and it's a fantastically fun game.

Or at least, HoN is. And it's literally identical, they just updated the graphics and adapted the gameplay and renamed the items.
Which is fine, they asked the modders who made DotA, "Can we do this? You cool with us doing this?" and they gave the all clear.

It is pretty. DotA was permanently stuck in 2002 Warcraft III graphics. HoN has distinct animations, sounds, when the Legion conquer the Hellborn a massive tree root wraps out of the cracked earth and forms a new World Tree. And when the Hellborn win, an equally impressive tree is split in two to form a new sacrificial demon altar!

It is a good videogame. It has many of the characteristics that first sucked me into WoW so many years ago: It's engaging, interesting, continually changing and updating, pretty, and most importantly, it has that WoW feel.

That is to say, it has a complicated jargon/technical side that you can study and get good at, and theorize about when you aren't playing. It is faceted.

Now, the part where it gets neat is that it's running off of a previous game, the DotA framework. All the items are the same, but they've got two sets of names, so everyone calls stuff by their old names, and new players (me) have no idea whats going on, but the point is that it SOUNDS REALLY COOL.

Like there's this item, called a Wingbow, only in DotA it was a knife called The Butterfly. And it's base components are soooort of similar, and they serve the same purpose, and so forth.

What's even more interesting is the Hero conversion. In DotA there was at least a vague mod backstory of the Scourge attacking the Night Elves, and these heroes were from the Warcraft universe.

In HoN it's a completely different lore, that they just had to adapt! So this Dwarven character, Lord of Olympia, who threw lightning around, became this Ape-Man Shaman character, Thunderbringer! And everyone refers to him as Zeus from DotA.
The Moon Rider Night Elf got changed to the Moon Queen insect-ruler woman, and everyone calls her Luna.
It's all fabulously, unnecessarily complex and possessing of a steep learning curve, which all come together to make me like it a lot. DotA, I forgive you. Or at least I like your hotter, younger sister.
But I wouldn't have gotten to know her if I hadn't met you first!


I have been so very busy these last few days. Busy being unproductive and lazy in an entirely different way, a group way, a public way. Interactive inactivity. Socialization via being lazy bastards.
I am sure it will change now that school is starting up again.

I am glad to have the ability to close my door and go batshit again, after a week and a half of meeting new people, doing the College with my Dad, and spending three hours in a Target.

I appreciate alone time again, after a year of forced solitude.

That makes sense.

Everybody Tane!

Remember that video I had a few months back with the slow motion ice cream fight?
(Here is its again it is wonderful, hot girls and ice cream)

This tops it.


I mean yes it's sexist and a bit ridiculous at the end, but actually? That's good dancing! I am impressed more by the dancing bits than the sexy bits.

That is a damned lie and you all know it. The dark brunette in the oneandahalf-piece? I would give my left pinky just to lick her shadow off a hot sidewalk.

Everybody Act According To The Season They Were Born In

God, there is something so hilarious about that video. Maybe it's just the music or the fact that he pokes in time with the beat.....man


Are you familiar with the song that you don't actually like to hear, but listen to over and over again anyway?
It's like your brain can't make up it's mind get it hurr hurr hurr, so the only available option is to do it again.

This is one of them. I could make a list of things I like and dislike about it, but it would get scrambled on the next viewing. Also, apparently that’s BoA on vocals back in 2003. Who’d know. Other than you, I guess.

An unthinking song is different than, say, a song you definitely don't like but secretly listen to guiltily or a song you know you'll only like for a short amount of time so you listen to it over and over while you can. (Yes, that is a Neptunes beat. Good to see you've been doing your homework.)

I actually had to turn the lights off and close my curtains to watch that Ashley Simpson video. Out of shame, that is. Except that, as my window faces up the hill road now, I felt weird, like, in case somebody had already seen me and was thinking that I was closing my curtains and turning off the lights to do something inappropriate with that video. But I figured the chances of that were slim.

Which is a nice segue into the fact that I have curtains now, in my room, here in Arcata.
Which is nice.
How about that.

They are typically depicted as mindless, shambling, decaying corpses

I'm at my dads, right, where I haven't been for two years, right.

I have this feeling that I have lots and lots to write, but I'm currently incapable, it's too windy or hot or fuzzy this exact moment but I've got so much to say to everyone that is fairly important.
It is a frustrating feeling.

I get lots of traits from my father. I mean, don't get my wrong, I get lots of traits from my mom too. And my brother.
It's easier to identify shared traits when you share living space with the person.
My dad is a fine guy, I mean, this is the obligatory assurance that I am okay with my family that you have to get over with before you say anything remotely against one of them.

I worked at the lab, right, and I took the bus down, the 9:52 bus down to the mall every week, and every morning I'd walk through the mall and buy a small jamba juice which cost $4.01 and I would put a penny in my pocket every day so I could give exact change otherwise if you give them five dollars they'll give you 99 cents in change. One day I forgot the penny and got the 99 cents in change so I put an emergency handful of pennies in my bag.
So I'd drink my small jamba juice of various flavors, you know, I'd alternate between lots of flavors, they have lots, as I walked across campus to the chem building.
About, I'd been doing this since August, about around January I walked in one day and the chem teacher saw me and told his class "SEE? Told you he'd have the jamba juice! Griffin, you're a real creature of habit!"
And I grinned right, cause it's totally true, but I guess it really bugged me because I had never even thought about it, it was just my morning ritual. It stuck with me, because I've got it in my head that being a creature of habit isn't how you should be at age 20, you should be wild and crazy and fresh.
Capricious. It's one of my favorite words and I'd love to be able to have it apply to myself, but it's really not true at all.

The point is I get that from my father. He's been in this life of his for maybe seventeen years, and nothing big has really changed since then.
This is how all the indie films start, with a crotchety sad guy living in a bare apartment with his rare plant that is the sole receiver of his affection and then along comes some oddly fashionably dressed young girl, maybe she moves in next door, maybe she's poor, maybe they go on a cross country trip in an old run down car, the point is this is not how it is at all.
My dad is perfectly content and so am I, this is my familiar california house and life.

The point is that my dad is a really ritualized guy and there is a real negative light shed on the ritualization of a life because people think that variety, I mean, it's the spice of life.
We watch movies, we watch old comedies or old world war II movies or old mystery science theater 3000's. We make popcorn, and when we're done, we throw the unpopped kernels out the bowl off the deck. It's not the creepy kind of ritualization where, like, we eat a specific meal at 5:00 every monday.
That's the whole point.

It's the real small stuff that automatically becomes tradition, the brand of tortilla chips we buy, or the fact that no piece of furniture has been changed in this house for twenty years, or that we quote old movie jokes at each other while we do highly ritualized stuff like taking down the trash on thursdays, rolling the bins down the drive way with a flashlight lighting the way.

He hasn't changed either, that's the whole point. Down to the smallest trait, he still acts the same. Don't get me wrong, he buys a new computer or airplane model every now and then. When a new supermarket opens, he goes to it. The stickers on the back of his car change as we change schools. I don't want to call it a "tic" or a "tendency"...there is no word to describe a consistent persistent behavioral trait that doesn't carry a sinister negative vibe to it.
Maybe that's just how I see it.

He absorbs things into his ritual, is what I'm trying to say. It isn't that he buys a half-gallon of milk every Tuesday from the same store at 5:32 pm.
He just eats a bowl of cereal every day, whatever kind of wheat-chex-ies type.

It isn't like he gets the same exact flavor of jamba juice every day at the same time.
He just gets a jamba juice for breakfast cause he likes jamba juice.


Editor's Edit: And also, music!