Reality

I want to get this off my metaphorical chest before anyone comes here for the wrong reasons:

I started this blog on a whim, with the off hope that I might scrounge up some additional cashflow while writing it. Hence the ads (which have become increasingly more depressing, I might add), and the donate button, especially.

This is not another ARG.

This is not a blog specifically started up to document the Slender Man wandering around my house being all spooky and demanding my twenty dollars (I don't even carry around cash ffs).

This is just me writing about whatever happens to be in my head, and yeah, the Mythos has kind of a way of embedding it in peoples' subconscious minds, but I am not writing about it because I want to be ... I don't know, linked somehow to it, leech off its fame, whatever. I'm writing about it because it happens to be there, and I can't really tell my subconscious mind to stop fucking with me.

I don't plan to lie to you about anything. There aren't any secret clues or mysteries to be found here. Sure, I'll omit things - leaving my exact location/name for privacy/security reasons, for example - but I'm not going to lie about anything and then pass it off as reality.

Even the backwards writing and the coughing is easily explained rationally: I've been able to write like that for ages, and it just struck me as the thing to do for that post. And, well, I'm allergic to this entire fucking state. I've always got a minor sinus infection of some sort going on.

This is just me writing about my boring life.

Now, that doesn't mean I plan on, I dunno, going out and telling other people to stop having fun with their ARG, or even to point out that it IS an ARG anywhere else. Hell, for all I know, having never met the people out there or the Man himself, it might well not be, which is a good thought for never sleeping again, now isn't it? Believe me when I say the uncertainty of that has ....

huh. I kind of got distracted reading comics and stuff and completely forgot where I was going with this.

I actually don't think any of that really needed to be said, but since I've got massive writer's block due to not ... really having a ton of stuff going on in my head, this'll have to do.

'Til Friday.

Being sick is really leeching my brainpower.

Foreboding

The other night, I had the oddest sense of foreboding.

It was dark, of course, since I leave work after sunset.

The parking lot was mostly empty, and I park a ways away from the entrance to the building. Every sense was straining for some kind of movement, some anomaly. I felt a little like I was being watched, but there was nothing there. No one.

Of course now I pay more attention than is really reasonable to the distant tree-line.

Fucking trees are everywhere. 

When I got home, the whole neighborhood was empty. No cars parked in front of my neighbors' houses. Trees remain abundant, like tall people with black arms stretched up toward the sky. It's a midwestern suburb. Of course there are trees everywhere.

The neighbors probably just had somewhere else to be.

Which, you know, never happens really.

But whichever.

It was just so ... quiet. Eerie. So I fished around in my purse to find this thick chain necklace (think: necklace made of chain mail) I keep because hell, getting hit with it hurts, and it draws less attention than anything else I could have on me. I don't think 'jewelry' properly qualifies for weaponry, but hey, if I can make a potential intruder disagree, I've done a good job. No? Plus it looks pretty cool.

Nudged the door open with my foot, turned on the light - that humanish figure I was seeing is just Mom's mannequin. I knew that. Grab my sword. Poke around a bit, make sure there's nothing to find.

Don't really have the courage to check the upstairs alone.

Decide I'm really alone.

Jump out of my skin when Mom opens the door.

There was nobody here.

I'm feeling kind of silly right now.

You know?

Oh. Friday's post is going to be a bit ... odd.

Irrational

Can someone be said to be suffering from a crisis of (absence of) faith?

I think I have diagnosed a key problem with my psyche: I have significant difficulty with belief.

I have been raised as I think most Americans have, with an odd duality. At once we are told to believe only in the rational and quantifiable and logical, the hard data and concrete proofs in the world, yet then also we are told of Santa Claus, God, the Devil, tarot cards and Slender Men, and we are supposed to sort which of these are fiction from the facts.

I don't believe in God. Not really. I don't believe in God or Jesus, Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, Slender Man or the Devil himself.

But I also cannot so blithely discount myths and legends, magical and unquantifiable lines of reasoning, just because I have not personally experienced anything that counts as hard, logical proof. There is an incredibly large chunk of my mind that simply wants to believe in something ... more. Something beyond the dull mundane world of phone calls and little handheld computer-phones and sleeping peacefully in my blissful island of ignorance. Some part of me wants to get the chance to talk to Cthulhu, no matter how much it would shatter my mind. I think there's a very real desire to be special or important, and I think most humans experience it, and I think that's part of why we devise our little religions with us as the center point.

This inability to decide leads to an ... unease, we will go with unease. There is a schism in my personality, a hard line between a very serious, stony side which believes only in that which I can see and feel and touch, research and prove, and a more ... childlike innocence, a willingness to believe and an enchantment with the fantastic.

I love the idea of magic.

I hate the idea of magic.

No, I really don't want you to try and convert me to your religion. What really makes you think it's all that much better and more true than any of the hundreds of other lines of illogical thought? What makes you think that believing in an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent deity (who actually still gives a damn about humanity, not to say a reality that, being omniscient, he/she/it knows inside and out, from start to finish) that rules over everything is any more reasonable than believing in an omniscient, omnipresent deity that gives out material wealth to small children over the course of a given holiday season (be it the Easter Bunny's chocolate Cadbury Eggs or Santa Claus's gaily wrapped presents)?

Yes, I really do want you to try and convert me to your religion. There's a certain ... comfort ... to belief. There's a joy in feeling as though you are a small part of something larger than yourself. The idea of being a large part of that selfsame entity is intoxicating, if foolish. There's a wonderful relief to the idea that a man with a gun might not completely and utterly end your consciousness just because your brain - and all of your chemical, emotional responses - have been shut down. I only ask for the one thing no religion seems able to provide: proof that cannot be explained by any other means. Proof that does not rely upon confirmation bias and self-delusion.

There's a reason I identify as Agnostic but actually don't try to think about it too hard.

My head hurts.

Now excuse me while I go sleep with the lights still burning because I can't disbelieve in the Slender Man just because He's probably fake.

Tiny Freewrite

So, fair warning, this post is depressing. Like, very. Like, I might as well slap "Trigger Warning" on the front if you're a particularly sensitive, easily-depressed person. Written Thursday, before the whole ... dog ... thing.

 

Purse-sized notebook is pretty cool

Writing smaller to fill full quantity of content.

Talking and thinking is becoming garbled.

Multiple Monsters, can't recommend.

Sleepy. So sleepy. Terribly sleepy.
CAFFEINE IS GREAT.

I feel sometimes like this whole blog is one long ode to sanity slippage.
Then again, aren't all blogs that even so much as mention the Slender Man a bit like that?

Planning to buy Droid for self for Valentine's Day. No male/female/inanimate object to serenade, and getting paid.

Valentine's day: Because FUCK single people am I right?
w
aita
sec
I'M
SINGLE

Thinking about selling off old computer since it's never used.

Destroy she said   THE END
   My love again     WILL
Don't try again      COME
   to make amends  QUICKLY
  (A boat)              YOU'LL JUST
   (I'm on one)        END UP Sinking
If you explode in aftermath
Don't think that you've
DESTROY    been Dreaming
she said    My love again
When it's not worth keeping

TVTROPES
WILL RUIN YOUR LIFE. Seems like a lot of people learn about Slendy via TVTropes. So is it TVTropes will END your life? Whoops.

tinyurl for tiny text. I don't ever use the full link, and since you're here, probably you knew that, huh? ( X )

Google has become a verb. It's like using a band-aid. Technically it's a bandage, but eh. Some wacky foreigners call it a "plaster," too. I think mostly Brit

GAH LIGHT VERY BRIGHT
I mentioned that I'm a very boring person who mostly stays home right? Sunshine is shiny. It's dark in my house. Like a CAVE inside. I'm a very nocturnal person too, seriously. Before I started my job I was going to bed at 8 AM.

Otterbox cases are apparently BOMB-proof. Run it over, drop it in the toilet, hit it with a hammer, and the phone still works. I just wow.

Twitter being faster on my phone is kind of sad to me. The computer in my hand is nice. Want the Droid.

I kind of like this wonky line in the middle here.

Technical support with people who should never have a cell phone, much less a smartphone. FUN.

I suck at everything and I'm stupid and I should just die.

Phone trees are cyborgs. They're made partly of people, partly of machinery. PHONE TREES will kill the world.

Rolling words in my head. I don't think there's even a Bluff around here at all. This place is kind of flat. Maybe they're referring to bluff as in the horrible lies sense. With a high enough bluff check you can pretty much rewrite reality. LOLOL.

Everyone makes stupid mistakes. IF I'm so smart then I Shouldn't. EVER.
My god you're such a whiny fucking BITCH Should just DIE. Fuckfuckfuck. Suck at everything.

Probably shouldn't post this.

DUMB BITCH. =(

Unlikable loser. Only thing worse than a know-it-all is a stupid know-it-all who's a fucking idiot.

Hahahahaha. "Nightly ritual of bitching about how everybody but me and my healer are incompetent." That assumes I'M not incompetent. I suck just as much if not more. 


I'm my own worst enemy
DON'T LET ME GET ME
It's bad when you annoy yourself
So irritating 
DON'T WANNA BE MY FRIEND NO MORE
I wanna be somebody else.


ALL
I do is bitch and whine, bitch and whine. How can anybody stand me?
Shut up.


My brain is so empty the thoughts are falling out. I think I hate myself. I really do.

Feeling queasy. Didn't sleep enough.     FUCKING
Depressed and STUPID I'm such a       IDIOT                                              ANY
Like a black cloud in my head that I can't begin to penetrate. Like I'm good for THING. 

Had a weird-ass dream this morning. Two actually. First one I thought I was waking up and then my door opened. A grayscale clown tried to shove his way into my room, and he succeeded, but I smashed the door on him a few times, then hit him a lot with my sword (it has a wooden sheath so I just use it like a club). And he kept laughing. I got the impression I managed to shut out something worse though.

The other dream was just as weird. I was laying on the ground in the underbrush of a forest. I saw two pictures in front of me, only they weren't photos, they were like five-second videos on some kind of clear plastic substance. The pictures - was it two or three? - were of little boys I'd never seen before. When I reached out to look at them (there wasn't any clothing, but it was a bust shot every time) a shadow fell over me and I just knew it was the Slender Man. Worse: NO AUDIO.

Felt like I lurched sideways out of my body just now. Feeling dizzy and disoriented, eyes are watering, what the hell.

Sam

UPDATE: MWF this week. Don't think I can manage more.

Ah hell, I lay odds I'm gonna be crying by the end of this.

So, anybody who can scroll down the page and see my twitter feed will probably already know this. Kind of. So here's the somewhat less abridged version.

Sam was never really my dog, you know? He's a little toy poodle, purebred, not like it matters since the first thing Grandma did when she got him was cut off the breeding bits (with a vet's assistance but still). He had a bunch of genetic problems - his teeth were messed up, his knees were messed up, his heart was failing him for the last five years of his life. Which, see, is why inbreeding is a bad thing, purity or not.

But yeah. So, initially, he belonged to Grandma, and she took care of him, I guess, at least until she passed away from liver cancer. I miss Grandma sometimes, but it's finally distant enough it doesn't hurt so badly anymore.

Then, my Great-Grand-Uncle (I think?) Tom inherited him. We always called the old man Uncle Tom, which come to think of it is part of the name of a book, right? They were basically inseparable, right up until he, too, died - from pneumonia and old age. There's a little bit of a pattern here.

Grandpa took care of him from then on. There's this old recliner in our house, and I've got all kinds of memories of Grandpa sitting in it, learning computers and watching television, whatever. He retired, and less than a year after that, we found out he had lung cancer. A couple of years after that, and he's just gone.

Two days before Sam died, I saw him just -staring- at that recliner, the one that sits empty most of the time anymore. Sam used to sit in it with him, you see.

And now Sam's gone, too.

We couldn't even bury him properly, because of all the snow. We'll do it, yeah, after the ground thaws out, but still.

I was never really all that close to him.

The house seems so much more empty now that the last of the pets have gone.

Admission

Or, the Awkward Post

So it's Monday again, and I figure, why not.

Since last week was all about the Slender Man, now's as good a time as any to mention that I write in advance as far as I possibly can. You know, just in case I get abducted by Candlejack or somethi

All joking aside, this entry was written Thursday of two weeks ago.

Hello, future me! Have you been abducted yet?

Probably not.

In the daylight hours, I find it easier to ignore, disregard, and disbelieve in lines of fantastic reasoning. I prefer to think rationally in situations that require logic.

Other admissions, given the post title here's as good a place as any for them:

I actually identify as Asexual IRL. I don't know if it ever came up, or became particularly obvious. It's more apparent IRL than online, in my opinion: I have spent my entire life immersed in a sex-driven culture, and have absorbed the vernacular. Besides that, I tend toward apathy. It's fairly hard to showcase a lack of something. Probably the most obvious clue is how utterly oblivious I am toward being hit on (a trait that accidentally transfers to my characters in RP, since I don't even notice). I have to be pretty much hit over the head with a shovel to recognize a compliment.

Speaking of apathy and lifestyle choices, I tend to label myself agnostic. I am the exact opposite of a religious fanatic of any stripe: I actually don't care enough. Religion is one of those things that is almost impossible to prove, and without proof, I can't really care too much which invisible, omniscient, omnipresent entity I "should" be trying to appease - and how would I actually know, anyway?

That said, I wear a pentagram, not a cross. Of all the mystical, metaphysical babble I've bothered to expose myself to, Wicca is probably the most empowering and female-positive.