Perch @perchingpath@eldritch.cafe

Mustering my chirpiest voice to pipe, "I'm made of lead! My bones will fall through the water as through thin air & thump against the seabed!"

"Billiards! Bollards! Hyacinth, bawl & dirge, lice, craw feet, convolution! Prosopagnosist! Fastness, temulance, affixion & armistice! Divisionist, desistor, glossotomic foxglove!" is the sort of thing I'd say if I were Capitaine Haddock & had been deceived into a pratfall.

Irritating to find that a story I care about has a fandom, and I could thus at any time stumble across skilled illustrations in which the characters, whom I imagine to mostly be various strains of haggard wreck as befits their circumstances, are all thin, young, & cute.

My aunt's on bandcamp now. Her page has a gothy, primitive-digital aesthetic, enough to make me wonder if she'd gone industrial, but her latest single is still new-agey waiting room jazz. Great move.

Starting in 1960 my grandfather worked for an amusement park called Freedomland, whose Midwest-themed section contained a microcosm of the 1871 Great Chicago Fire, continually igniting and being doused. That's a gap of 89 years, so some visitors could have watched the pantomime while remembering the actual fire, which killed about 300.

Ugh, the first sentence of this thread is getting circulated as a truism on twitter. Let me take another stab at the point: Making every rationalization socially unacceptable wouldn't be sufficient to stymie the defensive, expulsive reflex. Knowing that tragedy could befall you at random, & controlling the resultant fear, are necessary to avoid harming people it's already befallen.

My most attractive feature is the formation of four angiomata that stretches across my lower left ribs, marking the the angles of the pyramid which you must soon build should you wish to shelter from what's coming. I am best appreciated with a protractor & an army of skilled masons.

Cases in which no acceptable rationalization can be formed, though, still provoke the same defensive aggression. You can likely still feel at least the minor spasm of this in yourself even if you've let misfortunate caprice soak into your awareness.

Most people become intensely defensive when encountering those who've had ruinously bad luck. Sometimes they'll be able to formulate a way in which the ruination's actually a just penalty, possibly through an entire horseshit framework of fault (Christian Science, "poverty is caused by laziness," etc.).

"You'd look good with stiff vibrissal sprays like a tiger's," I'd say, "to match your charnel breath." And then I'd kiss your forehead, probably.

Undergoing social obtrusiveness therapy by lounging expansively across a bench outside a suburban Catholic church & reading Nights at the Circus for 90 minutes.

Stood with knitted brow in front of the touchscreen drinks machine in this burrito place like a time traveler freshly arrived, eventually figuring out how to steal rootbeer, which I haven't tasted in years.

Sigilla to prevent injury, technically.

The great blue heron which I often see gliding over the creek at dusk appeared early & distracted me from the delineated arc of water, but only briefly.

Applying a Korean lip mask the color of cabbageworms & the scent of baseball card gum.

Gelatinous

Some unshakable anamoly of optics keeps convincing me that the subway door a row behind me and across the car is open as we move. If I'm mangled by wheels tonight it'll be down to hallucination or tunnel rat magic rather than any thanatic urge of mine.

@erinbee A public school in nowhere exurban USA, with scrutiny sharply intensified by Columbine-era paranoia. There were a lot of (largely trans-/homophobic) reasons people had their eyes on me in particular, so flashy ophidian silver was presumably just the final confirmation of my evil to somebody. :)

@erinbee Hell yeah. I used to wear one of those (but not quite as nice at the head & tail) to school when I was 15 & some of the staff definitely interpreted it as, like, a Satanic emblem.

I don't think I've mentioned that I live close enough to Rumer's office to pass it while running errands. I always think, "Wow, that'd be really convenient if I were someone inclined to make a different set of compromises."