Below is a partial translation of the Irish War Goddess Badb’s delivered prophecy after the defeat at Mag Tuired of the Fomorians by the Tuatha Dé Danann. She augers the eventual end of the world, “foretelling every evil that would be therein, and every disease and every vengeance.”
[translation: celt.ucc.ie]
(more…)While I do have other regrets in my life, I think those that cut deepest are those times that I acted cruelly or unjustly to someone as a defense mechanism against all the times that people treated me cruelly or unjustly in my youth.
I was bullied most of my childhood, by extended family as well as by my peers.
By my mid-teens, I was starting to be mean to certain people with the justification was that then I was doing it before they could do it to me, especially when we started drifting apart after being close. Always “as jest”, of course. Plausible deniability…
By my late twenties, I wouldn’t even let most people get closer than superficial interactions with me.
There are people, both living and deceased, that I wish I could apologize to for treating them the way I did. But how to find them? Even social media is useless for finding some of the people most owed an apology. And not everyone wants to hear an apology from me anyway. Those are the kinds of knives I used to stab people.
And while I try to not live in the past or in regrets, I do wish I could at least try to repair as best as I am able those moments where I was unnecessarily mean to another person out of avoidance of risking feeling pain myself.
Instead of avoiding pain, I now carry this poison with me with nowhere to set it down.
You have to laugh at the irony.
One thing that has nagged me recently is the concept of blue pills and red pills.
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I re-opened a blog site from ancient history (2007-2008) and made it public again because one of my new readers requested access to what had been marked a private blog (or maybe not, but it is back “live” regardless).
It is just a catalog of quotes and poetry that caught my fancy, namely of a Taoism or Zen Buddhism bent. There’s nothing terribly exciting there unless you are into those kinds of things, or if you want a peek into where my mind was about a year before I ended up choosing sobriety as a more enlightened path than wonton drunkenness.
Check it out, if you are so inclined: Useless Tree
I originally made the site private primarily to stop a reader from demanding new posts when I had decided I was no longer in the mood to be enlightened. And then I never got back to posting on it or making the site public again when that mood passed away.
I started reading Jhereg by Steven Brust last night as part of my recent determination to create some air between my brain and various digital and social medias (streaming services including YouTube, mass-social media, news sites, video games, & etc.). I am annoyed with myself now that it has taken so long to read his writing aside from Freedom and Necessity.
I hope that no one is offended when I say Jhereg is just the kind of pulp fiction I was looking for. It is not high literature, nor does it pretend to be. The novel is a fantasy tale of an assassin and mobster, Vlad Taltos, who happens to be a second-class citizen (because he is human) in a fantasy city full of thievery, deception and double-crossings. Plus, he has magic and a reptilian familiar.
And, so far, it works — as a bit of a hard-boiled noir and fantasy crossover. A movie with similar DNA (except set in a futuristic Earth instead of a medieval fantasy world) might be Blade Runner.
Like The Witcher books I’ve been re-reading, it has an easy flow to the storytelling that I think might be missing from a lot of the more recent writing out there. Even some of books I’ve enjoyed that have been written in the past 25 years seem to be trying real hard to be “good literature” when they are, at their base, pulp novels. Or, maybe, I’m just more tuned into penny dreadfuls, pulp fiction, and weird tales and would prefer to read that birdcage liner stuff.
Sometimes I wonder if we put too much emphasis on structure, formulae and erudition, and not enough on merely telling a “ripping yarn”. I certainly don’t know. But I’m sure there are tons of opinions about the matter.