lioness_hart | Recent Entries

Hm. I guess really the point here is that I don’t know what story I want to tell anymore. More to the point, I don’t know what I want to write about. I haven’t known for a long time. Demonologue feels… far away. Unattainable, unwritable as I am right now.

I don’t know how else I’m supposed to trick myself into writing than to just do it every day, but the demoralization of it not being any good is the opposite of the dopamine that makes it worth it. So quit complaining I guess? This is the same argument I’ve had with myself for going on years now. And the answer–sorry, excuse– I give myself is that there will be some magical future point when everything will be correctly arranged, inside and outside of my brain, to make writing suddenly Easy And Fun Again.

And I think part of me is raging against the very real fact that that is not my fate. I’m the one who has to make it Easy And Fun Again to write. And the more time has gone on, the more I have let that muscle atrophy, so that it gets harder and harder and the amount of time between the drudgery of starting and when it feels Okay Again gets longer and longer.

My relationship with writing is, unfortunately, a victim of all of our brains’ enslavement to nostalgia. As much as I hate to say it. I want things to be like they were; I know they can’t be, and that pain is stopping me from starting again.

I blew a lot of wind about repairing my relationship with writing, and I’ve come around to the conclusion that I can’t really do that any other way than to just. Write.

I’m scared about what may happen in November, and I’m worried that voices like mine will continue to be silenced, even more than they already are. But that’s not now, and they can’t stop me from writing. So far. So I should write.

It’s not that there’s nothing I want to say. There is PLENTY I want to say. So I should go about the work of saying it. Even if it takes me a few tries to get the music of it right, because I know that we, the universe, is made of music. The universe hums; the universe sings. Thus, we are songs. Matter is really energy condensed into a slow vibration; we are all one consciousness experiencing itself collectively there is no such thing as death life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.

Think for yourself. Question authority. Think for yourself. Question authority. Think yourself. Question authenticity. Unthink yourself. Unself yourself. Understand that information is not knowledge; knowledge is not understanding; understanding is not wholeness. Is not going to get at that slow and waiting hum at the edge of all things that is the song and zing of atoms and poetry.

Everything needs everything; this is necessary. We are necessary because we, unselfed and open-minded and knowing-not-knowing, learn the universe to itself. Whether you believe that or not. Life is not necessary just as knowledge is not necessary. Do we call what the roach knows knowledge? Yet it persists. Life is persistent, insistent in its unnecessity. It is an open-mouthed shout of triumph: yes, yes, I am here! And I know! I know I don’t know! Yes, everything is confusion and that is the low and persistent hum of circling electrons that moves the paw and finger and root and soul. That is the necessary of it: the unbeing, the unbecoming, so that you can need everything and not get lost in craving. Everything you need needs you; you and everything are the same; root and rind. Skin and skitter. Ground and god. Song and scream.

“The fiction will see the real/ the answer will question still.” I love this couplet because it is just that: a couplet, containing two dualities which are often thought as opposites. But they’re not. We’ll get to that a bit later.

I am drawn toward dualities and binaries. This is the way I am. Often it’s a limitation on my thought and causes internal strife, because it forces me into an all-or-nothing, this-or-that frame of mind and set of choices. Which makes me feel like someone has dual swords crossed at my throat, and no matter which way I shy, I will be blooded.

It makes me feel trapped, which is the central terror of my character.

Thus, like with most of us, my internal climate is both seed and nourishment of my most dehumanizing terror.

For all the thought and time and words I’ve spent on why my fear is a cage and why my eyes are lensed to focus on agents of that terror, I don’t have good or complete answers. I may never. At this point in my life, I don’t know if even finding the answers will help me that much. It’s good to know where you came from, because it helps you understand who you are. But how much of my time do I want to spend gazing deeper and deeper into my navel? Until I’m eyeball deep in my own pulsing guts? I don’t want to go through the rest of my life hunched over like that. This life demands more steel in my spine than that.

The way you kill weeds is to pull them up by the roots, not just cut off their stems. But my point is, weeds don’t exist. The concept of a weed– a thing whose pure existence is undesirable or at odds with a planned purpose– is false at best and lethally anthropocentric at worst. At least in the biome of my mindbody, everything that could be called a weed is not a weed, because even though I may not like it, it’s there, and by the unblemished, unblamed fact that it is there, it is a part of me. It is a note in the song of me.

So then, the question-answer becomes this: how to bring this note into harmony with the rest of me. I am not giving up on Becoming; I am simply replacing an exorcism with an embrace. We are both the ghost and the thing haunted; this I have believed since I was a child. Each of us has our own way of quieting our ghosts, and whether you see them as weeds growing in your internal garden or ghosts haunting the house in your head, my answer-question is the same:

Learn to live with them. Learn to live well with them; learn to live with them well. Learn what you must do to give them space, give them grace, and speed their stillness when they become rowdy.

It's fashionable to hate being outside in the summer. Because the sun is hot, because the sun is a deadly lazer, yes, yes. We know.

And yes, it is becoming a health hazard to be out in the heat of the day in the middle of summer. Because the sun can kill you, because skin cancer, yes, yes, climate change, yes, we know, we know.

Secretly I've always hated when people talked ill of sunlight. Secretly I've been dismissive of people who say they hate the sun. I'd never disagree with anyone to their face because I know people who do actually live in places where it's hazardous to one's health to be outside in summer for any great length of time.

But I will never be one of those people who hates being outside in the summer. I will never not love the sunlight. I grew up--and currently live-- in one of the places where it hasn't been, but is rapidly becoming, dangerous if not lethal to be out in the heat of the day in summer.

But you will find me out anyway, with my face turned up to the punishing light, the nourishing light, the scorching, loving, terrible, eviscerating, killing, life-giving heat. I don't know why. I've always been this way, and if the world finds it in its ways to be kind to me, I will die in sunlight.

Hozier said it well.

All the tales the same
Told before and told again
A soul that's born in cold and rain
Knows sunlight, sunlight, sunlight
And at last can grant a name
To a buried and a burning flame
As love and its decisive pain
Oh, my sunlight, sunlight, sunlight

Each day, you'd rise with me
Know that I would gladly be
The Icarus to your certainty
Oh, my sunlight, sunlight, sunlight
Strap the wing to me
Death trap clad happily
With wax melted, I'd meet the sea
Under sunlight, sunlight, sunlight

Do you ever love the sunlight so much? So much that your insides ache to feel it? I hope my guts see sunlight one day. I think they've earned it.

This isn't a resolution, because I don't ever keep them if I make them. But I've decided that I will cut as much as half of my screen time (TV, doomscrolling on handheld devices) in favor of reading actual paper books.

I'm a book purist; I strongly dislike reading eBooks and anything longer than a 5k-word fanfic on a screen. That's simply a personal preference, but it also has to do with the glare from the screen hurting my eyes. I don't have an eReader (Kindle, etc) and I don't want one. Putting on a blue-light filter helps, but I still end up downloading and printing longer fics (yes yes I am a tree murderer, sue me).

Audiobooks are right out! I have never been officially diagnosed with any kind of auditory processing disorder, but spoken word input without either captions or a face with moving lips just completely goes in one ear and out the other. Watching TV without the captions usually works out, because people's mouths are moving. But trying to process/understand podcasts and audiobooks-- anything spoken-word without an accompanying visual (subtitles, transcripts, a person on screen speaking)-- is an exercise in frustration for me.

So it's paper books! I like having physical media anyway; digital media is increasingly susceptible to the late-stage capitalist feature of the death of ownership. I've heard too many stories of people who have "downloaded" and thus "own" some of their eBooks having them suddenly be deleted from their libraries without explanation. I am not about that life.

I used to be an absolutely voracious reader when I was a kid, so much so that I got to know both my school and municipal librarians personally. I usually devoured 2-3 books a week, all the way up through college. I was an English lit major, and it was only then, when I was required to read at volume, every day, for my classes, I found myself first not having time to read for pleasure, and then not really enjoying it since I was reading so goddamn much everyday anyway.

After that, reading for pleasure slowly... fell... away, as so many of the joys of childhood do as the wheel of time grinds you toward adulthood.

My to-read list is, at this point, about 11 pages long. And I mean full-size, 8.5 X 11 pages. How embarrassing. What better time to do something about it than now?

I've already finished 2 books (not too bad, considering all the other crap that's going on in my life) that weren't even on the list. I'm starting with the books I already have physical copies of, and once I finish those, I'll start looking for the books that I don't have yet.

I'm not going to say I'm excited, since it's tough for me to get excited about much of anything these days. But it's nice to want to read, instead of just rewatching the same 5 shows over and over and over again while doomscrolling on my phone for 3 hours a night lol.

I'm not setting myself a number goal or a page goal; I'm simply going to read, and let my intuition tell me what I want to read when. Like when I was a kid. Hopefully it'll help me feel less desperately miserable about life and maybe, just maybe, it'll be fuel for my writing.

But that's another (extremely thorny) discussion for another time.

Current Mood: busy

This is the worst I've felt on a new year in a long time. Most of it is deep terror of what might happen in November, and even deeper terror of what would follow.

How do you manage to go on with all of that hanging over your head?

I had a dream last night that Trump not only engaged martial law but he told all of his supporters that they were now a 'civilian peacekeeping force' and they had the right to raid homes and kill any immigrants, POC, and leftists they wanted to. His people scraped together a giant list of people who had voted Democrat or whose social medias had leftist/liberal leanings and basically gave those people hit lists of us all. I watched as everyone I loved was killed by raiders.

When they came for us, they killed Brian and tortured Hannah in front of me. I wanted to beg them to kill her because I was so deeply agonized at the thought of both of us being dead and there being no one to care for or protect Hannah. Of course they didn't listen and shot me anyway.

I've never been killed in a dream before.

Happy 2024.

Current Mood: depressed

Usually I buck against ideas that set humanity apart from the rest of the natural world, but I think there's one that deserves some sitting-with.

For most of the beings alive, survival depends on one part sheer brutal luck and two parts being the most well-suited to the circumstances in which you find yourself. Survival of the most well-adapted, as it were. 'Survival of the fittest', as it used to be. We know better now.

But humans have done an amazing job, for less better and much more worse, of severing ourselves from the natural world. Thus, right now and definitely in the upheaval to come, we run by a different rule:

Survival of the loved.

I'm going to sit with that for a while and see where it takes me. But it feels right; feels like a seed from which a lot of good things might grow.

Current Mood: pensive

lmfao

Will Tumblr actually die this time? Honestly I can't decide if I actually want it to or not. Like. OBVIOUSLY NOT, but yknow. I've gone through all of the stages of grief multiple times with this website as it has been "dying" about four times since the Great Titty Ban (2018? 2019? what even is time) and I'm just tired.

I don't want it to die because I have nowhere else to go, and nowhere else aggregates the people I love and the artists/writers I love the same way. I may break my resolution not to make accounts with Bluesky or Mastodon or whatever other Twitter alternatives there are but goddamn guys.

Twitter's become a shitshow. Pillowfort will run out of money by the end of this year. Now Tumblr's on a skeleton crew, which means the site won't disappear in a puff of smoke but I've been around the block enough to know what that actually means:

There won't be enough staff to take care of the problems users experience and report; the website will become increasingly unusable; users will leave; what little money Tumblr makes will slowly just come to a stop; they will abandon the website. IDK if that means selling it or shutting it down, but i doubt anybody would want to buy it at this point heh.

Anyway, I guess I'll need to kick back up my accounts on here and Wordpress, etc., huh?