Hello, all. Yes, it’s that time again. Time for more of Myria’s patent-pending stream-of-consciousness Grade AAA certified incomprehensible lunacy. Fortunately for all y’all, this will be the last such assault on your sanity. Robbyn’s ship… Boat? Whatever in god’s name they call those overgrown metal rafts, it left Barbados yesterday and is on its way to a Saturday Florida arrival.
Usually these little trips Robbyn and her father take are good for me as well. Gives me a little time to myself, I get a chance to rip the house apart, clean everything, and rearrange it to my pleasure, stuff like that. This trip, however, has been something less than pleasant. Between fighting with the company that hosts our sites (including this one), fighting with my landlord, wanting to throttle my loud-mouthed neighbors (their vocal volume permanently stuck on ‘11’), having the cats constantly fighting for a place on my lap and then fight on my lap (Ow!), and the dang gerbils deciding to take up synchronized drumming at 4AM, the only thing around here with a pulse that hasn’t managed to make me massively urinated is the bloody damn fish.
Oh yeah, and the frog.
But she’s laughing about the whole thing.
I’m a libertarian, which is basically a fancy way of saying that the one thing on Earth I value above all other things is my right to be left the hell alone. Why is it so hard for people like my landlord to grasp this simple principle? He just has to be a pest and annoy me about things he really shouldn’t be annoying me about. It’s just not wise to annoy me, it really isn’t. Do you know what happens when someone like my landlord won’t see the wisdom of not violating my privacy without very good reason? I start contemplating suicide. Not my suicide, of course, his.
“I don’t know, Officer, he just came in, babbled something about the plumbing, and then leaped out the window!”
Blah, blah, blah?
Great, I get the only cop in history who’s taken a physics course. “No, Officer, I’m sure I have no idea why he fell straight down, as if dropped, rather than falling in a parabola, as one would expect if he ran through a window.”
Blah… Blah, blah, blah?
“No, Officer, I have no idea how he got that massive contusion on the back of his head. Do we really need to wonder about such things, though? I mean, it’s a clear-cut case of premeditated suicide. Look, he even tied his own hands behind his back...”
Blah. Blah, blah… Blah.
“Yes, I know my Miranda-rights. Ummm… Would you care for some coffee before you haul me away? I believe I have a blend that would be perfect for you. I call it ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’, I hear it’s to die for...”
Sometimes I think that someday all the advertising in the world is going to start to collapse under its own weight. Once that starts, it will quickly pass the Schwarzschild radius and become an advertising micro-singularity.
Woe to any who get pulled into that event horizon.
Best five CDs to crank whilst doing housework --
Feel free to disagree.
As long as you don’t mind me contemplating suicide…
Oh, and Jon Bon Jovi is the third most gorgeous man in the world.
Just thought I’d mention that.
Do any of y’all watch Jeopardy? Is it just me, or has Alex completely lost it? It’s like he’s gone around the bend and seriously come up short on enough fries to make a happy meal. He’ll say anything to the players these days, and often it’s not exactly what you’d call supportive. “Well these contestants both suck and blow, where the hell is Ken Jennings when you need him? I hope everyone sticks around for final humiliation… Ummm, I mean ‘Final Jeopardy’ tonight, this should be pretty laughable.”.
Ummm… Alex? You’re Canadian, you’re supposed to be nice!
You have to wonder, what are one’s chances of going on Jeopardy and not being humiliated? I mean, even if you’ve got an encyclopedia for a memory, if you get the wrong topics you are so toast.
“I’ll take ‘Stuff Only I Know’ for $200, Alex.”
“What planet’s rotational axis is nearly parallel to the plane of the elliptic?”
“What is ‘Uranus’, Alex?”
“Correct.”
“I’ll take ‘Stuff Only I Know’ for $400, Alex.”
“In the human body, what enzyme is responsible for converting Cholesterol to Pregnenolone at the beginning of the steroid biosynthetic pathway?
“What is P-450 side-chain cleaving enzyme, Alex?”
“Correct.”
“I’ll take ‘Stuff Only I Know’ for $600, Alex.”
“Atoms cooled to the point where they collapse into a single quantum state is referred to as?”
“What is a Bose–Einstein condensate, Alex?
“Correct.”
“I’ll take ‘Stuff Only I Know’ for $800, Alex.”
“What obscure actress, whom you’ve never even heard of, won the Academy Award in 1960 for an obscure movie you’ve also never even heard of?”
“Ummm… What is… What is… How the hell would I know, I wasn’t even born yet?”
“Ohhh, I’m sorry, that is incorrect. As you’re clearly a moron, why don’t we just end this now?”
“Wait, Alex, put that gun away! No, Alex, please… Don’t you dare pull that trigger! Aiiiiiiiirgh!”
That is why I don’t go on game shows, it’s just not worth it.
The five Best nail-day movies --
Sundays are nail day for me. Me, Opi, and a couple of good flicks, ya’ know? It takes a particular kind of movie to be a good nail-day movie, though. It has to be good, but It’s best if it’s something I’ve seen before and not something overly visual, as my attention is split.
Then again, my attention is always split, multitasking is my middle name.
Well, actually, Myria is my middle name, but that’s not the point…
The five best movies you’ve probably never seen --
Why is it the Archangel Gabriel gets such bad press? In The Prophecy movies, Gabriel (played wonderfully by Christopher Walken) is an evil lunatic who hates humans—“Talking monkeys,” he contemptuously calls us—and is carrying on a war with heaven. In Constantine, Gabriel (played by The White Witch… Err… Tilda Swinton) wants to bring Satan’s son to Earth in order to make humans worthy of God’s love. The only ‘good’ Gabriel I can recall is from The Crow, and that Gabriel was a big fluffy white cat.
I do gotta say, I do prefer the lunatic Gabriels to the fluffy-bunny angel rat-poop of the late nineties. That stuff just drove me bats. I’m not a particularly religious person, but I have read the bible through a time or three and I don’t remember any mention of fluffy little cherubs flying around and shooting people with happy little arrows. What I do remember is more akin to Thomas Daggett’s (Elias Koteas) description in The Prophecy --
Did you ever notice how in the Bible, when ever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?
Fluffy bunnies they are not. And, no, I don’t think I would ever really want to see such a creature.
Sleep is a design flaw.
Whenever I say that, people think I’m joking. I don’t get that, I really don’t, I don’t get why anyone would think that sleep was not a design flaw.
Sleep and I have never really gotten along. As Robbyn quite accurately observes, sleep and I have an adversarial relationship. I have had a month or two of decent sleep here and there in my life, but most of the time I either can’t get to sleep or I sleep too much. The happy middle seems to be the norm for most people, for me it’s the exception. When I think of sleep I think of laying awake in bed long into the night. I think of staring at the clock and tossing and turning for hours. I think of waking up at four in the morning, after not falling asleep until two, and not being able to get back to sleep even though I feel so tired I can barely think.
I hate the sandman, which I figure is fair as, by all evidence, he hates me. But even if I didn’t, why would I not think of sleep as a design flaw? We live a limited span of days, we humans, yet a third of that time is wasted. Even if I didn’t have chronic insomnia, I expect I’d think sleep a design flaw.
I’ve asked people what it is the like about sleep, what it is that, to them, makes it not a design flaw, and generally the answer comes down to dreaming. For many dreams seem a form of escape, another life away from the concerns of their everyday selves. I’ve even heard it suggested more than once that my dislike of sleep perhaps come from my having boring dreams.
Hardly.
In the dream I and a few others somehow ended up in this old dilapidated Victorian home—the prototypical haunted house. My companions, whomever they were (I expect we were kids on a dare, or some such, but, if I ever knew in the dream, I don’t remember), were fairly quickly being picked off one-by-one, in the fashion of horror movies. The house itself seemed violent and out to get us, and it seemed to stop us from being able to find a way out. Things only calmed down whenever this odd stranger, who seemed to be able to come and go at will, showed up. This stranger was very, very tall, had very white skin and very black hair and a sort of British aristocrat’s hawk face, and he wore a very old fashioned suit, complete with tails, a black party mask, and a top hat—all very Phantom of The Opera-esque, sans the scars and singing. Eventually he manages to pull me aside and tells me that he can get the rest of the survivors out of this hell-house, but only if I agree to stay. Reluctantly, I agree, and he takes me to a small, bare room near the center of the house. He disappears, presumably to take the others out as he promised. The only thing in the room is a bare bed frame, a vanity, and a whole lot of dust. The house doesn’t attack me while I’m in that room, but I can feel it kind of looming over me like a predator waiting to strike. When I touch the walls I can almost hear it screaming in rage, telling me all of the nasty things it will do to me.
By the time the mysterious stranger returned, it seemed like an eternity had passed. He didn’t walk into the room of course, I never saw him enter, it was more a matter of turning around and he would just be there. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he wasn’t exactly human, but he did seem real enough, physical enough. When he came back he was holding a dress he wanted to wear. White linen and lace, the kind of thing that wouldn’t have been out of place a century ago. He left so I would have some privacy whilst changing. Thinking there was no particular reason not to, I put the dress on. As soon as I had the dress on there was this extremely unpleasant feeling of something coming between me and the world. It was as if the world had suddenly faded some, or I had gotten further away from it without moving physically. The feeling from the house had changed as well, it still seemed nasty, bit it no longer felt as violent. Now it felt… Hungry. And it wasn’t hard to guess who the meal was supposed to be.
I spent a very long time in that room, never seeming to need to eat or sleep or use a bathroom. Periodically the mysterious stranger would show up and we would talk for a while. He told me that he was trapped in this house and went on, often and at some length, about how much he hated the house, hated its anger and violence. He didn’t know why he was cursed thusly, just that he was and that it made him supremely unhappy to be so. Then he would usually start in about how much my being there lightened his load and made his curse bearable. My feelings on that were more than a tad mixed, given that if I had my druthers I would rather not have been there stuck in a single room in a haunted house with reality bleeding away like a stuck pig. Reality wasn’t just bleeding, it had mostly already bled. Increasingly whenever he was there the room would change from dilapidation to new glory. Suddenly, instead of standing in a nearly empty and very run down room, I’d be standing in a freshly painted, stenciled, and properly furnished Victorian lady’s bedroom. Every time this transition occurred it felt more natural, and every time I felt a little more of my touch with reality fading away.
Complicating things even further, I was falling in love with this mysterious stranger. I’d known for quite some time that he was in love with me—or, at least, believed himself to be—but I’d never thought I would ever reciprocate. The realization that I was seemed to be something the house could sense, I could feel its hunger growing to near supernova proportions. When next he showed up, he seemed to sense that something was different as well. I confessed to him my feelings, and we ended up having a rather intense night of lovemaking.
When all was said and done… Well, done, little saying was needed, he told me how much he needed me and how much he wanted me to stay with him forever. This was hardly surprising, but it made me very sad. I told him that I would stay, if that’s what he wanted, and when he asked me why I sounded so sad about what he saw as joyous, I explained that I knew my staying would mean that I would eventually be absorbed by the house. That I would become part of his curse, part of what he hated most. I knew that he could not have me without the house also having me, devouring parts of my reality as it had been doing for some time, because he and the house were just two sides of the same person—like most of us, he was his own curse, it was just a little more literal for him.
He denied it at first, but it didn’t take him long to recognize the truth of what I’d said. He grabbed my arm and basically lifted me off the bed, telling me to get dressed. I did, but demanded to know what he was doing. He didn’t respond and I’d barely gotten my dress on when he grabbed my arm again and started pushing me towards the door. I tried to stop him from pushing me, demanding again to know what he was doing, but I may as well as to have been trying to push a bulldozer out of the way. Finally, when we reached the door, he stopped, looked down at me with the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen, and told me he was getting me out of the house while it was still possible for me to get out. I was stunned, I hadn’t thought there was anything I or anyone could say or do that would cause him to give me up willingly. He opened the door and half led, half pushed me down the hall.
The house was furious, by now I could hear it even without touching a wall. It threatened all manner of pain and damnation upon us both and promised that I would never, ever, ever leave its confines. As we went down the hallway beams and studs came out of the wall at us. He blocked most of them with what seemed to be superhuman strength, but some got through. I was pummeled and stabbed a couple of times, until I could barely stand. He picked me up in his arms without missing a beat and kept moving. When he got to the main hall the stairs collapsed, he just jumped down and kept on going. When he got to a hallway with a side door to the outside at the end the hallway seemed to start to fold in on itself. I was sure we’d never make it, but somehow he shouldered through. We reached the door and he opened it. He looked at me, silent goodbyes in his sad eyes, then literally threw me out the door and onto the lawn.
It took me a second to recover and untangle myself from my own skirts, by the time I looked back at the door he was gone. No mysterious stranger and no sign there’d been anything strange going on at all—the hallway looked perfectly normal. If it weren’t for my bruises and wounds, not to mention the dress, I would have had to wonder if it had all happened at all. I could still feel the house, though, I could feel it’s anger, pain, and hate. But I could also feel him, his love and desire. Where before the two had been at an uneasy truce, now there was clearly an outright war going on. A part of me wanted to go back and help him, but I knew that if I entered that door I would never leave again.
I made it to the main gate and out to the street, where things seemed somehow more tangible and real. I walked down the road until I came to a more populated area, where I promptly collapsed on the sidewalk. When I woke up next I was in the hospital, clearly having been there for at least a little while. I don’t know what I’d told them in my delirium, but they clearly thought I was rather a sad case, not to mention loony as a toon. In the hospital I discovered that my experience in the house had changed me more than a little. My memory of my life before going into the house was a jumbled mess, which perhaps wasn’t that surprising. What was surprising was that I was seeing people around the hospital who weren’t really there. Or maybe they were there, just not in the flesh exactly. Whatever the case, since none of them seemed to have it out for me the way the house had, few of them even seemed to notice me at all, it didn’t really bother me. What was a minor issue was trying to figure out whether someone was there in the flesh or not, since talking to people not there in the flesh tended to make those who were there in the flesh think I was even more nuts. I figured eventually I’d work it all out. That or they’d throw me in the loony bin, whichever came first.
Clichéd, perhaps, but boring? I think not.
I wrote that Monday morning, while the dream was still fresh, while I could still feel the passion of that night, the fury of that house, the terror of that trip to the door.
When I remember my dreams, and I often do, they are often much like that one in their intensity. They are at least some compensation for the time which sleep steals.
I’d like to again thank Aarlene again for being the Knitting Chatters’ guest hostess while Robbyn has been away. Both Aarlene and myself will be there tomorrow evening, I hope everyone can stop by and chat for a while!
Have fun, everyone!
Myria
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Myria....you’re amazing. Would Robbyn be offended if I asked that you guest blog more often?
If I bring her yarn when we see each other in June would that make up for the offense?
If Jon Bon Jovi is the 3rd most gorgeous, who are #1 & #2?
I loved the Prophecy movies...but then I love Christopher Walken. ::Grin::
I’m totally empathetic regarding your fight or flight reaction to sleep - it’s the same for me many, many nights.
I’ll do my best to be there Thurs.!
I wouldn’t wish such a thing upon Robbyn’s longsuffering readers, Bron :). I’m sure Robbyn wouldn’t be offended, though, she’d like it if I wrote more—albeit, not necessarily on her ‘blog.
I don’t know who #1 is, to be honest, I just figure that out of six billion human beings there’s likely some guy out there more gorgeous than any I’ve ever seen. #2 would have to be Viggo Mortensen—while he apparently lacks the brains god gave a demented gnat, he is utterly breathtaking to look at. #3, of course, is Jon Bon Jovi. #4 would have to be Keith Hamilton Cobb. #5 varies, depending on my mood, but at the moment it would have to be Patrick Fitzgerald.
Not, mind you, that I keep a list or anything…
Howdy Myria, your dream would make an excellent movie. Who do you see playing the parts?
I’m hoping the universe will cooperate with your libertarian self and everyone vexing you will back off.
Your game show dialogue was a hoot, too. That Bose of the Bose-Einstein thing: is that the Bose of the radio?
To sleep, perchance to dream…
Yeah dreams supposedly reboot our brains but geez! what weird ones we have sometimes.
See ya tomorrow!
And I hope to see EVERYBODY tomorrow, don’t forget!!
To be honest, Aarlene, I don’t really ‘cast’ stories in my head, though I know some do—I know Robbyn does.
No, the ‘Bose’ of ‘Bose–Einstein condensate’ (as well as the term ‘Boson’) was Satyendra Nath Bose. The founder and chairman of Bose Corporation is Amar Gopal Bose. Both are of Bengali descent (albeit Amar was born and raised in the US), and both were professors, otherwise they don’t share anything in common that I’m aware of.
See you tonight 
!
