Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

I don't think any headline from the past 10 years has been as perfect of a #moodsnapshot as this.

I sympathize with ya, buddy. It happens to me all the time: you're just sitting around trying to be friendly, suddenly somebody panics, and next thing you know, Animal Control is up your arse.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/stuffed-tiger-causes-45-minute-police-standoff-at-scottish-farm/ar-BBINgoP?li=BBnbfcL

(thanks to @001zlnv for the link!)

#DescendedFromStHobbes

I can't help thinking back to all the counterculture literature I read back in college, stuff like On The Road. Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Ray Mungo's Famous Long Ago, which was an autobiography by the co-founder of the world's first underground press news service. They all fell apart one by one. Sometimes it feels like there's a Subculture Community Failure Flowchart and we've not only failed to avoid following it, we've spent this year speedrunning it.

#ThingsFallApart

Let the record show that the thought of forgetting all about them triggered my first really good cry over this. Nothing else has moved me, but for some reason the idea of forever losing the whole emotional tickertape, good and bad, was too much to take.

Everything is so eerily... normal this morning. Everyone's been supportive but low-key, I'm having no trouble joking around with people, it's like nothing has really changed. Except there's this enormous, unyielding black censor bar over a part of my life that was recently very important, and is now completely barred from my view. It is, to borrow a painfully familiar image, like a big glitch in the Matrix. And things just warp around it, like they do. Will I forget too?

That moment when, after a lifetime of thinking you were being groomed as a Cleric, your dump stat was WIS all along.

Where do you even go from there? You can't fight worth shit, and mages are just tedious. 😽​

See, this is why I like GURPS. I can have Empathy AND Bad Temper AND Charisma AND an Odious Social Habit AND Philosophy:14 AND Weak Will.

And another level of Shyness, gained through good honest relationship failures and a series of critical misses.

C'est la guerre.

I have made a healthy, informed, democratic decision to spend the entire day as stoned and drunk as possible and accomplish absolutely nothing today, except for binging bleak British comedy and piling up mutant corpses in the interdimensional wastelands.

You would do the same, and woe betide they who think ill of it. Except my boss, to whom I'll make it up tomorrow.

Yeah. So, for those of you who didn't piece it together, a very long-standing and once-close set of friendships basically ended yesterday.

There's no need for details. If you know the people involved, you know. I wouldn't want anyone to treat them any differently, anyhow. This is between me and them.

I'm still hurt by the circumstances, and the sense I'd been put in a tremendous double-bind all along, but right now I'm okay and almost glad for the closure.

DENIAL

ANGER

BARGAINING

DEPRESSION
<----- YOU ARE HERE
ACCEPTANCE

Thank you for the support. I'm feeling less alone and less against the wall now, and I can work on tying off the loose emotional ends. I'm sorry to be so cryptic, just a clumsy attempt at damage control.

But I got hurt too, and I won't pretend I'm not disappointed that's probably never going to get addressed. I want everyone to get along again someday, I really do, but in the meantime I've GOT to withdraw from people and things that remind me of this situation. I will always do my best to be there for you, ALL of you, in an emergency, and if I vanish for a bit, it's not out of anger or as punishment, but out of shame & recognition this stage of my life must be gotten past at all costs.

There is no war and no hate here, just aton of confusion & frustration about how exactly it got to this point, and a lot of questions about the events that led up to it that I'm giving up on getting answered.

Basically, I wrecked up a good friend's boundaries in the search for answers to old questions and I now realize that even that was a huge mistake and imposition. I can now work on putting all this behind me like they wanted and that's... fine-ish. I'm so damn tired of people hurting.

Thanks to everyone who's checked in on me. I will get through this physically intact. At least a huge amount of painful, frustrating ambiguity has finally been resolved, and that's something of a relief. The final exchanges at least left some hope of a reconciliation someday, and I can finally stop guessing at whether I'm supposed to be looking for hope or not.

Yeah, worst case scenario, end of an era, social life is at least dramatically simplified.

Let the record show that I did the best I could up to the end, and am putting a lot of things aside in the name of peace.

If there's one thing I've learned from my past relationships, when something is over, it's over. (Peg and I are fine, great even, FWIW. It's... not that.)

I'll be okay. I've been ready for this for the better part of three years, just feel dumb for not accepting it sooner.

I've learned something kind of heartbreaking and I've got nobody to talk to about it, because I feel like I've exhausted every possible confidant I have on this issue.

I really don't know what to do, and it's been a big day-to-day drag on my mood. I'm even scared to post this, and I'm doing it because if I don't at least leave a marker that it's happening, the sense of bottling it up will totally cripple my productivity. Again.

I really, really tried to do the right things. *shrug*

...Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,
Are found in Heaven by the newlydead
Stored in its strongholds through the years.

--"Pale Fire," Canto II, lines 525-536

(cc: @anthracite, with love)

And I'll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;
The claret taillight of that dwindling plane
Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay
On running out of cigarettes; the way
You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime
Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme,
This index card, this slender rubber band...

So why join in the vulgar laughter? Why Scorn a hereafter none can verify:
The Turk's delight, the future lyres, the talks With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks, The seraph with his six flamingo wings,
And Flemish hells with porcupines and things? It isn't that we dream too wild a dream:
The trouble is we do not make it seem
Sufficiently unlikely; for the most We can think up is a domestic ghost.

--Pale Fire, Canto II, lines 221-230

There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known -
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me.
There was the day when I began to doubt
Man's sanity: How could he live without
Knowing for sure what dawn, what death, what doom
Awaited consciousness beyond the tomb?

--"Pale Fire," Canto II, lines 167-182

"Morally, democracy is invincible. Physically, that side will win which has the better guns. Of faith and pride, both sides have plenty. That our faith and our pride are of a totally different order cannot concern an enemy who believes in shedding blood and is proud of its own." -- Vladimir Nabokov

Meanwhile, turns out my huge work project is only half as huge as I thought -- the figure I was given was the whole shebang, not my share, and my boss-in-law is braving half of them. So I might not disappear _completely_ this month, though part of me, an inner Lisa Simpson, is perversely disappointed at losing the excuse for panicky all-nighters. Some of the best altered states of my life happened during those, 'cause there's no drugs like sleep deprivation and mild fear. :>