Demons

"I ain't sayin' you fellas are, and I ain't sayin' ya aren't. All I'm sayin' is -- Times have changed. Even old fellas like me are more accepting than we used ta be. I'm not saying I think it's right. All I'm saying is, times have changed."

The old man at the Scoreboard says this to Gabriel and me, the 47th time we are assumed to be gay in the last...week.

(If I keep writing about this, does it look like -- you know -- "The lady doth protest too much"?)

I tell Lee Ann: She says, "It's just because you two are so stylish."

I've never thought of myself as terribly stylish.

***

Today, payday, "pay" day, and I learn my account is overdrawn, not 30ish dollars as I feared, but $150 or so. Including fee, fee, fee, fee, fee, fee, fee, fee.

Money is something that I've never understood and never made sense to me. Usually I don't care. Today, I want to cry.

But crying is what the Gay do.

I want to complain: In the schools, you are never taught about financial literacy, about budgeting, about debt, about credit -- especially not about credit. And I wonder that it's on purpose, and want to Rage Against this system, and then I think about "politics," my radicalism, and how much of it is only my desperate way of distracting myself from the actual lived difficulties of my day-to-day my life.

It's so easy to have passion and feelings about political matters: They are far away, they are unchangeable, your rage directed that way is a way to make you feel better about stuff for a minute by diverting your energy toward something you can't do anything about (as opposed to your emotional life or your psyche's health or your wrecked relationships or your job or your budget), which makes everything easier, because you exhaust yourself mentally & catharsize (notaword) (it is now) without having to go through the difficult process of doing anything.

(In the preceding paragraph, the word "you" means, of course, "I.")

(& ask yourself: What is this "radicalism," scion of the American bourgeois?)

***

Or sometimes politics exhausts itself and I flee to my fantasy worlds.

A dozen storylines, characters, places in my head, most of it unwritten.

This is what I'm thinking of today:

There are two characters. One has spent his life a conservative, struggling to fit in with his society's individualism and militarism and masculinism. He has failed, and failed, though kept this failure a secret from his current companions, all of whom are from elsewhere, and at the very last finds himself questioning the values he learned as a child.

His name is Josther, he is 7 feet tall and green skinned and carries a sword and he is from Io, the volcanic moon of Jupiter, terraformed by advanced Singularitarian technology to support human life. He finds himself now in the company of a band of outcasts, pirates and revolutionaries from an asteroid civilization called Archipelago, in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune. In this moment he is on a planet far away, a "primitive" world of smallish folk that make their living herding giant echinoderms like land-dwelling starfish; a world which has now been invaded by a horde of Ionians acting in the service of Marishta, the Witch-Queen of the Galaxy.

You with me so far?

Josther, questioning his own society's values, turns to his friend Arok for comfort. Arok: Once, he was a priest of the Galactican faith, the dominant religion of the Archipelagan society. Looking around him, Arok saw the corruption to which the priesthood had fallen into. He saw the chiefs, kings and nobles of Archipelagan society living in luxury and starving their peasants and ignoring the simple truth that the asteroids survived thanks to ancient technology which was failing; that, in fact, Archipelago was dying, and these men with power did nothing but enrich themselves. And Arok began to secretly support the Revolutionary Command, based on the hidden asteroid, Haven 3. And eventually left the priesthood with a younger woman, a novitiate priestess, whom he would later marry, and became a leader of the resistance movement, though never abandoning his faith.

They are talking about religion. Josther is an Ionian pagan, worshiping fiery war-gods that live beneath the volcanoes and reward skill in battle and cast aside the weak. Arok tells him of the Galactican concept of Redemption. ... I have written out a stretch of dialog between the two, including a long speech by Arok on this topic, but in order for it to be tolerable, it is necessary that it comes after scenes of wonder and terror and battle and sorcery. Some of that is written, some sketched out.

It may be that this will be my project tonight.

***

Can I tell you a little more about this story, these characters?

I wrote a short novel in October called The Dreamers of Caldren.

It's about 8 people on a ship. It's called Ship. They travel around space and time, planting human DNA on millions of far-flung worlds. They stole the ship from Marishta, the Witch-Queen, who now pursues them across the galaxy. I told you before that they are pirates, brigands, rebels.

The Dreamers of Caldren was one of my favorite things that I ever wrote. It is flawed. It doesn't remember who its main character is. Its middle is, maybe, too short, cop-out-ishly so. All 8 are not as developed as they could be.

I tried to write more adventures.

I wrote one story about how they go to a planet 10 billion years ago and encounter a nightmarish alien Power that tries to kill them and instead makes its home in the mind of one of the crew. This story was not very good.

I wrote the story I talked about above. Except that it was too short. And too scattered, focusing on too many POV characters. And I committed a ridiculous cop-out at the end.

I tried to write a story called The Planet of the Field Mice. This is honestly my favorite. It's about a world in a billion years. Humans have evolved into thousands of species, and all of them are sentient, and all of them live on this world: And so, there is nothing to eat but OTHER SENTIENT BEINGS!!!! So it's about ...

That was the problem. I couldn't figure out what it was about. Which character? I tried to write it from 4 different POVs. Dumb! Now I want to return to it too and I don't know how.

I don't know how, I don't know how.

So when I'm stressed or tired or sober I flee to this world and a Ship and these characters, I know them all, they are living in my mind and crying because I keep not writing their stories, and maybe they will remain unwritten, and this will be sad. I don't want them to fade into Mnemonic Oblivion They must be writ soon or forever disappear.

God of drunks and would-bes shine your light on me.

It is only a mess of silliness and not too much to ask.

Exogenesis!