O Death Where Is Thy Sting? O Grave, Where Is Your Victory? (Pictures of Luna the Cat included) · 3:06am Sep 5th, 2015
I feel lifted out of a great darkness, and I've come to tell you about it.
As of right now, I am almost 8000 words into the next chapter of The Night is Passing. All my writing these days happens in and around Law School, which I have finished my second week of as of today! Hurray! Some of you may remember that I wrote about moving, and I have in fact moved. I live now in Oxford, almost two hours from my verdant home. It is also green here, though the hills are, well, hillier. I live on one, in fact. (As for LUNA I have a quick update below, so hold your horses!) But it has not been fun or easy to come to this city, beauty and significance it holds aside, and live here. It is more crowded and noisier than my home. It's people are friendly, but not as warm or as open as I am used to. Not that they are cold--you'll not find a city in Mississippi without hospitality in its own flavor and way. Simply... more reserved in some ways, and less so in others. But also perhaps that is me.
I must explain. I am a creature of habit and home. In Oxford, 80% of my eating out has been at the same two restaurants where the proprietors now know me by name. Or, well, the noodle bowl manager knows my name but the guys at El Mariachi know me as the White Russian guy. When I was in undergrad at Mississippi College, I did the same things most days. I smoked on the same hill, I piped and coffee'd at the same coffee shop. My friends went to the same place behind the dorm on the Smoker's Hill to discuss difficult things. I sat on the same couch and played games and watched anime or wrote things for class. This familiarity, this comfortable simulacrum of domesticity, it kept me feeling whole and sane. I am fragile in some ways. I am easily dismayed. Living in the same city for my whole life, as far as I remember it, I came to love my home. And now it is not my home anymore. I live in Oxford alone with my small rambunctious cat, adrift and awreck. I did not drink my sorrows away, but I did not shake them off either. I sank and sank. I wrote and wrote. I read and read.
I have written several times of the sickness unto death, both in reference to the book and to despair itself. And friends I felt it again, and thought of Lazarus.
But in writing TNIP I remember again why I started it, the emotions that gave it birth. Finishing the Dredgemane arc in End of Ponies, I remembered that hope which is sunlight with which I began it all, and as I have many times before, heard Corinthians in between the lines of SSE when he is, I think, being more honest than usual. (Ask me about Corinthians, ShortskirtsandExplosions, Kierkegaard, Paul and Pinkie sometime). I remembered again that the world is a Kind Place and it wants to be Kind. That Life is good even when and if the world burns, that death is swallowed up, that death is that last enemy that shall be swept away. And so I continue writing. The next chapter is called "Have You Passed Through This Night?" But I could have easily called it "The Last Enemy That Shall Be Defeated Is Death". Perhaps another chapter will get that name?
I reread Gardez's Salvation again, and he is right. Love's the currency of the land and the greatest treasure. Also a great fellow, and one I look up to. He has seen more of life and death than you or I shall see, reader, and reached out his hand I think to touch the face of God. Or had the chance to, somewhere twixt Kabul and Gardeyz. (I wonder if its like the road between Jericho and Damascus?)
In short, I've read something like a million words in the last week. Give or take, probably take. I've played with my cat, listened to music on my porch, been bitten by hordes of mosquitoes, read several cases for law school, and had said cat crawl on my face and go to sleep there. Several times. And I'm learning to live, a bit at a time. It's about an eternal approximation, which I think applies as much to ultimate reality as it does to the most mundane sort of everyday life. We are never going to get to the core at last, and that is okay. We shall be walking in this life, working our way towards being human. Because more and more I find that being a Human, being that one solitary Individual, is not so much a thing one IS as it is a thing one DOES. You and I, I think we're becoming human bit by bit, making it there as best we can. Further up and Further in! And it is not always a happy thing. S.K. was right when he set either and or against one another, that life is about choices, that being a human is about moral choices, about Either/Or. I think every choice is, in its own way, a moral choice. It is hard to nothing about Lewis:
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.” (From The Weight of Glory)
So I am trying to live and be alive. I hope you too, in your kitchens and on your couches, on your porches by cellphone light or in your darkened bedrooms by monitor light--I hope that you too are that Solitary Individual, and that you too are trying to be alive.
New followers, hello! I've been getting an on and off again stream of new followers the last week and wanted to say hi! Introduce yourselves, if you see this.
And finally. LUNA is doing very well. She is still teething and still getting up to trouble! Have some pictures.
In fact, she is poking her nose in and around my computer as I type this. Took her to the vet today to get a shot and have the vet look at her
tail (the tip had to be amputated when she was rescued and we wanted to be sure that it was doing alright) and she was very displeased about being carted about in her kitty carrier to said vet. She meowed quite a bit. But we survived, didn't we, kitty? (In response she is biting my ankles like I am a kitty toy. And now has found an actual kitty toy. And now she is back.) Worries about her sight have proved unfounded, and all in all the vet gave her a clean bill of health and said she had more or less recovered fully, tail and nick out of her ear aside. She greets you all by teething on my phone/everything else, with her sharp little teeth which are the love of god for her exceedingly.
Tell me a story if you got this far.
Oxford, as in the U.K.?
Also... love the kitteh! XD
.... :O
KITTY!!!
3370184 Oxford, Mississippi. Olllleeee Missss
3370194 kitteh says haollow
3370196 Ah, ok. Oxford University in the UK is the first thing that comes to mind when I hear Oxford lol (which is strange, cause you would think I would think of Oxford Plains Speedway here in Maine first lol)
3370218 Have you seen Stephen King loitering in the shadows up there by chance?
3370223 I have met him... I was thoroughly unimpressed.
Remember that guy who hit him with his car a while back? He should have been driving a big truck... at a hundred mph. (I do NOT like the man. He is an asshole.)
3370346 alas. So it goes
Jeez, your prose is fun to read. Good luck in the new city! I bet it's hot as hell down there right now.
My sister is afraid of microwaves.
Our late feline, Precious We-Didn't-Name-Her The Cat, in her younger and more rambunctious days (back in the prehistoric era before Kady and I moved in together) once decided to explore the little metal pipe that went toward the central heating unit from the loose floor grate ... and got stuck in the pipe.
Kady heard plaintive mewing from beneath the floor, couldn't find her, and ultimately figured it out and had to call one of her friends in on an emergency mission to free her by literally going into the basement and sawing the pipe apart. Fortunately, it became one of those things that everyone could laugh about years later, and Precious gave her(/us) another 17 good years.
It warms my heart to see Luna doing well. Please give her a pat for me.
3370382 quite hot! But a bit of sweet tea and a nice sit on my dinky lil concrete porch covers a multitude of
sinsdegrees Fahrenheit3370382 also that is a legitimate fear as microwaves are portals to hell similar to Krystal's/White Castle and the Jackson metro center DMV
3370445 oh my god it's so hilarious but also so sad I feel bad for laughing poor kitty!
She got lots of pets. Had to banish her to the moon in order to get some sleep, but all her cat toys are out there and she's finally sleeping in her little bed.
How strange, the concept of pets. Dominion over all that creeps above and below the earth my foot, where cats are concerned. If cats weren't so busy being cats they would have been a way cooler adversary than the snake in Eden
A story: One upon a time there was an asian dude who liked the naughty things because he was asian. Then later a white russian fella who just became a laywer arrested him because that's what lawyers do or something or whatever I don't know shit.
Later they had babies in prison and gave birth to cats with amputated tails.
The end.
I went in for a sleep study due to developing multiple severe sleep disorders, one of which was insomnia. At some point about five hours into the sleep test, the nurse walked into the room to adjust something on the machine that was hooked up to me.
"Hi there," I said, startling her.
"You're still awake?" she asked.
I couldn't resist exclaiming in my most sarcastic tone possible, "NO WAY! I didn't know I was awake! Wow, how could you tell?"
She didn't ever answer. In fact, she wouldn't talk to me at all after that.
You need to banish that celestia damn cat to the moon more often. For no reason. Just to show her who's boss. Bonus points if you yell something about bananas in the meantime.
Law school. Ugh. Been dealing with lawyer-y stuff at work over secrecy agreements and NDA's and contracts. It's enough to make an engineer go mad. Do you think they'll let me just drive the forktruck without a pay cut? Maybe i can go back to driving the zamboni again.
Story for getting this far:
My kid had some left over birthday money and Mrs. FlimFlamMan took her to target to buy something. She was thrilled to buy the toy Carousel Boutique, as Rarity is her favorite pony. When i got home from work, she dragged me into her room to show it to me.
After seeing it, I said to my wife, "I like it. Good pick on her part. I especially liked that it came with the little pony mannequin."
To which Mrs. FlimFlam man responded, "Don't you mean a MANE-equin?"
...
It feels like the last 2 years of my life have been one, long extended horse pun.
3370455
Dog says "You love me, you feed me, you care for me, you give me affection; I think you are God."
Cat says "You love me, you feed me, you care for me, you give me affection; you think I am God."
3370382
A Micrøwave ønce bit my sister...
We had a stray cat, "Ditzy", make herself at home at the production warehouse where I work. She was pregnant before we could get her spayed, so now we have Ditzy, Lilly, Rose, Daisy, and Fancypants, all taking up residence (we are all closet Bronies). We all pitch in a few quid each week to keep them topped up with milk, mince, and minnows and they in return offer fluffy snuggles during lunch/smoke breaks as well as terminate any sparrows, lizards, frogs, snakes, mice, quail, squirrels, bats, toads,... near the facility with extreme prejudice.
3370499 you finally did it. I knew one day you would write a good story and at last you have this is as arty as the school of Athens
3370989 I am become Celestia banisher of things. Ah engineers. We took engineers with us when my old church's band went on a trip and they spent an hour fixing the light inside. In transit. Because they could.
3370995 for I will consider my cat Fancypants, for the slowness of his pray is the love of god for him exceedingly
Also that made me aww. Wharehouse kitties
3371529
Also I have tacos
3371839 marry me
3371965
I'm already married to the taco
3374477 be in an open taco relationship
3374558
But then people will find out about it in a hack :(
3374630 that's why you gotta upgrade yo securitreeeee sonnn