Rollin' Up 2019

howdy, been awhile~

a lot has changed for me (and the world) in the silence since my last round-up of wholesome goods. for a while i tried to make it fun and elaborate, getting dense and esoteric with my writing style while sharing some interests of mine throughout the year. most recently, and in the midst of my breakdown as i realized people were less and less interested in actually reading anything longer than a paragraph, i decided to write even more and dive even deeper into the weird. although i had some fun, it was at the expense of some of my dedicated few friends who still wanted to support me in my annual dalliances with recommendations and light critique. i did it for me. i liked it, i was good at it. and i was really... i was alive. anyway, i still didn't really make a ripple (for my audience, for myself) and i took some time off in the middle of the project (and indefinitely) to figure out what i actually wanted to do with my writing and my propensity to consume large quantities of media every year.

on that front, i'm not really sure i have an answer. since the beginning of facebook, i have posted recommendations of things i have consumed and enjoyed. after a while, i realized that spending too much time explaining why i enjoyed these things either created some sorta debate room or discouraged others from developing their own thoughts about said-thing by engaging with it. so i opted for a very simple imperative formula: "watch _____", "read ______", "play ______". i've had varying success with those statuses depending on the media (films always tend to get more interactions, books less so, games barely), but in recent years it's become somewhat of a long-standing joke for a lot of my friends and followers or else a "yeah thanks, i know" for those already initiated in the product. the annual blog became a side-project that was intended to alleviate my desire to elaborate and talk about a thing i enjoyed or was challenged by. in an age where people are less likely to read and would rather engage with a tweet or comment thread (or, in the mind-boggling case of Discord, participate in a perpetual scroll of increasing girth), i continued my sisyphian pursuit, rolling ever onward for attention.

anyway... blogs suck. that's why i'm happy to announce i'm still gonna try and keep this ball rolling, be it uphill or whatever. i still enjoy writing despite my periods of dormancy and blockage. this year i won't be crafting an elaborate scheme to get you to read my interdimensional-wasteland fiction (specifically, i apologize to justin and connor who would independently fund my publishing if they had the means (i know this, and i love you)). but i will have some bits about film, books, and games. in the interest of me actually producing something worthwhile, i will restrict my writing to pithy paragraphs of substance, something i will appreciate in the long-run and i'm sure whatever readers wander nearby will as well. it'll be something akin to my earlier "media i consumed for the better" posts of old, but hopefully more insightful and less.. uh, needlessly wordy. i had just received my english degree, i had to flex my junky (read: bad) grammar gymnastics somewhere.

if you've gotten this far, thanks! means a lot. i'm doing this for me, i have to remind myself that writing is a passion of mine, a passion in need of pruning and whittling and much more practice. but it means a heap and a bushel that i don't have to do it on my lonesome. so keep an eye on the horizon and we'll be in touch! i plan on having these finished and posted over the first three days of the new year, so look forward to that.

and, again, thanks.

nightmares

i'm not sleeping well these days (it's because of: the stress), but i'm having some vivid nightmares/unsettling dreams, so i thought i'd write down the gist of em here. i'll update it as i have em.

I. the room (08/19/2019)

me and three others are shuttled (literally) into space to a housing unit. it's affixed to the side of a floating asteroid, that's all we really know though. we don't know each other, and we've been sleeping for the entire flight. our heads are kinda foggy, but we're told (or rather, just know, via dreamknowing) that we're here for a job and we've been selected special due to our skills. not sure what the skills are. not sure of each other, nobody is talking, and we enter the housing unit.

the housing unit is made up of three rooms, forming a sort of T-shape. the two major rooms, a room for rest, and another for socializing and eating, are connected by a door. we spend a majority of our time in both of these rooms and are encouraged not to leave for the third room until we are sufficiently rested and get along well enough. when we are (and we do), we can leave and join one another in a hall that exits from both the rest room and the socializing room, leading down to the third room. all four of us are required to be there in order to access the room. we know nothing of this room except that the job we've been hired for has something to do with this room.

when we enter the room, it is drab. the floor is some sort of grey dirt, hard-packed, old. the walls are the same make as the rest of the housing unit. there are no windows, and there is a low light from the ceiling. when we're all in, the door locks, and there's the presence of something there. we can't see it though. but there's a definite feeling that something is in the room with us. suddenly we hear voices all over—it's nothing in particular, nothing we recognize, it's just cacophonous. it's not human, i know that. we all start to dig, with hands, small rocks, just dig, making small piles familiar to the ones we saw upon entering the room. there's a lot of fear, this was when i "woke" up and had that sensation of buzzing in my head that i get when i'm having a nightmare, along with this sensation that i'm not alone in my room. as i drift back to sleep, me and two of the people i was in the room with are returning to the shuttle and are congratulated for the hard work we did. just as we take off, i'm falling asleep. some time passes and me and three others are getting off the shuttle onto a housing unit, two of them are familiar but i can't place why. the other is unknown to me. apparently we've been selected for this job because of some set of skills we have. we don't know what it is. (the dream repeats, we are being used for some unknown purpose, and not everyone makes it out each time, it seems.)

II. the red woman in the trunk, man in the hole (08/21/2019)

this was brief, but still alarming. i'm with students of mine in wartime. they've been taught how to fire long-distance rifles, and we're making our way through valleys. we are sieged and run deep into a dirty valley where cars are littering the floor. as we're hunkered down beside these cars for cover, i see shots claim the lives of a couple of my students. then i see a series of bullets riddle a car's trunk a bit away. as i watch, a head bursts through the trunk (clear through it) and gets caught at the shoulders, but continues to rise, a bright red woman's head with black holes for eyes and the glimmer of a deep red light within the holes, staring directly at me, continues to rise and rise and rise as her mouth opens wider and wider.

i woke up and laid there for about an hour. i couldn't stop thinking about the woman, and when i'd try to think of any other women, that woman would eventually peel out of the others. i thought of, and drifted off in a lucid dream, of a volcanic expert trying to discern the reason for why lava was bursting from a flat and featureless wall. she was trying to remember what had happened before, when they were analyzing this incredibly blank and massive wall, before gouts of lava came from it. she remembered, while writing in her notes, which she was handing to me, and i was reading, in bed, that she had an associate she'd forgotten til then who was working with her on the wall. he had been coring a portion of it, looking at the core samples, making note of that, etc. but one day, he had made enough corings in a close arrangement that the wall began to crumble and gave way to a deep hole. he wandered into it, hunched over, and would not venture back out. he called to her, and she came over and told him to get out, "it must be unstable" etc., but he wouldn't. he kept inching in deeper. there was an incredible stink coming from within it, and he kept beckoning to her, hunched over, now naked, telling her how incredible it was in the hole. his eyes were the only things she could see after a while, glistening in the dark.

III. the church (8/23/2019)

this one is a bit brief, but it's tied to a fear of mine i've had recently in realizing why i'm having a hard time determining what i want to do for a living. i'm in a neighbor's house, a neighbor who moved out years and years ago, and their house now unnaturally branches back into a high hill that has not existed there prior to. this was the house where i had youth group as a high schooler, which fed into the content into this dream i feel.

there are hundreds of people scattered on the hill leasing to the house and as i make my way up it they are excited and begin to hang on me and make it much more difficult for me to get up to the house. "you're not like them, you don't sound like them," they keep saying amongst other things. there are women who, individually from one another, keep trying to pull me away for themselves. it takes days for me to get into the house.

when i get in, there is a large window overlooking the arroyo behind our neighborhood tract with a pulpit in front of it. there are spiral staircases all over the room, leading into the infinite ceiling above. i'm fluttery inside as i'm at the pulpit, like that feeling after you throw up and every cell in your body is vibrating. when i open my mouth, a language not my own comes out and i don't understand what i'm saying. but i'm excited and the room is excited and a furor is rising and rising. they're all thumping the room and i can't see the floor, there are so many more people than there were before. it's becoming very hot and i feel like the room is a heart chamber beating.

in terror i try to leave but i can't find my way out, there are so many people and they're clamoring and clinging to me and the words are still spilling out of my mouth and i'm sobbing and i can't leave. "you don't sound like the others, you're not like them." it ended there.

IV. the factions (8/24/2019)

i'm in the same house from the previous dream, but it's like it used to be. something really bad is happening outside, in the world, but i'm not completely aware of what it is. a strange militia has taken over the house, with all the people in it (there are a lot of people in the house for some reason) and i get the vibe that they're former prisoners of some sort, they're wearing black and white stripes. i'm being held prisoner, though. they won't let me leave.

suddenly another group is trying to get in and you can't focus on their shape--wings, smearing, colors, all sorts of shifting when you look directly at them. they begin to take the shape of the men and women holding us captive and within the house itself. a wolf begins to slowly push on the door, it's gigantic. it's slowly pushing the door open, which is now made of thick concrete, and someone pushes me forward to push the wolf out. i can't even touch it, the shape and form shifts beneath my hands, and it looks directly at me and the eye fills me with something sick. i don't know how to say it but it felt like nothing i'd felt before, and i still can't tell if that was the dreamself or the wakingself.

it tears into the house and the original captors are dispatched or escape, but it's difficult to tell since the group replacing them look mostly just like them aside from their shimmering outlines, i still can't look directly at them. one turns into an older woman, decked out in incomprehensible clothing and armor(?) and she takes pity on me and says that she can help me get through this. rather than beautiful, i'd say she's sublime, and in this raw power of hers i find a semblance of comfort. she holds me and tucks me into a box on my side, giving me a gap before my face for breathing and eating and holding my hands so i can make the "symbols." i'm not sure what the symbols are now, but at the time it felt like a great mercy, knowing that i would live on in some way, while the rest in that house would not be spared. she sealed the box and i laid there for a time looking at my hands in the faint glow of the box.