It's hard for me to forget that intoxication was once considered (and still is, in places) influence from some sort of nature spirit, some elemental or duende or elf drawn evoked into a potion of grain mash or fruit juice or cane juice by building a trap and waiting, concentrated and purified by distillation, and bound and sealed in clay or glass jars.

Fermentation was necromancy, medicine was sorcery, and literacy was high magic indeed. Still is.

A can of Pabst Blue Ribbon ... lacks. It's like the industrial process captures one spirit per vat, and it's shared among all the cans filled per run. Wine has one spirit per barrel, whiskey one spirit per cask. That's better than per vat, but it's still not up to snuff.

The only real way to do it is one spirit per bottle. And keep the bottles small enough to be drained in a single draught. Anything else is watered down to the point of uselessness. For necromantic purposes, anyway.

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

I'm convinced the reason people used to carve roaring animal faces into the corners of their furniture was in effort to stop housecats from sharpening their claws on the legs and arms.

It's like those people in India that wear masks on the backs of their head in order to keep tigers from pouncing on them from behind.

I expect the efficacy was similar, though I have no guess to what extent it worked.

In fact, I think every reference to the need to repel "evil spirits" was a euphemism of a sort. For housecats, or maybe their larger cousins. But if you let on that it was housecats you were trying to repel or defend yourself from, you invited their retribution.

Gargoyles and other scary carvings? Repels housecats. Burning incense? Repels housecats. Crossing running water? Can't be done by housecats -- if it's farther than they can jump. Garlic on the windowsills? Repels housecats. Salt over the left shoulder? Repels housecats. Knocking on wood? Repels housecats.

A least in theory. If done right. Housecats don't like sudden loud noises. They don't like to lick garlic off their paws. They don't like to get their paws wet. I had a housecat that could be kept out of a room by having a fan blow across the doorway. Whether a gargoyle (or a mask on the back of the head) would work more than once I leave as an exercise for the reader.

I really hope there aren't any housecats reading this.

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

The bride was good looking. Fresh faced with a slightly naive look
about her as of one who had somehowmissed all the cruelty life could
throw her. She lacked the obvious and keen wit possessed by the,
presumably jaded, older cousin who had slinked onto the dancefloor.
One was a triumph of innocence over experience and perhaps the other
just looked good in a catsuit.

How petty the suffering of love seemed to him now. Yep, they had money
- the couples future was secure in that sense, but he'd seen all of
this before, and if he was still a betting man he'd have given the
girl 2 years before she realised what a donkey this 'suit' would prove
to be. We all are at that age. Yet she was too enrolled in her dream.
She had paid the membership, left the job and signed her name.

The catsuit purred as she stepped up to get a drink. She had danced
already but there was was nowhere to go on this ship except prop up
the bar. He'd found the same all his life. There's being trapped and
there's being trapped. Carlos knew the difference.

Posted by jc1000000

Halfway between the darkness and the light ... is a crock.

Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, God versus Satan, Yin and Yang, this whole thesis-antithesis-synthesis thing ... the problem with these is that, basically, your eyes adjust to whatever light there is, whether you live in a bright sunny place or a deep dark hole in the ground.

That's why these huge Platonic ideals fall flat. We're forged in the fires of opposing forces? Whatever. Not everything has an opposite. A leaf has no opposite. A handful of dirt has no opposite. A kick in the groin has no opposite.

And for the things that do have an opposite? We pretend that where we've been standing longest is that balancing point. It's ludicrous.

The darkness and the light. There's a good one to start with. Day and night happen here in more or less equal quantities, but daytime is spent a whopping ninety-three million miles away from our lightbulb. And light we can see is a tiny sliver of a wedge of the entire span of photonic energies.

Look up into the nighttime sky and measure the average brightness of what you see. That's the true measure once you pull the camera back from our little lightbulb. And then realize that all of the bright little dots you see are outweighed better than twenty to one by dark matter and dark energy. And that's not counting at all the pure empty blackness that it's all swirling around in.

If we're that screwed up about Light and Dark, how dead wrong do you think we must be about Good and Evil?

Every gambler will tell you he pretty much breaks even or is maybe a tiny smidge ahead of the game. If you can do math, then you have to know that all but a tiny few gamblers are either deluded or lying through their teeth.

Do as much good as you can. Shine your light as brightly as possible. But don't be deluded about how much good you're doing or how bright your little light is.

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

Ghosts drive cars, too.

This is a picture of a ghost trapped permanently in the world of ten minutes from now. He drove so fast, in such a complete mortal panic, he got completely ahead of himself.

You know how it happens. Inertial frames being what they are, we really can only share a Euclidean reality with everything else that's going our way. Accelerate too quickly in any particular direction, and everything you know distorts until it's unrecognizable and perpetually inaccessible, stretched thin or squashed flat and pushed outside of our light cone.

It happens with people, too. When someone says, "They drifted apart," now you know what they mean. "Drift" seems like a weak term, maybe, but we're so focused on where we're headed we don't notice what happens to everyone else...

That's what happened to this guy. We smell a whiff of his foul exhaust, hear the dying echoes of his screeching tires, but by the time we get to where he's been, he's long gone, forever stuck on the tachycardial side of the lightspeed barrier.

The absolutely hysterical part is that he's totally convinced he's late.

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

The street preacher lifted his voice to the heavens, but it wouldn't reach. The best he could do was the edge of the sidewalk on the other side of the road.

"Look at this!" he shouted. "The abandoned package -- the symbolic weapon of the New Model Warrior." He pointed at the backpack against the wall of the nearest building.

"We've come a long way from braining your brother with a rock because God likes him better, haven't we?

"The first excuse ever for the first murder: My brother's sacrifice was more acceptable in the eyes of The Lord. God blessed him instead of me. Jealousy of God's blessing and God's favorable attention!

"God Himself inspired the first murder. Is it any wonder that every war since has been holy? Every side thinks God is on their side -- and they're right!

"And look at the progression of weapons. I kill you with a rock and my hands. I kill you with a sharpened blade at arm's length. I kill you with a pistol so far away I can't see your face. I kill you with a missile, on the other side of the planet.

"And then landmines and booby traps and -- and now this: I leave death here, innocently, on the sidewalk. Let God Himself determine, through His mighty wisdom, who He wants to be walking by. He no longer has to choose just soldiers. He may choose anyone! And, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, may He choose only the guilty, our enemies!

"I create death and leave it like a dog drops a turd on the sidewalk. I kill no one! I have no way of determining who will live and who will die! It is all God's will!

"The New Model Soldier is the lightning! He is a tornado! He is the weather! He is an Act of God!"

The preacher lowered his head and spoke the next words quietly.

"And we all know it is God's will that those He has blessed die under a bloody stone in the hands of the less favored brother."

He hit the call button on his disposable pre-paid convenience-store cell phone. But the backpack failed to detonate.

Somewhere else, however, another bomb blew up. Like they always do.

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

A woman walked past me today, laughing. I laughed too. She didn't seem to see me sitting there on the sidewalk, and I don't know what was so funny. But it felt good to communicate.

Posted by sswiwa

One of the more useful rules of living with schizophrenia is that though you may hear the voices, you don't have to do what they tell you.

I find this works for real voices, too. If some bum walks up to me on the street and follows me around whispering "kill your mother" in my ear, I can probably gut-punch him and walk away. It helps with my defense in court if the bum was actually saying "kill your mother", or was actually a bum and not a banker, or was actually present at all. Ignoring is probably best. Just in case.

Unincarcerated schizophrenics are Olympic-class performers at ignoring annoying things, because, hey, it could just be a hallucination, right? Never be the first to react. Is the building really on fire? Wait until you see someone else running. Maybe even two or three people. And don't count the ones with scales or wings. They often don't have your best interests at heart.

So anyway, Frank the Fish is taller than me, which I hear is odd for a fish, and he's not telling me to kill anybody. He just wants me to give him some money. So that's where another rule comes into play.

No one who asks me for money, no matter how desperate they seem to be, gets more than fifty cents. Because, really, if they're down to asking me for money, they've passed up a million better choices.

That's a rule I will break if the circumstances are bad enough. I mean, a certain few people have been plenty generous with me, completely unexpectedly. I can't afford not to pay it back. Pay it forward, as they say.

So I keep a thousand dollar bill folded up and tucked under the skin in my neck, right where my gills used to be before they closed up when I was a baby. My grandfather gave it to me for my second birthday. I can still feel it when I prod around there with my fingers.

I can probably get at it with this boxcutter I carry.

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri