I indulge my idiosyncratic conclusions often but sometimes recognize their great disparity with the normal course of human reasoning. One recent example came from my current cursing redirection. I grew to realize that I have a very relaxed attitude toward swearing and was using “fuck” sometimes beyond the comfort of those around me. So, I decided to shift away from that particular word again. My swearing will remain constant – my earlier experiments confirmed this – but I can substitute in a different, unsused word. I explained all this before from the theory and intention standpoint in June last year. Rather than perpetuate the relation of fuck (sex) and negative situations, I now use “sin” and some variants.

Very quickly, I felt the gravity of that particular choice. The effect is largely diminished now; but, at first cursing sounded very judgmental. Muttering that the person who cut me off is a ‘fucker’ or a ‘motherfucker’ only expresses my disparagement for his action. Calling himer a ‘sinner’ felt like a more comprehensive repudiation. No one has commented on the change, but I wonder if they feel a greater sting than I intend.

But that confrontation is a straight-edge compared to the twisted nature of the next, as I currently understand it. Most Universalisms bore me. Rewarding people of value within my social circle (or who provide free services to me) will always win out over UNICEF, no matter how many cleft lips they repair. Still, I am not immune to certain appeals provided they come with a suitably wonderous solution. One such is the problem of animal meat.

The problem consists of its overwhelming demand on our resources. Frankly, there is no point in repeating an argument found a hundred other places if you should care to brave the vegetarian appeals they primarily espouse around it. I have no compunctions with factory farms and the discomforts they occasion on the sentient protein and lipid sacks grown within. Wasting the land and water bother me instead. Giving up animal protein isn’t a viable option. That stands close to choosing a diabetic diet because sugar is evil and addictive or something. The elegant solution simply substitutes another animal, a more efficient animal: insects.

If you have seen any food tourism show, you have likely seen that other countries sometimes include grasshoppers or ants and so on in their diet because they can’t afford beef. In that case, the cooks probably fry or bake them whole. Frankly, except for kids sucking Hot Lix, American’s will not ‘regress’ in that manner. Western advocates for incorporating insects into the national diet don’t seem to realize that the sympathetic magic mindset is powerful and people will just not want to eat anything that looks like bugs any more than they want to drink reclaimed sewage water no matter how sterile engineers make it. The idea taints. (Insect cookbooks are made for the converted, so they just leave the crickets and mealworms whole in the recipes.)

My answer draws from that discontinued Burger King (anti-McDonalds) commercial. Two lab coat actors poke and prod a chicken whilst the narrator declares they are looking for the ‘nugget’ on its body. Which part of a pig are sausages or bologna made from? No one knows or cares because its identity fell away in the meat grinder. You see my answer, right? Just grind the insects and treat them as crunchy meat (pretend it is corn flakes). Then it can be anything you want: meatballs, koobideh, croquetas, or part of a Sheppard’s Pie. In that way, it becomes optimific.

Still, I know it would expend lots of my social capital to try the experiment here, whilst I live with people who care for me (and regard me watchfully). The interest seized me nonetheless, so I bought an insect cookbook for a single page within it. I wanted to know where I could buy insects for that far future when I might incorporate them into my diet. I hoped that the author would treat obtaining them in a whole chapter, comparing raising them against buying them from a wholesaler. Alas, only preparation dominated her mind. She left a single page for a list of suppliers with no commentary. I delayed looking up the companies for two or so months, out of disappointment.

Some have websites, some do not. She published ten years ago, so this is no surprise. The candied insect sites are obvious and useless to this project. Still, some cricket and mealworm wholesalers conduct internet sales and within California too. Some sell live insects some do not. All struck me with a horror that called my commitment to task. I realized the insanity of the project as the superstition reassembled, unbidden, from the floor of my psyche. Grubco Inc. doesn’t sell insects for human consumption; it sells fish bait. The others similarly hype their product for feeding to snakes or birds.

I felt betrayed. The problem came from my abstracted expectations. I had hoped those companies would keep their sites impersonal, like that adult rack behind the bookstore counter. ‘We just sell bugs, use them as you like: beetles, grasshoppers, ect.’ Of course, without engaging their target market, they won’t distinguish themselves for significant sales. And yet, I want to blame them for recasting my principled conclusion into eating dog food. Reason frayed as I debated the compatibility of human and bird or fish nutrient requirements. Surely, it isn’t poisonous or anything. That contested with the image of having to clean the intestines out of unshelled shrimp. Do I have to do that?

In retrospect, my reaction shouldn’t have shocked me so much. Hiding the origin of the protein is the whole reason I want to grind them into a paste. As pioneer, though, I have to do it myself; buy, process, and cook them myself. If, say, I won the lottery and sold bug nuggets, customers would be removed from this level because they would buy it in the frozen section alongside lean cuisine. Further there is no urgency to my task. This option doesn’t open even experimentally until I move out. That will ease the transition with familiarity.

The purchase itself is ambiguous. The prices look ok, but I am not sure about the volume or the shipping. It bears a closer scrutiny. The fish bait likely sells smaller amounts than bird or lizard food, given the difference in long term demand. In the end, I will need to diminish my pride whether I am using soy all the time or mealworm fritters.

By the way, I had planned to write this and keep it hidden but the concurrent news article felt like providence. Its Universalist hope is still foolish and fails because it can only offer a Luddite solution. Say we buy less meat collectively. Initially, there will be the same amount on the shelves before the supermarket realizes the slack; they purchase supplies months in advance. Then, they will offer more meat at the same price. (I just read another article about how chips bags are bigger during the recession and smaller in boom times without changing the price. They do this because consumers hate seeing the price go up, especially on an elasitc good like snacks.) If that fails, they will put all their meat on sale and the temptation will eat into the new converts. A good, long time will pass before the (global) market reduces its supply. Still, any visionary would counter that with, “effort and delay doesn’t make the outcome any less valuable.” It would probably have been safer to hide this dissonant aspect, but it isn’t as though I expressed anything more than a flirtation with the idea. I’m neither buying nor eating insects for the forseeable future. I am not crazy.

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I had read one Kurt Vonnegut book prior to Slaughterhouse Five last week, Welcome to the Monkey House. I read the short story collection perhaps six or so years ago. The only memory that stuck was a scene from the title story wherein an (avowed feminist?) was deflowered by anarchist rebels to convert her to their opinion about the value of physical, heterosexual intercourse. Otherwise, nothing else indicated his power as more than simply average. Nonetheless, people routinely include the former in lists of good science fiction novels.

While it sat way down on my list of books to read, I had lowered my standard on the most recent trip to the library. In anticipation of the move to the newer building next door, the Tustin librarians have shed at least half of their entire adult stock. The effect is rather depressing and akin to an exploded view of a swiss cheese. The book I had planned to check out was missing so I wandered to the classic paperbacks and gave Vonnegut his second chance.

Slaughterhouse Five is a fictional memoir of a World War two veteran who lives his life (or simply recounts it) nonlinearly. I admit, this device would have surprised me much more had I encountered it before its descendants, most obviously the movie Momento. Further, I had already read the most difficult nonlinear novel I have yet encountered, Eye in the Pyramid. Roberts Shea and Wilson not only shifted without warning across time, but also between (distant) characters occasionally within the flow of a single conversation. To my understanding, the only more difficult text is Finnegan’s Wake. A Chorus of Stones is much easier and distinct for being a nonfiction account of the intertwining threads all throughout the second world war and conditions that fostered it. Coincidently, it also treats the destruction of Dresden (via a firestorm) that the protagonist here survives.

After the boring frame story, Vonnegut delves into the anecdotes and experiences of Billy Pilgrim as he slunk through the German prisoner of war system and his subsequent life. These mostly constitute the accounts of absurd behavior that populate any treatment of war time. He meets an artillerist who operates in an unrealistic fantasy because his many layers of clothing shield him from the snow. The fool’s world breaks down when a German patrol captures them and takes his coats and exchanges his boots for two blocks of wood with leather straps. “So it goes.”

The last is Pilgrim’s response to many events deaths and coincidences. In practice, his nonlinear experience involves seamlessly shifting from one event to another but “adopting” the mindset and memories of his ‘concurrent’ self. In essence, to an outside observer, Billy Pilgrim lives a linear life but his consciousness flits through all its states randomly (including the womb and the ‘purple hum’ that is the afterlife). This encourages fatalism in Billy because he controls his body – in a given time frame – for short periods and lives chronologically later events (like his marriage to an obese woman) ‘before’ he will ‘possess’ himself at the time when he makes the decision. The next thought is a spoiler.

Spoiler spoiler spoiler.

However, the narrative supports the interpretation that Billy only ‘rewrote’ his memories late in life. The linear chronology follows his army days, Dresden, marriage, abduction, mundane dentistry, and post airplane crash when he decides to share the alien’s outlook with others. At all points except when abducted, Billy lives as he would have linearly despite transitioning between, say, a golf game and the prison cattle car. The only exception before the crash, when he claims remembering and prophesying memories from his entire lifetime, comes during his abduction.

The fourth-dimensional Tralfadorians take him through a time warp to their home (besides the crash, the only likely cause for his temporal condition). and put him in their zoo along with a porn star who bore his child after he returned to Earth. Their fatalism comes from an even stronger temporal objectivity. They see their entire lifetime (and that of the beings they intersect with) simultaneously, as a three dimensional snake stretching as far as they can see. By Vonnegut’s description, the aliens have even less control than Billy professed to because they are merely an abiding consciousness with access to a particular body’s perspective with neither influence nor embodiment. The experience would likely reflect a soul in limbo seeing the solid tapestry of an individual body’s life.

Besides the peculiar existential alternatives and morbidly entertaining war anecdotes, Slaughterhouse Five underwhelmed me. Its enduring fame likely springs from its pioneering device that others have since improved (and I consumed ahead of time). Asimov’s Foundation similarly underprojected its future. His atomic empire comes across as a shade dated and succeeds by its characters rather than wondrous prediction. Both are easily readable books, recommendable even. If you like pseudo-arbitrary number conclusions, I’ll settle for 62/100.

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The next events occurred privately between Chase and me on Facebook and AIM. I considered falsifying the report, but have since admitted to the true version of events.

Supheter awoke for the last time in his home in Harkenwold. The scent of ash drifted through the drawn curtains, likely a warning from the dragon Renophylax to the city he held for ransom. Last night, Citric reported disrupting some of his agents attempting to free a demon from its prison close by. This morning, Supheter frowned at the prospect of meeting its possible descendant, a female tiefling attached to Baron Thomas Harken. Citric had brought spoils from his adventure: a chest full of ritual component powder.

Supheter considered its safety whilst he ate some breakfast. Carrying the chest would make him a target and leaving it would permit theft. Supheter decided to take the cautious path of playing a shell game. He separated the powder into three bags as well as two bags of flour. He hid the fake bags as well as one real bag in abandoned neighbor’s houses. He left another in an Enneadin dead drop and kept the last. If he were shadowed, the kobolds wouldn’t have enough to finish the ritual.

He entered the castle and found Miranda gloating over her army’s advance. Apparently, she gathered a mercenary army from the eastern Dragon-born providences of Praseolaire to intersect the Queen’s army. To protect Harkenwold from invasion, she would quarter hers within the city when it arrives. She lent Supheter three of her silent lieutenants and bade him scramble the portal to the demon. As it is a fourteenth level ritual, he asked her to prepare a scroll version of it.

Supheter spent the time searching for his political rival and fellow wizard, Chester Pence, to no avail. The other factions had left. Baron Harken remained in a tower, under watch. Supheter asked him about Miranda’s first appearance and plans. Significantly, Thomas revealed he had maintained contact with a dwarven court wizard, Rellum Redfate.

He descended and picked up the scroll and minions. In weaving through the deserted streets, the group avoided a platoon of the Queen’s troops before arriving at the house with the stashed powder. Supheter explicitly lined out his plan and likely tactics against their foes in the basement. In action, the lieutenants revealed themselves as two sorcerers and a shapeshifter. They handedly beat the guardian demons and advanced to the vault’s antechamber with the portal.

Facing the portal, Supheter now saw the hulking devil clawing at the warded door. It turned toward him as he readied the ritual and spoke an Abyssal that Supheter nonetheless understood. It called itself “Barabalam, lord of the seven hundred forty-third circle” and bade Supheter cease helping Miranda. It claimed that the tiefling had stolen an item he had safeguarded for centuries for a dark paladin who had sold his soul. Supheter’s mind raced for hours in the space of seconds [a benefit of these informal sessions], charting the short and long term consequences of each scenario the creature’s offer portended.

Thankfully, Barabalam eased his decision somewhat by holding a brief, telepathic conversation whilst verbally chiding Supheter for indecision, to deceive her lieutenants. Supheter suggested he could steal her prize but the Old One claimed she absorbed his charge as well as another piece of the Staff into her body. Further, she had plans to unite the entire set and “unlock an ancient destructive force” thereby. With a prayer to iQi, Supheter killed the weakest minion and stepped into the portal.

Barabalam chortled at his decision and blocked Supheter from the minions’ attacks. They fought to the death, thankfully, rather than warn Miranda of his betrayal. Rather than scramble the portal, Supheter realigned it with the exit in his chambers in the castle. To cover his intent, Supheter asked the Old One to polymorph to an unassuming shape. It could not, but shrank and Supheter disguised it somewhat as an angel via prestidigitation.

Supheter ran down the stairs to the front gate, hoping to corral the sheriff into helping kill Miranda. Unfortunately, he had led his own troops into the streets against the Praseolarian incursion. Though they represented little more than meat shields, Supheter convinced some men and Gerald (a second level fighter) to ‘save the Baron.’ In the throne room, Barabalam reverted to his towering stature yet the disguise held. Both sets of minions evaporated under the onslaught and we three began to bleed. Miranda declared she would punish us as were the ‘elves and men of the north.’ She flew out the room, followed by Barabalam.

Supheter ransacked her room finding items, healing potions, and ritual reagents, but no journal. He ran up to the Baron and found him sprawled in the center of the room, back-stabbed. Ominous clouds hid some of the mess in darkness, but Supheter shoved the rest of the healing potions into his friend’s mouth. Though he vomited out half, Thomas woke. Both shared consoling words before they noticed that “a great fireball hung in the sky above, three times the size of the sun at high noon and nearly as bright.”

Barabalam broke through the window sill and carried them down to the teleportation circle. Baron Harken suggested Hammerfast and all strove to complete the ritual as quickly as possible. The light and heat rose until Harken fainted Supheter heard his skin crackling. At the last possible second, all three barged through. (I have expressed the end as akin to a nuclear explosion. Chase scoffs, but I will paste his exact narration below.)

The inferno that sweeps through Harkenwold and the surrounding lands is unimaginable in depth for those looking in from a distance. For several miles underground, a great thundering shake is felt, and aboveground the heat reaches several million degrees Celsius. As the explosion touches down on the castle, surrounding buildings are flattened and the heat flash vaporizes most of the people in the city: local militia, Miranda’s mercenaries, and the Queen’s forward company are all turned to dust. In mere seconds, the entire land is nothing more than a smoking wasteland. In the coming days, the heat will dissipate but the magical pollution will rival that of similar sites. Such is the power of the Crown and Staff.

If one good thing should come of this, it is that the queen no longer has an easy entrance to the valley. Her next company of men come upon a blighted landscape, and are unwilling to cross it. They must find a different route, now.

As no one was in the teleportation room, their arrival went unnoticed as an earthquake swept past the Dawnforge Mountains a minute after arrival (the theory of relativity at work). The Old One informed Supheter he would accompany him, knowing the wizard wanted to disarm the tiefling as much as he. In the end, clerics took care of Harken’s wounds. He and Supheter submitted to an interrogation about their arrival and the Harkenwold’s final day. Supheter told a careful reconstructon of events to the king and Rellum (and later, the Vanguard). Though Supheter regarded the demon dispassionately (and yet watchfully), he knew others might despise his choice. So, he substituted in the dragon Renophylax instead.

In the days before the Vanguard’s arrival, Supheter stayed in the abandonded human consulate. He copied more of Spah’s rituals into his own book and urged Rellum to have mages and bards research the Crown and Staff as well as the Black Rains.

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I have now orbited our local star twenty three times, as we regard it. However, I almost didn’t remember until just before. At the start of June, both my parents went on their respective trips with their partners. My father went to Florida and the Bahamas for a week. My mother left to Spain and a Mediterranean cruise including Italy, Greece, and Turkey. She returned two weeks after my father. This was a long, peaceful time for me. Even better, my friends and I managed a D&D session each weekend. There were ample distractions (and lack of reminders) about the pending Holiest of subjective Satanic holidays.

Describing her cruise would make a nice transition, but that isn’t possible. She told me about it, but as a summary and highlights only. (Writing this has been a good reminder that I need to ask to copy their pictures.) Any vacation longer than a week subsumes so many events and minor surprises that describing it to another is hopeless without extensive documentation. I have tried keeping travel journals twice (in Europe and Australia); but after the first days, my interest flags. We pack our days and arrive to bed tired and in line for the shower. Spending an hour hunched over the uncomfortable escritoire – often in the way of the television – can’t compete with vapid relaxation.

Nevertheless, my mother always brings back curios, perhaps for us to remember her trip by. Both my parents bought shirts, which is nice. I had been putting off buying more for a while because entertainment > clothes. But, shirts don’t satisfy my real request. This is a cafepress era. I can buy a shirt that says Harvard without graduating high school. I can buy a jacket that says FBI in official colors despite working at a crooked gambling parlor. And, anyone can buy a shirt that says Costa Rica, Greece, or Red Dirt Hawaii. Still, the shirts my mother brought were thankfully better than I expected. The Istanbul shirt hides the word in a letter grid that also has other (anglicized) Turkish words. The Barcelonan shirt says Barcelona, but over a matte web of its city layout.

So, when my mother asked me the day after I brought her home from John Wayne what I wanted for my birthday, I gaped in surprise and stammered that the shirts would be just fine. She said no, so I had to work. Any year where she hadn’t left, she would have reminded me during late May or so and I would have made a list of prospective gifts. During April, I even noted an improvement to submitting the list. Normally, I send an unedited version of my personal buying lists to her with updated prices. Unfortunately, she runs into trouble when I put, for example, a Sandman trade paperback. Amazon has the weird compulsion of only listing outdated editions of the graphic novel, no matter how you search for them. Of course, if she opened the product page for one, she would see the link to a current printing under the ‘different binding’ options (hardcover, mass market paperback, library binding). To ease her frustration, I planned to link directly to each item as I updated the price. It isn’t an amazing change, but I had never thought of it before.

Here is a snippet from my book buying list. It is toward the upper middle because my favorite authors dominate the top with little variety (just science fiction and some fantasy). [Amazon; Barnes & Noble; library]

Ubersleep           15lulu

Alphabet of manliness   10am/12.8bn/-lib

Getting Even: The Complete Book of Dirty Tricks               11.7am/-lib

Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar            <am/-lib

Watching the Watchmen              26.4am

Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers: Guerrilla Girls Guide to Female Stereotypes  18.3am/-lib

The Encyclopedia Of Tarot           22.8am 1-4 105.4am/  II  26.6am  III  34.2am  IV  45bn

Revelations of the Dark Mother                <am/-lib

The hero with a thousand faces                t lib/10.7am/13.5

Will to Power 11.6am/17bn/5bkmn

In the end, I didn’t submit a list to either and ate the consequence. Not directing my father held more significance. He bought me a shirt and a Barnes & Nobel gift card. In light of amazon, that retailer is neigh worthless. Sure, I liked to visit when a minor without a credit card. It was sort of like a browsing the library with more variety and the spice of a potential impulse buy. Now, I know – absolutely – that retailer prices everything five dollars higher (or more) than amazon does.

They offer only one saving grace: sparkcharts only sells through Barnes & Nobel. I consider them worthless, in principle, for any class I am studying. Without writing and relying on personal notes, I would do abysmally. However, the breadth of their offering suggested I could use them as a tiny introduction into a subject I don’t plan to study. For example, I bought Music Theory and Marketing to this end. They are as superficial as I expected, but good enough to quiet my interest. Further, I can return to ignoring the retailer in perpetuity.

I made sure to direct my mother’s gift more, despite dithering. In the end, I decided that she could buy me a pair of everyday shoes. Mine are scuffed, but have no holes. However, she had made a little fuss about them earlier in the year and during year 8, so I knew it would please her to buy me them (rather than committing to a block of cash). I had counted on the good will to reduce her input. When my father bought me a new pair of work shoes, I used the newbalance (one of the few major brands that sells 4Es) website and chose velcro straps. These are much faster. Yes, the time is small but not trivial. Consider the comparison between pants with a zipper and pants with buttons. I happen to have one pair and know that it is an annoying extra effort.

Unfortunately, nobody buys shoes with Velcro straps and manufacturers severely limit their color selection. During my dedicated research to find one dashing pair my mother could agree to, I saw the same colors over and over: white, boring American; black, work shoes; and ‘bone,’ a light brown/grey. The most daring was a white shoe with silver streaks. In the end, my mother sidestepped color and declared Velcro straps are for old people. (I admit all diabetic’s variants have straps.) I dropped the issue (it’s her money after all) and agreed to typical navy running shoes. I toyed with ankle boots, but she reminded me they will look silly since I wear shorts all the time. I know my leg hair presents a brusque and unkempt front, but these months (and even a third of every California winter) are too hot for pants.

But the best came from aggregated money (mainly my grandparent’s). I am using it right now and had considered it for a long while. I bought a corner desk.

Prior to yesterday, I kept that red chair in the corner for storing my backpack and (occasionally) clothes. I used my laptop in the communal bonus room with the television to my back. I have typed for an hour and one half and not been interrupted in any way. If this were a weekday afternoon, my sister would be watching the Real Housewives of New Jersey or something similar. In that case, I often resorted to putting on headphones and listening to a series of white noise clips I recorded for the purpose. Music could cover it, but that is just as bad as prose English dialog calling out to me. So, I lifted the sound from four youtube clips of waves, rain, a river, and someone driving a stick shift car on the freeway. It throws a blanket over the ambient voices but grates and dilutes my concentration anyway. Now, I have near total privacy even with my door open.

I am very glad I chose this type. Officemax had tempted me intitially with cheap ‘L desks’ (two shoved together with a little round connector. As you can see, I need a deep desk because I use a separate, ergonomic keyboard with my laptop on a homemade stand. I put the towel on the lip to protect my elbows. I could go on about the trivial details, but it isn’t anything you can’t guess. The white sheet is a map of the world I drew (Winkel Tripel projection) but discarded. During writing, I hung it up. It serves nicely as a dust cover, but I have better and my work is nicer than a bare wall.

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