Dream Fairy! Welcome home!

For the longest time, I did not dream. The apnea woke me too often for me to get to REM.

Lat night was a longish,fairly coherent dream for the first time in a long time.

There are two parts and they don't fit together.
The part I was having just before Mudd woke me up was clearly after a con because and saraphina_marie and I were hanging out in a parking lot. The parking lot of the Holliday Mall in West Mempphis, which now sported an Irish pub. And we were looking for someone who had just graduated. "Well, after graduation, you go to the pub. What do you do after the pub?" was the question I couldn't get answered. The other two laughed at me for asking it, thinking I was just silly. "No, seriously, I was 5 months pregnant when I graduated. I went out for dinner and home to bed. I have no idea."

Mudd stirred me around about then and I grumbled "Sara and Elizabeth are on this side of my eyelids and only work is on the other." I rolled over and went back to sleep.

TI was in a cyberpunk thing. And Maggie, our runner, had all these rules. Yeah kind of an ST:TNG knock-off. And Tim Curry was the primary villain. And it ended with the words, spoken, "Maggie broke Rule Number One right there." (Rule Number One was "Never Fall in Love") I may have to use this someday.

It's Festival of Souls time

Since I'm not there, I've been doing a little searching and thinking and meditating.

What do I believe?
Why do I believe it?
Where do I go from here?

My Articles of Faith:
We are all part of the universe. We are energy made material for a little while by way of E=mc^2. Which means there's a lot of energy invested in each of us and if we press on our corner of reality right, we can affect the whole.

Gods are the constructs we make to understand the universe (given reality and power by the energy we lend them). Myths are the stories we tell ourselves about the way the world works. Both of these are vital and true, but should not be taken for fact.

The gods only affect us if we allow them to, by believing in them. A few have enough power, lent them by other people in our lives, or previously by us, to affect us if we don't/no longer believe in them.

Truth and fact have very little to do with each other. Facts are usually true. Truth encompasses many things that have no relationship to fact at all. All myths are true, because they fill a need in the hearer and the teller, a need to understand the world around them. Does observed fact bear out the idea of turtles all the way down? No, of course not. But the story is still true.


Now, where do I go from here?
I've been thinking a lot this fall. I'm not entirely happy with my church. One one hand, I see myself as in a position to do something about the problems I see in it. On the other, I keep asking myself if I really have that much time and energy to devote to anything, especially other people.

I am radically selfish. I hoard my time and energy jealously. I get it. My writing gets it. My company gets it. My family gets it. Anything left over goes out to other people. That is NOT a good quality in a spiritual leader.

I resent being made to leave the house these days. Even for work and grocery shopping, I resent it. And I find this deeply troubling. I blow off a lot of things I want to do. "Writer's Group? nah. Church? do I gotta? Chili cook-off and craftfair? Bleh. Gay pride? Whine, please no." (I did go out to Pride yesterday, but I almost didn't) This scares me, because it's a sign of addiction and a sign of budding agorophobia.

It would be easier to go solitary, show up for sabbats and do my own thing otherwise. It'd probably be healthier for me in the long run. BUT.

I'm a woman of a certain age. I grew up with a sense of obligation to the whole universe for simply letting me exist. I want Oli to grow up with a better spiritual connection than I have. Do these outweigh my selfishness, my need to husband my energy so I can make it through another week of work, another deadline, another tutoring session or another band concert? I haven't decided yet.

Your Creepy Song of the Day

I got to see these guys at Hypericon. Danced all night to them at Zombie prom.

Snippet of the Day

From "On the Night Road." Unpublished (needs to be expanded a LOT)

Another rat-gnawed skeleton dumped in a deserted field was no way to start a Monday morning, Sheriff Gary Redhorse decided. Kissed awake by a twink bearing breakfast in bed, sometime around elevenish, would have been much preferable to tramping around a dew-soaked field at the ass-crack of dawn, staring at scattered bones with teeth marks on them.

Gary knelt and prodded one of the bones, an ulna he guessed. The animals had cracked this one open to eat the marrow. He wrinkled his nose in disgust. Twinks at elevenish looked better all the time.

It was somewhere after eleven, but before midnight, when he managed to get home. The guy in the field had been dead when he'd been dumped about six months before, the examiner said. It looked a little like a case from about twenty years before and a lot like the last five skeletons that had been found in that same field. All eaten by wolves and rats and all decapitated.

No skulls had been found.

A killer picking his county as a dumping ground was a load of shit Gary didn't need. Especially one that took the heads with him. He tossed his hat on its hook and started stripping down for a shower.

He did some of his best thinking under the hot water. Tammy, the dispatcher, joked about installing a shower in his office so he could solve the crimes there. Gary liked his quiet county, with its population of about three thousand people and its low crime rate. A few boosted cars, some brawls, a lot of domestics, a couple rapes and usually less than three killings a year made up his blotter. Or they had, until these skeletons had started turning up out by Crow Lake.

Wasn't easy being gay in such a place, but he kept that to himself and indulged on the occasional trips up to Sioux Falls, where no one knew him. He let the hot water course over him. The examiner said all of the bones had been gnawed by wolves and rats. That wasn't normal behavior for wolves. They avoided humans, alive or dead, unless they had lost their natural fear. Rats would eat anything.

Something didn't track about this thing. Gary turned off the water, dried and went to bed, still twinkless.

***

Downshift. Stop. Lights out. Window down. The smell of cold dawn on the air told him he needed to get his hunting done quickly and be on his way. He sorted the scents that came on the black wind, diesel smoke, oil, piss, spilled soda, someone's illegal beer, reefer melt and most of all, blood. Blood pulsed through the humans who worked the night, making him salivate. It had been three days since he ate. He checked the air again, not wanting to have to lure a driver or a waitress aboard.

There, the smell he sought. Desperation, musty and thin, flavored the blood he smelled. Hunger spiking through the aroma, sharp and yellow, the smell of wildflowers trampled underfoot, and fear, purple and thick like spoiled grapes, adding the perfect tang. Dinner was served

State of the Sooky

Quiet day. Did a couple loads of laundry and grocery shopped.

Finished revisions on "Thigh to Thigh" and sent it.

Currently waiting to hear:
Orion Rising--Circlet's Like An Iron Fist
Worth the Woe--Ravenous Romance's Rumpled Silk Sheets
Experiments--Cleis Carnal Machines
Thigh to Thigh--AQ
Playing With Fire--Renaissance, Undead erotica
Between Despair and Ecstasy--Renaissance, Undead Erotica

Currently writing? Nothing.
Editing here and there, polishing up Long-Term.
Will resume writing on Nov 1
I need a brief break.

Tomorrow, I have a pulmonary function test. And I seem to have misplaced my ebook reader. Drat. I had it all day yesterday. I need to put Harlan County Horrors on it.