Filed under: UTTERLY worth the 6am flight.

In T-Minus (wait, did I just write the equivalent of T minus minus? Whatever: you know what I meant) three days + one business day melting in Houston...

I get to see The Bloggess!

Live and in person (which may mean under a table, which I completely understand and support).

I can't wait to see how many Rorys are floating around in the crowd. Wait...Crowd surfing Rory...hmm...this should happen.

If you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, I say go forth and read both of her books immediately. Or get lost in her blog for a couple of days. Well worth the time.

Oh shit. Does this mean I'll be reading Furiously Happy on the plane on my way home Saturday?

Dear fellow passengers at 6:40am: I will not apologize for the snortling. I promise when I start to wheeze and cough I'll put it down and knock myself out with a Dramamine for the rest of the flight.

I Broke My Funny Bone

Actually, I think I severely sprained my writing-anything-amusing bone. That should not be confused with a writing boner, which is really a different genre entirely.

I started a new job last week, and while I really like the team and the culture (and hello, benefits) I do miss setting my own schedule. The rebel in me chafes a bit on principle.

The point is: the past week or so has been pretty close to the first week of school when I was a kid. It takes me an adjustment period, and during that time I sleep like absolute shit. And therefore start nodding off around 8pm...because I'm a super exciting party...(yawn).

Tonight I stupidly decided the long hike would be good, since it's been a while, I was home by 5, and I'm apparently a sucker when my idiot brain says "seriously, this'll be great for us!"

The long hike is 3.5 miles in a park with demonically steep hills about every 200 yards. The first few are actually sort of helpful: imagine a large, out of tune orchestra playing bits of SOMETHING all together so you can't focus on one thing. If I don't have a way to expunge the surface garbage of news headlines and how gross I think a vegan recipe for mac and cheese would taste, it's harder to get to the good stuff.

I have a couple choices for feng-shui-ing my brain. First: journaling. I learned the Natalie Goldberg "wild mind" method in high school creative writing class, and that shit still works to get the Lucky Charms demented Leprechaun weird images out. Meditation works too. Sometimes opening my yap and spilling rainbow flavored verbal diarrhea works, but that's just...well, it's rude.

I mean, no one wants to be pooped on. DO NOT BURST MY HAPPY BUBBLE: I'M STICKING WITH THAT ASSERTION.

Exercise works because I can pretty literally sweat out all the toxic brain bits. Hiking works better than anything else because running makes me want to puke and swimming, while I do love it, puts me in real danger of inhaling chlorine water mid-evil-thought and drowning. I suppose there are worse ways to go...and now I'm thinking about poop again. Sigh. I'm so damned ladylike.

Plus, hiking is more of an adventure. Tonight I heard two owls hooting at each other, scared the bejesus out of a deer (the bejesus was really scared out of both of us, and I'm pretty sure the bejesii went skipping off in another direction together), thought bears might be heading my way but it turned out to be lumbering mountain bikers, and had an entire flock of crows laugh at me for a good 1/4 mile.

They actually perched in the tree above me, looked down, and cackled. That is not the exhaustion talking. I was fairly amused.

It's clearly been a while since I hiked, because I didn't get to the relieved state of a cleared mind until the second mile. The hills usually help: a fat girl huffing and puffing up a godawfully endless steep hill gets to a don't look up, the top is too far away and you'll just quit. Just put one foot in front of the other and be fucking careful not to sprain your ankle again because NOBODY will come all the way out here and roll your ass back to the car stage. I appreciate every terrible hill in a twisted sort of self-help-inspiration way. They force me to focus on the moment. They force me to keep going because I'm too damn stubborn to go back down and it's just one more step, then one more, then one more. And suddenly it's the top and I can look back down while I catch my breath and be sort of surprised I got so far.

Tonight, the first three hills gave me Dory's irritating "just keep swimming" song instead of clarity. I know I'm evil for saying so, but I really didn't enjoy that movie. Therefore, I'm CERTAIN I've not brain-dumped the bullshit in a while.

See? There is no funny in here today, only crass bathroom humor and sleepiness.

The Old Ones...or...Why I Shouldn't Be Allowed In Public

This should be filed under "yup, she's disturbed and thinks weird dark things" and you're welcome to ignore this post if horror isn't your gig. Or horror humor. Or really fucked up thought processes resulting in inappropriate innuendo. 

Yes, yes, I know it's early to be thinking about Poe and Lovecraft...it's still August, after all. But this week it's been cold enough at night to actually sleep under the covers AND Renaissance Festival started, so I'm in autumn mood. 

Anyway. 

I saw some horror art today that was Lovecraftian in nature: black tentacles reaching out of a center point, surrounded by human skulls-and-spines like some disturbing pinwheel of death. It was creepily beautiful, if you can wrap your mind around those two words working together. 

I got to thinking...humans are ever so full of ourselves as a species, even in horror. 

Let's imagine for one second that the Old Ones, Cthulhu and the rest, existed and are indeed just waiting out there in deep space for Hellboy or some foolish person to open a portal so they can come back. Let's imagine Leviathan (Biblical) or Jormungandr (Norse) have been hanging out in the depths of the ocean, encompassing the world, for millennia. 

Imagine what immortality might be like: where anything with a short life span matters less over time because, well, you can always get another one. Seriously, why would they give a hoot about humans at all? 

Humans, for example, live an average of 75 - 100 years. Dogs live an average of 10. Ants live an average of 45 - 60 DAYS. Do we care when a valued pet dies? I certainly hope so. Do we care when an ant dies? Um, speaking for myself here I have to say no, I really don't. 

Do I NOTICE when I have ants? Sure do: and I go about exterminating them so my house is clean. Do I make a point of saving ant skeletons (or exoskeletons, in their case) with which I terrify them and torture their existence? Indeed I don't give their psyches that much thought at all. I suppose were I Buddhist that would make me a bad one...and to be fair I don't mess with anthills outside (I figure that's their space, as long as they aren't fire ants in my yard). 

I have a point.

Given our size, our life span, and our penchant for colonizing every inch of space on this planet, how could humans not be considered the equivalent to ants to The Old Ones? 

Why would Cthulhu bother terrorizing ants, creating a pit of despair lined with bony dead human trophies? Even ant serial killers (not serial killers who ARE ants: that's just silly. I'm thinking the creeps who like to use magnifying glasses and sun to burn the little dudes to death in some disturbing version of a Greek Death Ray) don't stack up the dead anty bits in warning to other ants. 

The pinwheel of death art was neat, but it's a little ridiculous: only a human would create something like that to psychologically affect another human. The need to be FEARED implies a need to be recognized and valued (positively or negatively) by those who fear you: the terrorizer's value of the terrorized's opinion. Incitement of fear response is a defense against something which could potentially harm or kill: a wolf doesn't fear a rabbit and so doesn't make a point of threatening a rabbit. A wolf can (not always, but there is capability) fear a human, and so bristles and growls, attempting through incitement of fear to get the human to back the fuck off. 

Of course, it can be argued that they are kill trophies. Like a serial killer, or an interstellar Predator hunter. You know, like deer heads on the wall for decoration? Yeah, I don't get that either, but some people like it. Trophy decoration implies an opinion of the animal involved. Hanging a deer head on the wall is an advertisement that the hunter overcame something difficult to hunt, right, at least theoretically? Please let me be clear: I DON'T LIKE trophy hunting. Never have. I don't get it: eating the deer meat should be enough in my mind, but whatever. The POINT is that there's some psychological reason for displaying hunting trophies which implies the creature's importance to the hunter on some level...and that I've never seen an ant head or squirrel on anyone's man-cave wall. 

I'm not saying that, if the Old Ones saw humanity as ants, they couldn't or wouldn't exterminate. I mean, for all I know they ARE Daleks. I'm saying it's ridiculous to think they'd bother with psychological warfare, being both immortal and presumably all powerful (or, at least, so much more powerful we are essentially unable to conceive of the limits). 

And so, the idea that an ancient evil god imprisoned in space for a bazillion years, such as Cthulhu, has a collection of human bits either as kill trophies OR as instruments of terror seems...well it just seems somewhat unlikely. 

Now I'm seriously wondering if ants have Lovecraftian style horror stories about humans. "Boots On The Ground, and Other Terrifying Tales" to be read in short story form, because hello: 60 day life span. 

Also, animals with longer life spans than us, which would potentially be more of a pet to Cthulhu than we are: Galapagos Tortoise (190 years). Bowhead Whale (200 - 245 years), Greenland Sharks (190 years), Koi (200 years), Ocean Quahog Clam (400 - 550 years). Obviously, I make no comment on the intellectual capacity of any of them...what does a clam think about for 500 years? 

Oh dear. 

THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANT BY CLAM.