Daily Archives: July 12, 2017

from The Darkening of the Light

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SNIPPETS OF DEAAAAATH!!!!

(raw material to be
developed for other scenes)

A tear came to Jenny’s eye. 
“I was twenty-three years old.  I
woke up in the driver’s seat of the van one morning and I realized that I had
no one to call, nowhere to go to call home, nothing to go back to.  Since that day my life has just been
wandering from place to place, looking for something real.”

“I wanted to be a Diamond Dog.  They were making us all of us girls into dogs
and I wanted to be a special dog, a dog that sparkled like a diamond, a dog who
never gave them anything she didn’t want to, but got what she wanted out of
them instead.”

Becky frowned, “We were different.  We saw ourselves as the heirs of death and
decay.  We had all this history around
us, but it had never amounted to anything but failure.  There wasn’t any joke to make, it was just
the end.”

“I do that too,” said Jennifer.  “It wound up there, but the original impulse
was to do something.  It was like Goth
was the burnt out wreckage of Glam.”

“Victor and I didn’t come to it through glam.  We came to it through literature, through the
failure of everything we’d been taught. 
It wasn’t fun.  We needed you.”

“You needed me?” she asked, genuinely surprised.

“Yeah, I know I probably would have killed myself if it
weren’t for you.” 

from The Darkening of the Light

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Here’s a much better
version of what I posted yesterday.  I
have other things to post in a little bit, as well.

“You’re still trying to live it, Becky.  That’s all. 
You want something from it you can never get.” 

“Well, shouldn’t I be able to live it?  Shouldn’t I be able to put writing and living
together, after all I’ve read?”

“Never.  You feel it
too much.  But I’m glad you do.  I need you to feel something because it’s so
bloody obvious no one else ever will.  And
your intricately beautiful and elegant inner life should never ever be exposed
to this brutal, petty world.  The public
doesn’t deserve you, and even if they did they would kill you.” 

“But I’m getting so old, Victor, and I’ve spent so much of
my life around books, I feel like I have to have some response to it all, even
if no one’s going to care.” 

“If you want to write, write something for me.”

“I can’t do that,” she sighed.  “That wouldn’t be a response to my life.  And anyway, you’re part of what I need to
write about.  You can’t know, Victor,
what it’s like to be in your shadow.” 

Victor shook his head. 
“I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone in the world.”

She looked askance at him, “I thought I already knew
everything about you.”

“No one knows this about me, Becky, not even Jennifer.  When I was ten years old I caught my father
with another woman.  I snuck into his
office after the store was closed.  It
was just innocent mischief but then while I was going through his desk I heard
him coming up the stairs.  I panicked and
hid behind a bookshelf.  He came in with
a woman I’d never seen before and started kissing her right there while I
watched.  Eventually they left and I went
back home to bed but I never forgot that woman’s face.  Over the months that followed I caught sight
of her several times, going in and out of my father’s office.

“So here’s my dirty little secret.  From the time I was ten years old I was
convinced that my father was having an affair without my mother’s knowledge,
and I hated him ferociously.  I believed
he was a total hypocrite and a traitor to our family.  It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I
realized that my mother had always known about it, that she and my father had
agreed that they were not ever going to be in love, but chose to keep up
appearances out of fear of their families.  This affair he was having was totally
unimportant to my mother, just as hers were to him.  But by the time I figured it out it was too
late.

“My first novel was fueled by sheer hatred of him.  He had forbidden me to ever reveal anything
about my life to the world, and I felt that meant that he was preventing me
from ever genuinely being alive.  And so
I wrote a novel about a vampire based on my father who victimizes a hero who
was me.  I knew I could never say what I
felt so I wanted to leave a terrible trail of clues, so the world would secretly
know what a bastard he was and hate him as much as I hated him.

He shrugged, “Of course it didn’t work out that way because
everyone just sees my father as a boring fake.”

Becky agreed.  “People
could tell you were angry but you’re right. 
If that was supposed to be your father you got him completely wrong.”

“I know, it’s funny and stupid.”

“It wasn’t that stupid, Victor.  Even if he’s not a world-class monster he was
still a total ass.  I was there with you
while he was destroying you.  I think you
forget how much you and I talked about it at the time.  He deserves everything he gets.  And you did really care about writing.  It wasn’t just revenge.  If you were that petty you would have
just beat him up.  You thought it was important to
say something about resisting evil.”

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popculturebrain:

Quentin Tarantino Planning Manson Family Feature; Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lawrence Circling

Today in news that’s unlikely to attract much attention — or, for that matter, debate — but about which we nevertheless write, THR inform us Quentin Tarantino has likely found material for his ninth feature: the Manson Family and their murder of Sharon Tate.

The Buffy Diaries 7-11-2017

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10:08 PM 7/11/2017

A spray of relatively minor Buffynicities tonight, or a bouquet if you will.

Buffynicity #1:  Driving home I stopped at an intersection next to a car with a license plate that read “Erase”.  Then in the episode:

BUFFY
 The First. That’s what it wants.

GILES
 Yes, to erase all the slayers in training and their watchers along with their methods.

Buffynicity #2: Is this minor?  Right before I went to run I wrote an e-mail to someone and told them I missed them.  Then Buffy said to Giles

BUFFY
 Good. ‘Cause I miss you.

I noticed it, but I wondered if I should make a note of it, but tonight seems to be a night for several minor ones.

Buffynicity #3:

DAWN
 (walks back to the kitchen, Willow follows) Well, Annabelle and Molly are starved and I totally burnt the mac and cheese. Oh, um, I’ll put hot sauce on it, tell ’em it’s an American thing, say it’s blackened.

On Sunday I was debating whether to eat blackened grilled chicken because I couldn’t get my usual fried chicken.  This began a series of minor food-oriented Buffynicities.

Buffynicity #4:

WILLOW
 Or we can order pizza.

Within 30 minutes before I saw this I had been wondering what scene to write for The Darkening tonight.  Since yesterday was so dark I thought maybe I should lighten up and it occurred to me that they should order out a pizza.  Although this is minor this is truly a precognitive/telepathic Buffynicity.

Buffynicity #5:

Anna’s response is:

ANNABELLE
 (sitting at the island, reading a book) As long as it’s plain. I’m veggie.

Today I had to fill out an RSVP form on Facebook for an event I’m going to and it absoutely insisted that I select a food preference, and I am not vegetarian but I was noting that this form had one selection for “no special requirements” and three different kinds of vegetarian or whatever.  So it wasn’t exactly precognitive but it is Buffynicitious.

Buffynicity #6:

KENNEDY
 (eating a bowl of cereal) Sorry about the British invasion.

I don’t now how specifically Buffynicitous it is but I have been thinking a lot about my British characters today, wondering whether I am qualified to write characters from England, and also I was thinking a lot about Annie Lennox who was part of what they called a “second british invasion” in the early 80s.

So that’s quite a few, although not so many utterly spectacular onese.  I don’t mind, I have other things to think about. 

Not many aspects today.  Things were going smoothly.  My perspective is changing after last night’s event.  Also The Darkening is getting deeper for me.  What I wrote yesterday was very sloppy and also scary because it was very negative and opened up a lot of concepts I didn’t feel I was the master of.  There were a lot of things just sketched in and it’s going to be a big challenge to nail them all down.  I hate making mistakes with Victor.  I want the world to see him as I see him and I just wasn’t sure what I wrote yesterday really worked.  So I brooded over that but I’m also totally sure this is a magical process now and I’m very happy about the intensity of it.

When the Moon inconjuncted the Sun around 3 pm I was back from lunch and taking care of some long-standing business, getting ready to go shopping after work.  I felt pretty good. 

While I was shopping and on the way home I brooded over the evil people I’ve known in this world.  Specifically a lot of the creeps I left behind in Grand Rapids.  But by the time I got home I was mostly over it. 

I was running while the Moon sextiled Saturn.  I actually had a minor incident where I was scanning my id token the club over and over again, unsure whether it was working and the attendant was urging me impatiently to just move on.  I think that related somewhat to the transit, and also I was a few minutes too late to do a full hour.  Forty-five minutes is good though, since I’ve pushed my rate up to 7 miles per hour – I don’t do the whole time at that speed, but I do get up there better and better.

The Moon’s going to inconjunct Mars later tonight.  I do feel pretty energetic, but I also plan to go to bed early tonight.

Tomorrow the Moon sextiles Uranus in the morning and then goes void of course so I’m expecting to feel good because I’m getting my car fixed.  I’ll probably be spending the day at the mall, finishing Wuthering Heights and working on Amber Benson’s “Ghosts of Albion”.  VOC ends at 10:51 when the Moon enters Pisces and I’m expecting my usual laziness to kick in. 

The Music Box is showing West Side Story that night and I wonder if I’ll be too lazy to go see it.  On the other hand the theme of death and dissolution might be very appropriate. 

Thursday I’m working downtown and I’m especially looking forward to the Moon conjunct Neptune in the afternoon.  And once again there’s a Pluto transit on a day when I’m down there, although this one is in the late evening, after I’m home from work. 

Friday the Moon is conjuncting Chiron during the void of course, and then entering Aries during the Circle.  We’ll see what happens.

Now I’m off for a little more Darkening before bed.

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popculturebrain:

Quentin Tarantino Met With Margot Robbie For Sharon Tate: Sources

EXCLUSIVE: Word has gotten out that Quentin Tarantino’s next film will be a drama revolving around the Manson Family murders.