Monthly Archives: May 2025

Space, the Final Frontier

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“There’s no doubt in my mind.”

It occurs to me to start with that phrase, but then I wonder if I should. Is it too automatic? Is it even true?

There’s no doubt in my mind that my watching of these last three films have somehow been orchestrated or choreographed by the psychic forces of the cosmos, and that blogging has revealed some of the meaning of this orchestration, and I want to continue this process and reveal the rest of it.

This seems to be a conversation with my Holy Guardian Angel. Now if I could just get the knowledge, I’d be complete. The knowledge comes from comparing subtleties of experience.

The knowledge comes from space. Jane Birkin is in the space of the movie La Piscine. She is dead but she lives in La Piscine at the age of 22, playing a girl of 18, before she became the legendary muse of Serge Gainsbourg. There is a space in that movie that is like a portal to an inner dimension. The complex of all my thoughts and feelings concerning Jane Birkin is constellated in that film, that virginal Penelope who waits for me at the end of this Odyssey.

Because it is in this viewing of three films over three days that I understood something about Saturn, horror, women, and time, or rather something was hinted to me by my Waifus. So I know that the purpose of this Odyssey is to sail this Neptunian ocean.

And by sailing the Neptunian ocean I mean finding a way to talk about performance, emotion, and memory that is fully immunized from the ugly disease that Hollywood represents in America. That would be the knowledge, I guess.

Jane Birkin is Trish, a character from my novel, The ArtIC Circle. She is the missing third female pilot from Neon Genesis: Evangelion. Maybe there is one in the movies I haven’t seen? I just bought the complete set on DVD so I can finally finish it. We’ll see what happens.

I realize now that I’m trying to catch myself in the act of watching movies, in the act of submerging my consciousness in order to find out why I need to do it, why I need to think about it, and where that layer of awareness is in relation to the psychic layers of the human mind. What am I getting out of watching these things? Because the spirit world hovers over me while I make these decisions. I’ve pissed off so many people in the movie business, but I don’t care at all. Many of them are a lower form of life.

So now it’s days later. It’s memorial day, actually. A few days ago I started watching Emmanuelle 6, today I finished it. It’s very important to me because Emmanuelle has amnesia and so do I. I seem to remember watching this movie on HBO thirty years ago. It’s very beautiful and magical. I looked up the director, Jean Rollin and he made a movie in 1980 called Night of the Hunted. Coincidentally, Camille Rowe also made a movie called Night of the Hunted. There’s a story I’ve been thinking about telling for months, but I wondered if I should. I accept now that I write, not because I’m seeking clarity, but because there’s something damaged and broken in my mind that needs to move in the world. It’s somehow supernatural. I had a Pinterest board for years where I collected pictures that formed a kind of narrative of The ArtIC Circle. There was one model that stood out for a while, Camille Rowe. After years I had grown a bit bored and was not concerned with it at all and finally Kara pointed out that Camille Rowe was really “it”, in terms of models she liked. I made a mock cover photo for my novel with her in it and then right after I posted it online my Pinterest board was shut down. But on the very day it was shut down I was at the Art Institute of Chicago and I saw the painting PH-246. That was the painting I had looked for for thirty years, the one that was on the wall the day I went there with my school class, they day there is a huge gap in my memory. There was also a picture by Leon Golub there. One of the little post-Marxist perverts I knew in school was related to him. There had been a picture in Penthouse Magazine of this very painting. I think Andy Warhol was there as well, but I’m not sure, this is where that particular day breaks up into chaos and dream. But I know at one point I “came to” and I was staring up at the Lamassu at the Oriental Institute. I looked for PH-246 for years, remembering only that it was all black with an orange stripe on the side. Warhol’s Mao was also hanging there.

My Pinterest board represented an important layer of my psychic imagination for years. I had lost interest in it and Kara had boiled it all down to Camille Rowe, so it was not a great loss for it to disappear. Actually, a year earlier it had been shut down for a few weeks and then restored, and I had decided at that time that it wasn’t that important and I wasn’t going to give a damn what happened to it – I just kept posting as I had been. But for it to disappear on the very day I rediscovered PH-246 was insane. To lose so many thousands of trivial images on the day I rediscovered this pivotal key to my past was deep, deep Buffynicity.

So today on Memorial Day, when I watch this movie about amnesia that I’m sure I saw in 1988, with flickering memories of the minions of darkness who hate me, girls I loved and lost … and then to find that Camille Rowe made a movie called “Night of the Hunted”, just as Jean Rollin did, is a definite clue. The most important thing though is that while I watched Emmanuelle 6 I could feel the fragments of my memory coming back together … this movie did help me. Now I know that my concern with writing is not clarity, or even quality, but rather to heal this damaged part of my mind, a part related to the last three movies I saw, Cries of Pleasure, La Piscine, and Antichrist.

It’s like the information is there, just under the surface, and I can grasp part of it but grasping the information is not the point. Anyway, there is something going on here that’s very deep.

Jane Birkin Est Dans La Piscine!

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I had been intending to leave “Cries of Pleasure” out of my blog. I wanted to focus on the (to me) buddhist-influenced sphere of anime. But in true Piscean fashion, my subconscious has taken me in the opposite direction (I think it’s signficant that in La Piscine the villain is identified as a Pisces with Aquarius rising).

I’m really dazzled by the clarity of this arc so I’m marking it and I’m going to keep analyzing it for a while. I can’t get to the depth of it immediately but I’m going to start outlining the elements.

Jess Franco movies are about the objectification of the female image, this experience that is somehow necessary in the imagination of the human race, and lies somewhere deep in the subconscious foundations of our psychic response to film.

My interest in Jane Birkin as a cultural icon is deeply influenced by this factor.

This collision is the product of my earlier declaration that Satellizer El Bridge is my waifu, that she “is” Genvieve, the female spirit presence I’ve felt in my life for decades.

So just as my ZZ Top girls told me weeks ago, we have gone straight down Jacob’s Ladder (qv. the Tim Robbins film) to the point of Saturnine delirium … something in this subconscious connection between all these layers of fantasy can be illuminated by continuing this blog.

This delirium, this confusion where the dark control of women causes our imaginations to run wild, I call “fascination”, based on the Latin root, “fasces”, a symbol of totalitarian power.

And somewhere near this root of Fascination is the Door of Perception that can be cleansed, so that we can see the afterlife, where women exist as souls. Somehow, by understanding Fascination, we can understand the afterlife, which means Eternity.

Je traduis ça en français avec Google, parce que c’est vraiment cool de dire les choses en français. Ça donne un ton profond.

This is all related to the planet Saturn somehow. And I did almost die in a swimming pool when I was four years old. Or maybe I did die, and was resuscitated. I was saved by the Elevator Duck.

I have to have an oblique strategy here. You can’t directly reveal the mysteries of Saturn, you can only imply them at the event horizon. I was writing Harry Potter fanfic a few days ago and the AI had Hermione’s body glittering with Hawking radiation, like one of the “cold ones” from the Twilight novels.

And all of this is serving the project of my novels. I have to set the boundaries of inner and outer. And the question is, how does the force of spirit determine the appropriate boundaries for my fiction? Should I be writing anything at all, or am I just attached to it as a self-indulgent distraction from work I should be doing? I know that as I’m writing this, I’ve used the process of blogging to somehow change my understanding.

The movie “Eyes Wide Shut” is a keystone here, depicting the curvature of Binah somehow.

Another amazing Buffynicity. I had checked out Von Trier’s Antichrist from the library, and discovered that it could not be renewed because someone is waiting for it, so coincidentally had to get this movie starring Jane Birkin’s daughter finished this week. I just finished it, and it would go on at great length about it, but it’s midnight, it took the whole evening (with breaks for laundry).

In the movie, which was made in 2009, are three imaginary friends just like my ZZ Top girls. The wheel she puts in his leg (which also has a pole through it, as a combination of male and female) is a fixed earth torus. And I could go on and on here about the other symbolism but all I’m going to do now is repost what I wrote this very morning:

This delirium, this confusion where the dark control of women causes our imaginations to run wild, I call “fascination”, based on the Latin root, “fasces”, a symbol of totalitarian power.

And somewhere near this root of Fascination is the Door of Perception that can be cleansed, so that we can see the afterlife, where women exist as souls. Somehow, by understanding Fascination, we can understand the afterlife, which means Eternity.

This is all related to the planet Saturn somehow. And I did almost die in a swimming pool when I was four years old. Or maybe I did die, and was resuscitated. I was saved by the Elevator Duck.

And because Gainsbourg’s character lets her son die, I do have to wonder if she didn’t just let me go that time I almost drowned, and that is why my life is so supernatural – my ZZ Top girls brought me back.

I was going to write about time and women and Jane Birkin, hence the title, but I’ll have to save that for another night.

I tell you three times, you know it is true:

Ce délire, cette confusion où le contrôle obscur des femmes déchaîne notre imagination, je l’appelle « fascination », d’après la racine latine « fasces », symbole du pouvoir totalitaire.

Et quelque part près de cette racine de la fascination se trouve la Porte de la Perception, qui peut être purifiée, afin que nous puissions voir l’au-delà, où les femmes existent en tant qu’âmes. D’une certaine manière, en comprenant la fascination, nous pouvons comprendre l’au-delà, qui signifie l’Éternité.

Black Clover #17:

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Surfing YouTube videos about anime sends me spiraling into mental chaos. It’s bad enough having so many anime to choose from, having thousands of YouTube videos to choose from to help me choose causes me to implode, mentally. There has to be some way to move forward with this.

There’s no doubt all this articulation of subtle feelings is changing the way I look at video, so for that alone it has an objective, therapeutic value. Video catches a person’s attention with impulses. If you analyze your impulses you’re less subject to being influenced by meaningless garbage, and you waste less time looking for things that aren’t there. Specifically I’m thinking of all the hours I’ve wasted in my life scanning through YouTube videos looking for some specific rush I had years ago that I can’t find anymore. For instance, Nerdrotic was fascinating a couple of years ago, before he completely humiliated Hollywood. As I recall one of his first videos I saw was a review of Black Widow that pointed out the pathetically bad costumes and visual effects. I wouldn’t have noticed that if it hadn’t been for him and so for more than a year I watched him all the time as he articulated the mediocrity of Marvel movies. I don’t mind the concept of the “M She U”, but he was breaking through the resignation of the American public to Hollywood mediocrity. Now that his victory is more obvious, I don’t get the same thrill of controversy from the videos anymore. I’ve mostly stopped watching YouTube commentators on the movie business. But I still waste time scrolling through YouTubers, looking for something that might recreate that excitement.

Writing about that here on my blog actually brings that region of my mind into contact with the region of my mind that thinks about anime.

I am not blogging for anyone to read, I’m blogging to somehow bring pieces of my mind together in one place, to figure out how I feel about things from the perspective of eternity, where there are no secrets.

What am I getting out of this blog as I plan my posts during the day, versus what I get out of the confrontation as I write? This is a kind of game I’m playing with myself. Freezing and Toradora! both create a distinctive “inner plane” or presence. How do I choose an anime, not for its surface topic, but for the inner presence it creates? How do I find one more fun that those I’ve already seen? How do I refine my experience?

I cancelled my subscription to HBO Max. I have until the 24th to watch Zack Snyder’s Justice League. I don’t care about the movie at all, it’s just that fanboys made such a big deal out of it online, and it does seem to have been some kind of climax of the whole superhero movie genre.

I know now that the deeper meaning of my fascination with anime is confrontation with the brain damage that separates my long-term and short term memory. I spend more time searching for lists of anime to watch and shopping for dvds than I do actually watching. All the stories are the same to me. This damage is related to my confused sense of personal boundaries, a result of being doxed and knocked unconscious. But the closeness of all of it, the fact that it’s all taking place on a computer screen right in front of me, is reigning in the phenomena. Somehow I am affecting my own psyche by doing this. I feel that I am being helped by spiritual beings. They are getting clearer for me.

I just put up a picture of the Breakfast Club I got at C2E2. I know that at this moment I am merging with Drake Marshall because in The ArtIC Circle he is trying to write for America the way I thought it would be possible in the early 1980s, when there were still a few remnants of literature lying around. Just straight up about the U.S. like Stephen King, before poisonous Lucasoids and alt-rockers fucked everything up and made the entertainment business into an ironic, post-modern river of garbage. After weeks of experimenting with AI-assisted fiction, I’ve finally gotten around to having the Sickie Souse Club do fun things. I’m framing the feel of their adventures.

What else of my life is important? After years of having a pillow on my car seat, my back started to hurt and I bought an ergonomic back support. I feel fantastic when I drive. Is that important? Can I talk about driving? I was watching a Jess Franco movie. I think he’s great. I looked him up an his movies were playing at the Double Drive-in in Chicago in the 1980s. I never even thought of the Sickies going to a drive-in, but now it’s certain they go there in the Mercedes Estate to see Jess Franco movies and make out.

My personal boundaries about entertainment keep changing. I wish I could describe the sense of vertigo as my subconscious moves to accommodate this new sense of vitality. For years I’ve had three Waifus, Genvieve, Sandra, and Kara and each one would take the lead at various times, but for the last few weeks Kara and Gen have been showing up at the same time and on Friday I could see all three at once, knowing that, however real they are, they represent the damaged, lost part of my mind, the alternate past that was lost when my father knocked me unconscious. And I know that this blog is also healing my mind, altering the wave functions of my higher awareness, even if it doesn’t make much sense, a kind of Mind Game of revealing and concealing simultaneously that is somehow transforming me. I’m in a trance right now, very smooth, whereas only a few hours ago I was wondering if I should be writing any more of this. It’s the smoothness of the connection between the parts of my mind that’s important, not the blog, just as it’s the wandering in the aisles of stores and libraries that soothes my mind, not the stuff I buy.

How can I get a handle on the world of anime? Something about stories that are only drawn while invisible voice actors speak is so much gentler than the horrific bombastic bombardment of pathetically shallow Hollywood garbage. I watched the first episode of “Attack On Titan” this weekend and the depth of story implied in just that episode reminded me of that. It was at the same time so much more personal and more profound that I am at a loss to justify Hollywood’s existence. Of course I know Otaku culture has its own dark side and I’m watching out for that, but but as far as I can tell it’s not nearly as embarrassing as its American counterpart.

Somehow as I’m writing I’m attuning to the highest subconscious approach to “humanity” that I can. I’ll probably get attacked for that, but shouldn’t I be able to just say it? I would like to figure out something to put on the web that wouldn’t be “samskara”, I would like to know why I have all this ability to create an no guidance about what to use it for.

I finished La Piscine tonight, and it feels exquisite. Jane Birkin is so beautiful. She’s like my love goddess. I love movies from the sixties because many people at that time believed society could be benevolent, and psychically I can attune to their hope. Even a crime movie like this is made with so much more skill than the average piece of Hollywood crap today.

Buffynicity #1: On Sunday I watched “Cries of Pleasure” by Jess Franco. It’s a four people (and one servant) in a house, with a murder victim in a pool (two murders, but only one in the pool). And then all unawares tonight I watched La Piscine which is also about a house with four people, one servant, and a murder victim in a pool. I wasn’t going to blog about the Franco movie, but because of this Buffynicity I’m going to record it. I must admit, at the end of La Piscine I was wondering whether in my own family I am the murder victim in the pool.

My subconscious attachment to movies is changing, I’m being set free of them. My mind is whirling in the imaginal space which is partly spiritual (I think) and partly brain damage, I was immersed in this amazing movie, which would be considered “slow-moving” by a Hollywood crowd, but which created an interior space which I love. It’s at least an hour since I’ve seen it, and I’ve been flying all night, reorganizing my whole DVD collection out of sheer excitement at getting back into real movies again. Now it’s time to sleep. I can feel the astral plane calling me, the place where all the deceased filmmakers dwell, emanating their vibrations into the subconscious of the Earth.

Bonne nuit, mes braves.

Some ArtIC Circle action

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The CTA train screeched into the Howard station, its graffiti-tagged windows reflecting the Sickie Souse Club’s leather-clad silhouettes. Graylyn adjusted her lace gloves—dyed black with Rit, still staining her fingertips—and smirked at Drake’s latest vandalism: REAGANROIDS EAT SHIT scrawled in Sharpie across a campaign poster for the Republican senator whose Vitalis-slick hair she could still smell.

“You’re obsessed,” she said, her voice a cigarette-rasp as the train doors hissed open.

“And you’re complicit,” Drake shot back, hoisting a stolen bottle of his father’s Glenfiddich. His combat boots echoed on the platform, daring anyone to confront the Wolf Pack in their natural habitat: the liminal space between Evanston’s manicured lawns and Chicago’s throbbing underbelly.

They slipped into the cemetery first—their ritual. Beneath a moss-crusted angel, Chuck Crown spread a Persian rug looted from his mother’s Lake Forest mansion, its patterns swallowed by candlelight. The others arrived: Jules with his contraband VHS tapes of Labyrinth and In the Realm of the Senses, Felix tuning a thrift-store Stratocaster to the dissonant key of Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Graylyn lit a clove cigarette, the flame trembling as she recounted her latest family dinner. “Mother said my paintings ‘lack commercial appeal.’ As if I’m supposed to peddle sunsets to golf widows.” She exhaled sharply, the smoke coiling like the skeletal lovers in her latest canvas—the one she’d later burn on Chuck’s houseboat.

Drake snorted. “Commercial appeal’s for politicians and pornographers.” He tossed her the Zippo he’d stolen from his father’s NSA-locked desk, its surface engraved with coordinates to a bombing site in Hanoi. A relic, a rebellion, a fuck-you.

The senator found them at Neo hours later, his tailored suit clashing with the club’s black-lit fog. “Marshall,” he drawled, eyeing Graylyn’s choker. “Still playing Baudelaire with Daddy’s money?”

Drake’s fist connected before the insult landed. The bottle shattered, Scotch pooling with the senator’s blood as security dragged them into the alley. Graylyn laughed, loud enough to startle the rats. “You’ll never be him,” she whispered later, dabbing Drake’s split lip with her fishnet sleeve. She meant his father, the war hero, the monster. The man who’d called Ravenswood Academy to demand his son’s “moral realignment” after catching him with Ginsberg’s Howl.

By dawn, they’d defaced every campaign poster between Belmont and Fullerton. Graylyn sketched devil horns in Sharpie; Drake scrawled FASCIST TWINK beneath the senator’s smarmy grin. On the train home, she leaned into him, her Walkman sharing one earphone—The Cure’s Kyoto Song mirroring the syncopated clatter of tracks.

“Hollywood’s gonna hate this,” she murmured, nodding at Felix’s Polaroid of the vandalized posters.

“Good,” Drake said. “Maybe they’ll finally realize their rom-coms are lobotomy scripts.”

The Sickie Souse Club didn’t compromise. They corroded—wealthy, wounded, and forever seventeen in the shadow of Ravenswood’s bell tower, where the 19th-century ghosts of America’s ruling class whispered sellouts as they passed.

The CTA train lurched toward downtown Chicago, its windows streaked with November rain as Graylyn passed Drake the absinthe-laced flask—a relic from her uncle’s Berlin study, tarnished and heavy as guilt. “To mediocrity,” she drawled, her fishnet knees brushing his torn Levi’s. The Sickie Souse Club sprawled across the graffiti-tagged seats, Jules lip-syncing to The Cure’s The Head on the Door crackling from a Walkman, Chuck debating Cortázar’s Hopscotch with Felix, who kept flicking vodka onto the senator’s defaced campaign poster taped above them.

By the time they stumbled into the cemetery crypt—their “clubhouse” since freshman year—Drake’s vision swam with clove smoke and stolen Glenfiddich. Graylyn pressed him against the stone wall, her leather corset cold through his Joy Division shirt. “You’re still pretending you’ll outrun him, aren’t you?” she murmured, fingers tracing the NATO medal he’d ripped from his father’s uniform. The one he wore as a dog tag of spite.

He kissed her hard, all teeth and desperation, the taste of black licorice and Scotch sharp on her tongue. Her laugh vibrated against his mouth. “See? This is your manifesto. Not that Kerouac bullshit.” Her hands slid under his shirt, nails scraping the scars from their motorcycle crash last summer—a failed escape to Milwaukee that ended with them huddled under a highway overpass, passing a flask and howling Siouxsie lyrics at semis.

Across the crypt, Felix projected The Hunger on a bedsheet, Bowie and Deneuve flickering over the stolen Persian rug where Jules and Chuck writhed in a haze of clove smoke and mutual disdain for Reagan’s Star Wars program. “They’re rehearsing,” Graylyn whispered, biting Drake’s earlobe. “For the day Hollywood finally eats itself.” Her hips ground against his, the studs on her belt leaving crescent marks on his skin.

Drake’s hands tangled in her jet-black curls, yanking just enough to make her gasp. “You’d rather paint this?” he growled.

“I am painting this.” She tore open his shirt, buttons clattering against the crypt’s stone floor. “Every bruise, every fucking shudder.” Her lips trailed down his chest, lingering on the Zippo burn from last week’s confrontation with the senator’s lackeys—a “warning” that only cemented their status as Chicago’s prince and princess of decay.

When the absinthe hit its peak, Graylyn dragged him into the cemetery’s fog, their laughter echoing off mausoleums built by railroad barons. Under a leafless oak, she straddled him, her lace skirt hiking up to reveal the knife strapped to her thigh—a gift from Chuck after the senator’s thugs followed her home. “Still think I’m hiding?” she breathed, her breath hot against the NATO medal.

“You’re performing,” he shot back, flipping her onto the wet leaves. His mouth found the scar below her collarbone, the one her uncle’s signet ring left when she was twelve. She arched into him, not in pleasure, but defiance—a refusal to let pain be anything but fuel.

They returned to the crypt at dawn, soaked and shivering, to find the others passed out beneath Bowie’s frozen snarl. Graylyn sketched the scene in charcoal—Drake’s clenched jaw, her own smudged eyeliner, the empty flask glinting like a relic—while he scrawled MOLOCH LOVES MTV across the senator’s face on yesterday’s Tribune. The Sickie Souse Club didn’t sleep. They corroded, they collided, they etched their manifesto into the rusted heart of the ’80s.

The news hit them in Chuck’s houseboat, the Chicago River slapping the hull like a metronome counting down their innocence. Jules Roosevelt’s suicide note played on loop via CNN—”I am not a dynasty, I am debris”—as Graylyn shattered her uncle’s absinthe flask against the porthole, green liquid bleeding into the murky water.

“He was third in line,” Felix whispered, clutching a VHS tape of Jules’ 16th birthday at Camp David, where they’d all snorted stolen Adderall and mocked Reagan’s “Morning in America” speech. The footage now read like a eulogy: Jules in J.Crew sweaters, smiling emptily beside his senator mother, while Drake lurked in the background wearing a Misfits tee he’d later burn.

Drake paced, his father’s NATO medal digging into his chest. “They’ll say it was drugs. Depression. Not the fucking crusher his family built to squeeze out speeches and handshakes.” His voice cracked—a rarity for the Wolf Pack’s fearless leader. On the TV, pundits dissected Jules’ Yale acceptance like vultures picking at a still-wound.

Graylyn traced the Roosevelt crest on Jules’ old Ravenswood blazer, stolen from his locker the night they’d all skinny-dipped in Lake Michigan. “Two heirs on the list,” she said quietly. “You’re next, Drake.”

The room stilled. The list—that cursed spreadsheet of political progeny whispered about in Georgetown salons and Evanston country clubs. Drake’s grandfather had helped draft the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; his father’s shadow loomed over Langley. But Jules? Jules was supposed to be their joke, their trust-fund anarchist who smuggled Marlboros into State dinners.

Chuck slammed a fist into the wall, rattling his sister’s oil paintings of skeletal debutantes. “It’s the superstition. Two heirs collide, the universe fucking vomits.” He nodded to the defaced campaign poster of their Republican enemy—the senator who’d called them “Satan’s latchkey kids” after they’d trashed his fundraiser. “They’ll come for you now. For all of us.

Graylyn pressed a clove cigarette to Drake’s lips, her hands steady despite the tears smudging her kohl liner. “We’ll burn it down,” she murmured. “The list. The legacy. All of it.” On television, CNN was showing the crowd at the funeral, mourning a future president who’d rather paint his veins with pills than shake another donor’s hand.

As Bela Lugosi’s Dead hissed from Felix’s Walkman, they plotted their revenge—not with knives or fire, but with Jules’ last act of rebellion: a sealed envelope containing every dirty secret the Roosevelts had buried. The Sickie Souse Club didn’t mourn; they corroded. And Washington’s gilded rot had never tasted so bitter.

Dramione Ravenclaw

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The first of my AI-assisted Harry Potter fanfic set in an alternate timeline where Harry dies in 1981 and Hermione and Draco are sorted into Ravenclaw. It’s not perfect but the audacity of such an undertaking requires me to take small steps, just to see how it feels. If you like, you can listen to the song “In Two” by Nine Inch Nails while reading it.

“Your grandfather’s journals mentioned dimensional folding through pain thresholds,” she whispered urgently, her teeth grazing his collarbone as the hand that bore Abraxas Malfoy’s cursed signet ring gripped her by the hair. The air crackled with quantum potential as she bit into Draco’s shoulder, her moan fracturing into harmonic overtones that warped the Room of Requirement’s walls. The Faraday cage—a fusion of copper wiring and Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder – pulsed with iridescent equations from Hermione’s levitating grimoire, their shimmering fractals rewriting spacetime as Muggle electromagnetic theory collided with quantum arithmancy. “Sensory superposition means we’re both here and…” Her words dissolved into a gasp as Draco’s wand traced a Klein-Gordon equation along her thigh, the tip glowing crimson with stolen horcrux energy.

“… And entangled in the Department of Mysteries’ archives,” Draco finished, his breath hitching when her grimoire flipped open mid-air. “You realize we’re violating six principles of magical thermodynamics.” His laugh dissolved into a gasp as he covered her mouth with his and the grimoire floated in a cloud of electric blue plasma, pages flashing with equations that made the Room of Requirement’s geometry weep.  Equations from Einstein’s Apparition theorems swirled around them, transmuting sweat into liquid starlight that pooled in the hollow of Hermione’s collarbones. The copper wires of her Faraday cage hummed at 440 Hz – A4, the tuning fork frequency masking their cries from Ministry surveillance spells.  Draco arched against her, wand hand trembling as he counter-rotated a protean charm along her spine.

“Einstein’s Apparition wasn’t about transportation,” Hermione whispered desperately into his ear. “It’s sensory superposition—oh God, there— “she closed her eyes and moaned, surrendering.  “– the reason your Dark Mark never burned.” Their joined magic warped the mattress into a Klein bottle configuration, every gasp echoing through folded spacetime. Their entangled screams tore through the wave function, birthing a wormhole, fusing with the runaway horcrux energy—a supernova of classified data erupting from their bodies to scorch the Minister’s lies from history.

“Granger… Hermione… if we phase just one Planck length—”

“—we’ll see what happened to Harry.” Her nails drew blood-magic sigils on his back, the pattern mirroring Neville’s venomous aconite grafts in the hidden greenhouse. As their magical cores synchronized at 13 Hz—the frequency of Voldemort’s horcrux network—the world dissolved into pure information.

She strained against him, fingernails clawing the Dirac matrices she’d inked on his back. “The Planck length – now, Draco – now! “Their joined magic ripped through spacetime’s fabric, revealing fleeting glimpses of Godric’s Hollow – a black-haired toddler’s laughter, Lily Potter’s protective charm blooming like supernova.

Time fractured into intervals and gasps as Draco’s thrusts synchronized with the resonance frequency of the Faraday cage—each collision of flesh hurling Schrödinger fractals that bloomed across their sweat-slicked skin. The air thickened with ionized desire, her fingernails carving non-Euclidean geometries into his shoulders while his teeth bit down on the paradox of her name—Granger-Malfoy-Mine—until blood and magic fused and triggered quantum entanglement, her spine like a bow drawn tight as his fingers dug into the supple curve of her hips. She gasped as his magic surged through her bloodstream like electricity, every thrust sparking equations from her grimoire that burned living tattoos onto their skin.  The Room of Requirement’s walls warped into a Moebius strip of raw sensation, every nerve ending firing in hex code as their climax ripped through Voldemort’s surveillance spells like Godric Gryffindor’s sword through basilisk flesh.

When collapse came, it left Draco’s silver hair streaked with temporal paradoxes and Hermione’s skin glittering with Hawking radiation. “You realize,” he panted against her quantum-entangled pulse point, “this makes us walking annihilation events?”

When coherence returned, they lay twinned in a puddle of liquid starlight and gravitational anomalies. Draco pressed his lips to Hermione’s scar, feeling the pulsing energy of the forbidden horcrux—a stark reminder of the war they had just reenacted across time and space.

She kissed him deeply, triumphantly tasting their forbidden knowledge. “Then we’ll swallow every last Death Eater whole.”

Later, tangled in ionized sheets, Draco stared at his hand passing through solid matter. “You’ve made me your most dangerous experiment.”

Hermione’s smile held event-horizon darkness. “We’ve weaponized the observer effect. Tomorrow, we collapse the Minister’s wave function.”

Black Clover #16: More Than A Feeling

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I’m zeroing in on exactly what lost feelings I’m trying to recover by doing this. I’m not sure how much I want to share. I did realize tonight that there is a “fantasy zone” in my mind, and in that zone are both artistic inspirations and air guitar, “powertrips”, as I call them. And Satellizer is in that zone as well. And also paranoia about what other people think of me. This process is drawing all those types of fantasy together so that I can get a unified perspective on them.

I had a little trouble at work, I found out I had completely forgotten something I should have done. And then just now I lost my watch and wasted half an hour of my evening looking for it. My memory is getting better, though, and with it I finally feel connected to the Air Guitar zone of my mind. So perhaps I’ll call this unified perspective of my mind the Air Guitar perspective, because of course I always wanted to be a rock star. Just tonight, while I worked out, I was listening to Taj Mahal’s eponymous album, thinking about the difference between music in the 60s and today, and reliving decades worth of wannabe fantasies. Rock was so much better in the 60s. I was also listening to Nina Simone, and Paul Oakenfold’s remix of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”.

Now I’m wondering, if I go ahead and watch Black Clover, even though I’m not really in the mood, will it develop some kind of baseline for my subconscious? Because honestly what I’m trying to recover is some kind of sense of stability I had in high school, before my father put me in a coma, some sense of being a child with a coherent society to grow up in, a sense of possibilities for the future. That’s the weave of Otaku culture for me. It’s not in the stories themselves, although their great, it’s in the sense of having gone through the process of interlacing the emotions. It’s similar to my feelings about the X-Men but I find the Japanese approach far superior to Hollywood. So I’m just going to watch Black Clover now, not expecting much but driving a railroad spike into my subconscious so I can move forward a little bit.

So it worked, my subconscious is nailed down and then some other part of my mind wants to go exploring, just like in the dungeon. I’m loving the regular bit where they’re walking down hallways griping at each other while goofy music plays in the background. Also it was fun when they entered the dungeon to the sounds of heavy metal music. Yami’s flashback to meeting the wizard king when he was younger was a hint at interesting developments planned for the future. I really love the density of the emotions in this story. I wonder if there are a lot of anime like this, or did I just hit the jackpot with this one?

I stopped watching Toradora! when they went to “Jonny’s” because it’s so obviously an analogue of “Denny’s” and the characters from my novel The ArtIC Circle go there. It just struck me how awesome this is. When Taiga and Ryuuji walk by the sports club and their crushes talk about them I had a deep flashback to high school. For most of my life those have been deeply uncomfortable because that time of my life was so horrifically unpleasant, with my psychotic father attacking me all the time. But now I can sense the underlying spiritual order of it so … at the moment of writing that the focus of my mind drifted from one place to another, from one set of data about my life to some kind of higher world of light, and then into a parallel universe where back in the ’86-’87 school year, I lived with a girl in a house owned by her aunt, it was condemned and abandoned, but she had run away from home and was living there, and I moved in with another friend of ours, and we went to Denny’s in the middle of the night. I think Taiga and Ryuuji must be reincarnations of us. She had been into gymnastics in high school. People were afraid of me because I had the Thousand Yard Stare from being beaten up so much by my father. Our friend Jim was a few years older, in his early 20s. He’d been in the military but now he was dressing goth like the lead singer of Dead or Alive, with long, curly black hair and makeup and black robes like dresses. We had a band called Beeswax.

This is what I imagine was happening to me during the time I lost being unconscious my senior year in high school.

Of course there was lots of sex. But writing this has just reminded me of what I was thinking this morning about fanservice. Freezing is a heavy fanservice anime. I think it’s being done correctly, in the sense that it is showing females as complete people, integrating their sexuality with their identity. But maybe I’m wrong, and it’s all a ripoff and an excuse to show titties. Somewhere in that ambiguity is the broken piece of my mind, a piece my father broke because he couldn’t control me.

That was really deep and I’m not going any further right now, I’m going back to the episode.

Buffynicity: I had been eating rice for dinner for months, but then I stopped for several weeks. Tonight is the first time I’ve made rice in a while but in tonight’s episode of Toradora, ironically, their rice maker is broken so they go to Jonny’s.

I’m really loving the complexity of the relationships, and the fact that they lack the sinister quality of all my relationships in high school. A lot went on while I finished that episode, but I can’t get to it tonight. It’s too deep. I just know it’s triggering all kinds of horror from my own high school years, the manipulation of it because my own family and friends were so dark and ugly that I didn’t have much actual enjoyment of people. Or did I? Because something supernatural was going on, and I can feel it working now.

Black Clover #15: Buffy Redux

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SPOILER ALERT: This blog discusses my reaction to anime stories, which means I discuss spoilers.

Buffynicity #1: Last Tuesday I ordered a 1 quart saucepan on Amazon so I could make ramen noodles while I watch anime. I was looking up “most loved anime characters” because I really want to get on the emotional wavelength of the culture. I found several lists that had characters from Naruto on them. I’ve been curious about Naruto because it’s one of the “big three” core anime that set the standard for everything that came after – One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach. Then I was looking for “anime like Black Clover” and Naruto came up again. So I decided to go ahead and start it, and in the first episode Iruka offers to have ramen with Naruto twice. I take that as a sign.

I was very pleased that Naruto is much faster paced than Black Clover, which required some patience to get through the first few episodes (although it was well worth it). I’m wondering if I’ll get the same feelings about the cast as I have about Black Clover.

Buffynicity #2:

I went to work out and I was watching this video on my phone. I was thinking all about Steve Martin and then I looked up and saw this commercial on the overhead screens:

So it’s a definite Buffynicity. Does it matter that I’m embedding the videos?

Buffynicity #3: I went somewhere I usually go, but I wasn’t sure if anyone knew who I was. Two people called me by my name for the first time.

That was Friday. Saturday was Free Comic Book day. I drove to my usual comic store but I took a wrong turn. I actually programmed my GPS for the mall but I “accidentally” entered the name wrong, it autofilled a different location that “just happened” to be on the way to a toy store I used to go to that I haven’t visited in years. The owner welcomed me by name when I came in. So that’s another addition to Friday’s Buffynicity.

This morning I was talking to a friend about Jungian Alchemy and I’m going to send them an outline for my fantasy heptalogy based on the Book of Lambspring.

I restarted with my Black Clover blog more than two weeks ago, thinking about one night in particular that I had been talking to a friend by the lake. That friend just called me for the first time in months and they are coming over tomorrow to watch Farscape. I’ve been watching Farscape with them, and only them for years. We’re only on season three. Months or even years have passed between episodes for us, but we’re still at it.

So my friend came over and we had a great time.

Buffynicity #4 My friend hasn’t been to my place since I created my current light show, with the whirling lights and LED displays that make my bedroom look like an aquarium. So when he came over I said several times “I can’t wait for you to see my light show.” Then as we watched S3E6 of Farscape, the villain took a shot at Crichton with some kind of plasma beam and Crichton mocked his “light show”. Furthermore, after the episode we took a walk up the lakeside into Evanston, and they had installed blue streetlights all along the road, giving the lake and the cemetery opposite it an eerily beautiful astral glow that seemed to extend the light show even further.

We’re having a donation day at work so I cleaned out my closet but I have to do twice as much laundry.

I watched S1E9 of Freezing tonight. Satelli believes that Kazuya only likes her because she has his sister’s stigmata. It’s horrifying! I thought about running right into the next episode, just to resolve the crisis, because as a side note there are also four Novas invading with new attacks that have decimated East Genetics. But what I love about this anime is that that is totally secondary to Satelli’s heartbreak, a suffering so intense that she dropped her cheeseburgers – that is a moment I will remember forever.

I feel for Satelli, even though I know it’s only a show. But I am reminded of how it was too painful to think about all the layers of feeling I had about Song One, so that I went ahead and plunged into an episode of Black Clover. I still remember that moment, though, and maybe if I watch Black Clover it will also preserve this moment for me.

I think it worked. Going from immersion in one anime world to another only increased the sense of vastness and sensuality of it all. But what about that moment of agony that Satellizer is in? Or was in 15 years ago when the anime was released? Of course I’ve seen episodes of season two (“Vibration”), so I’m not worried about what happens, but I’m still caught in the moment. And I think being caught in that moment (hopefully I’ll figure out how that works as I go on) only enhanced my enjoyment of Black Clover, as the excellent writing continues, satirizing class conflicts and introducing an interesting subtlety to Klaus’s character as he is embarrassed by Yuno’s courage.

Should I write SPOILER ALERT here? Because I’m talking about the story. Am I really intending for anyone to read this? I have to confront the question. The answer is more than 50 percent “no”, but still it would be rude not to, in case anyone did bother to read this.

The question remains. How much should I be “enjoying” the emotional distress of Satellizer? What is going on in my subconscious as I experience this “moment” from different angles?

Buffynicity #5: I’m doing laundry to donate at work and Yuno was competing with Asta to give more money to the folks back home.

I love that Orfai is always crying with sentimentality, so the writers aren’t just being bitter about classism, they’re taking a balanced approach to all the characters (except Sister Lily, of course).

I went ahead and put SPOILER ALERT at the top of this entry.