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.
Regnum Somniorum 