october_rosehip

I'm told this isn't normal. I'm told we each only get one life and whatever our brain tells us at night is, at most, working out the problems of said life.

But this has not been my experience. My dreams have continuity. When I dream, I can remember other dreams, sometimes ones that I had forgotten in my waking state. I know I am dreaming, but that doesn't mean what's happening isn't REAL. I never think to myself "I could just wake up, this doesn't matter." Because in the moment I am convinced it DOES. I have woken up before the ending and been grieved by the loss. I would lever learn what happened unless I was lucky enough to return to that exact place in the future.

I have friends, in my dreams. Sometimes I return to them and sometimes I can't seem to. I've lived entire lives and I will tell you that waking up to find you do not have a horse/ lover/ child is uniquely painful.

I want to introduce you to my friends, and the only way to do that is to give them a second life in my art and writing but I am finding that this is a lot of responsibility. Emotionally, they are real to me. I want to tell you the truth of who they are. It would be so much easier to mine my dreams for ideas if I weren't so convinced they held a truth I don't want to lose in the telling.

But I want other people to know about the old man who lived in an underground forest who would sell you a light for a penny to keep you safe. I want the Elf Sister's unique love for the Silent One to reach other people, even though I don't quite know how that happened myself. A forgotten goddess told me that though the world is ending, things will be all right, that there are a lot more endings that happened before this one. How do you pass on the words of a god from your dreams without twisting them?

Are these even things for sharing? I feel like I should. I feel like I am told a great many things that would be good for others to hear. I just want to do it right.

A writing warm-up from Nano that I utterly forgot I wrote. Zevran X Macsen Surana

Every mage in the Crows was a nasty piece of work. Zevran had little enough to do with them, which was for the best. They loomed in the shadows, did unfortunate things with blood, and assisted the maestros in jobs that had added layers of... complexity. Even the few circle mages Zevran had met tended towards duplicity and were not to be underestimated.

So, this elven man, dressed in furs and teeth, with spirits and shadows dancing around his feet, who drank the life from his enemies in battle and summoned lighting from the air was certainly something like Zevran had expected.

And then Macsen climbed a tree for the sheer fun of it, his bare back rippling with more wiry muscle than a mage needed, surely. He sat up there over breakfast, singing some random song about the changing seasons. It had the general rhythm of the elven songs Zevran had heard in Antiva. Zevran had not expected that.

He didn't expect to be armed in superior weaponry when the Warden found Zevran's own to be lacking. He didn't expect necromancers to be cuddly, or to smell like mint soap, or to have such soft hair. He didn't expect such a beautiful but sheltered young man to have been lying about his sexual experience level... because he'd been judged in the past for having too much of it. He didn't expect the skill of his new lover to match his own.

He didn't expect them to be so much the same. Zevran didn't expect to be understood, to be matched in both joy of life, and in the amount of pain he attempted to bury. He didn't expect the holder of his vow to have his back as much as Zevran had his. He didn't expect that very vow to be cast aside, when Macsen could no longer stand to hold another's leash. He certainly never expected to be offered trust, or to deserve it.

Zevran found he could enjoy a good surprise, or several.

I once had to teach an art history unit to high schoolers… without mentioning religion, allowing them to see any depicted violence, or any nudity.

Think about every work of art you’ve ever seen… how’s that going for you? I can’t even teach secular works properly without mentioning what they were rebelling from. Monet’s freaking HAYSTACKS were an absolute revelation… and a firm rebuke of a lot of the art that had gone before… that I can’t mention, in a situation like that one.

I did the best i could. We focused on surrealism. I’m not sure how great a job I did but I tried. I did take my future in my hands, dip a toe into dada and mention LHOOQ.

Now, here’s the punchline, though. Librarians are awesome. Anything in the school library was fair game. They had the Sister Wendy videos. If you’re not familiar, I think her discussion of the Lasceaux cave paintings made about half the room irretrievably horny. Beyond that, they got in a ton of modern art books and asked us to look them over. Mind you I wasn’t allowed to say anything about a lot of the subject matter, So they and urine-Jesus were left to their own devices.

This is what censorship gets you. A lot of imperfect understanding, unpreparedness, and nervous wreck adults fearing of the repercussions of stepping out of line.

I know censorship is only called that when the government is doing it… I know tumblr’s not the government, I don’t care. Control over everything people can say is ultimately what we’re dealing with, here, when almost every website where you could express any idea freely has been destroyed, we are dealing with censorship, for all that Apple is acting like a government.

And I sure as fuck didn’t elect Apple.