The Diamond Island

I tend to lack interest in manufactured mediopoly concisions; too many false-prophets shouting and screaming.  However, exceptions always manage to creep in, as it should be. No matter what system we come up with, it can’t possibly include boundless life.

A catastrophe has occurred and there’s been a tremendous loss of life. I feel that, because it touches a part of me I resonate with strongly.  There’s scorn and self-righteousness being heaped on the empathy many are feeling for the suffering that has transpired.  This development moves me to comment on a part of me that I also resonate with strongly.

Thoughts and prayers are a form of consciousness-raising activity.

They don’t exist inside a vacuum, they are a taking of action. Expressing them allows the sharing of ideas that de-atomizes the community, strengthens ties and organizes people around their mutual interest. From organization comes a scaling of action from which changes are made to our environment. So there’s nothing small or ineffectual about one’s thoughts or prayers—thus the hysterical ranting against them by vanguards.

Caring is a dissident act.  If that’s all you do—feel for another—then all is not lost.  That’s where the tide turns—with the blood shaking your heart in an awful daring of a moment’s surrender which an age of prudence can never retract.

By that, and that only, have we existed.  The false-prophets have reason to scream loud, but they can never scream enough to drown out the caring of a single heart for another.

Last Saturday two of my friends got married.  I always get emotional at such times, though not quite the way people might think.  Panic and fear.  Excitement and elation.  Confusion and bafflement.

See, whenever two people make that conscious commitment to each other public, these are the sorts of things I hear:

• “We’re going to defeat the entire Dark Destroyer army by ourselves—with a stick of chewing gum.”
• “We’ve decided to fly on a rocket straight through the sun—and not break a sweat.”
• “We’ll be, you know, rescuing the earth from the erupting super volcano—by eating hamburgers.”

Oh my goodness, my friends are going to rescue the earth!  Uh, won’t flying through the sun be a little like suicide?  How are they going to defeat an army with chewing gum?  My brain hurts!

Not that they should be saying something else.  This is marriage, the supreme ordeal of doom! We aren’t talking about a love affair, which is all about the fun (and once it stops being fun the gig is up).  We’re talking about epic quest stuff here, not mass entertainment stuck in the infantile view of relationship.

See, when two people take each other as their center, all other things are secondary.  Family, friends, communities, religions, governments, and corporations—all get second place.  That’s unacceptable—not only does it deny the obedience that is rightly owed some of these temporal authorities, but it absolutely destroys all other personal relationships.

This is often portrayed as the “ball and chain” in popular entertainment.  That crazy marriage has wrecked all the fun!  Don’t those two people realize they have to live in the real world?

So rituals exist to connect this unnatural act back to the rest of the world.  One’s allegiance is channeled back into the institutions of authority and privilege, lest people start getting ideas.  That they can, you know love another person and sacrifice themselves to that person regardless of suffering, regardless of death?

If that isn’t a harrowing adventure, big dude quest to save the world, I don’t know what is.

Can’t have any of that.  Must control the scope of the act so that only certain means of expression are allowed.  Only properly ordained types of people can be allowed recognition, because to grant even imposed rights upon any subset is to ultimately allow it for all.  This act must be controlled, sanctified by proper channels, and made into a sacred institution (that is, “safe” for local consumption).

In other words, the moral act of commitment is so dangerous it must be controlled.  Because God forbid these people actually start completing any of these impossible tasks.  Others might be inspired by them to jump into their own crazy act of unnatural disobedience.

Going over my horoscope for right about now (funk soul brutha!), and considering the numerological significance of what this year means (wouldn’t you like to know which system?).  I have come to the conclusion that this is the year in which our minds are gone.

There is no intelligent life on this planet, only you reading this and me telling you these words with my keystrokes in the past coming to the present to be read by your eyeballs in the present which was my future at the time I typed this.

Hold on a minute, I’m receiving a transmission from my past self.  He tells me he really enjoyed the music I sent his way from the unknown.  Most perplexing, because I’m not entirely sure I had anything to do with hooking him up.  I just sort of sent my blessing back in time to what already happened with a fond remembrance of the unexpected discovery I’d made.

Getting back to the here in now, as contaminated as it is suddenly with the rich and deeply satisfying youth of days long past, oh never mind.  We just shifted gears even more in the past and are sitting in the chamber of the distant shadows of what we hardly remember because it touches us in the formative years.

You see, our thoughts are unbound by the limitations of time and space, even though they rely upon time-space constants of electro-chemical interactions to create consciousness.  Our brains think they are running the production, but it takes a village to have a bowel movement.  There’s more going on than the mere cooking of a hamburger.

It’s a little strange to enter these weird fugue states of otherworldly consciousness (without the help of any props, look Ma—no hands!).  But consider it normal operations as the whole bunch of us shamble about on our quest for solutions to the puzzles under our trees this holiday season of SciFi past.

Oh, this century is ON.  But we have to lose our minds in order to find them.

My job stuff, along with romantic stuff, is off limits on this blog-a-roo.  But again I find exceptions creeping in.  Something Captain Picard in Star Trek: TNG said about laws being unjust as long as they are absolute.  That is, inhuman.

Inexplicably, a tale from my past keeps coming back to me this holiday season, and so I must reckon with it.  That is, after all, the purpose of this starship adventure I find myself traveling along.

There was this time I allowed love to enter into my house, and it tore my furnishings asunder as if it had been one terrible tumult of super-accelerated fireballs.  You see—I received as an Xmas gift a CD of an album I listened to in depth a great deal during this time.

I’d already been thinking of my past love in the crumbled corners of my mind, but to get those songs (and cheesy, adolescent songs they seem to me now—though still with great meaning) at this time, it’s as if I’m opening up a door I’d held long closed.  One I’d rather not revisit, as pleasant and as magical as some of the things I’d jammed behind it are.

But enough!  Wraiths of torment, I release you from your burdens of guarding these treasured memories.  Away with the tender keepsakes and wondrous insights of affection dwelling in a tightened tomb.  Let treasures sparkle in bright sun and with open offering to those who find them compelling.

Not into the dark, but into the light where this soft, glowing memory howls in vivid, windswept peaks and heat-soaked hills of elevated spaciousness.

I’m remembering a certain love I got to know during tennis class.  Our late night talks together, one of which led to our first passionate kiss.  The laser Van Halen show we watched together, and the smoked oysters we had one night in my room.  Walking alone in a field at night and collapsing with giddy delight so strong I had an out-of-body-experience.

Then the frustrations and misunderstandings with one another.  Each of us wanting different things and not having the wisdom to either recognize that or work it out.  Culminating in a break up in a hamburger diner that no longer exists, the two of us going our separate ways yet heartbroken and shaken by passions perhaps no human being knows how to make whole.

She married my rival and has a family now.

Me, I would wander many cold and empty paths to come.  Into darkness so terrible many never come back.  But I came back and I didn’t know why or how.

Now I know why.  I said, “yes.”

Yes to love no matter what the consequences.  It sent me straight to hell, but I held onto it fast as painful and disappointing as love turned before it tossed me aside face first into knowledge of my own death.

To those who have loved, that is how you answer evil.  You say yes.

Yes!  Yes, a wonderful word, a word of freedom and expanse, which releases all bonds and opens the door to the buried secrets you kept within.  Hoping beyond hope that an understanding would come.  That it would make sense before you die.

Could I ever have imagined I would share this now, in this time, with the whole universe of those who use computers?  To try and unburden my soul of even a smidgen of the choices I have made and bear the blame for?

Down the rabbit hole and up again, to witness the vast expanse of what love transforms before us.

Believe it!

I tend to meditate on issues of self-identify with my Irish ancestry. My aunt Dukey sent me a Christmas present the other day reminding me to do a little more contemplation on my Welsh ancestry.

She sent me a black tee shirt with a strangely familiar image and cryptic saying below it.  The image is of a figure draped in a white sheet with a horse skull and the saying is “Y Fari Lwyd”. Thank goodness for the Internets! The phrase is Welsh for “The Mari Lwyd”, or literally “Gray Mare”.

It’s a pagan tradition based around a contraption known as a Mari.  A horse skull is placed on a wooden pole, and then it is draped with a sheet (to hide the person carrying the pole, or symbolically I imagine the motive force behind the manifestation).

The eye sockets are often decorated with shiny objects like colored glass.  The skull is usually decorated with colored ribbons. Some skulls have spring-loaded lower jaws that can be used to snap at passers-by.

I’m reminded of the Hobby Horse from the original Wicker Man on that one, snapping at pretty girls. I also remember now that similar creatures were used by the ultimate darkness character of Evil in Time Bandits to chase the protagonists. Basically Mari with hooked, bony claws that shot fireballs out of their eyes.  Weird!

Back to the actual tradition.  A party gathers around the Mari and they go door to door, exchanging songs and in some cases rhyme contests (called Pwnco in Welsh) with the occupants of various houses. The battle of wits and song can get rather furious, with the party extorting gifts of libations (among other things) from the occupants. Or the occupants manage to drive the party off to the next house over with their superior skill.

This is what I call Christmas Caroling!

With the resurgence of interest in Celtic culture, the tradition has been revived in recent years. Perhaps this knowledge has galloped my way so that I might make use of it.  I do enjoy making up lyrics of a sing-songy nature to amuse my friends.  I’m thinking I might just build my own Mari for next year and see what comes up.

Thanks Duke.

Michael the cat surprised K and I by having a repeat episode of his bladder stones. The first time was two weeks after we had moved into the haunted house and were reeling from the major blow of circumstance that caused it.

This time the physical emergency was an upping of the ante. Kidney stones now in the mix (which might be solved by diet—the vet said they can’t remove them because it shocks the organ into permanent shutdown), and a stone in the pipe keeping him from venting the warp core plasma.  Not good!

Poor guy; Not only vacuuming our wallet but several days of poking, prodding, and other indignities from strangers. Away from his comforts. Plus he has a heart condition and is thirteen years old now, not good for his prognosis.

Right as we’re about to make a trip to spend time with K’s relatives, of course.  Now we have to do a day trip of four hours round total, so we can be back to check Michael’s status.  According to the weather fortune-teller, roads on the way back are going to be icy.

Michael is a pigpen, dirtbag jerk of a cat with a lot of bad cards in the health department.  But he’s tough and it’s K and I’s karma to be at his mercy, so I knew he’d pull through. He gave the vet a nasty bite for trying to give him a bath (K and I don’t call him towel-ripper for nothing, he will not be bathed, thank you). Go Michael, go!

Gamera is such an awesome monster car; He pulled us through the drive fine. The midnight Christmas threshold passed with us on the road through the cold and dark night taking the easy-does-it route home. Still, harrowing such that bed never felt so good with a face full of pillow.

I wake up Christmas morning to find a fog has descended on the neighborhood. It’s likely the warmer air mixing in with the cooler air of the blizzard snow pack.  The activity of the automatons is subdued, as if this holiday season pushed people to the brink of exhaustion. The kids shriek as they rip and tear, but the snow surrounds their enthusiasm, keeping it secret and safe. Michael rests on his favorite towel, content to have comfort restored.

Time for coffee. Frankie guard-cat and I sit upstairs in the crow’s nest and gaze at the fog together.  My friend Alexi should be in Orlando by now, jumping into the fray with his hair shaved off and starting a new life adventure like a Juke Box Hero.

Another random encounter Xmas survived; Can’t complain.

Technically, it was short of the 35 MPH needed for the designation of blizzard. Heard official reports mentioning 17 inches, even though I was standing in snow up to my knees, measuring 23 inches. The communications console reported similar anecdotes across the local galactics.

The northern adventurers might as well scoff at us amateurs just below the mason-dixon line. I understand; got a few stories of wandering around at the snowblind levels fighting yetigers with a ski pole up in them thar latitudes. Everybody’s got it worse off somewhere. At least the snow up there forces the Kling-ons to use chains on their disruptors.

Spent long hours in the dark watching the snow fall, with Frankie perched beside me.  For the beings in the chill depths of nothingness, it’s like the rains coming in spring on the wild plains of Africa. The neurotic adaptations of the mindless and the artificial satisfactions of the consumed are swept away by a blinding flood, and the dazzling elemental currents of the unknown may dance in mystery–safe from unclean eyes and shriveled thinking.

The drifts rise high enough for strange things to paddle by, in direct proportion to the amount of effort needed by snivelized coat-and-boot astronauts to tread the snowfall. If two inches of water is dangerous, what might traverse two feet of accumulation? One must listen carefully, between the breaths of snowy quiet and the biting snap of winter wolf’s breath across your unprotected face.

I plunge forward into a drift, the dry crystals sticking to my face and blazing white hot. Brushing off the stinging nettles as they burn my face raw, the cold invades my cheap spacesuit like an inviting alien force. I lay back and let the flakes crackle against me like hundreds of tiny asteroids. A moment’s intention and I’m beamed aboard the honeycomb hideout, safe behind life support systems and hot cocoa immunizations.

Play until you’re tired and cold and dragging. This state of exhausted euphoria is one children are familiar with; Mine’s tempered with the seasoning of adaptation patterns. We forget the previous state, still living because we have a manual override.

A whispering cuts through the quiet cold, telling me I must be like a crocodile.  Silent, prowling, unseen, existing in the winter monsoon where another life force dwells. I see pictures and diagrams as if watching the unrolling from a long papyrus–see, it is like this; use internal strength like so, leap across hidden crevices and through dark corners untraveled like this.

Winter is here. I return to my human existence, welcomed by Frankie who insists on making the biscuits on my cold but warming form swathed in blankets. I’ll tell her all about it during my nap.  I watch the snow on my hanging clothes melt in the light of consciousness as K makes some cocoa.

The last lantern-bearer gone and passing into slumber to the sound of purring, the wintery wonders surge like a noiseless wave in the darkness of falling snow. The rains have come, the drought is ended.

That’s what my friend h-bomb said. I believe she is correct. It’s time to kick this series to the curb and look for the new life that will feed us.

K and I have been watching the original series and made a horrific discovery. The old series is out of print. What is being sold now is the old series with the special effects and opening music revised. Basically, all the special effects shots have been replaced by modern CGI scenes in an attempt, I suppose, to inject new life in the series. Talk about revisionist history!

Dude, the crappy special effects were part of the charm. This is just stupid. Things like the colorization of black and white film, or the re-release of the Star Wars trilogy aren’t audience-driven explorations.

All the coprorate (like my new spelling?) owners have done is made Star Trek more irrelevant. Face facts suits, this golden goose has been throttled to death, you ain’t getting squat anymore, no matter how you re-imagine this stuff.

Well, okay. A livejournal acquaintance (Tweedle Me Deedles!) once did a post about how simplistic and ridiculous the old Star Trek was and I didn’t want to believe him. He’s right though. This stuff just doesn’t hold up anymore, did it ever? It’s headed right for the dustbin of history as a fad. Hek, I’m wondering if Science Fiction itself isn’t headed the same way these days.

Even the reboot wasn’t anything new or different, just more of the same. When you start adjusting the show to try and maintain the interest, the process has entered a recycling sandpit. Each effort thereafter is going to be worse off than the one before. How many people do you know are talking about Star Trek and how “fresh” it is? For goodness sakes, there’s a reason why ideas die and are reborn in new forms. Get on with it already!

The youth aren’t getting drawn in either, they’ve already got their awesome cool dude stuff to hit up for tasty culture goodness AND they can hit it on the old school front as well. There’s no “drawing in a new generation” anymore. The kids are born with it all now.

The bad moments of behavior in Star Trek just seem to get worse as I get older. The solutions to the problems in consciousness just irk me at times, the course of thinking that are pursued. Of course, as a kid I didn’t notice these things quite so much (it was a different collective consciousness at that time). But now, ugh. The flaws just stand out like sore festering zits.

The evil bureaucracy of Star Trek is there right at the beginning. Something that shouldn’t exist at all if this is a “hopeful vision of the future”. The much-vaunted solving of poverty-disease-crime seems to me not a matter of the system now but a result of warp drive energy (dependent upon rare dilithium crystals, oh the resource wars never end). The citizens of the federation enjoy increased standards of living because of the abundance of energy, not because they have rights.

The settler colonialism expressed in “The Apple” episode, made me laugh out loud. Yes, let’s force our way of thinking on the natives because our way is better. It’s somewhere around this time that references start being made to a Prime Directive. Maybe the Prime Directive was coming into being as a means of justification, not unlike the Just War Theory bogeyman is used to excuse violence.

Watching the evil Kirk from “The Enemy Within” attack yeoman Rand in her quarters, followed by the awful post-assault counseling that McCoy gives (with Kirk present and demanding she explain herself!), made me cringe. This is the kind of care that exists in the future? Pathetic. Hard to watch.

The cheap jokes at Spock’s expense—mostly based upon the science officer’s physical characteristics. I mean, okay it’s close friends busting balls for comedy relief. But it still strikes me as unfunny and a bit too much of showing the reptile brain.

Not that the intention of the series creator doesn’t exert an influence. And it should be remembered that the network suits were interfering daily with attempts at making a moral statement. If you consider the times in which this TV show appeared, to even suggest that the crew have a female black officer or a Russian weapons officer was a ballsy move.

There are times when Star Trek does begin to reveal a vision that transcends it’s mediocre reality in-play. When the crew members pursue more compassionate lines of inquiry (trying to understand the Horta in “Devil In The Dark”, or use the translator in “Metamorphosis”) the narrative holds together more strongly. This is true exploration.

The show is not important because of what it depicts, but what it evokes—an imagination of a better future. The seeds of a future society taking root in the present, which for us is now in the past.

I will always love the original series, as broken and simple-minded as it appears now. However, the time has come to re-examine the show, break it into bits and cast it into the flames. We can do better, and we will do better if we try.

A five decade journey that was worthwhile, but now it’s time to dock and see what we’ve learned. There’s more to life than charting gaseous anomalies.

I’m unsure if I should open this canister of two-four-five trioxyn, as my comprehension is limited.  But over here at the Diamond Island conversations tend towards the rare and unusual, so what the Hek.

Scott McCloud talks about comics, but I believe his ideas are applicable to probably just about any art form.  In his book Making Comics, he speaks of four kinds of approaches to comic book creation, but just substitute any art form and you got the idea.

• Classicists want to create art that displays a certain kind of technique worthy of being admired, as an image of what art should be.
• Animists want to create art that tells a story and relates to the emotions of the audience.
• Formalists want to create art that tests the boundaries of what an art form is capable of.
• Iconoclasts want to create art that has integrity and honesty to an ideal, unbeholden to any mainstream influence.

This is useful in determining what your stance is when you write, or create art of any kind.  You might say it’s the purpose you are drawn towards.  All of them are worthy; although the various camps will claim theirs is the only kind that is true art.  Yet each has a purpose that supports and encourages the other (but don’t tell them that).

Moving on, in Chapter 7 of Understanding Comics Scott also brings up the six steps of art creation.

• Step 6 (Surface): What you see at first glance.
• Step 5 (Craft): The skill involved in making the art.
• Step 4 (Structure): Understanding what goes where and why.
• Step 3 (Idiom): Speaking the language of a particular flavor.
• Step 2 (Form): The materialization itself—book, vase, speech, whatever.
• Step 1 (Idea/Purpose): Why am I doing this?

Basically, you start at Step 6 when you admire and are inspired by a work of art to get involved.  Each stage requires you to pass several thresholds of challenge to progress. At the end, you choose whether to go to Step 2 (re-imagining the form itself) or Step 1 (exploring the ideas available for expression within).

It’s a little strange for me to even contemplate these paths, for they reveal a pattern to our thinking and feeling, our efforts to create art which are grounded in the fundamentals of brutal survival.  Sex, Danger, Play (Art) are as necessary as anything we do.  Going further down you get to things like breathing, making hormones and the like. Then it’s molecules and elements.

The one indispensable part (so far as we know with our nervous system) of the process is the connection between artist and audience.  This relies on the system that delivers the contact between the two, which needs effort to make it effective.

Throw in the formulations of audience expectation of GNS roleplaying game design theory and you have the reader (or whatever the audience is called) demanding fun in the form of their creative agenda:

• Gamists who want to be challenged by systems that show who cuts the mustard.
• Simulationists who want the right to dream in an authentic ‘as if’ situation.
• Narrativists who want conflicts that resolve premise.

These match up with Scott’s ideas of art asserting our identities as individuals through exercise of our organs (gamist, or sports/mental games), the exploration of the world for useful knowledge (simulationist or discovery in language, science and philosophy), and outlets for mental imbalances aiding in survival (narrative, or self-expression through catharsis).

This is an extremely simplified view of GNS theory, but what I have found is it demands a retraining of the brain to expand one’s mind to the horizons available for meditation.  What you have, I believe, is a re-thinking not just of roleplaying games but recognition of the audience as participant, rather than a top-down gamemaster (or artist) responsible for everyone’s fun.

Take a step further in today’s digitized, mouse-driven age and you have the hierarchy of gamemasters telling people what to buy breaking up under a realization that everyone is both artist and audience, and capable of producing their own supply at will.

Demand is going to create supply, that is, people will create their own needs and fulfill them themselves without having to run the gauntlet of traditional gatekeepers, who dilute the message and inflate the price.

Or even demand that price exist at all.

In a free market, might not money be one of several other options (say, companionship and glory) as means of exchange?  Physical objects like books just become part of a series of modules (a way to make money on one end and a way to show allegiance on another).  Traditionals might have to content themselves with doling out prestige. If they’re lucky, that is—when one can count the number of followers they have does one even need a traditional stamp as a mark of “making it”?

This means the costs will have to go way down.  If someone can make a hit movie for ten thousand dollars, or a bestseller without the chain-gang, how will concentrations of power compete?  They’ll have to.
It can be done if they accept the reality of lower profits and less control—the alternative is extinction.  We are on the downslope of energy anyway, moving towards inner space and not outer space (it was a nice dream while it lasted).

“What about quality?!”  What about it? There’s no quality now, only your good and my bad.  Everyone is going to have to step on up and improve their game if they want to work on the delivery.  Contact is the only game in town now.  There’s no ‘elite’ telling you what works and what doesn’t.

Friends will guard you from crap.  Fans will make sure you don’t starve.  Both will “poopcan” (that is, work the dodgy parts out) your art for you if you are serious.  Just do the stuff.  Everybody’s on the same field and there’s no limit right now.  It’s a conversation; You talk, I talk.

The big question is, “what is your form about and what do audience members do?”

Fun.  NOW.

There’s more to the maiden-mother-crone triumvirate of female experience.  There’s actually a fourth stage of existence, just as there are four phases of the moon.  You know, that new moon thing, the dark of the moon, the hidden moon, the unknown where all is night and nothingness.

I went on about Fear of Icky Girl Power a while back, which was an attempt to make sense of the senseless.  You know, trying to understand the unknowable.  I’m talking about not the conscious, or the subconscious or the unconscious—all matters that can be conceptualized and grasped on some level.  But then there’s not just the infinite, but as a friend of mine once remarked, “the infinitely infinite”.

In practical terms we’re discussing the mer-she.  That woman which is completely veiled by the shimmering scales of the unknown and unknowable.  The other three forms of woman are veiled to various degrees but show some human side or character (crescent waxing, full, crescent waning).  Not so the dark of the moon.

This is some serious bad girl stuff we’re talkin’.  Associated with just about every bad thing you might imagine a woman capable of, because that’s all you can do—try to make associations.  There’s good reason to be afraid; not saying you should be unafraid.  But easy to project onto this unknown part of half the population, remain in ignorance, run and hide or try to overcompensate by subjugating and demeaning.

But all you’ll be doing is working out complexes on the other three parts of experience—half fears and mirages of the unconscious acted out by your own shadow, tortured by the rumblings of your fantasies at the back of your mind, or making stupid mistakes because you don’t have the waking tools to focus on day to day external reality.  The unknown?  Who knows?

It’s a futile absurdity, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t obligated to try.  The bad girl pushes us into trouble, and that’s just what she’s a gunna do.  So what if you can only guess, get hoofin’ it, sucker.

Difficult, because the numinous will materialize the unexpected for you.  Hostile rip apart of face and scarred for life, nothing at all but your friends laughing at you and your story of it—whatever it was, or Hek you might just wake up in the living room missing your coccyx.  What you thought you saw is also likely to disappear at your approach or never be found as be encountered.

You see a lot of movies based on encounters with this inexplicable experience.  The Fog (mist full of vengeful zombies), The Thing (extra-terrestrial shapechanger), Prince of Darkness (hostile liquid with psychic powers), Killdozer (machine animating space energy), Nightmare at 37,000 feet (psychic, freezing slime), Bug (swarms of fiery mutant roaches), The Giant Spider Invasion (swarms of inter-dimensional spiders), Return Of The Living Dead (hazardous animating chemical), and so on.

The plots all tend to center around identifying and neutralizing hostile forces previously unknown to our experience.  Maintenance of order through heroic action.  There is something to be said about extraordinary agency for the preservation of the community.  Stories that reinforce ideals of survival are useful.  They do protect the collective psyche from possession by outside forces.

However, it can also serve to repress and stifle creative energies that might be better served towards adaptation.  If you want to tap into survival talk to a bad girl.  But if you want to see what’s been saving our collective butts seek out the biggest baddest girl of all.

I’m talking about the bad girl as supernal super-predator.

• Absorptive (Devouring)
  Whatever you’ve got, she can take it and you as well
• Controlling (Possessive)
  She assumes command of anything she touches
• Infectious (Unrestrained)
  She goes everywhere and anywhere
• Exponential (Overbearing)
  Her influence grows in size with time
• Tenacious (Stubborn)
  She never takes no as an answer
• Disruptive (Difficult)
  She inspires fear and confusion wherever she appears
• Collective (Conniving)
  She is many, she is one

With qualities like that, she doesn’t need much else, does she?  She knocks over tyrannosaurus rexes for lunch money and invalidates the insurance policies of entire communities on good days.  On bad hair days she threatens all life on the planet!

The typical story throws in a hero (usually male) who discovers another quality of the ultra-bad girl:  Invented Weakness (Labeling).  The plot very often revolves around identifying and exploiting the way of thinking that will diss-empower (I play with words) this ultra-bad girl.

In some cases this just brings everything to a draw until the next sequel (In The Blob she gets frozen until next time).  In others there is a defeat but the knowledge that it could happen again is in the background.  Sometimes the attempt to stop the spread of the ultra-bad girl’s power only delays the inevitable and she returns even stronger (Return of the Living Dead has this kind of doomsday ending).

It could be that nature requires physical laws be followed and thus game-balance be maintained, but I can’t help but feel this is a human conceit.  It’s in our interest to believe in ourselves as being special if it maintains survival.

I prefer to dispel that characteristic as illusion and suggest a possible other characteristic:  Enjoys The Hunt (Capricious).  We are never out of truth, and does not the bad girl hold a mirror up to ourselves? Girls just wanna have fun.

I wouldn’t consider the realities of these movies fun for the participants, but are they not shared imaginary spaces of a certain form, in which we invite the ultra-bad girl to come and play?  To demonstrate to us her amazing power and give us insights into some of our deepest, most terrifying curiousities?

Who wants to be one of her victims?  Would anyone possibly want to watch as she destroys all our feeble attempts at understanding, turning us into corpses at her command so that we might slay our loved ones?

Or rather, is there not something in all of us who finds that exciting and invigorating?  She knows about life, and will teach us if we listen.  Because remember, she lives out there beyond the unknown reaches of what can be conceived.  Coming into our field of experience to scare the Hek out of us and inspire new ways of consciousness.  Bad girl just wants us to come out and play—wanna get crushed, crumbled and chomped?

So hey!  All you women out there:  Become the bad girl you already are.

Even if it’s just throwing mushrooms in the soup because everyone but you hates them and pretending it was an accident if they even notice.

The supernal super-predator ultra-bad girl knows secrets.  She’ll tell you one if you let yourself listen.

The End?