impulse.

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i'm fucking restless.

i've been restless all day. i don't know why. well, yeah, i do. it has to do with fucking politicians and their inane babble. if the people in charge wanted your info, don't you think they'd ask for it? and if you really wanted to help, don't you think you should tell it to them? not to national tv?

fucking vultures...fucking parasites...

i can't sleep...

it's 12:35, granted, which isn't that late, but i do have to be up really early. really. fucking. early. but i've got all this energy in me. it's just crunched up tight inside me, this ball of white-hot destructive/chaotic energy, and i feel like i can't sleep until i do SOMETHING.

i wanna beat the shit out of someone

i wanna fuck

i wanna break something. shatter it to dust.

is this healthy? no, maybe not...fuck it...fuck being healthy...i should've gone out tonight. i broke up with sara, just this fuckin monday. been a great week for me, yeah. no one to fuck. shouldn't fight. can't afford to break anything.

just so dissatisfied...like something's askew, something's gone wrong, and the only way to right it is to unleash this knot inside me.

maybe this is why people loot stores after a disaster. not out of malicious intent, or out of desperation, even. just to feel the glass break. just to feel shit break. just to let this thing out, one way or another. i KNOW this is why people fuck like weasels after a disaster. it's a release. and it's a return to instinct. it's like something's fucked up so bad your human intellect is blown away. all that's left is base impulses. fuck. fight. hunt. run.

damn it.

damn it!

i wanna say something profound. but there's nothing to say. so here's me, signing off. gonna take a shower. try to get some sleep.

nyc.

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I just wanted to say something about the terrorism today...

NYC is the symbol of America. Fuck Washington DC. Fuck everything else. NYC. The original melting pot/salad bowl/whatever. Diversity. The good and the bad. The best and the worst. The bastion of capitalism and the stronghold of liberalism, at least on the East Coast. There's nothing like New York, New York.

As Chuck would say, there are cities...and then, there's The City.

They tore out the heart of the City today. There's never going to be another World Trade Center like this first one, even if they rebuild it. The innocence is gone, I guess. They tore out the heart of the City that's the heart of the United States, and they did it because they wanted to destroy our spirit.

They failed.

The World Trade Center might be gone. And I'm pissed about that. I'm really pissed. I don't care if New York City's crime rate is sky-high and a zillion people get murdered there every year. That's different. That's ourselves killing ourselves, and that's...allowed. Not good, but allowed. That's part of New York's imperfect, stained, macho glory. But THIS. This is a fucking outrage.

NYC is a city somewhere between heaven and hell, but it's OUR city.

It's our city, even if they blew the Twin Towers up. And all they've really done, is piss us off. All of us.

We're a tough breed. Those of us in New York City. Those of us in San Francisco. All of us. We're a diverse breed, and we don't always get along, but when shit hits the fan, we unite. E pluribus fuckin unum, assholes, so gloat while you can. We're coming after you.

And there's hope. There's always hope. Out of atrocities come beauty. I heard people say "I love you" today, and really mean it. There were rescuers rushing into the fray, ready to give their lives for others. There were volunteers heading into ground zero hoping to help somehow. Anyhow.

I saw the hospitals flooded with people willing to give their own life's blood to aid strangers. I saw people of every imaginable religion praying for the wellbeing of strangers. I saw young men and women still on the brink of life hold up candles in honor of the dead. We gather; we cry; we sing; we will pull through.

They can blow up all of New York. They can blow the whole fucking nation up. It won't make a difference. Those who survive will just come back twice as strong, twice as pissed.

This shout-out goes to New York City. For those who died, and to those who lived: rock on.

mindscapes.

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There's a meadow somewhere...

It's nested high in the mountains, and the grass grows as long as a pretty girl's hair. It's long enough to catch the wind, which is moisture-touched and warm, because it's late Spring (which is the most hopeful time of the year), and it's long enough to bow and ripple in that wind. And at the edges of the meadow, trees - evergreens - stand sentinel against the sky, which is littered with stars, more stars than you could count in a lifetime.

The grass is red. A deep, ruddy red, not the red grass turns when it has been bled on, but the red grass can be in your dreams. The sky above is a deep, deep, deep purple, a royal color lightening to lilac at the horizons. During the day, it'll brighten to the most royal hue of purple never to grace a king's robes.

Only it does grace a king's robes...in this world, which exists only in my head, and shows itself in glimpses and snatches in my writing and my ramblings and my dreams.

The King's name is unknown to mere mortals like us, but I've always associated him with Oberon. And his land, of course, would be called Avalon - and it's an Avalon far larger than a mere island.

The King lives in a shining castle in the proud imperial city. The streets are filled with merchants and peddlers, sailors from the wide ocean. The imperial guard is decked in shining silver splendour, bearing graceful, deadly swords and spears. The knights on their steeds pace through the cobblestone streets and ride off to save maidens at the far reaches of the kingdom.

Over it all the imperial palace towers: the castle, all spires and graceful arches, buttresses that literally fly. It's built not by physics but by magic, a gleaming jewel crafted of blue and gold and silver and white. The castle - the city - the world - is both fantasy-medieval and supermodern; medieval in the style, but clean-edged, sleek, futuristic in the taste.

The nobles hold court in the great hall, seated at both sides, while the King and Queen sit upon their thrones at the far end of the room, resplendent on a raised dais, the sunlight cascading through a window at their back, falling upon their shoulders. Commoners - which in the Imperial City is to say, sailors, for with magic, there is no need for anything else - come to petition before the High Lords of Avalon in open court, and in closed court, the nobles stand to argue eloquently, to compliment and snipe. They're decked in their finest robes, and they are beautiful, elfin, high cheekbones and exotic features that tilt and slant. Their hair comes in every color of the rainbow but purple streaked onto a white purer than snow; their eyes, in every color but green.

Those are the colors reserved for Oberon and his Queen, because those are, and have always been, royal colors. And Oberon's eyes are a light green, like frost on grass, but Titania's are the color of emeralds - not the paltry emeralds found on earth, but larger ones, more perfect emeralds that glitter and glow and hold the sun in their bellies.

There is a third class in this world: the warriors. The knights, who are not as conservative (to put it nicely) and droll (to put it not-so-nicely) as most the nobles, but not as uncouth as the sailors. They are the ones who wield the shining blades out to the outlands to conquer the dragons and slay the sea-serpents. Every so often, a young would-be knight comes of age, and the Queen sends him (or her; my world is democratic) forth on a quest to claim a place in the world.

The quest always takes a year, and takes the future knights into every corner of the world. And there are a lot of corners.

There's a railroad, for example - a bullet train, actually, that arcs out of the city on its slender-columned, raised tracks that soar well over a mile above the ground. It travels faster than any known plane, and it streaks roughly southward, across the great flatlands with their dark rich soil and their golden crops under the surreal purple sky. There are farmers here, far from the grace and decadence both of the city: tanned strong-limbed men and women with cowboy squints and a slow drawl to their fluid elfin tongue. They're simple folk; they grow corn and cotton and all those crops, and under the harvest moon they dance. The girls marry young and the boys grow up young here; they die young, too, and die beautiful.

The train speeds on: further past, the land wrinkles up into a sudden, rocky mountain range. Then the lands dry out; flatlands become scrublands, which gradually thins into a wide silent desert, all pristine sand dunes amber-gold, shifting slowly like an ocean almost-frozen. Only it's hot, so very hot, and no one can survive long here.

Past those, the sand hardens and cracks; it's a desolate place, but beautiful too in its own savage way. Eventually the cracks become ravines, and the ravines become great stone canyons, where natural monoliths stand motionless as the wild dry wind howls past. Tumbleweeds roll; the canyon is five miles deep, and the sky is almost a dream above.

Then the wind begins to take the flavor of moisture again. It's nearing the sea, that is to say the Ocean, which is the only sea, and the sea that rings the entire, vast (and only) continent of this world. To the south the sea is angry and grey; temperatures are dropping again. It's cold at the southern edge of the continent. It rains often, but it hails often as well. The sun sets slanted and distant, and the dusk is long, the night longer still.

There's a great city at the edge of the world, at the terminus of the train's run. It's a grim city, dark and seedy. The building are modern, but scarred by acid rain and twisted - literally - they corkscrew into the sky, and inside millions of people move like bees in a hive, silhouetted by the lights within. The alleyways are littered with refuse and yesterday's newspapers. The walls are concrete. They weep when it rains. The city races right to the edge of the sea and then crumbles messily off, perching at the very edge of the cliff while great sewers open to vomit the sludge of the city into the sea. You never see the sun here, and steel is always rusted, but impregnable.

The Queen's jealous sister, rules this city. She is beautiful; she is as beautiful as Titania, but her heart is cold, and her hair is raven-black shot through with ...mmm, I don't know. Some livid color, born of envy and a deep-seated, hidden pain.

She makes me sad. She makes me want to comfort her, but coming that close to her will only end in a beheading.

Every year, at Winter Solstice, she sends her sister a gift: something lifeless and exquisite. Bone, crystal, steel. It goes north along the train tracks, and every year it's some sort of plot to kill the Queen, but at the last minute a messenger arrives, and warns her of the danger...because, you see, she loves her sister. She just can't forgive her.

North of the Imperial City, and west, there is nothing but ocean. The Imperial City is the center of the world, but it sits at the northern edge of the continent, which cuts away south-west from there. The ocean there is milder, broad and greyish blue. The docks are crowded with husky sailors, foul-mouthed and hearty; they load cargo onto their ships, though where they ship them I do not know. There's a colonial feel here, even though the City itself is medieval, and the plains to the south are 1800s. The ships are graceful clippers and majestic schooners; there are a few lumbering galleons, and from their masts stream snapping banners and billowing sails.

It smells like fish here.

The northwestern coast is rocky, but the weather is mild. Fog comes in here. Somewhere there's a city that's the distant dream of San Francisco: always shrouded in fog, always indistinct, always beautiful, always shining. To look too long would be heartbreak.

South of there, along the western coast, there is a great redwood forest. Or it looks like redwoods - but they are large, so large, that a man (an elf) is like an ant beside one of these giants. The first branches loom high, high above the earth; the needles are deep green. The air is tranquil and holy and wistful with the salt air; the ground is springy with the root structure of these great trees.

Inland from there, the forest becomes a rainforest. The thunder rolls low, and warm rain falls like a salve, drenching everything. Ever dripping, ever a deep, rich green that even our jungles can't match, the canopies stretch one over another. The earth is rich here, rich and wet. Everything is rich here. Green and brown, and the occasional splash of color - spotted cats the size of elephants that slink through the green shadows and scream in the night. Here and there, a sudden burst of red: flowers, erotic opening lush things.

It's sweltering; the mosquitos could eat me alive. Literally. Insects here grow as large as dogs; sometimes, a giant beetle, large as a cow, ticks slowly through. It's a wet land, disconcerting, throbbing and alive.

Farther east, the rainforest becomes fields, and we cross the path of the train again. East of there, fields becomes grasslands, prairies in deep red, and past that, the grasses turn sere and golden, and it's a savanna. Wide-spreading trees with wide-spreading roots sheltering maned beasts that roar louder than thunder, but they're black, and their manes are golden. There are spotted cats here too, and the things they hunt: the graceful timid creatures besides that eat the grasses and flee from the predators which stalk, and mate, and roar their pride to the stars.

The stars: there are more than you can imagine here. Brighter, too, millions of them, scattered across the velvet sky. There's a band of the galaxy visible, just like on earth, but it would put our milky way to shame with its ethereal beauty.

There are two moons hanging in the sky. Large, large moons, both full tonight, full over the broad savannas, and if only earth's moon was even half as beautiful...

Sometimes the rain comes to the savannas, though. The dry season ends and the sere heat ends and the wet season comes and storm clouds gather, piling high into the sky, brilliantly red at sundown, lividly bruise-purple at their bellies. They move over the savanna and lightning trades between the thunderheads.

Thunder booms out across the savanna. The animals raise their heads and listen.

Then rain falls like a heavy curtain, blurring the world. Not the cold lashing rain of the southern edge of the continent. Not the warm drenching rain of the rainforests in the west. This is a powerful sort of rain, but without bitterness: a masculine force of nature, but inherently good. Animals move like grey shadows through the rain. This is the only time of the year the grasses are green instead of red, and the tree-trunks are dark, and the tree-blossoms bloom fragile and pink. The long-dried gullies and ponds fill again with the rain. The monsoon sweeps through like a tidal wave. Life returns. Life survives.

And, north of the savanna - for here, the continent juts northward - temperatures begin to drop again. The grasslands return, but only for a while. In the distance, purple shadows of vast mountain ranges, nothing like the mountains of the rest of the continent, loom up. Trees gather at the edge of the grasslands, and spread in a thick carpet up the feet of the mountain like lichen on a rock, but the mountain is too high. The treeline ends at the mountains' waistline; barechested, the rocky giants rear into the sky.

Not far above the treeline, the clouds gather thick. These are storm clouds; tempest clouds. They roll in off the frozen polar sea, full of fury and ice. They growl and snarl, writhing about the mountains. They are slate-grey, lead-grey, heavy as lead, and when winter comes they spit snow in great white torrents, blanketing the forest and the highlands.

The peaks of the mountains are too high for the snow to melt and the ice to run to water. Though a river tumbles out of the mountains' breast, a river in which river nymphs bathe, a river by which the Prince has once lost his heart to a slip of air - though there is a river, it does not come from the highest reaches, which are perpetually frozen. There's another screen of clouds, miles above the first that stretches in from the ocean; this one is miles thick itself, and the only way through it is to climb the mountains, clinging like burrs on the side of a great white tiger.

The highest peaks rise even above these highest clouds. Up there, the air is thin and intoxicating. It is silent there, truly silent, silent as it can never be anywhere else in the world. It's silent and the clouds below mask all traces of the world below. It's beautiful beyond speech, but it's a lonely world, a cold world; to be at the top is to be the only man left on this world, and when the sun sets, the barren peak about you, sheathed in ice, is also drenched with the blood of every man, woman and child that has ever died in all of history's black annals.

At the very highest peak, a great monolith stands in tribute to every knight to have ever fallen in battle. Names are carved into the black granite, and in the grooves, liquid gold burns pure and true, vehement negation to the loneliness, the silence, the loss of the world's highest end. Warriors come here to honor their lovers, their brothers, their teachers, their fallen. And there's hope for every loss in this world, and beauty for every sorrow.

This is the world that exists only in my mind. This is the world that has existed in me before adulthood, before games, before roleplay. This is the world, I sometimes think, that has existed before books, before schooling. Maybe before the world I live in really existed for me. This is the world that spreads in my head - or, in reality, only the smallest slice of it. There is so much more to tell, and in the end, everything I ever say, everything I ever dream, has its root in this world.