Kevin's Watch

Excellent! Keep in touch

Mighara Sovmadhi wrote:Oh they're goin' Nice to talk to you guys too. When things are a little more normal, I've got to talk about some of the books I've been reading.

Do that.

--A

Two things, then:

Got a copy of The Darkness That Comes Before, and quite sad that Goodwill only had that entry in the (first!) series.

Secondly, more in line with the theme of these personalish threads: on a whim I picked up A Knight of the Word, since years ago I got RWTD and it impressed me (these are Terry Brooks books, in the Word&Void series). Now I've been obsessing over Halloween as the day when my theory about the government starting to destroy American cities will, err, be experimented with, I guess you could say. Like, Seattle, theoretically, would be destroyed then, or something. (I have pretty much no evidence besides my warped intuition, for this all, haha!) So imagine my haunted surprise to read that this story takes place in Seattle (with a girl from Illinois!) around Halloween, and obsessively goes over homelessness questions. (OK, not like I never read about this book before, I've read synopses for all three W&V books as it goes. So actually, maybe this is part, a major part, of where my silly intuition on this score is coming from. After all, I read RWTD at a fairly relevant point of time in my life; arguably my intuitive theory of the end of the world harkens in part to feelings I had at that time. Like, the intuition, which seems "objective," is really just grounded in my memory of the W&V narrative. Brooks' Shannara books go even further back for me, after all, with the first of those novels being the first non-YA fantasy I ever read.)

Much as I would be interested in seeing some sort of doomsday scenario play out over there, I think the odds are that it's extremely unlikely to happen.

(Feel free to say "I told you so" in the unlikely event that it does, )

And Terry Brooks...well...he's sorta persona non grata here ever since the Terry Brooks Hack Team nailed us lo these many years ago now.

--A

good to hear from you again, Mighara.

but Av, look at what he's saying...

Mighara's not saying, "I think I've found more evidence for this one theory I have about a doomsday-ish scenario."

He's saying something like: "I think I've found evidence for why my mind might have constructed a very specific theory like that one theory I've been so focused on lately..."

He's saying, "I think maybe it happened because my mind was ruminating on these specific stories that I read at a relevant moment in my life."


[Edit: I made fussy changes in my wording.]

Oh, I know he's not saying the scenario is real or likely or anything, and that he knows why he might have that theory / feeling, but I also didn't get the feeling that he's dismissing it either...

--A

Somewhere on the Watch is my fantasy boxing match (or was it wrestling - I forget) between Tolkein and Brooks in which Shannara and TLOTR are pitted against each other in a titanic struggle for supremacy in the public eye. Can't find it now, but damn I loved that post! Low blow after low blow into each others unprotected groins!

Re: Shannara stuff, so yeah, the Sword one is pretty derivative of LOTR in various ways, but so was the First Chrons, to be honest. Thing is, the Shannara world plays with the LOTR concepts by having it be in the distant future post-nuclear war (this goes with what I will re: below!) while Donaldson played with them by having them be like "what if it was a dreamworld?" So two takes on a similar theme, sort of.

Re: Linna and Av: I have to confess, there is an obscure chance that my ridiculous dread will still come true, somehow, or rather I still am concerned that it might, for various reasons. But now the thing is, the fear is very deep-seated. I mean couldn't I worry about meteors or plagues or something? Why is it nuclear war, not to mention self-inflicted (as in, not US vs. Russia but US vs. itself)? But the Shannara stories were the first fantasy books I read (aside from some Narnia/Prydain, IIRC, which are more young-adult-ish anyway). Like, they have had this influence on my mind going back to when I was 8 or 9 I think, and I remember being so proud (and my dad being so spiteful) of the fact that "I read a 726-page-long book!"

Then I read Running with the Demon around the time I started my last job (jobless as of now, don't recall if I mentioned that quite or not...). At that point in time, Illinois was only relevant because of my friend from Chicago, no clue about my favorite band's relationship with the area, had no idea the Mormon connection (via the city of Nauvoo), and so on and on. But the idea of someone having the potential for world-devastating evil--and world-healing good--divided inside them, dividing them, like with the character of Nest Freemark, well, that resonated with me (since my occurrent coworkers were alarmed by my dual attitudes around the time I lost the job I had with them). So fast-forward to now, with me reading into all sorts of coincidences and scenarios and so on, it's like, why have I fixated on Halloween this year being the day that Seattle would be nuked? Sure, the next Familiar book is scheduled to come out that day, and that book will be entitled Redwood, which is the author's long-time moniker for an evil force stalking him and seeking the apocalypse, plus it'll be the 5th anniversary of the day I tried to, uh, "go away," but still. Any number of days could be the one, and no one here in this world, in theory, "knows the day or the hour," so... it seems as if my mind is still just churning together information without necessarily attaching this information to actual objective reality.

EDIT: Which is fine, maybe, sort of, except, like it doesn't do any good. The way things are going, even if I have a job and a place by Halloween, it's not too likely I'll have a way to get to Cedar City (in Utah), and even if I did, what good would that do? How is going to Utah relevant to preventing Seattle from being destroyed? Or Chicago for that matter? Of course, butterfly-effect logic says, anything might be relevant to anything on some level, sort of, but unless I really just decide to fully believe that God is flashlighting this pattern for me to follow, in order to affect the butterfly's wings and their flapping, well... But that's ridiculous too, because if He really was so interested in using me to help save Seattle (or Chicago, or whatever), inspiring me to quit my job while I wait for my tax return to come in...

And that's another thing. I filed for 2015 and 2016, since last year I didn't file. So I did get my 2016 return, it was about $950. Even the cheapest way of getting to Cedar City that I came up with (a flight to Las Vegas/a ride from there to CC) would still have cost me over $400, possibly, leaving me with $500 to figure the rest out with. That would have meant me wandering a desert town of 30,000 people, where I would know no one except one man whose address I would not have known, whose reaction to seeing me (even if I found him) I would not have reliably predicted, etc. Like, I know he works for some plastics company in the area, so maybe I could have gone to the local office for said company and leave him a note... and then what? Get a tent and wait in the desert outside town until he texted me or called me or whatever? With my cat! Luckily or not, I guess, besides "God is telling me to go to CC" my mind is also hooked on the thought "but He doesn't want me to go there in a way that will endanger my cat," like the puzzle is figuring out how to get there with my cat safely in tow. So there's that keeping me from doing anything too wild. But anyway, deeper point is, if He really wanted me to accomplish all these wondrous things, wouldn't He have predestined both my returns to come in at the same time? Right now, my 2015 return is "still being processed; a refund date will be provided when available."

Who knows, there's a troop of Mormon missionaries sitting behind me in the library right now

EDIT 2: I still wish I knew why it was Colorado Springs, of all places, that my Facebook was hacked from. I did give Dean my FB password one time, I thought maybe that meant he did it or something, except CS is 600-700 miles from CC, and Seattle is 1000 miles away, sure, but it seems only a little likelier, then, that... what... Dean went to CS and logged in to my FB from there? For what reason?

Good...look after the cat.

--A