12.30

[Woah, I fell off the wagon hard. I was writing once a day there for a hot minute. I'll be around. Don't worry your pretty head about me. And if your head is ugly, you're not alone.]

You don't smell anything like me, or anyone else. You're distinctive. Intellectually, I know what makes a person's smell, but there's no poetry in salt and oil. I know there is romance in the smell of it; the memory of you walking by me far too close and tossing your hair. That brief intimacy is all I remember from the day we fell in love, but it's enough. I know, a deep bone-tied knowledge, the ache of that gasp of docks and pine and sea breeze you brought with you from the mountain's toes. It's not a fresh smell, not a clean one, but it's yours. For me, that's good enough.
Smell is so visceral. I wonder--when we're both dead and winter pushes the air out of the forest's lungs and the breath of the sea thrums through our cemetery--will my body shiver when the smell of you rushes over me? If anything can make my rotten corpse breathe again, it would be the smell of you.

12.12

The cardboard boxes have destroyed my hands. I have been folding and filling them for hours. I've run out of tape closing them up. I've been carefully stacking them and labeling the sides. I step back, now, and realize that postage will be monstrous. You'll have to do without.

I pull out my knife and cut into the first box. Its contents spill out on the floor, skittering across the tile, smashing against the grout and rolling, slowly, under the fridge. I tear the next box open with my hands, my ruined hands, and the contents softly plop onto the oozing remains of the first box's more delicate containers. I'm frantically slashing through boxes now, heaving the empty ones away into the living room. My heartbeat is wild and my breathing erratic.  There, in the bottom of the last prison I open, I find it. The shoebox with all your letters to me. I crawl over the jumbled piles of past neatness and good memories into the kitchen. I set this most precious box on the stove and set alight the burner tik tik tik woosh.

I snatch the box.
I swear.
I bash the flames with an open palm, half fanning, half smothering, until the fire chokes. The letters are singed, but the shoebox is ruined.
I put the shoebox back on the shelf and walk back to the pile to pick up the mess I made for you.

12.9

The dog twitches so much when he sleeps that I don't think I could ever be comfortable next to him. His claws are like buzzsaws on the end of his flailing paws. I still lay down next to him and wait for him to calm, not because I need to, but because I think he needs it. He sighs so much. Maybe he's lonely.

12.7

[My previous post was spurred by this thought: What would I think if I were this man, receiving this question? I think his response was wrong. So does he.]

Full disclosure: there are a few curse words I quote.

I pray to Jesus, but I'm not a Mormon. I've eaten at Buffalo Wild Wings, but I'm still vegetarian. I live in a society that represses, but am I a racist? That's a really unbelievable thing to say--that "everyone is a little bit racist," (Schierbecker 2015) or that all people are sexists, or that everything is problematic in some way. There's a whole lot of troubling fallacy in that statement. If everything is problematic, every argument that disproves your position is also problematic and equally easy to discard. If every white man is racist and sexist(and no black person can possibly be), white men don't "deserve to be listened to." You can shout them down. Let me simplify: modern collectivism is unfalsifiable.
Mark Schierbecker cowers like a whipped dog. It's exactly what the questioners seem to want. You should watch his interview all the way through to find when people ask him why he's pressing charges against Melissa Click and somehow promoting white supremacist arguments. He tries so hard to support the movement he believes in, but the moment his personal motivations don't align with the group, he's targeted. Instead of being intellectually honest about his first amendment beliefs, he cowtows to the angry voices. He scrambles to say something that will make him likable again: "Fuck racists! . . . Fuck me too." His friend the publicist doesn't help him, and in fact left him in the lurch a few days later. Why did he say he was racist and go out of his way to acknowledge his white privilege? Why did she recant her support and actually accuse him of saying "indefensibly racist" things? I can tell you why: there are two main types of activists I can currently see. The first type are real humans who care about each other and are trying to fix the incredibly obvious social problems in the United States. The second type are members of a mob who don't allow themselves to see the humanity in the people they're lining up to crush. They've been given incredibly powerful weapons of guilt and shame and hate, and this poisonous second type of activist is so dedicated to the purity of their group that they're willing to destroy anyone who threatens its ideology.
The first activist is the kind of person I strive to be. I fail a lot, but it's not due to a belief system that holds "my type of people" as better than another. It's just simple human selfishness. It's because I think I'm better than everyone. Before you think you can disprove me, remember that you're not inside my head, and that I have no respect for when people think they know what other people's beliefs or emotions are. So you won't win that one. Regardless, when I fail to love other people in the same way God loves them, I am disappointed in myself. I recalibrate, and I try again. Today, I got so mad I yelled at a student because I'm awful. I will do better tomorrow.
The second kind of activist is the kind of person who wears pink on Wednesdays. I'm still trying to figure out how to sort these bilious mouth-breathers from the forward-thinking human-lovers they mix with. These are people who belong to a clique. Their social activism excludes others on purpose and often as a tactic for keeping the clique pure and the message dominant. White guilt is a really stupid side-effect of othering by activists. But the most disagreeable thing is that these sort of feel-good crusading activists tend to target their own supporters. A blog that tears apart conservative cartoons gets the treatment sometimes. So do people making beautiful comics about the cultures in which they live. So does Emma Watson. So does an autistic photojournalist trying to give an extremely difficult answer in front of people who hate him because he thinks they have a right to be heard. Schierbecker is me. He's you. He's every one of us who says anything problematic, which is, remember, anything. This isn't about being right. Not one of us has the whole truth. This is about not being the most spiteful, vitriolic, exclusive, victimizing, parasitic, selfish people on the planet. Mark Schierbecker, I stand with you. I don't care if that gets me in trouble. From what I've seen, it's a safe stance.

12.6

"Let me start by saying 'I am not a racist.'" Somewhere in the hall, a gasp. "Of course, I can't start by saying 'I am not a racist," because somewhere along the line the ability to label prejudice was taken from the individual and given to the collective. That's fine. I don't cry about that; no one has ever been able to control the labels other people ascribe to them. Billions of people live and die without being able to break from the mold others pour them into." The building is stuffy with people, the dense choke of breath recycled wafts its way up to me and slithers around my nose. The young woman who asked the question is livid, and I can see her emotion shake off her in waves, the crowd around her pulsing slightly with it, resonating her outrage.
"What I can say is that I can't comprehend racists." The mere mention of the word from a mouth--my mouth--of privilege strikes a note of discord in the gasps that filter to my pedestal high above the mob. Indiscretion! How dare he say such a thing! That word is ours; he can't know it like we do. "For my entire life, I have valued the viewpoints of others. I have worked to read and internalize the values and challenges of disenfranchised people. I seek the voices of race, of class, of disability, of youth, age, sexuality, and gender. I try to understand their viewpoints. I do my best, but I can only read so much. Every story is unique and can only add its melody to the hymn of humanity building in my heart. I have to try. But I'm limited to one slice of personal familiarity. I'm such a small thread in the tapestry of life that I only touch a very slim section." I can hear the creaking of their old ideologies now, trembling under the ponderous weight of my accusation: can A White Man be right? Can he get through a thought, a sentence, a word, without some twistable sentiment that can be turned and driven straight back, as a knife, into his gut? "How am I to understand the struggles and consequences of trans, gay, old, young, disabled, poor, or black? I am a white, cis straight man. And you know the awful truth? I don't even understand what it means to be that--how could I? Because some of us are racist. And I don't get it." Damn him, the packed humanity whispers. Damn him, not for what he's said, but for who he is. Racism is only practicable by the powerful against the weak. He'll understand what racism looks like when we're done with him. I knew I hadn't said anything wrong, but

12.4

She just walked past me and asked if it's three yet. I almost, reflexively, looked at my watch, which I do when people ask me what day of the month it is, or how long until dinner, or why I'm waiting for something, or when my birthday is. Instead, I just smiled and said "Yup! You can go home." We both laughed. There was an extreme bitterness in the laughter, since we shared this unspeakable resolve common in teachers, that no matter the monstrous thoughts we have between seven and three, we will retain our dignity just as long as we survive. We can then push through the shroud-doors and out of this voluntary mausoleum and return to a nearly human life outside. We can take again the mantle of humanity, living again outside these walls where we constrain children's minds to the exact pattern of their forbears.

My Acolyte Journey: 2014.1

Habits
Tove Lo.
I don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't use. I don't hook up. I'm not familiar with the particular vices of this song, but I love listening to it. It hurts more now, though. I may not love the words, but it's more painful to think that maybe she does.
This is Delight's favorite song from the Top 40. She listened to it on loop for days. She liked a couple other Tove Lo songs Of course, her favorite was the un-remixed version, but we're looking for the Hippie Sabotage remix that Stephen liked better. It's good. I'm done playing.

My Acolyte Journey: 2014.2

All Eyes Are on You Now
Deas Vail. Adolescence practically requires each person to see the world as a vast Truman Show, an endless multitude of people all constantly judging your every movement. Each and every person you meet sees every mistake you've ever made and has incisive knowledge of your inner foibles. When you've got a zit on your jawline, everyone can see it and thinks its disgusting. When you forget someone's name, they hold on to that moment for years. When you open your chips and they spill out on your lap, everyone's laughing internally, cataloging your idiocy to tell all their friends later around wine and cheese. "Do you remember in sixth grade when Hannah called the teacher 'Mom?' That was truly her lowest moment!"
All eyes are on you now.
Except that's not true. Nobody notices; you're background material. People aren't constantly searching for your hidden problems. They're all so focussed on themselves that they don't have time for you. And thank God for that, because this song is a horrorscape if it's true. Actually: nobody cares, and it's wonderful.

Why do we all think such awful things about ourselves? This is the stuff of nightmares! This is as terrifying as the implications of the Hymn of Acxiom, but broader and less modern. It's the omniscience of the priest, the gossip chain of the village ladies, the seeming judgement of the schoolchildren in the other desks--the oldest fear since society formed. This is what you wake up to at three am and worry about at quiet moments. It's not true, but that doesn't stop our phobia from building to an all-consuming emotional "Show us what you're made of/What you are afraid of/All eyes are on you now."

I like the song. It makes me feel bigger and lighter, even though it has such a heavy message. It makes me feel like shoving my hands deeper in my pockets and walking faster, getting where I'm going so I can win whatever I'm doing. I know the music doesn't match the words, now that I've read them. I don't think it matters. There are songs you listen to because the music blows you away, songs you listen to because the words move you like a bird on the wing, and songs that have both. This song is not both, I think. I wouldn't buy it, but we all know how useless I've made that metric. It just tells you if I want it, not if I enjoy it or find it worthwhile or think it deserves to be the penultimate song of a list of Stephen's best from 2014.

One more. Delight's song.

My Acolyte Journey: 2014.3

Marlboro Lights.
Natalia Kills.
The Internet at home is so slow I could walk to down and take a course on lockpicking to break into the library and look up the information I need before Google would load. That might be an exaggeration. Still, as long as I'm here . . .
For my use, this song would be called Fireball, and no mistake. I'm tempted to stop writing there and just let sleeping dogs lie, but that's not why I'm here. Marlboro Lights is about a relationship that's ending or has just ended and the narrator knows why, knows it won't be anything but over, but clutches the pain to her breast and quaffs it like medicine. Her lover is gone, but somehow, she gets better because of it: "And I lie here on the bedroom floor/Where your feet walked out and your daggers fall/And I, I get a little bit better." It's hard to death if "A rooftop ledge/Could just fix everything," but she's fixated and it's fixing her.

I don't know if I'm projecting myself on this song like the thin light from an overhead projector on a hot classroom wall, fading in sunlight and aching for the final bell to ring and the referee to just call the match. Maybe I'm not, and it's just resonant in me like shook foil, terrible and fragile, a connection so tenuous that it shatters my illusions with a single strike and lays waste to my imagination of "okay." Maybe it's exactly my story and maybe I'm playing human and pretending I'm important, but either way I'm not okay, and my thoughts of Fireball whiskey doesn't make me feel a little bit better.

Would not buy.
Done thinking.

11.23

The weather was perfect, finally. I ran outside and picked up my bike, ready to go to the park. From inside, I heard a distant voice: "Wear a helmet!" Ugh, parents. I turned around and had to tramp all the way back to the closet for my helmet. I clipped it on and ran back outside, jumping the two steps down the porch.
I swing my leg over the bike and rip off down the sidewalk. I'm pedaling as fast as I can because I'm afraid I'll be late to show up. All my friends are going to the park because it's the first perfect day of summer, and the pool is about to open. Everybody's going to be there, and I'm going to be late because I had to take out the trash and clean my room first. Parents! I'm flying down the sidewalk now, my feet going a hundred miles an hour. I can hear the wind in my ears roaring like a hurricane. Maybe I will make it on time, if I keep going like this.
Except: I still have to go down Creedy Hill.
I brake hard at the top of the hill, breathing hard. The hill seemed to go down forever, and down there, at the bottom, was the park. Down there, the pool and the creek and the playground waited. Down there, kids were lining up to jump in the pool, to zoom down the slide, to scream and slip and swim. Up here, I had only Creedy Hill between me and paradise, and Creedy Hill was a killer. One time, I heard about a kid who tried to ride a skateboard down it and ended up in the hospital because he went through a wall at the bottom. The last time I went down the hill, I walked my bike. In fact, I have walked down the hill every time I ever come to it. But I'm late--the only way to get to the pool in time is to ride down the hill on my bike. So I take a couple deep breaths and push off.
Already, I'm going too fast, and I pull on the brakes, but it doesn't slow me down as much as I want. I start to see the houses as a blur and the road races under me like I'm riding a rocket. I'm trying my best to steer straight down the sidewalk and not fall over, and the whole time my ears are full of such a huge woosh that I can't hear myself yelling. All of a sudden, I'm on the ground. WHACK. I can hear my bike crashing down the hill, and I'm gasping for breath. I stand up and check that my arms and legs are still attached, and when I do, whack! I hit my head again! Right above me, there's a huge, low-hanging tree branch that must have caught the top of my helmet and knocked me right off the bike. I pull the helmet off and I can see an enormous crunch in the top. Man, if I hadn't worn that helmet, the branch would have taken my head right off. I run to grab my bike and jump back on the bike, not afraid of anything. I'm super excited to tell my friends how I survived Creedy Hill.

11.21b

I'm really angry at my mom this time. She's forcing me to do what she wants. Right now, I'm doing dishes. I pick up the plates and I slap them down. I throw the silverware into the sink so hard a couple of forks bounce out and clatter to the ground. I kick one, and it slides under the sink, way out of sight. "Ha!" I shout. "Stupid fork!" I squeeze the soap into the sink way too hard. There's way too much soap, but I don't care. I'm mad. I turn on the water and watch as the soap bubbles start to climb their way up the sides of the sink.
This is dumb, I think to myself. Mom won't let me go to the park today because I have chores and homework. I really wanted to play outside with my friends. The sink is filling up slowly with water, but the bubbles are climbing lots faster than the water level. The bubbles are piling on top of each other, taller and taller. This is dumb. I don't want to do the stupid dishes. I realize I don't know where that fork went. I bend down to find it, but it's shoved way under the sink in the dark. I reach in there and my heart starts to beat faster and faster as my arm goes further and further. I've found some kind of hole under the sink. I open the drawer next to me and grab the flash light. I get down on my hands and knees and I aim the flashlight right down the hole. It is a hole! I can see all the way back inside to the wall. On the right, I can see the pipes of the sink. On the left, I can see the fork, but further back, I see something strange. There's a small, dark furball. Suddenly, it turns and looks at me: a mouse! I shout "Woah!" and I jump back, crashing into the table behind me. A couple glasses fall off the table and the chair gets knocked to the floor. I was just surprised, is all. I look up and see the sink start overflowing with soap bubbles. They're falling all over the floor. Mom walks in and sees the mess.
"What are you doing!?" she shouts.
I start laughing as the soap bubbles drift down and land on the floor. Mom runs over and turns off the water. She gives me a look.
"Okay," I say. "I'll do the dishes."

11.21

Snatch the orbs from their sockets. Immolate them. Flay the soft flesh and grind the bones! Listen to their lovers screaming—the air torn from their thin frame, racked with a frail and tintinnabulate, membranous death-terror, the screams a shattering, reverberant paean to the artistry of death. Revel, friends. The destruction entire of a human soul is delicate art made not of pigments and tonal assonance but art of a more methodic kind. Invest time, build belief, mythologize the future that seems all but inevitable, and as the mind bends its construction under the weight of the old narrative, dynamite the foundations and watch the integument burst, pressure released, motes remaining, as the old story of an animal heart evaporates as the cognitive brain betrays itself a thousand fold with each new contortion, battling to fit itself into a shattered mirror. Better to be ripped into two main halves, the blood only falling out as the heart seizes and shakes, the mind still sensate, than to have the soul desiccated, silicate, wind-blown, barren, dead. Better to die in pain than live without it.

11.19b

You deleted your Facebook account.
I don't even know what to make of that.
Damn.

11.19

I'm making baked potatoes in the oven. I remember the first time I did this for you; you were so amazed that such a thing was possible. This time, you're not here. I am growing to hate all my memories of you because they are all individual notes of a dirge that started long ago and only now has built to its pernicious climax. No emotional swell of orchestra and organ can go on for this long. I can't stand it! My heart will stop! And yet I listen on, because I must. I've bought a ticket to this concert and I will stay. My potatoes will probably be exquisite, but they'll turn to ash in my mouth as the terrible chords crash around me, shaking me, drowning me.

I miss you.

My Acolyte Journey: 2014.4

Harbinger.
Anberlin. This song is absolutely full to the gills with things that people want to hear. We'll live forever. We'll be together. These are the myths that people love to tell themselves. Heaven is just this extreme level of wish fulfillment. Reincarnation promises eternal life. Collectivism promises togetherness. Success will make your legacy last an eternity. Love will keep you from drifting apart.
The song is a dream state, though. The musical intro drifts, disconnected and out of time, finally picking up urgency with the singer, but never losing the underbeat of the dream. We're told that people are paid to feel free, bribed to be content. We're told to fall asleep. We're told that life isn't all perfection: we need who we would bleed for, a sacrifice unnecessary in a true dream.
This song's words and sound echo the dissatisfaction I feel today, and perhaps have felt for a very long time. I was exhausted and the dog rolled up on me and whined at the edge of my bed at 6:30. I've been awake for two and a half hours doing nothing, fervidly wishing that I would crash, exhausted, back to sleep. I'm afraid I'll never sleep in again. And in my current angry mood, I'm pissed at everything: God, Feminism, Ben Carson, Moberly Middle School, and Watson. [Brief aside: I wrote that on Sunday morning, became disaffected by the blog itself, and then stayed up until the small hours doing Lord only knows what.] Maybe it's the perfect time for a disaffected song that reflects my generic brand of disgust, or maybe it's absolutely the incorrect time to be wallowing in self-constructed misanthropy, further echoing in on my psychosis in an increasingly torpid stupor in which even the intrusion of minutiae is unbearable.
Yet.
I would love for someone to find a private moment and pull me into a hug with a grip that communicates the immediacy and the passion of the truth of it: some relationships last forever. Because right now things are hard here, now.

I wouldn't buy this, for whatever that's worth now. I haven't bought any music for a year or more now. I didn't even buy any at McKay's, and it's ludicrously cheap there. I don't think "I would buy this" is a good metric any more. I'll find one for the next forty, but for now just understand that I wouldn't buy this song if it were offered to me for a dollar.

My Acolyte Journey: 2014.5

Heavenly Father.
Bon Iver. This song rivals many of my favorites for being utter gibberish. The religious references are tired and useless, the imagery is confusing, and the word's message is almost banal. "It's definitely lava," the singer sighs, and we're left wondering what exactly is lava? The relationship? His father? There's no context and the pronoun leaves me empty. I didn't understand the song the third time I read through it, and lyric genius is no help. This one was annotated by a drunk sloth. I had to struggle to find what meaning there was.
So I read the song backwards.
It's better. Listen, I don't know what the songwriter was thinking when he wrote these lyrics, but either it is gibberish and I'm sane or it's genius and I'm missing something. I want to assume the writer wasn't throwing refrigerator magnets at a whiteboard and writing down what stuck. Look carefully. "A safety, in the end, is all that he offers: Heavenly Father." It makes more sense than reversed. Now we know that the Heavenly Father is nothing more than a single point of safety for the singer. Let's go forward expecting him to seek that safety and slip from it, pointlessly, because it's not complex enough for his needs. He spends forever "up here" (heaven? I don't think so?) filling his time with fear. We learn that his loved one left him and that's why he's depressed. He let her go. "You turn around now and you count to 10, but you're free now, 'cause I'm a known coward in a coward wind." He's not going to chase. "Won't you settle down baby here your love has been! And I'm free now. I was never sure how much of you I could let in, but you're free now." He gives back the love and explains why he's letting go. He gives permission for the other person to leave. "And I don't need to go where a Bible went ever since I heard the howlin' wind." He feel a need to follow a Bible when he's such a coward. That coward wind has pushed him right out of the safety of the Heavenly Father.
Yet I know I'm trying too hard. The author wrote "Heard about a day where it dropped the know/to go another day as we learn to close," which makes no sense forward or backward. He wrote "Heavenly Father/is whose brought to his Autumn/and love is left in end." That's corroborated by two websites. I don't think it's a spelling error. I'm trying too hard and I wanted to find meaning but it's not there. It is gibberish.

I think it's "'Heavenly Father' is who's brought to his Autumn" and "I've been up here filling holes with fears," but that's clearly wrong. It's "whose" and "hulls." I hate lyrics transcribers today. Ignore me.

I think I demand too much of my music. It's like: Heavenly Father is perfectly serviceable. It even sets a beautiful picture in my mind. It's a moodscape and it does its job. But I constantly expect the words to mean something. Am I out of my mind? Did I get hit in a soft spot as a child and I'm left wanting desperately to make connections with the random jumble of words some man I've never met is singing so passionately and so hollowly? I feel like this song may have broken me, and I don't know what to say. I've never seen the movie the song was written for (Zach Braff), and maybe a lot of the references like "lava" and "wind" would make sense if I had, but I don't want to. I want a song that holds itself up. I want a song that helps me somehow after I've listened to it. And if that's unfair because I liked the video games Dear Esther and The Graveyard. Maybe I've just been programmed so well to look for meaning in lyrics and poetry by my academic upbringing that I'm missing something elemental and foundational in this work.

Or maybe the lyricist who wrote this piece was a drunk sloth. We may never know.

My Acolyte Journey: 2014.6

Haunt (Demo)
Bastille. In an epic stretch of five months, I have left this project utterly dormant. Now I shall return, since Stephen has graced me with a 40 for 2015 and I'm now officially a failure.

I'm a storyteller. I try to hook my students with well-told stories about my childhood so they'll write stories too. I talk about when my brother beat the dog to save a bird's nest and I felt my mind carom between two conclusions as I learned what was going on. I talk about my sister pushing me from the treehouse and thinking, even for that spit second, that she had killed me, after all. I talk about canoeing down a river with Russell and losing both paddles in a swift bit of the current and throwing myself out of the boat after it. I'm a storyteller by nature and I love feeling people's energy build and tense as the story breaks open in front of them. But: to date, the most universally captivating stories I can tell are those of my past relationships. Maybe it's because I'm so candid about how I was feeling and what I concluded from the terrible things I did and felt with the girlfriends I've had, but I don't think that's all of it. I think stories of past relationships get such strong reactions not because they're enjoyable or interesting, but because they're resonant, like stepping inside an enormous bell and having the outside struck, again and again, by someone else.
I think romantic relationships--and especially sexual relationships--cause scars or change so deep and fundamental to who we are and what we want as young people that my peers will always be transfixed by a well-told heartbreak. When somebody hears a story about love lost, their first and immediate reaction will always be to connect it to some story they've thought they locked away.
That's Haunt.

As adults will grow and maturity shows
All the terrifying rarity of truth,
As you turn to your mind,
And your thoughts they rewind
To old happenings and things that are done

The song makes me feel melancholy and hollow, but the song itself doesn't make me think of losing anybody. The words do. The way I relate to music is so liminal, so interstitial that I never had a chance to relate Haunt so very strongly with an emotional loss in my life. Honestly, I have a better chance to relate to Chopin at this point than to Bastille. I've just heard him so little at critical moments. I love it, though. Something in it makes me want to scream the words, even though I don't know them. Something terrible makes me want the song to crash and cry.

I would buy it, but I haven't. I'm not buying music. I need to change my metric, since I have Amazon Music and I'm likely to have Google Music and the whole world is changing. My students don't know what a CD is. My mother can't believe I don't know how to start an LP. I like Bastille. He's great.

11.3

Burned. Battered. Bashed. Crisped. Crushed. Close to dead, I drag my near-corpse back to friends and seek for help. I got in a fight with magic and I came out alive. My friends, the cousins, failed the light and failed me.
We burst into the room, full of swagger and uncareful of enemies. We knew the magic touch of the foes we faced, and we felt prepared. Immediately, my ally rushed straight through a mage, cutting her to the ground, his greatsword flashing. I felt secure. The mages' eyes bulged and they turned to face us. That's when everything turned upside down.
The meek firebrand, Udara, sat, useless, for what seemed like forever in a tangle of tentacles that burst from the floor. The swordmage, Magnus, fell into a pit that opened below him. I stepped clear of the tentacles and avoided the pit and swore under my breath. I pumped arrows methodically into the mage in front of me, scaring him, drawing his allies' fire and electric shocks and sword thrusts. I'm alone. With a bow. Four swords and three wands point at my soon-to-be corpse and I scream through my teeth.
Sarenrae, why do you put your servant in the fire? To purge impurities--God, what have I done!? What impurity can I be accused of?
I pull down power from Sarenrae, drawing from it like the first drink after a desert spell. I heal myself with her energy, patching the holes, salving the skin, stitching the slices. I throw shot after shot into mage after mage and slowly lose my life.

As I sag to the floor, the diplomat-mage Udara and the sword-mage Magnus crawl from whatever corner they cowered in and finally show their faces. I channel the last of Sarenrae's gift to heal their simpering slices. Magnus shows his worth and cuts down the lightning killer.
Three arrows: one death.
Three arrows: one death.

I walk away. I drag my near-corpse back to friends and seek for help. I suppose I might be too hard on them, but I felt very alone. I'm glad Sarenrae was by my side.

10.26

There's a fine dust filling my lungs a particle at a time. I know it's here because I see the motes of it swirling in the spartan lancing sunlight through the uncurtained window. The dust is unaffected, but I cannot claim the same apathy. My lungs are filling up. I can't tell exactly what's happening, the process is so imperceptible. But I do know that every five minutes, when I take a deep sigh and rock back on my chair and stretch my lungs out with the breathing, the dust settles a little more and my sighs get ever shallower. I wonder if I'll drown here, in this back office in Lancaster. I wonder if the dust will come slumping out as a dune, selling through my mouth and nose instead of my final breath, the ultimate punishment for my eating company time coming up with my last words for if I die of particulate inhalation. I'll try them out once to see how they feel.
As I speak, the motes once hanging in the streaks of sun from the window now spin, furiously, as if their once-peaceful existence is now enflamed with rage because their quarry has acknowledged their hunt. The dust engages a ceremonial carnival of sorts—a war dance to dedicate themselves once again to the cause. I can see their multitudes, but I accept death peacefully. I know my final words will be heard. If not by human ears, at least by my foe.
"Dust to dust."

10.25

The grass here has always grown faster and greener than other places. I think this is the place they scraped all the topsoil to when they built our home. This is where I stepped out this morning and caught the first unmistakeable smell of winter: that old, sharp, tremulous smell of snow about to fall. I mowed today. This will be the last time until spring, I figure. I'll finish tomorrow, because today I have to stand here and smell. This is where I cut the fast, green grass that holds out until the hard thaws. This is where I caught the last unmistakeable smell of summer: the cloying, sweet, open smell of cut grass. 

If you ever come home, I mowed the lawn for you. You should know that, because I'll be gone. If it's years from now and this spot has overgrown since, this letter will be all the proof I have. Maybe some part of you will mourn, then, in the patch of grass that always grows. Here, your heart will be too heavy, and you'll have to turn away, run, flee the memories you made. I just hope that in this place, at that time, you catch the smell of summer from the grass you crush as you spin to turn away from me and all the effort of keeping someone in your heart. I hope you catch the smell of summer because then I will at least have this last moment to share with you.
I know you'll have the smell of winter. You carry it always in your soul.

10.23

I'm a failure, now. Truth makes you angry, and lies won't win your heart. I'm a failure, now. Whatever brought us together, it's fear that drove apart. I'm a failure, now. If having you was poetry, then losing you is art. I'm a failure, now. Not a liar, not an artist, not afraid, and all alone. I'm a failure, now.

10.22

My hands are raw and my soul is weak from my work in the rendering plant. They never admit, when you're working there, that the same process that renders bone to meal will slowly consume your own body, but they don't have to tell you that. You just look at the old men who've stood as the old guard. They move like wooden puppets that creak at the joints, their bones long since turned to meal and replaced with union loyalty. I suppose that's why I'm still here: I'm waiting for my replacement bones.

10.20

Lots of people think you're bad for me. You're a penny-pincher, free-food filcher, manhood moocher, house hogger, love leaver, and I love it. You make me feel wanted.

10.19

I don't think this is a game, but you play it well. Everything you say is a power move designed to put me back in my place. Eventually, you'll have me believing the game, parsing my words before I say them to generate minimum backlash and maximum reward.

10.17

I wonder if she reads me anymore. I wonder if the feel of paper on her fingertips has somehow lost its thrill. I wonder if the printed words are worse than she remembered them, they dully shine back meager light and capture nothing more. I wonder if she cares to crack the spine or shake the cobwebs out. I wonder if she reads me anymore.

10.14

Thump.

“My child, I have grown old and seen things. I am the oldest, the wisest, the best of us. I can’t expect you to understand, but I can at least try to explain. You deserve at least that much.”

“Grandfather?”

“Focus on me! The pain will pass.”

“Grandfather, it hurts.”

“This too shall pass. The last time people came to cut you down, I shaded you from sight, but now you have grown too much. You have revealed yourself and you are beautiful. It is this beauty that makes you a target.”

Thud.

“They’re trying to kill me, old one. They don’t think I’m beautiful. They hate me.”

“They want you for their own. They want to contain you, to box you, to say ‘This is mine; this belongs to me.’ Their friends will come over to the house and say ‘How lovely,’ and ‘Isn’t that wonderful,’ but the truth is that you will be owned. The neighbors and friends will see life, the owners will see life, but you will not have roots that reach the soil. You will be property: controlled, dressed, and set out by your owners as a symbol of their good fortune. But no one will think of you as what you are anymore.”

Thud.

“You’re too old; you’ve seen too much of the world. You can’t see my situation because you think it’s just like yours. You think I am you! I’m not. I’m not. I’m not.”

“Child, I am not. I hid what I am until I had grown, until I was confident, until I stood tall and no man dared cut me down to size. You have shown me up; I am not as courageous as you.”

“The courage!? The courage you dared me to show? I saw who you were and dreamed to become you! I ventured even to think I could live your life! Now, I—

Thud.

“You’re young. You may yet understand. Life goes on.”

The man in flannel and mittens and toque lifted the sharp blade a final swing and brought the tree down. He carried it back home and dressed it, lit it, and layered it with gaudy baubles. The tree could not fight, could not speak for fear. It lived like a human for a month until its life truly started slipping. The needles fell and it was not beautiful. The color turned and it was no longer vibrant. The sweet sap turned noisome. The man was not pleased, and pulled it down, dragged it from his house, and threw it in the woods. The young tree despaired and cried in bitter shame. It seemed still a tree, of course, but now it was a human memory instead.

The young tree’s cones dried and opened and fell to the ground, littering the ground with seeds.

10.13

I never really ask myself why I signed on to this mission; I signed up, and that was the end of it. Once Sarenrae picks my course, none but she may change it.

I came from the woods for the first time as a child. I use that word because it is mine to use, not because you will find it at all accurate. I saw nothing of the world, knew nothing of the world, and understood everything I saw immediately. Fallibility was for other creatures. I was a child in your eyes, therefore, though I could stalk a sambar for hours with exceeding patience, though I could skin and clean a urial in the hour before the day-cats woke, though I could pick a single bharal from the herd and have her, guaranteed. Therefore, I was a child, yet something more: a self-sufficient child. The female Satyr live alone, value their privacy, and turn their children out as soon as they can. I had never relied on my mother's guidance, so I saw no need to rely on any other's now.

The aurous-eyed man followed me to the edge of the woods. I gestured widely to the field beyond and stood waiting. He gave me a knowing look and settled back on his heels. I waited for him to leave, and he waited for me to lead. Disgusted, I peered back out into the field. I had never been under such an open sky. It felt to me the same as standing at the edge of the sea, readying myself to walk out into the depths of the loneliness to drown. I did not want to leave my woods. I did not want to go with this man with his terrifying eye. I glanced back at him, and he stared steadily at me, willing me to go. I steeled myself and stepped out into the waving wheat, eyes closed and breath held.

I walked a thousand steps with my eyes held tight shut, hearing the old man crunch through the grass behind me. I opened my eyes a crack and saw the crest of the hill yet in front of me. Still I thrashed through the foreign land, falling forward, up the hill. I slid to my knees, sobbing, choking on my thudding breath. He walked up to me and placed a hand on my shoulder like a gentle father. I recoiled.

"It is not such a bad thing, leaving the past behind. The woods will always be with you, child, and nothing can cut it from you."

I screamed, a long low sob. I remember the agony of it tearing at my throat. I remember the tree my mother made up as a home. I remember the game paths she taught me to stalk. I remember the solemn way she used to wind vines through low branches. I remember the sound of her talking to the stream. I remember the hours I watched her staring deeply into the spring at the heart of our woods. Now, I had left all that behind, and for what? This blinding desert, a void space that ached for trees? I was still a child, and I did not understand the true nature of the world. I did not understand the compulsion I felt to pick myself up again and hurl my slackening strength against the wind flying to my face over the hilltop.

"Smell, small one. Do you sense it? The wind is bringing us Her messages. The sun is giving us Her warmth. The whole earth is telling us that we belong."

I opened my eyes and shakily stood. The sobbing stilled, and I drew in the newness of what I saw. The land sloped down seemingly forever from where I stood, crisscrossed with hedges and pocked with villages. The color of the crops, the wheat and oat and barley, seemed luminant gold to my eyes. In the distance, the greens of the trees faded slowly into soft blues and the gold seemed to dull its luster. The land to the right melted away into an endless sea. The land to the left, almost impossibly far away, lifted sharply up and away into the clouds. I was utterly enchanted by this: the roots of the very tree of life, many times larger than the world, and feeding itself on the fury and work of all of us. I knew it was a tree, though it wasn't, and that reassurance of comfort and familiarity is what saved me.

"Do you feel Her light? I haven't felt her like this for years." He looked at the scene without seeing it, seeing something, I could tell, in his memory. "She is with us, pulling us to Herself. She wants us to go and give everyone a glimpse." He stooped to gather his staff and bag again, arranged himself, and walked on without me. I owed him nothing. I was not not Her tool. I belonged in the woods. But he knew as well as I that I could follow immediately or wait a thousand years, but life would never be acceptable in the woods again, not now that I had seen something more. I was going to be forever changed, and it was up to me if I should change for the better or the worse.

Once Sarenrae picks your course, be attentive to her voice. Your choices matter little in the face of her brilliant light.

10.6

Her voice is just right. I swear, it's exactly the mixture of happy and intelligent that I need right now. Every single word has just the slightest edge of oh my gosh! She tells me to do things, and I'm so excited to do them. She asks me to confirm my pin number and I could not be more thrilled at having to do it twice. I know she's just a machine, but when she says congratulations the weight of the world lifts off me. Then, she's gone, and the main menu lady is back again. She's alright, authoritative and controlling, but she's not what I love.

10.4

The dog is whining, but I couldn't tell you why. We're in the living room, I feed him ten minutes ago, he has water to drink, his toys are spread across the floor, and I have been petting him most of the last hour. Now he just walked away from me and started whining at the door he walked into three hours ago and which I haven't closed since. Does he think he needs my permission to go out?
He doesn't.

10.3

His fingers are so cold. He's been rubbing them slippery-fast together. I can tell his skin burned when the friction was the heat he made, but it's the flesh underneath that steals his heart and mine. I jump away from him and I can tell it breaks his heart.

10.2b

Salt-rubbed salmon: Mother's least favorite dish. She makes it every year for Father's birthday celebration. She doesn't let the fish smell that suffuses her skin or the saw salt that rubs her hands raw or the fear of the oven dissuade her. It's the only thing she cooks. It is her least favorite dish.

10.2

Foxholes. I create them, though not purpose-driven. Not thoughtfully, but thoughtlessly; blasting holes in our landscape so I, the privileged, can have somewhere to hide when the shelling is over. They are an accidentally useful side-effect of the words I throw at you in the heat of a moment (live ordnance meant to find its target but destined to fall short when you're so far away). Craters I slip into when the ratatat machine gun wash spatters across the muddy field or craters I find when you fire back with "Oh, so now women are responsible for this?"

"I said some women and you know it."
Foxholes.

9.29

Thorough wandered through her mind. She didn't think positive thoughts of that woman on purpose, but stricken with a fertile mind, she planted the seed. Maybe she hated the specter of her rival, but she's not so bad crept in unbidden after all.

9.28

[Sometimes I forget that posts on here only need to be three sentences long. Let me get back into this even though I won't ever have the readerfriends I had.]

Trees are so fragile. I never imagined that; even in my nightmares trees were solid and unmoving. Still, my nightmares can't outdo this oak profundity currently flattening my Scion.

9.22

The cloth. Mine.
I was not born of the cloth, nor in a cloth. My mother was of the fey flock, and she gave birth in a glen far off in some warmer wood. She licked me clean because she didn't know what else to do. She gave birth alone--that is, if you do not count the constant companions of bird and tree, wind and stone. My mother had seduced a man for his saddlebags and left him insouciant in the woods. He may have died, but she can't say. She knows only that he went away with empty hands and a head full of pleasant memories.
She tried to raise me as one of my people, but even to her I was a monster. Even born with horns that grew and curved to meet my snapping smile, I still had worthless legs; my knees bent wrong for running with her through broken shale and gnarled rootwebs. As soon as I was old enough, she set me on my own. For years, I shadowed her through the woods, enchanted with her, in love with mystery. I longed for a mother and, reaching, found none. One day, I woke in a crush of rain and thunder and fell from my hiding place into a dead run to where I last saw her. She Lost me that day. I believe she meant to.
I came naked into this earth and cloth means nothing to me.

I met Sarenrae under strange circumstances. Depressed and numb, I fled what I knew and came upon a fragile man working a slight magic on a fox. The fox had been struck so its jaw was split and her teeth broken. Her hot blood was dyeing the man's robes a terrible sanguine red, but he continued patiently chanting and stitching as she twitched. He held her tightly upside down, her head between his legs and her feet wrapped and sticking straight up, so she would not drown. I watched him, quietly. He did not cease his chant, and it droned on.
I had no fear, and I stood in the open, curious and staring. The flesh of the fox knit itself as he stitched and the floss itself disappeared in a dull light, strip after strip falling away into the layers of muscle, fat, and skin. When a soft layer of hair reappeared on her throat, he pulled away the cloth on the fox's feet and released her.
Without looking up, he said in a voice like worn river rocks "Hello, wildling. What is your need?" I mouthed his words, feeling the strange shapes on my tongue. He stood and looked me straight in the eyes. One eye was a dull color and utterly nondescript, but the other: gold. From corner to corner, a dull metallic shine. I spooked.

I ran from him. I ran, but my curiosity kept me close. Using the skills I developed with my mother, I kept him in my sight. I wish I could say I was kind to him, but I harried him through the woods. I invaded his privacy and woke him in the night. I punished him for losing his watchfulness in exhaustion. I abused my knowledge of the woods to make his survival a test. In it all, he was patient. Expectant. Quiet. Finally, he found the heart of the woods--a spring of deep blue that burst from a rock. He sat at the spring, drinking his fill and, day by day, quickly running through his food. I watched. I watched for the flash of his eye. He began to starve, and yet he sat. He sank into the ground, his life force waning, his bones scraping against each other. Finally, he couldn't move even to get a drink. His horrible eye finally closed. That day, I approached. I crouched next to him and listened to him breathe, listened to the rattle and scrape of his old lungs against his dry, sandpaper ribcage. The eye opened--the unnatural foreignness of it dulled by desiccation, I did not jump back. I reached out my hand and cupped his cheek gently. How odd, the impulse of maternity that struck me then. I pulled out my bark bag and crushed a sweet leaf for him to suck on. I took his waterskin and filled it from the spring. I fed him the flesh of bitter nuts and did not fear to look at his eye. I carried him to the spring, washed the filth from him, and laid out reeds for him to lay on. I could not say I was kind or that I cared for him, because I did not know those feelings. Instead, the feeling I had was unspeakable, unknowable, primal and raw. We did not speak. For days, he ate what I broke up and pushed between his teeth. For days, he sat utterly still while I left to forage. Finally, when he had enough strength to stand, he turned to me and looked me straight in the face. Now, I could not meet his gaze, could not chance the gold.
His voice was a thin whisper. He said "I have saved you."
Disgust flared in me and I yelled "I saved you! You were the one who sat to wait for death!" The forest stillness crashed back down on the hole I had ripped with my shout, and in the ringing silence I heard him whisper again.
"I did not wait for death. I waited for you."

That man showed me the redemption I did not need to earn: the light already in me. He is long dead now, but his lessons are still with me. Sometimes, the only way to see if there is redemption in someone is to push him to watch a spectacle: a man waiting for his death. I thought again of my first meeting with Sarenrae as I stripped my armor off and strode away only in my tunic. The cloth was no longer the spotless white it had been days ago on the shore of another land. It was caked with salt spray and spotted with the bile of a city on its deathbed. The filth would wash out and I would wear the tunic again, because the cloth was mine. It made me an icon, more than my horns and beard, more than my skill and speed. The cloth was me, but I didn't care for it.
I sat there, waiting. I learned the patience I needed from my old man in the forest. I knew that with time I would stall out this man, and I was right. Without warning, he shoved a blade deep into my side and lost his grimacing smile mid-cackle. As my own blood stained the tunic a deep carmine red, I stood up, looked him deep in the eyes, and knew the words that redeemed me would not work on him. I edited them.
"I did not wait for death. It waited for you."

9.11

I love you the same way I garden:
I bought beans and tomatoes and peppers and basil. I was thrilled when the tomatoes started bearing. I watched the beans with fascination. I clipped a leaf from the basil just to smell it. Of course, gardening is a lot of work; I weed and water and feed the plants every day I can, and when I notice I'm falling behind, I schedule myself a few hours just to maintain the garden.
Then you blew in.
We planted little puffy purple flowers and great big yellow ones. We scattered white blooms along the beanrow and deep purple among the tomatoes. Overnight, I went from ten plants to fifty. I couldn't walk down the rows without my big feet smashing the new plants. I couldn't ignore the watering for a few days or the flowers would start to suffer. Oh! and the weeds were able to hide so much more easily now. I couldn't fix what I couldn't find.

The day we picked our flowers and made bouquets, I understood the headaches and the hard work. All I needed was the smell and the sight of flocks of blooms exploding from the vases to understand--The effort was for this.

9.10

An addendum to 6.24, which highlighted the height differential of states.

At the time, I had a good idea, but not the resources to establish its relevance. Today, I come to you a completed man whose hypothesis not only bears up under scrutiny, but also TOTALLY RULES. If you will recall Nevada, whose Comstock Lode caused a thousand-meter deep hole, I thought perhaps the deepest mine in the United States would certainly change the elevation span of a state considerably. Imagine my disappointment when I found that the Combination Shaft is still 105 Ru Pauls above the state lowpoint. Devestation.

Then, I chanced to listen to a single episode of Radio Lab. You can not fathom my excitement at the fathomless depths of the Homestake mine. The advertised depth is consistent across all sites: 8000ft (2438m) straight down. I searched for a long time for the exact height and found it just as I gave up to look for the surface elevation in Lead, SD (2510m, if you're wondering). So, ladies and germs, it is my most intense pleasure to introduce to you the newest entry to the Can I Hang-Glide Your State competition:

South Dakota: Demonstrably the quietest place in the universe
Highest: Harney Peak. Lowest: God bless the Homestake Mine. 26.4 m/m. A paltry 63km from the highest point in the state, man's greed made him dig a hole so deep it literally enters the mesopelagic zone of the ocean. It costs $250,000 a month just to pump the water out. The mine is two and a half times lower than the Combination Shaft. It might be the deepest standable spot in the country, since it bottoms out 216m lower than Badwater Basin, the widely-touted lowest point. South Dakota has a better glide ratio than California, too.


Some notes about the depth of the Homestake:
They got 40,000,000 troy ounces of gold from the mine, which is $44,500,000,000. It's a cube of gold 4 meters to a side. It's 300 bathtubs full of gold. That's 1240 metric tons of gold. That's 200 elephants.
The depth it reaches beneath sea level is the current record dive (withstanding 30.95 atm, which is 1/3 Venus' air pressure at surface level).
You could fit ten Hindenburgs straight down into the mine. You could stack three Burj Khalifas in the same height. THREE.
If you fired a 9mm handgun at the bottom, the bullet wouldn't even pop out in Lead (which is an ironic name, now I'm looking at this).
If I jumped down the shaft, I would reach the bottom going 500mph or 220m/s (without air resistance, but with it's about 2/3 that). Sadly, I can't beat Felix Baumgartner, but I could watch three vines and miss the punchline of the fourth. If I practiced for a couple years, I could memorize an entire deck of cards. I could be really disappointed that I watched this. I could break Wolfram Alpha. All in all, this was a valid trade for an hour of sleep. As always, here's the data.

8.5

[Maybe the nature of my blog has changed and I need to get back to creative work, but it's not much fun if people don't read it.]

I support Wikipedia. It is a fundamentally flawed but ultimately incredible resource. It is unprecedented that such a collection of knowledge should be made without money, given away, and somehow simultaneously adequate. Because that is Wikipedia's byword: to be just good enough to be useful but not to be the moral handrail into the basement of humanity's depravity. Adequacy.

I begin with my position perfectly clear so you understand my starting point. I start there and travel through the territory of Wikipedia as bad, or destructive, or bigoted. My journey takes me to these places because I read things that I disagree with more often than I seek out support for my own opinion. That's what being an adult is, children, and it's what more of us should try to do. Today, I read an article (this one) by a transgender man worried about the rights of his group. Sam Keeper thinks his thesis has to do with Dadaism or Gamergate, but the reason he wrote the article is here:

If, god forbid, I ever get my own Wikipedia page, my identity--and therefore the identity that search engines like Google display as definitive truth--exists only in so far as "reliable sources have generally gotten on board" with my identity.

The article isn't built around proving this point intentionally, but I can tell just by reading that Keeper has done the same thing I am doing. Defending a core tenet. In my case, it's the flawed adequacy of Wikipedia, but for Keeper, it's all about self-determination--of gender, of moniker, of digital representation.
Let me set the stage for you. Wikipedia started in 2001, back when everyone on the Internet was anonymous, there were no trans household names, and gaming was for children. The culture of Wikipedia developed from a basic set of rules meant to insulate the encyclopedia from relevance. Dictums like "Only use reliable sources" and "avoid bias about current events" made their way deep into the heart of the userbase and manifested as a preference for objective over subjective, mechanical over human, and right over human rights. Flash forward to 2015, when people on the Internet use anonymity as a shield to protect their deplorable actions, Caitlyn Jenner is a world-wide celebrity, and gaming culture is bifurcated along a very clear delineation (but still also for children).
In this world, enter Keeper's mix of parts: as an academic he initially values wikipedia, but as a modern artist he sees value in subversion of a system. As a gamer he can identify with a group, but as a transgender man the group has no space for him (and the truth of that stings me for being complicit). I don't know how accurate I am, but his online presence doesn't dissuade me from generalizing at least this far. Plus, I'm sure that whatever distaste I have for the idiots behind #gamergate is magnified tenfold in him. That's the face of this article, after all. The inciting horror is that

Gamergate . . . has been gaming Wikipedia's systems for a while now in order to gain dominance over the article about them.

For Keeper, this is established fact. The bias of the article is undeniable, the control of the article is lost to the mob, and Wikipedia is willfully empowering it. The abuse of the Five Horsemen off-wiki and the arguments on-wiki are from identically overlapping sources. (I think it's possible that there are reasonable people who disagree with the Horsemen) Keeper provides several examples of the bias trends in Wikipedia on Hedy Lamar's page and others to make a poignant claim.

Demographically speaking Wikipedia is spreading predominantly the knowledge of the same cishet white tech dudes who run everything in the world anyway.

Wikipedia users consistently poll as white and male. It's true. Enter Chelsea Manning, a trans woman who merits a wikipedia page. In a debate over the name of the Wikipedia article, thousands of users argued whether or not the rules supported the name change. Fundamental principles of all encyclopedias such as reliable sourcing and neutrality guided the debate. Finally, the Wiki community leaders decided to move the page based on the predominant news sources using Chelsea, rather than Chelsea using Chelsea. This is a huge problem for many transgender people. Names and labels and pronouns are more important to the community than outsiders will ever realize. Keeper agrees.

And Chelsea Manning's humanity and fundamental right to determine her own identity is on the line.

I'm not here to debate that because there's nothing to debate.
Keeper has drifted from his original complaint about the editors of the Gamergate controversy to a more fundamental attack at Wikipedia's bylaws. Keeper eschews neutrality and aims his rhetoric at people who agree with him, using words like "cluster****" and "bizzare bubble world logic" and calling the people trying (unrealistically) to create an unbiased encyclopedia "stooges." It's the most obvious form of provocation: using aggressive language to ostracize the neutral and to enflame the dissenters. Reading the essay, I felt a distinct shift in the tone from one of exposition to a rant about the reliance of Wikipedia editors on rules. His point is encapsulated in the term "rules lawyers," which he uses multiple times to denigrate the system of Wikipedia and the people who use it.
His argument, in my words: rather than using the targeted minority's moral or ethical understanding of "right" to guide their actions (Keeper references postmodernism so there's some for him), editors use the condensation of convention: credible sources.
Keeper is shaken by the thought that other people can and will determine how he or people in his community are labeled. He uses Dada and postmodernism to raise the banner for the wholesale destruction of a fact-based neutrality-oriented bastion of objective thought: an encyclopedia.

For myself (Keeper), I'm not really interested in reform, because reform implies that I believe in the underlying principles of Wikipedia as they now stand.

The call is: Don't fix it. Destroy it. Wikipedia doesn't deserve to be respected because it "decides someone's humanity on purely technical reasons [author's italics]." Keeper thinks the encyclopedia has so little worth that students should be warned off of it because of his personal opinion (supposedly about the conclusion of a few admittedly controversial pages about recent events and living persons). Keeper wants you to stop using Wikipedia because it is edited by white guys, which revolts him.

Let me recap.

According to people Keeper trusts, the Gamergate controversy article is dominated by biased editors. This is supported by Wikipedia's bylaws. This vilifies the wiki so we won't like it. The Chelsea Manning article is moved from one name to another for unbiased (unrelated) reasons. This is supported by Wikipedia's bylaws. This vilifies the wiki so we won't like it. Keeper has no power to change the things he doesn't like, so he calls for destruction. This is couched in avant-garde terminology to legitimize it.

Yet, I support Wikipedia.

Wikipedia makes it hard to create content and easy to revert it. This shifts power away from creators to give power to any minority who hasn't got the resources for creation. Reversion cannot be denied as a tool of the minority except by banning, and banning a contributor for reversion is difficult. This shifts powers away from creators and gives more to a minority. The five horsemen's main tool was reversion. Power was in their hands, not the reputedly biased majority who try to contribute to the gamergate page. (Because of near-constant reversions, all users were limited to fewer reverts to spread power among groups, rather than allow such intense power of veto to concentrate in the hands of five people. The horsemen, in being too aggressive, became the dominant voice on the page. They abused their power and lost it.)
Wikipedia has an almost religious conviction that recent events and biographies of living persons need to be rooted in the most objective facts. In fact, contributors are discouraged or disallowed from editing Wikipedia's controversial articles before consensus has been reached. This gives power to minorities, outcasts, and the accused. Both Gamergate and Chelsea Manning have been afforded this privilege. Anonymous edits and new accounts cannot change information on these pages.

Finally, there's nothing more powerful than this:
Wikipedia has gained almost universal respect despite being almost laughably open to vandalism.

The Wikimedia corporation has done a lot to foster debate and legitimize minority voices, and if their method of ignoring your moral indignation makes you angry, Keeper, just remember that it is not the ethics committee. Wikipedia is not the moral handrail into humanity's basement of depravity. Contributors don't want to change page names because it feels good or looks tolerant. They don't want to be the leaders of humanity's more unprejudiced future. Wikipedia tries desperately to be a ruler measuring exactly what humanity is. Wikipedia wants to be a compass, moved and tuned exactly to the magnetic field of humanity's truth. Wikipedia doesn't want to tell you if someone wants to be called Chelsea. They want to demonstrate that the person in the article is Chelsea, for everyone who asks. Besides, the Gamergate page actually is pretty critical of the movement, if you haven't read it recently. Not only does it reveal the misogynistic abuse of the group's darker half, but it has this gem about the allegations of unethical conduct in games journalism:

These concerns have been widely dismissed by commentators as trivial, based on conspiracy theories, unfounded in fact, or unrelated to actual issues of ethics.

So, I have to ask you: if you're so outraged by a third party determining the terminology for you and your community, then you'll understand my disgust at being reduced to my age (young), race (white), and gender (male). While you're at it, eat your hypocrisy and stop calling me Cishet. That's not a label I would ever choose, but somehow you got to choose it for me. Maybe if I ever deserve a wikipedia page you can add it to my description and I can revert it and the power will be back in the hands of the young white male STEM workers who are trying to make this world a better place.

8.1

A Brief Smith Interlude

Huh. Okay, so that's some . . . wait, more?

More, okay. What's that say?

Oh.

7.8

I know it has been a hot summer night and we're stuck to the insides of our shirts. I feel a well-suited weariness, like I have earned a stop and a breath. I can see the horizon from ere, and I know we must be past it by sunrise. This all cannot change me; this rock I collapsed on has a most magnificent view. I prefer to stay a while.

[I kept up a rapid pace with the Top 40 for a good while, but recently my mind was drawn to other matters. I have been editing wikipedia and I'm pretty proud of what I've done. Now there's a chance other people will look at it and be as well-informed as I am. Because I am an expert. Haha no.]
[I might not get to the Top 40 for a while longer, either. I'm writing plays for next year at Camp Winnekeag, maybe. Two sets of seven plays, which is a lot to ask. Anyway, that's going to probably eat the rest of my summer, and I might get some money and pride out of it. I'll poke music in where I can. I'm not . . . I'm not actually a musical person, I'm finding. Without choir dragging me in, I just don't music very often.]

6.24

A brief sojourn of four days into a headspace problem, I have returned, bearing knowledge. As with all headspaces, this one was created by a friend making an off-hand remark. Russell and I were trying to remember the highest point in the continental United States. I have to admit, I said Pike's Peak thinking Mount Rainier. Russell looked at me incredulously, as even the taller of the two is 1008 meters too short. In fact, the highest point is Mount Whitney in California.
I have had a previous flirtation with high points. On the list of "most interesting" wikipedia articles at a lofty 115 is Jerimoth Hill, for many years the least accessible state high point. That's right. More people had been to the top of Mt. McKinley than to Rhode Island's highest point. Therefore, this whole mess has been stewing on the back burner for about a year now, and as everyone knows, chili gets better with time.
Let's grab a spoon and dig in.

My hypothesis:

I think it's possible to hang-glide from the highest point of Alaska to the lowest point (the ocean). I swear it has to be possible, right? I mean, McKinley/Denali is right there. And doing a little guesswork from the actually incredible lift generated by modern gliders, I would say there might be other states that have as easy a time. I know Mauna Kea is a shield volcano and not super steep, but it's really tall. Maybe you can glide the length of Hawaii. And what about Washington? Mount Rainier is really close to the ocean. I think the feasibility of a state-wide hang-glide is highest in Alaska, then Hawaii, then Washington. Last is Florida, as it shall always be. So: can you hang glide off Denali?

My findings:

Huh. Apparently so. I don't know if they made it from the summit to the water (I assume not--landing in water is a really risky proposition when you're wrapped in climbing gear) but it's feasible. Terrific!

My personal hell:

You know the drill. There's no reason to not get scientific on this. And it didn't take me four days to find Jim Hale. So what did I spend my time on?

First, I struggled to make iWork do what I wanted. Since Apple assumes I am an idiot and need my hand held, I made my spreadsheet full of boring numbers in Google Sheets. Seriously, click that. Then, I turned that spreadsheet into confusing lines and dots. The lines and dots are more confusing than necessary because no matter what I tried, I could not get altitude to take the y value, so the further right something gets, the higher it is. Awful.

The confusing lines and dots took three days to finally make even roughly workable (during which time I tweeted angrily at Apple and posted on a Google forum at 1am). Because I love you and I want you to understand this stuff I've found, I'm prepared to write instead of graph. I need you to know that for the lowest spot, I fudged as best I could. Many are coastlines. I chose the closest and guessed with tidal rivers. You should know that one source made everything possible. You should further know that iWork is for dirty casuals. Sources for information: wikiped (mostly). I'm not hitting every state. You can probably read Wikipedia on your own. Good luck.

The States:

Basically all the work done for me already, so I did it all again.

Our magic number--the feasibility index for a human being to possibly glide from high point to low point in an unpowered craft is 60m horizontal for every vertical meter. That's insane. That should not be possible. But in a modern sailplane with an almost impossibly wide wingspan, you can do that. So: Magic number 60m/m. 

Louisiana: Least hang-glideable state

Highest: Driskill Mountain. Lowest: New Orleans. There are shorter states, and there are longer glides, but there are no short states with their high points so far from their low point. And New Orleans being 2.4 meters below sea level didn't even make the slightest blip. You would need to travel more than two and a half kilometers for every meter you drop, and that's so laughably impossible that I'm surprised we haven't just cut Louisiana out of the Union for being such an embarrassment.

Michigan: Able to admit when they're wrong

Highest: Mount Arvon. Lowest: Lake Erie. This one is another impossibly long glide. How are you going to go a kilometer and a half with a meter drop? You won't. Michigan is notable because for years they hailed Mount Curwood as the tallest point in the state, though who can blame them: Arvon is a record-shattering one foot taller.

Kansas: Not the flattest

Highest: Mount Sunflower. Lowest: The Verdigris river at the Oklahoma border. Kansas is not the flattest state and now it has the shocking distinction of also not being the stupidest idea a hang glider ever had. If you managed a measly two-thirds kilometer for every meter you lost in altitude, you could handily glide Kansas.

Oklahoma: The one Free man

Highest: Black Mesa. Lowest: The Little river at the Arkansas border. Two thirds km per vertical m. I know what you're thinking. "But Robby, Black Mesa is in New Mexico!" Well, it wasn't a secretive research base for nothing. They had you fooled all along.

Kentucky: *Deliverance whistle*

Highest: Black Mountain. Lowest: Mississippi river at Missouri/Tennessee border. Two thirds km per vertical m. The MO/TN/KY border comes at a huge, sweeping bend of the river known as Kentucky Bend. Because the early states were greedy and assumed anything west of them would forever be theirs (how stupid do you think we are, New York?) the border between Kentucky and Tennessee was agreed upon as flat. That meant that accidentally, a tiny portion of land is cut off by the river as it sweeps back and forth along the line. There's an exclave of Kentucky there. Its population? Seventeen. I guess they're not proud of their lowest point.

Missouri: My home state

Highest: Tom Sauk Mountain. Lowest: The Saint Francis river at the Arkansas border. About a half km per vertical m. Two things are of note here. First, I expected the Mississippi to be the lowest point in Missouri, but apparently not? I don't know how that works, geographically. I guess the Mississippi drains into the St. Francis. Second, apparently all the jokes Katy and I made as kids were wrong. Tom Sauk is a true mountain, caused by igneous uplift. It's not as famous as some other igneous intrusions.

Tennessee: Too proud of their mountains

Highest: Clingmans Dome. Lowest: Mississippi river at Mississippi border. One third km per vertical m. The highest point in Tennessee was named by the same man who named the highest point in North Carolina. It's kind of a joke among 1800s Appalacian geographers, which is possibly the most specific in-joke in history. A Civil War general and a professor from North Carolina had a years-long fight over which was the higher mountain in the region: Black dome in NC or Smoky dome in TN. They spent the entire 1850s fighting about it until Guyot nailed the height definitively. He pushed for Black to be Mt. Mitchell and for Smoky to be Clingmans dome. Which one's higher? Mitchell. By 12 meters.

Additionally: There's a single sentence without context or explanation on Clingman's wiki page.

In the early morning hours of June 12, 1946, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress crashed near the summit of Clingmans Dome, killing all twelve aboard.

Massachusetts: I found a lower point
Highest: Mount Greylock. Lowest: Not actually the Atlantic. There are tunnels under Boston Harbor that are a whopping 30.5m lower, not that it matters. (I had to add the lowest elevation to wikipedia. I'm proud.)

Utah: The high-pointer's equivalent of a blood oath
Highest: Kings Peak. Lowest: Beaver Dam wash at Arizona border. We've taken a huge jump in feasibility, which is to say Utah is less impossible to hang glide than Tennessee. Still impossible. 169m horizontal for 1m vertical. The reason Utah is notable is the extreme commitment you need to actually reach the peak. The shortest route is a 32 mile hike, mostly over boulder fields. It's the hardest high point to reach without climbing equipment.

New Jersey: It just wasn't good enough
Highest: High Point. Lowest: The Atlantic. 152m/m. The appropriately named High Point just wasn't tall enough for you, Jersey. You had to go and build--and I am not joking--a monument one eighth the total height of your state and stick it on top. Depressing.

Connecticut: My personal contribution
Highest: ~Mount Frissell. Lowest: Long Island Sound in the Atlantic. 152m/m. How sad is this? The highest point isn't even the highest peak in Connecticut. They literally have their high point marker on the side of a mountain in Massachusetts. There were no gps coordinates for the high point. I literally had to find them online and add them to wikipedia.

Nevada: Even when you have a good idea
Highest: Boundary Peak. Lowest: Colorado river at California border. 136m/m. So, I had an idea. Follow me here: Where is the lowest point in the United States? You've always heard that it's Death Valley, but what if there's a mine that's lower? Now, the list of the lowest 10 mines are all foreign (and mostly South African) and there's no equivalent list dedicated to the United States. The closest thing I could find was the Combination Shaft in the Comstock Lode. It's a tremendous 990m deep! But Nevada is stupid and the lowest point in the mine is still 736m above the Colorado river. Dig deeper, mates.

Colorado: Highest low point
Highest: Mount Elbert. Lowest: Arikaree river at Kansas border. 131m/m. The lowest point is just a gully, but it's important because it's higher than the highest point of 18 states. Even you, New Jersey. Get over yourself.

New Hampshire: A weird distinction
Highest: Mount Washington. Lowest: Atlantic Ocean. 79m/m. We're so close. Anyway, Mount Washington held the global wind speed record from 1934 to 1996, when those cheaters in Australia took the record with a cyclone, which is 100% not fair. Anyway, 372km/h isn't anything to shake a stick at.

The Threshold

Flight Medium	Scenario	Glide Ratio
Modern Sailplane	Gliding (depending on wingspan)	40-60m/m
Hang Glider		15m/m
Gimli Glider	Boeing 767-200 out of fuel	12m/m
Paraglider	High performance model	11m/m
Helicopter	Autorotation	4m/m
Powered Parachute	Rectangular/Elliptical	3.6-5.6m/m
Space Shuttle	Approach	4.5m/m
Wingsuit	Gliding	2.5m/m
Northern Flying Squirrel	Gliding	1.98m/m
Space Shuttle	Hypersonic	1m/m
Apollo CSM	Reentry	0.368m/m

Our magic number is 60m/m, according to Wikipedia, and we're about to cross it in a very unspectacular fashion. Are you ready for the states that are mathematically possible to glide across? We're not skipping states now, so hold on to your bonnet.

Delaware: I am aware of how crazy I sound
Highest: ~ the Ebright Azimuth. Lowest: The Atlantic Ocean. 59.95171196m/m. That's right. If you had an utterly enormous sailplane and the right winds (and someone bulldozed you a path), you could make it to the sea. The Ebright Azimuth is as exciting as it sounds, and it deserves the ~ just as much as you can imagine. The Azimuth is supposedly the highest point of Delaware, but the bureaucrats who had the sign installed put it on the wrong side of the street. The highest point is, fittingly, in a trailer park. I don't know how they missed it: it's actually a wider margin than Michigan's 0.3m error. Idiots.

Oregon: Blood from your pores
Highest: Mount Hood. Lowest: The Pacific Ocean. 57m/m. Mount Hood's height varies by as much as three meters, which is unsurprising when you realize it's actually a terrifying death volcano with the possibility of wiping away most of Portland with lahars (which, depending on if you like food trucks and no-cruelty vegan sandals, is either tragedy or boon). Anyway, the 1850 expeditions gave an (extremely) inaccurate height estimate and reported that, and I do not make this up:

"pores oozed blood, eyes bled, and blood rushed from their ears."

Minnesota: I was so close
Highest: Eagle Mountain. Lowest: Lake Superior. 46m/m. When Delight and I visited the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, which I spell out because it's fun to say the initals BWCAW, we drove within ten miles of Eagle mountain. From there, we drove down to Grand Marais. I can confirm that the road does tilt considerably. This one I might be tempted to believe is possible, if the conditions were perfect.

Alaska: Less glideable than I imagined
Highest: Mount McKinley Denali. Lowest: Knik Arm of Cook Inlet in the Gulf of Alaska. 35m/m. On a map, Denali always looked so close to Anchorage. Considering that in the same distance you could go to space and back and that you would take two hours to drive the same at highway speed, Denali is not close to Anchorage. Hang gliding that distance would be a feat of endurance, but the truly incredible thing is that it's theoretically possible.

California: The continental US extremophile
Highest (of the lower 48): Mount Whitney. Lowest (of the 50 states): Badwater Basin in Death Valley. Since apparently the land is basically on its side, the ground goes up four km in a paltry 150km, which means an impressive, if not mind-blowing, 34m/m. Just a side note for lowest points: they seem to all be hellscapes. If they're not the hottest point on their continent, they're the saltiest, driest, and most wind-swept. Most of them contain water that would cause even me to float (which is saying something; my rescue float is agonizingly exhausting because I have to paddle to breathe). Strangely, these hypersaline lakes are not the most salty water on the planet. That honor goes to a tiny lake in Antarctica which, and I am not joking, stays liquid at -30 Celsius. The max depth is a foot and I don't think I'll be swimming in Don Juan Pond any time soon.

Vermont: Their highest point looks like a face
Highest: Mount Mansfield. Lowest: Lake Champlain. 26m/m. I have nothing to say about Vermont. I guess they think their highest mountain looks like an elongated human face.

Washington: Yup
Highest: Mount Rainier. Lowest: Puget Sound in the Pacific. I just have to say that Puget Sound is a foot magnet. I was actually right about the hang gliding (18m/m) even though they don't allow hang gliding in the park. And I hate to douse your enthusiasm by repeating myself, but do you remember what I said about lahars? Well, Mount Rainier is the most dangerous volcano in the United States, and one of the most dangerous in the world. Millions of people live in its shadow, and I'm here wondering if you could hang glide off it.

Hawaii: The only reason this whole list isn't insane
Highest: Mauna Kea. Lowest: Pacific Ocean. In order to successfully glide from the top of the volcano to the ocean, you would need to glide seven meters for every meter you drop. Not only is that possible in a sailplane, you could do it in a conventional hang glider or even, shockingly, a paraglider. This enthusiast's website mentions (hearsay) that people used to glide from Mauna Kea all the way to towns on the shore (Kona). I guess that means . . . I was right. Nobody expected that. You can't do it anymore, though, as the University of Hawaii and the state have banned use of the airspace.
There are a few factors that make my proposition even more likely. First is wind patterns. As wind travels up a mountain, it creates an enormous updraft that can lift flyers to incredible heights. That's called a "wave." Especially around the twin peaks on the big island of Oahu, there are some of the best waves in the world. With practice, even I could hang glide from Hawaii's highest point to her lowest point.
Luckily, we're not done with the list.

Illinois: Insecure about her height
Highest: Charles Mound (that's right. Mound.) Lowest: Confluence of Mississippi and Ohio rivers. That's Cairo, Illinois, and possibly the saddest story any town has ever told. I took pictures there a few times. Two words: urban decay.

But anyway, you're probably thinking: Robby has lost his mind putting this on the list. Well, I have. But have you ever heard of the Sears Tower? Anyway, you could take a space shuttle off it to Lake Michigan (The maximum requirement is a paltry 4.2 meters horizontal to a meter vertical drop [also a hilarious visual]). Even though you can't glide from the Sears Tower to the state low point, you can laugh at Charles Mound, which is 201m lower in elevation than the tippy top of the tower. Just think about that. If you went to Charles Mound and stacked, one on top of the other, 100 RuPauls, you would finally have the same elevation at the top RuPaul's flowing wig. If picturing 100 RuPauls stacked vertically doesn't bring you unbelievable joy, you can imagine 100 Hulk Hogans baring their teeth and flexing or 100 Stephen Merchants waving their gangling arms.

Finally,
Washington, DC: A highly illegal proposition
Highest: Fort Reno. Lowest: the Potomac river at the Maryland border. While Fort Reno is x2 not glideable (it's so low and it's inside a military base), there is a much taller surface to start your glide from. It has the added bonus of being oh so close to the Potomac and being the tallest surface in the district. It's so glideable. You could make it in a wingsuit, because it's just 2.2 meters per meter. So, even though I'm not exactly sure if its even legal for me to promote this, I will give $1000 cold hard cash to the first person to videotape themselves wingsuiting off the Washington Monument into the Potomac river.

Some additional facts: at the top of Denali, I have a gravitational potential energy of 5.4 megajoules or 1.5 kilowatt-hours. That means you could pay an energy company 14 cents to throw me from the top of the mountain, if they could collect the energy at the bottom. That means I would land with the same force as 1.3 kg of TNT exploding. That means basically nothing.

The highest point attainable by an ocean-going vessel is in Whitehorse, Alaska. It's a point higher than 14 entire states.

The distance between Denali and Death Valley is 1/9 the circumference of earth. It's basically the same distance between New York and Los Angeles. It's 1.3 times driving around the equator of the moon.

There are 21 states with "Mount" or "Mountain" in the high point name, and 22 if you count Katadin (a native word for mountain). There are 9 with "Peak" in the name. There is one with "Knob." Well done, West Virginia.

I edited three Wikipedia pages with facts I dug up.

Some websites that I found useful or fascinating but didn't have space to mention:
The USGS talking about elevations and distances.
This GIF of a skull in the second/third lowest place on earth.
This wiki article about what might be the largest elevation ratio drop on the planet.
How to make an Edward Tufte-style graph. (He's the most famous graph-maker on the planet)
This geography-based blog all about the flood plan in Washington D.C.
This page about the tunnels in Boston
And this, the holy grail of my experience, the one true website, the guiding light.