About that thing · 2:14pm Aug 7th, 2015
Hi.
...How's it uh, going?
...
I've got the chapter done! I swear, all my editors are up to it, most of them had a look through it (excpet Tofty, get on that lad,) It just uh... may not... be out... this Monday.
ANY QUESTIONS CAN BE DIRECTED TO JBL! HIS FAULT NOT MINE!
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But in all seriousness, sorry about the delay. To make up some of the time, here's an extract from a completely non-fanfic project I'm kicking around for shits and giggles, its a rough draft but hey, its something to waste five minutes at work on if you're bored.
Yes you have.
You think you haven’t but you have.
It doesn't matter what age you were, it doesn’t matter what you were on, if anything, it doesn’t matter how tired you were that night, or how out of it you were. It doesn’t matter you think you were only imagining things because it was hallowe'en or someone told you a scary story before you went to sleep that one night. It doesn’t even matter what age you were.
Its not something you grew out of, something only kids’ and their overactive imagination dream up for one reason or another. You are just more clever at attributing it to something else. It helps you sleep at night.
You think you haven’t but you have.
You’ve noticed it.
Its not right, its not normal, it isn’t supposed to be there.
But it is.
It is right, it is normal and yes, it is supposed to be there, just as much as you are supposed to be here, right now, in this vale of tears and sorrows.
Do you think those ignorant savages years ago didn’t just rationalize it away too? No, of course you don’t. Why, they were ignorant, stupid. Pagans who didn’t know better, or Christians who burned books, they wrote all those legends and myths and all that other, superstitious dreck dreamed up on dark lonely nights to rationalize actions of ordinary human monsters. Werewolf attacks where just poor ignorant peasants trying to make sense of the actions of a peadophile in their midst. Witchcraft was just some poor woman being blamed for a village’s bad harvests. It’s only by the light of reason and science we have come to our enlightened age.
Our enlightened age, where we still invent new myths and monsters and legends and share them over the internet rather than over the fireplace. Our enlightened age where we are locked in our rooms, lit only by the pale screens and all alone, physically cut off from the world yet still fooling ourselves that we can see the world for what it is, just as soon as we feel like looking up once every few hours. Our enlightened age, where everything we hear is, more or less, taken on faith, just because someone more clever than you say such is so.
Keep lying to yourself that you’re independently minded. You aren’t. No one truly is, for no man is an island, human beings aren’t built that way, we aren’t supposed to think that way either. We literally cannot truly be free like that. We’re not God.
That seat has long since been claimed and trust me, it’s still warm.
You’ve seen it. You’ve heard it. You’ve felt it.
It was those shadows that kept disappearing around corners no matter how often you shouted challenges and chased them. A trick of the eyes, you were only seven at the time after all. It was that time you were sitting on the doorstep of your house, waiting for someone to show up to unlock the door to let you in because being the fool child you were, you forgot your keys that morning, it was night and the bushes started whispering to you as they shook in the wind. It was the monster in your closet who was your imaginary friend only a year before. It was that time in the woods and the growl you heard that was a bit too deep to be any animal you knew of. It was that man on the bus late at night who you don’t remember getting on, sitting at the back seat with a hood and never moving no matter how the bus jutted or tilted. The brush along your hair at night that wakes you up to find yourself alone in your darkened home, just as you were when you had gone to sleep. Its the abandoned stairwell, the thing in the darkness that’s not really there, the child on the side of the road you passed late at night who you looked back at, only to find she was never there.
Its their world too. They have as much a right to be there as you do. Sure, it isn’t their only home and yes, they are rare. They were rare back in the good old days too, that never changed, in fact nothing has changed. Why would it?
One would think with over seven billion people on the planet such phenomena would be more commonplace, just because there are more people to run into them. You’d be right to assume such, for that is exactly the case. We live in a time when the claims of such encounters of such sights, of stories of such things are now so numerous as to be beyond counting, so common as to be worthy of dismissal out of hand. Its funny how the biggest phenomena of our age is we ignore growing evidence to the contrary of our held positions out of hand. Its funny how you think the world cares about whether you believe it or not. Its funny you still cling to such an old, outdated superstition.
It’s funny but no one is laughing.
This world is dark, it is very dark, they are dark. They are afraid, they have needs and wants and desires just as you do. Just not the same, just different, so incomprehensible and alien as yours are to them. Its your fault their world is dark too, or, rather it’s man’s fault, but there’s no need here for a history lesson and the lies of snakes.
You were right however, it is rational, it is reasonable, it is logical. All very reasonable rational and logical. Why are they here? Simple, they are here because they are a part of the world too. They, them, it and that, this thing and whatever it is that’s scared away all the cats in the neighbourhood the other week. How can they do they things they do? Obviously because there are mysteries of the universe they understand and we don’t, that we can’t. Or do you honestly expect them to fully understand how man can do the things man is able to do from their persepctive? Arrogance will get you nowhere. But how can this be rational? The answer to that is simple; I don’t know. Nobody alive does. But they must be for we live in a rational world do we not? Fire burns, gravity works, but for some reason the guy across from you at the bar who’s been looking at you all night has no reflection in the landlord’s mirror behind the taps. To be ignorant of all the laws of the universe, is not the fault of the universe, you must not lose faith just because you do not understand, you’d never get anywhere with that attitude.
You just need to accept that there are some things you will never be able to understand this side of the mortal coil. Such as the existence of evil. But how can evil exist in the world, one might wonder, when the world has no means by which to measure it?
The answer to that is as simple as it is frightful in its implication. Its the same reason you unknowingly engaged in polite conversation with the psychopath who shared a seat with you on the train on his way back from murdering his wife and children and leaving their bodies were none may find them. The same reason a robber baron may leave a hundred thousand people jobless and homeless, debauch himself at night and then sleeping like a baby before doing it all over again the next day. The same reason the kindest man in the world could pull a trigger and end the life of a child without a moment’s hesitation. Its the same reason the rain falls upon the fields of the bad man as well as the good. That answer is choice, they are as capable of it as you are, and the same silent God who saw fit to let you live after you casually told that poor girl to go kill herself as you laughed and laughed is the same one who saw fit to let those things continue their own wretched existence.
For even the wicked need a place to live.
Cool story bro, might be hard to make that poem longer though. Nice idea though.
3302322 Poem? Its meant to be a forward.
Dude. Even if you updated only once every month you would probably be praised for it because it would be a dam site better then what's the standard on this site.
'Pulls out big knife'
So... you know. Ten second head start.
3302332 Very well, once is a month shall be the new standard we strive towards.
3302327 It's rather lengthy and vague.
3302336 From the second I closed this page I knew a comment like that was coming.
Ah yes, the reality of the cold universe we live in. Why is it so easy to sin, yet so hard to right? Why does it seem like we're fighting against the natural order to improve our lives? If you were to spend one day obsessively laying destruction, and then two days devoted to prosperity, what would you sow greater? Truly, it's a testament we've made it this far at all.
Nice little piece you've written there, mate.
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So why exactly might the chapter be delayed?
Good start you have there. I'm intrigued by what is to follow it.
As for the delay... JBL, maybe you should change you avatar to a scapegoat.
Things that go bump in the night do so because we turned off their light, and in the darkness behind our eyes where we are ourselves the most "us" we never realize just how crazy we really are. Probably because we've never been anything else to judge it by.
We are all a little mad here aren't we?
3302327 what ever happened to the riddle code thingy? i was really looking forward to seeing the solution.
3303048 Handy fucked himself over by losing the damned key, so he has to crack it himself so that he can continue helping others do it.
At first you had my interest. Then you had my attention. But now, now you have my...uhm...I'm trying to find a not-quite-synonym-that-happens-to-definitively-be-a-step-up-from-the-previous-word-used...
3303328 really? where did he say that? not that i dont believe you, im just curious.
3303638 One of the past few recent blogs, can't remember which one.
I'm starting it now I SWEAR.
That's a lot of stuff to read. I don't even know who you are. How can you possibly assume one so very integral to society as I has time to read your thing-stuff?
3305119 Because you already wasted your time finding and subsequently writing a comment on my little corner of the internet.
I have you now.
3308688
You fool. I am timeless. How can one waste that which is infinitesimal and incalculable? You've gained naught but the ebon scorn of my jaundiced benediction/urine.
3310711 If you are timeless than you by definition can't waste time and I can therefore rightfully expect you to spend time reading my word things the same way I can expect a man with infinite money to spend it.
3314049
You miscalculate. What if I'm a stingy curmudgeon of a fuckpistol with my infinite time? I have all the time in the world. But I have no desire to spend any of it on the likes of you. That speaks volumes about the both of us.
3315830 Well then you are also a liar, because you are already spending that time on me.
3316511
Somewhat. I have to do something while I take a dump, right?
3316696 No.
3316714
Fair enough.