Landscape painting comma wordy

This is a story where nothing happens and there's barely any characters. It's also very short. Some stories have to be direct, without diversions or ornament, even if it makes it easy on the writer and harder on the reader.

Bronze, if well made, can theoretically be more molecularly stable than pure gold. And it's only made by human hands. As much as there's nothing less natural about things humans make than things that grow in nature because humans are still a part of nature, it feels like that matters.

THE BRONZE GARDEN
(Syndetic, symmetric, not synthetic, not cyclic)

Metaphor is the wellspring of human language, stories, abstraction, reflection, self-awareness, everything that makes us people.

The valley lies next to the mountain, but never under her shadow. The sun loves to see them together and walks long, lingering loops to give them all its light. The rain also loves them and gives the mountain a rich growth of flora, yet still sparse compared to the valley, when the water runs from the mountain in a flood through the valley and she's drowned with green, hot and wet and filled with deep, loose earth being bound by the deep roots of the trees. Life blooms everywhere.

The name of the mountain is Impulse. The name of the valley is Intention.

A rainbow appears in the cascades of the waterfall. The human sees the beauty of the rainbow and seeks to depict the beauty, to show it to their brothers and sisters. There is no human here. No hand guiding the growth of hanging moss in the branches of the trees, reaching down the the ground. A forest of curtains with no rooms to close in.

In a grand old alder tree, among a hundred shades of green and white, rainwater gathers in an indentation and drips in slow fat drops. A drop falls on a spiderweb, where it sticks. A lone ray of sunshine among the shadows of the leaves reaches the water drop and it glitters like an infinite universe. There is no sun and the stars glitter over the mountain, quiet and lonely in the night. One perfect moment hangs in stillness for all time. There is never enough time. Time marches on and the wounds heal and the vegetation spreads.

A wide reach of trees sprawl across the valley and covers much of the river. Standing, glowing, growing, living and dying. And underneath the wondrous green gold they die and rot, turning into black earth that nourishes the life. An ant waits in the dark, after losing the chemical trail it has followed. Without sensory stimuli to respond to it's as good as lifeless. A seed falls in front of the ant, so slightly sweet, and the ant comes to life to feed. A small lizard eats the ant, a fish eats the lizard, a bird eats the fish and the bird, with a broken wing, dies alone. Germs eat the bird and shit fertilizer and the cycle of life goes on. The ant is all things. There is no ant.

Summer lasts forever and a day. Winter comes from time to time. Blinding, howling storm covers the mountain. Precarious sheets of ice and snow topple over in avalanches of unstoppable force. The valley is a field. She is shining white in the sun. She is smooth, quiet. She lies still, forever.

Life in the valley never goes away. It resumes when the hot rains come down and the snow melts away. It sparks amid the brutal floods and on bare rock washed clean of soil. It grows into a fire that burns all the green to ash. It grows again, nurtured by the fertile ash. Always moving, growing, verdant, angry, irrepressible.

The edge of a tart fresh leaf cuts the paw of a lemur picking berries. The lemur, startled or angry, crushes the plant. The sap poisons a small patch of the ground where it falls, killing budding moss, making the soil barren. A termite colony steers away from the dead land. A number of birches grow stronger and taller in the termites' absence. In the birches' shadow an ancient and irreplaceable strain of ferns withers. This violence, this chaos, is part of the order of nature, is balance.

And the continents shatter and the mountain tears apart from the valley and the continents smash together and the valley and the mountain form. They are together for one of the planet's heartbeats. They end. They are forever. They are not alive. They live in our minds. The mountain and the valley.

The book of hope is less than two pages

How to hope: A self-help guide

Hope hurts, but it's worth it. There. Can I get publisher money now?

I found a large, thin book in my mailbox today called "How to hope for children". It didn't have any words on the back of the cover or any signs of a publisher, and it was covered in clear plastic which prevented opening it up. I put it in my pocket and went on my way, thinking about what kind of useless clichés it would probably contain and what weird government initiative had led to delivering this thing to presumably every household in Sweden. We got a manual with basic instructions in case of war or crisis the other year, it's not unreasonable to think they would have come up with a bunch of exercises designed to keep kids hopeful for the future, times being what they are. I thought I should try to write this thing you're reading now, because I know a thing or two about real hope. We'll get to that.

When I got home I checked the mail again (useful reflex I've developed while living alone), and further down I found another, smaller, thicker book called "How to hope". But this is not an anecdote about how skimming my mailbox created a mystery that inspired me to write; it's an anecdote about the deliberate, carefully thought out ways in which organized religion targets people at their most vulnerable. On the back of the adult's version I could read "How to hope" was in fact the New Testament and this was a project by a coalition of the town's churches.

So I threw the books in the trash – disassembling them for recycling seemed like too much work, and we need so much trash to burn for the heating plants we buy it from Norway anyway – and sat down to think about how to explain hope.

Hope, trust, love, life: These things are all both feelings and actions, all closely related in my observation. Dear and necessary cousins that I have had to spend a lot of time constructing for myself as an adult, after a childhood where I discarded them before understanding what they were. Or caring, or feelings in general. Or other people.

I lived alone with my mom, and after a dream I had where she walked away I couldn't trust her like a child should. Especially since she tried to assure me it wasn't real and she'd never leave me. I was maybe four years old and I didn't quite know the difference between dreams and reality, but I knew people shouldn't say one thing and do another.

And that was that, until I was maybe twenty-two and I figured out reality doesn't actually work if you don't trust people on some level. You have to trust people when they tell you you're not dreaming, for instance. Otherwise it's a short road to full solipsism. I knew that in my head, and then I could start figuring out how to trust people, how to create and maintain the condition of trust.

You just decide. It's scary to trust, because it hurts when they let you down, but there's no big secret to it.

(There's a secret to being brave, but this margin is too small to contain it.)

You just decide to trust people, as much as you can, over and over, because you have to. Because the alternative is dying. I think you have to want to not die enough, but that's it.

You're allowed to be biased towards life over death, because we're alive. I think that's the least controversial statement I have made in my life, but it bears repeating. It bears thinking carefully about. Something like seven percent of all humans who have ever lived are still alive today; I think we are more important than the 93% dead ones. I think the perpetuation and improvement of human life on this planet is important. And among the conditions for life that can be improved – conditions we as individuals have some actual power to change for ourselves – is our mental condition. The way we think about things, what we prioritize.

You decide that life matters, that trust matters, that love matters, that hope matters. You decide to act according to that belief. And the world will reward you for it every day.

I won't bore you with the details of how I figured out each of those feelings and actions for myself. You can either take the time to figure it out as I did, or trust me. (See what I did there?) If you're reading this you may have been expecting a novel-length thesis, but I believe in keeping lessons short, plain and to the point. There's only so many different ways I can say the same thing and at 800 words this text already feels like masturbation.

So, just as plainly as I can: You don't get hope from a poster of a cat hanging from a tree branch. You don't get hope from a magic man in the sky who's promising to save you. You don't get hope just because you have it hard. You don't get hope in your pocket as something you can pull out just when you need it. In fact you don't get hope for free in any way whatsoever.

You have to build it yourself. It's is a lot like food, now that I think about how to explain it.

First, you need effort to make it. You can make it from scratch, hunting and foraging in the wild, if you can put in a lot of leg work. Or you can pay someone to make it for you if you're lucky. But, secondly, you need to choke it down. That can be hard if you're starting with bad ingredients or you're poorly equipped for cooking or you're a picky eater. But both cooking and eating are skills you can develop – that you have to develop in order to survive, unless you're gifted with more resources than most of us.

Also it's easier and more pleasant to share cooking duties and meal times with a group of people. I highly recommend doing that if you can.

But that's all I can say. You decide to feel hope, and to hope. You insist on hope. You rise into the air on wings of hope and you lift as many people up with you as you can. And when you get knocked down in the mud you cry and then you stand up and build up your hope again because the alternative is to wallow in the mud forever, until it gets too heavy to breathe and you die.

Hope insistently, trust implicitly, love deliberately, live like you mean it. This is neither poetry nor philosophy, nothing romantic, just basic survival tips. You should do these things because it's healthy for you. Because sometimes you need to eat salad.

A list of Stephen King novels that could be on the current events shelf, particularly in the US of A

Carrie - Prom is ruined

Salem's Lot - A man's old hometown is consumed by greedy monsters

The Shining - Self-isolation for beginners

Rage - It's always too soon for this joke

The Stand - The title in Swedish is "The Age of Pestilence"

The Long Walk - Reality TV distracts the populace from the corrupt regime

The Dead Zone - Somebody wants to shoot the president of the US?

Firestarter - The government locks up children

Roadwork - Okay this one's more always relevant

Cujo - Feral dog attacks are increasing

The Running Man - See The Long Walk, but with hijacked airplanes flying into skyscrapers

The Dark Tower series - We can change Roland's name to Greta

Christine - Self-driving car kills people

Pet Semetary - White man invades Native Americans' holy place, destroys himself and his friends and family

Cycle of the Werewolf - I think this one gets a pass. To be fair I barely remember it.

The Talisman - You won't believe how hard this 12 year old boy worked to pay for his mom's cancer treatment

The Eyes of the Dragon - Haven't read it, but it ties directly into The Dark Tower so

Thinner - White man gets away with killing Roma woman because he's friends with the judge, sacrifices wife and daughter to escape revenge

It - Monster pretends to be different things to prey on people's beliefs, eats children

Misery - Judging by what I read on Twitter today, George RR Martin had better put that book out soon if he knows what's good for him

The Tommyknockers - Freelance worker destroys herself, hometown to keep up with hustle economy

The Dark Half - Haven't read it

Needful Things - Something something consumer culture

Gerald's Game - Woman suffers for trusting man's unfounded confidence in his own sexual ability

Dolores Claiborne - Woman speaks uninterrupted for 300 pages, resulting in redemption

Insomnia - The world is run by two spirits of order and one of chaos. Okay, this one may have become irrelevant.

Rose Madder - A cop is a bastard

The Green Mile - Black man performs literal miracles to redeem himself, still gets executed for crime he didn't commit

Desperation - Small town consumed by cult

The Regulators - Haven't read it, but see above?

Bag of Bones - Writer isolates himself, solves old crime?

The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon - Getting lost in the woods is a popular pastime these days

Dreamcatcher - Under-qualified commander goes out of control when faced with situation he doesn't understand

Black House - This one gets a pass. Of course King is only co-author.

From a Buick 8 - The cops are keeping something secret. . .

The Colorado Kid - Haven't read it

Cell - Cellphone malware kills billions of people. Okay, this hasn't happened yet, but it feels more and more likely doesn't it.

Lisey's Story - Writer discovers new levels of escapism. Okay, this one may just be for us writers.

Blaze - Haven't read it

Duma Key - Several creatives are able to harness their disabilities to do great work, truly, a story of our time, except for the murderous ghosts

Under the Dome - Society run by a lying amoral monster is put under pressure cooker, soon explodes

11/22/63 - Man discovers time travel, tries shortcut to build ideal society, learns the fact that we're all stuck here with each other

And that's all I have read

Some personal questions stolen from tumblr

1: 6 of the songs you listen to most?

Six is a good number. Kind of forces me to think about which of the hundreds of songs I love most fall into top two through six. I rarely just sit down to listen to songs, for a couple of reasons - I didn't really discover music until I was about 22 and tend to forget it's a thing, I'm a very visual listener who can barely hear people over the phone without something to occupy my eyes (it's easier with the phone in my right ear, though) - but I do love music. I've got a rating scale that goes fine-good-great-masterpiece-archetype, that's a whole other thing that may wait until I start this music blog I've been thinking about. But you'll note the scale doesn't have any place for "bad" music.

But yeah. The #1 spot is reserved for The Awakening. This three-channel midi tune from a SNES game is, in my considered opinion, the greatest song in the world. Its base movement of thirty-three notes transport me to a world i discovered all on my own in the summer of '97. A wholly alien world, vast and strange and full of heartbreak and war and people trying, trying so hard to be near each other, to fill the holes in each other's lives, to repair the world, to stand up against the cruel, power-hungry rulers of the world. Okay, the song doesn't say a lot about that, although the collective 60 songs - at least 58 of which complete masterpieces - on the game's soundtrack might say something, so there's a little bit of confluence there. Helped by the confusion of several tracks using the same tune as The Awakening. See, "The Awakening" is the name of the theme of the main character Terra, but "Terra's Theme" is the name of the main theme of the game which is sort of a marching band version of The Awakening. And so on.

So, what else? Songs that have been on my mind (and my Youtube player) a lot in the last year include The River, Black Parade, Make Them Gold, Times they are A-changing and Lost on You. Obviously we're going to have to go over them one by one.

"The River" is the best example here of what I mean by the classification "archetype". It's not as good as "Born in the USA", but it does a slightly superior job of digging up a complete skeleton from the earth that's much older and bigger than any individual band. The story it tells is not universal, of course, but it's a story I think everyone can recognize and believe in and feel in their bones an ache of sympathy for. Get me drunk sometime and encourage me to invent some music for the song I wrote where the guy in "The River" and the girl in "Fast Car" meet each other.

The memories come back to haunt me
They haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don't come true
Or is it something worse?

Speaking of haunting things, these lyrics. Springsteen's simple valleysman character may not have the wit to avoid doubling down on the word "haunt", but then he goes around and asks the question of what is worse than lies? I don't know. I guess it's the unspeakable thing that his life has become. I love it. I've got chills.

On "Welcome to the Black Parade", as we speak I have the third book of Gerard Way's comic Umbrella Academy on the table behind me, from the library. Both that and my late discovery of My Chemical Romance may tell you how bad I was at being a teenager in the 1990s. I believe in most chat rooms on the Internet, randomly shouting "WHEN I WAS" will trigger an ironic nostalgia, but my love for the song is both recent and sincere. It seems earnest to me in its attempt to communicate a sense of youth, of importance, of ambivalent feeling towards one's father, and most of all raw, overwhelming emotion. It does some cool stuff with stylistic changes through the song. The music video with the sparse colors, the quasi-skellington costumes and the prevalence of more or less symbolic televisions, is such a highlight of the golden age of MTV. But beyond all half-assed rationale, I just like it. It's not the best song of all time or even in the top 100, but that's clearly not stopped me from listening to it day after day.

"Make Them Gold" on the other hand feels like a very constructive song to listen to. Its relentless positivity, the bright voices of the singers, the energy that can only be described as "upbeat", it's like health food for the ears. Funny, such an easy song to love seems to mean I don't have a lot to say about it.

"The Times they are A-changing", specifically done by Tracy Chapman, is similarly a lovely song with an important message, but painfully delivered. This I find irresistible. Probably the same reason I'm interrupting my third BoJack Horseman rewatch marathon to do this assignment. Why this cover? Well, Dylan wrote the song, there's no denying the genius of that, but listen to the way Chapman sings the words. I've not found one recording where Bob Dylan sings it like he means it. But Tracy Chapman sounds like she's thinking very carefully about what the song is saying and very specifically means every word of it.

Don't criticize what you can't understand, she says. I wonder how many times a black woman somewhere have had to choke back those words to survive; how many have been killed just for looking like she might want to say them. And I listen to this song and I realize Tracy Chapman knows the answer. She understands more than I. We're going to have to shut up and listen to her and try to learn.

"Lost on You", then. I don't know a thing about LP other than apparently she's determined that people should figure out she's a lesbian within ten seconds of seeing her. There are probably nuances in the very personal story the song tells that are, shall we say, lost on me. But it feels like a breakup song anyone who's formerly been in an intimate relationship can get behind. It's catchy, it's full of inventive sound, it's just incredibly well made. LP has the skill of someone who's been learning singing and musical theory from birth (okay, that's one more thing I know) combined with a creativity that I don't think can be learned, and it's just a pleasure to listen to her.

And to see her, sure. A trans lesbian can dream.

2: If you could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be?

Vladimir Putin. Unarmed in a locked room with no witnesses.

I don't know, there are two wildly different ways to take this question: Who would be good for you to meet, or who would benefit from meeting you. I'm more inclined to the second one, which may be because I'm such an enlightened, giving person nobody has anything to teach me as much as I have things to teach them, or because I'm so introverted I don't know how to get anything out of a sit-down with a stranger that I couldn't get just as well if not better from reading their books et cetera.

Honestly, if there is a person I'd want to meet for my sake rather than their's (or the world's, in the case of Putin) it would be you, dear reader. The "dear reader" I picture in everything I write, a woman much like myself. So much like myself I want to imagine if we ever met and sat down and got a chance to get to know each other we'd take hold of each other and never let go. If you exist on this Earth, then, yeah, you're the one I would want to meet.

3: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 23, give me line 17.

"anybody need one halfway up a church? It looked as if it was intended to lead"

Alan Moore likes his churches, I guess. This is a line in "Jerusalem" which I'm sort of dreading to read. It's 1266 pages in paperback. Tightly spaced!

4: What do you think about most?

My stories, probably. I've spent so many years halfway living in the head of Jenny Creed, immortal time travelling half-dragon superhero. The thousands of years she's lived in my imagination has sort of given me time to think very hard about a lot of stuff. Well, it could be just an effect of being without a social or professional life for a couple of decades.

But there is a distinct possibility I have something more. I look at the very pointedly enlightened, utopian spacefuture of "Star Trek", I look at the unimaginably ancient and wise Doctor Who, I look at "The Good Place"'s Team Cockroach after they have spent so many thousands of Jeremy Bearimys learning about what we owe to each other, and I think that's kid stuff. I look at the Dalai Lama's tweets and think it's adorable how he tries. Seriously. I'm glad that these people (and the people writing the fictional ones) are doing what they do because clearly people need to learn this stuff and I'm a terrible teacher myself. I don't know how to explain most of the things I've learned, and it's unbearable to me when I try to tell someone something and they don't get it. So I'm glad someone is doing something. It's just constantly shocking to me how these things are widely regarded as extraordinarily educational and possibly out of reach for the common man to understand when what they're saying is all just basic knowledge, self-evident, so deeply ingrained in my mind I have trouble verbalizing it.

And hence the need for me to try and put stuff down in the form of stories.

5: What does your latest text message from someone else say?

"I have to at least try to make things that way"

Boy that sounds dramatic. I'm not even going to give you the context, that'd ruin it.

6: Do you sleep with or without clothes on?

Funny story, I've slept in the nude from the day I came out as transgender. Somehow making it real that way immediately made me more comfortable with my body, in a small but profound way.

7: What’s your strangest talent?

Maybe my extremely vivid imagination. The dividends of which discussed previously. I'm never able to actually fool myself, thanks to Mom very carefully teaching me the difference between reality and make-believe so I wouldn't kill myself after she read "The Brothers Lionheart" to me. But though the things I imagine aren't real to me, they're as if they were real. The only differences being a) me knowing it's not really real and b) real things taking way more effort. I could easily spend my day in solipsistic fantasies of having boobs, except it would always be embarrassing to me to pretend I really believed it.

8: Girls… (finish the sentence); Boys… (finish the sentence)

Gender essentialism is bullshit. That's the end of both sentences.

9: Ever had a poem or song written about you?

No but I did have a caricature drawn of me with my made-up girlfriend in eight grade. By the class virtuoso artist and violinist, no less.

In a shocking turn of events, when I revealed in tenth grade I'd made up Sara it was I who learned nobody had believed in her for even a minute.

10: When is the last time you played the air guitar?

About eight hours ago. It had to do with watching "BoJack Horseman" while drunk.

11: Do you have any strange phobias?

When I get really freaked out by, say, Junji Ito comics, alone in the dark, I become terrified of windows and mirrors. It's pretty weird, because in both cases I am scared of what I might find looking back at me. The worst monsters my unbound imagination can conjure are monsters who "look at me from behind the glass". They don't do anything else. They can look awful, giant bloodthirsty beasts who stalk the second floor apartments or twisted images in the mirror who don't move like I do, but that's just the brain working to justify the fear it's feeling. The fear comes from the idea of being seen. Specifically through glass. It could be as simple as someone spooking me by passing outside a window when I was very little, I don't know. But it's weird how powerful that fear gets.

12: Ever stuck a foreign object up your nose?

I think the last time I did that I was five or six years old. I got a pea stuck in my nose and freaked the heck out and Mom had to teach me to blow my nose as hard as I could mid-panic. Exciting stuff huh.

13: What’s your religion?

Humanism. I believe in humanity because I'm sure that we need someone to believe in us. And because as far as we can see we are the only animals who can look up at the stars and wonder if there's something bigger there, and who can develop the tools to figure it out.

14: If you are outside, what are you most likely doing?

Most likely? Going to the grocery store. What I most like to do outside is wander, watch nature, watch people, and search for my "dear reader".

15: Do you prefer to be behind the camera or in front of it?

In front. I take terrible pictures. Never held a camera I couldn't make take nothing but blurry Dutch angle pictures.

16: Simple but extremely complex. Favorite band?

If there was only one band I could ever listen to again it would be Nobuo Uematso, who's probably a band or at least has one to play his compositions. He's done the single greatest song in the world, see above, and many hundreds of masterpieces beyond that. I could live without the works of every other musician, but not his.

So that was pretty simple.

17: What was the last lie you told?

"I'm not going to eat this in one sitting."

18: Do you believe in karma?
I don't believe there's some universal force that delivers the correct consequences for our actions, no. Evidence would suggest there is just us.

19: What does your URL mean?
ODAW stands for both "Of Dragon and Woman" and "Optic Drugs Attack Waffles", two webcomics I've tried to make now and then since 2004. You can tell I started this blog with an eye to this, and have been unable to change the URL even though "Of Dragon", the main project, has since become "Songs of Truth" and also pretty firmly a book. Without pictures. In Swedish.

"Optic Drugs" is still technically ongoing though. It's on a "whenever I think of a joke in a comic strip format I haven't used before" schedule.

20: What is your greatest weakness; your greatest strength?

My greatest weakness is perfectionism. Well, it would sound less conceited to call it "fear of failure". Apparently this is one of four common affectional disorders, caused by parents not giving enough support for or feedback on your work during childhood. I would have liked to spend days discussing each of my Lego creations, I'm not saying I was an easy child to please, but no matter who's at fault, the fact remains that trying to do anything at all to me feels like trying to step off a tall building.

My strength on the other hand, I have to think about. It's probably my supple, light-footed, Legolas-like mind, capable of bending around most any subject it can conceive. I'm not afraid to think new thoughts, to challenge my most foundational beliefs, to question how I know what I know.

I smoked the ganja one time (let's say as a way to deal with my Mom's death) (this shocks my cousin every time I remind her of it), and I had a hilarious and heartwarming hallucination where I perceived every object in my field of vision to be visibly vibrating with the depth of its inherent meaning, and that meaning was love. Don't think I wasn't aware that I was hallucinating; but the hallucination was that all matter in the universe is made out of love.

But then I went to sleep in my brother's bed and slept right through my meeting with the town's only amateur theater group that I had only just managed to get signed in on. I was in the grip of a potent, chemically induced apathy. I could literally feel my capacity for empathy breaking down. And, to the point of this story, in the middle of this high I was able to reconstruct it. I very self-awarely built myself the ability to care about other people from scratch, because I decided it would make it worth getting out of bed.

That's one strength I have, at least. The power to change my mind.

21: Who is your celebrity crush?

I think Lupita Nyong'o. It's not that she's hot and cool and a skilled actor and quite a force for truth and justice, not that there's anything wrong with that, but something about her makes me want to just hold her in my arms and shield her from the evils of the world. Probably mostly an impression of her character in "12 years a slave".

One time I had a dream where somehow she was three years old and I was babysitting her with my grandparents. I think I had to maintain the secret that she was going to grow up to be a big movie star so the timeline wouldn't go wrong, but she just kept being adorable and a great actor - she jumped down into a barrel full of plush animals over and over to play out funny exaggerated death scenes - and I don't think people were buying it.

22: Have you ever gone skinny dipping?

Yes. By myself. Not much of a story huh.

23: How do you vent your anger?

I take hold of anger when appropriate - mostly when it's time to yell at racists on Twitter - and then I let it go. This is one of those things I've learned that are hard to explain, but I don't have some sort of anger tap that keeps flowing and builds up a reserve that needs to be vented, because that's not healthy. If you feel like you do have that you've probably trained your body to enjoy that "venting" and therefore trained it to produce more of those brain chemicals that make you feel anger. The body gets better at whatever you do with it and stuff.

24: Do you have a collection of anything?

A vast library of music, books, movies and videogames probably counts. But more personally, I have a collection of weird little things. A yellow and white mouse made of rubber, about 3 centimeters tall. A huge coin with some medieval artwork and Latin words about S:t George, made of something that may be aluminium. A small metal cross with one arm ending in a big clear blue sphere. That sort of thing.

25: Do you prefer talking on the phone or video chatting online?

I prefer sending coded messages through ring signals like a secret agent. For instance, you could call and let it ring for ten seconds, break for twenty seconds and call for ten seconds more to signal "Dinner at my place tonight?" Cheap and amusing. Alas, no one of the two people I call can be bothered to sit down with me and develop even the most rudimentary system.

So, video calling would probably be better for me considering the concentration it takes to listen to someone I can't see. Don't know why I've never looked into it.

26: Are you happy with the person you’ve become?

No. I'm a work in progress.

27: What’s a sound you hate; sound you love?

I hate the sound of the alarm clock I had in school. Yes, twenty years later I still hate it. It made a brutal, rasping sound of static that was so irritating I got in the habit of leaping out of bed, with my heart in my throat, to turn it off the second it clicked to turn on.

And I love the sound of a cello. (I also love pronouncing it in Swedish, "sello" rather than "tjello".) It has been said it's the instrument closest to the human voice, which even though it's a skree and not a doot instrument I feel is true. (Did you know the four types of instrument are skree, doot, bang and bleep instruments?) I like to watch "Hero" just to listen to the background music. How can one describe what a cello does? It's a sound that's as comfortable in your ears as in your throat. You feel good humming along. There's been studies showing singing in a choir is the single most relaxing group activity there is, hitting directly on those evolutionary brain lumps that feel good when we're doing stuff with other people. Harmonizing with a cello or two is a lot like that probably, but without the need for words.

28: What’s your biggest “what if”?

What if I had been born with genitals matching my mental map of my body?

It's a whole thing. I've got this elaborate, indulgent fantasy about growing up more comfortable with my body, better trained to socialize with people and be aware of their needs and feelings. I'm raised with the expectation to "work" to accomplish stuff rather than "be a genius". I become friends with this girl I spend a lonely morning with building a snow fort outside the school entrance, instead of never speaking to her again in fear and confusion over children's idea of what relationship men and women are supposed to have.

I'm allowed to have honest, fulfilling relationships with other people without also having sex with them. I'm encouraged to help my family keep our house and little farm together and we never move into the city. Curious about people and not just books, I end up a single mother at sixteen. When the house gets too small for Mom, Stepdad, my brothers, my twins and me I end up taking over it, as I'm the only one who actually really wanted to live in the country. Comfortable with the staggeringly low rent and my stable disability benefits and a little under the table business renting out the garage to neighbors and doing web design, I lead a humble and happy life close to the dirt, nice and quiet except for Midsummer and Christmas when the large extended family gets together here, not that I particularly like the stress but they do take care of everything for me so it's not that bad.

Almost a paradise, until the twins reveal to me their classmate is getting abused by her daddy and I walk into town one night and stick a knife in his throat. A perfect crime, nobody suspects the kindly old maid who wouldn't even have the means, living without a car out in the country and all. And I can offer a space to the widow since our kids are friends and all and I certainly have room to spare and she discovers the joy of the country life and also women, and we live happily ever after.

Well, that's the most self-indulgent thing I've ever written.

29: Do you believe in ghosts? How about aliens?

How about alien ghosts? I don't know what these things have to do with each other. One supposes an afterlife which, against all available evidence, is in evidence in this world; the other supposes that out of the unimaginably large number of stars in the unimaginably large number of galaxies in the impossibly large known universe - and beyond, in the unknown - there is more than one that has produced life.

30: Stick your right arm out; what do you touch first? Do the same with your left arm.

A red bull can, a balcony door.

31: Smell the air. What do you smell?

Just my usual apartment smell. Might get more interesting when the Estradiol begins to take effect.

32: What’s the worst place you have ever been to?

I've been to an orphanage in Russia (1996) and I've been to the Salvation Army in Corpus Cristi, Texas (2001) and I'd sooner go back to Russia.

33: Choose: East Coast or West Coast?

Of North America? The west coast is where most of the people I know live, so.

34: Most attractive singer of your opposite gender?

Leonard Cohen.

35: To you, what is the meaning of life?

When I was 14 I decided it was to make people laugh. Now I'd say "To enable as many people as possible to do what they want, go where they want and be where they want". Creating possibilities for more people to figure out what they're living for, simply.

36: Define Art.

Oh boy we're trying to get deep now huh? I think art is anything that makes us proud to be humans. It can be the work of the hands that paint the sunset, the brain that inscribes meaning and draws inspiration from the sunset, or the heart that aches at the beauty of the sunset.


37: Do you believe in luck?

I think that's just a question of semantics. There are forces beyond any person's influence that directs the course of her life for good or bad, that's not a question of belief, just observable fact. If you shuffle a pack of cards and draw some good ones you can call that luck, or chaos theory, or magic, or probability. I don't see why you should worry about what it's called as much as understanding what you do understand and don't understand about this process.

38: What’s the weather like right now?

Too much snow, too cold to live.

39: What time is it?

2020:02:05:13:01. Let's see if everyone can work out which of these numbers is the month.

40: Do you drive? If so, have you ever crashed?

I do not. I crashed a go-cart once in a way that told me I can't be trusted to keep my attention on the road.

41: What was the last book you read?

I'm currently halfway through the "Good Omens" script book. The last book I finished for the first time was "Record of a Spaceborn Few", by Becky Chambers. A funny and sad and earnest and hopeful look at humanity's future.

42: Do you like the smell of gasoline?

It has its moments. There's a certain mood for it. Breathless, bright, destructive energy. Hot, violent, chemical lifeforce. When you think about it the guzzoline is literal life-force, once living carbon based organisms compressed and refined to a state of almost pure energy. Of course it's unhealthy, basically inimical to life as we know it. Everything is bad if you have too much of it. It's a fire that only breaks. It's the idea of getting drunk, but taken up to eleven. Yes, gasoline smell has a certain romance to it. A bad boy kind of romance.

43: Do you have any nicknames?

Never had any I liked. Since I changed my name I've gotten a few "Ams" which seems okay.

44: What was the last film you saw?

Funny since you mentioned gasoline just now, it was "Mad Max Fury Road". Movie of the decade if you ask me. It's so dense with good stuff it's almost overplayed to reference all the kabillion articles that's already been written about it, but honestly, it is super hard to try and say anything new about it. I could watch it every day but it's hard to find the time.

45: What’s the worst injury you’ve ever had?

Well there was the time when I was born with an inside out vagina. But okay, I once got something like a cyst in my thumb bone and broke it like a twig. It was such an easy break no one believed it was broken, and my parents wanted me to sleep off the extra joint in my thumb so they wouldn't have to be at hospital all night. Had to get the thumb opened up and repaired with a piece of bone from my hip.

46: Have you ever caught a butterfly?

Depending on your definition of "catch". I had one living in my apartment for what seemed like most of last summer. Just the risk of having all you windows open all the time. It mostly sat in the least bright corner of the hallway ceiling.

47: Do you have any obsessions right now?

This endless quiz, "BoJack Horseman", writing my book. Those are the most prominent right now.

48: What’s your sexual orientation?

I like the ladies. I likes my women like I likes my coffee, sentient and electing to be part of my life by their own free will.

49: Ever had a rumour spread about you?

I've spent ten years fighting with fascists on Twitter. I've had the most banal, blatantly made up, hilariously offensive rumors imaginable told about me to my face. But no, as far as I know, no serious people have ever been telling things about me that haven't been true.

50: Do you believe in magic?

Depends on what you mean. What Grant Morrison calls "imagination technology" and what James Randi studies with the scientific rigor of the sun studying water on its surface are very different things. I believe it would be ridiculous to blindly embrace or dismiss poorly understood science as "magic", and I believe the best word to describe the process of mental discipline involved in changing your mind with intention and self-awareness, as discussed previously, is magic.

51: Do you tend to hold grudges against people who have done you wrong?

No. I'm more interested in what people will do than what they have done.

52: What is your astrological sign?

Scorpio. One of my favorite jokes is taking any given horoscope and going "This describes me perfectly, and it's not even my sign!"

It's funny because it's always true.

53: Do you save money or spend it?

I think the question you're looking for is "do you make enough money to be able to save any?" I don't, really. Most of what I can put away is money I get from my dad on my birthday and Christmas. I don't make enough on disability to get any credit whatsoever. Been trying to save up for a trip to Iceland for the 2026 solar eclipse for a couple of years, but it's looking like my best bet is to become a rich and famous author before then.

54: What’s the last thing you purchased?

I guess that'd be a Patreon subscription to a Twitch streamer/model/fantastic person I know a little bit.

55: Love or lust?

Sure.

56: In a relationship?

I wish.

57: How many relationships have you had?

Nope. I mean none.

58: Can you touch your nose with your tongue?

Only if I bend my nose with my finger. Big nose, comically inflexible tongue.

59: Where were you yesterday?

Pretty sure I didn't leave home.

60: Is there anything pink within 10 feet of you?

Well, this giant, mace-like novelty lollipop has some pink on it.

61: Are you wearing socks right now?

Yes. It's too cold not to. I hate it. I'm always barefoot if I can.

62: What’s your favourite animal?

Octopuses. They're cuddly and have a bizarre set of powers and an even more bizarrer intelligence. I'm writing one story about a girl who gets superpowers from a bite from a radioactive octopus and one story with an octopus that's both a Druid's animal companion and a Sorceress's familiar, and I don't think I'm done yet.

63: What is your secret weapon to get someone to like you?

The Norwegian saying "Love without honesty is sentimentality, and honesty without love is cruelty". I try to treat people with both love and honesty. I don't know if it's working.

64: Where is your best friend?

About 400 meters to the right and behind me, and a couple of floors down.

65: Give me your top 5 favourite blogs on Tumblr.

medievalpoc.tumblr.com, animalssittingoncapybaras.tumblr.com, one-time-i-dreamt.tumblr.com/, livebloggingmydescentintomadness.tumblr.com/ and tehamelie.tumblr.com/. They probably speak for themselves best.

66: What is your heritage?

A quarter Danish, a quarter Finnish and mostly Swedish, with some possibly apocryphal Russian roots. I've seen a family tree that goes back to the 1600s. I'm telling you this so you don't think I actually just don't know when I tell you that I don't care.

67: What were you doing last night at 12AM?

Watching BoJack Horseman, drinking whiskey. It's been an ongoing effort for several weeks to try and adjust my sleeping schedule to stay awake past 8 pm and last night was a leap forward, so I'm happy about that.

68: What do you think is Satan’s last name?

Are we talking about Satan the tempter of forbidden knowledge, Lucifer the rebel or the Devil who reflects the worst of humanity, or some conflation of some or all of those characters who usually fall under the name? Okay, I don't think any of them have a last name, I just wanted to share this fun fact.

69: Be honest. Ever gotten yourself off?

Yeah, well, I've basically done everything by myself since I was about twelve. If I didn't handle my own business, no one would.

70: Are you the kind of friend you would want to have as a friend?

I really want to believe that, but I don't have enough friends to know for sure.

71: You are walking down the street on your way to work. There is a dog drowning in the canal on the side of the street. Your boss has told you if you are late one more time you get fired. What do you do?

In this hypothetical scenario I have a private sector job in the USA and I'm about three bad days away from being homeless? It's not like I can really understand the desperate circumstances of being at risk of being fired, but I can imagine that means the dog is fucked. But I have actually arranged my real life so that I'm always free to stop and help people in need. I'd probably save the dog even though I couldn't keep it in my hypoallergenic neighborhood.

72: You are at the doctor’s office and she has just informed you that you have approximately one month to live. a) Do you tell anyone/everyone you are going to die? b) What do you do with your remaining days? c) Would you be afraid?

Yes, probably write like I'm going to die in a month, and definitely.

73: You can only have one of these things; trust or love.

Well I do have both of those, and I can tell you you cannot have love without trust. It's a fool's errand. Choose trust and you might have something from which love can grow. Choose trust and even if you're magically prevented from ever feeling love and you will at least have that one.

74: What’s a song that always makes you happy when you hear it?

So many. Even the sad ones. I love music, and so much of it is so good. I'll go with an unpopular opinion: Creed - Arms Wide Open. It's much harder to make a happy song interesting than a sad one. Put this next to let's say Hurt and tell me Mr Cash looking back at a long life of pain and betrayal doesn't make it much easier on himself when he wants to tug at your heartstrings than this little baby-face whatshisname does waxing cliches about being young and pregnant and full of hope.

75: What are the last four digits in your cell phone number?

Speaking of interesting, about the only thing I can say about those digits is that they involve my birth year. I figured that'd make it easier to memorize it. Still took me three or four phones to do that.

76: In your opinion, what makes a great relationship?

Love and honesty. *wink*

77: How can I win your heart?

Honestly (hehe) I'd be head over heels for you if I just got the idea that you liked me in any way.

78: Can insanity bring on more creativity?

Sure, but more creativity is not very useful in producing more or better creative work. Creativity is the spark in the darkness. It's not the matchstick, it's not the striking board on which you kindle it, it's not the candle, neither wick nor wax; it's not the heat of the flame nor the light. Just the ignition. The motion from inert matter to thermal reaction. The moment the fire comes to life. The spark.

79: What is the single best decision you have made in your life so far?

Telling people I'm transgender.

80: What size shoes do you wear?

45. That's not the largest you can possibly get in regular store, but large enough that I'm used to settling for what shoes they have.

81: What would you want to be written on your tombstone?

"How do you know what you know?"

82: What is your favourite word?

Probably "fantasi". It's Swedish for "imagination", but it also means fantasy as in the genre and fantastic as in reality-defying.

Imagination is the sole thing in the entire universe we can be really sure exists, you know.

83: Give me the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word; heart.

This quote by some dead white man: "The heart has its reasons, that reason cannot know."

84: What is a saying you say a lot?

"The vague promise of restoring the nation's lost glory is the fourth item on Eco Umberto's list of fourteen things all fascist movements have in common." That one's gotten a lot of mileage since someone started saying "Make America great again".

85: What’s the last song you listened to?

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Once in the Nineties I was in a very famous TV show

86: Basic question; what’s your favourite colour/colours?

If I'm painting it'll usually be with the red-yellow spectrum, or the green-blue (with shades of yellow). Actually I can just show you.

87: What is your current desktop picture?

I can show you that too!

88: If you could press a button and make anyone in the world instantaneously explode, who would it be?

Vladimir Putin, obviously.

89: What would be a question you’d be afraid to tell the truth on?

Depends on if Russian intelligence is listening.

90: One night you wake up because you heard a noise. You turn on the light to find that you are surrounded by MUMMIES. The mummies aren’t really doing anything, they’re just standing around your bed. What do you do?

Go nuts with my mace-sized novelty lollipop, probably.

91: You accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what’s even cooler is that they endow you with the super-power of your choice! What is that power?

Gravity manipulation. With some practice, flying and bending time would be the least of what I could do.

92: You can re-live any point of time in your life. The time-span can only be a half-hour, though. What half-hour of your past would you like to experience again?

If it's just experiencing the same thing again, I can already do that. My recall may not be total, but my imagination can fill in the gaps very handily. If I can change things, there isn't really any point in my life where doing things differently for half an hour would make a lasting difference. Not for the better. Tearing things down is easier, of course. But I guess I'd go back to the winter of '86 and write a letter to my Mom. Predicting Chernobyl and Olof Palme's assassination will be enough to establish my credibility and I can look up lottery numbers to make us rich and warn her that I'm transgender and Autistic and that she's going to die of a bleeding ulcer in 2012 and some stuff like that. There are a lot of ways to leverage information from the future in thirty minutes with a little planning.

I don't imagine that's the spirit of the question though. More like, what would be most worthwhile to experience again? That might probably be a sleepover I had with my cousin in about 2004. Such things we talked about, and most of what I remember is the feeling of branching off in our conversation tree and forgetting things I wanted to say.

93: You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?

Well, now I'm imagining a world in which 9/11 never happened. No war on terror, no explosion in terrorism, no rise of Daesh, probably. It was a massive freak accident they managed to pull it off, I believe there's a good chance erasing that one incident will keep anything on nearly that scale from happening to give the US imperialist machine an excuse to go into high gear.

Unless we're only talking about erasing "my experience". There's a curious conversation to be had about the physical component of memories, i.e. if I erase the experience of poking myself on a broken glass my body go back to its original shape? Then the glass can't have been broken, can it? That would create a paradox where the glass shard occupies the same point in spacetime as my foot. Experiences don't occur in a vacuum. Memories have physical substance. (Fun fact, a byte of data weighs in the neighborhood of a large virus or a molecule of plastic.)

And anyway I wouldn't erase a single memory if I could.

94: You have the opportunity to sleep with the music-celebrity of your choice. Who would it be?

I'll go with "whoever wants me".

95: You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart right now. Where are you gonna go?

The moon. By the Apollo 11 landing site specifically. Wait, there was no mention of a return trip. Then I can't afford to go anywhere.

96: Do you have any relatives in jail?

Not that I know. In my family I'd probably be voted the one most likely to go to jail.

97: Have you ever thrown up in the car?

A bus, once. I ate way too many cookies out of boredom.

98: Ever been on a plane?

Like ten times.

99: If the whole world were listening to you right now, what would you say?

"There's one question I'd like each of you to ask yourselves every day: Why do I know what I know?"

And now some BoJack Horseman fanfic

HIS LAST LEG

BoJack Horseman maybe goes a little too dark for the series finale

It's been a full year since anyone has called him. Every friend and even the ones he just told himself were his friends have left, at last. Nobody calls, and he calls nobody. He doesn't leave the house anymore. He's given up on solid food, given up even the pretense of cleaning. Now he just shovels the drifts of empty bottles out of the way with his legs. When he gets up at all.

How would Diane write this, he thinks, idly. The thought doesn't get much further than that before he's distracted by seeing himself on the television. In the show he's young again. He's never not watching the show these days. Paid some nerd to get his DVDs onto a computer that plays them on a loop. The horse on the screen is saying something sentimental to Sarah Lynn and it twists in his heart and he takes another drink. Maybe he's crying.

He doesn't care. He's too drunk to feel anything. Too drunk to remember anything. It's surely the five hundredth time he's seen this episode but he doesn't remember it.

It feels like he's waiting for something, but he has no idea what. It's like he's waited his whole life and never realized he didn't know what he was waiting for until now. It's a terrifying thought. A long pull of bourbon quenches it. The sun comes up and goes down and comes up again and slowly he becomes aware that someone's standing next to him, talking. She sounds angry.

'Can you even hear me?' she says. 'Shit, are you even alive? Did I get here in time?'

BoJack turns his head, so slowly. One eternity at a time, the pieces come together. The white flecks in her fur, dot, dot, dot. Her big twitchy ears. Her big doe eyes. Charlotte. That's Charlotte standing there. With a shotgun.

'What are you doing here?' says BoJack. The words feel familiar in his mouth but he can't place them.

'I told you I would kill you', says Charlotte. Her voice is hard. Hoarse, like she's been crying, but hard like iron. 'If you ever got near my family again, I would kill you. Remember, BoJack?'

He remembers it vividly. It's the worst things that stay, and that was the worst. The very worst thing he ever did. He doesn't remember doing it, though. Getting close to them. Oh well, he can take her word for it. He must have done something. He hopes it wasn't too fucking awful.

'Hello? I'm going to kill you, BoJack. Can you understand me? I want you to understand that much.'

'Yeah. I understand. You're going to kill me.' He looks at her in the eye, feeling absolutely nothing. 'Thank you.' This part is going to be hard. He can feel that. He can feel it's wrong for him to say her name. But he has to know. 'Is Penny, is she going to? What did I do?'

'You don't remember, do you? Well it's been a few years. You showed up at her school dressed like a stalker and spooked her. You didn't leave when she told you to leave. She ran home. Ring any bells?'

'Yeah, it sounds like something I'd do. I'm sorry.' It's the simplest thing in the world to know what he should say, but still the words come out of his mouth like heavy stones. Each one. 'I fucked up. I can't be trusted. I need to be. Put down. You're doing the world a favor. Doing me a favor. Thank you, Charlotte.'

It seems like he should stand up or something, but he can't figure out how, and anyway he's probably less threatening like this. Less frightening. He's so sick of scaring people.

'I, uh, I'm glad we agree', says Charlotte, and raises her gun.

'But I mean, I could do it myself. I'm probably going to be dead inside a month either way. You shouldn't, you don't have to bloody your hands. I don't want my murder to hang over you the rest of your life. I don't want, do you see, I don't want to cause anyone pain. I never wanted that. Once you kill someone, even if it's a shitbag you don't even care about, it's something you can never walk away from. Just ask me.'

'That's very thoughtful of you, BoJack. Very considerate of my feelings. You know, I still think you're a good person deep down. But good intentions isn't enough.' The gun goes off, but there's no sound, no pain. Just a flash of light, and BoJack slowly glides down until he's looking at her upside down, lying on the floor in a weird position that doesn't seem to fit with where the couch is. She looks so hard. Pitiless, that's the word. She puts the gun down, leaning against the wall, and kneels and pets his nose.

'It doesn't hurt', says BoJack. 'I thought it would hurt.'

'Me too', says Charlotte, and shrugs. She keeps her hand on his nose, pretty gentle, and keeps her eyes locked on his without any gentleness. It's strange, how part of her is calm and caring and soft while part of her is shaking with rage. 'But that's okay. I aimed low so you would stay alive a while. And know you were going to die. And you're going to die knowing that you ruined me too. You've destroyed everything you ever touched, and you couldn't even die without destroying me too. Your oldest, best friend. Maybe the only one who ever loved you. Maybe I'll go to prison, but I doubt it. But yeah, I knew that it was wrong to kill you and I did it anyway and I'm going to carry that wound in my soul for the rest of my life. Because of you. How does that feel?'

'I, fuck, I let you down, but do you really hate me that much?'

'I really hate you that much.' She bends down and kisses him and gets blood on her lips and there's tears in her eyes and he breaks all the way through the armor.

BoJack cries, in ugly choked sobs, and it's like the last fifty, sixty years didn't happen, he's free and he's crying and this time his mom takes him in her arms and even as he's blacking out he knows it's not really his mom and he doesn't deserve to die happy and that makes it even worse.

Publishing writing: A working definition

You're a published writer if: Some third party is giving you some form of compensation for making your text available to a reader.

Yeah, some forms of compensation are better than others, but the key is that whatever it is flows towards you, the writer. You're not paying them to publish you, not in currency or time or favors or work; that doesn't count. If they're paying you, then it counts. Payment in exposure barely counts.

Self-publishing is a little murkier. I can put up any old garbage on this here blog, that doesn't count. Paying a printer to make physical copies of your work counts like masturbation counts as sex. I think the key is you have to involve other people on some level. An editor. Someone who is in a position to tell you when to stop. The reader themselves can fill this function, if they're directly compensating you for your work like with let's say Patreon, as this gives them a certain amount of leverage and input.

It's a question of self-respect, really. "Published writer" is an arbitrary label. To a writer like myself it's a measure of the worth to the world at large of your skill at imagining things and then translating and presenting those things in ways that other people can appreciate and relate to. If writing is your life, and mine certainly is, it's a measure of the worth of your life. No pressure or anything. We can just pretend not to care what the world thinks.

Edited on August 30: Fixed a terrible typo in the first sentence. xD