somnulencelogencia

Until Batrick died, I was vaguely angry at most aspects of Texas government, and blisteringly irate at a few of them, but was not really thinking in terms of it being a direct threat to people I knew, or that my staying here would be considered a tacit endorsement for living in Texas, thus making me a threat to my friends - a thing which is Utterly. Unacceptable.

But their death really woke me up to the fact that the estimated 3 THOUSAND preventable deaths per year in Texas was not a flaw in the public health plans of those in power. It was a feature. A deliberate and eugenicist decision was made that me and my friends, through no fault of our own, should die, because we take up resources that could be used to give tax breaks to oil companies that pollute and warm our planet, weapons manufacturers that kill its populace, and data centers that are driving up prices for electricity and clean water. That Bat’s death was by design made me so … verklempt with rage, and fear for my friends, and guilt for my own complicity, and even gave me fear for myself. Maybe I had those feelings before and just didn’t know - alexithymia is a motherfucker like that.

My relationship with Ghost was already starting to get alienated and distant when Batrick died, and if divorce became likely, I would not be able to support myself to anything above the Medicaid “donut hole” coverage gap. So I was dealing with naming my feelings in my grief-processing protocols, and kept coming up with all this tangential shit about my marriage, my life circumstances, and my location that I wasn’t expecting to find, and most of it was … not great.

Texas was making me feel all these things and I could finally recognize all of those feelings that were in my body without my knowing it, and it was pretty shitty that in addition to my friend being dead, I had to have even more feelings about him being stochastically murdered by fascist health policies.

And dealing with the fear, the fact that I’m not a badass anymore, nor capable of financially protecting my friends, nor blameless in my choosing to stay and fight giving cover to making others like Bat feel safe enough to stay when he should have left … all of that required getting the hell out of Texas and rearranging my life to deal with those risks (which is an ongoing project, but that’s another entry).

The 5 Spells Meme

You are a magician, and you have immense power, but it can only be channeled into FIVE SPELLS. You can cast the spells on yourself or as many other people as you like, an infinite number of times. Your casting range is as big as you decide it is, but no larger than the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. No building Dyson spheres, sorry. I didn't make the rules. So: what are your 5 priorities? You can take as much time as you like to think it over, and it took me about 16 hours of turning things over in my mind.

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My answers are:
1. Cause Disbelief - All within the affected area can suddenly spot the flaws that the caster can see in an idea, religion, or other form of dogma. Imagine if the whole planet suddenly spotted the massive flaws in capitalism, and instead of thinking wack stuff like "That's the exception that proves the rule" and dismissing the cognitive dissonance with a thought-terminating cliche, they thought "Hey, this has more problems than I was thinking it had. Maybe this isn't such a good idea to base our whole economy on." The world would be radically different within 5 years, and I wouldn't even need a guillotine to do it.
2. Heal Person - heals a person to maximum hit points. Cancer? LOL, NO. I don't think so.
3. Heal Trauma - heals a mind of the terrible things that happened or the terrible absences of connection that traumatize us and break our ability to form narratives and feel like real people. That next 5 years is going to look way different, and the 20 after it will be a golden age of growth if we can get past our aversion and psychic pain associated with growth, to which end:
4. Create Outrun Bullshit Drug - For 1D4 hours, a person taking this non-addictive magical drug will experience mild euphoria and easier physical pleasure, but their mind will work faster instead of slower - so fast that they can spot the bullshit that they've been trained to think but that they don't really want to believe. I want it to wear off fairly quickly so that people are incentivized to do the work on themselves that makes them better people. It might slowly change our culture towards more easy acceptance of the self, less hiding and holding shame, and less feeling trapped and frozen inside the wicked mess problem of being a person in a world that has been manipulated into being an unwinnable game.
5. Teleport - teleports self or others any distance within the Earth's orbit. This one is just for fun, because I want to take my besties out for Indian food. In like, Mumbai.

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Credit for this meme goes to ot_atma. A blank copy of the meme will be in the comments.