I can never show him this, but writing it helped me feel better anyway

Dear Vella,

Recently you have been PMSing, excuse me, irritable and blaming a great many things on your eldest son and your eldest son’s girlfriend. While both these people admit they are hardly stainless innocents, there are some things that they rightly refuse to accept responsibility for.

Things that are not Eagle’s fault:

• Your leg ulcers.
• Your summer flu.
• Faruque’s bad habits.
• The bloody oppressive summer heat.
• The fact that Ash sometimes calls when you want to talk to Eagle. This is made especially pertinent by the fact that you keep slamming into the room, yelling for thirty seconds, then leaving for ten minutes or so before coming back in and yelling again. If you have a point to make, then MAKE it for goodness’ sake instead of ranting vaguely and then storming out. And if you leave, you cannot expect Eagle to not assume you are done with the conversation and find something else to occupy himself.
• The fact that when you vehemently tell him to do something, then five minutes later and just as vehemently tell him not to do it, Eagle just sits there like a lemon blinking confusedly.
• Your forgetting to use a condom, approximately twenty-one years and eleven months ago.

Things that are not Ash’s fault:

• Your leg ulcers, summer flu, Faruque, etc.
• The mess in Eagle’s room. Amazing though it may sound, Ash is not capable of making a mess in a room at the other end of the fucking country.
• Any and every defect in Eagle’s character.
• The fact that she sometimes calls when you want to talk to Eagle. You hardly have a schedule or some such that she can avoid.
• The fact that Eagle does not always agree with you.
• Eagle’s lack of ‘respect’ for you. That has more to do with the fact that it’s hard to respect a total whackjob even if they are one’s father.
• Original sin, bird flu, the destruction of the rainforests, the high price of butter and the common cold. Despite your claims that she is responsible for ‘everything’.

the home front

I can't blog about this. It's too private, too personal. But I can't not say something about it either.

All I can say is-homophobia in religion sucks, especially when it gets internalised. That, and...there's the moment when it all becomes horribly real and immediate-all the shit you know goes down. When some of it happens to someone you know, or a friend knows. The moment you can hear the wolf at the door.

Cousins, it's dark outside.

Hoenn roller coaster ride?

Hunting the Suicune; this is a new phrase in the land of its birth, one coined by recent developments, a recent person who is becoming legend. To hunt the Suicune is to chase your dreams; to quest after a hopeless cause; to seek and never give up, though you never glimpse your quarry, but to carry on seeking from pure orneriness; to go to see the elephant, travelling because you’re sick to the stomach of staying in the same place; to try and go out beyond the edges of things. “Now, bring me that horizon.”

I’m waiting on the delivery of the Hoenn games, fingers twitch-itch-itching to press the little buttons on the little controller and begin to kythe. Only that’s a lie; I’m kything already, but bits and pieces, guesswork and stepping stones. When the package comes in the post and the cart’s in the bottom slot of my little red spaceship, that’s when I’ll let myself fall into the river, be carried by the currents out to sea. When the kything becomes the air you breathe and the ground you walk on. (Earth, sea and air; Hoenn again there, the slow strong amoral forces that birthed the world where life can be.)

I don’t know what I’ll kythe from Hoenn, though I have guesses.

(And there’s an irony in all this; I walked those paths before and didn’t feel a thing, too caught up in annoyance at new game mechanics and the absence of old favourite Pokémon. I didn’t care for the third gen ‘dex; couldn’t see the beauty in the Hoenn beasts. Too narrow. Always too narrow. It’s always that way with me, maybe with everyone, like Jack pointed out in The Magician’s Nephew; try to be stupider than you are and you’ll succeed, try to be deaf and blind and you’ll succeed. Say No, not this, I do not accept this-and it won’t go away-it never does-but it’ll go from you. Or never show itself at all. It’s possible to go through the world with eyes closed, sleepwalking, and everybody does it at some stage, in some places.)

My guesses, my snippets, my dreams; earthquakes, volcanoes and tidal waves, hurricane and typhoon, twister coming-

-it's about the stars
the way they burn, the way they kill
it’s about the black acid ocean
the way the planet’s heart is red-hot iron
gravity that crushes
radioactivity
so many different ways to die-

so many different things we need
because we need all of them to be
or we cannot be.

the world is destruction
fury without malice.

all order is based on chaos.

Glory to Groudon. Glory to Kyogre.

...

The people of Hoenn-from them I kythe human warmth. Schoolteachers in sensible shoes. Old men who like to laugh. Lovers billing and cooing. An exuberant twychild. Stories, human stories, familiar as paving stones and sweet as Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.

Maybe that’s paradox, but to me that just looks like life.

I’ve been listening to the Lilo and Stitch soundtrack lately; the gorgeous sounds of Mark Keali’i Ho’omalu and the Kamehameha Schools Children’s Chorus have become the Hoenn Sound, for me. Hoenn roller coaster ride? Maybe so. It crossed my mind just now that Hawaii is volcanic. Lava and ocean water. Hoenn has Mount Pyre; I’ll have to wait for the playthrough, as I really can’t remember the geography, but perhaps there’ll be some similarities of appearance at least?

And I’m pretty sure that Wallace knows how to surf, as well as Surf. Hehe.