Be Better or Get Fucked

 Oh, there's so many monsters in the world.

 I wish they were just ogres or perytons or any of the panoply of beasties I know from games. But they're not. There are so many loathsome brutes who are just plain humans with a bit more money or power or influence or stupidity than the rest of us.

So a good new motto for them all is "be better or get fucked." In everyday life, shitheads will attempt to make you feel small or bad or useless, and they can get better or fall of a cliff someplace lonely. Everyone needs to be better, me and you and that guy on the bus and that person walking their dog and saints and members of the Trump family and even your family dog. (not actually your family dog, who is a good boi and needs do nothing. But otherwise my point stands.)

I know there's all sorts of ways we each fail to be better. We do things we wish we didn't have to because CAPITALISM or we are just tired or mental states/conditions preclude other actions. We let ourselves down, we let others down, we pick the bad choice. We're all fuck ups now and again. That's different. There's failing, and there's deciding to fail. Deciding that failure to be better is the win-state. So if you're someone who feels like a fuck up but you're trying to be better, I'm not talking to you.

If on the other hand you're regularly making choices that make other, humble people's lives worse: get fucked. Fall into a pit. Lose your sense of taste before your big dinner. Stub your toes on every corner for all time. Die in a way that's painful and embarrassing to you and all your cohorts, even, because that would make the world a better place, and the rest of us would get a laugh.

Be better, or get fucked 

Local Library

 We've struggled a bit with libraries in Portland.

There's a big overall system-wide upgrade going on, where the Multnomah County Library system (which is the Portland system, since Portland is almost all of Multnomah county and vice versa) is closing and remodeling or expanding branches one after another. When we moved here, the Central Branch was our closest, and then it closed for a while, and then reopened for a few months, and then closed for a year almost, and then we moved not too long after it reopened. Then our local branch was in the part of our area we went to all the time in Hollywood, and so that was nice, except it too, then closed. So I was going to a branch near the Powell's Book Store location I worked at, but then I left that job. And truly that wasn't a branch, just a pick up for hold books, and drop off for any books.

So we've been here almost 4 years and our local branch has been closed roughly half that time.

This week, the Hollywood branch reopened, and it's not super close to us but as noted it's where many other things are: the grocery stores cluster there, there's a nice record store, a farmer's market, and so on. So we go that way a lot, and it's really nice to have the branch open again.

I'm not using the library so much right now, because I have an exceptionally large number of books on my to be read pile (it was 141 at the start of the year, and I think it's probably gone down by a handful of books at most because I keep buying more, somehow.) (Somehow, as if it were a mystery.) But there are books I know I don't want to own, or I'm pretty sure I don't, or that I don't want to buy at least, so those are coming from the library. Uncertainties, possibles, grim monstrosities, various categories like that.

Right now I have only one book, You Weren't Meant To Be Human, and I'm kind of dreading it but will be starting it probably tomorrow or the next day. It's apparently A LOT, and I don't know if I'm ready for it, but I'm going to dive in just the same. Hopefully I'll finish it?

It's wonderful, though, that I have the option, that I can walk a bit and grab a book of my choice from a very, very wide selection and read it, no risk except to my mental state, and then give it back after. Libraries are the best. 

Shit, two plus weeks

 I thought I meant to post more often

But I'll try

So it's been a far too nice winter, but then we had two incredibly wet days, and now it's sunny and clear but cold overnight, and that at least feels like the way a winter here should be. I'm not personally able to complain about it being sunny and not terribly cold in February, because winter gives me SAD and so if it fakes summer I feel so much more alive. But it's not, in the abstract, good. So a few days that feel wintry (for PNW standards) is nice.
 

I am working on maps in watercolor and dip pens with sparkly ink. It's so very nice. I just love it, tbh. The one I finished a bit ago is so damn lovely.

 

Maybe there's a world for it? Faerie winds blowing from the east, and a fallen empire that is shattered by rebels and the inability to deal with the faeries who occasionally follow the winds and transform lands into nightmare wonders of wild, untamed glory. Even if there's not, it feels wonderful to hold it and just think "I made this beautiful thing."

Analog life, that is. Creating things more by hand than before. Also I've bought a lot of cassettes, two players (one portable, one home based), and I'm listening to them so much. It's just...nice. Real.

So then is blogging of any use? It's a computer! It's digital!
But I guess I'm making a thing? Which is also nice. I don't know. Have to consider it still. Figure out if there's a point that outweighs the online of it all. For now, I'm still going on. But we'll see.

(aside: the Seahawks won the Superbowl, and I mostly don't care, but it's still a pretty cool thing, I guess. My boss at the bank, because I work at a bank these past two months, went to the celebration parade today. So that was fun, for him, and I'm happy he got to go. end aside. also end post.)