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28 Oct 2009 04:38
27 October 2009
cenobyte answers #5
10/27/2009 12:45:00 PM 3 CommentsAs part of the ask cenobyte experiment, Brielle asks:I know the answer that pops into your head when I ask this, as it does every mother. But put that aside for a second and really think beyond your kids and family because that's a given. Let say...What is your greatest fear? Or, if you'd rather What have you always feared. Yeah that one is better I think.
I think fears, like loose teeth, sore shins, and acne, come and go. I think they change. They *must* change. That being said, the easy answer is clowns. I have ALWAYS hated clowns with the burning rage of a thousand angry suns. From my earliest memory of the horrible things, with their rancid dead baby breath and their cracked, brown claws and rows upon rows of jagged teeth, I have always, *always* hated clowns. The genesis for that hatred is a perfectly natural and wholesome fear that they will, someday, as they are wont to do, manage to make it in to my house and destroy everything with their green acid saliva and toxic sweat. And when they're finished burning holes in floors and doors and windows, they will fold themselves up into the shadows behind things and beneath things, and they will lay in wait for a succulent piece of warm flesh, or a particularly vibrant soul, to feast upon. Also: china dolls. Whoever came up with these monstrosities clearly not only hated children, but also must have had a distinct and unobstructed desire to create mass distress. Who wants a horrid little object with matted human hair and staring, hollow glass eyes boring into them? Do you know how they make china dolls? No? Well. Let me educate you: first, they find a sad, neglected child. Sad, neglected children were a dime a dozen when they started making china dolls. First, they capture the child's soul in a little glass apothecary jar that can be used only once per soul. The souls of sad, neglected children are difficult to see, but dollmakers can always tell; sometimes they need a piece of equipment similar to a jeweler's glass, but most dollmakers are born with the ability to see the souls of children. So the dollmaker finds a child, and extracts its soul using the kind of tool pictured here:
Once the dollmaker extracts the child's soul, he stores it for quite some time, neglected on a shadowy, cobwebbed shelf. Freshly harvested souls are not often used in dollmaking, as they tend to still have some kind of hope or happiness encased in them. The body of the doll is made from the childrens' hair and dessicated bits of their tongues and liver. When the dollmaker makes the porcelain, he uses the ashes and pulverised remains of their soft little bones to grind in with the clay. Those little glass eyes are made by melting down the soul jar and pouring the molten glass into little molds. This is how the soul is captured in horrid glass eyes. This is why china dolls stare at you incessantly. This is why they rise from their places of slumber in the night, and crawl into bed with you; it's why they follow you around and flop on the couch when you're folding laundry. Because the souls of children are trapped inside each and every one. They're trying to take your soul, stealing it in your breath (sometimes they blame this activity on cats). They don't stop, either, because when you capture a child's soul in the pit of its misery, it will never, ever stop hunting. You can't stop a clown or a china doll, I always say. There is also a certain reticence to accept success that lingers oddly around me. In going through the things that people are supposed to fear, I think of things like: death, which does not scare me (unless it is death by clown or china doll); loss, which does not scare me (unless it is because clowns or china dolls have caused the loss); lingering illness, which unsettles me somewhat but does not cause me fear (unless it is the lingering illness caused by fetid clown spoor and the bacterial mileu that thrives in china doll hair and eyes); being alone, which does not scare me (unless I am alone with clowns or china dolls); failure, which does not give me fear as failure is necessary (unless it is the failure to keep clowns and china dolls away from me and my family).... I suppose the greatest fear I have (other than clowns and china dolls, which fears have been addressed above) is, and this is going to sound barmy, nuclear annihilation. At the age of six, I began hiding under the couch or the coffee table, afraid that people in the world would lose their sense and start pushing big red buttons all willy-nilly, setting off a chain reaction of nuclear missiles trained on every populated area of the world. I had visions of skin melting from bodies, of hair falling out in great, matted clumps, of losing teeth and fingernails. Children would be born with no faces, after a generation of stillbirths and spontaneous abortions. There would be no uncontaminated soil in which to grow food, and eventually, everyone would die of radiation sickness, which would have a specific name, possibly called after the doctor or researcher who tried for an entire lifetime to find a cure for it, but who failed because she could not keep her eyelashes from falling into her petri dishes. I have always been afraid of the decisions other people make on my behalf, to a certain point. Coming from such a place, is it any wonder I do not place a whole lot of faith in elected leaders?
26 October 2009
cenobyte answers #4
10/26/2009 09:04:00 AMAs part of the Ask cenobyte Experiment, Melistress asked:Have you ever taken inventory of your books and if so, what is the current count and what would you say to be your favorite of them all?
I have begun an inventory of my books many, many, ma-hany times. Probably more times than gypsies fart. However, I always get distracted by "Ohhhh. THIS book! I LOVE this book!" and that's about where the inventory ends. I have attempted to catalogue my books on Shelfari and on Goodreads. I didn't even get as far as putting any books in my Shelfari account, and according to Goodreads, I have 637 books on my shelf (does that mean I own them?) and 500+ that I've read...I spent a VERY late night putting most of that stuff in there. Oh look. I just got distracted again by my Goodreads account. I suspect there are easily a thousand books in my house. Probably more, if you count the ever-growing stacks of 'give-away' books. And I cannot, absolutely CANNOT choose a favourite. They are all my favourite, for different reasons. Well, maybe not *all* of them, but I do have something good to say about each of them. Damn. There, it happened again. Got distracted by Goodreads (you can see, over to the left there, a feed that shows some of the books I have read/am reading/will read). But I will say, at the top of my list is The Velveteen RabbitCat's CradleCome, Thou TortoiseThe Catcher in the Rye, nearly anything by Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, or by my international literary boyfriend, Neil Gaiman...there really are too many to name. I could never pick just one.25 October 2009
cenobyte answers #3
10/25/2009 09:03:00 AM 4 CommentsAs part of the Ask cenobyte Experiment, Schmutzie asked:What is a particular object to which you have a great attachment? Why?
I have a great attachment to the piano which sits in my dining room. It was one of the wedding gifts my great-grandparents received from my great-great granparents. It's a Heintzman upright grand piano, made in Toronto in the 1890s sometime. It was well taken care of by my grandmother, who never played, and it is the piano I learned to play on. Its keys fit my fingers properly; they have the perfect weight. The texture of those keys is like coming home on a chilly day. It has a nice tone, and still has its original ebony and ivory keys. I believe only two strings have been replaced. I am attached to it because the first day I played that piano in my own house was the last day I saw my grandfather alive. He and my father hauled the thing up out of my grandmother's basement (no small feat) and into the back of my father's truck. They sweated and swore and slapped at the back of the bloody thing until they were panting and wheezing and calling it "you bitch" and "goddamned whore". I remember them, standing in the bed of the truck, grinning and filthy and their faces all running with sweat. I remember them shaking hands (men didn't hug in those days) while I ran after them with the piano bench, knowing they would lift me in to the back with them. My Gramps opened the lid off the keys, opened the top of the piano to "let the music out", and he played the first five bars of Let Me Call You Sweetheart. He closed up the lid, and he closed up the keyboard, and they tied "that bitch" down to every place they could. We jumped down from the truck and went inside for lunch. Harvest was over; all the grain was cleaned and in the bins. It was early September, and the sun was hot and the sky was the brightest blue, with the tiniest wisps of clouds scattered around. We walked up the steps to Grandmother's house, and Gramps stopped to take off his dusty, oil-stained workboots. "Gramps," I said, "I don't like your boots." "Why not?" he asked, his easy smile lighting up his eyes. "They're dirty," I said. "Oh; I'll die with my boots on," he said, and laughed, and gathered me on to his lap, which had been steadily and strangely shrinking since my fifth birthday three years before. I don't remember how long after that it was I was walking to the babysitter's for lunch - maybe a week; maybe two weeks - when I saw my mother standing at our front door. Dad's truck was in the driveway; this was odd because they were both teachers. I got excited...I never got to go home for lunch! Mum called me inside, and I skipped and shouted how lucky I was to go home at noon! I burst into the entry, and saw Dad sitting in the rocking chair in the living room. Mum told me to sit down, but I didn't want to. The air in the house was wrong. The energy in the house was wrong. Something...something was wrong. The piano sat up against the wall in our living room. Dad looked at me with an expression on his face I'd never seen before. "There's been an accident," he said. Then my father burst into tears.
Dads don't cry, though, I thought. Dads don't cry.
Mum hustled me off to my bedroom, but I could still hear him sobbing. I could feel his heart breaking from two rooms away. Gramps had been killed in a farm accident. Gramps was dead. He'd died in those dirty old boots, alone in a field under the pale blue sky. Gramps, with the sparkling eyes and the belly laugh and who smelled like dust and spice. Gramps, who couldn't read any better than a six-year-old, but who held me on his lap and let me read to him. Gramps, who I loved more than anything.
Gramps never got to hear me play, so every time I do, it's how I talk to him. I let the music be my voice, and I thank him for his gift.
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