A long overdue Open Thread for Personal Stuff. (There’s also one for non-personal stuff.)
As always, no trolls or MRAs. Let me know if any show up.
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Open Thread for Personal Stuff, 5/16 Bearcat Edition
We Hunted The MammothBucking the Backlash
@IP
When I was much younger and in boy scouts, we were going on an overnight hike along a river between two towns, mostly along what used to be an old railroad track. It was quite remote, and the towns were quite small, so we didn’t see a single person the entire hike.
Afterwards, one of the leaders developed the pictures she had taken, and we noticed that in the background of one of the pictures was a person we didn’t recognize. The picture is of a group of us with backs to what was basically a sheer drop down to the river, so there was no way for someone to have been behind us without us noticing.
This on its own was creepy – I got a weird feeling every time I saw it – but one of the girls at our school recognized it as her uncle who had died 3 years earlier, after falling into that river one night while drunk.
@ IP
This isn’t a story directly from my life, but it is one of the weirdest ones I know of.
For some years I’ve wanted to write a screenplay about a legal case called R -v- Dudley and Stephens. The background to that case is that four sailors became shipwrecked and had to take to a lifeboat. After many days at sea things became desperate. The men drew lots and ended up killing and eating the loser, a cabin boy called Richard Parker.
If you’re a fan of Edgar Allen Poe you may be familiar with the story as the plot of his novel “The Narrative of Gordon Arthur Pym of Nantucket” is about four sailors who get shipwrecked, take to a lifeboat and after many days at sea draw lots and end up killing and eating the cabin boy, Richard Parker.
Where it gets weird is that the real life case took place in 1884 but Poe wrote the novel in 1839.
So, I’ve been catching up a bit on DC comics since I’m about two months behind and now they’re doing their whole soft relaunch thing again, and I figured I might as well use some of my free time to work through all of the ones I’ve got.
I don’t know if it’s possible to do spoiler tags around here but I will forewarn people because, wow, the things Ben Percy has done to Green Arrow really rub me the wrong way. He’s trying to add social commentary to the comic again, but he’s really just coming across like how MRA types always strawman “SJW”s to be — he’s even unironically called Oliver Queen a Social Justice Warrior in multiple interviews. I mean, yes, historically he has been, but could you use more loaded language?
Anyway, his run started off with a real bang by equating “listening to the streets(/people)” to “listen to the prophecy of this old lady who’s standing on a soap box shouting about night ravens” and then tossing forward the idea that racism is vampires. It really only went downhill from there, when he gave Oli what amounts to werewolf AIDS, which was side-lined for a bit so that he could have an abusive relationship that led him to drug traffickers who were run by a zombie. Of course, both of these problems were readily solved by effectively a swift punch to the face and then haven’t been seen again.
Then the werewolf AIDS came back, which brought with it a very blatant “now I’m seeing what it’s like to be oppressed” narrative (pretty sure Oli even openly says something to that effect) and another heavy wave of racism “commentary” in the form of a group who called themselves The Patriots and would go out in the middle of the night wearing President masks to hunt and torture and kill people infected by the lycanthropy. Oh, but the central faction of werewolves are being portrayed as highly violent terrorists who are trying to forcibly infect everyone else so that they won’t be persecuted anymore.
And then Oli goes to Africa to track down a miracle cure to “heal” the lycanthropy infecting Seattle — conveniently the blood of a man everyone calls “Doctor Miracle” — and runs into a violent group of terrorists who have Doctor Miracle and call their group “the Whites” because they want to culturally appropriate America (his own words). Deathstroke swoops in (because Percy likes the character, and for no other real reason) and slaughters the entire camp and then stabs Oli, but oh, the sword Oli got stabbed by was coated in Doctor Miracle’s blood and so he’s not only miraculously not hurt, but his werewolf AIDS is cured too! He brings Doctor Miracle back to Seattle and tells everyone to stop fighting, because there’s a cure now, and lets the faction of terrorist werewolves ride off into the night when they don’t want to be cured with a pithy remark about how “change can only come from the warring sides of us.”
I don’t know, maybe I’m overreacting here, but everything about this run has made me feel like it’s patronizingly heavy-handed while simultaneously being incredibly shallow and uninformed.
@dlouwe
Oh shiiiiiiiit.
@IP
Ooohhh…I don’t have any personal stories, but if you’re in the mood for spooky stories, I’ve been listening to the Black Tapes podcast recently. It’s not exactly scary, but it is super creepy and I’ve really been enjoying it. It’s in the second season now, so there are lots of episodes to catch up on. I binged on the first season and now the two week gap between episodes seems so long.
http://theblacktapespodcast.com/
@ej
Add more podcasts to my 24/7 podcast schedule, you say? Hmm, yeah I’ll take a look at it. 🙂 Thanks!
I have a story to share but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Off to bed now!
@ guy
It’s not something that really worries me (though I have other reasons to fully trust my memory) but just something I find a tiny bit disturbing and interesting. I’ve been managing my emotions fairly well for a long time, but I was only able to get to this point by ruthlessly examining my memories and behaviors so this is just something that seems like it could be important, maybe.
@ Brony, Social Justice Cenobite
My understanding of how we access memory is that it is much like an old cassette tape, we are calling up the memories and then rerecording them. Our emotional state at the time of recollection colors how we save the memories back. In my own experience, recalling pleasant memories while in a depressed state leads to those memories being discolored as I tend to get overly critical in how I interpret others’ motives – things which seemed honest and innocent at the time (and most likely were so in fact) get stored back with a lot of doubt. To use a metaphor, the sunny day that I first remember gets saved back as partly cloudy. Then the next time as overcast, then storming, and then finally black as night. There were a large number of years that everything was out of control and a lot of time to constantly revise my memories.
Anhedonia.
Yes.
That.
Imaginary Petal:
I think mine is more amusing than anything, and all of it was in my imagination. Maybe I’ve told this before, maybe I haven’t, but let’s hear it anyway.
When I was a kid, I spent lots of summers and winter vacations at my gran’s family — she had two brothers, one with a farm on a really high hill, and the other one at the foot of the hill. The name of the place translates as “Moose Hill” and it was appropriate, as that region was indeed rife with noble (and mighty tasty) Alces alces.
I liked to stay at the uphill farm, for solely selfish reasons: indoor toilet. That, and the view is amazing, especially in the middle of the night in winter, as everything is dark and you can see the Milky Way and stars going forever.
There were two tiny snags with this staying plan. The first one is that the region is also prone to spectacular thunderstorms, and hooboy, when you are on top of the area’s tallest hill, you sure can see them in exquisite and pants-wetting detail, and hear it first-hand as everything happens right on top of you.
The other one came at night: the guest room where I got tucked in was facing the forest, a dark dark forest right across a short stretch of grazing fields, and it was a single-story building. What if…
…what if I wake up in the middle of the night…
…and THERE IS A MOOSE. STARING IN!
It didn’t help that I imagined that the moose would have sort of nightvision glow in its eyes, baleful pale green, and something about it was very undead too.
A MOOSE. STARING IN.
The worst monsters truly live in our imagination, and mine was a ghostly MOOSE, STARING IN.
PS: No, it never happened. BUT WHAT IF!?
@pitshade
Sort of. The conversations I saw about Dwarf Fortress are useful here. Less like a cassette tape and more like a procedurally generated videogame world. Brains have the ability to create maps of experience and store the information associated for the parts of the maps that were activated at a given time (saves space versus having to store every unique memory).
They talk about “muscle memory”, but the reality is that every sensory system and structure connected to your nervous system has its own memory. A memory is the coincidental activation of every part of that experience from the “5 senses” down to how your limbs were arranged. A memory can in principle be accessed by any feature, metabolic state, emotional feeling, conceptual information…but you are right that it fades in time and there are probably unknown individual difference issues here (people with photographic memory for example).
So while I would agree that we do alter memories as we repeatedly access them over time, I would not assume that we necessarily lose the old emotional connections. You can have more than one emotional state connected to an emotion. That is me being optimistic with what we don’t know and what I have read. I guess I would next try to talk to someone who has recovered from depression and ask if the anhedonia can be reversed.
To add a small amount to the above.
Another consequence of that is memories with similar features can sometimes get connected. That is probably where deja vu comes from, and a pretty good reason to be honest. I avoid dishonesty because (in part) I doubt I have the space and precision of recall for all those alternate realities that will eventually get confused…
I haven’t caught up on the thread but someone mentioned anhedona. Is the horror writer Thomas Ligotti anaverage person with severe anhedonia? I’ve always wondered about how someone can get through life without pleasure but it seems he’s been at it for 60-70 years. I haven’t read his works but I tried reading his philosophical views in an interview but I got too depressed to keep reading.
Thanks, Kupo, EJ (The Other One), and Viscaria, for your thoughts on how I could get more work as a freelance editor.
I’ve taken notes on what you (along with Alan, Axecalibur, and Guy) said. I’ll be giving it a lot of thought.
Thanks for your brilliance, WHTM people!
Okay, here’s a story about something that has stayed with me for my entire life. I think about this quite often, but I don’t have any contact with any of the people in this story anymore. I guess I’ll never find out what exactly was going on or what happened.
I grew up in a very typical small town in Sweden. Population of 10K, a couple schools, one high school, a few pizza places, one thai restaurant, a few football teams, and that’s it. When we were kids I made friends with a guy named Fred. We would hang out from time to time when we were 7-10 years old, and then we went to different schools and lost contact for a few years. We ended up in the same school again at 13 and developed a sort of best friends relationship that lasted into our mid-20s.
However, this story is really about Fred’s cousin, Jim. He was a quiet kid, a few years younger than us, and a pretty good football player. I never knew Jim very well, even though I met him a number of times and played football with him on occasion, so most of this information is second hand through Fred.
When he was 10 or so, Jim started to suspect that he was being stalked. Wherever he went in town, he very often happened to see the same person, an old man with a walker. He was described as seeming too old to be out and about by himself. He always wore a blue robe and some form of pj’s, and slippers. Jim had told Fred about this man because he was starting to feel weird about it all. He’d go to the library and the man would be there. He’d go to a coffee shop and the man would be standing across the street outside. He’d go to the sports hall and the man would be standing in the parking lot. The old man would never walk or otherwise move, he would just stand there and look.
At first, Jim thought this guy was just one of those people you randomly see everywhere. When you live in a small town like that, there are always people who you seem to run into extremely often. Maybe they just take many walks. But this man seemed way too old to be walking around all over town all the time. Even in the winter he would wear the same clothes. When Jim had told Fred about the man, Fred made an effort to keep his eyes open, especially when he was with Jim. But he never saw the old man, and eventually Jim stopped bringing it up.
A few years later, when Jim was 15, and Fred and I were around 18, Jim had once again brought up the old man in private conversation with Fred. At this point, Fred had forgotten all about it, so his reaction was something like “oh yeah, that was a weird thing that happened for a while”. However, Jim said he was still seeing the man everywhere, and he had only brought it up again because it was escalating. The reason why he hadn’t talked about it for a few years, was that he had slowly realized the man was invisible to other people. Jim had tried pointing him out to friends, but they just couldn’t see him. Jim had then stopped mentioning it, since he didn’t want to be alienated from his friends.
When he said it had escalated, Jim meant that the man had been showing up in places where he wouldn’t normally be. Most notably, standing in the middle of the street outside Jim’s bedroom. He would also stand by the side of the road in various places when Jim was riding in his parents’ car. Sometimes the man would seemingly be in two places at once, or moving impossibly fast between one spot and another. Another detail was that Jim now felt like the man was more directly staring specifically at him, rather than just standing around.
The most significant experience I had with Jim’s fear happened when Jim was 16. Fred and I went to watch a game with Jim’s football team. Jim was a striker/poacher and would normally spend a lot of time in the opponents’ penalty area. In this game, however, he kept dropping down in the field, almost playing a midfielder/playmaker position, despite his coach yelling at him to let others do the build-up play. At half time, Jim took himself off the pitch, telling the coach he felt nauseous and couldn’t continue. Later, he told Fred the real reason why he didn’t want to stay on. The old man had been standing by the opposing team’s goal post throughout the entire game. Jim said he couldn’t focus on the game and didn’t want to get too close to the old man.
At some point after this, Fred’s and Jim’s families went on a vacation trip together, somewhere around the Mediterranean. After they got home, Fred told me that Jim had been seeing the old man there too. Fred and Jim had shared a hotel room on the third floor, and at one point Fred had woken up to Jim’s panicked screams when he said he had seen the old man standing on their balcony in the middle of the night.
Shortly afterwards, Jim’s family moved to a different city for work, and Fred didn’t see Jim very often from that point on. He never heard any more stories about the old man, and so neither did I.
I’ve always wondered what was going on with that guy. I don’t have any contact with Fred anymore, and Jim seems unsearchable on Facebook. I also can’t see that he has a publicly listed address or phone number. At first we assumed Jim was just making up a spooky story to freak people out, but over the years it became clear that he was definitely not joking. He saw something, whether it was all in his head or not. I don’t tend to believe in the supernatural, so my explanations for this are rather limited. I also don’t want to speculate about Jim’s mental health, but of course it’s crossed my mind that he was in serious need of medication or some other treatment.
There’s no real kicker here. This story is just a mystery, still. :/
Oops, that turned out way longer than I thought.
It’s interesting how shifting paradigms lead to different explanations for the same phenomena. Supernatural, hoax, mental illness
I don’t believe in the supernatural but it is interesting thinking about it. There is a place in Roswell, GA that was the site of a number of mills from the 1800s through the 1970s. A friend of mine lives near there and sometimes we go hiking through that area. It’s really very close to the center of the town, but the area is so heavily vegetated and the terrain so broken up that you feel like you are in the middle of the wilderness.
On one occasion, my friend, her husband and myself were on the trail. She went up ahead to the river but we hung back and looked down the trail. Both of us admitted to hearing footsteps but no one or nothing was visible and we could see for quite a ways. My friends recounted how another time there were they and another person were hiking and birds and other wildlife were getting spooked and moving away from the path, after the group had passed, suggesting that something was following them that the animals were afraid of, though the humans hadn’t disturbed them. Another time, my friend and I had an uneventful hike there, but later while we were sitting on her couch, a magnet flew off of the refrigerator and landed several feet away on the kitchen floor. My friend had just recounted how there had been times she felt as if something followed her home from the old mill site.
FrickleFrackle – I haven’t read any of Ligotti’s non-fiction, but his short stories are horror gold. I still remember “The Frolic”, which I must have read years ago. Somewhat reminiscent of early Ramsey Campbell – the kind of thing that makes enjoyable reading, but I want to take my brain out and scrub it so I can deal with reality afterwards.
Knowing that he’s lived with anxiety and anhedonia his whole life – whew. I hope he at least can appreciate how good a writer he is.
So, I have some upsetting news: I just discovered the body of one of my family’s cats, Mr. Whiskers.
He was super old, but he was the best damn cat. He was a pretty seal-point siamese cat, and he had big ol’ paws that looked like mittens in the front because he had an extra toe.
He liked sleeping in all sorts of tiny places in this old house, and it was always really funny to look up and just find him there.
He also liked to sit on his corner of the kitchen counter, because we wanted to keep the dogs out of his food, and he’d reach a paw out and try to grab your arm when you went by if he was hungry, which was all the time.
One time though, he hopped a fence, killed a neighbor’s rabbit, and drug it inside, while we were all in the living room, and drug it behind the couch to eat it. We lent our neighbors our foldable dog kennel until they built a hutch.
I’m just so upset right now. I went to pet him and he was stiff and cold and it felt so awful because he used to be so soft and warm and he’d purr really loud when I scratched his hindquarters.
@PI
Oh no, I’m so sorry. 🙁
Hugs, Paradoxy. That’s awful. My best internet hugs to you.
I’m sorry PI. Hugs if you want them.
I’m so sorry, PI. And belated condolences to everyone else in the thread who has recently lost a pet because I don’t think I’ve said anything about it yet.
Hugs Paradoxy
Thanks, y’all.
And hugs for anyone else who’s lost a pet recently. That shit sucks.
Please accept my condolences, PI.