A haven for creative people living with mental illness. This is the place where you can tell it like it is, not yet another place where you have to pretend to be someone you've been told you should be.
If all you wanna see is the poetry, this is is your stop. If you wanna take note of the notes, stick around!
I am very grateful to the folks at the Sunday Muse blog for providing this photo. It turned out to be the push I needed to get out of my stuck place with my WIP, The Ballad of Gerry Clifford.
Lotus is the older sister of the titular character. She was adopted into the large, loving Clifford family when she was six years old. She wrote this sonnet after being molested at twelve years old by the doctor whose children she babysat for.
If you would like to see more snippets from this and other stories as they develop, please click the following link to check out your options.
I have not been well. My diabetes has decided to behave in a more completely shitty fashion than it had previously done, so not only do I find myself dealing with the frustration of contending with this garbage condition, I find myself mired in self-loathing because I learned at a young age that anything shy of physical perfection was a personal failure. I will say with unflinching honesty that if it weren't for the fact that I still serve a purpose in assisting my son, I would punch my own ticket. I realize that suicide ideation is an uncomfortable subject, but please refrain from the blah blah counseling blah and blah blah medications blah rhetoric. Counseling doesn't help, and psych meds cause me to become manic and psychotic, two things that I, shockingly, don't enjoy being.
This poem describes the dead world of Zetar 6 (Zecor), a key player in the Fetch Universe. Fetch is Team Netherworld's flagship story, which was born in early November of 2014 when I was working at the retirement community where I would work for close to 11 years. The idea was born when I learned that someone who had meant a great deal to me for many years had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. This person was only 55 years old at the time of diagnosis--the same age that I am now.
In my shock and grief, I walked through the vast retirement community and was prompted with the idea of finally starting a project that I had envisioned taking on for close to forty years. I had always wanted to write a backstory for the Lights of Zetar, a Star Trek episode which has been universally panned by critics and which has its problems, but has, nonetheless, always fascinated (and scared the bejeezus out of ) me.
The inspiration to finally begin this project and to incorporate it with my beloved Cthulhu Mythos came from a mind other than my own. I will not go into detail except to say that this inspirational individual was noncorporeal, and you can think whatever the hell you want about that, I'm not going to argue with you. I refer to this presence as Gem, and I am deeply grateful to him for the gift he gave me. I am saddened by the fact that when I am gone, the door to this world will close. No-one enjoys my work, and I am well aware of that. My writing style is entirely unappealing to most people, and my personality even more so.
I love you, Gem, but sometimes I am not sure if you possess much in the way of good sense. If you did, you surely would have chosen a scribe who was less of a complete and utter train wreck of a human being to be your co-conspirator.
I know nobody gives a flying toss about my notes, but since I'm pretty sure no-one will read this post anyway, what do I care?
I am recovering from a mental breakdown and from a TIA. I am trying to move back in the direction of writing what I want to write rather than what I think will make money. My health is precarious and I don't really know how long I have left on this planet. I worry like hell about developing vascular dementia. I'm not too worried about Alzheimer's because there isn't a history of that on either side of my family. My father had vascular dementia. My aunt on my mother's side probably had Lewy body dementia, although nothing was ever really confirmed. Hers seemed to onset more quickly than Alzheimer's tends to, although I have a feeling she was hiding her memory lapses until she couldn't anymore.
The TIAs I have had exacerbate my ADD. I don't have any short-term memory loss, but there is a change in my cognition. I blame this most recent episode on not having adequate insulin (thanks, Medicaid). My P.A. changed up my prescription so hopefully, this won't happen again. It probably could have been changed sooner but she was on maternity leave, and I am reluctant to see another provider. It is critical that I have a provider who treats me with respect and looks at numbers such as A1C, blood glucose, blood pressure and triglycerides (all things I'm taking medications for) as opposed to focusing on the damn number on the scale, which only triggers episodes of self-loathing and restrictive eating. Anyone who thinks that shaming large people (or anyone else) reinforces positive behavior is dead wrong. All that sort of behavior does is makes people avoid seeking medical care for fear of being shamed.
I write a segment called Henry and Henry for the Fetch universe. Henry is my female protagonist Pepper's beloved cat, who passes away suddenly. He is modeled after my Lafayette.
Henry Kalmar is the spirit of a flamboyant, openly gay New Orleans blues musician who commits suicide on the tenth anniversary of his beloved half-sister's death. Henry is modeled after Lafayette Reynolds, my favorite character in the show True Blood. Lafayette was the namesake for my Lafayette. He was played by the very talented Nelsan Ellis, who died on 8 July 2017 at the age of 39 from complications of alcohol withdrawal. Nelsan's sister Alice was murdered by her husband in 2002. This was something that Nelsan never got over.
Nelsan attempted to stop using alcohol on his own because he was ashamed to seek help for his addiction. This, unfortunately, created deadly complications. Here we have an example of how shaming people for addiction doesn't work. If shame worked, there would be no addicts, no fat people, and no smokers. I repeat that shaming doesn't work, it only makes people reluctant to seek medical care for fear of being shamed by ignorant health "care" providers.
I adopted my Lafayette's half-sister or cousin Tara at the same time that I adopted Lafayette. I suspect that both of them were very inbred. They came from the same feral colony. Both of them had to have most of their teeth removed because of feline stomatitis. Lafayette had problems with his fur falling out and scabby skin which I attributed to a grain allergy and began feeding him grain-free food which seemed to help somewhat. I later misattributed some of the signs of system failure to a return of the feline stomatitis and assumed that he would need the rest of his teeth removed. I had no idea, and I will go to my grave blaming myself for being so wrapped up in working that I missed critical signs. I will never forgive myself.
Henry the Cat meets Henry Kalmar in the Dreamlands, and together they become part of the team trying to save the Cosmos from an ultimate threat headed by Nyarlathotep, the smartest and trickiest of the Outer Gods. This ragtag group of reluctant heroes also includes a snarky Swedish spectre, a benevolent Yithian, a sweet-natured but foul-mouthed Scotsman who departs his cognitively impaired body at night to join the fight, a terminally ill British prog-rock icon, and a couple of good-natured ghouls.
I let the story languish for five years in favor of attempting to write stuff that I believed would sell. It didn't, and I'm not going to back-burner my beloved project any longer. Would I like for it to have an audience? Sure, I suppose, but sometimes knowing that other people are watching prevents me from unleashing my creativity. So, whatever.
Generally speaking, I am not the kind of person that other people gravitate to. I have kind of a prickly, defensive personality from years of having to defend myself, what do you know? I can count on one hand the people who will respond to this post, and I thank you in advance.
Younger Brother (Turned 50 on March 17 of this year)
The Ugly Duckling Who Never Became a Swan (Turned 54 on 14 February)
I am now doing NaPoWriMo and trying to catch up on Poems in April with The Imaginary Garden With Real Toads, which I didn't know was a thing until a couple of days ago.
I'm going to try and get reeeealllly creative with the prompts so I can catch up sooner. The result will probably be a cobbled-together horror which would make Nyarlathotep run screaming into the night. Let's get going!
So, NaPoWriMo wants to know where I'm from, not as in my location, but as in, who am I? It's probably more of a what than a who, but I'll give it a shot.
The Toads want to know the news from my bed and what would scare the thing I'm scared of. Well, go get your coffee and donuts and come back. Eat a donut. Drink your coffee. And don't move, this is a Haibun!
Where Am I From?
Back on February 15, 1965, a thing that really didn't belong in this world was born into this world.
This thing was an awful pain from the start.
It was born in a raging blizzard.
It didn't sleep well.
When it was about a year and a half old, some genius of a doctor gave it phenobarbitol to try and make it sleep. It was awake for three days.
Something was evidently weird about this thing. It didn't play by the rules.
What Did I Become?
Not surprisingly, the thing grew up to be terribly unpopular and not all well liked. Its peers made it their scapegoat.
Since the thing really didn't have any friends among its peers, it found "friends" in other places.
The thing found "friends" in reruns of a very special program called Star Trek.
It especially liked Mr. Spock, because he was kind of sad and didn't fit in either.
What Scares an Abomination?
I could have written about how much I hate centipedes and cockroaches and earwigs, but I don't know what scares those. Cockroaches aren't scared of anything. They are going to survive the nuclear apocalypse. If cockroaches had middle fingers, they would be scuttling around with their middle fingers raised all the time.
I didn't want to write about roach motels anyway.
So, I thought I'd write about the thing that scared that ugly, unwanted little girl monster, and continues to terrify and inspire the ugly, unwanted adult monstrosity that she became. Ready, readers? Let's go!
The Lights of Zetar
One day the child monstrosity was watching her beloved Star Trek and daydreaming that she was grown up and pretty and that Mr. Spock was her boyfriend. Please keep in mind that she was ten years old and stupid.
That was the day when the girl monstrosity would discover the thing that scared her most. Even more than vampires. Even more than the Xenomorphs that would later lurk in the shadows. Even more than malevolent ghosts.
The girl monstrosity was raised Catholic, and the most frightful idea to her was that of being possessed or otherwise overtaken by a demon. But there are ways of stopping even demons if you can find a priest who has mystical knowledge.
The Lights of Zetar were something that could travel through space at warp speed, come through walls, and destroy a person's brain. There is something viscerally terrifying in that concept.
With the medical knowledge that I would later acquire, I could have told Dr. McCoy that the Lights of Zetar cause their victims to have a massive stroke. Fortunately for the story's heroine, Mira Romaine, there was something unusual about her brain, so they only caused her to have a T.I.A. (transient ischemic attack, colloquially a "small stroke.")
From my current vantage point, I know how the Lights of Zetar effect was created. The entity itself is made of gelatin. The flashes are caused by aluminum powder.
The script had its problems. When watching the episode from my current vantage point, I always end up thinking that if Captain Kirk refers to a grown adult woman as "the girl" one more time, I'm going to make him wear his balls for earrings.
Nonetheless, even knowing that the entity depicted is pretty much Jello and Pop Rocks, the CONCEPT remains compelling, and The Lights of Zetar remain the scariest combination of Jello and Pop Rocks in the Universe. I still have nightmares about these fuckers.
As to why I find Jello and Pop Rocks more terrifying than Xenomorphs, vampires, or even demons, there are ways to fight all of those. Even though you might not have much of a chance, there's still some chance. Besides, demons generally don't blow out their victim's brain.
The Lights of Zetar can travel faster than light speed, pass through the hull of a starship, and most of the time, they fry their victim's brain. It's like a supermassive extraterrestrial cerebrovascular accident (CVA). I did not have knowledge of the term CVA when I was ten years old. All I knew was that The Lights of Zetar terrified me.
Fan Fiction and Beyond
I always wanted to create a back-story for The Lights of Zetar, but wouldn't end up doing so until more than 40 years after I saw the original episode.
Thanks to my obsession with an almost universally panned episode of a decades-old television series, I can now tell you all what would scare the thing that scares me.
Qweh, tyrant king of West Zecor (I believe the image is of a mage from Skyrim)
Serab, a lowly Ahprizite hybrid thief (This image is from deviantart. The artist's information is in the watermark.)
Yadira, high priestess of the Outer Gods and daughter of Nyarlathotep This is a very impressive prosthetic makeup created by Daniele Tinzani
Zecor is the sixth planet orbiting the binary Zetar star system. East Zecor was a peaceful, almost Utopian society. West Zecor was ruled over by King Qweh, a sadistic tyrant who relished physically torturing and having his sociopathic scientists experiment upon his hapless subjects.
Qweh enjoyed psychologically torturing his insubordinate younger sister, Princess Ondina, by turning his victims over to her and challenging her to use her empathic healing abilities on these usually fatally wounded unfortunates.
One day, Princess Ondina's bodyguard managed to enrage King Qweh and wound up dead. Qweh rounded up his posse and went searching for his daily quota of victims. The group happened upon Serab, a destitute thief. Serab was nimble and adept at escaping from impossible situations, but he was badly outnumbered and taken into captivity.
The ruling race on Zecor tended to be very tall. Princess Ondina was around six feet tall and King Qweh stood at around seven feet four inches. Serab was an Ahprizite hybrid. The Ahprizite were a diminutive race of humanoids. Serab was only five feet three inches tall and slightly built.
King Qweh thought it a great joke to present his sister with the tiny Serab as a replacement for her slain bodyguard, but Ondina did not react with the scorn that the king had hoped for. She instead saw Serab's potential and took him on as her bodyguard and assistant.
The affection between Ondina and Serab quickly became romantic, and, although they tried to present their relationship as being purely one of mutual respect, their true feelings were impossible to hide. Qweh was enraged at the way his sister was conducting herself with a common thief right under his nose.
Qweh had an adviser named Baroness Yadira, who was not only a powerful sorceress but the daughter and high priestess of Nyarlathotep. Yadira taught Qweh and his followers the indomitable magic of the Mythos of the Outer Gods.
Qweh was meant to use this magic to subjugate other races and turn them into cultists serving the Outer Gods. However, he was an inept bumbler and, on one drunken night, attempted to exert his newfound power over the Zetar system's small sun. The small sun reacted by cannibalizing the large sun, causing itself to go nova, and flooding the planets with deadly gamma radiation.
Qweh used the magic Yadira had given him to turn himself and his sycophants into a powerful noncorporeal hive entity, the manifestation which came to be known as The Lights of Zetar. Prior to vacating his doomed body, Qweh murdered Serab and admonished Ondina that he would destroy the unfortunate thief in any future lifetime where she attempted to reunite with him.
Ondina responded by dispatching Serab's departing spirit to The Realm of the Yellow Sun (Earth's solar system.) She spent many lifetimes distancing herself from him so as not to bring down Qweh's wrath upon him. However, Serab's love for Ondina was undying, and he spent as many lifetimes trying to draw her back to him.
Finally, in Earth's twentieth century, Serab was reborn as Gerold Lyon Clifford on 12 December 1951 at 6 P.M. in Glasgow, Scotland. Ondina was reborn as Pepper Baiij on 12 October 1967 in Lawrence, Kansas.
Both Gerry and Pepper had strong psychic abilities. They also had a millenniums-old enemy tracking them. When Gerry was twenty years old, he celebrated a record deal by dropping a tab of acid. While standing on a balcony smoking a cigarette, he was attacked by the Lights of Zetar entity, which hoped to use him as a host to enact Qweh's undying hope to become ruler over the cosmos.
Gerry, however, had unusually strong latent magical abilities, which enabled him to banish the entity from Earth. His physical vehicle was unable to endure the constant struggle to keep the planet safe, and, over time, his physical brain started to erode. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease on 20 December 2007 and committed to the Candlelight Ridge Residential Care Facility on 19 November 2013.
As Gerry's physical brain deteriorated, his vulnerable spirit was targeted by Yadira, now known as Yadira Root, who assumed the guise of a kindly volunteer at Candlelight Ridge. In reality, the sorceress was seeking souls to become part of her own personally crafted hive entity, intended to counter the narcissistic and overall ineffective entity comprised of Qweh and his toadies.
Yadira's intent is to eradicate Qweh and his Lights of Zetar and to finally make her father, Nyarlathotep, proud by conquering worlds with the help of the entity which she has been carefully creating over the course of many centuries. Like other Great Old Ones, Nyarlathotep is patient. He knows that all will transpire when The Stars Are Right.
Thus, to make a long story long:
The Lights of Zetar are proven to be frightfully inept though nonetheless incredibly dangerous and exceedingly terrifying.
The thing that most frightens King Qweh, the commanding component in this psychokinetic salad of a giant spacefaring brain, is an ancient and pissed-off sorceress who wants him erased or enslaved, and she doesn't care much which.
Although he would never admit it, the mighty King Qweh is also tremendously threatened by Serab, a small and humble being with a stalwart spirit. As well, Qweh was always quite keen to keep Ondina subjugated, for it was obvious from the time of her birth that her innate powers easily exceeded his own.
In conclusion:
Mighty you may seem
In truth, you are a blowhard
Felled by a small thing
Created by:
The Real Cie
with essential help from
Gem Moondreamer
Lady Eddie
and
Rose LeMort
Notes:
This piece was started at donut and coffee time. I hoped to have it finished by lunchtime, but it was not completed until dinnertime. I suck at deadlines.
Nyarlathotep and the Outer Gods are the creations of H.P. Lovecraft
The Lights of Zetar is a (thankfully) fictional extraterrestrial being which appeared on the original Star Trek series in 1969. This entity is the creation of the late Jeremy Tarcher and the late Shari Lewis.
Shari Lewis' involvement in this creepy episode tends to come as a surprise to people, as she was famous for her work with the cuddly Lamb Chop puppet, not for writing about horrific entities from space which scare grouchy and curmudgeonly horror harridans for a lifetime.
First, why would I take on ANOTHER daily challenge when I'm already involved with two of them?
I could blame the bipolar disorder, but I think the truth is, I'm genuinely insane. I'm not referring to the bipolar disorder part. That's mental illness. Mental illness is not insanity. Insanity is knowing something isn't realistic and doing it anyway. I have a proven track record of insanity.
The second factor involved here is my intent to finally publish a book of my poetry at the end of the year. I don't need to worry about publishers who insist that only previously unpublished works appear. The book will be published by Team Netherworld Creations, a seedy little independent press of which I am the Head Buttmunch in Charge. I don't have such rules. With any book I publish, whether it is written by me or someone else, the author retains all rights to do whatever they want with their material at any time.
Now, about the poem.
The poetry form is Jueju. I wrote two quatrains with seven syllables in each line.
Pepper Baiij is the female protagonist in Team Netherworld's long-running WIP, Fetch. The first chapter of this tale emerged in November 2014. The work is nowhere near ready for publication, but new chapters and poems are always emerging. Maybe someday we'll actually have a finished product.
Kris Rooiakker is an actor with whom Pepper became obsessed in her younger days. He is a psychic vampire. He found Pepper on the astral plane and took advantage of her vulnerability and low self-esteem. Pepper's obsession with Kris cooled many years ago, but he doesn't like being ignored. He keeps coming back to pester her.
The prompt asked writers to grab a book and find a sentence, then:
Use all the words of this sentence in a poem
OR
Pick a word or phrase from this sentence for the title of your poem
OR
Use a part or the entirety of this sentence as the first or the last line of your poem
Now, as it happens, I had the manuscript for Carnal Invasion VI: The Dark Delights of Mistress Kali open for reference in working on the forthcoming Carnal Invasion XI: Good Sports. (I am also the Head Buttmunch in Charge of Naughty Netherworld Press, which is Team Netherworld Creations' lust-crazed sibling.) I found a sentence suitable for public consumption and used the words "in thrall" for the title of the poem and in the first line of the poem. Here is the original sentence.
“No, Jefe, she ain’t hurt, but she in thrall of La Jefa,” Krystal whispered. “You can peek in, sí, but don’t say nothin’. Like I say, we don’t wanna end up being prisoners.”
If you are interested in learning more about the series of novels that this book came from, visit the Naughty Netherworld Press blog, where you will find snippets from the stories and links to purchase the books.
Here are some questions I've answered for Share Your World. You can read them if you want. Or not, if you don't want. No skin off my nose either way.
What is the best pick me up that you know of? To shake you out of the blues?
The Blue Garage
Photoshop Image by The Real Cie
How about the blues? The blues is a goddamn art form! That shitty way I feel when my soul starts crashing in on itself and I feel like I'm lying dead at the bottom of a scummy trench? I think that shit should be called "the gray-green death bile from hell." But that's too long to say readily.
Here is a poem which Pepper, the main female protagonist in Team Netherworld's long-running WIP, Fetch, wrote for her beloved Gerry, the Fetch referred to in the story's title. I think it's kind of a poem about having the blues for the blues.
Where do you like to go when you eat out?
Somewhere cheap where the food tastes good and I'll be served quickly.
Do you believe in luck? Gratitude Question: Aside from necessities, what is one thing you couldn’t go a day without? My son
Notes:
I referenced my own work in this post, which for some reason makes me see the need to mention that I plan to participate in NaPoWriMo in April as I've done every year for the past several years. I'm also planning to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo. I might try to participate in the A to Z blogging challenge if it doesn't turn out to be too muckin' fuch. I haven't decided yet if my participation will be official or unofficial.
