Life Before Death

"I wrote a eulogy for my best friend last week. Then I read it to him. At the pub. On a Tuesday."

He was alive, holding a pint, looking at me like I'd lost my mind. Maybe I have.

I'm Mick. I'm 70. The man across the table was Barry. Seventy-two. Best mate for 46 years. Met on a building site in 1979. He dropped a plank on my foot. I called him something unrepeatable. He bought me a pint after the shift. Haven't gone a week without talking since.

Three months ago we went to a funeral. Bloke we'd worked with. Cancer. The eulogies were beautiful - people saying what he meant to them, things they'd clearly never said to his face. And all I could think was, he can't hear any of this.

Every beautiful sentence. Every "he changed my life." Said to a room of crying people and a box of wood.

I turned to Barry. Whispered, "What a waste."

Drove home. Couldn't sleep. Because I realised, if Barry died tomorrow, I'd stand up and say extraordinary things about this man. Things I've never said in 46 years. And he'd be in the box, missing all of it.

So I wrote them down. Took a week. Harder than expected - not finding the words, but admitting I had them.

Rang him. "Tuesday. The Crown. Need to read you something."

"Have you joined a book club?"

"Just come."

Same corner table. Pint of bitter. Crisps. I pulled out the paper. He saw my hands shake.

"Mick. What's this?"

"Your eulogy. I'm reading it now because I'm not wasting it on a day you can't hear it."

"Have you gone mad?"

"Probably. Shut up and listen."

I read it. In a pub. To a man very much alive and very much uncomfortable.

I told him about the plank and how it was the best injury of my life. About the night he drove forty minutes in rain to help change a tyre. About how he rang every day for three months after my divorce and never once asked "Are you alright?" - just talked about football and weather, because he knew I didn't need a question. I needed a voice.

I told him he was the funniest man I'd ever known and his jokes were terrible and both things were true. That he'd been a better father than he thinks. That his wife's a saint and he knows it. That I'd have been a worse man without him.

He didn't look at me. Stared at his pint. Jaw tight. Doing that thing men do when the feelings arrive and they'd rather swallow glass than show it.

When I finished, long silence. Then he picked up his pint, took a sip, and said,

"You're paying for the next round. And the one after."

That was his answer. Perfect. Because Barry doesn't say "I love you too." He says "you're buying."

But in the car park, he hugged me. Not the quick back-pat. A real one. Thirty seconds. Neither let go first.

And he said quietly into my shoulder, "Don't read that again at the real one. I want new material."

Who would you write a eulogy for - while they're still here?

Don't wait. The flowers can't hear. The box doesn't laugh. Say it now. At the pub. Over a bad cup of tea. You'll feel ridiculous.

They'll look uncomfortable. It'll be the most important thing you've ever done.

Read them the speech while they can still hug you in the car park.”

But until real human beings who experience hallucinations are treated like human beings worthy of respect and dignity...I think perhaps it's shitty to keep associating hallucinations with being non-human, dangerous, and a liar.

It actually really fucking sucks that hallucinating is seen as monster-movie-scary, dangerous, inhuman, and worthy of scorn and/or mockery. It actually really fucking sucks that people who hallucinate or experience delusions can't get compassionate help or understanding, because everyone thinks it's an automatic sign of being dangerous, violent, and a liar. It's a massive problem that people look at hallucinations as "dangerous crazy person shit" that should be gotten rid of or locked away.

I find it crass, at best, to flippantly use the term "AI hallucinations" when real-life people get abused, imprisoned, and killed because they experience hallucinations.

Language is weird!

kaladin and shallan have two ends of the 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' story within a corrupt system while dalinar realizes from his position as an embodiment of the system that corruption exists. there are good moments here and good themes, hope and perseverance and don't kill yourself etc. (neoliberal slop)

then we get moash and the parshmen are people reveal. the ambiguity of the moash storyline is what makes it compelling. if there wasn't a case to be made from both sides then it doesn't work. the audience needs to be with kaladin all the way through even as he helps and then ultimately betrays moash. parshmen slaves being full sentient beings is a slight subversion of a sort of house elf trope, but not unexpected. we have had rlain the whole time as a tease that things are not what they seem.

oathbringer is where it all comes together to get to the point where reality and fantasy are almost merging. humans conquered the continent and subjugated and exterminated the natives and their culture. your way of life, even if you can't abandon it was built on genocide and slave labor. can you still participate in that and consider yourself a good person?

and then RoW shows that Brandon isn't ready to write these books. he regresses back into fantasy, dropping the ball on the moral rolling stone that has been building momentum since minute one. all nuance is written out and it becomes a straightforward fight between good and evil.

the way odium and the fused were written means that any doylist critique can be given a watsonian answer.

q: should the land of the continent that was violently conquered be given back to its original inhabitants?

a: no because they worship an evil god.

q: when, if ever, is revolutionary violence justified?

a: never, he told his best friend to kill himself.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

slay

let it go

hello, im here