She Wrestles With Angels

Hiroshi Nagai's paintings need sunglasses to look at.

They look like how it feels to walk across a parking lot on a 98° summer day without a speck of shade in sight.

They look like heaven but also like you'd burn your bare feet on the ground.

Even when you can see shade you know it's not enough and the minute you step out you'll be burnt to a crisp like a vampire.

This feels like I could trip on that radio and fall right into that water, feeling the crystal waves as I drop in.

And this, a nice stroll down a resort strip, where my sunscreened skin could literally feel cooked if I leaned too close to the tiling.

And then a nice stretch of summer street, wherein you could see your face in the flushed red of that car provided it didn't blind you from its sunny reflections.

ok brief context first for any readers not aware: in the Odyssey, the unfaithful maids are a group of enslaved women in the house of Odysseus who are hanged for 'betraying' Odysseus by having sex with Penelope's suitors. In the Penelopiad they are instead Penelope's most faithful and trusted maids who she enlisted to spy on the suitors.

my issue w the Penelopiad on this subject is just that I think making it so the maids weren't actually 'unfaithful' carries the implication that if they had done all the things the Odyssey says they did then in some sense they would have had it coming.

yeah I haven't seen the Nolan film but i read the summary bcos i was interested to see if they kept in the Unfaithful Maids and not only are they out but the film also seems to have really played down the massacre of the suitors?

which is another thing where like, even in the original context, we are not supposed to 100% agree with that!! its followed by a sequence where the suitors' families are all like 'dude what the fuck'

part of the emotional impact, to me, of the Odyssey is that we spent the whole epic being encouraged to sympathise w Odysseus as this almost everyman-type main character who just wants to go home and then at the end of the poem he murders a bunch of people. yikes!!

Someone owes me a significant amount of money, and has made it clear that they do not intend to pay me back.

I sent them one text to follow up about it around two months ago, letting them know that I wasn't stressed about it and I could wait or do installments if they needed time or things were rough, and they promptly blocked my number and deleted me on social media.

I was kinda bummed, but then, you know. I figured, it's a lot of money, but at least they've removed themselves from my life, right? If I were to choose between thinking someone like that was a reliable friend or paying a lump sum for the trash to take itself out, I could make peace with it. Whatever. Live and learn.

So, I haven't seen them in a few months. Cool. But then I was walking downtown and I see someone out of the corner of my eye just sitting around, having a drink. Don't know who, don't know what. Not paying attention, yeah? I'm living my life.

But as I get closer to walk past them, I see them get up and start booking it. And as I turn to figure out what's up, why is someone running, I recognize the back of their head, and as they look over their shoulder, we make eye contact, and then they're gone.

And I realize

I just got off work. I'm power-walking in what could ostensibly be interpreted as their direction. They look up and see someone they ghosted, who they have screwed monumentally, coming at them with a hundred-yard-stare and what they may not know is a regular resting bitch face. I don't even care about the money anymore, I've accepted it as a loss, but they blocked me on everything so they don't know that. And they went, "fuck this shit, not today" and dipped.

And that would be funny on it's own, but we do not live in a large, heavily-populated area. It's definitely going to happen again. So my question is this:

How long are they going to let themselves live in fear of my stumpy 5'3" ass hunting them down like John Wick or the devil himself before they snap

STOP-

Their current missionary age for both genders is 19. That's barely out of fucking high school. Any younger and they're going to be sending actual fucking children to random ass countries and making them struggle to survive.

We need to be doing everything we can to keep this scamming, abusive, pedophilic, racist church away from young people.