#the dread

adding fire to the problem was that my parents and my grandparents wanted to watch my matches, because they were very proud that their Gangly Nerd Son was actually Sporting, and they wanted to cheer me on. which would've been sweet and all, but if there are four people you do not want there during a key part of your Burgeoning Sexual Awakening, it is your mom and your dad and your grandma and your grandpa.

right? i mean, imagine some guy's got your head in his armpit, and you're going you know, old sweat smells bad, but fresh sweat has a sort of and then you make eye contact with your grandpa in the stands and you remember you're swearing spandex so if you pop a boner people aren't just going to be able to see the outline, they're going to be able to count the veins, and the only way you will be able to restore your family's honor after that would be by moving to siberia and renouncing joy, forever. that, or lift your entire body up by your kneck then twist 180 degrees without paralyzing yourself.

it’s a lot of pressure, is what i’m saying.

still it did motivate me to win my matches really fast. because i was so tall and skinny, i was stupidly good at the double leg takedown, and then once someone was knocked down, i'd just do the half nelson and kind of flip em over for the pin. then the ref would count to three and i’d win. EZPZ.

i had one match where that went great. won in the first ten seconds, sat back down, and prepared myself for a good hour or two of doing fuck all. didn't even feel bad the parents/grandparents were gonna be bored. the matches went up from me in 5 pound increments (i was in the 115 lbs division) and it was going great until we got to the 145 lbs division. the other school's wrestler stepped onto the mat, and she turned out to be a girl so our guy flipped, because for straight guys, wrestling a girl is not a pleasant experience.

i'm not entirely unsympathetic. my experience wrestling dudes was definitely a little traumatic. but also, i dealt. guy could've dealt too. instead, he refused to wrestle, and the coach went - fine. not even worth fighting over.

so he went to the 140 pounder, and that guy said, nosir, my mom said mormons can't wrestle girls. next guy down, 135 pounder, now he knew he could pull the same card and thus did. 130 pounder, 125, both tapped out. he got to the 120 guy, and that guy was catholic, but he said he was considering being mormon, and thus would have to pass. as a precaution.

coach blew up a little at that. he said "is there anyone - anyone - on this entire goddamn team that is willing to wrestle a girl?" and then he pointed at me and said "YOU. MAT. GO."

and i'll be real, if i'd been paying more attention, i'd have pulled the mormon card too, but i'd just been putting all that audio into a buffer file because i was reading, so i was halfway across the mat before i even processed what had been said and by then it was too late to turn back.

still i had a plan. and my plan - my beautiful, perfect plan - was to do what i'd always done. tackle, flip, pin, win. sit down. read. bore my family to death. move on.

i got the first part right. she was bigger than me, but she wasn't taller. just an incredibly stout woman. god built me like a snake with glasses, just as he built her like a combat cube. the problem was the half nelson. soon as she was down, i tried hooking my arm under hers from behind and for both genders, the defense for this move is just clamping your arms really fucking tight against your sides. if you're a guy, that's whatever, but if you're a girl - especially if you're god's chosen combat cube - that pins your opponents hand right against your boob.

so, i got the hook in, she clamped, my whole arm pressed against something soft, my coach was yelling THE HALF NELSON. BABYLON! JUST FINISH IT! FINISH THE HALF NELSON! and i was just trying to press hard enough to finish, when then my brain went

...oh.

and i flipped out. of course i flipped out. i like girls, and touching a boob is an elemental experience, and i was not ready. i was not prepared. i had not committed the sacred rites. i recoiled like i'd just brushed my arm against the surface of the sun, stood up, and backed away. nobody in the room knew why i'd given up. all they saw was me, right about to win, suddenly flailing around and scrambling. so everyone started screaming at me to just get the half nelson again, and i couldn't really yell back there's a fuckin' boob in the way and it was very distressing, and the only way i could think of to make them stop was just doing it over again the right way.

so i did.

i hunkered down and prepared myself for Wrasslin' Attempt #2: The Sequel.

i knocked her down again, EZPZ. i went for the half nelson again, but she knew what i was about to do so she super clamped, and i knew she was gonna super clamp, so i wound my arm back like a pop-eye cartoon punch before swinging my arm through the gap between her bicep and her side, but the amount of time i spent winding back super signalled what i was about to to do, which gave her time to clamp even harder, which somehow redirected the entire force of the popeye punch to the bottom of her bra.

it spat out a single boob the same way an action hero might spit out one single tooth after getting a solid crack across the jaw. as if to say:

*ptooie.* "that all you got?"

i did not actually see this. my experience was that first there was an arm, then there was a bit of boob, but i was braced, i was ready, forward at all costs, tatakae motherfuckers, and then the boob went away, and i didn't know where it went but my team, and the audience, and everyone who was in front of me, they all gasped like i just kicked them in the stomach. except for my coach. he was behind me, and thus one of the four people in the room who did not see the boob. now my mom, my dad, my grandma, and my grandpa, they all got flashed but nooooooo, coach thunderbutt was behind me, and he didn't see shit so he was still yelling NOOOOOO BABYLON WHAT ARE YOU DOING JUST FINISH THE NELSON! GO FOR THE KILL! BABYLON! BABYLON!

but i did not go for the kill. i stood up and she stuffed her boob back real fast, and we just kind of circled each other awkwardly until time ran out and i won on points. that's not technically allowed, but the ref had some mercy on me.

my coach did not.

i barely had time to sit down before he strode over to the bench to chew me out.

"babylon," he said, in that very calm way people get when they're too pissed to yell. "why didn't you pin?"

and i didn't know how to say well coach, i tried, but there was a boob, and it kept getting in the way, and my mom was watching, and so was my dad, and so was his dad, and his mom, and god (like bible god) and that's a can of worms because i'm pretty sure he was already mad at me, and i'm wearing spandex, and i think i might have to move to siberia, so instead i said

"i uh. i forgot how to do the half nelson."

which is actually impossible. forgetting how to do the half nelson is like forgetting how to swallow your spit.

and he looked at me, like i was the dumbest person in the entire world, and i looked through him like i'd just survived my 250th day in a trench at verdun, and he said: fine.

fine.

but we're all going to practice it for an hour tomorrow because you forgot.

and then he left.

and my buddies had the gall to be salty about it. i got so many comments saying "dude, why didn't you just tell him the truth?" and i said "you can if you care so damn much. you could've wrestled the girl too. maybe someone else should do the hard thing today."

but they didn't. so the next day, we did an hour of half nelson drills, and i spent a decent amount of time getting thrown around the mat, and it was pleasant in exactly the way that i hated and the year after that, to the surprise of everyone but myself, i quit wrestling and joined the trivia team.

and if you want more reasons to love my mom, my grandpa joked after the match that i might have to talk to my bishop about it, and my mom told him he would be allowed to make jokes after he stood in front of a crowd of 110 people in spandex underpants while wrestling a woman that was not his wife.

he paused for almost five seconds after that. then he said: aw. hell. sorry babylon.

(Small, unplanned essay dedicated to @winnower-winnower , a truly beloved friend) (Discussion of slavery, spirituality, suicide, and death ahead, please be mindful)

Rereading Mataiodoxía and seeing how the Witness, using paracausal forces, desecrates an organic form and calls it “raw material” that is “mediocre” is reminiscent of stories I’d hear of sorcerers preying on vulnerable people to capture their bodies, either by visiting people nearing death to psychologically alter them into a zombie-like trance, or viewing graves as an opportunity to find moldable bodies.

A sorcerer can approach a grave much like a subjugator can approach a pit, such as when “…they drag heaps of un-sculpted flesh by viridescent chains of suspension—lashed to the pommel of their lance—and casts them into a cyst-pit within the depths of the Witness's monolith.” (Attendant’s Mark, Ishtar Collective)

The purpose of zombies is to serve their master with no sense of self and came about as a response to enslaved conditions that not only brutally killed countless people physically, but stripped people of their personhood, faith, and autonomy for the sake of serving malicious, arrogant masters.

Either for labor or to carry out further subjugation, zombies attend to their master and do their bidding, for their spirit is bound to their body for an eternity by the sorcerer, instead of being allowed to pass onto the ancestral afterlife. The susceptible nature of their soul is often due to their life being harmed or ending by violent causes, leading to zombies often being victims of horrid conditions before being preyed upon further.

Their past, who they were and what they endured, no longer exists and they are unaware of everything but the purpose instilled by their master. The servitude zombies endured in their lifetime follows them into their eternal life, leaving them completely at the mercy of someone wielding powers for the sake of fulfilling their vision of what the person deserves or is useful for.

Zombies, whether one believes in them or not, whether literal or metaphorical, are an examination of the trauma of colonial oppression in the Caribbean and how that can be exploited by people with power and arrogance to define victims of colonialism by nothing more than their abuse and what their religious/economic/cultural/linguistic “masters” want them to be.

The binding of a spirit to an undead body for the sake of service has the same decaying scent of “The shapes shatter from their hold and step into existence, frozen fragments of a mind now forgotten. ‘You. Warriors of pain born from salvation. Attend to us.’ (Attendant’s Mark, Ishtar Collective)

The trance zombies are claimed to enter and the slipping awareness they endure as their entire being is erased to suit the taste of their master looks uncannily like “His eyes burn—the final remnant of Veskith gazes blankly from within a catatonic fog, unaware of the reality beyond his cage. The unchanging image of the portal burns into his retinas, as their body ignores twitching nerves pleading to blink.” (Husk’s Cloak, Ishtar Collective)

And it is exactly the uncanny look the dread bear that raise the same hairs that rose when I thought about becoming an eternal victim of a purpose that wasn’t mine as a child. An attendant is a zombified psion and it must be mortifying for a psion to see their form with evidence of The Witness’ enslavement all over them.

There are some takes on zombies that portray a softer image, for the zombie does not necessarily suffer due to their unawareness and someone whose life purpose was to labor would see little difference in how they spent their eternal life, but I find this softness the same one the Witness uses to justify its actions.

Zombification can be seen as softer than the life the person lived, but there is no softness in an eternity of living by someone else’s design when, within Caribbean spirituality, can find meaning in your passing and the thirst for freedom you instilled on your people.

A bòkò (sorcerer) during the colonial period might have created zombies in an attempt to spare the tormented spirit of people who have committed suicide trying to escape enslaved conditions, but the Witness occupies a very different position compared to a colonial era bòkò.

The Witness is creating dread out of species it has brought devastation and subjugation to, like the Eliksni who suffered the whirlwind and the Psions who were shown “beyond the veil”. The Witness and it’s campaign is what inspired zombification; it is a similar force to the one that caused Caribbean people to warn of a fate as horrid as the one of a person who becomes a victim of the devastation left behind by colonial powers in both their physical life and spiritual life.

Yet, it positions itself as a savior that, is so far above the people it pities, it has both the right and vision to decide how it’s dread will serve it and what their eternal form will mean. The bòkò may be opportunistic about the conditions colonialism made, but it is the Witness who creates conditions it can then exploit to create dread and cause whole civilizations to be susceptible to the dread it’s ideology speaks of.

It is the enslaver who drives the enslaved to suicide and then instills that the spirit of those who take their life will not be in heaven, for they should of just turned to his god.

A beloved relative once laid on her death bed (which was just a bed to everyone’s knowledge at the time) and said that if she could be of no more use in this life, that if she couldn’t do the labor she had done her whole life, that higher powers should let her die for she had no purpose and had a life of suffering.

It wasn’t until the morning of her death when she awoke from a dream of an obeahwoman she knew stalking her body and filling the house with zombie potions that she found the spirit to fight, to get well again, to refuse to be owned and refined by someone who believed themselves to have jurisdiction of what was best for her.

She feared what that woman would of done to her more than she could ever fear death, and when thinking about that eternity spent bound to a body she could no longer recognize, she remembered how meaningful her life was if she decided it would be.

She began to talk of how she would gladly live, even while ill, disabled, and pained, if it meant she didn’t have to use a functional deceased body to serve the obeahwoman.

And for the last day of her life, she wanted to live, even if she was of no service to anyone. She wanted to live because she wanted to choose impermanent meaning to permanent purpose.

She was loved, even while ill and in her last days, and that was meaningful her.

Unlike the zombie of Western media, it is not the actions of the zombie you truly fear, but the fate you might share if your hardship is captured permanently for all to see in your empty gaze.

The dread are a potent terror designed to evoke those very feelings. Their crude, soulless heads forced onto their haunting carapace bring about the same gut-wrenching horror of Zora Neale Hurston’s description of a supposed zombie in her book Tell My Horse (1938):

“That blank face with the dead eyes. The eyelids were white all around the eyes as if they had been burned with acid . . . There was nothing that you could say to her or get from her except by looking at her, and the sight of this wreckage was too much to endure for long.”

And what was the word Hurston used to define the look of the zombie?

wait a damn minute

WAIT A DAMN MINUTE

are you fucking kidding me!?!?!? that is the sweetest god damn thing in the fucking world!?!?!?

DESTINY 2 AS TUMBLR TEXT POSTS 💠💬✨