So I had this odd dream. There was a medieval sort of capital city in the middle of a large country with a central temple. Inside they kept a woman who was selected to be a "princess goddess", an idol of sorts, chosen to be a kind of elected goddess. Quite an important role, one might imagine. The various surrounding provinces each picked a girl of noble blood and the right attributes (some kind of psychic attunement or other), and she was pampered and groomed from youth to be a candidate for the next goddess for when the time came. The candidates knew that there would be a degree of physical immobility and so trained for that, but they had never actually met the princess goddess, and certain details of the position were kept secret from them.
Well, the time came and one teenage girl was selected. She was greatly honored and excited, though nervous as one might expect. She was taken to the capital and brought to the temple where she would be staying. In the temple, in the center of a round dais, was a hollow, polished stone cone. Picture a traffic cone cut in half. In a solemn but rather rough ceremony that ignored her confusion, she was seated naked inside the cone, the top level with her neck. A fancy neck brace of brass and ebony was fixed around her neck, though it was just slightly too long for the girl's neck, so they had to force it shut despite her discomfort... she was too overwhelmed and too well bred to complain. Then two thick halves of a round wooden lid with a hole in the center were closed around her neck like a pillory with her head poking out the center, so that she was trapped inside and her head and the top of the brace were the only parts left visible.
She had been trained for this, so while she didn't know it would be quite so immobilizing, it wasn't terribly traumatic. But it turned out they weren't quite finished. A naked woman was then brought in... a tall, heavy, amazonian sort of woman with her head and hands encased in brass spheres. She, too, had been groomed, had only one duty in life and sight and hands weren't needed for it. She was also filthy, spattered with mud all over. As she approached the dais, the frazzled girl attempted a formal greeting, but the woman was uninterested in formalities.
The people, it seemed, worshiped their goddess, but also believed that something of such importance and reverence should be kept humbled. So the dirt-spackled woman turned around, leaned back, and rested her weight against the girl's face. The stunned noble girl, her nose and face buried deeply in the large round cheeks, could breathe only through the narrow space below the woman's crotch, in the gap between her spread thighs. And that, apart from ceremonies and audiences, was how the girl would spend most of the rest of her long tenure as a goddess.
Heh. Dreams are funny.
Though the imagery did put in me mind of a possible future featured fetish artist... Namio!
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Friday, July 27, 2012
Chickens? Marriage? Frogs? What is this?
First of all... Chick-fil-a, noooo!
I do enjoy Chick-fil-A, especially the nuggets. I've enjoyed them ever since they showed up in a local mall in the mid 80s, back then right next to a large video game arcade. They've always been closed on Sundays for religious reasons, which I found a rather antiquated policy and often annoying (how often have I had a craving for Chick-fil-A and realized that it's Sunday?), but whatever. You don't have to open a business when you don't want to, for any reason you choose.
But the other week I heard their president has announced opposition to marriage equality, touting biblical marriage, that he knows better than the rest of us, saying "I pray God's mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about." As if that's not what people have always done, including him. Not to mention that marriage in the Bible is pretty darn weird, what with the concubines and rape victims being forced to marry their rapists and polygamy and executing non-virgin brides and so on and so forth. What, you don't follow those outdated precepts and traditions anymore, Mr Chicken? Are you, too, guilty of arrogantly defining marriage due to changing cultural and social standards?
And even then, up until the 11th and 12th centuries, the Church didn't get involved in marriage. Marriage was a common law thing, defined by the community. Priests weren't involved and marriages didn't even take place inside the church. It wasn't until the middle ages that they decided to turn marriage into a holy sacrament and made various laws enforcing it. Later on, protestants would come out against that, removing marriage as a sacrament and returning it to the realm of earthly, civic jurisdiction. Marriage has always been defined and redefined as needed by a society.
Well, anyway, even that's not all that important when it comes to selecting your vendor of battered chicken. You can believe what you want. Every CEO has their own personal beliefs or lack thereof, and is free to live his or her life accordingly. Closing your business for whatever reason doesn't hurt anyone. It's when I learned the company's been donating millions of dollars to oppose legalization of gay marriage, support of anti-gay conversion camps, and criminalization of homosexuality that I have to ask myself if I can give any money to a company that purposefully attempts to actively cause harm to others, make life harder people they don't like, and stand in the way of other people's pursuit of happiness while using religious dogma as an excuse for their own bigotry.
[Edit 8-04: This morning I was stuck behind an suv with its back and side windows painted "LOVES GOD AND JESUS, GOING STRAIGHT TO CHICK-FIL-A!" Lovely, so now eating fried chicken is a religious statement. And then, as if to punctuate his piety and demonstrate his civic-mindedness, the driver chucked an empty Chick-fil-A cup out of his window into the street. Littering is next to godliness!]
But I was pleased to hear that the Jim Henson Company, which had been working with Chick-fil-A, has ceased their business relationship because of the company's stance. Good on ya. There's a company that's never ceased to amaze and, thanks to its movies and shows (Fraggle Rock, Dark Crystal, Labyrinth) shaped my childhood imagination to a strong degree. So I thought I'd share this to wash away the bitterness. Remember it?
I do enjoy Chick-fil-A, especially the nuggets. I've enjoyed them ever since they showed up in a local mall in the mid 80s, back then right next to a large video game arcade. They've always been closed on Sundays for religious reasons, which I found a rather antiquated policy and often annoying (how often have I had a craving for Chick-fil-A and realized that it's Sunday?), but whatever. You don't have to open a business when you don't want to, for any reason you choose.
But the other week I heard their president has announced opposition to marriage equality, touting biblical marriage, that he knows better than the rest of us, saying "I pray God's mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about." As if that's not what people have always done, including him. Not to mention that marriage in the Bible is pretty darn weird, what with the concubines and rape victims being forced to marry their rapists and polygamy and executing non-virgin brides and so on and so forth. What, you don't follow those outdated precepts and traditions anymore, Mr Chicken? Are you, too, guilty of arrogantly defining marriage due to changing cultural and social standards?
And even then, up until the 11th and 12th centuries, the Church didn't get involved in marriage. Marriage was a common law thing, defined by the community. Priests weren't involved and marriages didn't even take place inside the church. It wasn't until the middle ages that they decided to turn marriage into a holy sacrament and made various laws enforcing it. Later on, protestants would come out against that, removing marriage as a sacrament and returning it to the realm of earthly, civic jurisdiction. Marriage has always been defined and redefined as needed by a society.
Well, anyway, even that's not all that important when it comes to selecting your vendor of battered chicken. You can believe what you want. Every CEO has their own personal beliefs or lack thereof, and is free to live his or her life accordingly. Closing your business for whatever reason doesn't hurt anyone. It's when I learned the company's been donating millions of dollars to oppose legalization of gay marriage, support of anti-gay conversion camps, and criminalization of homosexuality that I have to ask myself if I can give any money to a company that purposefully attempts to actively cause harm to others, make life harder people they don't like, and stand in the way of other people's pursuit of happiness while using religious dogma as an excuse for their own bigotry.
[Edit 8-04: This morning I was stuck behind an suv with its back and side windows painted "LOVES GOD AND JESUS, GOING STRAIGHT TO CHICK-FIL-A!" Lovely, so now eating fried chicken is a religious statement. And then, as if to punctuate his piety and demonstrate his civic-mindedness, the driver chucked an empty Chick-fil-A cup out of his window into the street. Littering is next to godliness!]
But I was pleased to hear that the Jim Henson Company, which had been working with Chick-fil-A, has ceased their business relationship because of the company's stance. Good on ya. There's a company that's never ceased to amaze and, thanks to its movies and shows (Fraggle Rock, Dark Crystal, Labyrinth) shaped my childhood imagination to a strong degree. So I thought I'd share this to wash away the bitterness. Remember it?
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Busy Bee
It's been a while since I've made an entry. You might well ask what I've been up to? You might well ask, indeed.
Well, I haven't been drawing. I can only effectively focus on one creative task at a time. No, I've been writing. Write, write, write. I've been working on this one story - er, novel really - for several years. It's set in a mysterious and somewhat shabby hospital. The patients aren't sure why they're there or why they're being subject to seemingly unnecessary surgeries. Medical madness abounds. Intrigues! Escapes! Bedpan lickers. Why, it's fun for the whole family!
It's so big that many times trying to figure out the logistics of what happens when has stymied me. The thing has pages and pages worth of outlines alone. So I've frequently left it to work on other things, though I've never abandoned it. I was moved to pick it up again a few weeks ago, so that's what I've been doing. But I doubt I'm more than halfway through, so it's still going to be a long time before it's finished.
In other news, the heat wave broke and it rained a little, ending the drought. The trees have been getting so dry that they've been turning brown and losing leaves. In a strong wind there were so many leaves flying around it looked like late October. Very strange weather.
Well, I haven't been drawing. I can only effectively focus on one creative task at a time. No, I've been writing. Write, write, write. I've been working on this one story - er, novel really - for several years. It's set in a mysterious and somewhat shabby hospital. The patients aren't sure why they're there or why they're being subject to seemingly unnecessary surgeries. Medical madness abounds. Intrigues! Escapes! Bedpan lickers. Why, it's fun for the whole family!
It's so big that many times trying to figure out the logistics of what happens when has stymied me. The thing has pages and pages worth of outlines alone. So I've frequently left it to work on other things, though I've never abandoned it. I was moved to pick it up again a few weeks ago, so that's what I've been doing. But I doubt I'm more than halfway through, so it's still going to be a long time before it's finished.
In other news, the heat wave broke and it rained a little, ending the drought. The trees have been getting so dry that they've been turning brown and losing leaves. In a strong wind there were so many leaves flying around it looked like late October. Very strange weather.