#461

Returning to the subject of skeletons (yes! yes! Factually Macabre 2024 continues!), perhaps nothing is so iconically and universally used to symbolize the fearful and gruesome aspects of death itself, though it is in actual fact essential to life, part of a living body, and is merely the most enduring of a certain kind of organism's structure. A human skull should no more symbolize death and evoke fear than a seashell, or a dead leaf. 

And yet it does.

Skeletons could never hurt you, unless they were indeed animated by dark magicks or the like. They cannot in actuality hold themselves up. It's not merely a matter of nothing attaching the joints and bones themselves--the very cohesion we grant a skeleton, its human shape, is a human conceit, a deception. A skeleton is a pile of useless junk. The parts are nothing without the life of the whole. Bones do not support themselves just to make a shape, they are parts of how a leg is, they hold suspensions in a stasis, they change densities and temperatures throughout the course of a day, they are affected by the physics of the tendons and the unceasing contraction and relaxation of the muscle fibers. A skeleton does not walk; it floats. It is not wired together or marionetted like a puppet, it is flowing and falling and breathing and mostly water, and the dried-out husk that lives in the human imagination brimming with jealousy and evil intent is nothing more than persistent minerals reminding us that no one grows too old, and it really is no big deal.

And yet it is.

For some reason, most of us shudder. And indeed, given everything I have just said, to witness a skeleton standing on its own? Would shit myself instantly. I have destroyed probably hundreds of thousands, maybe over a million skeleton enemies in video games and I have trained my mind and spirit to welcome death as a release and an adventure, and still, in present tense and living color, a skeleton would freak my whole composure to pieces. 

Thankfully, they can be summarily destroyed. Not like a fucking ghost.

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Ghosts next time? I'm thinking ghosts next time.

--JL

#459

Alright, alright, I'm beginning to adjust to being a MANager again. The heavy investments, in time and currency, I have made towards video games have leavened the portion and granted me the necessary rise.

Boy, I'd hate to find out what full-bore description of maniac I would be without video games. The government would no doubt have me developing something gruesome, conceptually or experimentally. Or I would be a priest. It's hard to say with me, with the past, with the might-have-beens and probablies.

With the priest thing, I do not visualize the kind that messes with anybody but definitely the kind that drinks too much and turns up dead. At least, from the vantage point of the phenomenon I am in this universe, in this iteration, that is the kind of thing it is easy for me to imagine. We are all of course one of infinite versions of ourselves, including infinite shadow doppelgangers we barely dare and perhaps cannot imagine, let alone confront.

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It's a good month to entertain spooky, twisted, maladroit, and outright horrifying notions. And what better way to celebrate this quirk of the human mind than by doing a thing here on the ole blog? Let us enjoin a brash and rousing session of 

FACTUALLY MACABRE

2024

yessssssss

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One rather feels that, with the consideration of real beings, real persons, invaders from another universe whose familiarity to you and with you is as absolute as their proclivities and appetites and attitudes are abhorrent to you, I have already completed the mandate for the day. But perhaps we can drive our scalpel deeper, and observe how marrow will issue from a cut in living bone.

*

Haven't watched The Substance yet, but I'm gonna! Before it leaves theaters, I will do this thing. My buddy almost passed out! To lose consciousness right in a movie theater; imagine.

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I will also watch the second Joker and F.F. Coppola's Megalopolis by F.F. Coppola. All of these viewings will take place near the end of the run of the film, maybe on or close to the same day I bet. 

Also I would like to see The Wild Robot,

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We're gonna roll Akira this month at the old theater. Gotta catch that shit; never seen it on the big screen. If that is not factually macabre piece of art, man, I dunno. I guess the scope of "macabre" is to a certain extent whatever you decide it is, so "macabre" might define a fairly narrow band of light. I think of it more like a vein of substance that runs through many different sedimental layers and types of bedrock, and is component to many alloys and composites. 

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Oh, skeletons. Yes, the simple skeleton is macabre, natural and of a piece with something as basic as shitting or eating or having sex. One does use one's skeleton for all these things, after all. Don't you ever think about that? The way your skeleton looks underneath it all, as you wait in the elevator with a bunch of other flesh-sheathed, organ-laden skeletons? As you grind your flesh into the flesh of another in the heat of passion, do you imagine two skeletons having come together to perform a bizarre mummery in which they pretend to but never quite touch? 

How ridiculous your skeleton looks as you fuck. As you wipe your ass. You fool! Cover that thing up!

*

Cool. Cool. Some food for thought, eh? I mean. Some maggots to devour your brain even as you stumble from horror to horror here on

FACTUALLY MACABRE 2024 

--JL