Tag: the world is quiet here

newt-skamander:

silverybeing:

I’ve been thinking about liminal spaces a bit tonight. And truck/rest stops are often considered to be liminal spaces. Having family a few states over, I’m no stranger to family road trips and, by extension rest stops. There is one thing about them that I’ve thought about for years. 

People work there.

There are people who are not just passing through, but show up day after day, clock in, work for hours, and then go home. Where do they live? What are they like? Are these liminal spaces no longer liminal for them? Its a set destination for them now.

What sort of weird shit do they see every day that they just sigh and return to mopping the floor? The unusual that is just another day on the job. That weird otherworldiness at 3am but whatever I’m on a break. 

Perhaps they are immune to the effects of the passing spirits mixing with the mundane, cause how can you be in a liminal space if its your job? Maybe they are special caretakers that keeps the spirits moving on their way, giving directions to things no one else is supposed to see.

Either way they aren’t paid enough to deal with this shit.

so i work at a highway servo in a small rural town and i’ve done so for about a year. and 100% the creepy shit doesn’t stop, but you do sort of become resigned to it. like in the beginning i once screamed because saw myself in the mirror behind the milk and thought it was not me. but here’s some stuff i guess:

we keep the doors locked because crime exists so they make a beep sound when someone’s waiting to enter, but the amount of times i have checked the monitor and there has been nothing and no one there is not enough to say ‘general sensory problem’ but just enough for my anxious personality to be wary of the ghosts.

occasionally i discover large strange bugs i have never seen before that apparently only exist in the dead of a hot summer night. i also watch a lot of spiders crawl across the outside cameras.

once a man came in around 2am – no car, just wandered off the highway – and took every sausage roll and walked out without paying. which okay, theft happens. but he did it, looking into my eyes, and did not say a word as i called after him. he just walked in calmly, looked into my soul, remained entirely silent, and casually robbed the place. i was shook.

a cousin of mine who had been missing for three months once showed up.

and there’s this totally dead period between 3 and 5 where i usually mop the floors. which is why its weird when i find footsteps in my clean floors after ive finished.

plus, time passes differently in the freezer room . i fill up four full fridges worth of coke and red bull and other assorted soft drinks in fifteen minutes – like i’m not trying that hard its really not possible. and i know that because when i do the three fridges that cant be filled from behind, it takes me more like forty minutes or more.

i get strange customers who come in asking for directions with out-dated melways who don’t own phones and seem misplaced in time somehow but are always so very thankful. sometimes they ask for directions to places ive never heard even tho i’ve lived in the area my entire life.

or i get the same person at the same time to get the same thing every day. they have the same greeting and we have the same conversation like we’re stuck in a time loop. these pod people always come between 4 and 5am.

and i can safely say, you will never know fear until there is a 3am power outage in a storm and you are blanketed in absolute darkness so suddenly your heart stops beating. and then you have been outside in said storm taking out the rubbish and become soaked through like a drowned rat with only the weird glow of ur phone light with a painful 3% battery life to guide you.

overall its just a strange environment: deathly silent, with flickering fluorescent lights and grime in the back store that no matter how hard i try to clean never comes away and footsteps in the newly moped floor even tho there hasn’t been a customer and this room at the back entirely empty save only for ancient promotional material for products i’ve never heard of that makes me feel uneasy.

batmansymbol:

one of the most important things to me about harry potter is its portrayal of happiness. in the harry potter world, happiness isn’t just a feeling—it’s a weapon. look at how harry and his friends fight: with riddikulus, laughter stymies a creature made of fear; with expecto patronum, the very memory of happiness beats back the grim forces of depression.

the weaponization of positivity stretches beyond that. fred and george weasley’s inventions, meant for laughter, turn into arms against umbridge’s regime. and after their departure from hogwarts, their joke shop becomes not only the single bright spot in diagon alley (literally & figuratively) but a hub of defensive magic. the whole weasleys’ wizard wheezes narrative serves as maybe the clearest example in the series that happiness can act as both shield and sword.

there is something deeply empowering in a depiction of happiness as something so tangible and usable. as a profoundly depressed person, i often feel myself scrounging for happy memories and clutching them close; i find myself grasping for laughter in the dark. the physicalization of expecto patronum is not a quantum leap from reality. the boggart’s laughter as combat fuel, the weasleys’ levity as not just a choice but a difficult and defiant one—it’s all familiar.

the series has its share of darkness, but it revels most in the light. it lets us believe that the act of joy is not small, trivial, or inconsequential. happiness is something not just to be lived—it is to be wielded, on your own behalf and the behalves of the people around you, to battle against the world’s heavier elements. harry potter teaches us this.

roachpatrol:

astercrash:

Did anyone notice how quickly the internet turned into a
Lovecraftian horror scenario?

Like we’ve got this dimension right next to ours, that
extends across the entire planet, and it is just brimming with nightmares. We
have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this endless legion of malevolent entities
that are blindly probing us for weaknesses, seeking only to corrupt, to thieve,
to destroy.

Add onto that the corrupted ones themselves, humans who’ve
abandoned morality and given up faces to hunt other people, jeering them,
lashing out, seeing how easy it is to kill something you can’t touch or see or
smell. They’ll corrupt anything they think could be a vessel for their message
and they’ll jabber madly at any who question them. Their chittering haunts
every corner of the internet. They are not unlike the spambots in some ways.

Add on top of that the arcane magisters, who are forever
working at the cracks between our world and the world we made. Some of them do
it for fun, some of them do it for wealth, others do it for the power of
nations unwise enough to trust them. There are mages who work to defend against
this particular evil, but they are mad prophets, and their advice is almost
never heeded, even by those who keep them as protection.

All people know several spells to use the internet. Facebook
asks you for the magic words to log in, so does your email, so does your
twitter and on and on. The spells are words or a gesture with the hand, some
use the colour of your eyes, or the shape of your finger. Our chief of security
joked about requiring users to give a drop of blood before they could log in.
Many do not understand the humour of mages.

The cracks between the two are breaking. IP cameras filled
our world with eyes and the magisters learned how to open almost all of them.
We all carry magic slabs of glass that if you hold it up to your ear can sing to
you with a loved one’s voice, but if you look at it with your eyes, can show
you a corrupted human with bleeding orange skin scream the profane with a
thousand voices. The other day I saw someone hack a moving vehicle. At one
point they made it stop. At another they made it so it couldn’t stop. Some of our best and brightest are going to create
an army of four winged bats hovering throughout every city and we are going to
connect them directly to the dimension where the nightmares live.

I’m not saying it’s all bad, but I am saying Cthulhu lies
deathless dreaming in this web we built him and he is waking up.

if you’ve spent your adolescence in the darker and more profane areas of this web you sure as hell don’t develop normal human appetites, that’s for damn sure. you wind up with a hunger for a lot more tentacles than humans are normally equipped with. 

geekdawson:

Kindness is often mistaken for softness and let me tell you, friends….that is a mistake you don’t want to make. 

Kind people are not born that way, they do not stumble into it, kind people are forged in fire and darkness and imploding stars…they have steel cores. Throw a punch and you’re going to break your hand. 

Not kindness but goodness, but i think it’s applicable anyway.

From A Wizard Alone by Diane Duane:

Nita nodded. “I never thought goodness could be so tough,” she said. “So strong. But then again…I guess goodness isn’t something I’d think about a whole lot, anyway. Nobody uses the word much unless it’s in a commercial, and then they’re just trying to convince you that something has a lot of milk in it.”

Carl nodded, looking wry. “Virtue,” he said. “The real thing. It’s not some kind of cuddly teddy bear you can keep on the shelf until you need a hug. It’s dangerous, which is why it makes people so nervous. Virtue has its own agenda, and believe me, it’s not always yours. The word itself means strength, power. And when it gets loose, you’d better watch out.”

“Something bad might happen…”

“Impossible. But possibly something painful.”

Sensitive souls don’t have it easy in this cruel world. They feel like their souls are getting trampled on in so many ways. That’s why you see their eyes light up when they can caress a face or an animal, or breathe in the scent of a flower.

from “Lonely Traveller Part 2”, by Sereno Sky
(via briqou)