My rainy day craft box

After the week it's been at work I fear to see what the weekend will bring.

In my last entry I talked about Mr. Conceal & Carry, the Neo-Nazi, and the false alarm child abduction. Last night I saw a customer lose his shit at the lady in sporting goods because she was following store policy and insisting that he pay for an expensive item that's kept locked up at the sporting goods counter because that's how we do it. He was already mad because she was "rude" to him but not dropping what she was doing with the customers she was already helping to go and help him when he and his brood showed up. How bad did he lose his shit? Put it to you this way, the customers she was already helping insisted on staying around until the manager showed up to make sure he didn't try anything and I was standing around the corner in the tool aisle where he couldn't see me with a hammer in my hand, ready to go.

But that's not the mother load, oh no. Today, today was the mother load because we had a fucking BOMB THREAT. And not just us. One other store in Kansas City and three other stores around Missouri all got bomb threats at the same time. I spent the last hour of my shift standing around outside, which honestly wasn't bad getting paid to sit in the shade and all. But... we were not prepared.

Most of us left through the back door. By then word was already going around that it was a bomb threat. So what does the ENTIRE staff do? They stand in the alley directly behind the building. I pointed out in a loud voice that if the place was going to blow then I was going to stand slightly farther away from it. It was like you could see the light bulbs come on over peoples' heads and the began to file away with me. Then one of the managers told us to move toward the parking lot of the store next door. I didn't fuck around, I got in my car and drove it to that parking lot. Good thing too because about five minutes later everyone who didn't was fucked in terms of leaving. The police came and barricaded all the parking lot entrances which meant no one was getting in their car and leaving.

Then there were the people who left their phones and keys and everything inside the building. I'm sorry, but I don't understand why you would not carry these articles on your person at all times. In this day and age there is no good reason not to. I got to go home when my shift would have normally ended and I was the only one that I know of who could. Everyone else getting off at that time had keys they couldn't get to in order to operate cars that couldn't leave.

I don't know what time it all ended but I do know it went on for several hours. If only there had been one determined citizen in the store with a conceal & carry permit. They might have been able to stop it.    

I haven't posted a dream journal in a really long time; almost a year, I think. My dreams have been blessedly uninteresting.

Tonight I laid down at 7:30 PM to take a nap and finally had a more vivid dream than I've had in a long time which woke me up at 1:30 AM. Been wide awake ever since.

I'm sure I've said it before but I don't have recurring dreams in the way people probably think of the term. I'll dream I'm in the same place doing the same thing but it doesn't follow a "script" and it's never the same way twice. Tonight I had the "back in college" dream. As usual, this dream involved me trying to attend classes that were somehow scheduled at the same time. Unlike usual, I was not also trying to prepare for a final in a class I had not realized I was enrolled in all semester and therefore had never attended.

This dream is never as interesting as its location. I attended Kansas State University which is a campus full of old, decrepit, decaying buildings that are never cleaned. In my dream the buildings are always even older, more decayed and decrepit, and even less clean. The dream almost always features a building, or sometimes a trio of buildings, that don't have a counterpart on the real-life campus. It (or they) looks like the other campus buildings at a glance but there's something wrong with it. It just seems to radiate evil and sometimes it's decorated with baroque-style sculptures - a common feature of "bad" places in my dreams. Sometimes the building(s) even has a stench coming from it that it seems only I can smell.

When I'm in this dream environment, I always know the building is there on the campus before I see it. As I said, it has no real counterpart, yet I "remember" it just the same. Most of the time I actively try to avoid coming in sight of it; a few times I deliberately seek it out. Of course I always wind up there. I have never gained entry to this building. In fact, it doesn't seem like a building that *can* be entered. It's like a mausoleum, in a way: a building you're supposed to look at but not go inside of.

Tonight when I found the evil building (just one building this time instead of three,) there were what appeared to be RenFest actors performing in front of it. They were apparently pretending to be ghosts of soldiers slain on a battlefield. They had on greenish makeup and medieval armor with green tarnishing on it in places. One of these men in particular was walking up and down the sidewalk doing his best cheesy ghost routine, moaning at passersby "W-h-e-r-e are my teeth? G-i-i-i-v-e me my teeth!"

I was one of the people he accosted and he roped me into his schtick, talking about his damn teeth. It actually diverted my attention from the eldritch house of indescribable evil lurking behind us and just then I woke up. I have no idea what the house is, what it symbolizes, and why it keeps luring me to it. I do know that I've never been so grateful to be harassed by an in-your-face Rennie before.

"Conservative Christian murders 80+ in Norway. If this guy was muslim, we'd be in the middle of another round 'Islam is a religion of violence' commentators being paraded across television. Of course, since he was a christian, he's just a nut.

The elephant in the room that no one's talking about is that if Islam is a religion of violence, so is christianity..."

Happy New Year everyone. I'm not as grim as I'm about to sound. I've actually had a couple of very pleasant days but maybe that's just making me more appreciative of how absurd things are out there right now.

Placing fantastical or magical elements into a contemporary modern setting, whether you call it "urban fantasy" or not, always seems to come with the conceit that you must explain why most people in the contemporary modern world aren't aware of it. Some settings (e.g. World of Darkness) have the supernatural creatures actively policing themselves and camoflouging their activities from the normals. Others (e.g. Buffy) have the normals themselves trying to hide the nefarious goings-on from the world.

I just finished reading Widdershins by Charles De Lint which postulates an alternative theory. In De Lint's works, most people who've had supernatural experiences - even very intricate, involved ones - simply forget about them. Their mind actively shores up the supernaturally-shaped hole with layers of rationalism and skepticism. Simply put: reality requires no conspiracy to sustain itself. Reality is self-healing.

I think Mr. De Lint may have the right of it but it's worse than he thinks. Not only is reality self-healing, it can barely be wounded in the first place. Whenever something utterly bizarre or unexplainable happens on a grand scale - whether it's glowing spirals in the sky over Norway or the unexplained mass die-off of birds and fish in the southeastern United States - People seem to muster an ability to look the other way that is so overpowering as to be supernatural in and of itself. You can even be looking right AT the thing and still look away. As in, you'll read an article or see a video, go hey that was weird, and move on. A news clip might have a couple of nervously laughing anchorpersons accompanied by a few bars of the X-Files theme song, and then it's on to weather and sports.

I'm not saying the Norway spirals or the animal die-offs have or require any kind of supernatural explanation. They certainly don't and animal die-offs are not unprecedented. But I think people *should* look at something like that and want to know why. Humans should see these phenomena and not go "huh that was weird" before going back to weather and sports. Secret military tests could create eldritch happenings in the night sky as easily as UFO's. Parasites and viruses can kill masses of birds and fish as easily as a Biblical prophecy. And yet I fail to see why one is less feared than the other. Mutated viruses are preferential to an angry God... why, exactly?

People don't know and they don't want to know. The conspiracy theorists always treat any "official" explanation for something out-of-the-ordinary as a lie. But I wonder why the official liars would even bother. People are linking this shit on Facebook and then forgetting about it. It's not even a sound byte in the news cycle, if that and then lost forevermore.

Excuse my melodramatic tone, but God help us all.

Oregon man police apprehend a man because the think he might commit a crime.

Police can come to your home and apprehend you without a warrant if they think you might be thinking about possibly committing a crime. Think about that for a moment.

At least in The Minority Report the guy they were chasing was a Scientologist.

http://www.kmiz.com/news/story.php?id=13725

According to one Missouri law enforcement official, no adult has any reason to play Animal Crossing unless they're out to molest children.

I don't play Animal Crossing, don't know the first thing about it. But I am an online gamer and what affects one section of our community affects us all. This is ridiculous. Of course children have to be very careful on the internet, whether they're playing a video game or doing their homework. But for that guy to imply that any adult who plays a certain video game is a criminal is unbelievable. A lot of adults get interested in online games *because* of their children playing them and it actually becomes a good way for families to bond. If I have a young daughter and she teaches me to play Animal Crossing and I enjoy it and start playing on my own am I now a rapist? This is ridiculous. Granted this is a state crime task force guy talking and not, say, the federal government. But since internet crimes are often federal in nature since they cross state lines, it might be worth watching which way the wind blows this particular fire.

When Helter Skelter comes down, new wave of survivalists will be ready.


And quite frankly, I'm not sure they're wrong.

My wife already posted this and it's making the rounds pretty fast. My apologies to those who are seeing this for the second or later time.

http://www.pjvoice.com/v32/32300words.aspx

The people who would do such things are not my people. Their dreams are not my dreams. Their god is not my God.