Chapter 4: Demons

EMETT

So anyway, we're back to the dream I mentioned. I had this dream just around community college during summer break, and I wondered what it meant. By this time, I had developed a sort of affinity for element of wind. I had just come up with a religion after being stuck almost overnight after a field trip to an aquarium. I had overslept, and decided to drive there myself. I got separated from the bus, and then wound up having to find the place myself. On the way back, I got separated again, this time because I didn't want to pay the toll. So I was stuck in town of Baltimore, since apparently there were only a few ways out of the area. Depressed, I considered driving my car into a wall, as I felt like there was no way I'd get back home. I honestly don't understand how I was thinking back then, but I remember feeling a well of determination after that, and made my religion based from the sense of finding meaning where none should exist.

So unlike most of the world that didn't believe in magic, I strongly considered it a possibility. After all, writers that wrote fantasy novels were obviously writing what they knew. Clearly they were drawing either from alternate realities where magic existed, or they themselves had limited experience with magic themselves. In any case, I was able to adjust my body temperature slightly, somewhat affect the wind from not breezy at all to sorta breezy, and I had a limited sense of where other people were, which I thereafter called the "heart sense". It wasn't like I could make fireballs or throw giant boulders around with my mind though. In fact, my mind didn't actually enter into the equation. It was feelings that did this.

I suppose I can't talk about what happened next without being "culturally insensitive." On September 11, 2001, the day that I was supposed to take a chemistry test, some monstrous assholes flew a plane into the World Trade Center, and we also headed from several other targets if they hadn't been stopped.

Anyway, I got past that, and took my test. But the world wasn't really the same. This was the day that dream sorta came true. This was the day that the demons attacked my home town. Well, in a manner of speaking anyway.

Over the next several years, things got worse. Under the banner of "hope" and "change", the country in general was filled with high taxes. I had never really thought of the world in terms of black and white, good and evil. To my line of thought, there weren't good or evil people, all people were good and evil. So the idea that a man supposedly elected to fight "racism" was to me an alien concept. Even more alien was the seemingly punitive healthcare laws. On the pretext of dealing with "pre-existing conditions" my healthcare went from a PPO family plan which at my end cost me only $40 to basically an HMO which covered nothing until I paid nearly $11.5 thousand, and was expected to cost $440 monthly if I read correctly. I didn't care to find out, but went straight to the insurance people and asked them to cancel me from insurance. I then tried to get exempted from the $600 charge for not having insurance. Also around this time, New York passed laws that said you could have someone fined up to $250 thousand simply for misgendering you. This wasn't as simple as calling a person who presented as female "he/him" because there had been recent new gender pronouns, like "xe/xir". Since it was impossible to know what someone wanted to be called, this effectively meant that you could have someone's house foreclosed on them, by charging them enough money all at once to force them to sell. While I believed that people in general weren't evil, this convinced me that there were in fact demons in the world, and they manifested through government tyranny.

High taxes, high regulations, all of this upset people enough that they tried to get rid of the system. After all, most people don't mind how other people live their lives, it's that freedom to live one's life in peace is a moral good, while telling other people how to live is a moral evil. And so, when one unfortunate politician made the political suicide of telling much of the country that it was racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic when they honestly wanted everyone including their enemies to leave them in peace, the fact that they rightfully lost for their folly was blamed on Russian hacking.

I would like to say that with a new leader in power things were better, but he never really got the chance. Despite his best efforts, most of the time, he was either defending against accusations of scandal, in impeachment proceedings, or dealing with other drama. He did manage to abolish the onerous mandate to have health insurance or pay a $600 fine. But it was like the demons blocked him from acting. After the second impeachment attempt failed, a "dangerous pandemic" swept the world. Although honestly, neither I nor Alexander my dad, not Bianca my father seemed to ever get it. My brother and sister claimed they got it once or twice, but I suspect that had more to do with over-testing than anything else. It was all too obvious to me that this was more tyranny being shoved down people's throats, and ultimately I suspected the man who was president during this time of being an accomplice in all this. After all, he hadn't told people what they needed to hear, that this whole thing was a fraud to seize power, and he had endorsed a dangerous vaccine that hadn't been tested but just arrived ready-made to fight this thing. Almost as if it had been planned years in advance.

I grew skeptical of the whole sorry thing, seeing this leader as controlled opposition, and deciding maybe in fact I had no friends. I had also argued with a friend (we'll call her Momo, though she's not Japanese) so I had one less person to talk to while dealing with near-total isolation. My parents didn't deal with this. They masked up, they played the game, and they made it a point to try to keep in touch with friends all during this. But I had only a few connections in this life, and once those were cut off, I basically shut down. I didn't want to eat. I didn't even want to drink water. I didn't want to even breathe if I could help it. My parents tried to talk me out of this, but realized they couldn't force me. And so I lay in my bed waiting for death to take me. Time passed, and I was still not dead. It turns out that self-suffocation is hard because of a gag reflex, and the other two are long and slow ways of dying. I went down for whatever reason because I wanted to help my mom cook a curry dinner. Even if I wanted to die, I didn't want them to feel bad about it. Though I initially refused to eat curry. My folks eventually talked me through my sadness now that I was in the same room as them, and I finally wanted to eat again. The curry was one of the best things I had eaten, as it had coriander, cardamom, and cinnamon all freshly ground with vegetables chopped by me and my mother. Also, apparently a family friend had brought doughnuts, one of which was topped with bacon. It was probably awful had I been feeling better, but today after having nothing to eat, and finally letting go of some serious depression, it was the best dessert ever. There were other doughnuts there, coconut, almond, and I think blueberry frosted, but I only ate the bacon one. I cannot remember whether I ate the doughnuts or the curry first, honestly. But what I do remember is that this day rather closely resembled the story of Elijah (by the way, I am born on the Feast of Elijah, July 20).

Now Ahab told Jezebel everything that Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. So Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “May the gods deal with me, and ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like the lives of those you killed!”

And Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself traveled on a day’s journey into the wilderness. He sat down under a broom tree and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, LORD,” he said. “Take my life, for I am no better than my fathers.” Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” And he looked around, and there by his head was a cake of bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water. So he ate and drank and lay down again.

Elijah later goes on a mountain, talks to the Lord, and God basically tells him "come outside, I can't hear you." He tells twice how everyone has abandoned him to do what is wrong, and he's the only one left. God tells him that he's not, that actually there are seven thousand who did not worship other gods, and that he is to appoint leaders to help him. But what made me laugh about this story was reading about the "cake of bread" after eating comfort food doughnuts.

MOMO

That's not really how things felt to me. One of my relatives died, and later on, I came down sick with the thing myself. It was lucky that I was protected or I might have gotten far sicker.

As for that argument, well it's been awhile, but I think one of my relatives said something similar, and it just pissed me off so much. It pissed me off even more that I was hearing the same words from someone that I thought was my friend. I also needed time to work through the idea that some topics we just had to agree to disagree. Even though they were totally wrong. It took a long time to work up the nerve to make up with them, and to be honest, it had to go in stages from talking only occasionally, to getting letters asking what was going on, to return to normal conversation. The first attempt with letters ended up disastrously, with us both cutting contact for letters too. But then one of us sent a letter in response to a question about being plus one in a wedding of all things, and that led to another letter. And another, until finally returning to normal texting on Discord. So yeah, it was a wedding that neither of us wanted to go to, of all things, that brought us back in touch with each other.

While all of that was going on, my life was a quiet hell. My sister was having a baby or two, and we all were supposed to be excited for her while the house was crowded and she would barge in right when I needed to take a long shower to wash baby. That I had wants or needs didn't enter into the equation, because I was the one being selfish, of course. Never mind that my sister probably had enough for her own place between her working full-time and her husband bringing in money, but it was "selfish" of me to want to take a damned shower without a dirty smelly baby being shoved in my face. A friend of mine told me (just now) about a comedy horror called Santa Jaws where some kid sorta wishes his family would go away and a drawing of a holiday-themed shark becomes real and they get attacked. While that movie seems absurd, in my darkest moments I've felt that. But then I remember I'd have to cook and clean and handle things all myself. To say nothing of it being kinda messed up to have that wish come true.

At the library, for quite awhile, it was surreal. We were closed, yet staff came in to change up the shelves and add to the interior. I was completely isolated during this time except other coworkers. I was sorting and shelving books that nobody was going to see, because library was closed to most of the customers. Then we "opened" but only for curbside service, and staff were still the only ones inside, while we moved in and out of the building for customers. Then we built this wall partition to keep out the disease. Then nobody seemed to believe in the disease, but the wall must remain, because reasons. I just don't know anymore. I suppose things are okay now though. I do miss being able to play music in the building and sing why shelving books.

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