RUNNING ON EMPTY

Staying in the motel was becoming a real hardship. Not because the room was especially terrible in itself, but because the neighbors on either side were the sort that believed being loud was a right and not a rudeness.

The couple on one side loudly made love all night every night, while the couple on the other side screamed at each other and threatened violence at such volume their every word was clearly audible. Both pairs were risking their lives without knowing it.

She wrapped the pillow tighter around her head and clenched her jaw tightly to keep from screaming at them to "SHUT UP!"

Her body trembled with the effort of holding herself still. She could feel the madness growing inside her. The need to unleash terrible violence on the inconsiderate aholes.

She was exhausted. She hadn’t had more than a few minutes of sleep for the last two weeks. If she could have left the motel room she would have, but she had promised to stay inside and wait for him to return, so here she was. Suffering from cabin fever and maybe malnutrition from only having delivery food to eat, which in this town had meant food from the pizza place every day.

She’d promised she would stay in the room, but it was becoming harder and harder. It was only her absolute terror of Them that kept her inside.

He’d lined the motel room with paper charms and hung up carved wooden rune squares. As long as she remained inside she was invisible to the monsters chasing her. The monsters he had gone off to kill.

The moans on one side were growing louder, the fervent filth they called out growing louder and LOUDER while the couple on the other side screamed such vitriol at each other that she thought she could feel her soul curdling inside her body. Both couples were so LOUD, screaming and panting and groaning and the thump-thump-THUMP of a headboard slamming against the too-thin wall.

She pressed the pillow tighter around her head, mashing it against her ears. The pain was growing in her brain, the headache having grown so much worse over the last two hours. To the point that she’d begun to fantasize about going to the door and stepping outside.

There would be the howling screams and They would appear. She would be torn apart, she knew it, her blood and viscera splashed so far and wide and horrifying that it would be near to impossible to clean up. The motel owners would have to use bleach and paint to wipe away the mess, and even then the cement would be stained forever.

But those assholes… They would kill her, yes, but they would also kill everyone else staying in this section of the motel. They would kill her, but that would not slate their bloodlust, the need for violence and murder.

Assaulted by the loudness of her neighbors, the continuous torment of their screaming and their lust and the THUMP-THUMP-THUMP of that damned headboard… She was tempted.

All she had to do was open the door and step outside.

=END=

~Harper Kingsley
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog
https://twitter.com/harperkingsley0
https://paypal.me/harperkingsley
https://kimichee.com.
https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.
https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.
https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.

I haven’t watched Game of Thrones, and I don’t have any interest in watching it. (I’m not into watching a bunch of bad sex.) But I have read a lot of fics the fandom has produced, and so I have a general idea of the plot and all the little things about it.

I have seen the final battle scene from the show, so, spoiler alert, I know that Arya is pretty much the main character.

So with all my fandom knowledge and that ending scene in mind…

What if the whole "Prince That Was Promised" prophecy was about Arya?

"But she’s not a Targaryen!" Of course she’s not. BUT if Rhaegar hadn’t run off with Lyanna, there wouldn’t have been a rebellion leading to Robert taking the throne and Cersei becoming queen.

• If Rhaegar had done what he was supposed to at the Tourney of Harrenhal and met with his lords to overthrow his father, the Mad King wouldn’t have burned Rickard and Brandon alive. And therefore, Catelyn wouldn’t have married Eddard and Arya wouldn’t have been born. // Brandon had to die to ensure the birth of Arya.
• Without Joffrey becoming king, Eddard Stark wouldn’t have been executed, leading to Arya apprenticing with the Nameless Men. She wouldn’t have learned her fighting techniques that she used in the final battle.
• The Valaryian dagger Arya used came into play because of the attempted assassination of Bran.

At the end of the day, the most important character was Arya. And the prophecy was used to bring about her birth.

So like, if I was writing a GoT fanfic… that’s the angle I would take. And maybe I’d add a smidge of the Children of the Forest hating the dragonriders of Valyria and the Andals for ruining the faith of the Old Gods which resulted in the destruction of the weirwood tree groves, thus severing the connections that allowed them to view and effect everything across Westeros.

Controlling the dissemination of the prophecy through Aemon to Rhaegar via Brandon Rivers would have been their greatest revenge on the interlopers that had nearly ruined everything.

It would be even funnier if the mixing of fire and ice was about the blending of Catelyn and Ned.

Redheads are considered to be "touched by fire." And the big reason Hoster Tully and Rickard Stark wanted an alliance was to act against the Mad King.

If they hadn’t been so worried about the ever worsening madness of Aerys, Catelyn likely would have been married to someone in the south.

• Rhaegar was obsessed with creating the dragon with three heads because of the prophecy. He ruined his marriage and destroyed the Targaryen legacy because of seeing Lyanna and conflating her with his prophecy.
• "The Prince That Was Promised" could be Arya because the Starks were the Kings of Winter. Once her brother Robb declared himself King of the North… Arya would be in the line of succession for the Northern crown. // Who says that "prince" is a gendered term? Especially in a prophecy that was translated from another language a long time ago?

If everything was intended to lead to the birth of Arya and to having her be at the place of confrontation… That would be hilarious.

~Harper Kingsley
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog
https://twitter.com/harperkingsley0
https://paypal.me/harperkingsley
https://kimichee.com.
https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.
https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.
https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.

I dreamt I was in the Matrix.

Maybe I was an update patch?

It started with my dream self thinking that I wanted to watch the newest Matrix movie, which I haven’t seen yet. And the movie started… then I was in it.

There was a desert and any people that appeared were hungry and thirsty. Desperate to survive.

And there was a desk in front of a ruined shack, with inky blackness welling out from beneath it. Tempting and dangerous, an apple sat on top of the desk as a lure to the unwary and the weak of will.

The dream cut to a scene on what seemed to be a skyscraper under construction. It was the stronghold of a group of powerful people that kind of dressed like goths in the Mad Max world. So, you know.

And Dumbledore and Snape and a couple of their followers were there to see those powerful people. They were looking for their savior, their chosen one, but they were denied in a mocking manner.

With a single shove, Snape was thrown through a window and Dumbledore and his followers apparated away.

Meanwhile, Neo was back in the Matrix as a little girl. At some point, she changed to become adult Keanu.

And back at the desk, the ripe red apple gleamed temptingly, and a starving wanderer from the desert reached out to take it, only to be consumed by the inky darkness. She was pulled, screaming, underneath the desk.

Trying to remember the dream, it seems somewhat nonsensical. But while I was sleeping, it seemed to play in linear order. Everything made sense, and now, my waking mind struggles to explain the things that I saw. Because that’s the power of dreams: It was all visual, arrayed in ways that mere words cannot explain.

Color and darkness. The sense of looming threat and burgeoning hope. The thoughts I had in the moment that explained things I glimpsed without really seeing.

I woke up, and I didn’t want to wake up because I wanted to know what was going to happen next. I wanted to see the story through to the end, but I couldn’t, even though my mind tells me things I didn’t have a chance to dream.

In my dream, there was something wrong in the Matrix. All these different stories and worlds were converging, and that’s why an update patch? was needed to fix things.

Everyone was waiting for a savior, and there was disappointment that the ones they had weren’t the ones they expected to see. Not realizing that appearances mean nothing, it’s what’s inside that matters.

And now? I have to look up how I can watch the new Matrix movie because I’m kind of curious what it’s about. Plus, it’s always nice to watch Keanu in a movie.

~Harper Kingsley
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog
https://twitter.com/harperkingsley0
https://paypal.me/harperkingsley
https://kimichee.com.
https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.
https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.
https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.

P.S. Was I the inky blackness? The trap made to consume the unwary? To pull them into the depth of shadows where anything can be, and it’s only supposition that it was death inside and not the start of something new.

Dreams are weird.

I always feel such a sense of disgust for the "we should leave Earth, it’s the only hope for humanity"-style of propaganda movies and TV shows.

"We’ll terraform and colonize another planet!"–My dudes: You can’t even help keep Earth habitable, and it’s the planet we are adapted to live on.

Or the whole "The Earth is going to become a barren wasteland… We must create biodomes on other planets or moons, and we must take everything we need with us when we leave Earth" idea. Which is basically colonizer talk for "We need to rip out all the resources and leave Earth a desolate hull so that we, the rich, can live in miserable hovels on non-habitable planets. Its the only hope for humanity!" Which kind of handwaves the 8 billion people and all the animals that are going to DIE as a result.

I look at the kinds of people gazing up at the stars as the future for everything, and that who completely believe they will someday live as royalty on some other planet, and I am disgusted.

Not because they dare to dream. But that they see the cost of their dream as being the lives and wellbeing of everyone and everything else on this planet… and they shrug it off as a minor inconvenience. As a bit of nothing to be paid as long as they get where they want to go.

Meanwhile, Earth might very well be the only true home that humanity ever has.

We evolved on Earth. We evolved to survive in Earth-like conditions, and the likelihood of finding everything we need somewhere else is next to nil.

There is a reason there doesn’t seem to be large life out there on other worlds. There’s a reason we don’t gaze out and see the flickering lights of other civilizations reflecting back at us.

Because if they exist, they are so far away that we will never meet them as the universe continues to expand outward and away.

Because the lucky chances that all added up together to create a planet with all the requirements for life to evolve were so astronomical that to think they would be replicated on a planet close enough for us to ever reach… is fantasy.

We may not be alone in the universe. But we are remarkably lucky to have a planet that can maintain life. We are the blessed ones.

So to watch and listen to all those people talking about pissing everything we have away for the DREAM of being a God-Emperor-KING of some colony out in space… It’s grotesque.

Because you can dream of living on a Martian colony. You can make up the plans for biodomes on the moon, or space stations circling high above the Earth. WITHOUT destroying everything we already have.

You don’t have to take away from billions of other living people and the countless generations to follow. You don’t have to cause the extinction of all other life on the planet. Simply to imagine yourself as being able to have SOMETHING else.

We are on the cusp of a future that can be gloriously bright or a dismal despair. We passed the point of no return when we refused to stop polluting and caused the melting of essential ice. But that doesn’t mean the fight should end.

It means we must fight HARDER to reverse the damages humanity has caused. We must strive further and reach farther to make things better. To fix what was done in the past and prevent the harms of the future.

We have been given guardianship of a planet that provides EVERYTHING we need to live and thrive. And while others have abused and desecrated that great trust… Those of us that wish to see the future must raise our voices, change our actions, and save what is to protect what will be.

This Earth might be all we ever have. It will definitely be all that most of us will know.

Because while the wealthy dream of rocket ships to other planets where they will rule over a slave-class of workers… the rest of us will be left behind to die in the wreckage they have made.

And that disgusts me.

~Harper Kingsley
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog
https://twitter.com/harperkingsley0
https://paypal.me/harperkingsley
https://kimichee.com.
https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.
https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.
https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.

I saw like a NowThis video of a solar panel setup in, I think, California, that is able to filter fresh water out of fouled water.

The solar panels absorb the sunlight and make energy enough to power a whole city, and as a part of that they create a great deal of heat. Using that heat, they’re able to pump in fouled water and condense it into clean water.

With a setup in someplace sunny and hot like Arizona or countries like Africa or India… communities will be able to provide electricity AND drinking water.

I’m not sure how much a setup would take to build, but it’s one of those things where billionaires wasting their money on stupid shit could ACTUALLY be helping both the human race and animals.

I was seeing the good works that the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (https://sheldrickwildlifetrust.org) is doing in Kenya. They protect the animals from poachers, and rescue like elephants and warthogs and other animals from the terrible drought conditions that are leaving the infants orphaned.

Every day they go out to their many manmade watering holes and they fill them up with life-giving water. They provide bales of lucerne (alfalfa) to feed the different animals that are starving in the untenable conditions. They are doing AMAZING work funded by the donations of people that care about saving animals.

If they had access to fresh water and electricity, they could only do more good. Because they are good people.

Meanwhile, there are a few people with near limitless resources that are SQUANDERING what they have on pure selfishness. Because they lack the imagination and self-awareness to picture themselves doing anything good.

They dream of boarding rocket ships and flying off into the stars. To live as kings on other planets in the same way that they’ve lived as kings on Earth.

It is a lack within themselves. An emptiness in their own souls. Because while they see themselves as "great men," they are actually the smallest kind of people. One-dimensional cutouts that dream they are greater than they actually are, while completely empty of anything of worth.

They are small people in a big world, and they don’t even know it. A speck on a grain of sand, washed away by time, on an Earth that will continue to move on without them.

They are nothing. And they will always be nothing. Because their dreams are as shallow and empty as they are.