Beyond the dreamer’s edge, there are near possible places just past the reality of places to visit. Such as the called Venice, Tennessee. Where the roads are flooded, and new roads are built above the land.

One can take a double boat across different sectors of NashChat. I was riding on a boat with Lenora, who wearing was wearing Jesus sandals at the time. She would be smoking pot, while observing me stare out beyond the front of the boat as we drifted into the tunnel of the mind. In this tunnel there are unseen things, one no mind was meant to observe. As we road along the boat, we eventually docked on what seemed to be almost a Neo Victorian underground city; it had technology of various types from the Victorian era, and somehow they had made their way to the United States. The whole facility was covered in gears.

The city of gears we would call it.

The city would rise every ten years above the flooding planes. Although I have heard that the city would eventually no longer have to float was the water was sinking. I’ve never been sure whether those stores were true, and wondered myself what it would look like seeing the building so high up in the sky, and watching the birds fly along where the surface I had known once was. Although I had only heard these rumors from disreputable people.

Yet still on my mind I picture the water slowly sinking.

And then the doors along the building would eventually rise above into the heavens, as the land now covered in dirt and dust comes into view exposing a barren planet when dying fish. I wanted not to see this.

My dying wish as I drowned myself.

And I sunk into the muddy waters. I leave behind my girlfriend, who as I observe her eventually stabs the person who pushed me off. One of the original guards that wanted me dead.

She was taken to the square to have her head taken off in town, she trembled in her brown and orange patterned dress as she observed the delicately ankled blade that would kill her. Tied to the main board in her Jesus sandals, the grooved soles of the sandals exposed for the onlookers behind the guillotine admiring her non bony bare feet, whose ankles matched her thin swan like looks. She was lowered and her neck placed between two board.

The tears in he eyes begin to well up.

The sound of skin and bone cut through by a loud thunk, swiftly the beheading machine showed no mercy cutting through her long swan like neck the executioner was caressing. Her blond haired head falls into the basket in slow motion. The basket and the blade are covered in blood. Her soft blue eyes fade. Consciousness remained in her head for the next few seconds.

Her head was picked up and shown to the crowd.

The executioner slaps her face. Cackles fill the crowd.

The rats in the morgue ravage her Jesus sandals, nibbling at the leather straps. And then gradually nibble closer to her dress.

I wake up, and prepare for another writing day.

In the waking world, I find that my reality is all to mundane. I live in the world of the possible, even overly possible cities. Cities where people go to work every day, and pay whatever bills they can.

So they can live their lives. Whatever life they follow. Yet for me I am unable to work due to my own delusions.

I live a dreamer’s lover’s life in sleep.

There was once a calliope, that played to the tune of ancient myths. The fare was one held in the town every year, though few times have I ever personally gotten to go to any of them, despite the money to do so.

I had always wanted to try my hand at winning a teddy bear. It wasn’t until later I found out second hand, so take the salt for what it’s worth, as being rigged in favor of the game engineer. Engineers of taking money from the poor. One of the few fares I got to visit was the renaissance fare.

While I’ve had certain issue with medieval fantasy for some time, there was some kind of fascination with the fare. There was something different about a fare that allowed me to buy swords of whatever I desired, although asking for ID was a constant nuisance.

At the end of the day, it always seemed to amount to “little boys shouldn’t play with swords”, although as I’ve gotten older I wondered why they didn’t know that they were meant to be decorative, and frankly whether anybody should be playing with swords. Plus I’m a girl, not a boy.

I had grown quite a prolific sword collection in my closet. This was before the time that I had grown the issues of self-hate and resentment for those more beautiful than I. And so because I never got to buy a dress, for I considered myself a girl you see, I could never touch the back of my flowered hat straw hat, and stare to the sky. And as I stared at other girls far prettier than I, my family would always ask me if I had some vested interest in the footwear they wore.

Even if I was, keep in mind I was seventeen, and I mainly looked at other seventeen year old girls. Sometimes sixteen, but in either case, my family had not real good reason to really be interested in that information, and I certainly wasn’t about to give that to them. It was bad enough not being able to buy clothes of my desired gender. Of course the family member in question would always misconstrue it as catering to my own personal sexual fetishes.

Clearly she had no idea about my gender issues.

Like I was going to tell them that.

At home various memories played in my head about the fare, and built up certain kinds of resentments and associations, although some of which only bother me to this day. I only bring this up because recently I had tried getting back into playing JRPGs, and get into reading fantasy novels to begin with.

Combined with the fact I still had weird issues about sword shops, wanting to see more gore in fantasy in the west, and having resentment of certain characters due to finding it petty one could still hold onto their ex if clearly they broke up with them. It may be judgmental on my end, but when you throw someone who doesn’t even want to be a hero under the bus like that, particularly if it were me I would have said good luck rescuing your planet on your own, you split from my party and lets go our separate ways.

Unfortunately most of the 90s era games coming from Japan had not multiple ending or narrative options, so I was mainly stuck with what the game me. I think that was one of the first grains of why I wanted to become a storyteller.

I wanted to create my own narrative.

I wanted to tell my own story.

In many ways I was largely raised by the video games I grew up with, from Platformers, JRPGs, action rpgs, you name it. One game was the one that allowed me to have a childhood I never grew up with.

Even with fantasy it was a world so different from my own I could give it’s crap sack world kind of a pass. But I withdrew into the world of the video game largely as a way of ignoring issues I had with other people as well as other mediums of expression. And yet the thing that always bugged me about this one game was at times it had a bit of a subtle western aesthetic I didn’t care for.

The most immediate example is Westerns. Now I recently heard that westerns were not originally macho, being more reflective of the actual wild west. All fine and good but anyone who has payed attention to American film making over the last century will notice how macho western movies tend to be. If these were advertisements for western novels, I would pay one look at a western novel. Those novels would lose money, and the other would be on Food Stamps like I am now.

For example, in Western they had hanging by the neck instead of the guillotine. Apparently the reason behind it was it was cheap and if done right was swift and relatively painless. Let’s put arguments pro and anti-death penalty aside (I’m very anti-death penalty if you haven’t noticed.) I once had a conversation with a guy on here that hanging wasn’t suppose to be either quick or painless. So I have two different people with wildly different ideas of what makes a western, largely thanks to Spaghetti Westerns. So he had this condescending attitude about guillotines in a Western novel.

That is if you don’t include how it seems like on some level in American films it was somehow the expectation that women wore very female clothes, even though there isn’t anything inherently wrong with women wearing pants and–and yes these existed at the time, though you probably had to have them imported–Birkenstock sandals. Nope they wore basically the same clothes women were expected to wear in the 1950s and 1960s. And that’s ignoring the larger culture of female victims needing to be rescued, god forbid a woman actually needed a good hanging herself.

I really really hate comedic relief characters. It didn’t totally take away from the games experience for me, but it left a permanent mark for me. It seemed like her entire purpose was to be rescued by the male hero.

Maybe it was self-hate, maybe it was hate for others. But I can’t explain it, it was simply me. Your darling the pacer. Imagination is a powerful thing. And I realized I had the power of love and not hate.

I could be with Lenora again.

Make her smile. And so I listen to the song, of the JRPG I used to play as a kid. And try to relive the powerful positive memories I can.

I owe it for Lenora.