Maybe when they're older, it shifts from "happily ever after" to "happy for a brief, shining moment of mutual delusion," and that sense of anticipatory loss becomes the spice that sharpens the sweet to a cutting edge.

Standing in "authentic wonder before the beauty of God's creation" is that "raw, real, direct experience." Everything in my attention is converging on this idea. I'm lost in Plato's Cave.
bsky.app/profile/vult...

Just got a second-round hold notice too, after 56 days, so that's nice.

I asked a question at an author's book release, and a stranger made it a point afterward to tell me I had a beautiful speaking voice. Many years later, that memory still warms me.

Aha! Found it--thank you!
www.apple.com/tv-pr/origin...

Ooh! Where is this?

Are the members reliable? Is the data reliable? Is the algorithm reliable? Is Elon's Personal A.I. reliable?

So many questions. And all the answers are "no."

Damn that's cold.

"He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else."

A longing for a raw, real, direct experience, unfiltered through all the intellectual categories, comparisons, and contexts we build up. A lens that bends light in a predecided direction.

Is it fear? Is it anticipation? Feelings likewise blur, when the protag's condition deadens his life with precautionary routine and isolation. "Cretins" shows impersonal cruelty perverting natural human desires into monstrous forms. "What a feeling, to be needed."

A 1996 movie, Kissed, had a demented premise treated with such tenderness and empathy that it almost lulls you into finding it romantic. "Cretins" reminds me of that. The protagonist, savagely marginalized by a debilitating condition, finds the line between connection and predation blurred.

The parrots give up now.

"The humans... desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe.

But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices?"

electricliterature.com/the-great-si...

If The Empire Strikes Back were a TV series, Han and friends would defeat/escape each of the bounty hunters in each episode until Fett and Vader caught them on Bespin.

And that's what I think about bounty hunters.