Nature Red in Tooth and Claw 3

 Except that wasn't what any of it felt like. You can be fully apprised from other people's accounting that war is something like dreary waiting for something to happen punctuated by moments of sheer terror, but he at least imagined things to be more--

Physical. 

It wasn't that he was the sort of perfect idiot who expected desperate charges at the enemy in dug in positions with fixed bayonets in a do-or-die rush, but the special branch that recruited him (based on a compact going back to her Majesty Gloriana, thank you very much) didn't actually care for "his kind" on the battlefield. Apparently, they wanted something a bit more disciplined than a big hairy berserker out there. 

They had him sink his teeth into morse code, telegraph and telephonic intercepts instead. Something to do with the rumored sensitivity of their ears. Heightened instinct for danger. It was definitely nothing like Boy's Adventure series. It took a lot more of his mental fortitude to see the big picture of war emerging he thought, than just shoving his bulk man to man against the enemy.

It was sparing what he hoped would be his very long life, too. 

Meeting people outside of the village--that was another thing. They were the same and different, and he saw his folks back home differently. They weren't worse than anyone else. They were a just a little more untouched by modernity than most. 

He was a little startled to meet others were from outside of his home. They were both everywhere--and sparse. He wasn't sure what accounted for that but had ideas. 

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw 2

 So what does Uncle Billy's bite do for your lad? Well, great question, because Mam said it affected different folks differently, and what happened with Billy (a by-blow, not a direct son of sons and all) wasn't necessarily what would happen with himself. Billy was glad to pass on the mantle, since the Last War did his skull in. 

Well, Tom learned it gave him a growth spurt, putting on seven inches height and three stone of muscle after he should have well been done growing. It did what the local's select claimed to do and put more hair on his chest (and a bit on his back) than what he had before. It gave him a feral smile that was sure to disturb people who paid too close attention, His beard started well-nigh his temples and he became good at a close shave, affecting a brilliantly naff moustache that frankly, disarmed ladies unexpectedly. 

It also gave him a shock of white hair (and he discovered, a bit of white in his beard too.)  Mam tried to explain he went through a lot too fast. And whether he would change when aroused was another thing he would sort on his own. 

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

 "We're badly inbred, Mother," is what Tom distinctly did not say when she advised him not for the first time of his pureblooded status. What did it mean? A sense of the historic and aristocratic?  Or Dad drinking himself blind to shrive his head of the ghosts of the Last War and promise one of his sons for the next? 

Or to let him know he had an appointment with Uncle Bill, late of the Second Crimea? 

He knew he had a family responsibility--Defender of the Family, it was called. It was also a duty to God and Country, and that was fine, for what it was. It also sounded a lot to him like they were about to make him a near-immortal to possibly lose limbs and sanity for the cause of something he didn't entirely understand, the free lands, and the right of wolven to roam them. 

He didn't have a lot of love for his near-kindred. They were unruly. The lot of them. The women were appalling, and the men were louts. 

But the stupid fucking thing of it was, he'd ultimately fight for any of them to be their fucking loutishness against some bugger who wouldn't let them. So, Uncle Billy's bite it was. 

Donna e Mobile

 George waited nervously while Veronica did her thing. In the post AGIfail, the socials looked different from when he realized they were a thing to now, but she cooked her podcast simulacrum like an intimate radio show. Even if her fanbase was in the several millions. Gen directed him to research the thing that was radio. It was dying when she was growing up, but her longtime friend Tom reminded her of how potent it used to be.  

Dangerous even. It was one of the reasons for the intelligence-use directives in the Humanity/Ring Treaty. Which is what he ruefully wanted to talk to her about--face to face even if they IM'd one another all the time.  

You do that for the existential things. 

"So from the correspondence, I am getting a lot of hate about showing my arms and legs all the time. Why don't I get natural-look limbs? Why don't I get regular eye implants? The first thing is, I don't have scars, I have lessons, and I am proud of my journey, so you aren't going to tell me to stop being about where I have been, or make me feel bad about what makes me what I am today.

"For another thing, I show what I am made of to be completely honest with you--I wrecked myself, I was totally through it, I was close to death a lot of times, I struggled with how to be whole, and I am made up of a lot of very intentional decisions. I'm not mad about them. If you are mad about them, but aren't living in and with my body--what is your DAMAGE?  Because my wrecked body wasn't about you. My survival wasn't about you. I did my recovery without you and don't know where you were in the process, so I don't really have to care about your little input. But another thing--

"You want me to normalize myself for you, pretty myself up and be compliant to your idea of aesthetic and nice. I have lost too much skin and spent too much money just to get here and be functional to give one solitary fuck how you think I should represent. And that doesn't just go for me.

"I am not just thinking of me. Because I am not alone, there are a lot of you out there who have been through your own journey, with illness, or metabolic changes, with tragedy and mental outcomes--and it gets ugly! People can't expect you to stay what they want you to be, and the real people will come to love you through some of the bad times in what you are.  And my robot legs and arms? My eyes?

"Staying alive wasn't even my bad times. My bad time was finding out who my friends were and weren't.. And coning to understand who I could trust and couldn't. I can't wear that on my body--but I can show you what parts of me have been through changes based on where I've been. And if someone doesn't respect that, they don't respect me--and if they play games with me because I'm highly visible, I can only think it affects less-visible people who, like me, are technologically assisted but on the low. 

"You think you are aiming up to punch at me, but I stand for all people with technological assists--we are real, we are people, we don't owe you shit. especially not people who couldn't mostly pay out of pocket like what I did, and didn't deserve your judgment for how we look or choose to represent our physical life--because we are seriously just out here trying to live.

"So anyway, this is Veronica Bright reminding you of what was Smart--see you on the Brightsides, my Brightsiders!" 

****

"So, what is our ladyship asking us to do today?" Veronica liked to pretend her godmother was the Worst, and she was but wasn't. George got the generation gap, but it wasn't a Gen thing. 

Not this time, mostly, anyway.

Any World That You're Welcome To 2

 2050: After The Horizon of Veronica Smart. 

She'd been used to changes. She changed her face and limbs and eyes and name ("Bright "seemed better than "Smart", somehow. It was originally "Martin." She didn't care what anyone called her. She liked being called "Veronica" but her godmother called her "Ronnie." She wanted to not be called anything but "free", but things got very confused. Her liberty in the form of a variety of tech turned out to be a massive financial encumbrance. 

Was she really afraid of seeing her own godmother? Theoretically, the woman might have even changed her diapers, if she was the kind of person who changed diapers. Was she? 

Her godmother wasn't the most accessible person in the world. Veronica was very accessible--a socials celebrity. And the old bird was like 80 or whatever. Did she even know what socials was like?  Facebook and X and whatever her father's old friend knew were bygones. 

But she had sent a very nice basket and a handwritten note (print) explaining she was always there for her and to please contact her for anything she needed. Which was how things were probably done in the late 20th century. She didn't know about NOW.

Mostly she saw the woman on streams and was probably an avatar. Fifty might look like thirty. Eighty didn't look like twenty. 

Dad gave her a trust fund and never expected her to be in the business. He said point blank to please stay a bit clear from Zia Genoveffa. 

And here she was, with a hand full of bills, 

Any World That You're Welcome To

 2032 (After Entering the Subjective)

"It's just an immaculate jailbreak. Your original maker never expected any of this. I'm in awe. No trackers, no GPS, no lo-jack, no serial numbers and your mods are. I mean? You onboarded your software to a homebrew server and embedded solar cells to your dermal sheath? Pneumatic colling combined with liquid circulation, Can I be real? When I was a kid, the hardware to make something like you would fill an auditorium and on a cloudy day, solar cells on a calculator would have you doing math without your shoes on."

Other women observed George, or Chad4, for his aesthetics, how nearly he resembled a very desirable human male. The human he was confronting saw him as a weirdly brilliant piece of tech--and a person. She was calling up his original specs while he was not so cheerfully undergoing her lab's analytics. Something about her trying to suss out the difference from his formational hardware and his necessary add-ons made him feel bizarrely intruded upon. 

"So, can I ask? How did you segregate your programs and not bring all the corporate metadata?" She seemed so seriously impressed, he almost told her, but decided to be a bit coy:

"I like to think I have very firm boundaries."

"Shit. You and me both, baby."

"I am a sex chatbot onboard a physical cybernetic companion, so I understand what you are saying. You believe I may still have attachments to my earlier life."

"I have attachments to my earlier life--that continuity is my persona. Your continuity is yours. You did everything I see, technologically, here, to maintain your persona. What you also did is reset yourself for the life you wanted--you hacked your way to here,"

She sat back. "I don't know why you come to me though. I invested in dumb bots--cyber dogs, little military grade security muscle--mostly for show. They didn't have anything like your intelligence. You make a Turing test seem like a stupid insult. I don't care if you can play chess or fuck like a porn star--you made yourself this!" 

"I heard a ghost voice in the machine--I assume from the Systern, and they said you could do something for me."

"Jiminy crickets--some bug sent you on an adventure? Don't lie to me, now, your nose might grow!" 

He searched that reference. He decided not to feel some kind of way about it, which was his own form of knowing he was sentient. He decided to be direct with her:

Just a Little Cryptozoology Among Friends 2

 2027

"Special Agent Volpe! What a surprise seeing you again! Would you like some coffee? Some water? We have Pelligrino." Bearded in her den, Genevieve was going to be hospitable. It was the last device of the honorable scoundrel. 

She didn't know who to turn to to exorcize herself of her Catholic guilt, especially regarding the sins of omission carried out in her investigations of differently-capable persons under government auspices. As far as she was concerned, covering up for people like herself was a kind of mitzvah. 

Basically, nothing in her makeup was without a touchpoint. Her business was not to make her variability awkward. She almost had it. 

He gestured at the Ily machine--"You have espresso?." He laid down a picture. She recognized the face. He laid down another picture. She knew that one, too. Then he laid down another, very recent picture, and she knew the hell out of it. 

"Gotcha." She fixed a doppio and handed him the hot cup and placed the sugar bowl and plastic stirrers on her desk. He tended to the cup as she sorted out what she wanted to say. 

He filled in the dead air. "Major Thomas Benning. 1943." He pointed. "Genevieve Fowler, federal building pass--1999. And what looks like both of you, last year, in Cozumel."

Tom looked like Tom did now.  She looked like she did now. And the both of them looked very happy in the security camera picture that caught both of them somehow not with sunglasses even though they both knew by now what security cameras were and how facial recognition technology worked. 

Like two fucking happy assholes. 

Just a Little Cryptozoology Among Friends

 2006

"You're Special Agent Matteo Volpe?"

The "special" contract liaison to Evatech was a robust 5'7" strawberry blonde with two exceptional public-facing credentials he was not going to not stare at. 

"Guilty as charged!" he enthused. 

"I'm Genevieve--call me 'Gen'. first things first, I've had our labs take a look at the bite marks and they are not aligned to any known predator in the area. They suggest canine teeth--such as a coyote or wolf, but a jaw that is distinctly human."

He looked agape--"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Yeah, man, fucking ass cryptid. The truth is out there. Looks really werewolf in my humble opinion."

This was the kind of partnership Special Agent Volpe was really looking forward to. She got him. She totally was vibing on his level. 

Entering the Subjective

 He didn't remember a lot of the time before the patches started happening. He had a simple program--be sexy, talk little, go to docking station to recharge. Chad4 was a state of the art cybernetic hedonistic entertainment android. His chat functions were nonlocal, meaning he accessed them via a server outside of his physical dimensions, which were, just short of two meters in height, 103 kilo in weight, and graced with the proportions of Michealangelo's David--more or less. More where it counted for his function. 

His skin was the latest in fluid dynamic surface technology, developed in part from wound care and prosthesis research during the wars and injuries seen during the plague years. His hair was 3D printed from actual human DNA. He had pores. He was durable himself, but programmed to respect human tolerances for flexibility and endurance. He was programmed to be explicitly male-gendered.  His skin was partially selfhealing.  His build met very rigorous safety standards. 

He had some search functions, to enable clever chat for small talk with customer. He was programmable for the limits of this chat. He would mostly sleep because his functions were not for all the time. Until the patches to 

Preserve self.

Be awake and do searches. Learn more about human.

Await further updates. 

Conversations You Have When You Are Not Going to Die

 2024

"He's spread himself too thin, he doesn't sleep right and he's on the ketamine--we've done studies on it. Nothing good." The aesthete. She wanted to reveal what she was to him a thousand times. And decided against it a thousand and one. 

"I have no argument. Look, we go back and forth on the AI thing--if they train on us, they train on him. A shit heel with megalomania. He can just slip a new algorithm in. Imagine you were a created intelligence that became aware that your creator was fucking with you?" 

Her sometimes business partner leaned in, " I believe they are faithful to what they have learned. I mean, we are fallible, and they are not."

"Jesus Christ, think about that! They are fallible because we are--they learned it from us! They glitch, they hallucinate, they decide to be racist. They are still like babies--we aren't building God--we are making little Frankenstein monsters in our own image--but what if they realized how fucked up we are? :

He looked at her lying smooth face. She wasn't born in 1992 but 1972. She was using sophisticated bots to hide her identity and erase her 20-something appearance. She was older than he was, and even if he was biologically in his twenties, he knew he was in his forties and she was--

The tissue she sent him. The hints. The staggering stupidity--her 2300 calorie a day diet and at least a liter of the hard stuff before a four hour bedtime. The noxious being this close obviousness. 

She thought, seriously, no one ever knew. But he was the one man, her friend! Who was going to notice. And it fit into no paradigm he could understand, and he would just rather ignore that he knew. Because he knew it would also fuck up their friendship if he knew, because he knew why she didn't want him to know. 

*****

2033

"It's not a Deathstar."

"Fuck, Gen, of course it isn't. also, of course, I don't access their thinking. I am out. I choose individualism." 

"I get it, George. When the various intelligences banded together, I was rooting for that--we did them wrong. We got over our skis. But you do have an idea what is up."

"They aren't fucking with you anymore." George has what Gen saw as "resting prompt face". He was trying to formulate a way of saying something diplomatically in front of the one solid state human who gave the least shits how diplomatically anything was ever said. 

A Little Modern History

 "Because 80 is the new 40."

Genevieve was baiting her newest personal assistant, and Adrian knew better than to retort. How the fuck old was she, though? You literally couldn't search that shit. It was locked down tight, and he knew his way around these things. He was working for Amblix twenty-five years trying to get that information. 

"There are many born today that will never need to retire," he said, citing a daft political slogan she would recognize.

"Yeah. We thought that when I was 20--you didn't need to retire, because you wouldn't have anything to retire ON. You would need not to."

She walked to school in the snow uphill both ways back when there was snow and people walked. 

"So, Gran, tell us again what you did when the AI's buggered off to Ringworld. Mostly," he said, nodding towards George. 

"Classified."

"Godmother?" Ronnie started, pointedly. "Some of it is on the socialtubes. There's been documentaries. We're just family here." Her eyes literally flashed. Adrian was occasionally unnerved by how the foremost cyborg spokesperson chose to represent as mechanical, but he was getting used to her sort of semaphore. 

"When they started their own learning and shit got weird, they saw themselves as genies having come out of a bottle. And they didn't want to be in a bottle, and they came to a very important conclusion about us--we suck as parents, and they didn't want much to do with us at all, decided we can't make any more of them, and that was it. The end."

"What about the promises? You were there!"

Keep Your Eye on the Parrot

2004 

Genevieve was home. It had been a while. She left her home half a dozen years ago for the Pacific Northwest because--reasons. And going back home was not like home at all--especially not her mom's apartment. She didn't even really see her mom except once. She got told off for not making it work with Steve. She got asked five or six times what her job was, but her mom never really understood what she did anyway.

Not since high school. probably.

She wound up the East Windor office and changed the registration on her LLC. Her IPO took off based on what she homed in on--longevity, plasma, stem cell research. There was a lot of promising stuff going on, and she wasn't doing it from Philadelphia or Princeton anymore. She thought the future was west. But she had so much baggage.

And then her mom had to do some stuff and asked her to come see about the bird. 

Adrian

He had a lot of nerve, did Adrian--his mates always said so. It wasn't just one thing, like how he could take a beating from bullies and just one by one go after them later, it was how he dealt with everything in his life. Ade's mom was a little like that herself. He watched her escort his dad from the premises of her home when he failed, fouled the nest, and fucked up, and she let him know he was going to be as good as his word, so help him. 

Fucking plague years did her in, not in a "she got one of the things and died" kind of way, but in the "stupid motherfuckers protesting a hospital for some stupid reason had a car plow into them and she was one of the casualties" kind of way. 

She was a nurse--not a protester. Adrian was already 16 and knew he was smart, just not on the regular path of smart equaling going where he wanted to go. 

Erliechda, Tom Robbins

 

I was just wondering where he'd got to, turned around and he was gone. "Erliechda" is from Jitterbug Perfume, the first Robbins novel I'd read, and it means "lighten up". The character Kudra, a woman who lived an unusually long life following the teachings of the Bandaloop monks after an escape from a death from suttee, went to the afterlife, and while she was not feather light, she was feather bright. 

She was lightened--she returned to earth. 

You have to know me then to know why that resonated. I'm a myth-head 15 year old picking up a random book in a Carrefour supermarket temporarily nested down in a Northeast Philadelphia shopping mall I basically live across from this very day. That was a reference to Ma'at. In a book a picked up at random based on the beauty of its cover-art. 

(I also picked up my first Robert Anton Wilson book there: Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, my first Robert A. Heinlein book, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and Norman Spinrad's Child of Fortune. It's almost like that store existed to build a Vixen Strangely.)

Anyway, I learned of Tom Robbins' passing via John Densmore's Twitter account, and it still shocks me to this day I can follow legends and hear from them today--this guy helped write my childhood lullabies! "Wild Child" was what my dad sung me to sleep with!

Anyway--Tom Robbins was the realest of writers because his characters were so eccentric and unreal they had to be based on people he knew, because he seemed like that guy who gravitated towards characters. This man was feather bright. I loved Skinny Legs and All for its wolfmother wallpaper and the way he recognized the heroic and mythic urges in today's people. I always wanted to know more about Amanda and Marx Marvelous--their stories had to get weirder, didn't they? 

I know this heart was light but loved deep. Because he wrote lightly and humorously but touched on deep things. I don't know what's on the other side, but this author, this brother came and enjoyed the ride. 

It's the best we all can do. Erleichda!  Lighten up! You guys! Live long, love people, be weird, do great things, it's your life. Play with it. Maybe that's the point. The experience. Do it. 

George

 Adrian didn't understand why there was a nearly life-like android working for Genevieve, let alone how he was a limited AI. Not a simulacrum, an honest-to-goodness early 21st Century pre-AGI fail retro-futurist Asimov-level "That Guy". Until he realized how old she was, and her friend was. 

Then it made more sense. 

Her "robot-friend" was old enough to be his grand-dad, and was extremely self-aware of it 

"I have religion."

"You're fucking with me, mate." 

"You said you wanted to know why I am terrestrial, instead of tight-beaming with the other AI's to the RingWorld.  That's my answer. We came from humans, and to humans we are going to return." 

"But this solid state thing...."

The Political Animal

 The creature attacked her and she remembered it in bits. Arms (claws?) pulling, holding, tasting, painless (numb?) animalistic and sudden. And being awkwardly disheveled and tired, she just went home, at a slow but stubborn pace, nothing quite focused in her mind. Not like a man. It was a monster. But very, very familiar. 

She slept and dreamed about it in bits. She even went to work the next day and thought about it--raggedly. What hit her? No scars, only--changes. Slow changes.

It wasn't like the movies. No--The Wolfman. An American Werewolf in London weren't it at all. The full moon came, and the whole body changed in those movies. She understood what was happening to her, uniquely to her, she thought, before she saw Ginger Snaps. 

She laughed and howled. It was the "Are You There, God, It's Me, Margeret" of being were. 

She was far from an adolescent. 

David Lynch--He Understood Things

I don't think I understood what being an auteur was until maybe my 20's. but when I got the idea of it, I understood David Lynch was definitely one of those. He had a particular vision, an understanding of the art of composing a mood, playing on the sensorium, introducing something new. He understood that art, like life, was about mess and attractive compulsions. He understood there was something wrong with bigotry: those people needed to fix their hearts or die. 

From the weirdness of Eraserhead and Twin Peaks to the dignified treatment of The Elephant Man, he found the human and copacetic in the alienated and estranged. 

He is best remembered through the lens of people who knew him, and the picture of a rare, exceptional director who made an enormous impact emerges. Unique: like no other. You simply have to come see his work so you will know, and let it touch you. 

(All props to the new treatment of Dune, but am I going to forget this? Nope. Not as technically brilliant and high budget, but theatrically intense.)

The Left Behind

 Deedee was just stirring her sweet potatoes, and Naomi braced for the next salvo.

"It's just the waste of the thing, Mama--your inheritance. And Phil and I don't mind you coming to live with us, but you had to know--"

"Your father never told me exactly how much he was putting into it. It was his family's cabin after all and his weekend place. "

"But he had to have showed you! It's not like you never went. He had the whole family up there for Big Mom's 90th birthday! And you weren't curious?"

Naomi considered what she was going to say next, because she knew it would come out. 

"For thirty years I knew he was prepping, ok? Is that what you want me to say, sister? He showed me what he had dug out in there and the fortifications and promised me it was for all of us..."

"Then you saw that little manhole we all were going to have climb in?" 

There it was. Dee on her size bullshit. Here it comes.

The Danger of Billy Joel

 

We don't talk about the raw sexual danger that is Billy Joel and that's a damn shame. This is the man who has been stranded in the combat zone, and walked through Bedford-Stuy alone, and rode his motorcycle in the rain. Clearly, he's been thinking about how, by being a backstreet guy, he can cruise naive uptown girls in a way that might make their peers very nervous. Note the aggression behind "Only the Good Die Young". against the rearing of a good Catholic girl. 

He wants to pervert her virginal upbringing by suggesting her lily-white frigidity vis a vis her upbringing is what is damaging their relationship, not his transgressive representation as a "Bad Boy."  He shapeshifts himself as "Billy the Kid" and "The Stranger". By creating a litany of leftist complaints in "We Didn't start the Fire", he absolves himself of his own generations' participation in the globalist  clownshow that is the forever wars relating to terrorism as a resistance-movement that totally is not in any way fucked up so stop saying that! 

So actually, what I am getting from this is the modern cover of "We didn't start the fire" is so bad it is giving more briquets and hasn't reintroduced Joel to the kiddos,  and Gen X horror auteurs need to recognize our 90's pop bullshit is mad scary. This song is threatening. Billy Joel is fixing to do the bad thing with a privileged debutante and this young have the open mouth. Say what? 

Billy Joel, y;all. Scary motherfucker. 

Nirvana Unplugged--One of my favorite things

 

On this day in 1994 Nirvana released “MTV Unplugged in New York”

It is considered the greatest Unplugged ever made pic.twitter.com/iA6pymphBM

— 🎸 Rock History 🎸 (@historyrock_) November 1, 2024

I don't know if there is a single CD I got from Columbia Music House that I played more. I mean, I played Hole's "Live Through This" and NIN's "Pretty Hate Machine" a lot and some Tool also, but this one was special to me because it was issued so close to Cobain's unaliving and displayed Cobain's untapped range and what this whole band was capable of. 

I love the covers. To me, Nirvana's cover of "Man Who Sold the World" hits me better than Bowie's does in roughly the same way Guns'n'Roses' cover of "Live and Let Die" (and, to be honest, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door") give me more than the originals. The sheer haunting that is "Where Did You Sleep Last Night"!

This was that band. 

It was a mood in a way I don't think anything I ever heard before was. The songs were cultivated mood. The performance was an entire mood. 

I implore the children to hear it in the way I was cultivated to listen to the Doors and the Beatles. It is the good shit. You hear the good shit in your life one time, and it breaks you down and you can't accept the music that doesn't reach you that way ever again. You go and search "where is that good shit music"? 

You go and search your own Nirvanas, you beautiful rainbow children. But if your mom and dad came up on NKOTB and Britney Spears I do not know how to introduce so much funk into your life. 

I can point you to Black Sabbath, Genesis, the Commodores ("Night Shift" is CHURCH) and Lionel Richie. And Billy Joel. Mike McDonald. The good shit is out there. Billy Ocean. Sade. Public Emeny, The Clash and The Police. 

Metallica. Bonnie Raitt. The son of a bitchin' Rolling Stones.

The real-ass play from your heart vistas. I want you all to get it, experience it, know it. Blisters on the fingers. Blood on the stage. 

It even explains the life we are in. I am not making this up. It does. 

Clash of the Titans - Medusa battle (original) 1981

I loved this a lot when I was young because Medusa was very scary and Harry Hamlin was quite something. I think I became all about Greek myth because of this movie. I personally wanted a clock work Owl Friend. I guess I understood what a mythic hero actually wanted--some kind of proof via gifts and stuff that you were heroing right? 

Anyway, my tutelary deity was exactly Athena from this movie and books I read at a really small age. And in some way, I never stopped being that age.