#83 - I Am So Humiliated

I swear these people will be the death of me.  The humiliation I feel burns and I cannot lash out in rage.  Truly they are ALL like this… Even the scorching shit elephants and the ice-assed High Priestesses.

They nearly blow themselves up because gun cotton looks ‘so innocent’.  One idiot, one fool, one moron with ice and shit for brains offered to sit on the box containing the explosive.  I heard afterwards, when they were picking the shards off us and the elephants were lifting wooden beams off people, that this self-copulating, hydrocephalic fool fainted dead away, confusing people who were trying to help victims of the explosion.

These people.  It looks so innocent? Freeze and scorch me I might just keel over in a dead faint myself should anyone show some useful cynicism!  I should never have said anything.  And M’sieur Lachemi has the insufferable gall, the inexpressible, unutterable and ineffable elephant balls to ask me about MORE things that the empire has come up with.

Fountain pens, enclosed air stoves, and high explosives aren’t ENOUGH?  I reeled off float glass, moveable type, which my friend M’sieur James says they have but made of hand-carved ironwood rather than poured metal, and lift locks on the river to make the navigation head somewhat higher into Innéan country than here and the man is gibbering.  He’s taking EVERYTHING I say now entirely seriously and it makes me want to start throwing fantasies at him.  Like the fool who showed me a children’s toy fire-balloon and tried to convince me that it could be up-scaled to a military observation platform. Silk gas-bags driven by leg-rowed spinning propellers!

Or the asinine idea of using water wheels to draw wire!  Wire rope! A fat-based paint that stops rust on military gear.  Can I throw all these wild theories at them to overwhelm them and make them leave me alone? Hmmm. Perhaps I will just throw everything at these Innovators.  At least they will then shut up and go away, leave me mostly alone.  I have a plan.  It will take them years to sort out which ideas are viable and which are merely chaff that I may hide behind.

And… and… I continue to avoid both Pel and Yolend and his children.  It hurts too much.  This makes the High Priestess’s offer to invest me as a priest up at the Veil much more appealing.  I just… can’t keep it together around people. I want to learn to love them.  Too much.  Too much. They... are lovable and I just do NOT know how to love without tying it to injury and torture.

I pull out the ink stick and the paper and begin to try and calm my mind.  Grind the ink.  Mix the ink.  Wet the brush. Breathe.  Try to draw a line.  Try to draw a circle.  Try to draw the image of Liryen’s Peace which has all the ink strokes in it.  Crumple them all and jam them into the closed stove in my room… the newly installed closed stove.  Ashes.  I have not one single clean line.  My mind is chattering and flailing and the ink shows it.  My hands are covered in ink spots and ashes.

Rutaçyen’s hands are always clean.  Her lines are clean.  I have managed ONE clean line and that was when I was so shaking exhausted I couldn’t see straight.

Didara can draw a better line than I.  Jagunjagun loves the idea of the ink sword and draws every day.  Innéans come to speak to him, to see him draw, to spirit away his ink marked pieces of paper.  I sit and am nothing but an embarrassment.

An embarrassment that needs to be dangled by one ankle and dunked in ice water until I obey. I hate them all.  I hate them all.  Of course I hate them.  They humiliate me. I hate them. I want to love them so badly.  But that's hard.  It is easier to hate them.  I have never done 'easy', though.