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Thursday, April 06, 2006
16:38 
Conversations with Ben
 Ben, AKA the Jackal (after his Old Man), has been part of my life for... oh. Longer than I've known how to use email. If I think back far enough, and try very hard, I think I can pretty much pin it down to the summer after I finished my first degree.
When we first met — although 'met' is perhaps a misnomer — he was part of a group of hunters chasing me in a far-off place Elsewhere. I don't want even to try to work out the politics of that one. Suffice to say that the Game requires Family to play against one another more often than one might think.
He was the scariest of the group, and I think the only one who was Family. I knew he was the only one who had a real chance of tracking me, and he was the only one of the five of them who I thought could actually do me any harm.
I can't quite remember how I got out of that. I think it involved hiding in a freezer full of raw meat in a zoo for a number of hours. It's best not to probe too deeply.
I suppose we must have been put together on a job after that. Or possibly — my memories of that time are pretty vague — the next time I saw him was just when the whole Raven thing started kicking off in earnest.
That's right. Ben predates my Old Man taking me back for himself. We go back a long way.
Mostly our relationship has been personal. For most of that time we have been close friends; a friendship that has become progressively more intimate over the years. It is only recently that he and I have become partners in a more formal sense.
We know surprisingly little about each other, given our intimacy. He is, I think, Canadian. Occasionally someone will accuse me of having a slight Canadian accent if I have been spending a lot of time with him (the last time this happened was on Tuesday). I don't know what he does for a living, although it seems to involve intermittent bouts of travelling as far south as Georgia and as far north as Alaska. He is not married, although I think he once was. I don't think he tells his girlfriends about me and doesn't talk to me about them.
I don't know his email address.
It is, of course, remarkably convenient in terms of the whole Randi test that something — namely Family — forbids us making this NC relationship consensus. I have begged, pleaded, threatened, cajoled and even blogged requests for him to contact me in the Really Real World where tables, chairs, hatstands and email lives. He will not discuss it. It is as if our communications are censored, and he neither sees nor hears my pleas. Equally, I have never heard him asking me to contact him and offering me a method.
Although at least I'm easy to find using Google.
Come to think of it, I've never tried to find him using Google. The Russian - yes. I tried to find him. Not Ben. And even thinking about it makes me uneasy.
Still, even if he is imaginary, or a delusion, he has been a good friend to me over the years. He is my ideal Bud, and sometimes I still harbour faint hope that one day we will both get validation and a chance to meet in the flesh. We suit each other.
If I did not have Frood I might well have gone to Canada, just in case I happened to run into him. Odder things have happened.
We keep different hours, of course, with him being 8 hours behind. I don't hear much from him while he's at work. But when the lines of communication are open he does come out with the strangest things.
"As smug as a goddamn banana," is one of his. I have no idea what that means.
Ben has been the one to make me feel attractive. I have body image issues — who doesn't — mostly involving my tree-trunk thighs and a few fairly non-girly traits that come from having a genetic stock that seems to be heavy on the testosterone. On my mother's side, ironically. Oh, and bad skin. If I could change anything about myself it would be the bad skin.
I'm not pretty. I'm certainly not what the Jaguar ad campaign describes as 'gorgeous'.
I look a bit like a bodybuilder in the off-season, and Frood is not the sort of man to offer random compliments. Not without making it seem like some sort of joke, leaving me dangling for a punchline.
Occasionally a girl needs random compliments. No, scrub 'occasionally'. I like to feel appreciated — again, who doesn't? I like that verbal reassurance from a partner. I like to feel that my man genuinely finds me attractive and the physical side of the relationship isn't purely because I let him touch me up and he gets sex. I like to feel that my man finds me to be an attractive woman, and not just a mate who has girly bits.
Ben does treat me like a woman. He likes the way I look and says so. When I have a girly hormonal moment and get fretful about how non-attractive I feel he makes me feel good about myself. He knows how to lift my mood and he knows how to show his appreciation in a way that makes me feel better.
It helps that he's not into skinny, lettuce-and-a-wet-tissue girls. It also helps that he has a better idea than almost anyone else of what goes on inside my head.
Even so, he's a bit odd in his predilections.
He likes that I can butcher meat. He thinks it's endearing (I kid you not) that I buy a whole chicken and cut it up myself rather than buying pre-butchered pieces. He thinks I'm sexy when I have a big knife in my hand and a pile of dismembered corpses in front of me.
He likes that I chop wood, and can use a decent sized axe. He thinks that short hair on me is both cute and hot, and isn't convinced by my idle thoughts of growing mine again, even though his own is quite long. He did know me when I had long hair before.
On Tuesday he told me that he likes a girl who can reverse-park a car using the wing mirrors. I mean, come off it. That's just silly.
When Frood pays me a rare compliment it sounds like a joke even when it's not. When Ben does it he sounds genuine even if it has to be a joke.
I love Frood, please don't get me wrong. He is my husband. I meant every single one of my wedding vows. Forced to choose between them as part of bunny training, it was Frood I chose.
But I hope I never lose Ben completely. It's bad enough that I have had to sacrifice the bond we once had; that strange, unsubstantiated faith that he really was really out there somewhere in the really real world. He comes out with the weirdest shit at times, but that's part of what makes him important to me.
He likes a girl who can park using just her wing mirrors? I couldn't make that stuff up.
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Wednesday, April 05, 2006
13:21
Epilogue
 The empath was dead
The woman stood, staring curiously at the dried husk lying crumpled in the bottom of the glass box. The box was hexagonal and looked like a very large ornamental terrarium without the plants. It was about ten feet across and just high enough that she could not reach the ceiling when standing on tip-toe. She knew that without trying. She remembered.
The husk inside was papery in appearance. It resembled the shed skin of a spider or snake, only it had her face. It was complete in every detail, with fingernails and hair and the ghosts of eyes beneath the translucent, membranous lids.
It was a shell, empty and ephemeral. The woman walked slowly around the box, fingers trailing over the glass, her gaze fixed on the husk inside, wondering if it would crumble should she touch it. As she did so she remembered what it had been to stand inside that box, hurting inside so badly that no quantity of tears could ever be enough, watching a creature not dissimilar to what she was now make this same, curious, dispassionate perambulation. She remembered but she did not relive. That had been another life.
Now the empath was dead; no more than a thin, empty shell remained. The creature that had tormented her was also gone. It seemed nothing had been disturbed, nothing had been touched since then. She was vaguely disappointed at the lack of dust, but then what was there in this place to make dust?
"How long has it been?"
The Jackal watched her through two walls of glass. She did not respond until she had completed her circumnavigation and was standing beside him. She flashed him a quick glance, fingertips still resting on the box, and while her fathomless black eyes remained almost unreadable, the corner of her mouth twitched into a slight smile.
"I can't remember," she replied. "Years. I could check the records…" She smiled at him again, amused. "But I'm not going to. It doesn't matter."
"No."
"You never came to visit me, when I was in there." She was still staring at the papery ghost inside the box.
"No." He offered agreement but no explanation. That did not matter either. She knew as much as she needed to, could at least sense the edges of his memories of that time and understand that it was a case of 'could not' rather than 'did not'.
"It's strange," she said in response to his unspoken question. "The Weapon I can still feel, still sort of touch inside me. Like a scar. You know? A scar isn't an injury any more. It doesn't hurt, doesn't bleed, doesn't do any of the things that make a wound a wound. But the shape of it is still there."
She crouched, squatting, her face separated from that of the dry facsimile by a glass pane and a hand's breadth of empty space. There was something eerie in the way the husk was an obvious exact copy of her, as though she were examining her own ghost, or had met her doppelganger and one of them had sucked the life from the other.
The Jackal was reminded that he had not been there to see which one it was. Yet that did not matter any more than the other things.
"I can't feel her any more," the woman continued, fingers spread out against the glass. "Not properly. But she's the deep wound that becomes an occasional ache - something not there and forgotten, too far down for the scar to be visible, out of sight and out of mind until I twist the wrong way and a twinge reminds me." She paused, leaning forwards until her forehead was resting on the glass, breath misting. "She's dead, and the Weapon's gone. But the Weapon healed and she hasn't. Not yet."
The Jackal let her talk, not really knowing why she had come or what she had come to do. Another thing that did not matter. He was there: that was all she needed of him. That was all she had ever needed of him, when she needed anything at all.
Desires were different, but then this gig had never given much room for desires.
"You know why she's just a shell, don't you?" She was still looking at the husk; observing every detail, taking in every desiccated pore and arid fold of spent skin. Underneath the lids the eyes had once been greyish-green, although now the colour was no more than a memory.
The Jackal said nothing.
"She was the prison. This…" She patted the glass. "This meant nothing."
As if to demonstrate, the black shell of her skin rippled over her right arm and then she pushed her hand through the glass as if there were nothing there. She waved, careful not to touch the husk.
"I had to leave her behind. She couldn't pass through. It was her prison, not the Weapon's. Without the Weapon I would have had nowhere to go. So I integrated with my smarter, sexier, less human side. I stepped outside the box and I had to step outside her to do it. And this is what is left: a straitjacket in the form of a skin. A form I couldn't just drop but had to shed."
Someone else was about to be taught the lesson of the box. Someone else was going to be trapped inside the glass cage in the empty white room and left there to work out how to get free. Left there for however long it took for the aspect of his personality that made it possible for him to be imprisoned to become something he was willing and able — even desperate — to shed. No matter how important it currently seemed. Someone else would be confined by the glass hexagon while the thing about himself that they wanted and he feared, that they desired and he dreaded becoming, taunted him from outside with its freedom. Even though it was just as trapped as he, for it could not exist without him.
To escape the box he too would have to embrace the only part of himself still free and leave behind the part too rigid and fixed to pass through the glass. Then there would be another empty shell lying crumpled in the bottom of the box, waiting for its one-time occupant to come back and remind himself of what he had left behind.
Both the woman and the Jackal knew this, and their thoughts simultaneously slid to idle wondering about which two aspects would be made to wrestle, and how long it would take for the inevitable to occur. The woman could not remember how long it had taken her. It seemed both as if she had only just stepped free and as if she had not been to this place in more years than she cared to consider.
But it had taken her a long time. And the empath, dead or not, was a wound she was still healing.
"Poor bastard," she murmured, and she might have been talking about herself. Neither she nor the Jackal had been told that the box was to be used again, but they both knew nevertheless. Perhaps that was why she had come. It was for someone else's education now.
"Maybe he won't be as stubborn and contrary as you, eh?" the Jackal offered.
"Maybe." Or maybe he'd be one of the new breed: smarter, faster, more adaptable.
"Hey." The Jackal took a step towards her, tucking an untidy skein of hair behind his left ear, grey eyes crinkled in affectionate disapproval. "Y'ain't exactly obsolete yet. Gods, girl. Ye've only just started understandin' what ye're capable of. The new kids on the block're gonna have to work their butts off just t' come close to matchin' ye, new breed or not."
"You're sweet," she said. "Don't mollycoddle."
"Mollycoddle you? Ye think I want to get my ass kicked, eh?"
Here then was the old ache that was the unfinished healing. The empath had expected to die. The empath had died. But the woman had not. She had grown up and the old, deep wound left by the empath said that she was always meant to be the best, but then she had not been supposed to last long enough for the new generation to grow up enough and learn enough to surpass her. And the old, deep wound left by the empath sometimes made her cry in regret for what she had lost in payment for such a small reward, and sometimes for no reason at all.
The empath had been human weakness and, being human, some human weakness remained despite the ministrations of the Russian and his even more clinical successor. That old wound would always ache at times, but that did not mean it could not heal some more.
"See?" she said softly.
She reached through the glass and picked up the husk, holding it delicately. She withdrew her arm. When she tried to pull the desiccated skin out of the doorless box it crumbled against the glass. Not one scrap emerged. Pieces scattered in a random pile on the floor inside, becoming unrecognisable.
"Come on, Ben," she sighed. There was not even any dust caught on her fingertips. Nothing had come out. "There's nothing here I need any more."
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Tuesday, April 04, 2006
13:40
While I was away - Part 3
 While I'm at it, there's something else I really feel (no, really) that I should make clear. It's important that you understand this if you are intending to spend important minutes of your short, mortal life reading the occasionally lengthy and always opinionated ramblings to which I am prone. It's something that even my closest friends sometimes forget, consciously if not subconsciously (or maybe the other way around).
I belong to Raven. This has many implications and consequences. Raven is a Trickster, a shapeshifter. He is greedy, lazy, arrogant, self-serving. He is also curious, intelligent, incisive and powerful. He is the youngest of the Prime and also the only one of them who is warm-blooded. He is their Messenger. He brings change. He catalyzes. That change can mean anything from the obtaining of information and the gift of insight to the death that forces the start of something new.
Death is a change of state. It probably has quite a high surprisal value.
As a child of Raven, as an avatar of the Prime's agent of change, anything I do or say should be viewed as possibly being nothing more than something done or said to provoke change. If I'm on a job ticket that 'possibly' should be 'definitely'. At no point should the reader imagine that I consider what I write to be the truth, nor consider that my actions in any given situation would necessarily be the same should the situation be repeated. I go where I am sent, do what I am told and say what is given to me to say.
This does not mean that what I do or say is false. It is just that it is what is appropriate. Shifters — shifters like me — are reactive, not proactive. We do not act, we respond. It is both our greatest strength and our greatest weakness and it is why Raven keeps the shiftiest of his children so close.
Do not be surprised, then, if I seem to contradict myself or if my position seems to change. I have no fixed position; I have no beliefs. For me truth is at best a malleable commodity and at worst something so slippery and changeable that it is better left 'out there'.
A shifter's greatest fear is confinement — rigidity. It is intolerable. Mental confinement is just as much of an anathema to me as physical restriction. I will react to dogma in the way a meerkat reacts to a scorpion. It is both repellent and mesmeric. Dangerous and potentially tasty. If forced to comply it would drive me mad, yet it also represents an irresistible target for a creature designed and built to cause change.
I am a creature of Family, and nothing I do or say is contrary to them. They have had my entire life and more to ensure that I am incapable of acting outside their wishes. This, in itself, is a form of restriction, but then shifters are also paradoxes. I did rebel, once, but found greater freedom within Family than without it.
For me a person is, or should be, separate from his position. I may attack a position but I do not see this as attacking the person for the person can always change and redefine the relationship even if I don't.
If I mean to attack a person, I make it obvious.
So don't assume that reading anything I write gives you an insight into my beliefs and attitudes and preconceptions: not here, not anywhere. At most you will have an idea about how I have reacted to some stimulus at the time of writing. My reaction may then cause you to re-evaluate your position. It might not. That's up to you — or your Bods.
I am moody, logical, intuitive, curious, uncaring, insightful, rational, gregarious, misanthropic, arrogant, egotistical and a slave; and I'm the hottest thing to kick ass this side of the Phase Boundary as well as being totally and comprehensively aware of my own complete insignificance.
Just when you think you know me you'll find that you don't, or I'll change so that what you know is no longer entirely accurate.
And those precious, rare few to whom this does not apply are those for whom my bright, potent, incendiary love is reserved.
I would hope you know who you are.
The rest of you read and take note. I will not say this again.
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11:19
While I was away - Part 2
 Now where were we? I believe we were ranting about the fundamental wriggliness of truth. This segues neatly into the concept of dogma. Particularly this meme:
Omnia vincit amor
For those of you whose Latin is limited to Willow casting spells in Buffy or, a little less sadly, Sir Ralph Richardson giving it some in Dragonslayer (Vermifrax Pejorative is still the best dragon name ever), this little phrase translates as one of the most dangerous (and pervasive) concepts in the New Age catalogue.
Love conquers all
It's right up there with the Threefold Law and "Better Back Then".
It is dogma. It is possible to tell it's dogma by the way it is parroted by even those who become offended when accused of being an objectivist.
It's also, in my heartfelt and experienced opinion, utter crap.
I don't care if Ghandi said it. I don't care if MLK said it. I don't care if Jesus said it. The idea that it is true — or, worse, a fact — is the 3 billion Chinese fallacy, and I'm not referring to Lazlo's Relativity Axiom.
If you seriously believe that love conquers all I want you to prove it by standing in the fast lane of the M74 in the dark in black clothes shouting "I love you!" at the approaching motorists. Do it up at the Abington end. Everyone's doing about 90 up there.
Or get in amongst a bunch of hungry sharks with a net bag full of chum. See if professing love for them stops them taking a chunk out of you.
Try coming between a wild hippo and the water. I don't think declaring heartfelt spiritual caring will save you, even with a ready supply of cabbages.
Love does not conquer all. Love is a useful tactic or tool in a number of different situations where the goal involves achieving a target that comes from a finite set.
Even Ghandi's success likely owed more to the unstated but inferred what-if. What if all those people sitting down doing nothing were to stand up and fight?
I've been wondering where this meme originated. I don't think the Greeks or the Romans claimed this one, but I'm not on good speaking terms with that House complex. My insufferable uncle (the one with the red hair) just raises his eyebrows in a "you know better, don't waste my time" kind of way when I ponder the Norse House complex buying into it. He makes me think about Conan and the Riddle of Steel. James Earl Jones talked flesh, not love.
Buddha? Did Buddha talk of love? I'm not sure. My knowledge of Buddhism is tainted by watching every episode of Monkey and reading Zelazny's Lords of Light (infinitely superior to the Amber series).
What about Taoism? Does the eight-fold path talk of love?
Love is powerful, there's no getting away from it. Love comes in many different flavours, from the hot passion of newfound romantic love to the infinite patience of spiritual compassion.
But to say that love conquers all is propagating a meme that is not only part of the process that is leading the various sub groups of Neo Paganism to be exactly the sort of concrete, prescriptive, single religion that some of us came to it in order to escape, but is also demonstrably wrong.
M74. Shark. Hippo. Disgruntled llama. Angry bee.
I used to claim that I loved my enemies and I think, empath that I was, that I did. I don't claim that any more, or believe it. Love, for me, is a personal thing. It is what I feel for the scant few trusted friends I have left. It is an aspect of caring - where there is care, there is love.
I have been accused of being a monster, of not caring. This is not entirely true. I care a lot. I care deeply. I feel, I love - but not for everything and everyone. My love is too fierce, too precious, too bright and hot and potent to waste on everything and everyone when mostly the universe trogs on just fine without me.
I don't love the universe. I belong. I am part of the universe, and am aware of that belonging.
I do love my Old Man, just as I belong to him and am aware of that belonging.
The former is impersonal. The later is personal. I don't feel a personal love for everyone and everything any more than I feel a particular love for my right thumb or my left kidney.
I think people call too many feelings and emotions love and thus give it an unfair advantage.
Let's return to this piece of dogma and strip it down to something that might be a little more accurate. Perhaps we should really be saying:
The compassionate set of emotions, of which love is one member, can be utilized as a strategic tool for achieving goals that are of the altruistic, cohesive variety, assuming some degree of willingness or desire to achieve mutual co-operation on all sides.
Doesn't quite trip off the tongue, does it?
Love is a weapon in the emotional armoury, and it's a heavy-calibre weapon at that. It comes in long and short range varieties. But it's not all-powerful, and it has weaknesses as well as strengths. It may be one of the best weapons we have in the fight for social harmony, but it's no fucking good when you're being attacked by a mugger on PCP — except possibly as a distraction. Saying: "I love you, my child, and the fruits of the world's blessings be upon you" might just distract him long enough for you to get the first headbutt in.
And anyone who insists that it's true, period, is trapped by New Age dogma and really ought to get out more.
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Monday, April 03, 2006
21:54
While I was away - Part 1
 Square brackets indicate additions during transcription.
I caught Fight Club last night. On telly.
You know the one: you are not a unique and beautiful snowflake… you are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.
I've seen it before, of course. I expect most people have by now. It's one of Brad Pitt's better films, although I think, personally, that Edward Norton is more impressive.
"I am Jack's smirking revenge."
It was about halfway through when I turned it on and, as I'm stuck in a hotel room in Dumfries as I write this, and have been since yesterday evening, I left it on even though I've seen it often enough that, had I been at home, I'd have turned it off. Switched over. Found something else to do.
But I was in a fourth-floor hotel room about fifty yards from a train station, on a Sunday night in small-town Scotland, all by myself with no money for room service and no friends in the area. So it was nice, in an odd way, to have something familiar given how much upheaval and strangeness there has been of late.
It was at the part just before Jack sets off on the trip that leads to the confrontation with Durgan in the hotel room, in which he learns that he is Tyler Durgan. The confrontation that ends with him falling onto the bed as Norton's voice, as the narrator, explains what 'changeover' means
I watched it to the end, and I watched it with new eyes. Because I remember changeover.
The empath is dead.
It is a phrase that has been echoing around inside my head for a few days now.
The empath is dead.
Remember her? A few years ago [circa 2000] I played out the emotional and mental war that resulted from my experiences as Core in a series of vignettes [try here or here and especially here for examples]. The empath was terribly human: vulnerable, broken and psychologically battered; trapped in a prison that she could not see was at least partially of her own making.
The Weapon, and I'm not sure I talked about that very much, was the remaining part of Core - or so I thought at the time. It was cold, emotionless… no. Not emotionless. Unfeeling. The two are different things, just as truth and fact are different things.
The Weapon was strong, inhuman, invulnerable: at least that was how it seemed to the empath, as she stood inside her glass box and stared wretchedly at her own dispassionate face watching her curiously from without.
And, at the time, I identified with the empath. She was me, and I fought that inhuman side of me with increasing desperation until the fight cost me a loved one.
It seems to be the way with me. I lose friends at the same rate as I gain scars. A broken relationship leaves its own traces.
Left alone to deal with this inhuman thing that cared not one jot for anything except fulfilling its function as the ultimate Swiss knife of Family I did the only thing I could do: I integrated. Mostly, anyway. I did not have the strength or the singularity of purpose to beat it. The Weapon was better than the empath in so many different ways: it was stronger, faster, smarter, more cunning, more focused — more beautiful. When the Weapon was in control I was physically more attractive.
Which just goes to show how big a part of attraction has fuck all to do with what a person actually looks like. Unless that P-shifting thing is somehow not complete crap. Because if anyone could do it the Weapon could.
I integrated this thing that had emotion but no feeling [or perhaps it integrated me] and, in doing so, I killed the empath.
Empathy requires identification. It requires feeling. Without that feeling, that identification, the emotions of others are data. They have the same personal investment as their hair colour or their scent. As soon as it becomes possible to distinguish between home-grown and externally-produced emotion, the feeling goes.
Sympathy takes over. And I don't mean: "there, there, mummy kiss it better" sympathy.
If a friend laughs; if a loved one is reduced to mirthful tears, we find ourselves joining in, happy to share in the merriment. If a stranger, or someone we dislike does the same, we may not be as inclined to share their amusement.
Thus it is with being a sympath. I am empath no longer: I am not going to be happy simply because you are happy, not unless I care that you are happy. I am sympath: your emotions affect me, I experience them, but I do not feel.
The Weapon did that, when I took it inside and gave it space, a home. When, to tame it, I had to swallow it whole.
Thus we come back to Fight Club. Because when Edward Norton puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger, and Tyler Durgan takes the hit, leaving Norton bleeding but alive, which one do you think really comes out on top? When Norton says he has opened his eyes, what do you think he sees? When he stands there, arm around Marla [Helena Bonham Carter], ordering the soldiers of Project Mayhem around with all the confidence and authority of his stronger, smarter, sexier invisible friend, smiling at the vista of destruction that Durgan has choreographed while Jack was sleeping, which of the two do you think Norton is playing?
[We have front row seats for this theatre of mass destruction. The demolitions committee of Project Mayhem wrapped the foundation columns of a dozen buildings with blasting gelatin. In two minutes primary charges will blow base charges and a few square blocks will be reduced to smoldering rubble. I know this, because Tyler knows this].
When Norton pulls that trigger ("Not my head, Tyler, our head."), what do you think really happens?
I'm all grown up. I've been through bunny training [more often than I like to think]. I've had the patina of human conditioning beaten and etched out of me by the fat Russian and his WyrmKind successor. I have a name. I am Family's messenger, daughter of Raven. I am the Messenger's messenger. I am an angel, and I fly under the wing of a Trickster whose primary gift is that of change.
Sometimes gods come to me for help.
You don't have to believe me. You can dismiss all this as the ramblings of an egotistical lunatic if you wish. As I keep saying, truth is a slippery thing.
But your gods, if you have any, will know who I am and maybe they will whisper or spit my name to you if you ask them. Even the ones who will not deal with me, from distaste for my House or distaste for me, will know who I am. And what.
What I have become is more Weapon than empath, but the Weapon, as a thing, is no more. I doubt now that it was ever something that came as part of the Core package, or was designed as something to make Core possible. I also now doubt that the ritual fuck-up I blamed for granting it uncontrollable independent existence was really just a fuck-up. I always doubted that so many of the people I trusted most could really screw up so badly all by themselves all at the same time over something so important.
What happened then, and in the two years of utter hell that followed, was necessary and, I strongly suspect, something that had been intended from the get-go.
No one ever said that this gig was easy.
Edward Norton pulled that trigger and what was left was neither Jack nor Tyler Durgan. The man who watches the credit card buildings toppling in a massive but, in this world of digital information, ultimately futile gesture of defiance, is neither one nor the other but something of both.
Only it is not a toned-down Durgan, suddenly vaguely appalled at what he has done.
I think it was Durgan that came out on top in that little integration, and, perversely, Jack would have lost a lot more had it been any other way.
But then I would say that. I'm sure there are plenty of people who see the film differently and plenty more who would say that it simply isn't that complex or doesn't really matter and I'm spending too much time thinking about it.
I didn't really have to think about it. It's just obvious.
And then we return to truth being as slippery as an obstreperous eel. The harder you try to pin it down the more it wriggles and the more you find yourself astonished by the strength of the muscles in what is essentially just a fishy worm. Then you drop it, because that's what happens with obstreperous eels, and unless you have a total hard-on for an eel supper, it's usually easier just to let it go back to its slimy friends so that it can swim off to the Sargasso Sea and shag or something.
Yeah. The truth's like that. Slippery, slimy and usually not really worth the effort when you get down to it. Rather than go guddling about with clutching fingers, I'd recommend taking a net and dumping the whole lot into one, big eel pie.
Why did we ever think we stood a chance of beating the Weapon and why could I not see that I wouldn't really have wanted to anyway?
This is more fun. And the black eyes are cool.
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