weaponiized

OC RP blog of Milo Donovan +++ Military anthropologist, poet manqué and craven functionary

[weaponiized-humanist]

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I have an idea for a new OC, just no time to make the blog this weekend. 

I posted about it before but at that point I hadn’t seen Wormwood. New OC believes his father was a government agent and his mother a (would-be) revolutionary. In a COINTELPRO-like operation, New OC believes, his father entrapped his mother into a loveless, bickering, soul-draining marriage, thus neutralizing her revolutionary potential.  It’s the reverse of the usual family romance, where the child thinks they can’t have come from this mediocre family. Surely they’re a changeling and their fairie king and queen real parents will be along any day. For my New OC, the tedium of the parents’ lives, the frequent moves to new and more depressing towns, the numb uselessness of their days, all these are signs of his parents’ election: underneath, his mother was (meant to be) a hero. And his father a villain.   There’s not a lot of evidence for New OC’s theories, though his mother did go to some demonstrations. He might be deluded on this point. (But there were those lawsuits in the UK about undercover agents fathering children with anti-nuclear activists.) This is of course an expensive operation: it takes one whole agent to neutralize someone by marriage. But it doesn’t take them their whole life to do it. After a while, the damage done, the father disappears.  So New OC is always either looking for his father, or writing/researching his muckraking book, or maybe preparing a lawsuit. He could drop into a lot of other characters’ worlds, since all those things--searching, researching, preparing to sue--are just variations of not starting his life. 

[weaponiized-humanist]

On Hiatus. 

I haven’t been here for months. Still, if anyone’s reading, I’m doing okay. Finishing my dissertation in the next few months and it’s taking everything. I hope to come back in 2018.

[weaponiized-humanist]

*

[wordsnquotes]

I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Babylon Revisited”  (via wordsnquotes)

[weaponiized-humanist]

@markhitchcock

“You,” Milo said, though he didn’t know the soldier from Adam. “They didn’t send anybody else?”

The man was a private.

What did Milo expect? MPs with tear gas and flash grenades, maybe. A humvee full of guys to frog-march him out of this mountain village and straight into some plywood B-hut hoosegow. 

Milo was one man. One old, unarmed, civilian man. He was more a walking, talking Taliban kidnap risk than anything else, ambling in the mountains all day long like a man with a spiritual vocation, and idling his nights away smoking shisha and dreaming of the good long walk from here to Samothraki. The sea.

[weaponiized-humanist]

Under the cut because it’s political, but it’s related to Milo and my qualms about war RP.

Milo was supposed to be wracked with guilt, or maybe disturbingly free of guilt, regarding the American venture in the Middle East. He hasn’t really lived up to that.

“You remember. It was supposed to be 21st-century war, American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth; special-operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a triumph of modern military science. Everything ‘networked.’ It was to be a glorious dream of limited destruction combined with unlimited power and success. In reality, it would prove to be a nightmare of the first order.

“If you want a single word to summarize American war-making in this last decade and a half, I would suggest rubble. It’s been a painfully apt term since September 11, 2001. In addition, to catch the essence of such war in this century, two new words might be useful: rubblize and rubblization.”--Tom Engelhardt in The Nation.

[weaponiized-humanist]

scouscr:

weaponiized-humanist liked your post “starter call”

Seldom is he one to ask for help, more inclined to donating any number of his still functional and somewhat healthy organs than degrade himself by having to lower the bar so far. Still, feet draw together before the stranger, some random fellow he had observed passing through from his seat at the diner, exit rushed and waitress left with a suggestion that he’d ‘be back to pay later’ when the blond had no intentions of returning. 

A wave of hand is extended before he attempts to approach, though John, in his acute desperation is already setting after the man whether he draws to a halt or not. This is the only soul he’d seen walking around in this backwater town tonight who struck him as the type who might have a fair idea, might be opinionated enough to entertain lines of conversation considered quite blasphemous in the deep south.

And punishable by death in certain reaches of the inferno down below.

“Oi! You there! Got a moment to spare, by any chance?”

“Yeah,” Milo said, half wondering, was he being worked here, being asked a question likely to elicit a yes. But he even without the limey accent (”oi”?), just the brashness of speaking to a stranger was so un-American and therefore in this moment so welcome. He missed Berlin, where somber Turkish teenagers spat on the ground and shook hands, coming and going. He even missed Camp Dakota in Baghdad. 

The man before him wore a trenchcoat, just like some homicidal high-schooler. But he had a raffish, worn face. As if in homage to outdated customs--ties, overcoats, words shared with anyone not a blood relative or a boss--Milo held out his pack of cigarettes.

The Texas night was close and muggy as broad day. Junebugs leapt and fell rattling on their backs on the sidewalk, maybe driven mad by the sodium streetlights. Or by the boredom here. Milo had thought there couldn’t be a less likely quasi-military gig than Human Terrain System in Afghanistan, but there was: consultant to NASA in the hour of its decline. 

For some reason Milo thought just then of the Ashbery poem “Anticipated Stranger,” but Ashbery isn’t the kind of thing you can recite, it’s not sonorous, not august: “the bruise will stop by later./ For now, the pain pauses in its round”--Not for reciting, not least because he’d forgotten some of it, like how the poem gets to the line, “What the hell/ did you think you were doing?” 

Too much cogitating. Not nice to go vacantly strolling through the mind’s library when there is company in the offing. 

“I’ve got time,” Milo said. “Shoot.” 

[vvhippoorwill]

It's a pity you weren't here when they finally cashiered Nately. He said he was leaving for R&R but everybody knew. I mean we all expected him to be kicked upstairs but I guess the military did something right for once. He was walking to the jeep, affecting a stroll like all this was nothing. We weren't jeering or mooning him but I guess a certain silence had fallen. He couldn't take it, the silence and the looks. He cogitated a moment and burst out with "Goodbye!" Then he added, "Fuckheads!"

“Doesn’t sound like I missed anything.”

It likely wasn’t worth it to remind the other that –– despite the newly arisen vacancy –– he wasn’t going to become a permanent part in their little community, only there to finish someone else’s business with no glimpse of the bigger picture. But that was nothing new, he might as well mingle with the men here while he could, even if he might never see them again. Raphael’s eyes shifted from the other’s face to the bottle in his hands, unscrewing it with a light shrug before lifting it to his lips.“There’s worse ways of getting the boot.” he spoke before taking a sip, ’like catching a bullet’ being the part left unspoken. It was nothing Milo would have to concern himself with, anyway. Unless, of course, he ended up sticking his nose down the wrong business –– but he didn’t look like the type to try and learn more than he should, did he?

On second glance, it was actually hard to judge.“It’s common occurrence, old man.” he finally says, giving Milo a pat on the shoulder before walking past, to see if he could find himself some food to go with that water.“Views change out here. There’s plenty of temptation to go around, too.                                                                                                         Don’t follow their example.”

[weaponiized-humanist]

@alonggoodbye liked for a starter.

“Photographers over there, mac.” The bouncer pointed to a velvet-rope enclosure where a half-dozen men craned their necks and their Graflexes for a glimpse of arriving stars. 

“No, I--,” But the hulking man had turned away. It was Milo’s own fault. He was still carrying his kit from the night’s work, a homicide and two wrecks. Corpses lit like high noon for his large-format camera, the cops hushed as if Milo performed a last rite.  Work like that calmed him but wrecked him. He could tell no one about it, not that the LAPD cared but no one would have wanted to hear it. The images he made were lurid but ordinary. A man’s pale calf showing under his ruched-up trouser leg. A tortoise-shell comb slipping from the hair of a woman who’d turned up on the trolley tracks. 

If he’d wanted a drink he shouldn’t have come to The Dancers in the first place.  At The Dancers they get the sort of people that disillusion you about what a lot of money can do for the personality. He was about to leave when he saw her.

“Hey,” he said, cupping her elbow as if steering her, a courtly man keeping her well clear of the rabble. And then in her ear, “Sorry, sorry, look, just get me past the door and then it’ll be like I don’t even know ya. Which I don’t.”

[weaponiized-humanist]

Before the Trans-Siberian railroad, those the tzars had exiled had to walk to Siberia. Under guard, in columns of the damned. The prisoners formed artels to negotiate with the guards but even so conditions were tough.

This is my verse wish, transposed to post-apocalyptic US. Who’s in? 

[weaponiized-humanist]

from here.

“Get away from the window,” Raphael said. He’d spoken without undue urgency.

The Corolla seemed all windows now but Milo shrank back, back and down, slouching now like a man overcome with exhaustion. He wondered at the other’s calm. As if nothing of importance had changed.

For his own part he thought everything had changed, had taken on a clarity. He looked at the sand-scoured hills, rising and receding in serried ranks to the far horizon. He looked at the Corolla’s scratched dash and cracked leatherette seat. The crash had cracked the windshield through from side to side and the spidered crack glinted in the Afghan. Milo took all this in with what he thought was alert calm. But he was trying to memorize the world, and the sheer effort made his heart hammer with alarm.

He was just making ready to inch his way out the driver’s side door when Raphael asked if he could see them. Were they armed, he wanted to know. In all his census of the vanishing world Milo had forgotten the men in the black sedan.

Behind mirrored shades the sedan’s driver looked back at Milo as he drummed on the roof of the car with his fingertips. Beside him, behind him, two others sat and waited. A fourth man stood on the far side of the car and squinted, scowling. Something glinted.

“Yes,” Milo said, scrambling. “Armed.”

[weaponiized-humanist]

This blog is coming back from hiatus, for a short while. Like for a starter, from a few sentences to a paragraph. Or tell me if you’d like to pick up a thread.

[weaponiized-humanist]

My next OC.

A man believes he was fathered in a years-long counter-terrorism mission. The whole relationship between his father and his mother had been a reverse honey-trap, not sex was on offer but married misery. The government’s man had trapped his mother in bitterness and quarrels and debt. And then the father vanished, took apart his “legend” and disappeared. OC searches the earth for him, while also haphazardly pursuing a lawsuit (but since he doesn’t know who his father is anymore, knows only his fake name, he tends to overreach and sue vast segments of the government, plus random people he meets.)

(Life. Life was wrongfully inflicted on the OC, in the course of a counter-terrorism operation. That is what the OC wants reparations for, his existence.)

It’s the opposite of that family romance, the changeling fantasy: a child looks at his dull parents, their fatigue, their resignation, the habit-dulled meagerness of their ambit, and he thinks, I am from somewhere else. Faires or gypsies. And they’ll come back for me. This OC thinks otherwise. It is his father who is from somewhere else, and back he has gone now. 

Oh, and also, the OC has an idea his mother was an activist, her vital contribution sapped and thwarted by the spy. But there is no proof she was anything but ordinary to start with.

It could be sort of a dud as plot, since it’s really just a backstory, but traveling anywhere and doing anything could count as research for his book or his lawsuit, as his focus shifts from one to the other. And since he’s so wrong about his parents, everyone he meets could seem to him to fit into the grand plot. 

[weaponiized-humanist]

“Tell me. Is it us? Are we devils doing something to mar your after-death experience?” The one who’d introduced himself as “on secondment here from from Hell’s further reaches” smirked. 

The sarcasm didn’t prevent Milo from wanting to talk. When he’d gotten to this bleak place, all heaps of blue slag and drifting ash, he’d accepted his burden. He’d shuffled with the others, adapting his gait to theirs, pulling a sorrowed mein, and not speaking, like them. No one spoke. Or gnashed their teeth or howled. In the whole place, not one voiced sound, only the soughing of blackened poplars along the Acheron, brittle leaves showing their silvery backs in the winds of hell.

But something was wrong here. There was no time to contemplate his wrongs in the world above, or... No, there was only time, but now he could not get a purchase on himself. The tangles of love and grudges, the low-level resignation, all that had kept him from the life he thought he’d wanted, it all got away from him. His life a dirty yellow foam scudding down a blackened strand. 

“It’s just--” Milo said.

“You want rue, you want sorrow, you want all your life arrayed before you like an Assyrian frieze. You want to run your fingers over the blunders and calumnies in bas relief. All the fine proud aching.

“The torments of the subject, that is what you want. Life, in fine,” the devil concluded. 

[weaponiized-humanist]

📰

meme: send a 📰 and i’ll tell you about an OC I’m not currently playing

Eduarda Golodyayeva, an embittered communist, embittered early on by Bolshevik perfidy and the violence and shortages and arrests–long before Stalin and the Terror. She was supposed to body forth this sentiment, from the notebooks of Varlam Sharlav, gulag prisoner: 

“I participated in the great lost battle for the true reinvention of life.”

But I don’t know how much if any of that came through, possibly because I suck at history and frankly also at war rp. 

She did come to life though, in a sort of fairy tale way, as a slightly wicked crafty friend to this uneducated working-class woman. For roughly two months of real time Eduarda and her friend Fox ate a roasted pigeon. Sounds dull but a fond memory, that thread. 

[weaponiized-humanist]

📰

meme: send me a 📰and I’ll tell you about an OC I’m not playing now.

My first OC and truest love–I can’t bear to repeat the awful name I gave him, at least not in full. It was two character names from two Jake Gyllenhaal movies, stuck together. And the character shouldn’t have worked, because I gave him the tired profession of “con artist.” (My apologies to anyone reading who has a con artist OC; I’m sure yours is great.)But he did next to zero conning. Instead he hung around a demimonde of criminals, better criminals than he, more ambitious and more violent. He hopelessly hoped they would have what he’d never found in the SM demimonde he’d finally turned away from: glamor, even if a ragged decaying glamor, and something real behind the glamor. Of course he was destined to be disappointed in this too, and the rituals in his new world were played for higher stakes. A  favorite moment: “There are police and there are police, Mr Swofford.””Oh yeah? Which lot are you two?”

http://sabering-the-top-off-a-jeroboam.tumblr.com/bio

[woolfcried]

new meme: send me a 📰 and i’ll tell you all about one of the ocs i don’t presently rp