Skyward

Nadajingen Tasm, known simply as “Nadji” by all associates, was raised by single mother Gardina Tasm in the port city of Memoch on planet Karadras of the Sol Cluster. This was formerly a town known primarily for the Federated Core Systems (FCS) military outpost it supported but in just a decade had burgeoned into a mining and prospecting city following reports of major Hecatyz presence in the surrounding region; prospects which have yet to fully live up to their billing.

Gardina and Nadajingen lived in the absence of a father or other relatives except for an Aunt Allie and Uncle Merc who lived “in the country”; a tiny village called Nightshade to which Nadji had never been. His absent father was “just some miner” he’d been told. Gardina refused to elaborate.

His aunt and uncle always made a great fuss over him on their visits which became less and less frequent with time. Aunt Allie always departed with a tear in her eye.

In early childhood Nadji made two friends he was fond of, both human but his mother was fast to reprimand him and insist that he only associate with other Hjalme. He was expected to be polite with all aliens but never to get involved with them.

When he tried to maintain their friendship in secret, Gardina found out about these transgressions immediately and he was severely disciplined on each occasion and before long these friendships were severed.

Nadji harboured two secret desires: to become an off-world explorer (and as such to join a prestigious local scouting academy affiliated with the military base) and secondly: to find out his father’s identity. He spoke of these desires only to his best friend, a Hjalme boy naturally, named Titov, but at once Gardina found out and firmly cautioned him against these ideas. Nadji was angry with Titov for revealing his secrets which Titov firmly denied doing. There was a spat and a cold period but their friendship recovered.

Nadji constantly researched other planets; especially the early exploration and development of new worlds. Where these pursuits turned up in school curricula he scored fantastic marks but he did poorly in most other academic areas which he found boring.

Gardina had almost no social life outside of the visits from Merc and Allie. She worked part time in a munitions factory and doted on Nadji with a love which seemed more severe and intentional than in typical highly-emotionalized Hjalme mother-child relations.

Nadji was shocked when he was invited to apply, and further, was accepted, at the local FCS Scouting Academy. He’d been certain he lacked the grades, and Gardina the money, for this to be possible, and that his race, despite its significant prevalence in Memoch and urban Karadras generally, might be a hurdle in the eyes of FCS officials. And yet he was accepted. There he befriended another human and insisted they keep quiet about their bond and at once Gardina found out and objected. To Nadji, her powers of information gathering were becoming almost alarming.

Nadji’s grades improved at the academy as his interests and knack for research widened in scope.

When the news reported the disappearance of radical Hjalme religious leader Alhoya Alcana, Nagji delved deep into the story, employing standard news sources as well as underground channels which he’d developed a knack for infiltrating. He learned a number of interesting things:

l The extreme nature of Alcana’s quasi-religion which was claimed by some to possess a partially secretive agenda proclaiming that only one intelligent race must exist in the universe; that race being Hjalme.

l Another Hjalme disappearance occurred on the same day: that of an underground militia leader known as “the Skuggharon.”  

l Claims that the Skuggharon’s real name was Mercerodat Alcana, that he and Alhoya were formerly married, and that they’d produced a son named Largo Alcana whose whereabouts has never been known.

l Claims that the Starlight Brigade, whose presence on Karadras had grown significantly in the last two years, were behind these two coordinated abductions.

Upon studying images of Alhoya Alcana, Nadji was haunted: She looked so much like his aunt Allie they could be the same person.

Nadji slipped away from the academy and returned home where Gardina cited contagious illness and would not leave her bedroom for two days, demanding she be left alone. Nadji, through the bedroom door, insisted he was worried about her and insisted they get help for her. “Let us call Aunt and Uncle,” he said, carefully playing his cards. “If you will not tell me how to reach them I will find out myself!”

She replied that Allie and Merc had only been friends and they’d lost touch, and that the titles “aunt” and “uncle” had merely been a show of respect.

Further investigative research revealed that Gardina was not employed at the munitions factory and that she and himself only existed in local records but neither of their identities existed at higher governmental levels. And as for Allie and Merc, there was no village in Karadras known officially or colloquially as Nightshade.

One week before graduation Nadji, armed with the skills they’d taught him, fled the academy and confronted the woman who raised him: “Am I Largo Alcana?” he said. “Son of Alhoya and Mercerodat?” She displayed incredulity; claimed this to be nonsense. “Then I will see you again one day, Mother, and I hope you will tell me the truth.”

Nadji packed his bags and went to work with Titov who had dropped out of the academy earlier and now performed scouting services by private contract. Their client, he soon learned, were a branch of Waller’s Pirates and Titov was an official member.

Nadji worked for Titov casually in a specialized form of piracy: the locating and acquisition of rare materials from remote environments, until the time came to confirm his own membership in the band, but there, armed with experience and a growing list of contacts, he broke out on his own, with the goal of becoming an elite independent provider of information and rare objects.

His most important contact was a dealer by the name of Cyril Ozzyter who brought him into the Black Market fold and eventually introduced him to Lionel Lomax, adviser to a prestigious underworld family, who hired Nadji on recommendation, was impressed with his work, and opened up to him a wider, more lucrative field of clients.

And there the adventure begins!

I've been charged to create a character for the "Skyward" RPG campaign my pal will soon be running. It takes place in the future obviously. Our "Dungeons & Dragons" group is expanding; my D&D "Minerva" campaign will run concurrently with this one. I will be the Dungeon Master for some sessions and a player for others. I look forward to this variety and to seeing one of my young gang engage in the art of game mastering! 

Roller coasters and merry-go-rounds

Ooh, I wouldn’t do that, I thought. No, I wouldn’t do that either... Mmm… I wouldn’t say that... This is too linear and yet unclear….

She had sent me the draft, looking for an honest opinion. Would an honest opinion be possible? The 6-minute oral memoir performance was scheduled for this evening! If there are too many problems with the draft there wouldn’t be time to fix them all. In that case, better to down-play concerns? No sense worrying someone about that which cannot be fixed.

When it comes to storytelling, whether I am on the telling or receiving end, I am firmly in the subtlety camp. Not necessarily on the blog, mind you. When people send me tell-not-show writing, wanting my feedback, I am at a loss. I barely remember my tell-reading days. I can no longer really identify what works and what doesn’t. I eventually tell tellers, "Look: You have to find someone else to beta read for you; someone who gets your style. I’m not in that camp!" So my feedback did not seem to me very useful at all.

I also have no experience at six-minute memoirs (though I was approached by the event organizer last night about my possible future involvement, which indeed interests me as I have always been a natural with public speaking, even when I was a shy, awkward, teenage introvert. Which is rather mysterious I know. I was always instinctively more comfortable talking to an audience than to an individual. Weird is all I can say.

So my friend gets up and reads her piece. And I am completely hooked. The words have not been changed dramatically that I detect. And yes, I would have done it differently, but what she has done, now that it comes from her own mouth, with her own precise tones and inflections, well damn… it’s perfect!

She speaks of her roller coaster love life past, and the merry-go-round that is her stable new relationship. Like a pro, she carries the metaphor through to the inspiring end. I was hugely moved. I was in tears for six minutes. So much panic she had seemed to endure and why? She had it nailed! But what deep courage she needed in order to go through with it, both for obvious reasons and also for “political” ones. Meanwhile I continue to put off the stand-up comedy workshop even though I have several routines prepared because… well, what if I’m not funny?

I write this at the Espresso bar in Little Italy, a block from the Eloquent Potter’s home and looking forward to a major dinner-and-drink binge before he departs for Vietnam for another three month tour. This will be the last before he relocates permanently. I am armed with beer, wine, bread, cheese and a bouquet of flowers. The florists all hugged me; yes hugged me! - when I told them my friend would be leaving permanently! “Oh you must be broken-hearted!” they said. This is riotously funny. I guess when a man buys another man flowers they assume they can only be a gay couple!. It is such a warm moment for them that I just smile and tell them I will be fine! I do nothing to correct them nor to mislead them further.

The potter has made great strides learning a ridiculously difficult language and planning a new business and new life abroad, in a beautiful ancient culture.

I was once extraordinarily courageous. Then I became largely a chicken-shit again; just a wiser one. Today I am in awe of the courage of my sweet friends.

Racial dialogue and freedom of speech

So I just watched the documentary Alt. Right: The Age of Rage and got my first half-decent look at slithery citizens of Trump’s America Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor.  

The film could be claimed a simple forum for both sides of a race debate to state their case and that any failure to do so reflects on the them and not the filmmakers. But the project does strike me as a lightweight Michael Moore-ian effort where white-supremacists are cozened to and frankly look bad, but without overtly hanging themselves (humorously or otherwise), and where intelligent logical examinations of the material are noticeably missing; where a whole lot of unqualified opinions and groundless generalization suffices instead - and not just from the uptightie whities but from outspoken and unmasked black antifa (anti-fascist) champion (and potential martyr in my nervous opinion) Daryle Lamont Jenkins.

Jenkins’ mandate is to publicly oppose these speakers by leading rallies and counter-demonstrations and to publicly out alt-right supporters who depend on anonymity in order to keep their jobs and reputations. It’s called doxxing and its applicable targets are somewhat few in number given the nebulous nature of this so-called “movement”; a term in question given the great bulk of their apparent followers being unidentifiable in terms of their precise beliefs or motivations. Many, when cornered, appear to be more or less trolls, looking for dumbass entertainment as escape from lives they are too dull-minded to make meaning of, or, likewise, needing to unleash bottled rage in any direction someone will legitimize for them.

It’s hard to know what to make of the film’s two lead cretins. Almost certainly the film-makers are not entirely sympathetic to them and I wonder how intelligent they might have seemed pre-edit. Almost everything coming out of their mouths on-screen is dull-minded rhetoric, delusional ambition or childish baiting of their “opposition”; a mysterious entity known by the sadly-confused (including the U.S. president) as the “Alt. Left.”

There is of course, no such thing whatsoever as “alt. left” except as a keyboard button. Anti-racism and anti-violence are hallmark qualities of the entire left in their millions - which is why 99.9% of first world institutions espouse these values.

Richard Spencer, the dude who famously took the video-taped street-side sucker-punch, according to the (however possibly limited) film’s evidence amounts to an isolationist; a protector of white culture who claims that America must draw a line down the middle, offer the darkies whichever coast they prefer, and then relocate 150 million-or-so citizens (less however many millions die in the inevitable civil war I presume). The arguments against this, if you can possibly keep a straight face, could fill a library and I have more useful things to get to before this post becomes epic.

Author (self-published rather obviously) and American Renaissance online magazine founder Jared Taylor (per same proviso) appears as an intellectual pursuer of racial consciousness; a race realist; a white-advocate (and thankfully not anti-Semitic by the way). Neither express outward hate of non-whites but do publicly demonstrate disrespect with various degrees of subtlety.

At the core of my interest is the call of these and other such characters, including a pearly-white university freshman who virtually cried on my shoulder over the dilemma, is their denial of free speech with regards to addressing audiences, or booking academic meetings on issues which challenge, or potentially challenge, our traditional observances of racial, gender or other equalities. (I must confess that every time someone mentions free speech I immediately scan the horizon in hopes of swift alien abduction and begin stifling yawns. Much like political correctness I never find the phrase muttered in any coherent context.)

In terms of public speaking and free speech, there are some very important considerations in my opinion:

:

The origin of the right to free speech is the right to question your government or church without being prosecuted by them (An ideal which Bush Junior clearly began dismantling by the way).

What you freely speak is still ethically and morally bound to you. You are not protected from consequences of what you do or say.

Various rights are always bumping into one another and are subject to priority. There are other rights in this society which are not trumped by the right to free speech. For one, parties have the right to choose who they allow on the stages they own or are charged to govern and the right to choose who to listen to. Thus if you want to freely speak beyond your own bedroom it requires greater and greater levels of cooperation. Lack of cooperation does not necessarily amount to denial of your rights. You are not the centre of the universe.

People also have the right to life and as such, to defend it. When lawyer and Whack-Job o’ the Century (and self-tortured closeted homosexual almost certainly), Matt McLaughlin, tried proposing a California bill in which homosexuals should be arbitrarily “shot with bullets in the head or else killed by any convenient method” it was obvious to me that this very action was a legitimate attempt at causing death and that no gay Californian could be blamed for being terrified at this and could effectively interpret his life endangered and thus if he chose to kill McLaughlin it could only be considered self-defense and such a plea should be easily converted by any competent defense lawyer.

My point is that if non-whites, or any targeted group, can only interpret that a public speech can only manifest widespread motives for the de-valuing of their life then they are in danger and their instincts will know it and produce some degree of panic, lucid or otherwise. If you make this happen for people then it’s inevitable you will meet urgent opposition and whether we label that opposition legally justified or not is not very compelling. It’s inevitable. There is such a thing as natural law and natural justice.

So the question becomes: does your speech qualify as an attack? You either believe it does not or you rationalize and choose to claim that it does not. But then, if your aims are legitimate then who is your legitimate audience?

I actually would take an interest in reasonably discussing the natural phenomena of tribalism and its role in making our species successful, and its relevance in today’s society. I would happily provide a forum for discussion to “racial consciousness” or “race realism” were it in my power. And by the way, I would go on to point out how natural tribal instinct does not make racism legitimate but rather it is an example of our morbid domination instinct which made us “winners” but which we must evolve away from before it inevitably causes our self-destruction. Not that this is much of a motivator with regards to my own personal behaviour by the way. I am generally organically kind and respectful for the most part and feel a great fondness for most life forms with skunks and biting black flies among the few exceptions. I would delight in making those fuckers extinct.

But it seems I’m a pretty small minority in terms of that open-mindedness. It seems evident to me that the great majority of kind, empathetic people have no interest in opening up this troublesome dialogue likely due in some large part to their own repressed doubt, as witnessed by the social norm where nice guy leaders define racism to the masses in completely inaccurate terms, almost Santa Clausian which are very palatable to the average citizen but do not enlighten anyone and do not actually help the problem beyond potentially shaming outward racists into keeping their mouths shut. I can’t imagine that a minority of people; intellectuals or whatnot with a healthy interest in these subjects, would be at all inclined toward attending these kinds of public speeches. The potential perils outweigh the potential benefit. And indeed these speeches which I have glimpsed inevitably contain telltale tidbits aimed at delighting haters. Obviously they know where their audience is coming from and depend on their numbers to give them status.

When you know that your speech is going to be largely attended by, and supported by, aggressive bigots (because with or without your explicit endorsement you are the only public voice saying anything close to what they want to hear), then you have espoused their interests and can expect no discernment from them when you are judged, and so free speech has become irrelevant on the matter. You have limited your access to whatever dreary places your audience governs. You have made the wrong friends and thus made the wrong enemies, regardless how evil you are in your heart, or not.