xaara

Dear Show,

I love you, I really do. We've been through our ups and downs, had our squabbles and some awesome conciliatory funtimes, agreed and disagreed, spent some time apart and come back together better for it.

Sometimes, though, and I am dead serious about this, I sort of want to put out a restraining order on you.

I'm not even going to get into what made me angry/defensive/let down about this episode. It certainly had its moments, and some of those moments were gorgeous or hilarious and reminded me why I sit down and devote swaths of my life to this odd pastime of fandom. But some of those moments were like watching your parents fight, or listening to your boss tell you you'll never be as good at your job as the man you replaced, or having to walk home with your keys in one hand and pepper spray in the other, just because you were born with the ability to carry another generation of humanity.

You have a devoted following of people who come here and together because you have inspired love: semi-irrational, deep-seated love for this world and its people.

That's not something you shrug off, not something you throw away. With all your discussion of faith, and the deep, gutting place that is faith lost, you of all entities should understand.

Love (because yes, still, love, even through deep disappointment),

Carmen

P.S. To the rest of you: our show sometimes fails at women (surprise!) So, go claim a spnwomen_kink prompt, fire up the word processor, kick some ass, and take some names.

I've been fiddling around with a few fics lately, gen stuff, some set in season two, some in season five, and an AU of Lucifer Rising tentatively titled "Sam Listens to Dean For Once in his Goddamn Life; Also Dean Doesn't Act Like an Ass, and There's This Angel Dude."

However, I keep getting distracted. I keep getting distracted, because the story I want to tell and can't figure out how, the story that is really getting to me this season (and last, actually), is Dean's drinking.

In the spirit of full [tmi] disclosure, I have quite a bit of experience with drinkers. I work at a bar. My last boyfriend was a bartender; the one before that was a (now-recovering) alcoholic. My best friend is a recovering alcoholic. For about four months following one really, really bad breakup, I was mostly either drunk or hungover, until I realized that I could go one of two directions: down, or up.

Bearing that in mind, watching Dean's drinking intensify over the last couple of seasons has been an uncomfortable experience. I desperately want Bobby or Sam to notice openly, to say something, but aside from a few offhand comments here and there, they don't seem to think it's that big a deal.

It's a big fucking deal. Here's what it's like to be a high-functioning alcoholic: you wake up because your blood sugar drops dramatically, disoriented and slightly nauseous. You get out of bed resolving that this is the morning you're going to drink just water and maybe a little juice. Then, you think it can't be that bad to pour a shot of whiskey into your coffee, because it'll make you feel better. It does make you feel better. It takes the edge off your headache, and gives you a slight buzz, because you're so dehydrated that anything would get you buzzed right now. You fight to clear your head, and after a while you have a sort of gentle awareness of the world around you. It's like reining your brain in so it goes from functioning like a modern computer to functioning like an abacus, capable of doing only things that make solid, tangible sense in the solid, tangible present. You eat some cereal for breakfast, take a shower, and are careful to brush your teeth, despite the fact that the taste of toothpaste makes your stomach heave.

You go through the day on autopilot, and by the time you're done with your obligations (you've probably had a beer or two with lunch) you decide it's time to kick back with a movie and a glass of whiskey. And another. And a third. By ten, you're drunk and tired and just want to pass out, or you're out with friends just getting started on the real drinking of the night. Either way, you pass out--you don't sleep, not really, not with all that alcohol clogging up your body--and you wake up the next day, suddenly, and your mouth tastes like you licked a bar rag and you think, Man, I could use a screwdriver about now.

It's not romantic. It's not fun. It's painful, and disgusting, and alienating. You drink to get away from what's bothering you (in my case, grief and anger and loneliness; in Dean's, well, grief and anger and loneliness), but because the alcohol dulls your mind's ability to multitask, you end up unable to focus on anything else. So you drink more, because if you drink enough, eventually you'll pass out and you won't have to think about anything.

This is a liability at the best of times. When you're drinking consistently (even if it's not much--it doesn't have to be much), you lose the ability to create mental hierarchies. You're chronically sleep-deprived. Your reaction time and decision-making skills are moot points. It takes ages to process new information, and even important things like names and faces and remembering to call your mom on her birthday just sort of slide away.

Dean's not in the best of times. He's in the middle of the capital-A Apocalypse. He can't think straight; his body is breaking down and betraying him. His reflexes aren't what he's used to, and his fine motor skills, especially new ones, ones he doesn't know like the back of his hand, are suffering. Mostly, though, his friends and his family, people who need to sit him down and say something, treat it like a minor issue. The show's writers seem unsure of whether to play it as a joke or just ignore it altogether, but they've written themselves into his mess and need to acknowledge it's there.

I don't want there to be some sort of Intervention! episode. I understand that hunters, like most men and women who work grueling, unappreciated jobs, often end the day with a glass of the closest hard stuff. I think it's unrealistic for Dean to quit drinking, but I also think it's unrealistic for him to continue at his current pace without serious, potentially deadly, side effects.

So yeah. I want to address that. In a way that doesn't send people running for the hills, since it's not exactly a lighthearted topic, and I'm not sure I'm capable of treating it in any way except extremely seriously. I want the show to take responsibility for the characters it's created, and their choices. If you choose to set a series in Modern America+Monsters, you are obligated to address the problems inherent in the setting. Dean's drinking, like that of lonely, desperate people around the world, is not cute and not funny. It deserves far more nuanced, careful, and responsible writing than I've seen so far, if only in deference to those of us who see him unscrew the cap on his flask and take a swig to steady his nerves and feel a sympathetic burn right below the sternum where we've tried the same medicine.

I'm a massive freaking nerd. I mean, this really shouldn't come as a surprise, but sometimes I surprise even myself.

I've been working on my Enochian.

This involves reading lots of rather dry and irritating pseudo-linguistics, like Towards an Enochian Grammar, and An Essay on the Pronunciation of Enochian, as well as deciding whether or not the alphabet consists of 21 or 24 characters, and interpreting the idea that it's "usually" written left-to-right as meaning that it doesn't have to be (which seems to be the case if you're writing in geometric shapes, like when you're seeking the Abyss Experience, and I am not making this shit up.) Also, the only linguist who seems to have worked on this is named Donald Laycock. I am not making this up, either. I think he probably became a linguist to understand how he got saddled with such an unfortunate name, which still reduces me to 12-year-old giggles every time I read it. Basically, he says that Enochian isn't a language, and shares traits with more run-of-the-mill glossolalia, but that's not nearly as much fun as a secret angelic script. Plus, what does he know, his last name is Laycock.

In a moment of caffeine-fueled insanity last night, I even stumbled across Enochian Sudoku, proving, as Terry Pratchett would say, that there's nothing really damn stupid humans won't do.

(I know that I should instead be working on learning more Spanish than I need to understand basic dirty jokes from the guys in the kitchen. However, Spanish is useful and real and therefore not nearly as appealing.)

Even more caffeine later, I had decided that since Castiel was an Angel of Thursday and also of November, he was the Angel of Thanksgiving, which got me thinking all sorts of things about how he would speak sternly against the genocide of Native people and push Indigenous People's Day. Also, I am customarily hungover on Thursdays, since they are my Saturdays in the wonderful world of working at a bar and the day that I usually don't train. So when I'm lying there muttering to myself Never again will I combine four shots of whiskey with that many vodka tonics and I really shouldn't have picked that fight by playing "Legs" three times in a row on the jukebox and then beating the annoyed gentleman in question at darts, Castiel is listening!

Anyway. Time to go for a run, and then sit down and puzzle out some calls. Onward and upward.

I posted here a while back—a looong while back—saying I was abandoning this journal for a lot of reasons. At the time, it was true. I fully intended to leave and not to return.

However: I may have lied. I blame this on Supernatural, which has grown into such a beautiful, complex, and honest show that I am once again compelled to write back to it, to find my way into its world and its mythology. (Also, Castiel has run far, far away with my heart.) I thought about starting a new journal, but I didn't want to become a new fic-person or go through the trouble of rediscovering all my old fic-people, so I decided to stay me here. How's that for convoluted use of pronouns?

Having said that: it's been a very long time since I've written anything but poetry. Even longer since I've written fic. (Like, three years). It may be a bit until I regain my sealegs, so I'm starting somewhere small, with a little coda to the latest episode. A morning. Some words. A blooming.

--

Title: that it was good
Author: xaara
Rating: G
Timeline: post 5.14 (spoilers if you squint)
Characters: Dean, Castiel (gen)
Summary: A sunrise, a cup of coffee, and a conversation.

( that it was good )

Title: Yesterday, and Days Before
Author: xaara
Rating: G, gen
Timeline: pre-series & pilot
Characters: Dean, Sam
Summary: He’s not going to write a book.
Notes: This was originally written for my little sister’s birthday. When I pulled it out to give to her, it decided it was incomplete and would not be ignored. So here you go, miliani_2000. A few days late, but for you just the same. With love.


( Yesterday, and Days Before )

ETA: I didn't really think of it this way originally, but I suppose I should slap a spoiler warning on this for (possible?) spoilers for next week's episode.

The Weekly World News website is currently running a story featuring Sam and Dean.

So: it's a real story about fictional people portrayed by real actors on a real television show about hunting fictional things, but it's published in a real newspaper that is a spoof of other real newspapers that report fictional things as real and that reside next to the Twix bars in your local grocery store.

So, um, in class today? When I was supposed to be listening to lecture? I ended up whipping out my sketchpad and writing three-quarters of a page of a half-baked story in which Dean falls in love with a 'Cuda and cheats on the Impala with her and the Impala vows to get her revenge and it is crack, I tell you, crack. Hence the not typing it up, because typing it would mean acknowledging its existence in a very real way, and yeah, so not ready for that.

( I took a picture, though... )

omg. seriously, brain.

Do you also find yourselves constructing playlists as you write? Taking your inspiration from lyrics and melodies, writing about them as much as to them? Is the association always logical?

This generally happens to me a lot more with my original fiction, but lately I've discovered that, rather unconsciously, I've been constructing two SPN playlists. One corresponds roughly to the progression of season one; the other is just a random free-associated list of music I listen to while writing fic. Perhaps it's because the music is such an integral part of the show? I certainly never did this with Star Wars, the only other fandom I've ever become this involved with.

The spn_j2_bigbang fic is progressing nicely. And not at all how I expected. I don't know why I bother being surprised by this sort of thing anymore.

I am randomly excited about life today. I was also skimming through this journal and realized that my RL posts tend to the bipolar. I'm not; it's just that if I feel the urge to post about my real life it's probably because I'm (a) happy or (b) not-happy. Also I tend to forget that despite how much I complain about school, I actually rather like it.

Signed up for spn_j2_bigbang because omg yes. I already have an idea sketched out. I'm already a little bit in love with this idea. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing.