Caitlín R. Kiernan

Spooky's put the first of the Ravens Four up this evening. Here's the link to the auction, and I'll have more to say about this in the ayem (or early peayem). Also, you can see new photos of all four at squid_soup. The other three auctions will begin tomorrow.

I have a feeling this is going to be one of those "just me" things, but isn't anyone else out there a little bit weirded out by all the frelling hoopla over frelling Super Bowl ads? I must have seen stories on them and links to them in at least four places online today (Yahoo and MySpace, I recall). Are there really people who want to watch the ads that ran during the Super Bowl the day after? I mean, personally I loathe football and all football-related phenomena, and given that my interest in the Super Bowl is way less than nil, I cannot personally even begin to imagine why anyone should give a crap about the ads.

Meanwhile, I think my musical obsessions might have cycled back around to She Wants Revenge.

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An odd dream last night. This morning. An odd one for me, at least. I scribbled some notes after I woke up, almost posted about it this morning, decided not to, then changed my mind about the whole thing about half an hour ago.

A long climb through a tower of steel and concrete leading through and then above a roiling cloudbank. And I wasn't alone, though I recall nothing about those who were with me. We were trying to reach something, and finding ourselves in a sort of dome at the top of the tower, everyone was furious to discover the tower was such a stark and hideous thing. And later, I was walking on a broad plain and a girl offered me a small piece of shale as a gift. Preserved on the shale was the carbonized imprint of the front half of a scorpion. "Because you already have the other half," she said, seeming tremendously pleased to give me the gift. I took it, and thanked her, and struggled to recall if I really did have the other half of the fossil. It almost seemed as though I did, but the memory kept slipping away.*

And later still (and really, here's the odd-for-me bit), I was arguing with a very thin, genderless, turquoise-skinned humanoid about "god." We were drinking hot tea from cups shaped like stars. And finally, the turquoise-skinned thing began talking about the memory of the universe, and it reminded me how often I've said that the only true "evil" is waste, and that all evil can be reduced to a wasteful act. I asked what one thing had to do with the other, and it told me that if the universe is conscious, it would be a waste to lose the memories and experiences of any living creature. The repeated evolution of consciousness, it said, allowed the universe to gather to it innumerable memories. "Like a computer's hard drive," it said. "Nothing is wasted. Nothing is deleted. The universe remembers everything." I asked if we were talking now about life after death, about consciousness surviving death, and it said no, not really, that data does not necessarily entail consciousness of itself. And I asked what about the experience of any given consciousness? If that experience of consciousness were lost, data would be lost, and a wasteful event would have occurred. It sat and stared at me a long time. It had green eyes. It smiled and pointed up at the roiling clouds and that tower of steel and concrete. "The other half of the scorpion," it said.

And that's all I recall. I know I woke soon after seeing the tower that second time.

* While I have many thousands of fossils, I do not, in fact, have even a single fossil scorpion.