My back is trying to go out. My mom is recovering from her hip surgery and might come home today. Chick’s weird ear thing is still a weird ear thing and I don’t think we can afford to fix it. An appointment has been made for aspiration of fluids. I need to be making money. Wait, no! No pressure right now or I’ll curl up into a tight ball of inertia that will eventually implode and become a black hole into which everything will be sucked up and subsumed. The car might be breaking down too. Well, why not?

Bill O’Reilly was my boss in my dream, that’s how you know it was a nightmare.

I’ve been watching The Secret Circle. Another silly witch show. It only ran for one season so not a big run. I wonder why it seems that teen vampires and vampires in general are so much more popular than witches? Personally i find witches more interesting. I loved the Ann Rice treatment of vampires in the 80’s but it got old pretty fast. My friend Catherine posed a question on vampires the other day – how could they father children if they have no living fluids in their bodies? If they have no blood, they must also have no semen. They are, in fact, dead already. I would like to extend that question to this: if they have no flowing blood, how can they possibly get erections? If they can’t get erections, then how can they be having so much sex? These are worthy questions of those creating vampire stories. An explanation is not an unreasonable expectation. If you take a myth and you pervert it to your uses and you make it new, you still need to answer – in some semi-scientific way at least – how your mythical creatures operate and live.

If you create a new mythology based on an old mythology you have to back up your new mythology with some semblance of thought and answers.

One of the things that keeps me from being a real fan of shows involving the supernatural (except for “Supernatural” because of reasons) is the huge theme of predestination and fate. I am so fucking tired of the idea of THE CHOSEN ONE and THE ONE WITH EXTRA POWER BECAUSE OF ANCIENT BLOODLINE and INDIVIDUALS FATED TO BE TOGETHER or INDIVIDUALS ILL-FATED AND ALWAYS STAR-CROSSED AND PINING STUPIDLY FOR EACH OTHER AND ALL THE MELODRAMA OF DYING FOR LOVE AND DON’T YOU KNOW THERE ARE OTHER THINGS IN LIFE AND SOMETIMES WORLD PEACE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ROMANCE?

Humans love this shit. They really love, and apparently crave, the concept of their lives and purpose being decided for them by an unseen force long  before they were born. They love it as much as they love the idea of ancient family royalty. I think it’s total bullshit. (Both predestination and ancient family bloodlines meaning anything other than a nasty tendency towards incest to keep blood “pure”) People love predestination because it means they aren’t responsible for their lives or actions. People love the idea that they were born with a higher purpose. When played out in fiction it’s nearly always means that one person is born evil and another person is born “pure” enough to defeat them. It’s just God and Satan all over again. Infantile bullshit. Simplistic belief in good versus evil. Angels versus demons. Black magic versus white magic.

One thing I appreciate about the show Supernatural is the ambiguous nature of the Angels and the demons. That the angels don’t all agree with each other about their ultimate directives from God, that not all of them even believe that God is still in the building, that not all of them feel humans are worth protecting. And demons are not so cut and dried evil, that they have weaknesses humans can relate to, that they are not all completely evil. It’s still full of predestination and that break-off show they hinted at at the end of Season 10 is all about ancient families. I’m so sick to death of ancient families. Royal families. Special families.

Can we please stop with that bullshit? What I’d like to see is a show about witches that has no royal witch bloodlines. No chosen one. No star crossed lovers. No predestination. I want a show that has myth but without all the religious overtones. I want one that has more realistic characters, where there’s witchery and magic but without the childish themes of good versus evil. How about a show that has curses and spells and interesting characters battling real evil like political corruption and spousal abuse and bigotry? How about witches or other mythical creatures whose power doesn’t come from gods or devils but from the well of humanity and from nature? I’d love to see witches and other mythical creatures taking responsibility for their lives, their actions, and stop looking to blame bad relationships on destiny.

The thing that really ruined Grimm for me was the whole Royal family story-line. YAWNFOREVER. It’s so fucking irritating and soapy. I loved all the monsters and fairytale derived creatures – I loved the crime solving and the relationship between Nick and Hank and them having to negotiate between two worlds. I love the trailer full of artifacts and I love Rosalee and Monroe and the herb shop and trying to figure out how to stop spells and I loved how not all the creatures are monsters but beings from another world who have to learn to live with each other. I loved all that. Then they had to muck it up with the usual stupid bloodline bullshit. Did the Hapsburgs teach us all NOTHING? There is nothing noble about “pure” bloodlines. There is no such thing as pure blood and that people think that’s powerful and desirable creeps me out and it says how little we’ve evolved over the last few thousand years. That depresses me.

I’ve got a black kitten named Tonkatsu in my lap as I type this. How fitting is that? He’s purring like he doesn’t know that lots of people think black cats are bad luck and that black cats are harder to adopt out than other cats. Don’t you dare tell him! He’s the sweetest little boy kitten ever! He’s purring madly and he wants to be part of everything going on. He loves to be in human laps and to play and he has the funniest disco swagger EVER.

It’s time for me to get dressed and go visit my mom in the hospital and ice my back some more and think about what a family Grimoire for a fucked up weird 100% impure and un-royal family might look like. What magic might it contain? What myths might come out of such a tome? The most interesting and powerful families, in my opinion, are ones that are full of members from different origins and legends. People of mixed blood are healthier and stronger. That’s a fact of nature. Mixed genes are better. It also means a rainbow of stories and legends and family histories all mashed together. It’s crazier and harder to track and way more interesting.

So here I go. Having a boozeless Friday. May your family be mixed-breed and your future yours to make!