Being A Happy Fool

BREATHE!!

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One of my favorite characters in my work is “Leslie,” the bifertile hermaphrodite child of Aubry Knight in the “Streetlethal” books. Stolen from her mother’s womb, hormonally and genetically modified and trained to be an unstoppable assassin, Leslie is a being of total will, phenomenal physical command and frightening problem-solving capacity.

The only problem is that, due to her origins, she sees herself as a twisted, unclean thing. No matter what she does, how heroic she is (including, in one sequence, voluntarily jumping out of an airplane without a parachute), nothing is ever enough, and everything she sees in the world just convinces her that she is more worthless. The only person in the world she fears (and adores) is her father Aubry, and the only one who can reach her heart is her mother, Promise Cotounou.

Its fun looking back on my own work, analyzing it to discover what my unconscious mind was up to at that point. What the “boys in the basement” were working on. And with Leslie, I was speaking of a particular dysfunctional reaction to stress I’ve seen a lot of in the last month.

The trap is the: “if you aren’t (in a negative state) you are stupid/not paying attention.”

If you aren’t afraid you aren’t paying attention

If you aren’t depressed you don’t care

If you aren’t angry you are blind