Chương 1057: Day One Thousand And Fifty-Five

Dear Diary, Y'know, as a sort of multicultural kid back in the day, you'd think I had some inoculation to culture shock. You'd think. I mean, I'm not really as multicultural as you'd think, not really. Yeah, I've got some Hispanic, some Black, some Taino, but that's probably true of anybody from PR. Even if I personally don't look it, ain't nobody from Spain or Native America that has the kind of nappy hair some PR folks have. I mean, I didn't look Black back in the day, not so any four eff folks would clock.

My features were a little heavy, but that's about it. Looking back on what I remember from the mirror, my nose wasn't so much 'potato' as 'mix of Spanish raptorish and African broad'. My hair was more Hispanic than either of the other two, even if I straightened it most of the time. About the only place the Taino came through clearly was my skin tone and maybe my eyes.

Not like any of that is super relevant here and now, but my original point was that despite that mixed heritage, I mostly just lived in Camden, New Jersey. Plane tickets were spendy, and mom didn't have time to take off work and fly to PR with me. I think I had a grandfather there who would have taken me in, but the core reason of me not living with my sister across the river in Philly applied even more to living out in the ocean in Puerto Rico.

Because the core reason I didn't live with my sister had nothing to do with her or me being bitches of one stripe or another. Not really. It was because some part of me younger than my inner Tomoko thought that if I left that shitty little broken down row house Mom wouldn't know where to look for me when she came back. Yeah, look, I know it was irrational now. I kinda knew it was irrational then, but I wasn't ready to admit it then. I guess I am now.

At any rate, while Puerto Rico and Camden both were classic examples of 'melting pots', where different cultures met and clashed and combined and transformed into something new and unique, all that happened way before my time. By the time I got there, by the time I got out into it at all, everything in the pot had gone way past melting.

It had burned, been badly deglazed, taken off the heat and left to soak until it grew some weapons grade biological warfare agents, at which point I buried it in the tiny shitty backyard because I thought it was funny and the smell made me hallucinate at least twice. Yeah, that kinda got away from me there.

Still, I guess it's not surprising that while I arrived here more or less able to hide the fact that I wasn't from around here, because that's a survival skill being brown in the USA back in the day, now that I'm trying to become part of the culture rather than just an observer, I get shocked now and then. In this case, after saving Mads, or really after making sure she wanted another go and Reviving her, I wasn't surprised about her wanting to, y'know, celebrate being alive.

I wasn't even super surprised about her coming back home with me to give her report in person, or to meet little Aoibh. Thinking about the differences between me back then and me now, I understand that bit now in a way I couldn't back then. That desire to see the new baby and coo over her. Or him, I guess, although Sarah was a little too clannish and private with little D to let me do that when he was super little. At this point...

Shit, I just realized I haven't seen him for at least a couple months, and last time I did he was growing faster than my kits. By now he might even be back to being capital D, although what with me literally nursing him at one point I hope he'd stop by and let occasional surrogate Mama know he's moving out. Okay, no the fuck I do not, because I am already weirded the fuck out by the idea that I nursed somebody whose O face I have seen.

The only saving grace here is that I did the former after I did the latter, and now that I think that with my own brain no the fuck it is not.

That is not the culture shock I was talking about, but it's definitely an example of a shock based on the culture of here and now being really fuckin' different, especially the vaguely Greek and Celtic derived mess that is Bag culture, not to mention a Deific culture which involves a manchild who I'd hoped to help grow the fuck up but somehow wound up getting squished and helping become a literal man child, in the 'child with twig and berries very likely to grow to manhood without changing pronouns' sense.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. I'm going to carefully pack that entire messy tangle up in a box labeled 'denial, do not open until Sunday' and hope I remember to open it on Sunday, or at least before it ferments, not unlike D himself. Heh.

I just thought about how D is alcoholic, being literally fermented into being, and Marie is also alcoholic, and I was gonna say that she, and in fact both of them, are not alcoholics, they're drunks, because alcoholics go to meetings. But what the fuck else is a Revel except a meeting of people who are alcoholic. Okay, D's Revels are meetings for and of people who are alcoholic in the 'their blood has a proof' sense. My Revels not so much.

My Revels are mostly for those whose dopamine delivery device of choice is intimacy, not alcohol. Not that D's Revels are chaste, at least in the 'no sex' sense. I guess with a bar in the Temple of Love my Revels aren't exactly teetotaler Revels either, but we've each got a focus and we mostly stick to it. Because Revels get sticky, no matter how you mix them, or you're doing it wrong.

Shit, even my Revels with Wendell and Dorothea have gotten a little sticky, what with her bringing some of her kids' favorite candy to show me, and him trying out some chocolate beer at least once. Yeah, this whole thing about culture shock is really about my Revel tonight. So after spending the morning with Siobhan and Aoibh, not to mention the constant flow of guests, because not only did Mads drop by, each of my High Clergy stopped by to see little Aoibh as well.

So did the Lancasters, and if I kind of expected Lucas to be toddling around by now, he's at least crawling, and from what Siobhan surreptitiously told me, that's a sign he's throwing toward his Dan heritage in terms of lifespan. On top of all the guests from outside the Homestead, it seemed like everybody in the Homestead came through as well. Yeah, sometimes I forget that here and now people aren't 'a couple generations from feudalism', complete with lords and fealty and shit.

Fuck, if they are, it's a few generations before feudalism really set in. I'd say that we're gonna stop all that shit in its tracks, but I think maybe, just maybe, we can do even better than that. People need connection. They have an integral need to know how they fit with the other people around them. As the man said, we're Pan narrans, the storytelling ape, and we need to know how we fit into the stories of those around us. For all its faults, feudalism kinda did that.

I'm not sure we're gonna avoid it completely, speedrun it, or somehow mold and shape it so that instead of a rigid hierarchy, we wind up with something closer to a family tree. But one of the big things that traumatized me growing up was that lack of connection. The world I came from... The only place I found anything like connection was online, and everybody told me that wasn't 'real'.

That nobody online was 'real', so none of the relationships were real either, whether they be fleeting ones forged during a single CoD lobby, or whole assed things where you sat up trading pearl polishing material. Looking back I say 'fuck that noise'. Even if somebody was wearing a mask, pretending to be someone else, I had a relationship with that somebody they were pretending to be.

I can be in twenty places at once, looking like twenty different people, and I can probably convince somebody that each of me is a different person, and has a different relationship to them. Just because the people are virtual doesn't make the relationship unreal. Shit, I manage to convince myself that I'm Human Adjacent on a regular basis. At any rate, after a whole assed day of people wandering through to see our new addition, my ladies asked me if I would mind Co-Locating for tonight's Revel, which I did not.

Then they asked me if I minded Saffron, Siobhan, and Aoibh Co-Locating with me. After confirming with Siobhan, Saffron, Canta, and Loki that it wouldn't hurt Aoibh in the slightest, I agreed. Which is how Siobhan, Saffron, Aoibh, and I wound up doing exactly the same thing in the middle of each of my Temples. We sat right up there on the Altar as every single one of my Worshippers streamed by. Each of my Temples had one or two folks who joined us as well, sitting on the Altar as Guests of Honor or some shit.

Ora in New Amsterdam, George in Newark, Cherry in Phileo, Mrs. Driver in Camden Yards. Marilyn joined us in Calverton, and Jarl Willie Johnson showed in Norfolk. Mom sat out in the crowd, staring balefully at everyone who tried to interact with her. Not like that's not her normal thing anyhow. Finally, I kind of expected Adrienne or Cailyn in Rich Man's Port, but none other than Cat Sith slinked up onto the Altar. Tallulah glared at him. Just straight up stared at him until he rolled over and showed his belly.

"Wow, T."

"What?" I nodded to where the Cat lay there purring.

"You just straight up stared down the cattest cat who ever catted." She just nodded.

"He requires a firm hand." Meanwhile Cat Sith, who'd been chuckling since I dropped that line about them being the cattest cat who ever catted, just replied with, "I do." Yeah, it took your girl until damn near morning to realize why, which kinda reminded me we needed to make sure we didn't wind up doing a feudalism in any kind of bad way. Because everybody in the Alliance had shown up to see the Imperator's new daughter.