SubscribeIt’s been a long time coming, and I couldn’t be happier (or more pleased with my scroll!)
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Ordinary Girl. Ordinary Stuff. Ordinary Life.
Back when I started with the Spanish Inquisition and was just a innocent dungeon Lackey, I always had a fleece pullover at hand to wear in summer because the dungeon temperatures were so low. The torture devices in the dungeon generated a lot of heat while operating, so they had to be supercooled to remain functional. As is pretty common in the Inquisition, the equipment in the dungeon was much more valuable than the bodies that ran it.
After a few years I was moved from the dungeon to the cellar of rats across the hall, since my particular set of Lackey duties had all but disappeared. It wasn’t quite so cold over in the cellar, but I still needed that pullover, particularly in the summer. Then the Monarchy decided they no longer needed a Cellar Lackey in any capacity and I was let go. My pullover went back to my closet to actually be worn in the winter!
A year went by and there was no Lackey work to be had. Then one day I got a call from an Inquisition jailor in charge of the rats in a different cellar and I again had Lackey duties to fulfill. It was a very nice cellar, actually, with windows that looked out to a brick walkway, but I could see sky and the occasional squirrel. It was quiet and comfortable, and I really didn’t need a pullover.
Then one day the Monarchy decided to gobble up a neighboring kingdom that hadn’t been doing very well, and room had to be made to accommodate all the new jailors and lackeys. All the torture devices were removed from the dungeon and put in the ballroom, my former jailor was demoted to Flunky, and the dungeon was freshly painted in anticipation for all the newly-conquered lackeys. Or so we thought, over in our cozy cellar. It turns out that the new lackeys were dispersed throughout the castle, and lackeys and rats from the various cellars were being thrown together to fight it out in the dungeon. This meant my nice cellar was abandoned for the dungeon where I started.
The torture devices were gone, so the already-cold air was now frigid without all that extra generated heat. Unfortunately the cooling system seems to have developed its own agenda and insists that dungeons are meant to be cold, torture devices or no. So here I sit, in my brightly painted dungeon, thinking, “So this is what Hell is supposed to feel like when it freezes over!”
My fingernails are blue and I hate the Spanish Inquisition.
There are a bunch of billboards cropping up around town, usually showing one or two people in some sort of world-weary attitude, with the caption UNFULFILLED.ORG blazoned across. Before I even went to the website (which I did just now) I knew it had to be for some sort of religious group. I haven’t read through the site, I simply wanted to verify the URL, but as soon as you see a bible passage in the upper right-hand corner, there isn’t much else the page could be.
I think it’s effective advertising. Everyone feels dissatisfied with their life at some point, and those who never do are in denial about it. I can relate to the images. But my dissatisfaction is partly caused by the very thing they’re pushing.
Some might say I’m in the midst of a religious crisis. I was raised Roman Catholic, went to a private Catholic grade school and a private Catholic high school. I was married in the Catholic church and promised to raise any hypothetical children in that faith. And then the world got bigger, and high-level clergy made unacceptable (to me) decisions, and I became more educated, and loved ones died, and the representatives of the Church got more and more out of touch with the world, and going to Mass started causing me infinitely more pain and doubt than comfort. And that was when I decided I was done.
I currently have no religion. It’s not that I don’t have faith, because I do still cling to many of the teachings of my childhood, but that faith has nothing to do with the organized Catholic religion. It likely resembles no organized religion on Earth. But I do believe in morality and justice and love and yes, a Higher Power.
All the same, I am unfulfilled. I fail to see how any kind of ministry could possibly change that. A new church can’t convince a new company that I’d be a perfect fit for their team. A new religion won’t take away the agony of relationship decisions. A new spirituality isn’t going to make me at peace with a flawed and sometimes painful reality.
All the same, those damn billboards bring me down.
There’s something rather satisfying with starting fresh. A clean page. A blank canvas. A story just waiting to be told and song to be sung.