chthonic ovenbird My dreams take me underground. Gone are the star_kissed_nights spent indulging in food dripping with butter and honey. My mind no longer offers me a buffet for the senses. Here there are no rich smells, no colours, no life. Night after night I stand before the muffled darkness of a subterranean parking garage. It is a place of gods_and_monsters. The air is clammy and thin, the light is ashen and grim, the cars are empty eye sockets with rusty wheel wells begging to give me tetanus. This is the doorway to the underworld, masked and illusory. Spray insulation hangs from the ceiling like industrial stalactites. Fear propels me downward, away from the sun, until I enter the hush of a library that smells of stagnant water. The shelves are made of ancient oak, heavy and meticulously crafted. The floors and walls are mahogany. The wood in this room still holds the soul of the tree it was hewn from and it whispers incoherently, reading passages from the books it contains in languages forgotten thousands of years ago. A message takes shape in my subconscious, resolving slowly like a time damaged Polaroid: there is no running from the infernal. I had my moment in the summer sun and now it’s time to delve into the Cimmerian mysteries. Depression brays like the hounds_of_hell. Curiosity is the light that wards them off, keeps their rasping tongues coiled in their rotting mouths. In the library of perdition you have two choices—run and be devoured, or pull down the nearest book and see what wisdom you can wrest from the jaws of Cerberus. 250911 ... epitome of incomprehensibility (I forgot what this meant and when I looked it up I came across the Merriam-Webster website, which included this delightful quote in its list of citings - the sightings of underworld entities - "And no one suffers quite like the True Believer; surrendering to optimism is an invitation for chthonic forces to start doling out a whole lot of emotional rump puntings." —Anthony Crupi, Sportico.com, 16 Aug. 2024 "emotional rump puntings" = chef's kiss! Not to kiss ass, but that's a kickass turn of phrase.) 250911 ... ovenbird That’s a great quote. Thankfully I almost never surrender to optimism. It just isn’t in me. Ha! 250911 what's it to you? who go blather from