#look I actually have some THOUGHTS on magical ppl driving to king's cross

[remedialpotions]

So I saw a post- one that I actually noticed you liked as well...but what's your take on Hermione persuading Ron to take his muggle driving test/how Ron was convinced he should do so (maybe even on his own)?

“She’s eleven,” said Hermione miserably. “Eleven.”

“I know,” replied Ron as he climbed into bed beside her. “We’ve just had a whole party about it.”

“But I still can’t believe it.” Hermione’s head dropped back against her pillow, a few rogue curls escaping the knot of hair at the base of her neck. “Remember when she was born?”

“Yeah,” Ron chuckled, “vaguely.”

“It feels like it was - I don’t want to say yesterday, of course it doesn’t feel like it was yesterday but there’s no way it was eleven years ago.” Restless, Hermione sat back up. “And before we know it, the summer will have ended and she’ll be off to Hogwarts.”

“I know.” Ron felt a familiar little squeeze around his heart; it was happening more and more lately when he thought about his little girl, the precious, headstrong, whip-smart light of his life, boarding a train and leaving him behind. “But she’s so excited about it.”

“She’s probably going to forget all about us,” Hermione lamented. “She’ll be throwing our letters in the bin by October.”

“I really wouldn’t go that far.” Ron reached out to place his hand over Hermione’s, squeezing lightly. “I thought that was the whole point of, y’know, teaching them to read and do maths and everything, though. So they can grow up and be on their own.”

“I just wish they’d stay small for longer.”

Ron didn’t disagree. All day, while his daughter had played Quidditch with her cousins and opened gifts and exulted in the simple joys of a day dedicated to celebrating her, a barrage of memories had forced its way through his mind: the pink-cheeked bundle sleeping on his chest, the toddler who flung her arms around his knees with unadulterated glee when he arrived home from work, the little girl sat astride his shoulders at the London Zoo. For her to be eleven, on the cusp of brewing potions and transfiguring matches into needles and levitating feathers… he had not expected it, but it felt like a loss. 

“We could always just have another, then,” said Ron with a grin, “if you’re so desperate to have a baby around.”

Hermione’s head swiveled slowly toward him. “Have you gone mad?”

“Oh, come on.” He rolled over to face her. “Doesn’t that sound fun? Nappies and midnight feedings - oh, and teething! Teething’s the best-“

Her eyes narrowed - but even so, Ron detected just a touch of amusement playing on the corners of her mouth. “Are you quite done?”

He laughed heartily, then, a small thrill of satisfaction rushing through him at the exasperation on her face. “So that’s a no, then, on the baby?”

“I think you already knew that.”

Lifting their linked hands, he kissed the back of hers, and her expression softened. “It is strange, though,” he agreed, “that we’ll actually be sending off one of our own at the platform this year.”

“I’ll have to check that my dad’s old car still runs,” said Hermione thoughtfully. “We hardly ever use it.”

For years they had tagged along on the first of September to see off their nieces and nephews, starting with Teddy’s first year. But they always Apparated there, with the exception of the past few years when Rose and Hugo had wanted to join in, and then Hermione had driven an old vehicle that used to belong to her parents. Most of the time, it sat parked at the kerb in front of their home, patiently waiting to be driven.

“You know,” said Ron, contemplative, “I could drive her to King’s Cross. Drive us, I mean, we’re all going. But I could get my licence.”

“You could do,” replied Hermione. “But I don’t mind doing it, really. It’s not like we use the car all the time.”

“Right, but I still reckon I should learn how. There was talk back when I was an Auror, of having us all learn how. Just in case there was some kind of emergency.”

Hermione nodded. “But you’re not an Auror anymore.”

“I know, but there could still be a - I don’t know, some kind of situation - where I might need to drive a car.” 

“I’m sorry,” she began, lips pinched to hold back laughter, “but what sort of emergency scenario are you imagining that requires you to operate a Muggle vehicle? Are you living in a spy film?”

Ron laughed along with her. “I might be! I’m just saying, you never know when it might come in handy.”

Lying back down, Hermione turned on her side to face him. “It would be nice if I didn’t always have to drive. But why now?” she asked, curious. “You haven’t really had much interest in it before.”

“Right.” Ron turned onto his back, eyes cast up at the ceiling. “I think it’s just… I don’t know, it’s probably silly.”

“No,” said Hermione softly. “It probably isn’t.”

Ron let out a slow breath. “She used to need us for everything, right? To feed her and change her nappies and read to her and generally keep her alive, and - and you’re right,” he went on ruefully, “she’s grown up so bloody fast. She doesn’t need us for a whole lot anymore, and I just want her to need me for something.”

“You’re her dad,” said Hermione, voice low and gentle. “She’ll always need you.”

“I know, but I feel like…” He turned his head towards her and their eyes locked. Warmth and reassurance glowed in hers, a soothing tonic to his nerves. “If there’s something I can still do for her, before she’s grown up and out of the house, I want to do it. Even if it’s something small like this. I know it sounds stupid-”

“No,” she interrupted with a shake of her head. “No, it doesn’t. I love you for it, actually.”

Ron allowed himself a smile. “Besides, I’ve already had some practice.”

“Have you? When?”

“I drove all the way to Hogwarts that time!” he laughed, relishing as she groaned and rolled away from him. “So it can’t be that hard.”

[paraclete0407]

‘Some of My Memories of Milwaukee+ or a Personal Odyssey’ or ‘And in the Years of Doing Other Things’

2012

Talking with kind of ex-girlfriend never actually my girlfriend called her ‘think of you as my wife’ in letter ater wrote Mark Helprin-esque ‘disclaim you forever with canned blessing’ letters about Aristophanes’ ‘Lysistrata’ in which Greek women refuse their beds to the menfolk to induce them to stop warring.  Max Beerbohm or someone said, ‘There is a God and h/His name is Aristophanes.’  I don’t believe that at all but he was a good-natured writer that I can tell and also wrote about clouds and birds apocalyptically or otherwise and made fun of Socrates which I approve of.  I don’t know anything about Socrates; my ex-friend used to say ‘I LOVE Socrates,’ that he could feel Socrates’ love.  Socrates would say things like ‘The law is the advantage of the powerful’ and stated that if he reached an after-life he would continue to ‘troll, hit up, impertinently or insidiously argue with’ people forever there.  He said the after-life could be like sleep without a dream.  My friend said something about New York City and a production of Lysistrata then I started making hyper-fanfictions already in which Girls Gen decided to stop performing until war stopped or something and threw a Christmas festival with vermillion-colored fruit compotes but I honestly don’t remember a lot & it refleted my ‘Love of the Last Tycoon’ etc.-esque delusion that Media and woman- and girl-training like Lee Sooman would enable me to influence humanity’s future in a really gainful way.  Later on I told Tizzard that Media Studies is an endless kind of college dorm-bull-session and NKS was the real deal, that reality exists, that ‘Visual Pedagogy’ is an excuse for inferior faculty and no real curriculum or purpose but it didn’t really matter b/c kids / the poor in spirit love media - I loved media too.  I rem. being so happy in college to skip Phonology one day to play Final Fantasy 10 and I still got an A b/c Phonology is a decently logical human suitable discipline for someone like me.  There is a Korean word that kind of means ‘suitable’ that starts with  ‘J’ in transliteration that used to mean a lot to me and also I conflate with a kind of ‘yes.’  

This person was also like ‘Why did you say you would go back to KR’ as opposed to apply to CTC or be a literary agent to casting-couch desperate alienated lady-authors for fun and bragging-rights and I sold myself short saying it was all about drunken proclamations - I actually didn’t know what I wanted to do and kept ‘short-selling David James Johnston’ talking about TV-writing when I already sort of decided that the power of TV was just a money-making-vehicle and that TV would not really change people’s minds for the better but just hypnotize or mesmerize them with more of what Jay McInerney(?) pace some French satanico-moral philosopher called ‘empty beauty.’  I rec’d people Friday Night Lights and they became Amfootball-fetishists with a fake God-evasion-religion-system; rec’d ‘Generation Kill’ and instead of understanding the sadness of the Iraq War or the fact that people just like us w/ videogames and pornography and Jerry Springer and all the sad beauty of irreverence and sort of boyish self-pity in the world was being thrown teeth- and brains-first in to the walls of Fallujah.  (Years later thinking stuff like what is fake news what is real news, was the ComGen of the 1st Marine Division right to dismiss the Col. who had been careful w/ fueling tanks and his men’s lives?  Today did the USMC really disband their tank corps or is it more of a ‘clue.’)  

I remember when this person was 24 and I did quasi-test-adultery-turned-in-to-actual-adultery in NYC; I kept thinking that my dream would come true if I were faithful.  It puts me in mind in retrospect of ‘Adagio Cantabile’ from the ‘Pathetique’ in which the young boyish Beethoven keeps re-crossing and re-tracing and repressing the same few things.  There was a kid in KR who was counting his pocket-change to buy snack noodles + he looked about as well-fed as Haitian kids today munching on clay-biscuits to ease their hunger-pains or North Koreans or Chinese eating corncobs and smoking meth to cope whilst his mom supposedly hoped be would become a basketball-player.  Other kid’s om was working in a bar, constantly forgetting to check HW, so but, Counseling was really boffo / spec and just reminded her again and again b/c in some places there are still reasonable compliant obedient square people who don’t deflect from doing the right thing, just get overwhelmed at times and want a break.  Ironically Ayn Rand once defined evil as ‘blanking out’ yet she herself was doing amphetamines, propounding complex justifications for adultery, smoking, bashing a revelatory tragic anti-Nazi but pro-Germany author called Thomas Wolfe in ‘The Romantic Manifesto’ - Wolfe also cared about Japanese, about humility in the publishing industry, about nurses.  

I went to Whole Foods to get pineapple but there the story sort of ends.  There was Boa Kwon or BoA whom I once saw on WLIW NJ public TV and thought it was someone else; in retrospect this person was too smooth for me to read at all and I have no faith or trust in such an one who would lash out egomaniacally at any one at any time, prob. beat their kid to death with a trowl then take a nap in the next room b/c ppl at a certain level are like careless military officers that decide one illegal or irresponsible order deserves another b/c it’s image-management, what Emerson calls ‘a foolish consistency,’ or Derek Chauvin-esque drive and desire and determination to magnify one’s little point. 

Later I started to reticulate or conceive of Lee Sooman in terms of a failed priest or one who had repeatedly and almost orthodoxly dodged his vocation.  ‘Black Collar.’  I guessed using my ‘amae-guess-magic-bullets’ that his wife’s name is Eunjin + thought then, I don’t even remember.  Told some ppl who didn’t really care that love-dreams are good and ‘Love and Peace’ was great b/c whilst America was being sarcastic and deflectionistic about everything SNSD were like, ‘We will compose in C-natural; we will be Tolstoyian; we will make direct statements about reality.’  I felt ‘Everyday Love’ was about ‘cybernetics’ or adapting the natural ‘Spenglerian peasant wisdom self’ to ‘the cold intellect of the city / civilization / dying-but-peaking epochal imperial organization.’  During this same time in my life or thereabouts I read a neo-hyper-Nazi book called ‘Imperium’ by a guy who admired the kamikaze and called for ‘wars of annihilation’ as well as castigating America for her cult of the average.  This person said Japan’s not weak at all, they accelerated or amplified Spengler’s admiration for the Roman soldier at Vesuvius who refused to abandon their post since no one gave them orders to leave.  In re the which I can only surmise pace Grace to You that somewhere there are still ‘thoroughbreds’ like that.  At other times in life I said stuff that got me trashed on RedditButBothSides for using terms like ‘social form’ and Paul Washer of HeartCry who summed up much of my own life in telling it that ‘the porn-addict and misogynist is unloving’ was praising the African father, I love the African-African (not American) minister at Christ Church Episcopalian but then I am like, ‘drmdrmdrm Zulu king marching all his warriors off a cliff to prove a point about authority.’  I’m really really a child of the 1990s, Gandhi, MLK, Tiananmen Square bag-man, flower-in-rifle-bore.  I never expected to levitate the Pentagon but I truly believed that if we’re nice to them they will be nice to us.

Later I over-compensate the other way and started making ‘psychopathic midrash’ like, ‘What do you make of the Good Samaritan if the thieves are still beating the man half or more to death when the Samaritan arrives and what if the Samaritan has a taser, handgun, rifle, bayonet, how good are they at martial arts, what’s their chest-circumference, what’s their reputation.’  But again people hate this because its super-worldly and technocratic. I had started to admire fmr. President George W. Bush b/c I felt that he was pushing back against the people who wanted bad to go from bad to worse, b/c I agreed with him about immigration, and b/c I felt I saw progress in his life frankly and even in Trump’s life where he nuked his earlier marriages but remained faithful and respectful to Melania.   Marie Lee has it out for Barron Trump I guess but he’s still neurophysiologically / neuroanatomically very much not a full adult and it’s also literally ‘Titus Andronicus’-esque revenge pornography to go after a leader’s kids like that + distracting from WW3, nuclear terrorism, DF-26 Black Death warheads, satellite-bombs, annihilating the entire Midwest’s population for the topsoil here; and because Jack London once said ‘The Chinese work too hard so we the freedom-loving peoples ought to kill them all with germ-weapons and take their land.’

I later started dreaming about KKOOM Orphanage, a cold morning, eating coffee-crystals, a basketball-court a bit like ‘Trabia Garden’ from FF8.  I felt people learn a lot from poverty, limits, prison, commitment, losing things.  Meanwhile ‘Shanghai-1′ is like you’re exotic male prostitute and she too is the typical Chinese-Singaporean-Japanese-wannabe-British anti-Korean racist who thinks Koreans are the n-----s of East Asia permanently deserving of subjugation and that we all ought to amuse ourselves by making sure they remain permanent hedonistic sensualists physicalists etc.  Keep them thinking about hip-bones till the end of time + make sure we have EYK, reaction-vids, self-niggerization- / ethical-evolution-inhibition-engines such as PSY or really all of YGE.  

When I used to blog about T-ARA, Eunjung, and my dumb adventures with a secret life several Black girls approached e and I remember them well; curiously turned out to be involved in incest and/or rape-trauma.  I told ‘lonelystrangergirl’ she stood a good chance of finding ‘manly KBF’ if she joined the military but I didn’t then know or take cognizance of all the problems in the US military with women.  The fmr. Vice President Mike Pence was on talk radio saying, ‘WOMEN in the MILITARY’ my relation is like, ‘Millennial guys were pozzed pussy flyboys and effeminate art-fags who couldn’t transcend their self-consciousness so it’s no wonder’ but those are also ppl’s daughters, moms, people whose simplicity and loveliness might actually inspire a few men to act like men, though that is a very old complaint at this point, hopeful Kim Minju’s of the soul and mind who want to do what they can when they can, the world’s telling them to be super-heroines and it appears to convect(?) towards ‘All Loves Excelling.’  I hate doing physiognomy but it’s like this generation of Valkyries like Else in the Thomas Wolfe novel who won’t say anything about Hitler.  

Again however, JMC on Grace to You as saying, Christ is the Rock, pulverization.  

2014.

There was a new Korean restaurant w/ a limited menu, a stringed instrument no one ever plays, Thai lampshades.  I talked about General Petraeus a bit, yesterday’s wars the Korean 3-star general from Vietnam who was buried in an infantryman’s grave and talked about the caste-system in the North Korean military, about hundreds of thousands taking to sea to g out of NV.  In retrospect IDK why I said anything!  The ferry-sinking, I’m trying to say, ‘This is society; this is the pozzery of systems that don’t work; this is people who don’t even look at people ad think they know and care when they just made the Homer Simpson drip-bird-care-machine auto-billing, meretriciousness.’  I still think PGH took the fall for a bunch of men who devised the ROK Coast Guard and manned it, lesbian mysticist, hairstyle.  

I wish I kept all my thoughts and feelings to myself b/c then I could’ve planned.  That was Applebee’s which later moved to another location, hen to another, then was razed to he ground in like one night.  I mentioned my old mentor or affectionate person ‘Lt. Col.’ who told me about saving people but it was more K-wave self-exploitation, song-and-dance, ultimately, schizoaffective self-sadism.

I liked ‘Library’ by TTS a lot but didn’t realize it is about emotional-epistemic hedonism or wallowing in how much you could do and how useful you knowledge is or could be.  Later they did ‘Adrenaline.’  I am ‘Mr. Seo.’  SJH’s dad.  I’ve seen this a trillions times and I want to open up my ‘answer-macihne-gun’ and be like, ‘don’t listen to Black people; they all all all have the same mentality tow you.  Snoop says he’s a sex-trafficker and that’s precisely what he is; that’s what he is increasingly is and wants to be and is.’  Why did they let him in the ROK at all, except to put him on trial for crimes abroad against Korean nationals?  As this New Yorker cartoon said, ‘I’ll think outside the box when there is no more money in the box.’  

My best friend was traumatized by people like this although there again I ended up even more the worse for wear b/c I started cursing and threatening ppl and stuff.  

TTS however got super-fantastic for at least a little while with SJH’s song ’Only U’ which in retrospect might or might not have been self-composed b/c it’s a Taylorian era and ‘only you can make me,’ in which we become our truest selves by being understood.  This song didn’t even say anything except for a few moments at the very end and as with many things in this era the fan-covers were more perfect than the commercial versions b/c it is again the desperate love of the poor in spirit for leaders and ‘pharons’ (beacons) that makes sth or s1 seem better, seem perfect.  

Celebrity-culture and much of politics are about money, power, image, and corporatistic lesson-teaching / mental Derek Chauvinism.  But these are starting to be empty words.

2008.

Writing a long letter to s1 who had other people.  Why do not I edit all day.  I still remember thinking how these athletes at RU had really great low BF% despite eating junk food so I tried to eat junk food but felt like a loser.  I didn’t realize then that everyone was tagging everyone all the time.

‘If only they had stayed in h/Hot p/Pursuit...’  I decided to nuke my undergraduate syntax and just start every sentence with ‘They.’  Setpiece in Denver.  I talked about ‘agape’ (Gr. word about Christ’s Charity or Christian concern for the soul which I don’t speak Greek), about hotels with doors between the rooms.  But then there was all this in retrospect very obvious trash about overachievers and Asians which was trying to share one world w/ people from another who didn’t really want it.  Like FF.net people saying ‘We really admired you; a lot of us are kind of stuck in the trailer-park and we know RapMonster is far distant from us but we like that your admiration of RM has been getting you somewhere.’  Wanting to take everyone along when in fact some of them want to let you go; my friend KateLorraine’s North Star column from FFnet long ago where it is like ‘Let us teach everyone in the universe to be self-sufficient writers and literary critics of life as well as perfect book-reviewers of ev1 they ever meet with the perfect savoir-faire action-response-system-protocol pace Colossians 4:6.’  

This could make everyone friends with everyone today but I later came to see that t/Trust is something ‘circumscribed.’  It’s like Mirabel says in this Cogreve play that would need to be heavily footnoted by Bethlehem Seminary, ‘Let us be very reserved.’  Why party?  Why celebrate being a couple?  There’s this tiny hint of something at the end of the Song of Songs, ‘My small-breasted little sister, who’s gonna marry her?’  I for years ‘kept my virtue to myself’ b/c it is like Russian suitcase-nukes, anti-family, anti-couples, anti-biblical(?), anti-God, to say couples shouldn’t trash others behind their backs.  I failed to appreciate the total ‘Shakespearea-irony-sized’ or idolatrous / cupiditinous implication in songs like ‘Red Is the Rose’ or a novel called ‘Angel and Hannah’ which I still hve no summative statement on b/c it as just the 1990s and what Stephen Crane might characterize as the defiant, prideful, Son of Morning-esque devouring of one’s own bitter heart.  I re. years ago someone said Japanese like falling flowers and Chi like fallen flowers.  Ppl rly love their fallen flowers and what they used to be.

There are people on 4chan or all over this world that keep little dreams, hope-chests.  I want to say it can happen, the girl eating noodles can really make something, but maybe I as being a huckster and cultistic love-bomber in pushing everyone to leave home or secretly plot to ditch their family and burn their family’s expectations and social forms.  Again, IDK why Reddit won’t let me say ‘social form’ when all the smart people are saying social form.  But I am unhappy too b/c some ppl do not even have a social form or expectation but just the mind-machine that they’ll never make up.  ‘Let us be humble and faithful and very reserved.’

2013.

‘Jericho.’  Guy with all these flashdrives always taking notes, but why.  Just accept failure and rejection and give your body and presence to the task at hand.  I also made something pre-Covid called ‘Rorate Caeli Desuper et Nubes Pluant Justum’ from an Eastern European composer’s setting about kind of an unauthored person who kept veering from father-figure to father-figure but that too say cynical and IDK why I was attacking women, failing to relate, writing endnotes to the living.  I see to this is what happens when you stand around regarding what others have and are trying to forget particular actions or subsume their significance in some broader supposed mission.  This too was fanfic-ified / plagiarized from a real person which is part of why I guess I didn’t go anywhere with it; hoping to do something IRL.’  A speculative phi.-of-teaching piece called ‘When To Care’ but there again it’s Milwaukee Judgment and cf. Levinas, ethical interruption, unethical interruption(?).  ‘Teach You.’  

‘Winter Presences’ from BoA’s ‘Always,’ failed couple rituals.  ‘Perhaps a pizza.’  There was a Philip Roth or somebody’s novel and it crystallized for a sec bu in retrospect again, no real intended audience or beneficiary.  Delta Covid, also Lam(b?)da Covid, sudden transposition / teleportation of 3rd world perils to ex 1st world.  Heavily censor ‘On the Road,’ when they go to Mexico, ‘a bomb had come... and we would in the same same way...’  I remember the moment I was shocked and arrested by a Korean poem called ‘Flower’ which repeats a word sth like ‘desire’ and uses a phrase that people called ‘And we’ but is more like ‘And we all of us’ or even stronger than that, beginning and end.  I wish I could sew or insert a syringe reliably.  Power of children and little people.