Rise & Shine!

Shine as a thousand suns and rise as an enormous mushroom cloud!
Produce lots of fallout and give everyone radiation sickness!

Someone once told me I always got the best fireworks for New Year's. Truth is, I got them most of the time - but for the New Year I got myself this new cover pic for Facebook once more.

But the last day of the year was a good one. The brutal winter decided to hit the US instead this time. Here it rose above 50 F yesterday, I once more wore my battle jacket and only fingerless gloves when going for a little ride in the woods.

In the evening I celebrated by myself then, with some glorious music - including finding this wonderful and very suitable video, as well as my own playlist. Gothic rock, black metal, psychedelic, industrial, medieval, folk rock... dancing and singing and having some booze, the latter which I do only very rarely.

Singing with my steroid-ruined voice. Many males can easily reach higher pitches than I can. Yet still I sing - also on the bike, and even in the locker room at the gym sometimes when I can't bear someone else's babbling in German any longer. Like I'd give a shit what they may think about it. My voice ain't even that bad, just very deep for a girl. And I hate German - awful memories. Provoking nightmares of my childhood. I'm still constantly on the run from my past.

Yes, running, running. I had planned running today, but wasn't sure if I'd be up to it after dancing long and hard last night. And yes, I'm quite sore from dancing, but in my traps only (trapezoid muscles). No, certainly NOT headbanging - I've never done that and never would; to each their own but I personally find it extremely pointless. I mean dancing! Hard and fast, always. I guess my legs don't get sore easily because they're used to running.
Which I did again anyway today. 11K of ups & downs in the hills, a favorite route, in 59 minutes just as last time.
Can't ruin the first day of the year by cutting corners!!

New Year's is generally always much, much better than that awfully depressing Shitmas crap, and this year was so much worse than usual since I've already been through an extremely difficult time to begin with.

As stated earlier, I intended to sort of write my own salvation via my story "Dead Flowers in the Wishing Well", published here in the previous nine entries, and it actually did work as I hoped, at least to some extent.

Yet still I'm much more vulnerable to negativity, and by "coincidence" (no, I don't believe in it) I was in for a very hurtful conversation on Facebook right on Shitmas eve. No coincidence because Shitmas is shit. And no, not some random bully who will say crap like "you're ugly," I wouldn't even take that half seriously. Some people do think tanks are ugly. Some even think sharks are ugly, or snakes. I think all of these are magnificent. Tanks are very efficient war machines. Sharks and snakes are very efficient predators. And myself being a warrior, efficiency is what matters most. The mainstream ideals of "beauty" usually are appalling anyway and completely incompatible with the ideal of the (female!) warrior.

But this aside - no, it wasn't a bully but a person I had considered a friend.
Let me mention once more here that in particular for a Satanist I'm extremely easy going, open minded, and tolerant. But this person, apparently not even aware of it, kept pushing her own ideas in extremes that were hurtful and insulting. So much that in the end, despite giving her ample chance to mitigate her insults (meant as misguided "compliments", apparently), I had to delete and block her.
Only the next day I realized - should I really say this in public? Who cares... I realized she was so much like my mother. The same pretense of spirituality while being 100% materialistic, same pretense of open-mindedness while being the opposite.
And so I spent Shitmas back in even deeper depression than I would have without this nasty incident.

But back to the story once more. It's been quite a journey, and at the onset I had only the vaguest idea of where it would take me. I only knew it would have to be quite nightmarish, but in the end leading to salvation. No idea how. I just had it develop on its own.
I realized that in my stories I'm as true to myself as I ever could be. And obviously quite far from my ideal of absolute evil and of being the cold, unfeeling war machine.
I never claimed to be perfect - I know well it would be better for me to be closer to that ideal, it would spare me much pain.