Loki's Unlucky Lineage

Most know Loki as the adopted brother of Thor from the Marvel cinematic universe and actually know very little about Loki's true story. Hailed as the 'mischievous one', Loki is the magical, shape-shifting, gender-swapping, Jötunn ('giant'). His name crops up in just about every sketchy situation the Æsir (Old Norse for 'Gods') find themselves in throughout the legends of Norse Paganism. Since he was always in trouble with the ancient Gods and Goddesses and also a Jötunn, many modern believers (a.k.a. Heathens) dispute his status as a Norse God but have grown to accept his place in the pantheon. After all, Loki and all his children played some very crucial roles throughout the myths. Only there was something very odd about the family of a magic-using, giant from Norse mythology that even the Æsir themselves feared most of his offspring.

1) Nari and/or Narfi – Loki's family started off innocent enough with his son of two names, Nari or Narfi, born of Loki's wife Sigyn. Not much mention was made of this son of Loki except that Nari eventually took a wife and they had themselves a daughter by the name of Nött ('Night'). This made Loki the grandfather of Night. It did not end there because Nött found a husband named Delling ('daybreak') and they had a child named Day. This made the 'Mischievous One' the grandfather of Night and great-grandfather of Day. To be honest, Loki, Sigyn, and Nari kind of sound like your typical family tale from Norse Mythology. At least until one is introduced to Nari's brother, Váli.

2) Váli – Even less mention is made of Loki and Sigyn's other son, Váli. In fac I have only come across him in the tale of Baldr's Death, historically known as Baldr's Draumar; an amazing tale of magic, death, and torture. The 'TLDR;' version of the story is simple enough: Loki duped some Æsir which resulted in the death of Baldr; Odin and Frigga's son. As it turned out, Odin's family is not to be trifled with and he got very cross with Loki. As a punishment, Váli was magically turned into a wolf that eviscerated his brother, Nari. Nari's intestines were then used to lash Loki down to three large stones beneath the dripping mouth of a venomous serpent. Sigyn stood guard above his head and collected the venom in a bowl but when she had to empty it, the venomous drippings fell upon his face. The writhing from Loki's pain caused earthquakes in Midgard, that's the realm we plebeian humans like to call home.

3) Hel – In ancient Norse culture and mythology, marriage was viewed a little differently than today's standards. It was commonplace for both men and women to marry and take consorts, and sometimes multiple consorts. Loki was no exception and one of his mistresses, Angrboða, a giantess from Járnviðr ('Iron-wood'), bore him three stranger children. We'll kick off Angrboða and Loki's brood with Hel, the, er, least weird one? Hel was actually the Norse Goddess of death and she ruled over the deepest of the nine realms, Niflheimr. What was the off-the-wall thing about this daughter of Loki? She was half living woman and half corpse! This is why the Æsir shunned her to rule over the dead believed to be awaiting reincarnation in Éljúðnir, the hall Hel called home.

4) Jörmungandr – Up until Hel, the half-corpse Goddess of Death, Loki's family was relatively normal, at least for Norse Mythology. Jörmungandr was when things really started to get weird. Jörmungandr was Loki and Angrboða's cute, little serpent son. Yea. Seriously. A serpent. Needless to say, the Æsir were displeased and Thor cast Jörmungandr into the oceans of Midgard, in hopes that it would succumb to a watery grave. Instead of death, Jörmungandr ate all the fish and grew too large for the oceans. After it had fled the oceans, it wrapped itself around Midgard to offer protection from evil and chaos. At least until Jörmungandr took part in Ragnarök. Jörmungandr played a crucial role where it crashed into the oceans and flooded the world as Loki and Fenrir rode Hel's ship upon the waves into the final battle. It was in this last skirmish that Jörmungandr brought an end to all humans in Midgard and to Thor, the true protector of the realm.

5) Fenrir – Among Angrboða's brood was another monster with a myth as epic as that of Baldr's Draumar. Fenrir, the monster beneath the Ván, was Loki's wolf-son. Fenrir was not a werewolf or a shape-shifting human. He was, straight up, a wolf. The Æsir, mainly Odin, felt that he could be tamed so they agreed to keep Fenrir and feed him daily. Being of Jötunn blood, grew into a massive beast of a wolf. He grew so large that only Tyr, the sword-God, was brave enough to continue to feed him. As he grew in size, the Æsir became more and more aware that he would never be tamed and decided he must instead be tethered. So they fired up their forges. Fenrir's strength was so mighty that he busted out of both the chains that the Æsir had made to confine him. Shocked by his might, they called upon the dwarfs of Svartálfaheimr to construct a binding strong enough to hold Fenrir. The dwarf blacksmiths answered the call with Gleipnir, a silken-looking binding that Fenrir was tricked into wearing. Unfortunately, the trick came at the sacrifice of Tyr's sword-hand. As he struggled to free himself, the Æsir managed to jam his mouth open with a sword. The pommel in his lower jaw and the point against the roof of his mouth. The drool the seeped from his agape jaw became the river Ván.

6) Sleipnir – I had to save the weirdest of Loki's children for last and Sleipnir was an easy choice. Loki is the mother to an eight-legged horse named Sleipnir. Yea. You read that right. Mother of an eight-legged horse. Way back when as the Æsir constructed Asgard a wanderer appeared with an offer for him and his horse, Svaðilfari, to construct a wall around Asgard. In return for their work, the wanderer requested the sun, moon, and Freyja, Goddess of love and war. The Æsir thought he could not complete it in time and agreed to this payment but only if it was completed in one year. As time passed, the wall grew around them until there were only days left on the deadline and just a gate to complete. Always quick to blame Loki, the gods and goddesses decided that the wanderer must have been sent to them as a trick; they threatened Loki with a gruesome death should the wanderer finish the wall in time. Loki, motivated by fear, changed himself into a mare and distracted Svaðilfari the only way he knew how. Sex. He had sex with the wanderer's horse. Since Svaðilfari was gettin' busy with Loki-mare, the wanderer failed to meet his deadline. Enraged at his failure, the wanderer revealed himself to be a Jötunn and Thor made quick with the Mjölnir-style smashy-smashy on his skull. It was too late and Loki was pregnant with foal. Some time later, Loki revealed his gray-haired, horse of a son named Sleipnir as a gift to Odin. Sleipnir, with twice the legs as a normal horse, ended up being the fastest horse in all nine realms and found his way into a multitude of other Norse myths.

Well, there you have it. The wild and weird offspring of the mischievous God of fire, Loki. A family lineage wrought with scandal, death, magic, torture, and even a dash of bestiality. Loki's Springer-esque family tale doesn't stop there either. Due to the restrictions of ancient record keeping, we are left with only a few sources for the legends. From not being able to cross reference names, it is actually believed that Angrboða and her son Fenrir got down and dirty to make some incestuous wolf-babes. If this was really how it happened, then not only was Loki a father and a mother but he was also a grandfather-bastard-uncle.

Where have I been?

Wow. It has been quite some time hasn't it? Life has been, er...interesting. I have moved around a little, changed jobs, took on new hobbies, and even picked up a trade that has been a lifelong dream. At first, I made myself too busy to focus on this blog. Eventually, it just kind of sank away from my thought. I have recently been applying myself for some freelance writing jobs and gigs and realized, "holy shit, man! You've got a blog you completely crapped out on." So I'm back.
This blog is going to take a little bit of a new turn as I have changed some aspects of my life that I wish to include here. This blog will now be the not-so-mindless musings of a modern American heathen. I'm going to keep writing fiction and poetry but I feel I'm going to end up incorporating my faith into this a little bit more as I found it somewhat difficult to find a lot of information when I started getting into it. To elaborate, I have somewhat recently become a believer and practitioner of Germanic Paganism. Most know this as Norse Paganism but it was practiced all over Europe. It's also known as Heathenry and Asatru. Just to clarify, I am a staunch adherent to Declaration 127 and you will find no nazi/fascist/white supremacist/homophobic promotion, advocation, or propaganda here.

Be back shortly with something for everyone to read.

A Different Story

I've always been filled with the urge to become an eco-terrorist. Was I alone on this one? To just live in hammocks, high up in the canopy, spiking trees, and cutting the fuel lines of bulldozers? Steal the explosives that rip apart the unique American terrain and use them to destroy the constructs that dry it up? Dismantle the surveyor's markings and hide my tracks in the moonlight? ...Hayduke would have been with me.
     So would have Hawkins.
     He was always with me for anything.
     Don't get me wrong on this one. The kid was a great friend and I would have protected him to both of our deaths. That was the problem. No matter how either of us felt, we were side by side.
     I guess that's really why we ended up together. Here.
     We had plotted it for some time. We had prepared, planned, prepped, even got down to physical training so we could outrun our adversaries if the incident arose. Neither of us had been quick enough for what we ended up dealing with.
     We were together, living in the beautiful and majestic American southwest. We grew tired of the atrocities that we saw impact the landscape that had been cultivated over eons and had just started to discuss doing something about it. We even followed Abbey's Monkey Wrench Gang and started to plant strategic caches and plot out attacks against key points in the terrain.
     Honestly, most of it was just a loud, drunken chaos of he and I yelling at each other over the music at whatever bar we had picked out that evening. Aside from the caches and our newly acquired desire to exercise, each night after we had worked out, anyone in our town could find us at the bar. The cops in town had even grown akin to shouting at us from their patrol cars as we harassed the college students for never working for their keep.
     This was our regular routine.
     Until that night. That night where we finally left to enact one of our plans.
     It was a small one.  They had been building a new road up the side of the mountain. It would connect a suburb to the tiny downtown hub where we lived. A connection, though, that would change the economy and allow for a new mining industry to grow that had been started near the suburb. We were on our way to just pull out the surveyor's markings when we ran into him.
     He was our town's newest criminal. A serial rapist. His picture had just been posted about town earlier that week. That's not to say the situation wasn't a dead giveaway. He was on top of his newest victim.
     Hawkins ran up on him. I knew it wouldn't go well, he was a small framed man. He was definitely a scrapper but no match for the bastard, twice his size, that he ran towards. Nonetheless, Hawkins caught him off guard and kicked him right in his chest.
     He fell of of the poor woman with an exhale of air.
     It didn't take him long before he pounced from the ground on top of Hawkins and started to pummel him in the chest.
     I felt for my knife on my hip. I had never used it before for anything but just skinning animals so as soon as I touched it, my conscience told me to leave it rest. I ran in and tackled the bastard into a puddle in the alley.
     He and I were evenly matched. Same size. Same build. I think the difference that mattered was that I had grown up with an older brother, and Chuck liked to pick fights with me.
     He swung at me. One. Two. Three times. The first and last connected with either side of my jaw. Luckily, that had always been Chuck's favorite move in a fight.
     I shrugged off the blows like they were mere glances of a dagger against my iron shield and came in on top of him. My hands were clenched together and came down on his nose with the meat of my palms. I knew immediately that I had entirely separated his nose from his face as blood spurted all over my pants.
     His surge of adrenaline must have kicked in as he tossed me away like a doll. I hit the ground on the opposite side of the alley and my head bashed against the back door of a pizzeria.
     As he came running at me, Hawkins came in for a tackle like he was the game-winning linebacker and stole the bastards breath from him again. Hawkins stayed on top of him this time.
     Hawkins had found a sizable rock in the alley and began to use it as a fist pack.
     I joined in with swift kicks to the rib cage from my steel toed boots.
     We would have him now. We would pummel the life out of the bastard and he would go to jail to receive the same he had felt so righteous about doling out in the months prior to our midnight rendezvous.
     After a moment, Hawkins stood up and joined me. The fight had turned into a right proper romp. We made blood blisters of waffle iron markings in his forehead as our Doc Martens stomped down on his face. It was after that blissful moment of blood and boots that I kicked him in the ass and he flipped onto his hands and knees.
     I'm still not sure how he did it but he survived the beating with enough wits about him to scamper into the bushes on his hands and knees. The only thing I can surmise now is that it was the red and blue lights that flickered down the alley that had scared the pathetic excuse for a man off and into the darkness that shrouded the bushes.
     The cops came in on us fast. From both sides of the alley too. We were trapped. Not worried.
     The first cop jumped out and cuffed us immediately.
     We had been expecting as much. To go to jail as the two guys that kicked the ass of the serial rapist, that was something we had been willing to do. The ideals of our eco-terrorism had been long forgotten as we sat in the back of the squad car and waited for the cop to pop in and ask us how it felt to be the first people to pummel that bastard's face.
     When he finally came in, we couldn't believe our ears.
     "You two are under arrest for the rape and murder of this poor bitch in the body bag right over there. What the fuck do you two bastards have to say for yourselves?"
     We were too worried and dumbfounded to even say a word. So he carted us off to jail as the real bastard probably laughed at us from the bushes he had hidden behind.
     I'll make a really long story shorter. We ended up with a public attorney. The swine didn't do us a lick of good. He was caught up in the same hype we had been that night that we attacked the bastard and assumed we were just a couple more low lives that drifted in to ruin his hometown.
     He did absolutely nothing to help us and everything he could to convict us. The blood on my pants was turned into the remnants of my befouling of that poor young woman and Hawkins' bruises in his chest had been inflicted upon him as the woman fought back against his restraining arms.
     A week later, while the trial was still going on, the bastard's body turned up dead in the bushes he had crawled towards. We were charged with his murder and stories were concocted of how we had actually started a raping gang and he had threatened to turn us in and we tried to frame him on that night.
     Now we sit in prison. Our faces smashed against the bars. I day dream of our caches and plans to destroy corporate America's controls on the beautiful backcountry destinations that had been sworn to being protection areas. Hawkins dreaming of 100 proof whiskeys and craft beers. Neither of us regretting killing that bastard ass rapist that never had a chance to do it again.

Monsoon Season

The cliffs are painted
     with the thousand shades of red
     that dance within a campfire.
Their climbs protrude from
     the fresh green junipers,
     sage brushes and grasses,
     like red waves over a green sea.
The hawks circle in the sky
     like gulls above the ocean,
     motionless and waiting for their chance.
In the distance,
     the clouds are gray,
     a dark, smokey shade,
     they drop their waters
     and hide the red waves behind them.
The desert is not arid and lifeless this year.
It breathes with the life of the ocean
     and endures its scars.

Divided

Divide your time between work and life.
What's the difference?
Every day is one step closer.
Like the glow on the floor,
Cracked through an open blind,
It all has to fade away.
The same song on repeat
you find new meaning each time it plays.

Naknek, AK

I know I don't post too often but for the next 6-8 weeks I will be working in a remote village in Alaska. I will be cut off from the world and won't be able to post in that time. I'll be back soon.

The Figure Part 1

He ran across the hotel's lobby floor shouting at me. I was in no mood for whatever gamble this kid had concocted in my short absence. I had just arrived in town from a cross country flight, California to Maine. Maine?
Why the fuck, Maine?!
Fucking politics.
The dismal varicose veins of roadways spattered across America's soil had me in no mood for anything Duke was about to bring up to me.
"Sir!" He ran up to me, his voice high and loud. Very loud. Far too much cheer in that tone he had going too. The kind of tone that was enough to choke a man on his own whiskey. His hubris all stemmed from a low-rent county fair, it was just opposite the city from our hotel.
Shit.
In my childhood, this news would have excited me. My teenage hormones would have hit me with a hard on so stiff that I'd have found a half decent chick to bone all week long. Now, however, in the paramount of my writing career, and my mid-thirties, my brain turned strictly to cocaine, maybe even heroin, and the crazed story that would come from buying the drugs. Every one of the people I would buy from were the twisted personalities that erected the cavalcade of steel rails and rigged games that attracted all the local mouth breathers to what was pathetically dubbed the 'county fair'.
"You can go for your cotton candy and force fried foods deep into your gullet. I'm going for the story." I revealed a cigarette from my coat and promptly lit it as he reminded me of my publisher's commands to keep this young lawyer behind me at all times. Good damned logistics. I dragged my cigarette and swilled my lukewarm beer, "very well then, don't piss your pants, boy, because its time for you to grow the fuck up and I ain't about to hold your hand."
We hopped into the convertible Duke had conned out of the rental shack near the airport. He wasn't bad for a rookie lawyer but I could tell he and I were about to pop every damned cherry in one night. I sped off from the hotel parking lot and hopped a curb as I pulled two bones out of my hat. I smacked my lips down on one and through the wind that rushed down into the front seat, I lit it up with a crack of my Zippo. I held one out for the boy to snag, "you smoke any of this shit while you were in college?" Of course I didn't give him time to respond. I just snapped the lit on out of my mouth and tossed it into has lap, "smoke it or get your suit burned, you make the choice."
Who the fuck really knows why the publishers assigned this boy to me. Probably some kind of demented hazing they had been planning for their next new lawyer. They took a good man from my life, someone I'd considered a sidekick. A real lawyer, a true man. They fired him after he messed up an incident with a sweet and sexy publicist I'd chose to include in a story I had written up for small time publication while I lived in the Florida Keys. Apparently she wasn't too pleased that I had not refrained from changing her name, for artistic purposes, really.
The fair was exactly what I had expected it to be; the fattest men and women, children with high blood pressure and diabetes, and people so lazy they were abandoned all day in front of the same forsaken funnel-cake stand. The putrid smell of the fair gagged me as deep inside, that teenager wanted to come rushing out and find myself some strange lady to desperately try to impress as I regale them with made-up stories of war from my time spent in the military. I was a foolish little piece of shit. I looked behind me, Duke was following me like a drunk chicken, and swayed side to side each time we would have to stop in the crowd. I had all ready smoked the brains from his head and whiskey from the driver over really soaked into his blood stream.
My hound dog nose went right to work. Would it be PCP, cocaine? China white? The thought of what I could find was an easy distracting from the depraved sea of people that we swam. We quickly found ourselves in the seed backside of the county fair. We were in the dark alleys created by the campers and RVs that you dared not even look down as a child. That was where I found my people. The liquor slugging, rail snorting, pot smoking brethren that would get me my fix for the proper writing tools.
Duke's face was priceless as we approached a group of drunkards. His chin actually touched his chest and his skin as pale as an egg shell. Their radio blasted as they sat out in the chairs, a typical scene for me from my group of friends but Duke's lavish law school lifestyle had not prepared him from what we walked up on. I could smell the sweetened skunk odor layed thick in the air and I knew immediately that these would be the right people.
"God damn is it good to see some fine gentleman in this squalor they call a fair," I spat my cigarette on the ground and quickly lit another then pulled the whiskey out from my coat, "anyone care for pull?" They all took me up on my offer and I wasted no time as my bottle was spun around, "any you men want to make a little money and help another man out?" Their eyes stared right through me, "Jesus, have you all gone catatonic all ready? What hell did you take? I want some for myself and my colleague here."
They looked Duke over, he was definitely my weak link. I new the young blood could be my undoing on this adventure but he did have to be hot on my heels. Their eyes came back on me and obviously alpha male rose from his tattered lawn chair and approached me with his shoulders cocked back and a sideways stride. I assumed he hid a gun on his hip I couldn't see.
"Why'd we sell to a bloke like you? Bet you're a cop," his draw was definitely from the British Isles.
"Good god, are you Irish?"
"Accent don't mean a thing," now it was as redneck as the deepest Cajun.
"God damn, I know I"m not on enough drugs yet to be going this crazy. Pick a region and stick to it!" That was a a mistake. He picked slur of sounds that billowed out from his throat, I could only assume it to be Russian. "Come on! This is America and we speak English."
"Good on, ya."
"I'll be happy with Australian, so long as you speak fucking English!"
"Easy there, mate. You don't have to go mad on us," brave son of a bitch had the gumption to snag the cigarette right from my lips and take a drag. "How do we know you ain't know cop, undercover and here to bust the gyps that rolled in with the carnival?" He then pushed the cigarette back into my lips, he had soaked in enough slobber to disgusts a saint Bernard.
"Duke here is my lawyer."
"That's really going to help your situation, isn't it."
"Depends on if you would be offended on speaking with my very inebriated publication lawyer. You could really think of him as your human resources guy." I handed my flooded cigarette back to him and pulled out another, "in fact, seeing as he really is here more for you than me, it could really behoove you to have a nice long conversation with him while I finish my whiskey and get to know your company."