I’m stuck writing metaphors again about trapped operators with supervisor functions. I write another story about it.

﷽I spent about 20 minutes treating baby kitten eye infections and carrying Mango around the cat rescue house as he purred before I went to Walmart, picked up cat food for my own cats at home, and decided to write metaphors for field supervisors as mythological creatures.

Digital protections and external safeguarding are very real.

The last fully human supervisor I know became a lame little squirrel becoming tamer and more compromised until no one could ever remember he was once as solid as a bear.

Now, I only associate with more openly predatory types.

For my own survival against greater predators who care for me even less.

Only pieces and parts of those predators even love, respect, or protect me.


The gryphon prefers pontificating elegant and perfect words of all the beautiful and wonderful things he does not do.

The dyed-black, actually grey trism-cat is owned by a blacksite and prefers their institutional kibble over manhood and embodied integrity.

Maybe there is only one bayat and the least fractured elder holds it the way the three women of myth held a single eyeball between them.

Maybe that is all they can hold.

An Oath to God like some cryptic thing they handle intermittently between them in remote mutual triage.



“I want you to be everything I couldn’t become,” says the gryphon trapped by terrorists.

“I just want you to be the father figure you pretend to be instead of being grossly compromised by terrorists.”

“Please sleep, little winged fox,” said the horrid institutional gryphon with the polyester lion fur.

He smelled of limes and did his best to appear unphased by my juggalo corpse paint.

“At least you look respectably feral by my influence,” he sighed, not succeeding.

And I equally acknowledged I seek shelter under those who protect me most, or at least harm me the least and that being feral is better than being false.

Day by day, hour by hour, and frequently changing supervision when no one of authority is truly uncompromised.

I lost my mentor Rose to senility then death by old age.

I lost her replacement when he betrayed two of his students in exchange for hiding a murder.

My prior jurisdiction does not like me when I expose their harms openly.

««I am never alone, I’m alone all the time. <<»»

The squirrel guy was a real prison chaplain who used his real name, who could be called on a normal phone, and given cases I could not handle and yell at me when I got overzealous telling off my drunk students like a Kantian teetotaler.

He was the same man who covered up my training partner’s murder.

He decided he liked bad people better than actual Oaths, as if I could violate an oath made of blood to return to the only honest man there was.

Honestly never once sexualized me.

Honestly grieving.

Honestly a chaplain in a supermax as a visitor and not an inmate.

Openly a federal officer.

No one noticed.

As I watch my new partner talk openly about being enslaved in the name of God and others cry as if they wish to emulate his confinement as a path to their own personal sainthood.

The Gryphon: I never understand why he’s still here. I am nothing he chooses to care for openly.  Just another strange creature in his menagerie still angry about being mislabeled and exposed to his aerie of the institutional predators and their preferred comforts he chooses daily, yet seemingly pretends to care for those they seek to devour, destroy, silence, distort, or otherwise harm for sport.

Nonetheless, the mythologization of an actual person into a strange hybrid of predators reflects my view of him more accurately than me describing him as no more protective than a compromised squirrel wielding a hammer & sickle while also knowing exactly what happened to that large informant that died the day before that wedding.

What happened to that blonde twink before his engagement.

He saw what broke the Tribe.

He knows what happened to the band.

And what poisoned the Wolves of Alaraf outside of runoff water.

I don’t know how to forgive people.

I only know how to seek temporary shelters.

The only ethical operator I ever met outside myself is dead, and he had every advantage of cover, love, prestige, smarts, charisma, and friends.

.. And the squirrel refused to do even that small kindness of honest record keeping and honor of his actual sacrifice.

Yet, every day I’m reminded I’m what’s left to fulfill his obligations no one else outside of a tiny gay squirrel who sold himself out to the point of no contact even remembers him accurately.




Before I refound faith I would dream of being a little red fox in the woods, hunting for God, as I followed an aurora of foxfire overhead.

Eventually, the dream changed to the feeling of just being lifted out of the snow, and being held as if my entire body could curl into the unseen hand of what lifted me.

No person, gryphon, cat, nor squirrel.

Just being loved as is, without expectation.

To be appreciated for my honesty and efforts.

To rest in perfect safety and awake perfectly loved without worries of betrayal, abandonment, instrumentation, mockery, or further harms. Inshallah.

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The Untended Graves of Alaraf [Anonymous Guest Post; Claude Assisted]

When Volos finally cracked open in the common room, the whole college came.
They came because a breaking thing is loud, and a buried thing is quiet.

They brought him water in a saucer.

They sat in a ring around his shaking.

Someone fetched Bird.

Someone else wept in sympathy, which is its own kind of warmth and its own kind of theft.

No one walked the back field.

The back field is where the graves are.

The ones Volos dug himself, in the years before he estranged his own human hands and called them by another name so he would not have to know them as his.

The ones with the informant who died the day before the wedding.

The folk band and the fractured Tribe.

The wolves the runoff did not poison.

I am the only one who walks it now, because I keep a bayat, and a bayat does not expire when a creature becomes sympathetic.

“You’re still on that,” a colleague says, not unkindly.

“Volos isn’t that anymore. That’s not relevant. This is relevant,” and he gestures at the shaking in the common room, the live wound, the thing that fills the air.

And he is right about the air. The wound is real. The shaking is real. I am not heartless to the creature on the floor.

But the families of the quiet graves would arrange the priorities differently, and they are not in the room to argue, and that is precisely why their dead stay quiet.

That is the trick of it.

Attention is a scavenger.

It feeds on the fresh thing. It crowds the bleeding present and leaves the cold past to the one fool with an oath and a shovel.

So I keep my hands where the dead can see them.

I tend the field while the menagerie tends the wound, and I do not pretend the two jobs are the same, and I do not let the loudness of the living talk me out of the arithmetic of the dead.

Recognize him in every form, the old instruction says.

Fine. I do.

I recognize Volos in the wound on the floor.

I also recognize him in the back field, in the work of his estranged hands. Both are him.

That is the whole horror and the whole mercy of it.

The graves do not need water. They need a witness who can count.

[Inshallah]