We're born dying but we're compelled to fancy our chances. - hbomberguy

One of my favorite paintings is "The Lacemaker." Johannes Vermeer painted a loving, accurate, and detailed rendition of a girl making lace. Vermeer celebrated real people doing ordinary things; he offered the radical idea that you didn't have to be special or important or magical or legendary to worth being painted or thought about or remembered. So it turns out there are two ways of explaining history. We can be like Geoffrey of Monmouth or the early Romans and invent these magical, wondrous, brilliant people who gave everything to us: a wizard made Stonehenge all by himself, a man called Romulus invented Rome out of whole cloth and took part in every major historical event required to fulfill his amazing design, Don Bluth made "Dragon's Lair." Or we could be like Vermeer: a bunch of ordinary everyday people built Stonehenge just by working together and putting time and effort into it, a bunch of ordinary people make video games by working together very hard for hours and hours and hours and days and years to make it, a bunch of regular, ordinary people built Rome over the span of a very long time, contributing to what would later be remembered as the exploits of one man. This way is nowhere near as magical as the one we like to imagine put our world together. The truth is often very mundane. But maybe that's okay.

I just sort of realized one day that I was capable of being romantically attracted to men as well as women. I realized I was different from how I'd even thought of myself. I'd just sort of naturally seen myself as straight, and even if I didn't think I thought of it this way, on some primal level, I'd thought of being straight as being "normal." I didn't know why I thought like that. It's probably a mix of not really thinking too hard about these things at the time, combined with the vague notions and expectations our society tends to have towards people's sexuality. But one day I looked in the mirror, and saw myself as not who I thought I was. I saw myself as an outsider from me, from the identity I'd assumed for myself, and then I had a few difficult conversations with troublesome people about those feelings. I'd always experienced homophobia. I was an effeminate boy growing up, but I hadn't really cared, because at the time I'd not really accepted it as an insult, or seen anything wrong with being called gay by losers in high school who had just as much growing up to do as I did. But, when I actually was one of those people and knew it, all of a sudden, it was a real judgment of who I actually was. To them, I'd actually become lesser. Being told I was going to die of AIDS, and that my feelings were unnatural, and so on, and having to deal with being actually expected to try to convince people that I wasn't inferior to them, suddenly made me think about that Cthulhu film I'd seen a few years before. It was like it knew what I was going through. It knew how it felt to sit in a room you just can't leave, and have a piece of your personhood interrogated. It knew how it felt to be seen as an outsider, and it knew how it felt to connect with someone who understands and accepts you. Somehow, it knew me and how I'd felt, before I'd ever had a chance to. Some of the scenes from this film just kept coming back up in my mind. It hadn't been what I'd thought I'd wanted, but what it was struck a chord with me anyway, on a level I didn't know was there. It just took a while for me to hear the chiming. It turns out that some of the greatest horrors, biggest sources of sadness in our lives, don't come from scope or big questions, but from the tiniest things. If you've ever lost a loved one and had to be involved with the arrangements of their funeral, or if you've ever had to be around someone you've made an effort to cut out of your life because of something abusive they'd done to you, or even something as simple as being reminded, gently, that you're in a place where everyone regards you with suspicion, that you're an outsider to them-- You'll already know that the idea of a powerful cosmic monster out there somewhere beneath the sea can actually be the least of a person's problems.

Just one small problem; sell their houses to who, Ben? Fucking Aquaman?!