Personal: I Have a Lot of Feelings about a Lot of Things

I have lost track of how many missed cleaning appointments there were. It's been weeks. I've been scheduling twice a week since November in hopes of getting one a month. Which is annoying, but not nightmarish right now, but gets ugly fast in March, when Goth Millennial is going to burn through all their hours fast taking care of me post surgery.

The Millennials are working out a cooking schedule between them, but this is a huge load on Goth Millennial's shoulders.

Basically the company Medicare is out sourcing to is falling apart because treating their contract workers like shit and lying to them about things like mileage compensation when hiring them is a terrible business model in this economy on top of being an incredible shitty way to treat humans. My decision to start calling them the Asshole Agency within a week or two of starting to deal with them continues to be vindicated. The workers there need a union since the company is devoted to it's assholery, but I get why it's easier to quit.

The system is collapsing, basically. The Medicare advantage people know this and are "discussing options."

So Friday I spent hours playing phone tag with local volunteer organizations trying to get six weeks of help, but those systems are already flooded with people who are supposed to be getting Medicare advantage help, but can't because the Asshole agency isn't sending people and hasn't been for months. Still, I was hoping a short term acute need might get me in. The secular one got right back to me. They are full up. No word yet from the Catholics and the group that coordinates a bunch of protestant organizations.

I have been told over and over to try to get a church involved, but I'm not Christian and it feels weird, especially since most of my contacts with Christian strangers in the last couple decades involve aggressive proselytizers. I have Christian friends who are cool. I have no beef with the Quakers or the Unitarians or the Episcopalians or the Catholics who are trying to change things from within (Nuns on a Bus, queer friends trying to push their parish left) or what have you. I do have a beef with extremists, which most evangelicals are and the more conservative strands of catholic, orthodox, and Protestantism and there are a lot of door to door Mormons, Jehovah's witnesses, etc. in my part of the country.

Look, a had late family members who were very involved in their churches who were decent people with reasonable views. I was a Queer Medievalist and I have some sexy late medieval saint pin ups to prove it mixed in with all my other art, some of which references assorted other religions, despite never having been Catholic. I have a Quaker friend closer to me than my own sister.

I just… Christian religious strangers in my house make me uncomfortable as a queer non-Christian in a country where Christo-fascists are trying to make me literally illegal.

I know it would likely be fine. I did fine and made lots of friends at University which doing a major that is mostly Catholics, Ex-Catholics, and people in the process of converting. I come from a debate culture. I can quote scripture like Satan. ;) I was in Philosophy before I dropped out and moved west and switched to History in one form or another. I can talk theology across a whole lot of denominations and the major "heresies." I just don't want to anymore and I haven't wanted to for a long time. That was long ago and far away when I wasn't so exhausted and in pain.

I should have stared looking last August or October.

I am likely fucked because I waited too long.

Sigh.

In other news, I've been really doing well on the massive number of now mostly advanced physio things I have to do every day.

Sunday I was about a third of the way in when my arm noped out of about another third of Sunday's quota. I am trying to do all the remaining ones that don't move my arm that way, but I'm not sanguine.

I forgot to do my blood work Friday. I have an afternoon pre-op appointment Monday. Let us hope I remember then. I am so tired and it all hurts so much.

Oh oki “fire and brimstone” for Jameson maybe?

CW: Some talk about fundamentalist Christianity from perspective of someone who left and had a bad exprience with it, memory loss, backstory hinting for Jameson, recovering whumpee, mentioned domestic and child abuse

“Every Sunday, rain or shine,” Jake is saying, the skillet in front of him sizzling so loudly with the frying crumbled-up sausage that he has to raise his voice to be heard. “All of us right there for Sunday School at 9, service at 10, on a good day we’d walk back out at noon to go eat.”

Jameson watches him, and thinks, I didn’t come down here to hear your fucking life story.

They’re the first two up, the sun rising in pinks and purples slowly giving way to blue. Jameson had stayed in bed for a while, watching the sky turn gray first, thinking of Allyn’s eyes. 

He’d padded down here to get something to eat, only to find Jake already in the kitchen, pulling out a cylinder of breakfast sausage wrapped in plastic, heating up a flat black cast-iron skillet. Jameson hadn’t asked, but Jake had said it was a gift from his mother.

Pretty sure you’re not allowed to move out where I come from without at least one. Jake’s voice is cheerful, sparking lemon bursts underlaid with something deeper, darker, that Jameson can’t name. Something smoother. 

He’s trying to be friends, Jameson thinks, and he doesn’t want to be friends, not with anyone, but... his mouth is watering at the scent of the sausage cooking and there are biscuits already in the oven, warm dough smell overlaying everything else. 

White Lily Flour, Jake said, patting the bag of it on the counter. I was raised right.

Jake’s lemon voice took on a hint of bitterness. Jameson wonders, sometimes, if he tastes changes in emotion, or if it’s just his brain malfunctioning, sparking off-key. He thinks he tastes the right things. Nobody’s ever asked him about it. He’s never told anyone. 

None of this - baking, cast-iron cooking, church - means a fucking thing to Jameson.

Except... it sort of does.

“Some days,” Jake says, pushing the sausage around with a wooden spoon, breaking up large clumps that are still pink in the center, “We didn’t get out until one. Just depended on what he was pissed off about that day. Then Monday my dad had men’s group, my mom had women’s group on Tuesdays, we had another service Wednesday night - short one, though. Then Youth Group on Fridays once I was old enough... I wasn’t in it for long, though. We left a few months after I was old enough to join.”

Jake stops, for a second, staring down at the sausage. He picks up a small measuring cup and shakes out some flour, stirring the sausage round as it picks it up. 

“Your family get sick of all that fucking sitting?” Jameson asks, just to fill the silence.

Jake swallows. “Nah. Just my mom and I. Got sick of all that fire and brimstone being aimed at us.”

Jameson’s eyebrows come together. Jake’s voice dips, caramelizes, the lemon is sticky-sweet and feels like fuzz sticking in his head. There’s something here he doesn’t get, and he definitely doesn’t give a fuck, only... 

He leans forward. “What’s that mean?”

Jake turns the heat down on the stove, and Jameson watches the gas flame flicker and become smaller. Then he pours milk in from a carton Jameson drank out of yesterday, not that he’s telling anyone, and watches as it heats.

The timer over the oven dings. Jake pulls on his oven mitt and pulls the tray of golden-brown biscuits out, setting them on a folded towel to cool on the counter while he finishes up the gravy. 

For a second, Jameson thinks Jake isn’t going to answer him.

“My Papa - dad’s dad - was head of the men’s group. He’d been a church deacon for decades, preacher’s right-hand man. Nana Stanton ran music, played the organ, organized the choir. My dad was everybody’s favorite son, you know? Preacher and his wife had six daughters. My dad was prob’ly supposed to marry one of them. He married Mom, instead. My mom and I... we caused trouble for him.”

This is weird, and yet Jameson can’t stop the sense that the hair on the back of his neck is standing up. Something is whispering to him, from deep in the recesses of his thoughts. He doesn’t care.

He has to know.

“Trouble how?”

Jake takes a breath, lets it out. Slow exhale. “My Dad’s a piece of shit, that’s all you need to know. Spent a whole fucking bunch of my childhood in the ER, for me or for Mom.”

Jameson feels himself rock forward, like a hand clapped him on the back too strongly, like the handler slapping the deep red welts just to listen to him moan, right on cue, in reply. 

Me, too. I did that, too.

No. False memories are a result of the Drip, of training. He knows that. He knows-

Wait, no, it wasn’t me. It was-

I had to-

Slid a piece of paper across the table with what she needed to escape, money for college and an apartment and a plane ticket as far away as she could get, happy birthday, you got this, never think about this bullshit family again, and the woman sitting at the desk had smiled and said, I think we can make this work for everyone involved, Mr.-

“... needed help,” Jake is saying, as he cooks down the gravy. It had boiled at some point, now he’s simmering, stirring as it thickens, adding salt and pepper. “But they told Mom she should strive to be fucking Godly. That it was better for her to fucking ‘stick it out’ because marriage is fucking sacred. Nobody told my dad not to be the goddamn devil to his wife and kid, you know?”

“Yeah,” Jameson whispers. Jake’s voice is dark now, the lemon is nearly buried by something thick and black with anger. It slides over Jameson’s mind, smooths out the thoughts he is trying desperately to hold onto.

Jake glances over at him. Whatever he reads in Jameson’s face, he sighs, softly. “Sorry, man. You didn’t ask about my bullshit. Sometimes it just... gets to me all over again. Usually whenever my dad manages to manipulate my grandparents or something into giving him my p.o. box address again.”

The headache arrives, swift and sudden, and Jameson closes his eyes against the flash of light, the thunderclap of pain that follows on its heels. 

Jake fixes him a plate of biscuits, gravy piled high, and it smells so so good and Jameson takes his first bite with the sense of a hard wooden bench biting into his spine and the pastor’s voice droning and she was holding his hand, the two of them, knowing this was the last time they’d be here, together.

She sat in church with the plane ticket he’d bought her in her pocket, hidden from them all. He’d held her hand with his heart in his throat, thinking about his brother.

Was it worth it?

What was it, anyway?

Jake sits down across from him, and Jameson looks up through the throb of pain to see those blue eyes focused on him, concerned. “You all right?”

He’s back to lemon, bright and tart, slightly browned from sugar and heat. Like a candied slice on a cake. But Jameson feels the steady rush of a river underneath, flowing under mountains, gradually wearing away the very earth that keeps them standing. 

“I’m fine,” Jameson says, and takes a bite.

What had he done, when he signed up for this?

Who had he done it for?

---

@astrobly @burtlederp @finder-of-rings @whump-tr0pes @raigash @moose-teeth @orchidscript @doveotions @pretty-face-breaker @endless-whump @eatyourdamnpears @boxboysandotherwhump @vickytokio @outofangband @downriver914 @justabitofwhump  @thehopelessopus @butwhatifyouwrite @yet-another-heathen @wildfaewhump

A VERY REMOTE ENGLISH TEACHER

Where meditations, rants, reverie and absent seizures cross over... closer to one gun with one bullet, the rose of ruby and the cross of gold...uff, and MENTACIDE IN THE TIME OF MASQUES. Although I have never suffered from the guilty masochistic torture of ‘pleasure anxiety’, Bacchus hath indeed drowned more men than Neptune.  So I stopped drinking for 18 days to fool myself I was doing something positive and threw away enough things to be minimalist again. Arf. Beauty and/or function uber alles.  

Been treading water for three years and trying not to drown...big round of one hand clapping for the former poet. Meanwhile, in this temporary world and perception I have created of it, I am looking at a very possible exile one way or the other...my ‘plan’...a long phased withdrawal or hasty retreat. My wish is to stay, but once I leave, it might well be very hard to return.  Read as many metaphors as you want into that but in spite of my dislike of the conservatively minded Aristotle’s ‘either/or’ nonsense, there do indeed appear to be only two this time. And appear is the operative word. Appearances can be deceptive and emotions (unless raised and focused) cloud over what should be clear. Pain has a tendency to breed worry and fear too but let’s draw a veil over that for now eh? Suppress, suppress, release comes later...breathe deep and try not to cough, onward we go where the game gets rough...Just like Tom Thumbs Blues 65.  

Remember Roman Protasevich...As Lukasenko himself said...‘Belarus stood at the edge of an abyss and I helped it take a step forward’. Look good on your tombstone that will Al. Fecking outrageous the Indian PM only admitted in May that covid was transmitted in the air. He needs removing... as do two thirds of all the other world leaders East and West. Hello Bollsanaro. People are very easy to manipulate when they’re are scared or angry...and right now the world majority are both. But, ‘there is a crack in everything... that’s how the light gets in’... and ‘things could change’, doesn’t have to be for the worse. It can take decades to realise this as actual truth, but still nice to read and try internalise the following last week.’The odds actually favour the optimists, since dissipate structures are more likely to evolve into more information rich (intelligent?) forms than into primitive or chaotic forms.’ All my friends bar my best one are optimists..Hello you:-)

Ever onward deeper downward with Orban in Hungary and his mission of ‘Christian values’, which involves a familiar routine of arresting, beating and disappearing dissenters in the name of Christ and taking over the universities to replace professors with those who understand on which side their bread is buttered. Decent judges long gone. Nice fascist communism...and ex soldiers in France and the Czech republic warning of civil war...

And now spiraling we go into the black hole vortex of Disaster capitalism, ‘Let the bodies pile high’. There’s gold in them thar ills....ISLAND PARANOIA and PERFIDIOUS ALBION! A country which demands a contract, agrees, signs to it and then refuses to honour it. We look worse than ridiculous, we look deceitful. Gentlemen, your places please. Boris Johnson is a clumsy, inept, disgraceful charlatan, con merchant and LIAR. A blustering master bullshit artist, the only decent thing about his recent secret wedding is that now he legally has one less bastard child.  

Recently I read that British people are displaying signs of Stockholm syndrome...in that they dislike those who hold power over them and make the rules but during the time of pandemic, they are the ones who will release the saviour vaccine and get everything moving again. So rather than rocking the boat and daring to express dissent at the DIABOLICAL handling of the last 18 months, they have mostly kept quiet and voted for the same endlessly failing, corrupt and venal politicians who made a bad situation far worse. (That said, it bears repeating that there are a few million in the UK who didn’t quite understand that that the spread of a highly contagious airborne virus can be slowed by the wearing of masks/applying basic hygiene and even took offence at being told what should have made sense to any adult homo SAPIENS half capable of cogitating for themselves. Morons and scum. Same where you are?

By the way BBC...the colossal dearth of stories about the endless government failures in relation to Covid, death, corruption and the NHS...ever since they blackmailed you with threats of revoking the TV licence fee and got you to change Directors has been noted. Long may Have I Got News For You continue the satire and balance needed in a DEMOCRACY. Obey your public servants? Why, when they do not serve few but themselves? Power OF the people? Which ones...the mob? The same bleating pricks who follow populists?

Four eyed beanpole fop Rees Mogg, with his wonderful line that the benefits of Brexit will be seen ‘over the next fifty years’...well yes, that is why most people vote in democratic elections eh?...So they will be dead or ancient before the change they hoped for comes...and the politicians who lead them now, will have all long moved on to revolving door chairman of the board offshore limited liability company paradise. Bread today jam tomorrow fairytales. What I tell you three times is true.  

O, but the English do so love to be told what to do by dumb posh boys who treat them like dirt. Some are forelock tugging and some are self flagellating middle class upper class wannabes who will never get there but still feel proud they are not street level proles. Doby the house elf alien hamster Michael Gove found guilty of breaking the law. Nothing. Internal inquiries run by those connected to the money changing hands find nothing illegal. Corruption for all to see...and ignore. ‘Well, what can we do?’ The uselessly inept serial failure Dido Harding to be in charge of the National Health Service? (she of the collapsed Woolworths, Talk Talk and the 22 BILLION pound loss of the Covid Track and Trace program where non working consultants/insultants, were paid 1000 pounds a day). American style privatisation is coming where only the wealthy or criminal can afford to be repaired and well. Sick.  

Meanwhile, All our imported nurses out, and all the lobster red fat Spanish costa de la sol criminals back in. Great exchange, fair trade and forward thinking. The Kremlin are manipulating/supporting Scottish independence... I read years ago about their base in Edinburgh for Russia Today (the foul insert in The Daily Telegraph) and they were already encouraging it. Rees Smug has accelerated and supported their freedom with his snobbish utterances on countries in the UK other than England and their ‘foreign languages’. With every patronising, arrogant pronouncement, the Eton trifles fuel the fire in Scotland which has a long bitter history of being tortured, murdered and subjugated by their southern masters. Perhaps the chumocracy in Downing Street believe the Celts to be as easily cowed as the middle and working classes down south. Here’s hoping not. ‘Rebellious Scots to crush’? Not this time pal.

As for the future of Britain? A dystopian open prison where the lower social classes toil only at the pleasure of their masters. The higher caste getting richer and all others cast into a living Hell of debt, crime, and sickness. Serve until you die and be thankful we allow you to exist. Increasing in utter irrelevance to the world, other than as an example of how wrong a former democracy can go. This future started decades ago...its baobab roots truly deep now. Better education and critical thinking for the masses in the UK (or anywhere else) is highly unlikely now. Optimism huh? As long as I am not in England, I will still be able to tap into it, but once enclosed long term in the group mind there...trapped in a grey quagmire. Keep smiling...

Several weeks ago, I watched a video on YT of apparently English protestors running after the police in London, some attacking and throwing things, one pulling off the pandemic mask of an officer and all shouting abuse at the outnumbered cops who had to keep pulling back. As always, to get my caffeine rush of fury going, I read the comments and was surprised to see two or three from Chinese names. Almost all comments were against the government (fair enough) and dumb against the lock down, masks, vaccinations etc. Checking again, I saw the video had been posted by CGTN...a media company owned and run by the communist party in Beijing...and not one author of diatribes had mentioned this, nor speculated with a critical thought as to why such an organisation might enjoy turning people against their own democratically elected government (however mind rippingly foul and corrupt they are).

I copy pasted the Wikipedia paragraph about the company onto the page and hoped someone else would make the connection. I wouldn’t mind so much IF there were a credible and decent alternative other than the diseased populist poison for which the demonstrating goons chant. China really cares about the standard of democracy in Britain eh? Persuade your enemies to weaken themselves. Destroying countries by encouraging their ‘patriots’.

(That was written on the anniversary of Tienanmen Square...a few days later Xi Jinping gave a speech saying ‘...a lovable and respectable’ China must be presented to the world and must ‘expand its circle of friends’. Tell that to your teenage ‘dissidents’, Muslims, Falun Gong and Tibetans being tortured and brainwashed in prisons or being used for organ harvesting. Tell it to Hong Kong and Taiwan.) 

Unholy America...against abortion and the pill, sex education’s not Gods will and in the Name of Christ they kill...if truth be known, we’ve failed the test...but Jesus was a Socialist and Republican conservatives hate them. The founding fathers of America were Very clear about separation of church and state with damn good Reason. Another part time Christian, Mike Pompeo wants to be president. Q Onan deepstorm morons/Kremlin stool pigeons aka POLEZNYYE IDIOTY continue to push for Trump and his Big Lie...He with the brain where ‘In the left, nothing is right and in the right, nothing’s left.’ Arf.

Over the last two decades, the dumb have been finding their voice and are now louder and prouder of their dumbass ignorance. 74 million in the US alone, their egos unable to retreat in the face of endless evidence to the contrary, they all double down. Like children sticking their fingers in their grimy ears sing songing ‘la la la can’t hear you’. 74 million versions of Eric Cartman, loud, proud and wrong. And uuff, Megan Markle,  Majorie Taylor Greene, walking Picasso collage (bad car driver) Caitlin Jenner and Ivana Trump in politics...not exactly holding a proud lantern for women eh? I’d like to buy them for what they are worth and sell them for what they think they are worth. Not very PC?  

That was the point. Could easily been written about all of the men written about here too. Next examples follow...

Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones compete for who can be as mentally ill as trump. The Miami school where the husband and wife directors told teachers not to return if they had HAD their vaccine shots because their proximity to students was interfering with menstrual cycles and uuuufff...The sickness of utter mind buggering stupidity. I had my first shot, now waiting to turn reptilian when the 5G masts triangulate my position. Fnord. Covid appears to be killing more overweight meat eating males than females...perhaps testosterone is not useful for the coming Race of non binary mutant hermaphrodites...and look out for the end of the Y chromosome, coming to a temporary universe near you...in 4.6 million years. Yes, really.  

Glad Netanyahu is out at last, smug corruption is never a good look unless one is a rich criminal. Ha.  The Promised land of Israel...If I was in court for serial murder, breaking, entering and stealing and then defended my actions by saying that God had told me to do it, would the Judge; A. Call for a psychiatric report, B. Disregard the statement as unprovable and pass the appropriate sentence, C, say Ok mate, you’re free to go, good luck to you. ? Moses had a good schtick.

The law is only to punish the poor, do you feel as if you suffer from empathy? Once you know, you no longer need to believe. What does ‘reality’ seem to be? The more certain you are, the stupider you get and belief is the death of intelligence. The machine is running the engineers. What is the definition of rationality...the quality of being based on or in accordance with reason or logic. 

Nothing is, but thinking makes it so. Epicurus.  

EVERYTHING NOT COMPULSORY IS FORBIDDEN.

The glamour illusion of the mass of pointless hot influencers needs a constant renewing of the Banishing Ritual as much as all the pigslop bile coming from Fox News and Sky. Bloody long haired commie liberal faggot they cry against any not identical to them. Some days I have only flamethrowers of hatred for these idiots. Other days...not exactly self doubt, just questions...most of us seem to believe our opinions are more valid when there are emotions connected to them. Including me. Again, this seems like a very weak version of ‘truth’, unless disciplined, channeled and focused to a certain end.

Life appears to exist in order to become via chaos.

Most of us are working only not to be homeless, some because of the joy in our chosen work regardless of finances. Until ‘reality’ kicks in the door...the bondage gets tighter when you struggle. How much hardship is the individual willing to endure these days by choice? Surrounded by a universe of distraction and destruction, Maya mewling for our attention. Five years of Trump, rampant populism and Brexit doing a Hexagram 23 on democracy, compounded by the pandemic...all on top of ‘normal’ daily life. The ego feeds and the immune system breaks down. Hard to ignore without being on a mountain or in a parallel dimension and emotion free other than compassion. But BY GODDESS IT CAN AND WILL BE DONE. Ladies of Life Nin Khursag, Isis, Kali, Aradia...Love one, Love ALL. At very least have respect for thyself but be not thou proud of thine arrogance nor thy suffering.  

Or just Remember where you came from, what you were, seem to be and will become.

Heal, heal, more work to do, more love to give, more love to feel, Heal. Stay in drugs, eat your school and don’t do vegetables. Impose your own reality upon and through yourself, breathe, exhale, repeat, and continue, LOVE UNDER WILL. Experience and absorb but ‘It’s a house of tricks, ignore the world’’.

Stay well, be seeing you:-)

Evanescence’s Amy Lee Gets Back to Life

She’s speaking out like never before — and burning through a new Evanescence album, pandemic or no pandemic

Amy Lee misses Brooklyn. She lived there for 12 years with her husband (and later their son, born in 2015), before they left their apartment for Nashville a year ago.

“The perfect year,” she says with an eye roll over Zoom. Lee had hoped to be closer to her family in Arkansas and friends in Nashville when she moved, only to find herself stuck at home with the rest of the world. “We haven’t gotten [to see people] as much as we would have liked to because of Covid, but now we are here, and we will be set up for a better next year,” she adds optimistically.

That’s not the only plan she’s had to readjust: Earlier this year, her alt-metal band, Evanescence, returned to the studio with producer Nick Raskulinecz, writing and recording songs for what will be their first album of new material since 2011’s Evanescence. While the pandemic slowed them down, the group has forged onward, working remotely at first and later, after getting negative Covid tests, at a Nashville studio. In April, they released the sobering power ballad “Wasted on You” as the lead single from their very much in-progress LP, The Bitter Truth, which is due to be released in early 2021.

“I’m not going to rush,” says Lee, 38. “I’m just trying to live in the moment, feeding my soul with the music.”

When the band began making a concerted effort to work on new material last year, their one rule was that there would be no rules. They began with a wealth of material and inspiration, along with a couple decade-old songs that finally feel ripe for release. Since August, when her U.S.-based bandmates took tour buses to join her in Nashville (guitarist Jen Majura has remained in Germany), they’ve been powering through the rest of the album.

“The energy was just amped,” Lee says. “We were in there on fire. Now, the guys are back at their homes, and I am wading through the aftermath of all the music, piecing it together and finalizing the record.” In some ways, she says, lockdown has been a blessing: “The upside of this time is that I’ve had to buckle down and focus. Even on the days that I don’t want to, I come out here and I go, ‘Let’s do this. Let’s finish the album.’ ”

The near-decade leading up to The Bitter Truth has been both eye-opening and invigorating for Lee. After the release of Evanescence, the group went on hiatus to deal with a legal dispute with their former label. Lee took some time to work on solo projects, including a children’s album. When the band got back in the studio, it was to reimagine their past hits with orchestral arrangements for the 2017 LP Synthesis.

Those changes, among others, mean that The Bitter Truth will be their first album with the current lineup of Evanescence. The band has changed significantly since Lee formed Evanescence as a duo with guitarist Ben Moody in 1995, the year after they met at a Christian youth camp in Little Rock at age 13. Lee, whose father worked in the radio business, had grown up loving Motown before seeing the film Amadeus and falling for classical music. “I wanted to be like Mozart,” she says. “I begged for piano lessons. I got to take piano lessons. Then grunge hit.”

Soon, she was deep into the radio rock of the day, like teens across America, listening to Nirvana, Soundgarden, Tori Amos, and Beck. At the same time, she was writing poetry and thinking about the connections between her favorite sounds. “It just all fell together,” she says. “The heavier the music — the more it was in the Metallica, Pantera world — the more similarities I could draw with Bach and Beethoven.”

Evanescence signed their first record deal in the late Nineties, when Lee was 19 and starting to study theory composition at Middle Tennessee State University. It took a few independent EPs and a jump to a major label for the duo to become a full band, enlisting a few friends for their first full-length album, 2003’s Fallen. The LP became one of the year’s hugest commercial success stories, going platinum seven times over and making them instant peers to Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, Norah Jones, and Avril Lavigne. “Bring Me to Life,” its thrashing thunderstorm of a lead single, became an enduring goth-pop anthem, with follow-up “My Immortal” not far behind. At the 2004 Grammys, Evanescence took home the Best New Artist trophy, beating out 50 Cent and Sean Paul, and Fallen was nominated for Album of the Year (it lost to Outkast’s unstoppable Speakerboxxx/The Love Below).

Behind the scenes, though, success proved difficult for Evanescence to handle. “It was weird,” Lee says now. “I grew up in public.” She was surprised that an album so informed by real-life darkness, including the tragic death of her sister when they were both young kids, could yield Top 40 hits. “[We were] rock-band kids at the Grammys or the American Music Awards or whatever, rubbing elbows with the pop stars of the day,” she adds. “When we won, it felt like somebody was going to jump out from behind and surprise us and go, ‘Just kidding. Losers. You don’t belong here at all.’ ”

Lee spent the band’s first major tour worrying about an ailing brother, and tensions in the band boiled over with Moody’s dramatic departure halfway through a 2003 trek across Europe; he has never returned to the band. “I remember lots of times just wanting to go home,” Lee says. “I was the only female for miles, and I felt alone in my band and on the road.”

Every rock era has been defined by how few women have been able to break through to the mainstream, and Lee felt isolated even as her operatic mezzo-soprano became one of rock’s definitive voices. At one radio show, a DJ introduced the band by admitting that he had “jacked off” to the Fallen album cover, a close-up of Lee’s face. After the first song and a few minutes of simmering rage, Lee called him out. At another show, she interrupted her performance to confront a few members of the mostly male audience who were chanting “Show your tits.”

It took until this year for Lee to feel comfortable expressing her opinion on politics, speaking out in interviews against Donald Trump and the police killing of George Floyd. On “Use My Voice,” released as a single this summer, she makes it clear she’s no longer willing to stay quiet: “Drown every truth in an ocean of lies,” she sings. “Label me bitch because I dare to draw my own line/Burn every bridge and build a wall in my way/But I will use my voice.”

Evanescence recorded the song with backing vocalists including Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale and the Pretty Reckless’ Taylor Momsen — two leading voices in today’s hard rock who told Lee she’s been a major influence on their careers. “That started giving me life,” Lee says. “It made me pour myself into it with a new sense of understanding and purpose and confidence that what I was saying was worth hearing.”

The way Mason Hewitt gets utterly erased by fandom, replaced by Theo to be Liam's friend and anchor. And I think one reason he's left out of fic so much is because as we've discussed he is basically Fanon!Stiles. And to have him around in a story with Fanon!Stiles would look suspicious because... they're the same, except Stiles is actually nothing like fanon. And they'd rather *die* than portray intimate scenes with Mason because they find Black people disgusting to be frank (pt. 1)

and I've seen it in every fandom. They gush about loving ~the gays~ but ignore canon gay/bi boys, esp if they're PoC. And it's all about straight yt boys boning, and what they get off on. And because they don't find Black or Brown ppl attractive, they get no love scenes. Mason was openly thirsting for Brett, but fandom was silent because "eww, canon Black gay expressing lust healthily?" And this is what we mean when white fangirls fetishize gay/bi male ships/dynamics (pt. 2)

And I touched on that yt fangirls will misappropriate progressive language when it suits their agenda. Like dismissing Scott as a "cishet yt boy" yet worshipping Stiles + Derek. And they often try to make that worship seem progressive by claiming Stiles or Derek are nonwhite/Jewish, or claiming werewolves are a allegorical oppressed group (no) yet ignore Scott is Brown *PLUS* he's a werewolf too, so they claim he's an intruder on ~werewolf culture~ and a colonizer (final)

You are not wrong in any aspect.

We've talked ad nauseam about the appropriation of mlm sexuality and giving it to the straight, white characters. And as you said, its almost exclusively the white fangirls who get off to two guys together rather in the same way that straight men get odd to lesbian porn. The fact that they don't see that they're just doing the very same thing that they hate men for doing is... well, sad is the first word that pops into my mind.

I know you don't watch any of the SKAM shows, but I experienced a similar problem over there. By far the most popular storyline across any of the remakes is the season three story, that being a closeted gay man coming to terms with his sexuality and embracing it rather than trying to suppress it. But the thing is, if you actually go through the tags, that's not the sense you get at all. Most of the people that watch these shows, or at the very least the ones who are the most vocal in the tags, are only focused on the romance in the story.

They didn't care the actual struggles of being in the closet and the journey that character has to go on to accept themselves. They just wanted to see two boys kissing. That became very apparent during the last remake to do that story, WTFOCK. They changed up the timeline and didn't introduce the love interest until the third episode, and those three weeks were just filled with constant complaints. This was further compounded when we saw the main character, Robbe, do what a lot of closeted young people do, and he tried to have a relationship with a girl, hoping that it would "make him normal". The tags were littered with homophobic jokes about how Robbe was "secretly straight" and it was extremely disheartening, especially from the fandom of a show that preached acceptance.

And you can't call them out on this behavior. I did and half the fandom blocked me because I, an actual gay man, wouldn't let a bunch of horny fangirls be the voice of a gay man's struggle. I was also bugged down with anons (similar to the one that's haunting my inbox right now) claiming that the reason they were so keen on the love interest showing up was because he was a "healthy representation of mental illness". Of course, they then went about proving how much they didn't actually care about that by spending the entire season trying to diagnose Sander at every opportunity, but the romanticizing of mental illness is another matter entirely.

To circle back to the point, we were given actual, healthy mlm representation on Teen Wolf, but fandom outright ignores it in favor of focusing on a non-existent relationship that was based entirely on negative stereotypes. But that's the crux of the matter, isn't it? They don't care how their behavior actually affects gay and bisexual men, so long as they get their own sexual satisfaction. You point out how having an adult and a minor in a relationship just reinforces the predatory gay pedophile stereotype that the Christian Far Right have tried to categorize us as for decades (if not longer) and they cry "it's just fiction!" But these same people talk about the stigma of unhealthy body types for women because the girls of these shows are skinny and petite while able to run marathons and fight of almost anything.

This is never more prominent than when they continously call for more LGBT representation, always mlm and never wlw, and then go out of their way to ignore that representation because it wasn't what they wanted (ie. completely thowing out their stories for Stiles and Derek and devoting everything to making them a couple, often at the expense of everything else.)

The term double-standards clearly means nothing to them.

And we could shout until our voices are gone about the racism in this fandom, but those who perpetuate it don't care enough to listen. They don't want to hear how them going out of their way to erase or put down Scott, the Latino lead of the show, at every opportunity is racist. They don't want to hear how them taking all of Scott's most prominent attributes (his compassion and loyalty and persistence) and giving them to Stiles to make him more palatable is racist. They don't want to hear how them completely ignoring the canon gay characters, who are also characters of color, in favor of taking straight characters and "turning them gay" is not only racist but homophobic.

They don't want to hear any of that. They want to live in their little fantasy world where everyone recognizes their genius and that they right all along. The real kicker is that I'd be more than happy to leave them alone in their own little world, but they refuse to be put out to pasture, hence the reason Athena is still jumping on pro-Scott posts, or that someone posted anti Scott content in the Scott McCall tag, or the ever present anon. They refuse to leave us alone so we have to rehash these same arguments over and over in the futile hopes that maybe this time it'll stick.

2021 / 02

Aperçu of the Week:

Pizza is like the Beauty of God (My 12-year-old son Luca).

Bad News of the Week:

Our current governing party, the CDU, elected a new leader yesterday. The successor to Angel Merkel, who will remain chancellor until the federal elections in the fall. Toward the end of the Merkel era, fundamental questions arose about the future direction of Germany's largest party - from radical progressive change to a "carry on like this" in the famous political center to a revival of conservative values.

Much has changed in the political landscape during the 16 years of Merkel's government: the inexorable advance of globalization, rising populism, social polarization and imbalance, increasingly pressing issues such as sustainability and ecology, and much more. On the whole, Germany is not in a bad position - it is proving to be an anchor of stability, is assuming responsibility, and is able to carry all classes and groups along reasonably well. And some of the political decisions of the conservative party can certainly be seen as forward-looking, e.g., the simultaneous phase-out of fossil and nuclear energy (for an industrial country!) or same-sex marriage (for a party that calls itself the Christian Democratic Union and has a head of government who is the daughter of a pastor!). Nevertheless, Germany is also too slow in its reactions to the current challenges, not to mention proactive actions.

In this respect, the new chairman now elected, Armin Laschet, is only a tepid compromise that is more likely to administer Merkel's legacy than to modernize it. Opportunity missed. No wonder he fares rather poorly in the opinion polls "Can Laschet be chancellor?" These polls, in turn, are dominated by Markus Söder, leader of the regional sister party CSU and Bavarian prime minister, who has by far the best values as a classic leader. And that's the problem: historically, a Bavarian king has never become German emperor, and the two bids by Bavarian leaders for the chancellorship have also flopped. A Bavarian has always been considered difficult to place nationwide, and an unsuccessful attempt would weaken the party and the person.

So what will happen? In the medium term, it will hardly be possible without the conservatives: the Social Democrats are too outdated and too weak, the Liberals a shadow of their former selves, the Greens still too dogmatic, the Socialists too radical, the right-wing populists indiscernible. So in the federal elections this September, it boils down to a motley coalition that gets in each other's way, argues over trivialities and shimmies from one minimal consensus to the next. And that won't be enough to successfully address the fundamental challenges that will set the agenda this decade in a forward-looking way.

Good News of the Week:

Hard to believe in these turbulent times, but - if you look for it - there is also positive news to report. In matters of environmental protection and sustainability, for example. Here some highlights:

According to a study by a research team from Germany and the U.S., every U.S. dollar invested in rainforest protection saves $5.40 for other climate protection measures. Costa Rica has 5% of the world's animal and plant species, with a population of only 5 million - thanks to conservation measures over the past 30 years, about 30% of the country's land is now a nature reserve. A project in western Uganda aims to plant more than 3 million trees, restoring long-term habitat for endangered chimpanzees, as well as for more than 50 percent of the birds, 39 percent of the mammals, 19 percent of the amphibians and 14 percent of the reptiles and plants of mainland Africa.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE has calculated that by 2020, for the first time, more than 50 percent of Germany's electricity demand will have been generated from renewable sources. The Viennese start-up Greenwell Energy has developed a concept to generate geothermal energy from abandoned oil wells that can be used, for example, to heat greenhouses.

In Bali, there is the world's first rehabilitation center for dolphins, which are thus prepared for release into the wild after a life in dolphinariums or zoos. In Austria, window surfaces of high-rise buildings and passenger trains, for example, are covered with a special film that reflects ultraviolet light - invisible to humans but visible to birds, which thus no longer bang against the panes.

A Spanish researcher has found that seaweed on the ocean floor combines with free-floating plastic to form fiber balls, which the sea then washes onto the beach in a self-cleaning manner, potentially binding 860 million plastic particles per year. Two Germans have built a barrier on the Citarum in Indonesia, still the world's dirtiest river in 2013, that fishes out up to 1,000 kilograms of trash per week.

And in Freiburg, Baden, near the French border, parents are given an already two-meter-high fruit tree as a gift for the birth of a child, which - in the absence of a garden or balcony of their own - can also be donated to the public. The sum of these and countless other aspects gives hope that humanity may yet find its way to a respectful and sustainable approach to the environment in time.

Personal happy Moment of the Week:

Partly out of morning laziness, partly because of sensitive skin, partly because I think it suits me, I wear beard. I oscillate between Circle, Goatee and full beard. Now in Bavaria, starting tomorrow, it is mandatory to wear an FFP2 mask in supermarkets, subways, etc. And this only works properly if its edges close completely - which is already not the case with Long Stubble. While the media is now discussing whether bearded men should now no longer be allowed to go shopping or whether the mandatory shave restricts personal rights, I decided to take the plunge and try out various beard variants over the next few weeks that, according to the CDC, also work with these masks normally only used by hospital staff. I started today with the so-called "Frank Zappa" - and am amusing myself deliciously about the reactions of my environment, which range from shock to amusement to politely meant ignorance.

As I write this...

...I enjoy a dry red cuvée from France's Pays d'Oc.

Why You Should be Voting Democrat: The Republicans are Hypocrites Against God.

This is an essay I now have to give to a person living in this house with me. Some context, they pinned a piece of Republican propaganda they received in the mail to the community posterboard with the words “why I vote Republican” written on it. I have interpreted this as an invitation to challenge their beliefs. And my response is in the essay below.

Sincerely, By Everyone in This House

Pro-life vs Pro-Choice

This argument is a messy one to argue, this is something our country is literally divided over this and each argument is so twisted it's hard for either side to understand one another. For this to be the hill you've chosen to fight on I'm going to have to assume two things—1: you believe abortions are murder, and 2: You believe abortions are a common occurrence made by lazy people who want to get rid of the consequences of their bad actions.

Both of these are common arguments made by the Republican party to defund Planned Parenthood. So it may surprise you that not a single person on the Left is trying to disprove your fighting points.

That's because this isn't about abortions at all. It's about women's rights. Abortions only play into this because it was the item that forced the issue before the courts and the public.

In 1973, Roe v. Wade was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. This decision effectively guaranteed that a woman had the right to treat her body as her own property, meaning she could choose what she eats, who she has sex with, and, yes, whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term.

The decision ruled that the US Government has no right to decide the moral outcome of a single person's choices. Nor do they have the right to force a person to live in what they currently believe to be an ethical lifestyle.

This is the one and ONLY law in our country that explicitly gives women the same rights to life, responsibility, and authority that a man has. It also the only law that ensures a woman has the ultimate right to refuse to have sex with a man.

Republicans want to overturn Roe v. Wade and defund Planned Parenthood (not end abortions). They often cite the evils of abortions as the reasons why they want to overturn it. However, this is not their real motivation. Planned Parenthood has a multitude of other services for women and men besides abortions. They help people conceive children, provide safe-sex alternatives to reckless teens, provide both erectile stimulants and contraception, and even hormone therapy for trans people transitioning genders. They also provide pregnancy care for women just like any other hospital.

And as we've discussed Roe v. Wade is about a woman's rights to her body.

Republicans are trying to keep women from having equal rights. This much has been stated by Republicans in the 1970s and that mentality continues to today. It's blatant hypocrisy from a group of people who've only read the Bible enough to make real Christians like yourself believe they're doing God's work. And they are not shy about signaling how religious they are. God even has a Bible verse for them specifically:

 “Therefore, when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory from men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward.” Matthew 6:2. (NKJV)

Government Spending

This one's actually a very easy argument to refute. Republicans are always talking about making tax cuts and spending less money. In truth, all the money they save goes straight into the military budget which increases by BILLIONS of dollars each year. We're currently spending $934 billion a year on our military budget. According to the last Discretionary Spending Audit under Obama, more than half of that goes back into the politicians in both the House and the Senat across both sides of the aisles. That's also why this issue is one many Democrats actively support; the military is giving them a kickback.

The tax cuts you experience is not the government saving an extra twenty cents by cutting out beef from their cafeteria and passing the savings to you. It's the Republican party throwing the US into more debt to artificially give you a tax break so you'll continue to vote for them, and force the Democrats to be the ones to have to put that back to normal so they look like the bad guys.

Long story short, if you want the government to save money, vote Democrat, pay higher taxes and demand a drastic decrease in military spending.

Fun Fact: If we succeed in cutting the military budget by one-hundredth of a percent, the excess funds would pay to empower EVERY SOCIAL SERVICE the democrats suggest (from healthcare all the way to free electricity.) for the next ten years.

Education (Really? This one's so backward you should know better without me explaining.)

Republicans have been so far on the wrong side of this debate I'm surprised I have to tell it to you. For decades they've cut school budget both in the public and private sectors. They happily cut millions of dollars a year from the federal grants that are supposed to help kids afford college, while also artificially inflating the price of school, school supplies, and class prices.

This is not some secret thing you'll have to search hard for. They brag about it on tv every other episode of Fox News. 

The document you gave me lists education but provides no real proposals or examples of problems they hope to change, it is preying on your ignorance in this situation to make themselves look good. (What follows was not any part of the document they left, but are bullet points I thought they should be thinking about when they go to vote.)

Gay Rights

People who are gay, or otherwise not cishet WASPS should have the right to live a life of their own choosing without persecution or judgment from us. Jesus says everyone has that right amongst man. We're supposed to leave all that to God, so leave it for God.

Racism

I direct you to the current protests as proof that Racism is a thing that still exists, and has only gotten more unmanageable as time has moved on. Also, every Black Lives Matter protest since Martin Luther King Jr.

Socialism

Roads, parks, schools, and social security are all social programs funded by the government for the people. We on the Left wish to expand these capacities to healthcare, electricity, internet, higher education, and phone services, while also insisting that the government provide the minimum funding needed for people to live. (This in a time when the cost of living keeps rising higher due to unchecked capitalism.) We demand the government provide for the homeless, and regulate the supply chain of food. (because over 70% of all food in the garbage across this country is thrown away while it's still fresh.)

We have the ability to end starvation, and homelessness in this country. We argue this means we have the responsibility to do so as well.

Gun Reform

Democrats believe no civilian needs access to weapons of war. It's too easy to exploit these weapons and it results in mass killings of innocents. There are far better and more effective ways to defend yourself and your family than buying a bunch of guns and shooting anything that makes a noise in the night.

Police Reform

This is the current agenda. Police have gone unpunished for their crimes against civilians, (especially civilians of color,) and our current system 1: Encourages police to kill first, ask questions never, 2: Forces cops to take on roles they are untrained for, and 3: Gives them too much power without any reliable method of accountability. We demand all three of these things be addressed and changed in a meaningful way.

All of this without even mentioning Trump, the man actively trying to be a dictator.

please go off abt detective loki,,, im curious to hear what u have to say abt him!!! 💖

*SLAMS CHAIR DOWN*

SO. YOU WANT ME TO GO OFF ABOUT LOKI.

Praying for you that this read more link works bc otherwise this is gonna be a Cursed Post to all my poor followers. Shit gets long. I have A Lot to say akdjfshfk

Thanks to the investigative skills of the amazing and wonderful @deputyrook (ily), I recently learned that Detective Loki’s backstory included such things as: serving time in juvie, he was formerly religious, and he also possibly suffered from some kind of drug addiction he’s now clean from. It was briefly mentioned in the movie that he spent 6 years in a boys’ home (a rather rough one, by the way Loki talked about it). Boys’ homes are, by definition, “residential sectors where boys are provided food and care when they cannot be adequately cared for by their families, either due to a family crises or the child’s own behavioral issues.”

What this tells me is that:

A) Loki most likely had some heavy childhood trauma that drove him into being a “bad kid” (not that such a thing actually exists, imo, but that’s another essay for another day). It probably took well over a decade to get himself stabilized.

B ) Loki of present day has no family, no personal connections, no friends, absolutely nothing to call his own except the clothes on his back, his car, and... maybe a place to live? I assume he has one somewhere, but we never see him there - he’s constantly either prowling around town or at the station.

C) Loki’s occult tattoos, and his general distaste for anything religious, probably come from an internal place of feeling like some higher power abandoned him along the way. I have no doubt he carefully selected each one to have some personal meaning, but ultimately they all tie back to distancing himself from Christianity (double that if he was religious as a child, or came from a religious family). This also makes me wonder if his last name was something else, and that he changed it to “Loki” upon getting himself back on his feet.

D) Heading off of the boys’ home note; boys’ homes, like most other institutions in the US, legally can’t force residents to stay once they turn 18. Assuming his time there ended at 6 years because he aged out and went off on his own, well, for one that means he was admitted when he was 12 years old. Which is... wow. For two, that means his behavior was never necessarily resolved. Which, given how Jake plays Loki, I’m inclined to believe (I’ll touch on that later).

All of this leads me to some interesting observations during the movie.

For one, Loki is amazing at staying the “adult in the room” in the face of belligerence (e.g. Keller Dover losing his shit in Loki’s car). I know personally, it is almost physically impossible for me not to get my back up when someone else decides they want to take some aggressive tone with me - and I am about as far as one can get from a “troubled kid.” So I have to wonder how many years and how much abuse Loki endured to be able to choose not to respond to people antagonizing him? I have a hard time believing it was just police training that got him to this place of neutrality. And it seems to me like he’s making a genuine effort to stay calm, and to calm the people around him (”please just let me do my job”).

Which leads me into something Mrs. Dover said. “They say you’ve solved every case you’ve ever had, is that true?” And to be fair, I assume Loki’s silence there is supposed to imply that that isn’t true, but it implies so much beyond that. It implies he puts 100% effort into his cases, that he barely sleeps when he knows there’s a chance he can put dangerous people behind bars and save innocent lives. It also implies he feels deeply about the cases he hasn’t solved, or the ones where he got the perpetrator put away but the victims didn’t make it out alive. He carries that with him, constantly.

We see more of this when Keller recognizes his daughter’s bloody sock. His immediate response is to blame Loki. “This is your fault. You didn’t try hard enough. You did this to my daughter.” And Loki says nothing, he doesn’t make any different expression - but his eyes twitch. Jake Gyllenhaal remarked that this was a physical tic he improvised for Loki, one that served as Loki’s channel for intense emotions and/or becoming overstimulated with thoughts and information. Rather than actually emote, his eyes twitch. There is nothing newly informative or particularly overstimulating about the bloody sock scene, which leaves only intense emotion to be the cause of that twitch. And given Loki’s panic when he was searching Bob’s house and boxes for Anna and Joy, I doubt it’s anger. I’m willing to bet it’s that Loki already feels that way. He’s blaming himself. Keller just spoke Loki’s own feelings into existence.

I’ll circle back to that in a minute, because I think Loki making his cases so personal is very telling of his character.

Now, to go back and touch on why I think it’s most likely Loki aged out of the boys’ home rather than graduated - Loki has adapted with his behavior, he hasn’t resolved it at all. It does not seem to me at all like Loki has therapeutic strategies, especially considering I’m 99% sure any therapist or behavior counselor would not encourage bottling up your emotions and disconnecting yourself from human contact. Loki made these steps on his own. He learned to redirect his anger to people who deserved it by becoming part of law enforcement. He decided that he was safer closed off and unavailable to intense emotions. He might’ve even decided other people were safer stuck on the other side of his walls.

There are a whole of two times Loki clearly loses his temper - when Bob keeps drawing mazes rather than giving him a straight answer, and when Bob kills himself and Loki realizes he just lost his best lead. While these are both reasonable things to get worked up about, he reacts so intensely and so personally to them that (circling back to my earlier point) it tells me, deep down, there is an incredibly soft and vulnerable heart in there that’s been locked up for decades.

Loki didn’t want Bob to kill himself. He didn’t mean for things to escalate that far. You can hear it in his voice, he’s genuinely shaken and upset by what just happened. In the following scene when he basically destroys his desk, that is directed at no one and nothing but himself. He’s so angry at himself - for not understanding Bob’s maze, for getting Bob killed, for having to tell the Dovers their one suspect is gone, for feeling helpless when it comes to finding the girls. Loki doesn’t deal well with other people’s failure, but he doesn’t even accept his own.

And I mean - do I even need to mention when he finds Anna? The man is bleeding profusely from a bullet wound in his head, he’s half unconscious, he’s a long way from the hospital, but he doesn’t even think about any of that. He makes it his one singular goal to get her to the emergency room even if he dies trying. And the way he talked to her? “Stay with me Anna, don’t die, just hold on.” I know on the surface it’s obviously just a tactic to keep her (and himself, let’s be honest) awake. But it was so deeply feeling, so honest, so raw, so panicked?

I don’t know, man. I’ve said things to other people before that I wished someone had said to me, and that’s what those lines sounded like to me. Which, if he had been a drug addict at one point, and if he overdosed but no one was there for him? The puzzle pieces fit.

And then to have people visit him in the hospital? To have someone call him a hero? He has no idea how to react to that, because I’m guessing neither of those things have ever happened to him before. And he isn’t really sure what to say to someone being so overwhelmingly grateful for and to him. So he doesn’t really say anything. His eyes just twitch. We can fill in the blanks.

The man has a soft heart, a vulnerability that he refuses to let anyone see, but it’s there. He’s just as scared and angry and confused as Keller 90% of the time. He just hides it better.

Which, ultimately all of this leads me to the conclusion that - for as far as Loki’s distanced himself from religion, as clean as he is now, as stable as he is, as well as he’s channeled his anger, as guarded as he keeps himself - this entire job, to him, is a chance at redemption.

Loki doesn’t think he’s deserving of love. He doesn’t believe he’s capable of having the kind of stability the Dovers are so familiar with. He doesn’t think he can just slide into a friend group after all these years. He doesn’t regard his own life highly. But the ability to save other people’s lives and keep dangerous people locked away - that’s his apology to the world. Of course he cares about these cases because he’s a good man, but it’s more than that. It’s that he believes this is the only way he cant repent for not always being a good man.

Which leads me to his first name. I’ve rambled about the symbolism of his name to @deputyrook before, but David. David. Given all of the Biblical symbolism in this movie, personally my mind immediately leaps to David and Goliath.

David - detective Loki and his desire to be a good man - is in a constant war against Goliath - Loki’s own trauma and troubled past. And there really isn’t a way to have one without the other, which makes Loki’s character so tragic. He isn’t ever going to heal, not completely, not when his entire career is him trying to apologize over and over again. He solves almost all the cases he’s given because he won’t, can’t, accept more failure.

Loki’s last line in the movie is “pray for the best, prepare for the worst.” For being a character so deeply centered in anti-religion, that’s an odd line to make his last. Combine that with how strange it is that he wouldn’t also change his first name, if he changed his last name to distance himself from religion. His name, and that last line, might just be symbolic of the few shreds of hope he has for himself. Hope that maybe he can have what the Dovers have, the hope that maybe one day when he’s gone he’ll be remembered by somebody and for something good.

Because that’s really all he wants, all he can hope, for himself. Since he doesn’t think he’ll ever have human connection, or love, or a family - as much as he would like to have those - he’ll settle for being just a little more than somebody’s bad memory, or being a little more than some name on a headstone.

Idk much about uk/eu politics but I have a question.. is this correct: us "left-wing" = uk "left-wing" = eu "left-wing." What about right wing

That’s an extremely complicated question, and I’m not sure I can do it justice, but I’m going to do my best, because it’s a really important issue.

The joke answer is: the US left is not like the European left because the US doesn’t have a left.

The tl;dr answer is: politics depends on people and how they view the world, and those things are shaped by history and geography, so every country’s going to have a slightly (or very) different version of left and right.

For a longer and possibly boring answer, see below.

Leaving aside the fact academics fight about what left and right even are (personally, I think it’s like pornography: you recognize them when you see them) and that there’s tons of theories out there on what makes people left-wing or right-wing - in a nutshell, the main characteristic of a ‘traditional’ left like the European left is opposition to the status quo and a wish to distribute wealth more equally. After all, in their modern sense, political parties were born around the time of the French revolution, when those people who supported the king and the Church deliberately placed themselves on the right-side benches of the Assembly (right being, of course, a synonym for ‘honest’, ‘just’ and everything else) so that those standing with ‘the people’ and demanding change were forced to sit on the left.

Now - as far as I can tell, one big difference between the US left and the European left is that the European left was shaped by the unions and Communism in a way the US left wasn’t. 

See, in Europe you get two waves of ‘opposition to the status quo’: the first revolutions, like - arguably - the French revolution, were mainly middle-class people being fed up and demanding the same privileges the aristocracy had. Nobody really cared about ‘the people’; the question was, “How come we - the merchants, the clerks, the lawyers - the generally hard-working and generally educated and wealthy-ish people of this fine country, are still seen like second-class citizens because we haven’t got the right blood?”. Meanwhile, the ‘real people’, those at the very bottom of society, were too uneducated, politically unaware and scattered about to demand anything for themselves. 

All that changed when factories became a thing. Suddenly, instead of a bunch of exploited farmhands grumbling about their fate and being reprimanded in some village church, you had hundreds - or thousands - of workers crammed together and chatting about how miserable their lives were. That’s how you have the conditions to truly change something - bring about a lasting revolution instead of the disorderly, ultimately useless revolts farm labourers sometimes staged. All you need is a savvy political leader, and for various reasons, it was Communism who provided that.

That’s how the modern European left was born: in the factories, among the workers, supported and nurtured by union leaders, and later inspired and funded directly by the Soviet Union. In most countries, politics became a three-way street - privilege-defending right-wing parties which gradually shifted to fascism, a combative left with a minor split between anarchists and communists, and a Christian ‘middle’ desperately trying to stay afloat and losing its soul in the process.

(Religion is by nature conservative, but while many Church leaders sided - openly or implicitly - with Nazism and Fascism, many priests fought on the other side, forming an uneasy truce with communists. Today, this inner conflict is far from over, especially in the Catholic Church.)

And then, after the war, when the European left seemed so strong the US firebombed Greece and formed a plan to invade Italy if voters decided on a Communist government, disaster struck: the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, and we started to learn what the Soviet Union really was. 

It’s impossible to underestimate what a shock that was for left-wing voters, and particularly for those who’d fought in the Resistance during WW2 and had been calling themselves communists - with great pride - for generations. For decades, the Soviet Union had been an ideal - a nation built on the refusal of a murderous war, a nation of slaves butchering a corrupt and cruel royal family, a nation of new rights for everyone, of equality, of tremendous scientific and social progress. It was only in the late 60s that people in the West started to learn about the rest of it: about Stalin’s crimes, about the gulags, about the regime’s violence - everything. And at that point, everything just - collapsed. 

Roughly speaking, left-wing parties split between a majority of people who wanted nothing to do with Communism anymore and a minority who still defended it (and later turned to violence). There were many, however, who simply walked away, or started to vote for other parties.

The second death blow for the European left, which, as I said, had been heavily linked to the unions and the factory workers, was the closing of those factories. This was partly inevitable, I suppose, because globalization made it much cheaper to move production out of Europe, but right-wing politicians like Margaret Thatcher were publicly and privately over the moon about it, and the entire process happened in such a way that entire communities were literally destroyed. The left, of course, tried to fight back - in the UK, strikes went on for weeks - but for a bunch of reasons, they lost; and slowly but surely, they also lost their voters, many of whom never found a job again.

(In the UK and elsewhere, many of them took a sharp turn to the right when parties on the extreme right found an easy answer to their problems: those ‘bloody foreigners’ who’d taken their jobs.)

Finally, the European left got all but obliterated when some influential left-wing politicians decided the only way back was to move ‘to the centre’ (ie, to the right) and surrender to extreme capitalism. Left-wing parties had already lost most of their traditional base (factory workers) and when people like Tony Blair took over and preached the Milton Friedman Gospel, they mostly lost the other, smaller part of their supporters (students and intellectuals) without gaining all that much in return. That’s how in many countries today you find a left wing that can still command a sizable portion of the vote but is splintered among dozens of small parties. In some cases, like France and now Italy, voters are so fed up with the lack of clear values the left is almost gone.

In the US, on the other hand, things happened very differently. 

For one thing, the unions decided not to play a part in politics. For another, parties inspired by Soviet Russia were definitely a no-no. Then you’ve got the geography of the place - hundreds of small communities scattered here and there, all with different cultural values and political goals, the light of their ‘manifest destiny’ guiding them in a difficult and alienating environment. And the fact political parties in the US were born top-down instead of bottom-up. And, of course, slavery and its aftermath. 

(In a nutshell: since there are always more workers than bosses, the only way for bosses to control workers is divide them into prvileged and less privileged sections so they fight among themselves instead of collaborating and asking for better working conditions. This is particularly easy to do when the less homogenous your staff is. That means that in Europe, workers solidarity was much easier to achieve - though we still got tensions, even violence, because that’s nationalism and racism for you - while in the US it was much more difficult to integrate African workers with white workers and convince them to stand together, with people on various sides, and with different motivations, insisting that what divided these groups was too significant to be overlooked.)

That’s basically why you can’t exactly compare the Democratic party, which traditionally served the interests of rich land-owners in the South, supported slavery and was born more as a lobby than what Europe would understand as a party, with the European left. They’re two different animals. One of my university professors used to say Democrats and Republicans are not about left and right at all - they were shaped by other things, and serve more as geographical and historical markers than as parties - to the point were the left wing of the Democratic party would have more in common (and vote with) the left wing of the Republican party than with the right wing of the Democratic party. And while the Democratic party slowly became more similar to the European left (for instance by aligning with the workers and supporting civil rights) the transition was never complete. In fact, a new wave of fresh tensions is happening right now: there’s very little in common between people like Joe Biden and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and in Europe they’d probably belong to different parties. From what I read, many people (especially young people) are trying to pull the party to the left, but party leaders absolutely do not want that. That’s a huge problem, especially in a country with a two-party system, and may very well cost the Democrats the 2020 election.

As for the right: as I said in some earlier post, while the left splinters, the right simply - moves more to the right. That’s been a common trend for decades, and something you can see very clearly, especially in the US and the UK, but also in France or in Italy. 

(Germany seems immune - for now - but we’ll have to wait and see.) 

This happens, in part, because people on the right are generally motivated by concrete goals and are ready to stomach tons of unpleasantness to get there. The millionaires funding the Republican party may not like the prospect of a trade war with China, but they’re going to keep donating because they get tax cuts in return; and Christian extremists are not enthusiastic about a President who sleeps around with prostitutes, but if he makes abortion illegal, they’ll still show up for him.

The problem with all of this is that most people, everywhere, are sort of in the middle. And now the middle is disappearing - well, the big question is, where are they going to go? Every scenario is very dangerous, because from what we’ve seen so far, there’s only four bad choices:

People keep voting for their traditional party, but do it unenthusiastically and consider it the lesser of two evils. This way, party leaders are encouraged to stay on their path, and things get steadily worse (example: the Italian left).

People vote for ‘the new face’ because they’re fed up with ‘business as usual’. This is generally a disaster, because ‘the new face’ is either someone with a precise and hidden agenda (like Berlusconi or Macron) or someone with zero experience who’s going to fuck things up, because politics is complicated (like the Italian 5* Movement) or a combination of both (arguably, Nick Clegg and the LibDems in general).

People vote for the most radical thing they find, which is usually a party on the extreme right possibly masquerading as ‘the centre’ or ‘the sensible choice’. This is the ‘protest vote’ and partly how you get Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen.

Finally, lots of people just stop voting, which empowers the extremes because if you take those with doubts or uncertainties out of the equation, you’re left with the obsessed, the stans and the nutters. In fact, considering how many people don’t vote, extreme right parties like Salvini’s Lega don’t have a lot of support, but is this good news? They’re still at the head of the government.

So there you go. I’m sorry it got so long - I hope it made sense? In short, left- and right-wing parties of different countries are likely to have stuff in common, to the point where they often work together without too much friction (as they do in the European Parliament, for instance), but it’s problematic and incorrect to say there’s a ‘universal left’ and a ‘universal right’ based on the same exact values and goals. 

If you’re trying to understand whether you yourself are right-wing or left-wing, this test is always a good place to start - but you’ll need to have an opinion on a number of issues in order to answer it so that it’s truly useful to you. My advice would be to read up on the history of your own country, if possible from unbiased sources; to keep up with the news (from different sources); to discuss important issues with friends, teachers and family members - keeping an open mind and interacting even with people you don’t agree with; to accept political opinions are fluid and will change with age, or when you learn new facts; and take the time to listen to the candidates before elections so you know where they stand on stuff that matters to you (education? the climate? immigration? more jobs for young people? foreign policy? women’s rights? and so on).

Congratulations, Bigby! We have accepted your application for your OC, Tyler Orville (FC  Dane Dehaan) Please create a new blog (not a sideblog) for your character and send us the link via ask box as soon as you can. Along with your link, please let us know what lyric you’d like for us to use for Tyler in his bio if you do not wish to use the one on the skeleton. Welcome to Bloodline!

OUT OF CHARACTER

Name/Alias: Bigby

Age: Twenty-Six (twenty-seven as of jan 26, 2020!).

Preferred pronouns: they/them

Timezone: est

Level of activity (don’t give your activity a number value, please describe how active you will be as best as possible): I work full-time midnight shifts from 11:30pm - 7:30 am. I am gone from the house from 10:30 pm until 8:30 am. I do not get online in my “mornings” but after work I’m usually on for a couple hours before bed. This is/would be my only rp group so I can devote my free time and attention to it outside of regular adult responsibilities. That being said, I do have regular access to tumblr IM and discord while away for plotting and keeping in touch/up to date.

CHARACTER DETAILS

(The Resurrected skeleton).

Character’s Name: Tyler Orville

Desired FC: Dane Dehaan

Character’s Age: Twenty-Seven

Character’s Species: Immortal Witch

Character’s Sexuality: Bisexual

CHARACTER BIOGRAPHY

Tyler lived a fractured childhood. Fragmented moments glimpsed of a possibility, at something forever out of reach. He was born sick. Sick in an ever changing way, as if the unnamed disease that ravaged his body was more than such, as if the very illness were alive. He was their first child born following two miscarriages, two elder siblings he’d never know and he couldn’t help but think bitterly that whatever awful thing nested within his being had been the root cause of their deaths.

Francine Calhoun, his mother came from a long, long line of original witches; the kind of old blood that prided themselves on their lineage so much so that inbreeding had been commonplace in generation’s past. Her courtship and subsequent marriage the kind of witch that barely qualified as a witch. The kind of witch, that if it were a mere man and nothing more; would only go to church on Easter and Christmas and call themselves a devout Christian.  In fact, Teddy Orville hadn’t been much of a witch for the last several years; a decade even, outside of the odd potion infused tea to help during the university crunch before exams anyway.

Much of Tyler’s life was spent in hospitals. Moved from one doctor’s appointment to the next; a seemingly endless stream of doctors approaching his case with first fresh faced enthusiasm and big dreams of curing the incurable before frustration, disappointment, shame…no tests they ran produced conclusive results. Were they absolutely certain it was not environmental? Were they certain it wasn’t all just in his head? What a wicked thing to ask a boy of barely nine years, far too small and too many sharp edges, sunken eyes and blood stained lips.

His parents refused to give up.

Isolated from their magical foundations (your child’s illness, your child’s pain and suffering, your damned spawn’s death is what you deserve for allowing your body, your womb, to be tainted with such a lesser man’s seed) Francine struggled to cope, struggled to combat the evil plaguing her son’s body with her magical abilities coupled with modern medicine. For the time being, Tyler was alive even if that was touch and go; would it not be kinder to let him pass? To let him go?

He drifted from palliative care back to intensive, back to long term; his education was sporadic at best. Not once did he set foot in an actual school and he longed for a life outside these walls; to be like the children he watched on television or read about in his books. He longed for some greater being to come and purge him of this wicked illness in his breast and though his parents struggled to provide him with a life; he wasn’t living, was barely surviving the day: rinse and repeat.

His life changed when he received a clunky laptop at thirteen, it allowed him an unheard of outlet to the world in forums, in chat rooms, through games. He could be anybody. Anyone but himself. And maybe in the beginning he fell in love with that anonymity. He was no longer the sad little sick boy, he could be a regular boy doing regular boy things like going to school, playing sports, and hanging out with his friends. Friends. He began to make those too.  That was new. He’d never had friends that weren’t the nursing staff in the unit he stayed at or the PSWs that came to his home when he was enjoying one of his rare “good” streaks (they never lasted).

There were other children in the pediatric wards of course, but they were never the long term kind of patients. Not like him. There were the odd handful that stayed for a couple months, and some even a couple years but…their endings were not happy ones.

Technology improved with time, not just with his laptop but with medicine. With such improvements came new hope. And new disappointment. Funny that, he thought he’d long been accustomed to the bitter taste. As he got older, his good streaks became less and time spent within the gently titled comfort of his own home became sparse until it became nonexistent. By this point in time, the knowledge of witches had become common; and some younger, braver, perhaps even brasher doctors went against the norm to seek help out in these communities but came up empty handed.

His parents were drowning in debt, in sorrow and their exhaustion showed. Tyler almost wished they hated him. Wished they’d move on. Try again with another baby, a healthy baby. Do it right this time, since he was nothing but wrong.

He’s so young. The staff whispered, pity, sorrow heavy; had been whispering since he was in the single digits. Tyler would be forever young despite being closer to thirty than twenty. His activity in his group chat dropped to an all time low, his oldest friends feared the worst.

And he discovered something unheard of.

It was the kind of discovery one could only stumble upon in the places on the internet that no one should go. Where only those with wicked intent did linger. Immortality. It seemed too good to be true, some old wives tale; some fantasy story straight out of the games he played with his friends (less and less so these days).

Only it was real.

And it was obtainable.

A cure.

I’m a real boy.

Talking about being forever young had never rung so true, the doctor’s were baffled. His family was torn between horror and gratitude. He stood in the hospital garden, barefoot with dirt between his toes (and the odd cigarette butt or two but that’s less romantic) and simply basked in the sun. It was as close to a religious experience as he’d ever experienced, and he’d spent a lot of time praying to an uncaring God over the years. Begging. Pleading. Cursing.

He sent a letter written in a terribly untidy scrawl to Carden Manor requesting the chance to relocate. To discover the culture he’d never had the chance to experience, of witches and wolves and perhaps others like him. After all, it was the only community of their people he could name and maybe he was still on the tail-end of euphoria that had him wanting to throw himself into the deep end so to speak.

Maybe there was something darker there, something darker that festered close to pain towards his parents. Resentment. Anger. They claimed to have exhausted all means but what of this? “It’s something born of the darkest of magic Tyler please…” had it been a line they were unwilling to cross? Had they known about it all along but their morals had them unable to act?  This was an old magic, this wonderful beautiful thing that had been a boon to his ravaged body. This thing that had given him a new lease on life, was to him far more a blessing than any kind of curse. Already accustomed to the taste of (his own) blood on his tongue, the need to consume such a thing to survive was such that he didn’t even bat an eye.

Anger. It simmered, boiled toward all consuming and dark. Terribly, terribly dark. A want for violence, to let his hands hook into claws and act out such emotions; revenge? He wasn’t sure. Though, Tyler was absolutely sure of one thing: he wanted away from them.

Moving to the manor was the second best thing to ever happen to him and he’s all too eager to dive into a life he never thought he’d get the chance to have.

To live.

CHARACTER PERSONALITY

It’s almost painfully obvious that Tyler’s social skills are lacking. Limited socialization during his formative years has left its mark. The bulk of his ability to interact with his peers is stilted and awkward, he can come off as blunt, flat, and even cruel. Withdrawn as though secretive (and he is hiding something, hiding who and what he used to be before his immortality) he comes off as standoffish and every bit some kind of “edgy loner kid” persona. Though he is most comfortable when alone or in front of a keyboard, residing at the manor demands that he evolve past this. As does his new lease on life. He’s trying.

Incredibly self-motivated, Tyler is almost too eager to learn more of the supernatural world to which he’s been removed from for so long. His own magical talent, lacking largely in part due to a lack of proper training. His parents, understandably, had been much too focused on his ailing health. He has a truly impressive repertoire for potions and enchantments; the kinds of witch’s work one can learn from a tome but has very little hands on experience. His frustration for his…otherness that still remains is palpable. As though he hasn’t really changed. And due to such a state, he tends to lash out at his peers which does little to earn him any friends.

He’s used to not having friends, even if he finds himself frustrated with his inability to adapt in this regard. It’s a lot more difficult than he anticipated to reshape himself into somebody, a new and improved version of Tyler Orville.

Some parts of his original self remains, a quiet thoughtfulness, an impossible patience at odds with his frustration, and an optimism he tries to keep buried deep down for fear of coming off over eager and annoying.

PLOTS AND POLITICS

Presently, Tyler stands fairly neutral on the in game political spectrum due largely in part to his inexperience. His outsider status borders on some sort of isolation; which in a way, speaks the truth. He was woefully isolated from his people and hardly had it in him to follow the news much outside of the big events. Like the world discovery their kind in 2016, he saw that; read about it. His friends in the group chat talked about it. A lot. He and his best friend, Alex, fretted in a private chat about the repercussions of such a thing.

He’s not too overly keen on the servitude aspect of other species, finds it rather barbaric if he’s being honest but is well aware of the delicate line he walks here. Outsider. He’s the son of a marrying of a strong bloodline into a weak one, he never once met his Mother’s family and knows nothing of their history. Of their possible feuds. His Father’s family could never hope to hold a torch to such greatness. Tyler straddles the line between a somebody and a nobody.

In this, he could potentially be shaped into a supported of any party with the right guidance. He has power given his immortal status and his bloodline is strong, if watered down some with his Father’s genetics. He could prove to be a promising ally to any party should they wish to court him so.

As far as plots go, I want to explore him well, exploring life in person instead of looking on from the outside in. I want him to interact with his peers from wildly different walks of life and learn more about the world. The world, his world that had been so very small has suddenly exploded into something so grand.

I also have a potential wanted connection for him to offer, in the form of his best friend Alex (who can be played male, female, or non-binary) who is also a supernatural (species up to the potential other mun) and they met playing an unnamed fantasy mmorpg. Alex brought Tyler into their group of friends and they’ve been Tyler’s main friend group ever since. Tyler has gone radio silent before, but this is something new altogether. It’s like he’s dropped off the face of the Earth and Alex fears the worst. What exactly brings Alex to the manor would be 100% up to the other mun but a reunion would absolutely be required and their future interactions and relationship is anyone’s guess!

I love Sarek. But he’s really not that great.

Sarek and Amanda are my favorite couple, not just in Star Trek, but ever. I’ve written more than half a million words of fanfiction about them. I’ve watched episodes featuring them so many times I secretly worry Netflix will put me on blast.

But I am not a Sarek apologist.

I’m pretty sure what draws most people to this couple is the age-old romantic notion that opposites may attract but the power of love can overcome anything. Cue cheesy instrumental music and a torrid kiss in the rain at a train station. I imagine a lot of women see themselves in Amanda, a seemingly regular woman with a regular life. Then they see a successful guy like Sarek, a dude who’s physically fit, well-educated, powerful, and absurdly intelligent, and it’s only natural that a recipe for hotness is born.

Because I’ve devoted literally years to dreaming up various ways this couple might have shacked up and vomiting the results all over AO3, I’ve also been forced to examine the personalities of both characters in great detail, and the only consistent conclusion I come to is fanon (myself included) gets it wrong most of the time.

Their marriage can’t have always been smooth sailing. If you’re not willing to believe me, then believe Amanda. 

Oh sure, there are tons of one-shots where they have little spats, but they almost always end with both of them making heart eyes at each other and jumping into bed. I get that Star Trek originated in the 1960s, but that doesn’t mean Sarek and Amanda had one of those “golly gee” wholesome relationships that could put Ward and June Cleaver to shame. 

Whichever version of Sarek you personally subscribe to, be it Mark Lenard, Ben Cross, or James Frain, it’s entirely possible to find the actors attractive but still think the character of Sarek could use some improvement. It’s also possible to love a character and admire their good qualities while being disappointed in their shortcomings. Maybe it makes me a shitty fangirl. Maybe it makes me realistic.

Literally decades of fanfiction and fan art have polished over Sarek’s unprettier bits, often portraying him as a hopeless romantic, a tender lover, a devoted father, and a man fiercely dedicated to his wife. I’m not going to argue each of those is patently false—hell, as a fanfiction writer, I’ve bought into some of those tropes myself—but I think some are truer than others. Let’s examine the canon.  

When we first meet him in “Journey to Babel,” he’s callous and aloof. He’s Vulcan, I get it, more on that later. But seriously, the guy has a habit of summoning his wife and acts like he doesn’t even know his own damn son. No one should be standing up to enthusiastically applaud and hand the man a husband or father-of-the-year trophy. Even Amanda seems pretty resigned to the arrangement.

I already know what the pushback to this assertion will be. He’s Vulcan! You can’t judge a Vulcan by human standards! Well, his wife is human and one of his sons is half-human, so I would argue that it should at least be an option, but I wrote a whole other essay on Star Trek’s moral relativism problem. 

Long story short, Star Trek glosses over a lot of moral and ethical dilemmas by using the argument, “Who are we to judge a culture we’re not part of?” I can’t answer that, but I will say someone once gave me a great piece of advice that I think applies to this idea of moral relativism: no person’s belief is inherently worthy of respect, but every person is. Maybe to understand Sarek as a person, we should look first at Sarek as a Vulcan.

Obviously Sarek subscribes to Vulcan philosophy, and while Vulcan philosophy seems pure as hell with its pacifism and its belief in embracing Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations (IDIC), I’m going to assert the Vulcan adherence to that philosophy seems to be a little lunch counter in nature. Yes, they take two scoops of resting bitch face and they’ll pass on the extra helping of tolerance. Sarek hails from a culture that is ostensibly exclusionary, sexist, and xenophobic in its practices.

When we encounter Vulcans in Enterprise, they’re people who mock humans for being too volatile, go to war with their Andorian neighbors, and aggressively purge the Syrranites for wanting to get back to the true meaning of Surak. But you might say, but that was before the Federation! They got better when they put T’Pau in charge.

Really? When we meet them next in the chronological timeline in Discovery, they’re telling Sarek they’ll only admit one of his weird social science pet projects (or as Sarek calls them, his kids) to the Vulcan Expeditionary Group.

In the Discovery episode “Light and Shadows,” Amanda reveals that Spock had a learning disability as a young child, which clearly embarrassed Sarek. Sadder still? Amanda explains there didn’t seem to be any educators on Vulcan willing to help a half-Vulcan child with a human learning disability. 

In the alternate timeline, when Spock applies to the Vulcan Science Academy, the admissions folks give him a pat on the back for achieving so much, despite his great disadvantage of having a human mom. Replace the word “human” with any religious, racial, or ethnic group, and see how you still feel about that sentence. 

Yes, Vulcans have racists and nationalists just like the rest of us and it doesn’t seem like they’re a rare breed either. Sarek is clearly attempting to be a better Vulcan, so kudos to him. However, not being an overt racist is not synonymous with sainthood. 

It’s pretty obvious throughout canon that while Sarek loves his wife, he’s uncomfortable with humanity, and he’s doubly perplexed with the humanity she imparted in their son. She even directly accuses him of never truly respecting humanity, to which he replies:

Which, let’s be honest, sounds like the rough equivalent of the “I can’t be racist because I have a black friend” defense. So many things in canon point to Sarek being utterly baffled by humans, not cutely intrigued by them as so often seen in fanon. The only time Spock and Sarek seem chummy with each other is when they’re mocking Amanda’s human emotionalism in “Journey to Babel.” Whether or not he meant to (and he definitely meant to), Sarek raised a son who saw his human half as a thing to be overcome.

Discovery has also hammered a lot of nails into the affectionate father coffin. Up until the final episode in season 1, he never called Michael his daughter and instead referred to her as his ward. It’s nice that he finally got over that technical distinction, but it doesn’t exactly conjure up the image of him tucking her into bed and giving her a kiss on the forehead.

He seems to accept her humanity because, well, she is human, but his own son’s humanity isn’t ok? Not like it matters, because his plan was to mold Michael into a Vulcan-like human anyway, which is pretty weird when you think about it. At one point, Michael tells Sarek she knows he must have considered the effect a Vulcan education and lifestyle might have on a human child, but she wants to know what he wanted Spock to learn from the experience of having a human sibling. His reply?

Which is... nice? He doesn’t say the only reason he took Michael in was for her to be his son’s empathy tutor, but he does essentially admit he was worried Spock was becoming too much of a momma’s boy. So the theory that Sarek was just scooping up orphans all over the galaxy like some kind of Vulcan Angelina Jolie doesn’t seem accurate. It gives the distinct impression that even Sarek thought of his hodge-podge brood as an experiment, at least to a degree.

Now, some may argue that Sarek never told Spock that he had to follow Surak’s teachings, which is true-ish. But that’s like telling a kid, “You don’t have to believe in Jesus” and then sending them to a Christian school in the heart of the Bible belt. What decision did he imagine his son would choose when he decided to raise him on Vulcan and stand by when other kids beat him up for not being Vulcan enough?

Seriously, Spock was almost guaranteed to turn out one of two ways: either he would just try harder to out-Vulcan everyone, which he did, or he would give logic the middle finger, which, well, is the option Sybok chose to run with. 

Despite fanfiction and fanart imagining him as this really hands-on parent who changes diapers and decorates baked goods (yes, I wrote a story like this and I’m calling myself out), he admits he’s the kind of dad who works late in the evenings, not the kind that reads stories at bedtime. 

It’s also no secret that as a parent, Sarek holds grudges. In “Journey to Babel,” Amanda confesses that Sarek and Spock haven’t spoken as father and son for eighteen years. In “Brother,” Michael asks Sarek when the last time he spoke to Spock was and he concedes it’s been years. In “Light and Shadows,” he’s clearly [Vulcan] pissed that Amanda is harboring a fugitive, who also just so happens to be his own son.

Is Sarek just that logical that he believes in justice even at a high personal price, or is he embarrassed that his own estranged son has been accused of murder and appears to be in the clutches of a mental breakdown? As far as I can tell, it might just be a little bit of both. 

Then there’s the idea that Sarek is a caring and devoted husband. Is there actually any evidence for this in canon, other than he was married to Amanda and had a family with her? Lots of people are married and have kids and don’t have a relationship that would rival that annoying couple on This is Us. 

Their relationship doesn’t seem like an equal partnership based on compromise, but rather one where Sarek does what he damn well pleases and Amanda follows along as a dutiful wife. 

Amanda gave up a lot of things to be with him: her home, her culture, and potentially even her own son’s well-being. The woman went to extremes for love not even witnessed on the Bachelor, and why?

In some contexts, that sounds like the powerful kind of love and devotion that epic-poems would be based on. In other contexts, it sounds almost like a pathological self-martyrdom. Did Sarek ever fully appreciate her sacrifices? It’s hard to say, but if he did, I doubt he ever voiced his appreciation. 

In his later years, when Sarek is losing his mind due to an age-related degenerative disease and he mind melds with Captain Picard, he tearfully muses (as Picard), “Amanda. I wanted to give you so much more. I wanted to show you such tenderness. But that is not our way. Spock? Amanda? Did you know?”

He's strongly implying he never told Amanda he loved her out loud. I’m sure he did love her, but it hardly bodes well for the idea that he’s a flowers and handmade cards kind of guy. And as for the notion that behind closed doors, he and Amanda had a super intimate relationship that would make even characters in Harlequin romance novels swoon, please, point me to an episode that makes you think that. I will watch it every day for the rest of my life. 

In summary, between his first chronological appearance in Discovery to his death in The Next Generation, Sarek had a lot of improving to do as a person and we see evidence that he most certainly did. He came to accept Michael as his daughter. He started speaking to Spock again after wrecking his childhood and turning him over to Section 31. Even though it clearly exasperated the hell out of him, he occasionally gave into his wife’s emotional needs. 

But that’s still a pretty far cry away from galaxy’s best father, husband, or lover. I think that’s what draws me to this couple so much. Sarek and Amanda didn’t live happily ever after: they did the best they could and made it work, just like the rest of us non-fictional losers. 

What little we have of canon depicts them as a couple who likely got married before they really knew each other, probably should have spent their first few years of marriage in counseling, eventually figured one another out enough to raise three kids who could all probably benefit from some therapy, and loved each other no matter what, even if it wasn’t out loud.

Am I Betraying My Kid If I Stay at a Non-Affirming Church?

"Hi! About 6 months ago, my son came out to our family. I'm fine with this news and suspected for a long time, but now he doesn't want to go to the church we have attended his whole life because most people there aren't accepting of LGBT people. We've been going there for over a decade and I love my friends and community there. Is it ok if I keep going, or is that betraying my son?"

Question Submitted Anonymously Answered by Austen Hartke

Austen Says:

Wow, what a thoughtful question! Thank you for, first of all, respecting your son’s decision to stay home from church for the time being, and secondly for considering how your continued attendance might feel for your kid as he’s coming out.

I remember when I was coming out as bisexual when I was about fourteen. Every Sunday morning my dad would come and try to drag me out of bed and get me to go to church with the rest of my family. At the time I was out to my friends at school, but not to my parents. I felt like there was no way I could tell him that I didn’t want to go to church because, as far as I understood it, the church didn’t want me there. When I was at church I felt like I had to keep a mask on and not share too much about who I really was. Sitting through a service felt like navigating a minefield—you never knew when someone was going to say something negative about LGBTQ people, and each time it happened I felt like a bomb exploded in my chest.

I’m so glad that your son felt safe enough to tell you who he is, and supported enough to tell you he doesn’t want to attend church right now. That really speaks to the strength of your relationship.

So, should you keep attending this church, even if your son says he no longer feels safe or supported there? Well, I think that depends on a few other questions. You might consider asking yourself the following:

“Will my friends at church continue supporting me if they know I have a kid that identifies within the LGBTQ community?”

“Is this community one I can be totally open with about my life and my struggles, or do I have to hide parts of myself away in order to be accepted?”

“Is it important to me that our family go to church together? Is it so important that I’d be willing to go to a different, affirming church?”

“Are there other LGBTQ affirming churches in my area that I might want to visit, to see how it feels?” (You can find maps of affirming churches here and here.)

“If I stay at this non-affirming church, am I making it more difficult for my kid to come back when he’s ready?”

“Do I feel like I might be able to make some positive changes in the community by staying at my current church? Could I help people work toward a more affirming viewpoint by sharing my life and experiences?”

This Clash-like question (“should I stay or should I go?”) is one that LGBTQ Christians and their families have been navigating for a really long time, so you’re definitely not alone in asking. (There might even be a support group for Christian parents near you!)

One Bible story that I’ve found helpful in navigating this question comes from Matthew 14:22-33. In this story, Jesus’ disciples are in a boat on the Sea of Galilee, and a storm whips up. Jesus comes to the disciples walking on the water, and good old Peter—the one who always leaps before looking—tries to walk out on the water to meet his teacher.

Those of us in non-affirming churches sometimes feel like the disciples in the boat—we could stay here, and wait for Jesus to get to us, or we could step out of the boat toward Jesus and risk sinking. I don’t think there’s any right answer that covers all scenarios.

When it comes to your specific situation, I think the right thing to do is to talk with your son. Ask him, how does he feel about your continuing to go to this non-affirming church? Does he feel like you’re taking their side, and if so, is there a way to come to a better understanding so he knows that you aren’t choosing them over him? If you plan to do work in this community to move them toward a more affirming stance, share that with your son—I’m sure he’ll understand if that’s the case! Maybe take a Sunday morning off from services and instead go out to breakfast with your kid and have a talk. The gift of your time will mean so much.

Good luck!

***

Click through to read about our brilliant contributors!

Join us for next months speaker as we’re thrilled to invite Chris Corrigan to our virtual stage.

Register now.

Chris Corrigan is a principal partner of Harvest Moon Consultants, specializing in participatory process, international facilitation, and strategic thinking in support of organizations and communities tackling complex challenges. 

Corrigan’s formal bio includes info about decades of experience working with governments, not for profits, indigenous communities, and social enterprises, creative dialogue-based tools and processes informed by complexity theory to help leaders and teams make decisions in uncertain contexts.

But mostly Chris Corrigan is just a person who would like to share a pesto recipe with you:

Take a bunch of basil, destem it, place it into a mortar with a few pinches of coarse salt and a couple of peeled garlic cloves and begin grinding it into a paste.

When the leaves are all broken down, add some pine nuts and gently pour in a really good olive oil until the paste has the consistency you’re looking for.

Add a pinch of chilli flakes for a subtle feeling of heat.

That’s the secret. Purists will object, but I’m telling you, give it a try.

How do you define creativity and apply it in your life and career?

Making things I guess. It’s certainly what I have done from a very small age, made drawings, and songs and poems and games and all kinds of things. These days I make conversations and community and I try to make a difference by doing things that have never been done before. It is all creative.

Where do you find your best creative inspiration or energy?

In a few places: the early morning, or being with others. I am an improviser at heart and so I work with offers all around me and when I am creating with others I feel like I’m always at my best.

What’s one piece of creative advice or a tip you wish you’d known as a young person?

Pay more attention to what you have just done. Try to remember the feelings of sweetness and despair instead of just moving on to the next thing. There are so many experiences I’ve forgotten about because they seemed so fleeting at the time, and now I wish I could remember who was there with me and what we actually did.

Who (living or dead) would you most enjoy hearing speak at CreativeMornings? 

Have you ever had any children speak? Would you dare turn the mic over to a 12 year old child? A twelve year old girl ready to kick ass and take names would be an amazing thing to see.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done?

Quit a full time government job with a baby at home to become a consultant.

What did you learn from your most memorable creative failure?

Usually no one gets hurt.What are you reading these days? Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh by Mo Yan, What The Mystics Know by Richard Rohr, Trickster Drift, Eden Robinson

What fact about you would surprise people?

I am a practicing contemplative Christian.

How does your life and career compare to what you envisioned for your future when you were a sixth grader?

At no point did I ever play on the blue line for the Toronto Maple Leafs, so nothing has really worked out. I also didn’t start a band with Brian May and Freddy Mercury.

How would you describe what you do in a single sentence to a stranger?

I help people work together to figure out what to do when they are stuck so that we can make the world a more just place.

What’s the most recent thing you learned (big or small)?

How to move between an Eb melodic minor and an Bb major scale in the same position so as to find some compact soloing lines on A Child is Born.

If you could open a door and go anywhere where would that be?

Right now, it would probably be to the Grey Bruce Highlands in southern Ontario to visit my family.

What keeps you awake at night?

Barred owls on the hunt beneath a full moon and a Pineapple Express lashing the front of my house.

What myths about creativity would you like to set straight?

There are no myths about creativity. It’s all true. Even the myths. Especially the myths.

Who has been the biggest influence on your life? What lessons did that person teach you?

My partner Caitlin. She continually teaches me how to not lose my shit and succumb to anxiety and fear. And every day she reminds me that I am loved.

What are you proudest of in your life?

My two kids, who are young adults now and making their way in a weird world. They love each other and my heart bursts through my chest every time I think about them.

If you could do anything now, what would you do?

End patriarchy, capitalism, and settler-colonialism and watch SOOOO many of my friends fulfill their potential and make the world a better place.

Where was the last place you travelled?

Last air travel was in February 2020 and was a three point tour to Ontario, Columbus Ohio, and Minneapolis, to teach the Art of Hosting and complexity skills to doctors in Ohio and social change activists in the Twin Cities. And to drink whisky with my dad for his birthday.

What music are you listening to these days?*

Lots of jazz standards played on guitar and especially diving into the work of Reg Schwager.

What was the best surprise you’ve experienced so far in life?

Realizing in an instant that I am unconditionally loved.

Where is your favourite place to escape?

There are a few places on Bowen Island, where I live, that are absolutely precious to me.

What was the best advice you were ever given?

If you talk to people about what they know about, they will always tell you the truth. I heard that from Utah Phillips at the Vancouver Folk Festival in 1997 and it fundamentally changed my facilitation practice.

What books made a difference in your life and why?

Not just books? There are many creative artifacts that have been influential in my life. The Tao te Ching was super influential. A painting by Carl Beam called “Columbus Chronicles”, John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” Irish whistle player Mary Bergin’s album “Feadóga Stain,” the midfield prowess of Glenn Hoddle, Nathanial Mackey’s Bedouhin Hornbook. The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making by Sam Kaner. News of the World by Queen. Between the Breaks by Stan Rogers. Leadership and the New Science by Meg Wheatley. The Rez Sisters by Thomson Highway. The Sacrifice by Andrei Tarkovsky. Tsawalk by Umeek. The tifo and creative support of the Vancouver Southsiders and the Swanguardians. Listening for the Heartbeat of God by J. Phillip Newell, Anam Cara by John O'Donohue, Loving What Is by Byron Katie, the leadership artistry of Khelsilem. Each of these, among many others, have ushered my over various thresholds in my life. They are all creative works, some are creative re-imaginings of spirituality, process work, and ways of living.

What practises, rituals, or habits contribute to your creative work?

It’s a combination of the openness and rest that is offered by my meditation practice and the rigour of playing scales on the guitar or forcing myself to write despite my mind’s resistance to being “productive” when I’m feeling dry.

When you get stuck creatively, what is the first thing you do to get unstuck?

Go for a walk.

If you had fifteen extra minutes each day, what would you do with them?

Lie on my back, close my eyes and listen to three pieces of very good music.

What has been one of your biggest Aha! moments in life?

The first time I witnessed a meeting held in Open Space, with 400 people in a room in Whistler in 1995. It completely transformed my facilitation and leadership practice, knowing that a group of people can self-organize action around issues that they care about. I’ve never looked back.

What object would you put in a time capsule that best represents who you are today?

My music library.

What is the one movie or book every creative must see/read? 

You should read a book or seek out the traditional teachings of your place, of where you live, of the traditional territory you inhabit. Those aren’t always written down, but I feel that it is so important to know your place because if you create things that run counter to the place you are living you can perpetuate patterns of harm. Understand who you are, where you are and why you are there.

🎵 This month’s live musical guest is jazz & R&B guitarist, bandleader, and teacher (Teun Schut)[https://www.teunschut.ca].🎶

Originally from Holland, Schut has been playing guitar for five decades, studying and playing jazz, blues, and rock in bands and ensembles. Having toured around the world, Tuen settled in Bowen Island, where he continues to teach, play, and perform.

You don’t want to miss this! Register now.

#personal

I write here sometimes because it’s incredibly satisfying to be understood.  Some people take pictures.  I took pictures for years.  For a time I really believed that what I was doing was connecting with the world.  I traveled all over.  Spent weeks at a time in Asia by myself just wandering.  I shared it with ghostly friends and attachments.  I had understood it to be a precursor to a real connection.  That I was putting out this information on the internet to connect with someone.  Much like I had tried to make it in the music scene at one time to find likeminded people.  The one thing I’ve learned through failure is it doesn’t always work out the way you want it to.  It may just be from repetition that I’ve become more talented writing about the things I see and feel.  I’m never good enough at anything to be recognized or treated with some value in the real world.  I’ve had some of the same cryptic names cycle through my dash for years.  I’d argue sometimes that media here isn’t very social.  It’s rather communal.  A shared almost secret history of memes, idols, art and music.  You never have to clarify much.  Something here is cringe to one person and high art to others.  There’s this silent understanding that we’re all trying to move closer to what moves us.  We’re adrift in hidden connections plugged together like a Rhizome.  It’s all romantic shit if you grew up reading Gibson playing pen and paper Cyberpunk with a bunch of nerds.  But the world gets harder and harder to plug back into outside these delicate ebbs and flows of information.  I never really spent much time on Usenet back in the day other than to dig for mp3′s.  I grew up running Bulletin Board systems with my mother.  I was always writing.  I almost got expelled from a Christian High School for publishing a zine.  Some younger kids on my bus got a hold of it and claimed it was Satanic.  Half of the zine was about illustrations from people I met in real life.  Most of them were reminiscent of Pushead.  Very gory skate graphics.  The guy who drew them also designed flyers for punk bands.  Decades later I don’t really think there’s much difference between Tumblr and Zine culture.  Of all the things you’d have to wear the badge from high school, nobody really empathizes that I have become the patron saint of zine culture.  Of all the shit people could talk about me over the years.  He was a jungle dj.  Oh he was a footwork dj.  He was a white rapper.  He tried to skate but my friends are better than him.  He tried to make his own shirts.  I sold a lot of those here on Tumblr.  More so than knowing anyone in real life.  People get the impression I’m a lot of things.  I’m that guy you see helping the lady in the wheelchair in the grocery store find help.  This happened yesterday.  The woman thought I worked there.  There was an awkward sign on the door looking for a security guard for hire.  I spoke with the deli and got someone to assist.  For some reason everyone made the mistake of labeling me as a graffiti artist for years.  The police didn’t help.  I’ve had varying degrees of mistaken identity and my share of surveillance.  But I’ve never done anything other than run an apartment gallery for street art.  I was in the walk thru for an outside atm yesterday.  There was an angry white man scrubbing off some purple tags  with some orange zep.  I joked and said “get the led out!  He didn’t think it was funny.  He replied the people who lived in this neighborhood should do something about this.  I replied I lived here and there’s not much you can do.  He scolded me saying Chase could remove the atms as punishment.  He didn’t work for chase.  I told him I was more of a JP Morgan kind of guy.  Everybody on the internet thinks I’m the next roaring kitty but doesn’t want to admit it.  Or is that the other way around.  One thing I’m for certain.  I’ve been a lot of things and someone always tries to outdo me at being me.

I write here to parse the reality that nobody keeps score.  I keep track of my finances often.  For some reason, I’m doing about the best fiscally I’ve ever done just waiting for Godot.  I spoke with my dad last night about things.  I’ve had four packages go missing since mid April.  I’ve had people follow me around and give me weird looks.  I’ve had my locks tampered with.  I’ve had consistent fraudulent charges I’ve had to contend with.  It never ends.  It’s like a literal nightmare shit show outside the door at every moment.  I write here about it to simply let people know I do not think any of it is normal.  And generally, I start to believe that it never was.  I don’t drink anymore.  I don’t really have a problem with people who do.  But when people overdo it they forget how far they cross the line.  My biggest fear for this summer is the yolo effect.  That people will be so frustrated with being held back that they will use this summer as their ultimate party bus.  The shoe will be on the other foot.  If you wear a mask you are crazy to them.  Everyone will have the chance to speak their mind in public now.  They’ve been practicing on Facebook for fifteen months to tell you off.  Sometimes I feel like there’s a whole generation of people who think they stan me here.  Who go out into the wild and whisper what they think they’ve learned through reading comprehension about me.  I relish this.  Sort of like how Zizek talks of surveillance.  Let the dogs and the secret police learn something I say!  And you put it out there on the internet in any fashion and they will learn.  Often not in the way you want them to.  Which is why as a writer, obfuscation is the biggest weapon you have against nosy neighbors and pinkerton spies.  If I am even a writer at all.  This kind of activity just like my music isn’t considered anything of a skill.  There are a lot of people out there who can’t even reply in an email on LinkedIn with the spell check on.  If I have all these skills.  If I have all these things I’ve been.  Why am I in this situation particularly?  Why hasn’t anyone noticed how badly it is I am suffering on the inside?  Technically I’m not suffering as near as I was a year ago.  I’m out of debt.  I’ve gotten rid of a lot of excess baggage.  I’ve kept healthy by working out in my home.  I’ve adjusted to the reality that nobody ever gets it but me.  I’ve plugged myself into investments that I took the full risk on.  I’ve literally crawled from the ashes of a situation meant to break me.  And my consolation prize is that nobody ever.  And I mean EVER.  Talks.  About it.  What happened to me.  How fucking horrible it is.  How fucking wrong it all is.  All the way back to when I first started trying to be recognized as me.  To be valued.  I have to stop myself there.  I write here often and I feel to a certain group of dear friends it is valued.  That my context is understood a little more deeply than “maybe we can use this guy.”  I’ve been used on levels that would make you vomit in public.  And I’ve been gaslighted enough to know that there’s no use in trying to prove it.  I’m supposed to move on and understand the rules.  There are no rules out here.  There’s a semblance of order when people stand in front of cameras or their zoom mic.  When they’re shouting from their “platform” to change the world.  Nobody ever talks.  Nobody really listens.  And for that I feel we’re all growing tired of a world that simply shouts out it’s demands.  I wake up to the same reality every morning.  Nobody texts.  Nobody invites me out to socialize.  Everybody has something to say to me and it’s never “How are you doing?”  None of it really matters to me from simple statistical observation.  If I haven’t changed your mind by now, you don’t really want to know what I’m thinking.

When you get stuck.  And who knows if you will.  But when you get stuck like me.  It takes a lot of positivity to stay focused.  I go out and try to do things often.  But people will spoil that solitude with some bullshit excuse like “This is America.  I’m free to do what I want when I want.”  At the expense of others.  And out here, I’d love to tell you how I survive when nothing changes.  I stay out of the way.  I am so fucking disassociated from this place that it feels evil.  I’ve been in this city over two decades.  You would think a person like me would have some kind of culture other than being hunted and tested every turn.  Who knows who the ring leader is anymore.  People read what I write and then take it their own way.  Nobody really cares for my well being out here.  That’s self love talking.  And I am being real.  People have manipulated my entire life and put my safety at risk for the sake of some sort of performance.  Some of that is just life.  Some of that I accept because it’s the way this lane operates.  But nowhere in this journey have I sacrificed my authenticity for some big payoff.  I don’t even know what the fuck is going on with people anymore.  It is okay to remove yourself from a series of toxic situations.  It is okay to reset.  It is okay to understand that the pandemic might have reset everything for you back to square one.  It is okay to let go of social obligations that never valued you as a person.  It is okay to keep wearing a mask.  It is okay to say no.  It is okay to walk away from a disrespectful situation and rely on yourself.  It is also hard as fuck in practice.  If anyone can learn anything from me it is that you literally are asking for it.  The old fuck around and find out.  Except I’ve found out a lot more than just how charming I can be to the right person by being thoughtful and consistent.  I’ve learned the FOMO of trying to participate in a pyramid is not the kind of leverage I’m interested in.  I’ve learned that debt rhymes with net.  I’ve learned how to keep that somewhat stable in one of the most fucked up economic shitstorms in America.  I’ve learned I’m not eligible for the things people assume I’m on.  Like unemployment.  I’ve learned health insurance costs as much as my rent.  Which is a great deal on rent.  I’ve learned that making hamburgers and freezing them are delicious.  But even then you’d have to pay me more than fifteen dollars an hour.  I’ve learned this entire thing is my fault.  And I’ve written about it for years.  And yet nobody seems to want to have a conversation about it.  They just keep on assuming.  People are sleepwalking out there.  Some people are really good at faking it.  But then you follow their lead and end up in the same laugh out loud shit show.  When you get stuck, it’s best to count your blessings.  At least people might somewhere understand why I do the things that I do.  Why I think it’s completely futile to try to do anything drastic when everything always fails.  Why I’ve given up on believing that people have my best interest at heart in a city that’s ignored me for over a year.  I write to keep a clear narration of how I’m trying to tackle a problem far bigger than me.  I deal with it by staying out of the way.  Out of sight.  Trapped in a corner shack lighthouse in a highly accessible city.  With no end of people trying to access me.  To chip on through.  I wonder if you got to the center of all this.  If you really solved the mystery.  I wonder if you’d finally break down and cry.  That you’ve been wrong about me for this long.  There’s no mystery to solve about me other than why I keep writing on a dead platform.  And why the general public secretly pays so much attention to every word I type.  I don’t really “wonder” anymore.  I just know.  <3 Tim