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shiftyskip · 5 years

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Walter Scott “Smokey” Gordon

The Real Smokey Gordon:

(His twin sister Cleta is standing next to him)

Walter Scott Gordon Jr. was born April 15, 1920 in Jackson, Mississippi to Cleta and Walter Gordon. He had a twin sister, named Cleta. His parents had married later in life, in the 30s, which was unusual for their time. His father, Walter Sr. was called either BeeBoy or Bee. Cleta Sr. had not gotten her name until she was three years old and had another sibling. BeeBoy was a spec builder and a real estate developer. His mother was a fiery teacher in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She was once fired for getting caught not sitting side saddle “like a lady”. When news about her firing got to the students and parents, they threatened to fire the school board. Cleta was given her job back and inspired so many students that several named their kids after her. BeeBoy and Cleta were very popular in Jackson, Mississippi. This changed during the Great Depression, where they lost nearly everything.

His parents were not prepared to be parents, more or less parents of twins. After the birth of Smokey and his twin, Beeboy would sometimes drive up to his house after working, hear the twins crying from his car, reverse his car, and come back when his children had stopped and were asleep.

Smokey was bright, quick, and could remember details of almost anything he’d read. He even studied Latin. But for all his knowledge and skill, Smokey did poorly in school. He was smart, but he was witty and liked to joke around which didn’t go over very well with his teachers. They did not like his attitude in class.

Smokey’s family was not religious, but Smokey took it upon himself to become Episcopalian, a lay leader, and an altar boy. He memorized the Bible and could recite it from memory, This changed when Cleta Jr. died from breast cancer when she was in her early 30s, causing Smokey to lose all his faith. After that, Smokey would say, “Any god that could take away the most beautiful creation to walk this earth, I want nothing to do with.” But even after this, Smokey enjoyed religious discussions and could still quote the Bible down to the chapter and verse, saying that “Don’t you know the Bible is the greatest book ever written?”

Smokey graduated from Central High School and attended Millsaps College for many semesters. This didn’t work out for him in the end, since he focused on other things. Finally, he decided to enlist in the military.

The first time did not go as planned and Smokey was denied because he was colorblind and had flat feet. Dejected, he turned to BeeBoy for guidance. BeeBoy told him that the Army tried to distance you from your home, so your homesickness wouldn’t cause you to run the first chance you got. BeeBoy told him that if he enlisted up north, they’d send him down south and vice versa. With this in mind, Smokey hopped a train to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to try again.

Still colorblind, Smokey memorized the men reading the letters in front of him and passed. He heard about the paratroopers and decided to enlist, liking the idea of the extra pay. He didn’t exactly think that he was getting more pay because he was jumping out of an airplane and into enemy fire.

Smokey was not originally a Toccoa boy. He started his training at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina and got transferred to Camp Toccoa, Georgia. BeeBoy was right with that perspective at least. Smokey was in the 3rd Platoon of Easy Company.

Smokey got his nickname during the war. He had a chewing tobacco habit and it earned him the nickname, he also liked to smoke pipes and cigars. He would never drink, stating that anything he drank he would drink it with voracity so he stayed away from alcohol. He preferred water. And he drank a lot of water. I’m not kidding, he drank more than the average man. He drank so much water he would try and find ways to get other’s water during training. He started carrying candy bars around to get an extra few sips of water. He’d carry around Hershey’s Bars to exchange for water (don’t ask me why all of the Easy Company boys like Hershey’s, I really cannot explain it.) Smokey was also sort of a smart ass. One day, he gave his last cigarette to Tab, then said the payment was a dime for a match to light it.

In England, Lipton and Smokey would prefer to go tour museums and art galleries than go out drinking. They’d go together or sometimes even alone. Smokey did not give up his mischievous personality and one day, he took a trip to Bath, England with another guy. They went on a museum tour and when lunchtime came, the museum closed briefly, but Gordon and the other man hid inside until it was safe. Then they stripped and swam and played around in the Ancient Roman baths. Before the museum opened, they got dressed and rejoined the tour.

Winters, in his memoir, writes that Smokey and his friend Paul Rogers, enjoyed passing their time by picking a victim to dedicate a poem to. Their victim had received company punishment and therefore needed a poem about them told in front of the company when they were assembled. The victim would be throughly embarrassed and angry. If the victim of their teasing blew up on them, they got more joy out of their teasing. The more embarrassed their victim became, the happier Smokey and his friend were. Their easy target was Floyd Talbert. Tab, one Christmas Eve, had a bit of a temper tantrum when his silverware was removed and stormed out. Smokey met him afterwards, telling Tab he had skipped possibly his last Christmas dinner on Earth.

Smokey jumped into Normandy on D-Day. He landed on a farm, near an apple tree,with half his machine gun.The first person Smokey saw in Normandy was John Eubanks. Eubanks was supposed to be carrying the tripod for machine guns, but when he didn’t see a purpose for carrying it without a gun or a gunner around him, he got rid of it. Smokey found a way around it, and set his gun on low stone walls to fire it.

Guth joined them shortly afterwards as they wandered around Normandy. At one point, a voice called out the code word “FLASH”. Before anyone could do anything, Eubanks called out “Lightning!” WRONG CODE WORD, the right one is thunder. They ducked, knowing what happened when they said the wrong code word, and a grenade was thrown at them by the other man, who promptly ran away. The men found Talbert a short time later. Together they joined a group of 502nd men that took out a bunker, near a bar in Ravenoville, with Smokey’s orders.

Smokey was injured in Normandy in his calf, by a piece of shrapnel that went in his leg and out the other. When he was evacuated to England, he had a long cast up his leg. It ran from his hip to his toe. In this hospital period, Smokey met with groups of military upper brass as they went through. These groups spoke with the wounded men and gave them Purple Hearts if they qualified. This award was supposed to stay pinned to their pillows, but every time a group was gone, Smokey would take his off and put it under his pillow. He slowly collected a small amount of these by the end of the 8 weeks he was there.

Tab was also injured near Carentan. This was the night of Stab-A-Tab, where Talbert was stabbed by another Easy man by mistake. Smokey, with his tradition of making poems out of people’s misery, made one for Tab. The Night of The Bayonet was Smokey’s tribute to Tab when they returned to Aldbourne, England. He also gave Talbert one of his Purple Hearts as well. According to Smokey, whenever the night was brought back up, Tab claimed he could’ve shot the kid six times, but didn’t think they could spare to lose a man.

Smokey was also promoted to the NCO ranks during their time at Aldbourne. He would eventually end the war as a corporal. It’s also said that Lipton and Smokey went to tour Scotland after recovering.

Surviving all of Holland, we end his military chapter in Bastogne. I can’t tell you what he did in Holland, but I will let you know if I can find anything. (I do feel super bad about this but I can’t find anything right now.)

In Bastogne, Winters remembered walking past Gordon one day, as Gordon sat at the edge of his foxhole, staring out at the forest, without recognizing him at first, and then thinking, “Damn! Gordon’s matured! He’s a man!”

Smokey was shot on Christmas Eve morning. His partner was newer, and had no experience with foxholes. Their foxhole was not deep enough for the tall 6′1″ paratrooper, and Smokey was shot in the shoulder as he was drinking coffee. The hot drink poured into his lap as his body slid down. The bullet entered his left shoulder, traveled through him, and left through his right shoulder. It touched his spinal cord and he was paralyzed from the neck down.

He was dragged out of his foxhole by his close friend Paul Rogers and Jim Alley. They took him into the woods to see Doc Roe. There Doc attended to him with morphine and plasma. Lipton ran over to see how he could help Smokey. He was leaning over Smokey, trying to get a response out of the wounded man. Another man pointed out that Lipton was actually standing on Smokey’s hand and that Smokey could not feel it. He had lost his sensations in most of his body. This is when they realized just how serious Smokey was hurt.

Smokey was evacuated to an aid station, to England, to a hospital in Wales, He was put into a cast that left his head to his waist covered, only his face was left exposed. This caused a problem due to the fact his wounds from the bullet couldn’t be treated. They drilled holes into his head to install Crutchfield Tongs, to stop any movement. He was forced immobile, laying on his back, for six weeks.

One day, a doctor looked at Smokey and told someone to watch out for Smokey because he was goldbricking. Goldbricking is an excuse to escape a task, Smokey was so mad that he yelled at the doctor, “Damn it! If I could get out of this bed and I’d show you what goldbricking is.” The doctor left, successful with his attempt to rile up Smokey to keep his fight going. Smokey would keep in touch with this doctor, even after the war, for the remainder of his life.

Smokey gained control of his pinky finger during his time of recovery He was labeled walking wounded a short bit later. But he was still not free from the hospital. He was shipped off to Atlanta, where he’d stay in a hospital until the war was over in 1945. He was able to go home by that time, but continued to remain in the Army. In his letters home, he was never able to give an answer to that question of when he’d return.

Even though he was now well enough to go home, they were going to send him to Fort Benning for restricted or limited duty. BeeBoy, who Smokey called to tell the news, started yelling and threatening the Army that he’d take Walter to the US Senate, strip Smokey, and let them determine if he was going to be sent home or not. I’m not sure if that message to the driving force with the doctor, but Smokey was soon discharged with 90% disability.

The rest of his life, he suffered with chronic back pain and shoulder pain. His back would hurt if it was touched, even if it was a pat on the back. He took an Army aptitude test to see what his career should be, and got bulldozer operator. But Smokey didn’t like this idea and decided to put his strength more in knowledge than what the Army had expressed.

Under the GI Bill, Smokey went back to school. He attended Cumberland Law School in Tennessee. 6 months into this school, he returned to Mississippi, took the state bar exam and passed. He went back to school to officially achieve his degree, but he was already a licensed attorney. Even before graduating.

But he never practiced law. He became an oil broker instead. He had no car but was given work fairly early after the war. He wrote to Henry Ford II and the letter got him a car from the local dealership and he paid without having to wait for a new car. And instantly he got a way to work.

In 1950, while on a vacation, Smokey met his future wife. Her name was Betty Ball Ludeau from Louisiana. Smokey asked her to reintroduce herself several times, causing a bit of embarrassment on her part. But it’s Smokey, that’s almost expected. He swore it was love at first sight and he knew he was gonna marry her.

During their relationship, he worked in Hammond, Louisiana with oil and would drive to go see Betty. The pair had little in common, he didn’t like dancing or saloons like she did. He pursued her with a passion, and she refused him, She rejected several marriage proposals from Smokey, but Smokey continued to ask. She rejected him many times till one night he learned the answer. She blurted out that she couldn’t marry him because she didn’t know how to cook. Smokey told her he “wasn’t marrying her to be his cook”, he “was marrying her to be his bride”. Throughout their marriage, he would call her “his bride”. She finally said yes.

They were married June 14, 1951. Smokey said she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen to anyone who would listen when Betty entered a room. He claimed she was the most entertaining woman he’d ever met. Smokey dearly loved Betty. Everyday he’d tell her, “...have I told you how much I love you today? And tell me. what can I do to make you happy?”

Smokey didn’t have many hobbies due to how much he worked. He had no problem requiring the same amount of effort out of his kids, all five of them. There was Elizabeth “Bebe”, Linda, Eunice Gay, and Cleta, his daughters. He had one son, Walter S. Gordon III. He often ran by military tactics, and not parenting tools such as Dr. Spock. His kids chores were based on the military scale, he would inspect their completed chores and give them more if they weren’t done correctly. They didn’t want to be doing nothing around Smokey, for he’d given a good work ethnic and doing nothing around Smokey was nearly a crime. They also appeared to have hired a Nanny to help with all 5 kids, they called her MowMow. Often times, the only control the house had was when Smokey was in charge. When family arguments arose, it was all to blame the kids, even if they didn’t do anything (specifically for the cases where they escaped punishment when they thoroughly deserved the punishment).

He’d sometimes take his 5 kids out of school during the week to join him on a trip. They’d all travel on his business trip with him, missing school, and heading to New Orleans, Louisiana. Like everything else, their vacation was scheduled like military tactics. They had scheduled meeting times and places, where they’d to his hotel. He’d send them off to an arcade with 5 dollars and would continue with his business trip. At dinner, they’d go to a fancy restaurant. They were all around the age of 5-11, which to Smokey was old enough to be able to function properly, even though they weren’t adults.

Even though he loved working, Smokey was a family man as well. Whenever invited out for drinks with co-workers, he’d chose to go home to his wife and kids instead. He loved his kids and his family a lot, focusing his time on them instead of other places when he was home from travels.

Smokey loved his kids about as much as he loved money, Often times, using money to bribe his kids to come home and visit. He’d send them a check that wasn’t signed, bribing them with signing it when they next returned home to see him. Or he ripped a $100 in half, send half of it with a letter that stated they’d get the rest when they came to visit, and they’d come back, curious about his latest antic.

Smokey continued to love jokes. He loved practical jokes, sometimes planning them out for months. He once sent a letter to a reporter he saw dining at a diner he regularly was at, she left without paying for 2 cups of tea. He then adopted a pseudonym, wrote a letter where he portrayed the owner of the diner asking her to pay the diner back for the tea. One time, the lieutenant governor of Mississippi, a friend from law school, sent a joking letter to Smokey that read: “...I have been informed that you were wounded in the head in the last war. As a public official of the great state of Mississippi, I want to take this opportunity to say I am indeed sorry they didn’t kill you.”

Smokey is seen as the link between Ambrose and Easy Company. Ambrose lived about 15 minutes away from each other in Mississippi (not neighbors as the story is told). In 1988, Ambrose’s assistant heard about the group of veterans attending a reunion in New Orleans. They met with the assistant and were interviewed, and soon they connected the assistant to Smokey who lived nearby. They had set up an interview with Ambrose and Smokey, Lipton, Guth, and Winters. Smokey and Ambrose became close friends and their friendship lasted for a long time.

Smokey returned to Mississippi towards the end of his life, he was away from his bride, but they made weekly visits to each other. He spent much of his time with Tracy, his daughter and her kids. They talked daily, until one day where he didn’t call, two days after his birthday. Tracy’s nanny tried to call, and couldn’t get an answer, so she traveled with the grandkids to Smokey’s house. He was an early riser, and would have gotten his paper and started his day by then. She arrived to see he still hadn’t grabbed his paper. There, Miss Lilian, the nanny, and his 5 year old grandson found him in his bedroom and he was rushed to the hospital.

Smokey had suffered a stroke in the night. At first, it was believed he would recover, but a few hours later, while in the hospital, he had another massive stroke. He passed away 3 days later on April 19, 1997. Smokey was cremated and remained with his son, until his wife passed away in 2009, when he was buried with her.

His funeral was exactly how his life was, happy and full of jokes. Stories of his pranks and humor were shared along with a bunch of smiles. Gordon’s life should be remembered the way he was, with a few stories that make you smile and a heart full of love and humor

#smokey gordon #walter gordon #Walter Scott Gordon Jr.#band of brothers #Real Life Band of Brothers #real band of brothers #profiles

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euphoriacrossing · 4 years

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The closer we get the more my anxiety plays up...

What if I can't keep up with my journal that I worked so hard on?

What if I mess up something I can't change on my island? (I don't WANT to have to reset, but if it's the first day i will... i don't want to have to reset two or three days in because i change my mind about something...)

And the bigger ones.... I've been so tired I can barely stay awake two or three hours at a time. I can't do a whole lot of recreational things because I'm asleep. Right now I'm attributing it to depression, but I am going to ask my oncologist if maybe the meds could cause it (the meds I DID stop, but thay messed with my hormones anyway) or if the slight bit of anemia I have could cause it maybe? What if I am not awake enough to fully enjoy the game?

I go to the oral surgeon I think for a consultation to get some teeth pulled, what if he wants to do it anytime soon after the game is out? Will it mess with my enjoybility to have that kind of procedure? (Last time I had teeth out... my wisdom teeth I did very poorly, I got two dry sockets and was in some of the worst pain... I was LUCKY to be able to sleep as much as I did, because the pain was awful. And I followed instructions, so I don't know if I am more prone to those kinds of things or if it was the fact he didn't tell me to stop my birth control or what... but it was bad. And now I have a much higher tolerance to pain meds and will have to use the ones I'm ON so they'll be less effective probably. I'll die if I get a dry socket. Pain tolerance, mine is high until you get to my mouth and then I'm an absolute crybaby.) So say he wants to do it the Monday after... will I be out of commission to play for two weeks or more while I recover? I know this sounds more important, but to me the game is important, too. I want to be able to put in at least some work daily for quite a while so I can create a beautiful island at the same time others who start on the 20th are. So it may not seem like a huge deal, but it is to me okay? Enough of a huge deal for my anxiety to use it against me.

Those are just examples though. I have an anxiety disorder which in past years has become more generalized and entwined with my bipolar symptoms. So I am in no short supply of things related to the 20th to be anxious about.

I wish I could just be happy. And I mean, I am. We have less than a week and I'll be playing a game that is 7 years in the making for those of us that play Animal Crossing. I've been waiting with baited breath probably more than a year, to the point where when Pokemon Sw/Shld came out it was just a distraction instead of the main event, at that point I was already craving New Horizons desperately. And here we are nearly at the end of our waiting, I am happy, don't get me wrong.

But my mind never just let's me be happy.

What if I am too late to make friends in the first few days like I've planned? Everyone else seems to already have their friendships, but I knew I couldn't keep up with a friendship that long. So here is the week to make friends, and I don't feel I know how, or I feel like most people already have their friends. I have maybe two people besides my sister to play with. And I'm excited for that. But I'd love to be included in a larger group of friends or something, you know, that sort of thing is nice. If I only have a few close friends though, that'd be nice too. And i think the first few days it seems people might just be playing on their own, i don't always NEED someone to play with, I'll probably prefer to play alone, or maybe with my sister mostly, or just my close friend when I play. But it's just i guess i expected to use this opportunity to make more friends and now i feel i am wasting it. I don't often have such an "easy way" to make friends because I am disinterested in most things and just don't have a lot to talk about. This common interest is an amazing thing to talk about and should make things easier, but it doesn't as much as I hoped I guess.

What if I don't finish my journal? I worked so hard on it, but i need my dad's help with the label maker and need to finalize the decisions about what I'm going to record in it before I do make the labels. It can still be changed later because I am using labels on plastic tabs and a discbound journal but what if I don't have time once i'm playing?

Ugh. Just all the "what ifs". And I know some people will think "why'd she bother making this post?" Well random person, it does help to get them out in the open. Since most everything I have been thinking has been AC related lately, this has turned into a bit of a personal blog. Sorry for that. I do plan to make it a New Horizons blog and post as much original content as I can once ACNH is out.

Oh another one. What if posting original content is too hard?

Like, I want this blog to have original content and all that, but if you have to remove your memory card and get on a computer to do it, that's a lot of trouble and extra energy I don't have these days. And you had to do that for New Leaf and everyone did including myself, but I had more energy and it seemed easier. And it seems like it was less effort those days because people DID THINGS on the computer including myself. Now I use my phone and ipad as computers, you can do almost all the same things on them, and my laptop sits idle which might be the reason it doesn't run as well these days. Or it may just be that it's old as crap for a laptop. I mean, I guess it's moderately old for what it is, it's a very nice laptop, but I think it's the same one I had for New Leaf so it's been with me a while. Anyway, it SEEMED like less trouble because you were on the computer doing stuff anyway, so just pop your memory card in there and go while you're checking your stuff. It's not that easy on a phone, BUT I am hoping you can post photos and screenshots to SOMETHING through the Nooklink app. We don't know everything about the app yet as it isnt out yet, and I doubt you can post straight to tumblr (though that'd make things easy, huh?) because this is not the most used platform anymore, but if I can post them to anywhere (like facebook or twitter... I'd probably post them privately to facebook because I am less versed in twitter stuff, but then I did recently become an AC twitter on my personal twitter because I never used my personal twitter anyway, so... yeah...) I can grab them on my phone once they are uploaded and reupload them here. But I also plan to make my "diary like" text posts here. I am not recording a diary in my journal having to do with NH, I only want like... data and information I can use, etc. But that doesn't mean I won't want to write diary like entries, and I am less likely to lose my blog that a physical journal anyway it feels. (I say less likely... I lost my New Leaf blog for a few years there, but with effort I did recently find it.) So it could be very easy to post original content here, or if the app doesn't do things it really totally should, then it might be a bit more effort and I don't know if I have that to give right now, so I'm nervous about that. Everything I post here about my game experience is going to be more for me to look back on than anything, so I WANT to be able to post about that stuff here. But I guess we'll have to wait to see, along with waiting for the game.

And everyone knows how well waiting and anxiety get along. They are two peas in a pod, they play off each other like it's no one's business.

But I hope everything in the end will just be okay. I am "lucky" in a way. Since I'm chronically ill, disabled, and have cancer, I don't have work or school to worry about and while being sick is a big bummer, that does take a lot of stress off of me. I don't know how I would handle a job or school even just mentally these days, I don't see how it could go well and I guess that is because I am so sick, even just mentally... but I know a lot of disabled people DO still do those things anyway, sometimes because they HAVE to, so I am glad I am in a position at my age where I am still largely take care of. My disability money doesn't cover a fraction of my necessities, so I feel blessed everyday for my parents, even though my mom and I fight like cats and dogs. Annnndddd now I am getting to be anxious about what happens to me when my parents are gone and that's a WHOLE different type of anxiety... yikes... I need to stop letting my anxiety run rampant now I guess, it's gone too far.

But I am very "lucky" to be in a position where once the game comes out it can be my main focus for a while. Partially because i don't have the energy to focus on many different things, so it's good Animal Crossing can take up that main spot in my life for now.

Come on now, back to AC anxieties. Ya stupid general anxiety...

And I guess I am anxious about the typical things people are anxious about... what fruit will I get, will I like my first Islanders, etc. but to me those things arent as major. All the fruits are so pretty I could really get on with any of them I think, and hopefully my first villagers will be great, but I'll make myself a net if they're not, and I do have amiibo cards for moving in some of my favorite villagers later on, so I can deal with a dud or two.

I'm a little anxious about map layouts too, just picking the right one seems a little difficult to me since there are some things you cannot change. But I think I can make a good choice, I'm more worried if I'll be able to draw it in for my journal or not. I should draw the general layout for the map, but I don't even know if I can do that right.

Oh I also have a package to finish working on and get in the mail before Friday, BUT I finished the hardest parts (writing a bunch of postcards, basically a latter's worth of text but on postcards) last night, so I just have to do finishing touches and get it out. I maybe want to type another letter to send out, too, but if I don't get it done I'll try not to beat myself up. I got really burnt out on mail stuff lately and as much as I still get, which is about one or two things in the mail daily, I can't reply to all the things I should. I'm stressed about it, but I won't let that ruin my New Horizons time. Especially since mail was supposed to be a fun hobby for me and just... stopped. But that's a whole different thing, that has less to do with New Horizons than the other stuff.

Now I genuinely do feel less stressed since I rambled on for a while. Thanks for reading this, if you read any of it. I don't expect anyone to read all this anxiety inducing, depressing junk.

But anyway, now I am going to try and think about the Nooklink app and what kind of features I think it should have. Like I said, it really should have a way to post screenshots/pictures to social media, and I bet it's got something like that since we have the camera in game. I bet we maybe even can post pictures to social media from the switch. I mean, well, I know we can technically, but I mean I bet we can without having to leave the game. Because you can do that in New Leaf now. Gosh would that have been handy YEARS ago. I guess it came with the "welcome amiibo" update?

But at least we know we can scan in QR codes. I dunno if you've noticed but I have been collecting some and tagging them (you can find them under the "QR" tag on my blog, or by type of QR code, likes dresses I just tagged "dress") so I have them once we are able to use them in game. I am going to check my @playtimewithmadi blog to see if I have QR codes saved that I used in New Leaf, too, so I can reblog any good ones here. All of that gives me something to do, I suppose.

I could also work on my journal, or my mail. Both need to get done before Friday and need work.

But honestly, I am probably gonna play Happy Home Designer right now. I'll design at least one house, and then maybe I'll work on my mail and journal stuff. We'll see.

Anyway, thanks again for sticking with me, I love everyone who stays subbed to this blog even though the BS posts like this. Sorry for rambling on, but I needed this, so thank you for letting me have it.

Off to more distraction then...

#Animal Crossing anxiety #Animal Crossing #anxiety #mental illness #Animal Crossing New Horizons #personal #mine

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tossertozier · 5 years

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So like i wanna talk about mike hanlon when the fuck don’t i!!! and writing processes this is a bad post alert warning i’m just talking about writing & tfat

anyway i decided to embark on writing &tfat fresh after rereading the book & watching chapter 1 for the second time. i remember on my book reread i was hyper focused on the characterization and plot of the adults & barely paid attention to the time as kids... to the point i actually thought several kid scenes i remembered were fanfiction (richie calling eddie on the phone specifically was one of them)

anyway... mike & will’s relationship is so integral to the growth of the book... and losing his father and being truly isolated in his journey as an adult is such a key part of how i think adult mike operates and therefore how he brings the rest of them back together

at first (shock and awe) my first draft of & tfat actually included will & a lot of him because he was dying of cancer, the way he does when mike is 17 in the book. bc again i think losing his dad is such an important piece of mike being who he is... like how i think it is very difficult to truly write eddie without his mom being who she is. (doesn’t mean i haven’t done it but sndjxjxj still)

and then when i started planning the reddie stuff and specifically the eddie’s mom stuff it all got too heavy. i know & tfat might sometimes read and feel like i open a google doc and smash keys until they autocorrect themselves into chapters but i do try really hard in narrative planning to make something that feels balanced between humor and romance and drama. a true rom com if you will.

and though the fic is truly putting eddie tf through it it is like passable trauma whereas i felt like putting mike through losing a parent would be very much an overbearing weight on his character that would make it difficult for him to focus on much of anything else. it’s just so tragic. my childhood best friend lost her dad to cancer when we were fifteen and it permeated, rightfully so, almost every aspect of her life that year. it was just so much.

so i pulled the plot and got left with (what do i do with mike now) (amidst my fuck what do i do with stan panic!! which is laughable now bc of how much i love to write stan) do i kill will? both of them like the film? let them be?

i got hit with the idea of well, do i want to write mike as an adult or mike as a teenager?

which is really a Thought bc

all of the other losers are afforded the luxury of being a teenager. mike’s... for the most part, depicted as an adult. i still like to give him his moments and his outbursts & hope that people see his writing as intentional and not lazy Calm Steady Boring Mike Trope. And i hope people see that that characterization is grounded in the death of his parents.

although horrendously poorly executed, i thought 2017 made some interesting introductory points (that ultimately went nowhere like mike’s screentime) about obligation and calling & why we do the things we do and what happens to who we are when we feel our actions have been pre-decided that i was interested in exploring (and we truly just haven’t gotten there we’re still in the build up for all of this for mike he’s really only started to look around... which is why this is all i’m gonna say on this)

and i thought to myself that there could be really interesting dynamic stuff with mourning the death of a parent with another and what does that look like for a family and how do you move on... but decided that even post-will’s death, jessica wouldn’t let mike fall into a trap of obligation... and decided to follow the movie path of both of them being deceased.

but even know the death of mike’s parents serves as a catalyst for the loser’s club being friends... meeting at all really. and mike being who he is is essential to the story happening the way it does.

but still, i wish i had greater thoughts on mike and his parents but most of my headcanons serve this universe and thinking of the young mike with mr chips and his parents it makes me... so sad. like it’s truly devastating to think of mike’s losses... he lost his best friends. and sometimes i think that’s what closes him off from the rest of his friends. why he’s so willing to listen and so unwilling to share. he’s lost his best friends before, and i think him, more than anyone else, knows how easily he could lose them all again.

#meta about my own damn fic #im so fucking annoying

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buttsonthebeach · 5 years

Text

Life Itself

I had the pleasure of writing about Darva Lavellan and Dorian for @goblin-deity - thank you for trusting me with such a moving moment in their lives, friend!

My Ko-Fi || My Commissions (Slots currently CLOSED as of 8/7/19 - but check out my giveaway!)

Pairing: Darva Lavellan x Dorian Pavus

Rating: Teen for mature themes. Trigger warning for terminal illness similar to cancer, and death of a parent.

*******************************

If Darva Lavellan had been feeling poorly lately, that was to be expected. Weight of the world on his shoulders and magic hand eating him up, and all that. Who wouldn’t be feeling a little poorly? Plus there were the nonstop treks back and forth and back and forth across Thedas. That was the only reason he was feeling unwell.

It was only when the ache set well and truly into his bones - when all of his joints hurt - when he felt the swelling at the points of his jaw, that tender spot, the gland that the clan’s healers said had to do with your body’s ability to fight infection - that he knew it was something more.

It was then that he thought at once of his father. Ahgie Lavellan. His safe haven throughout all his childhood. The parent he could trust and turn to, who did not wear his fear like a badge on his sleeve the way his mother did. Ahgie Lavellan, strong and brave, who died at the hands of an Orlesian hunting party when Darva was fourteen. Ahgie Lavellan who, before that, did not fear the blades of vengeful humans, but instead the sickness growing in his own bones.

“You’re going to stop being sick though, right? Someday?” Darva had asked him when his father told him why he was tired, why he was in pain, why he had to keep going to the healers.

“I will,” Ahgie said. “But I don’t think it will be because I get better, da’mynatha’la. I think it will be the opposite.”

Darva still felt a shiver of sadness, an ache, whenever he thought of his father’s nickname for him. My little moon.

He’d died only a few months later. The sickness never got the chance to eat him up. But now, sixteen years later, looking in the mirror and seeing a face that looked more and more like his father’s every day, Darva knew what was wrong.

He went to the healers to confirm it. A wasting illness, one that crept into your blood and your bones, resulted in hard knobs of swollen tissue within your body. A death sentence.

“I need your utmost discretion with this,” he told them at once.

His mind was already thinking of the currency he dealt in frequently now: secrets. Of how the Inquisition’s enemies would react if they knew. The Inquisitor was not only a Dalish elf whose greatest qualification for his office was a magic glowing hand, whose greatest protection was a pair of daggers that he wielded with particular style and lethality, but a man whose own body was in revolt, who was dying?

“Of course, Inquisitor.”

He would tell Leliana to monitor the correspondence of the healers nonetheless - without telling her why. She might start to work out her own reasons, but he trusted her entirely. Whatever she did work out, she would keep to herself.

He felt oddly calm about it all. So he was sick. There was also an ancient would-be god who had it out for him, so in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t that big of a deal. He just had to stay well long enough to fix this mess. Then he could fall apart. Hadn’t that been the plan all along? Hadn’t he been running from one disaster to another ever since he took his vallaslin and left his clan? This was just the next disaster. Nice to have a bit of a head’s up, really.

He’d keep it secret until absolutely necessary to do otherwise. That was the logical, responsible thing to do. Pretend it wasn’t happening.

He’d almost convinced himself of that until he was standing in the great hall of Skyhold, and he saw Dorian across the way. He was just leaving the rotunda, Vivienne at his side. The two of them were talking animatedly. Dorian was gesturing wildly with his hands, as he was wont to do when he got worked up about something. Darva froze, sticking close to the shadows of the door he had just exited, watching the two of them go. Watching Dorian go. His broad shoulders and his sharp, handsome face. Darva’s heart beat faster at the sight of that man - every single time - and things were serious between them now.

And just like that, the illness - this next disaster - was suddenly, vastly, unfair.

He’d come all this way - endured all of the shit life had thrown at him - nearly drowning in that river when he was young, his mother’s controlling paranoia, losing his father, his mother’s anger and grief then, how they were directed at him - drifting from place to place, finally returning home, only to leave for the Conclave and land in this nightmare - he’d endured all of that, found a man who shone a bright light into every one of those dark corners - was just starting to imagine a world where he could be happy, could have a home -

And now this.

Fuck.

He let Dorian and Vivienne leave the great hall without calling out to them. He stayed there in the shadows, so full of anger, of fear, that he could not move.

Darva went up to his quarters after that. He even had them bring his dinner up to him. He picked at it for a while. Then he laid out his collection of daggers and began polishing and inspecting them. It was good to do that. It was something small that he could control. And besides - they were bright, dangerous and strong. Qualities he would need in the time to come.

Dorian didn’t come looking for him, which was unusual, but his lover also knew that Darva was a man who occasionally needed his space. Who had been a solitary, watchful child, living isolated in a world-within-a-world, for many years. Darva missed him immediately, and soon that feeling bled over into a kind of self-pity that pinned him to the bed.

It wasn’t fair. His own body risen up in revolt against him, at a time when everyone needed and needed and needed things from him - expected and expected and expected things - when he was already barely qualified as it was -

How had his father done it? A hunter, a family man, a husband - how had he still gotten up every day and smiled, gone about what he needed to do? He could never ask him, could he? Like so many other things, he was going to have to figure this one out alone.

Or maybe it wouldn’t be alone. There was Dorian. Dorian with his agile mind, his voracious appetite for reading, his kindness. His knowledge of what it was like to live a life alone, a life apart. Dorian understood him in a way no one else did. He could rely on Dorian.

Then, tossing and turning in his bed, he thought of his mother. She had not been an asset to her husband or her son, in the end. Not with the way fear and grief twisted her up inside, as real and as violent as any illness. Not with the way they came spilling out of her mouth in accusation after accusation. Dorian was not like that. But there was no denying that there was a burden here. Something Darva himself could bear. He was sure of that. So that was his final decision, late that night. That he would bear this alone in the deep darkness of his mind, in the deep darkness of each night to come - however many of those he had left.

They were preparing to head out to Crestwood soon. There was that absolutely lovely, charming lake full of undead that needed dealing with, and then there would be a holiday in a lovely nearby castle that was also overrun with bandits.

“Seeing as how we are about to enjoy such luxuries,” Dorian said to him that next day. “How about we slum it for a bit? Spend some time just the two of us really roughing it, so we can properly appreciate the weeks to come.”

Darva was already smiling, already opening up from the inside out - a sweet feeling, a rush like when you knew you had the perfect hand of cards in Wicked Grace.

“Would a private dinner in one of the spare rooms suit your definition of roughing it? Perhaps some candles and wine to really seal the deal?”

Dorian sauntered closer, leaning against the wall, smiling, his chin tilted up. All confidence and ease and sultry enough to grab anyone’s attention.

“Dinner in a drafty tower with terrible company? My, my, Inquisitor. You do know how to spoil a man.”

Darva wanted to kiss him right then. But he just mirrored his posture instead.

“Well, tonight isn’t about spoiling anyone, is it? It’s about roughing it. Or have you lost track of your own joke?”

“I never lose track of anything that matters.”

It was true. Dorian played the dilettante but he had the focus of a bloodhound, a mind to exceed any of the scholars in the Inquisition’s employ. How Darva had ever caught his eye - had ever held it - was sometimes beyond him.

Dorian would turn that focus to his illness, if Darva let him in. The sickness would consume Darva’s body but it would consume Dorian’s mind. He was more sure than ever of the decision he’d made not to tell him.

“Darva?”

Dorian’s tone had shifted and so had his posture. Gone was the flirtatious smile, the cocked hip, the raised chin. Shit.

“My apologies. Just trying to dream up a menu that will suit your very particular tastes, Serah Pavus.” Darva took Dorian’s hand, raised it to his lips, brushed a kiss across the knuckles. Light and polite and perfect as you please, just the way Josephine had taught him.

“I see. I expect to be impressed then, amatus.”

Amatus.

That word sat heavy and new on Darva’s mind the rest of that day. Beloved. It was a word full of promise and meaning and if Darva had had doubts about living up to it before - and he had - they were doubled now. Whether he died at the hands of one of the Venatori or some goddamn dragon or Corypheus himself or because of his own failing body, he was going to die. Sooner than he should.

So maybe he ought to tell Dorian - let him get out now, before that word amatus acquired more and more and more meaning, more memories.

But Darva still went to the kitchens and asked for roast duck in a pan sauce, figs, their best red wine, fresh bread, and baked vegetables. Because his mind inevitably circled back to all the things about Dorian that he could not bear to lose - his biting humor, yes, his wit, his charm - but also the things that lay beneath all of that. The bruises they shared in common. The loneliness - the disappointed parents - the years of not fitting in, and the armor they’d built up to resist that. And the tenderness that they had now, finally, found with one another.

He couldn’t lose that. Not now. He was selfish that way.

Dorian met him in one of the spare rooms they’d redone to house visiting dignitaries. It had rich green curtains that Darva himself had chosen out of an array of swatches that Josephine presented him with. They were shot through with gold thread, and it made him think of the light on the trees in the forests where he’d grown up. All of the furniture in the room was made of a highly polished red wood that he couldn’t recall the name of now - something imported all the way from Seheron, if he remembered right. The sort of thing he might once have seen getting unloaded off of a pirate ship in Llomeryn.

The candles he’d chosen were simple, unscented. He knew Dorian would likely have chosen his own scent to wear at the pulsepoint of his neck and on each of his wrists, and he wanted to be able to smell that instead. To drink in every aspect of his lover. All joking aside, he might have almost preferred that they didn’t meet in such a rareified space, with its tapestries and stained glass window and fine furniture. The better to focus entirely on one another. It was the longing for a simpler life that had drawn Darva back to his clan, after all - and without that longing he would never have ended up at the Conclave. Would never have ended up here.

“Does this suit your tastes?” he asked Dorian with a sweeping gesture of his arm as he welcomed him in. Dorian tapped a finger against his chin, as if truly considering.

“Passable enough, I suppose. For the South. And anything is better than the muck you’re dragging me too.”

“Well, it isn’t the Fallow Mire this time.”

“You mean to tell me that Ferelden isn’t comprised entirely of muck? What a fascinating theory.”

Darva laughed. He hadn’t laughed since he got the news, he realized abruptly, and that meant he was laughing a little harder than he should have been, as if his body was giddy at the sudden release. It was like what used to happen when he would escape out from under his mother’s thumb and go to see his friends, how the first laugh that burst out of him would be too loud, too nervous. Too relieved.

Dorian had noticed, of course. His gold-brown eyes were narrowed slightly. But he was quick to smile.

“I am pleased I can be such a source of amusement for you. Shall we sit?”

Dorian continued to do his best to be a source of amusement as they ate the roasted duck and vegetables (which he pronounced passable as well) and the figs (which he couldn’t even make jokes about, being too busy actually moaning over how sweet they were). His hand was also never far from Darva. Sometimes it was on his knee beneath the table, sometimes on his wrist. Sometimes he traced idle patterns on the back of Darva’s hand, or on the palm. Sometimes he just laced their fingertips. When the food was gone, Dorian did that one more time.

“Hello,” he said, quietly, and just like that, Darva landed fully in the moment. There was no banter, no thought for past or future. Just the two of them, sitting in the candlelight, bodies warm with wine, palms touching. Darva tugged Dorian’s hand closer and kissed the back of it.

“Hello.”

“How have you been?” Dorian went on. This was how it was with them. Dancing for a while, working past the layers of scars, until they were vulnerable to one another. Until they could really talk.

But Darva couldn’t really talk about the thing most on his mind, could he? The fact that he ached all over, that he was exhausted. That it would only get worse from here, and there was no telling how fast or how slow that would happen. His father had known about his own illness for a good six months before it became noticeably worse, and even then the healers thought he might have another year left from that point.

“Same old,” Darva said. “Weight of the world and all that. Must be the middle of the week.”

The answer was too flippant. Dorian recognized the tone for what it was. A defense. A scar.

“I know that there is only so much I can do about that weight - but you know that I will take any part of it I can from you, right?”

There was a lump in Darva’s throat that he desperately wished would vanish. It was a childish lump. A needy one. Not the reaction of a grown man in charge of one of the largest military forces in Thedas, who had a magic in his hand that could heal the sky.

“I do. Maybe you should just buy me a new dagger instead. I’d love one with a handle inlaid with mother-of-pearl, you know.”

His own instinctive sarcasm betrayed him again. Dorian only looked more concerned.

“A dagger. Yes. If that’s what you need from me.”

Shit.

Darva held out his other hand - the marked one - for Dorian’s. Dorian accepted the gesture, brow still furrowed.

“I’m being an idiot. I’m sorry for that. I do need more from you than that. I’m just - not good at asking. And I have my own things to work through a bit, first.”

“You have seemed off today. Is that why?”

It was strange, being that seen. Being that known. Darva had passed most of his adult life drifting, never staying long enough to be really seen. Really known. And here Dorian was, not just aware of his subtle shifts in mood, but concerned for them.

“Yes. But I don’t want to burden you with it.”

“It’s not a burden if I’m asking, amatus.”

Darva had a dozen witty retorts, and two dozen more that weren’t quite as witty, but his mind circled back to a single thought over and over again. It is. You just don’t know it yet. And then he was imagining actually speaking the words out loud: I am sick. Wasting away from the inside out. I’m going to die. He imagined how Dorian’s face would change when he heard the news. How everything would change. And he hated the idea so violently that he wanted to stand and leave the room, leave the castle, slip out of his skin and into someone else’s entirely. It was all so terribly unfair - pinned between illness and death and Dorian, and all that their love promised.

“Like I said,” he went on finally. “I’m being an idiot. Can you give me another day or two to be an idiot about this?”

“Of course.”

Darva let go of Dorian’s hands then, but only so he could stand up from the table, walk around to the other side, take his lover’s face in both his hands, and bend down and kiss him on the lips. He felt Dorian’s gentle intake of breath ghost across his cheek - felt him part his lips in reply, welcoming Darva in - and everything was softness, connection, warmth from there. They cleared up from their dinner and walked around the battlements, hand in hand in the moonlight, not speaking anymore, just feeling.

Darva came to a different realization late that night. The way he felt about Dorian - the way he lay there, picturing his face, hearing his laugh, turning the images of his lover over and over and over in his mind - he had not felt this way about anyone ever before. It was different even than the way he’d felt about Sorrel, his first love - or about Livonah before that. And that meant he could not behave the way he had before. He couldn’t evade, hide, conceal. He had to be forthright. Honest.

He had to tell him that he was dying. Dorian would do with that information what he would. Darva had to show him the respect he deserved - had to give him that chance to decide what to do.

This realization was a more difficult one. It sat higher in his throat - choked off his breath, made it harder to breathe. But he knew it was the right one.

They set out the next morning for Crestwood, all thrilled to bits at the idea of the undead they’d be fighting, all joking loudly about it - with the exception of Cassandra of course, who simply let out one of her long-suffering sighs and rode on ahead to keep a lookout. Sera eventually joined her, declaring that she didn’t want to be stuck with the schmoopy-eyed lovebirds. With the two of them gone, Darva found himself fidgeting - tugging at loose threads on his saddle, fussing with his hair, trying to make sure all the dark curls were tucked away, disturbing some of them with his fussing, putting them back again. It didn’t take long for Dorian to start staring.

“Having another case of your wiggles, over there?” he asked, smiling. Darva felt heat rise into his face.

“I don’t have wiggles.” This was an opportunity, though - to speak about the root of his unease. Cassandra and Sera were far enough ahead after all. Courage, Darva. He cleared his throat. “I am, however, feeling rather fidgety. I - I do have something to tell you.”

Dorian nudged his horse closer. His brown eyes were already full of concern, dark-eyebrows knitted together with it.

“Tell me, then.”

There was nothing to do but jump.

“I’ve been feeling poorly. More poorly than usual. I went to the healers earlier this week and they confirmed it for me. I’m sick. The way my father was before he died.”

The words felt surreal in the midmorning light. Even this high in the mountains there was so much life - the evergreens were a vibrant emerald against the slate-colored slopes. Cardinals dove in and out of them, slashes of brilliant crimson against the white snow. Further still you could see down into Ferelden, its myriad shades of green, brown, and gold. And here Darva was talking about death - thinking about his own death, about how he felt pretty good today, all things considered. There wasn’t that swollen tenseness in the glands at his throat, and only half of his joints ached instead of all of them.

He was stalling, of course. Taking in the sights around him so he would not have to take in Dorian’s face. He relented eventually. He was not a coward after all.

Dorian’s face had changed little. His lips were set in a harder, thinner line. There was something burning in his eyes.

“Your father - he was killed by Orlesians.”

“Yes. But…”

“But you’ve always hinted at something else, too.”

Darva’s mind circled back once again to how unfair all this was. How he’d found a man he loved more than breath and bone, who could finish his sentences, follow the bent of his thoughts, and how he would have to leave him so soon.

“He had a wasting illness,” Darva said finally, voice quiet. “It would have killed him in months if the Orlesians hadn’t gotten to him first. And now I have it.”

The thing he had always feared, spoken plain, in the daylight. Darva looked back out over the ridge, towards Ferelden in miniature below. His horse stopped suddenly, and Darva turned back. Dorian’s hands were on his horse’s bridle, drawing them both to a stop.

“Amatus - you are certain?”

“Yes. I suspected it even before I went to the healers.” Unease gathered at the base of Darva’s spine, making him shift in the saddle. He wanted to dismount and pace, as if that would discharge it. “It’s hard to say how long I have of course. For all we know the Anchor will get me before then. Or a dragon or a darkspawn or I’ll trip over a pressure plate in one of these ruins we keep finding ourselves in and -”

Dorian’s hand was on his now, squeezing so tightly that Darva forgot to think of anything else. Darva met his gaze again. The thing burning in his lover’s eyes was tears, he realized with a jolt of anxiety, with a wave of love that threatened to sweep him away.

“Amatus - what can I do?”

Darva’s mind flashed with hundreds of flippant replies. He buried them all.

“Nothing that you aren’t already doing. And that’s okay. If anything - I hesitated to tell you this because I didn’t want you to feel like it put any kind of burden on you. You didn’t sign up for this. You don’t have to suffer just because I’m suffering. If you’d - if you’d rather end things here -”

“Stop. That’s total nonsense.” Dorian’s voice wobbled. He looked away. “Kaffas. I can’t believe you told me this now. On a horse at the start of a full day’s ride.”

Of course. Of course Darva had chosen the wrong moment. The wrong words. The same way he always did. He was no good at this. Not good enough for Dorian.

“I’m sorry. I spent all last night drumming up the courage and when I saw my opportunity I just - went for it. I shouldn’t have burdened you with this when you didn’t have time to process -”

“No.” Dorian turned back to him, edged his horse even closer, so he could reach out and cup the back of Darva’s head, drawing them even closer. “That’s not it at all, you dense and beautiful man. It is because I want nothing more than to hold you right now, and Sera is already making obscene gestures at us from down the road.”

Dorian did look at him a little differently for the rest of that day. He did seem a little more solicitous than usual. It created a spark of worry within Darva. Wasn’t this what he didn’t want? To be treated like an invalid? To have things change between them?

Then, that night, when the others had gone to bed, when it was just them and the campfire and the great black expanse of the night, the hundreds and hundreds of stars pricking through, when Dorian was finally able to hold him - that spark of worry was extinguished utterly. Because he was in the arms of the man he loved. Who loved him back. Because Dorian was warm and solid and there, and he wasn’t going anywhere, as he kept murmuring over and over against Darva’s hair.

“I’m here no matter what, amatus. You won’t face a single moment of this alone. I swear it.”

Darva wrapped himself in those words - stronger than any medicine, warmer than any blanket - and together the two of them kept night and sickness and death at bay until the sun rose, and it was enough.

#beach writes #beach does commissions #darva lavellan #darva x dorian #dorian pavus #goblin-deity #dragon age fanfic #pavellan fanfic #ahhh i so enjoyed working on this one #thank you!

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youngster-monster · 5 years

Text

caution: friendship, handle carefully

Frank doesn't have that many friends left from service. Or before that. Doesn't have many friends left, period.

But he does have one number, scratched in an uneven hand on the back of an old receipt. "If you ever need help," muttered with an East European accent that never truly faded as the paper is pressed in the palm of his hand. "If you want to talk."

Frank was headed for the kind of mission you come back from with a hole in your file, the kind that wasn't so much redacted as burnt from records. John was headed home.

"Never took you for a talker, Wick," he says in a way that means, thank you.

John had shrugged and hadn't said 'you're welcome' because he didn't need to, and that was that.

It's been years. Frank isn't even sure John kept the same number.

He dials it anyway.

It rings, and rings, and rings, long enough he expects to be redirected to an answering machine any second now. But Then-

A click and a voice on the other end of the receiver, gruff, saying, "Yeah?"

"John," he greets with an odd sense of relief. "It's Frank. Castle. Wanna grab a beer sometimes?"

There's a long silence. There usually are, with John. The guy never says anything without deliberation. Then, finally, "Yeah."

They meet up at Josie's. The booze is terrible and there's a dead rat slowly mummifying in a corner but there aren't any nice places where Frank feels comfortable going to. Nobody will call the cops on him here. Worst things he can stumble on is a firecracker reporter, and at this point he's half hoping for it, even if he won't admit it.

Still he feels a bit guilty when John walks in, looking like his suit cost more than the entire bar and every dusty bottles in it. Not for long though. John doesn't seem to mind it himself. He eyes the room, something like curiosity or wariness in his expressionless face before his gaze settles on Frank. Recognition flashes briefly in those dark eyes of his and he joins him, sits opposite to him on the wobbly chair. Frank chose the booth in the furthest corner so they can both have their back to the wall as long as they don’t sit opposite of each other, out of habit. John immediately goes back to watching the room and Frank knows, from past experience, that he's cataloging each gun poorly hidden under a hoodie, each probable weapon. Frank did the same moments ago.

It takes a few seconds during which Frank stays quiet, watching him watch the patrons of the bar. Then John blinks, panther-slow, dismissing them all as noon-threats, and turns to him.

"Hello."

"Hey," Frank greets, pushing a glass of Josie's least shitty whiskey toward him. "You look good. Civilian life treating you well I see."

John takes his drink and grunts, noncommittal. "Can't say the same of you," he says, making the barest hint of a nod toward Frank's busted, bruised face.

Frank drinks his whiskey and makes a you don't know the half of it kinda sound. John nods in understanding and takes a sip of his own glass. Gotta hand it to the guy: he doesn't even bat an eye at the taste. Weaker men outright spat it back.

It's Josie's best whiskey, which makes it a solid 2 on the greater scale of whiskeys.

They don't say say anything else, for the full hour they stay at Josie's, sipping their drinks. Somehow neither of them can find the energy to talk. But it's... Nice. To sit with someone he knows, someone he's friendly with, and just enjoy some casual friendship like drinking in silence and resolutely not talking about the many way their lives went to shit since they left the army.

John wears a gun in a shoulder holster, hidden under his perfectly tailored jacket. Frank has a gun strapped to his side, barely covered by his coat. Happy, well adjusted people don't do that.

He wonders, distantly, how it went wrong for John. If it went something like it did for him. He doesn't ask.

He gets his answer, eventually, because they keep meeting on a semi-regular basis. Sometimes Frank is away on a job, and sometimes John goes radio silent for a while with no warning. But every week they're both in town, without fail, Frank's text proposing a night out will be replied with a simple "OK" and John walking into Josie's at 9p.m sharp.

He never learns to dress to the occasion (or lack thereof).

And at some point, they start talking. About nothing, at first – the weather and national news and Rome, when it turns out they've both been there before. Even though John gets a weird look on his face at the memory. Then the good old times, when Frank figures it's better than thinking about what came after. They both have fond memories of their drill sergeant – terrifying as she was, in comparison to the war she was a real sweetheart.

And then one day Frank has a bad day and gets really, really drunk and says, "My family's dead."

John's face falls – the first real expression he sees the guy make. His brows furrow together and his mouth twists and when he says, "I'm sorry," he even sounds like he means it.

And then Frank makes a dumb choice and asks, "How's your wife?" Hoping that someone else's marital joy can banish the fog of misery hanging over the day.

Because he's seen the golden bang around John's finger, so much like his own. It's not a stretch to guess he got married.

John's face- closes off. His eyes darken even as he looks down into his drink.

"She died," he says, short.

Frank hisses through his teeth. "Shit. Sorry."

John slams back his drink and doesn't say anything more.

They still meet up the next week.

And the one after that.

And somehow... They open up about it. Frank, first, full of righteous rage and drunken inhibition. Then John, quieter, clipped replies to questions he doesn't dare ask.

"It was cancer," he says when Frank whispers he lost them in a shooting, and,

"Everything I did- to be with her,"

And,

"She made me a better man."

"Cheers to that," Frank says, blinking away the tears he refuses to admit are in his eyes.

And then one time it's John who offers information instead of reacting to Frank's monologue. He stares at the crowd, or what passes as such in Josie's, and says,

"She left me a dog. So I wouldn't be alone."

By the tone with which he says it, he was fond of the animal, and it didn't end well.

"What happened?"

"Guy killed it for a car."

Not with: for. Frank nods and carefully doesn't ask for more details. John has always be the scariest motherfucker he knew. He doesn't know what happened to the guy responsible and he doesn't want to know. Pretty sure he got what was coming for him, anyway: he trusts John to do that much.

Turns out they have lot of stuff in common, once they got to talking – Frank doing most of the work on that, for once. They both have a rescue pit bull (Frank doesn't mention the context of the rescue in question). A love for guns and black clothes. Army background. A dead wife.

And, as they're soon to find out, nosey friends.

Frank knows exactly what kind of man D'Antonio is from the first look he takes of the guy, even before he knows his name. Young, rich, beautiful, powerful, the kind that's born into power and grew up learning how to keep hold on it.

He also knows, immediately, that he's a mob boss – he has that look to him, too put together, too clean, a smile too sharp. Frank would bet anything that each and every of the thousand bucks worth of designer clothes this guy is wearing has been paid in blood money.

They exchange a look, John and him, and Frank is surprised to see John as relaxed as he was before the guy's arrival. A quirk of his eyebrows, quietly curious rather than wary, tells Frank he knows the guy – knows what the guy is as well. He tilts his head slightly as the man sprawls next to him, both an acknowledgment of his arrival and a question toward Frank.

Can you let it be?

Frank looks at John, the most dangerous man he's ever known and only sees the edge in his eyes, the predator glint that says he's ready for a fight whether or not he wants there to be one. Frank isn't sure he could take John back then, let alone the man he became. Isn't sure he wants to.

Honestly he's just tired. Tired of the corruption, the mob's mark on every stone of this city, old friends getting their hands bloody for people barely more corrupt than their own government. He came here to drink with a friend. That's it.

He nods once, shortly. He'll let the mantel of the Punisher down, just this once. Mostly because he doesn't pick fights he has no way to win. He gets the feeling John is doing the same – putting down something far too heavy for his shoulders. The predatory glow goes out of his eyes and he becomes the same melancholy, quiet man Frank knew. The danger never goes out of the lines of his body. It doesn't leave Frank's, either. It sits, tense and ready, in his shoulders, down his arms, to the tip of his trigger finger resting lightly on the gun strapped to his thigh.

As a show of good faith he puts both his hands on top of the table. The mob boss looks an obnoxious mix of amused and satisfied as he watches the silent exchange. John politely pretends he couldn't kill Frank with the handful of napkins he's absently folding into little triangles. The atmosphere grows that kind of lightning storm anticipation, the air heavy with the stare of three killers eyeing each others.

"What are you doing here?" John asks the guy, his voice quiet yet crystal clear despite the noise in the bar.

He shrugs, careless from the quirk of his smirk to the shift of his shoulders. He acts with the ease of a man perfectly sure of his own invincibility. He knows who's the most powerful person in the room, Frank realizes, and it's the one holding the leash of the most dangerous one.

What did John get himself into this time?

"I was in the neighborhood," he says, never mind that someone dressed like he is would never be caught dead in a neighborhood like this one. "I thought I would drop by, see how my favorite investment is doing." At John's dark look his smirk grows and he adds, "Not you, John. My family has a few businesses in the area, one of which I'm quite fond of. You're just a social call. Though you are my favorite something alright."

John grunts and goes back to his drink. His 'friend' isn't going to drop it that easily, though.

"Aren't you going to introduce us?" He says, nodding to Frank.

"You're a grown man. Introduce yourself."

The man sighs like John is asking him a great favor. He turns to Frank. His smarmy smile doesn't quite make it to 'friendly', or even 'polite'. "Santonio D'Antonio," he says, offering him his hand. "I'm a friend of John's."

Well that's bullshit if he's ever heard it.

"Frank," he replies, not bothering to appear welcoming. He doesn't shake D'Antonio's hand.

"Lovely." He drops his hand and throw his arm around John's shoulders instead. John tenses up at the touch then forces himself to relax. If he were anyone else, Frank bets he'd be rolling his eyes. "Tell me, how do you know each other? Did you serve together?"

The guy can't seem to take a hint. Frank grunts, noncommittal, and glances over his shoulder. If the guy brought any of his goons–

If he did, Frank doesn't know about it, because the first person he sees when he looks up isnt a mob enforcer. It's Karen.

She noticed him too, and is staring at him openly. He's sitting there, drinking with people who are obviously not law-abiding citizens. In hindsight it's weird enough to warrant some staring.

She mouths a word, her furrowed brow turning it into a question. Frank?

He looks away. Better not bring any attention to her. But she's... Hard to look away from. His eyes are drawn to her like she's a magnet. It's been a long time since they've seen each other.

When he focus back on her she's frowning. She mouths, Intel?

He darts a look at D'Antonio. The guy is busy pestering John into letting him take a sip of his drink, not paying any attention to Frank. He shakes his head minutely. Karen's frown deepens.

Trouble?

Another look at the best dressed duo of the room. John relents to D'Antonio insistence with something almost like humor in his dark eyes. D'Antonio gets all of three seconds to look smug before he takes a sip of Josie's least shitty whiskey. He splutters and grimaces, probably doesn't spit it back only out of personal pride. John snatches the glass before he can spill it, cobra-quick.

Frank looks back at Karen. His eyes widen when he sees her walk to the table, spine iron straight. He glares, hoping to convey how bad an idea that is. She ignores him completely even as she sits right next to him, primly folding her legs and all but slamming her drink on the table. She smiles her reporter smile, her eyes jumping from Santonio "obvious mobster" D'Antonio and John "concealed carry is a fashion statement" Wick.

And then, because hanging out with Red has apparently turned her brain to mush, she extends her hand to them and say, "Hi, I'm Karen Page. Frank might have told you about me?"

"I can't say he has," D'Antonio says pleasantly as he shakes her hand. "But I've only been there for a moment."

John throws him a look above D'Antonio's head while the two are busy pretending to be polite with each other. There's a question in the tilt of his head.

Friend of yours? it seems to say.

In response he glares at D'Antonio, daring him to keep his grubby, mafioso hand on Karen for a single additional second. D'Antonio pretends he can't see it.

John offers her his hand next. She seems surprised by his quiet voice, at odd with his dangerous exterior, and the way she looks at him afterward is more cautious than outright suspicious.

Great. 'Karen and John getting along' is one nightmare scenario he hadn't thought about. This woman has a gift for befriending dangerous people.

He can't find it in himself to begrudge her presence. She easily distracts D'Antonio from him, asking him about his accent and Italy and what he's doing so far from home. D'Antonio is a man who like to listen to himself talk, and though his hold on John doesn't relent he doesn't pay any more attention to the two silent men at the table.

It allows Frank some time to just... Look at Karen. It been a really long time. She looks tired but unhurt, like maybe she got herself a survival instinct since the last time he saw her. Or maybe she just got better at getting in and out of trouble with minimal harm. Yeah, that's more likely, seeing how she's currently sitting across a mob boss and talking about the cultural differences between Italian and Italian-American cuisine.

John is doing the same opposite to him. His eyes track every movement D'Antonio makes with almost casual attention, like a cat watching the comings and goings of its humans. Frank wouldn't call his expression fond, but it's close enough that he doesn't know what to think of it. What the fuck happened in the last years for John to become friend with a mob boss?

Yeah. Pretty sure he doesn't want to know.

Frank and John drink quietly, both keeping an attentive eye on their respective unexpected tagalong. After maybe an hour, hour and a half, D'Antonio gets up.

"It's been a pleasure to meet you, miss Page... Frank," he says, then, to John, "Walk with me? "

It doesn't sound like a question. John doesn't take it as one. He rises after D'Antonio and, with a nod to the two of them, they leave.

"So that guy was absolutely a mobster, right?" Karen says after a bit.

Frank empties his drink in one long swallow and slam his glass on the table. "Yep," he says, dragging the word.

"And they're definitely fucking."

"Y- what?"

Karen gestures to the empty seats opposite to them. "That guy, Santino? Definitely fucking John. Or he really, really wants to."

"Yeah, I think you've had enough."

"Don't tell me how to live my life," she says. She gulps her drink down and adds, "But I'm gonna head out now."

He gets the nagging feeling she'd have left an hour earlier if he hadn't been there. Like she was rescuing him from D'Antonio. Pointless, but then again... She did work a small miracle in keeping him off Frank's back.

His lips quirk in small fond smile. "I'll walk you to your car."

#writing #john wick #frank castle #the punisher #karen page #santino d'antonio #FRIENDSHIP

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blandmemoirs · 5 years

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"How have you been?"

To put it simply, exhausted

I've been having trouble sleeping lately. I can't fall asleep and stay asleep, instead I sleep for few hour intervals before darting awake in the middle of the night or early morning. Usually three times each night. This has been a pattern for a few weeks now. I've had a mixed bag of dreams that will be worthy posts elsewhere. Some really good, others really bad. And I think that's how my life has been as of late. I do fun things and have a great day and then I get home and feel myself will with dread or longing. I don't have much to long for, but I just feel alone in my day to day. Even though there's not an hour that passes when someone hasnt demanded my attention, I still feel as if I'm drifting through this time in my life by myself. I feel like I'm stuck in my own head, talking to people has been harder as of late. Opening up and telling people how I feel has felt draining or tiresome. I feel like I'm worthless and some voice in me is echoing for a sweet release. It says "please let me die". Of course, I won't be doing that. Ive got too much to live for. Ive got people to help and care for. Ive got a legacy to build and jobs to do. My life cant end here, and wont end here. But something inside me just don't feel right and I dont know what to do about it. I think its just because my life has hit a point of stagnation at the moment. All my friends are busy and doing things with them is becoming more of an every now and then kind of thing instead of everyday. I feel like I'm waiting and waiting and waiting but the results won't be arriving anytime soon. I know what I want to do with my life and what I want to be and what I want to make, but I figured it out too early and everyone is going to keep me waiting until they figure it out themselves. I'm patient, but I'm oh so exhausted of feeling so alone.

The world threw a curveball my way the other weekend. I had my first major death in the family and my first car accident. In that order. I dont think they are related but my focus was definitely strained when I was on the road. The death was our beloved housecat, Midnight. She was black, rather small, and super soft. She was feisty at times and loved to run around the house and lay on warm things. Her meow would melt your heart. She, like all our pets, was a rescue. We got her after she was found to be clinging for life to my Father's old truck. He believed she might have followed him all the way from work. She was super tiny then. Our second cat in the house, after Stinky Pete. The third was my orange baby, Jackle. Before we got her fixed she would have her period and be extra moody, usually meowing into the late hours of the night. She waa my dad's cat first and foremost. Always in his lap. Always bugging him. Its natural seeing how he rescued her. Her favorite place to go was the garage, where it was cool or warm and felt the most like being outside. Of all our cats, midnight wanted to leave the house the most. She would always be near windows, especially when they were open. It makes sense considering the earliest parts of her life were spent that way. She was also always affected by fleas the worst. There was a time she lost patches of hair from the bugs. She was most grateful when we eventually adopted flea collars for the kitties. The last year or so she developed a nasty growth on her belly, and it would often pop and bleed. My parents, never having the money for a veterinarian, would just let her pick at it and hope it would go away. It never did. Then last week I recieved a text from my mother saying that they had her put down. I don't know the specifics, its not something I want to ask. What I know is that she had cancer that developed into a heart mur mur. My mom was with her when it happened. My dad said he couldn't be there. He wanted to, but just couldn't. That's incredibly tragic, conaidering she was his cat, but I understand that mix of emotions that kept him away. Shes buried by the garage, her favorite place. My mom said it was one of the hardest things shes had to do in her adult life. I dont think any of us were ready to see Mini go like that. My dad is going to make a tombstone and put a pot of roses by it. That little ball of fur will be dearly missed when I return home. I'm left wondering how the other animals in the house feel, if they even understand that their sister is gone. My dad told me today that Domino, our boxer dog, and Stinky Pete, the old man fat cat of the house most likely know. Stinky has always been oddly empathetic for an animal, his eyes sometimes seem human in how he expresses himself. As such they are all comforting my dad. He says he doesnt spend a minute without them bugging him, and normally he hates that, but hes letting them grieve and doing so himself. My Jackle cat is not the brightest thing, hes just supporting Stinky Pete my dad says. I would expect that. Those two are very close to each other. I've really missed my cat and want to bring him with me to my next place, but I dont think I should seperate him and Stinky at this point. It wouldn't be fair. All in all, Midnight "Mini" Bland was a sweetheart of a kitty and gave us no bad luck despite her fur's reputation. She will be missed and forever loved. She is family, even if it took until now for my parents to admit that. Rest easy.

The car accident was a product of wet roads, traffic, and poor luck. Some dude cut us off and we both slammed on our brakes but I rear-ended the dude in front of me from hydro-planing. It wasnt soft, but it wasn't hard enough to do any real damage to our cars. We both pulled over and traded the important info, took pictures, all the formalities. There was barely noticeable cosmetic damage to his car, and maybe a bump and scratch on my end but I'm not sure if those were already there or not. I bought my car used with a few bumps and scratches. Its personality. Dude was polite and patient. Said he will keep insurance out if I just foot the bill for his paint scratches, assuming he doesnt find more damage later. It being the night in a poorly lit city like Austin, it makes sense he didnt promise me anything until hes seen the sunlight. Said he'd text me in a week or two depending on his schedule. I hope he remains as respectful a guy when I hear from him. I really don't want to work the extra hours to pay for a heightened insurance over something as weak as that. But that's all for the future.

Writing, or I suppose typing, has been very therapeutic for me. I think I've gotten all the thinga bugging me out of my head for now. Time will tell. I'm going to start a storytime series on this blog soon, recounting different life stories that have impacted me or changed the way I am. Y'know, actual memoirs. Hahaha. Thanks to the few who read. You are the most important friends I have and I love you all.

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hamilton-one-shots · 6 years

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Hamilton High School AU 74

John made sure to set an alarm for early the next morning, careful not to let it wake Alexander or Thomas by shutting it off as fast as he could. Once it was silenced, he took a deep breath and got up, leaving a wall of pillows in his place to separate Thomas and Alexander before going to the bathroom and taking a thorough shower. Afterwards, he dried himself off and put on a white button up shirt, black slacks, a black tie, and black dress shoes, his hair up in a bun. He finished getting ready, then looked at himself in the mirror, taking a deep breath before leaving.

He didn't want to take Thomas's car, in case he needed it, so he called an Uber to take him to a flower shop, where he got a beautiful bouquet of white lilies, his mother's favorite flowers, then to the cemetery where she was buried. Thankfully, the driver could sense that John was in a fragile place and didn't say anything besides a quick greeting. John made a note to give him five stars for that.

When he got out of the car, he hesitated to go into the cemetery for a split second before remembering that his mom would've loved him no matter what. So what he was gay? So what he had two boyfriends? His mom would've loved him. He took a deep breath and began walking, looking around at the names. He never had the opportunity to see where she was buried, so he was a bit lost. Then he found it. The grave stone engraved with the words "Eleanor Laurens". He knelt down in front of it and put down the flowers before the sobs began. It started slow, a lump in John's throat, but, within the next minute, tears began cascading down his face in a waterfall and he cried. He cried harder than he had in who knew how long. And he couldn't stop. He didn't want to stop. He just let himself cry for at least the next hour. Then it slowly let up and he was able to speak again, his cheeks red and splotchy and his nose the same bright red as his eyes. He cleaned his face with a tissue before taking another deep breath. "Hi mom..."

He let his mind go blank and just started speaking, letting her know every little thing that happened in the years since she'd been gone. No matter how bad it was, he told her. But he doubted that it was all knew. He knew that, wherever he was, she'd been keeping an eye on him, helping him through the years. Still... he wanted to make sure she knew every little thing. He even told her about his relationship with Thomas and Alexander, making sure to emphasize the fact that Thomas had changed and that Alexander really did love him, even if he made a few bad choices. He wasn't sure how she would have felt about them or any boys who tried to date him, if he was honest. But, if he had to guess, she would have loved them just as much as he loved him.

"I brought pictures.." He pulled out his phone and looked at the pictures of his boyfriends, smiling softly. "This one's Thomas and that's Alexander. They're both really good looking, aren't they?" He chuckled to himself before continuing. "I really love them both... I know people are going to judge, they already have, but they make me happy and they protect me. They make mistakes, but they're only human. I love them, flaws and all.. I think you'd love them.." He sighed and put his phone away.

"All of the kids are okay with dad.. I wish I could watch them more often, but I think you'd be glad that I wasn't in that environment anymore.. He can't hurt me anymore.. He can't hurt us anymore.."

His father never beat or even hit his mother like he did John, but he did treat her poorly in some aspects, mainly from his own beliefs. Not letting her do anything around that time of month and yelling if he found out she did, keeping her away from her own friends, especially male ones, and family, making her change her name when they married, not using pain medication during birth and not allowing a c-section... Of course, his father refused to take the blame for John's mom's death, but he knew better.

He shook the thoughts out of his head. This wasn't the time. "I really miss you.. All the time.." He shifted so he was sitting with his legs crossed. "I made sure the triplets know all about you and how great I knew you were. They wish they could've met you.. I did my best, but we both know I could never be as great of a parent as you were.."

He felt his throat closing up again, his urge to cry coming back. He let the tears flow, but it wasn't nearly as bad as before. "Things are so hard without you.. But I'm doing just fine. I just miss you... I love you so much.."

He ran out of words to say, but he wasn't ready to leave. He'd been there for a couple of hours, but it wasn't enough. Ten years since he last saw her. It wasn't enough to come back. Then it clicked.

It'd never be enough. His father forced him away when he needed her most, when he needed to learn and accept that she wasn't coming back. He'd never have enough time catching up with her at her grave. The thought hurt, but it was true. It was never going to feel like the right time to leave. He frowned and stayed right where he was anyways. There was no rush to leave. He could stay there for hours. That was the plan.

"Sunshine?.." a soft voice called out.

"Hey, baby.." another called.

John burst into tears again. How could he not? He knew that the place he was most safe, besides with his mother, was with the two of them. What was there to stop him from crying?

As expected, both Thomas and Alexander immediately sat at John's sides and held him, comforting him as he sobbed. But they didn't try to stop his crying. They knew he needed it, that he needed to cry and get his feelings out. They just sat with him until he stopped crying on his own, letting him introduce them to his mom.

"This is Thomas and Alexander... I told you they were handsome.." He laughed softly. "And that they were sweet.. They're the best thing to happen to me besides you and the family.. I love them and they love me.. I know you'd love them.."

"We're taking good care of him," Thomas promised.

"John's amazing. We'd never try to hurt him."

"You raised an amazing son."

John smiled and shut his eyes, leaning against Thomas and pulling Alexander to lean against him. He let his tears fall until there weren't anymore, then moved to get up. "I think I'm ready.."

"Are you sure? There's no rush," Alexander reminded him.

"I'm sure." He wiped his eyes, smiling. He was never going to get over his mother's death. He was never going to accept it. But with Alexander and Thomas there to support him when he needed it, he knew things were going to be okay. "Let's get back to the hotel.. We can change into comfortable clothes, then do some walking around."

"Alright." They both got up and Thomas put his arm around John's shoulders, leading him to the car, while Alexander held his hand, walking right beside them. They got in the car and went back to the hotel. They all changed into comfortable clothes before going back to the car.

"Do you think we can see where you used to live?.. If not that's okay.." Alexander suggested timidly. He was curious about his past, but he didn't want to bring up painful memories.

"Of course we can. It wasn't a gated community or anything." John remembered exactly where he went to school and where he lived, giving Thomas perfect directions from memory.

Alexander was surprised to see that it was a normal, public school. He supposed it made sense, especially considering he still went to public school.

"My mom wanted to make sure I was around lots of kids, not just some from one social class or whatever. I refused to go to the private school and actually enrolled myself in the public middle school before my father actually gave up." That was not a fun week.. "We can go by my house if you guys want, too."

"Of course I want to see." Alexander smiled. The house was bigger than normal, but it was nowhere near the size of John's father's current house.

"You guys were probably expecting a mansion or something, but my mom tried to raise us pretty normally. She came from old money herself, actually, and she was always jealous of the kids who went to public school and whose friends weren't interested in her family name, just in her. So, she kept things pretty humble."

The only person that hadn't actually been interested in his mother as a person was his father.

John sighed and looked around. Things were exactly how he remembered them. There were a few more trees some places and a few less in others, but it looked almost exactly like- John's eyes went wide.

"John? What's up?"

He didn't respond. He just opened the door and dashed out, almost forgetting to take off his seat belt before running down the street and practically tackling someone in a hug.

Thomas parked the car and got out, following John with Alexander close behind. When they got close, they were able to see that both John and the girl he was hugging were... crying?

"... Are you Martha Manning?.." Thomas asked quietly.

She nodded and let John go, drying her eyes. "Yeah... I was the only friend this dork could make back in the day.. He told you about me?.."

John answered for him. "I told them you were sick.. I thought you were..."

"I know.. I didn't think I was going to make it, but I pulled through. I'm a few months cancer free."

Thomas felt his heart stop for a few seconds. So that's why John didn't want to tell them what happened to her.

She pulled off her beanie and showed John the short hair that she'd managed to grow back. "I'm getting my hair back, finally."

He chuckled. "I'm glad. It's a good thing you always liked it short."

"Pfft. Not this short." She smiled. "Maybe I can make something work with this, though."

"If anyone can, you can." He smiled and hugged her again. "I can't believe I'm actually here, seeing you again.."

"I can't believe you're here either. So, who are these two and are either of them single?"

John rolled his eyes. "They're both mine. This one's Thomas and this one's Alexander."

They both smiled and waved, but Martha's smile dropped.

"Thomas?.. As in Thomas Jefferson?"

"We're past that, Martha. He's changed, I've changed, we're happy together."

"I don't doubt that." She grabbed Thomas's collar anyways and pulled him down to her eye level. "You hurt John ever again and I'll make sure you regret it. Understand?"

"Yes, ma'am," he squeaked out.

"Good." She looked at Alexander. "And you, don't make me have to give you the same talk."

"Martha, you're so embarrassing sometimes."

"I have to make sure they don't hurt my baby brother." She pulled him into a headlock and rubbed her knuckles against his skull.

"When I say I've always wondered what it was like to have an older brother, this is not what I meant," he joked as he squirmed out of her grip.

She shrugged and let him go, helping him fix his hair. "I'm just saying, if they hurt you, I'm not afraid to kill a couple of people."

"I believe that. I'm just saying you won't have to."

"How are little Martha and the other three?"

"Not so little anymore." He smiled and showed her a picture of them all from when he last visited them.

"Aw, they're all so precious.." She looked at the picture and smiled. "I can't believe your dad made you leave them.."

"He was going to find out sooner or later... I'm doing alright."

"I'd expect so, especially with the inheritance your mom left you."

He furrowed his eyebrows a bit. "You know I'm not 18 yet. I haven't heard about any inheritance. I've been making money selling art."

She looked at him, confused for a second before it clicked. "You don't know.."

"Know what?"

She glanced back at Thomas and Alexander and pulled John a few feet away to talk to him a bit more privately. "After the burial, they read your mom's will. She wanted everyone who came to hear it. She left everything to you right after she died. She knew you'd be responsible."

John felt like a train hit him. "I never heard about this."

"That must be why your dad made you leave with Martha.. He knew it was coming and didn't want you to know. She cried through most of the service and he didn't make you take her until.."

"Oh my god.. I have to find out some more about this..."

"Do you think you can handle this?.."

"Yeah. That's legally mine and I've been struggling since he kicked me out.. It was her final wish. I can get this sorted out." John's father had managed to reach an entire new level of low. It was far from a fact, leaving John to fend for himself was exactly something that he'd do, but did he really believe that he was never going to figure it out?

"Sunshine?.. Are you okay?"

"Can we go back to the hotel? You guys can spend the day out, but I have to do something.."

"I don't know.. We'll go back, but I don't want to leave you.."

"Me neither."

John nodded. "You guys can stay with me. I just.. I need to do something, okay?.."

"Alright.. Let's get you back, then."

"Before you go," Martha interrupted, pulling John back towards her. She grabbed his phone and put herself in as a contact.

"That's a lesson to me to put a lock on my phone."

"Yes it is. You'd better keep in touch. I'll see you around." She hugged him one more time before letting him leave.

"Do you mind if we ask what's going on?" Alexander asked in the car.

"Kind of.. But you guys don't have to worry. I'll get everything settled." He smiled reassuringly.

"Okay.."

"You guys can look for things you want to go see and do tomorrow, okay?"

Alexander nodded.

"Yeah, we can do that." Thomas smiled at him in the rear view mirror for a second before looking back at the road as he drove them.

When they got back to the hotel, John grabbed his laptop and sat on the couch in the corner, looking up a few things while Thomas and Alexander quietly discussed what they should do. There were a few arguments that almost broke out, but they kept it quiet, for John's sake.

John stayed on his computer for a few hours, mainly exchanging emails with the attorney that had a copy of his mom's will. He found out a few things that day. First: Martha was right. John had no idea how much his mother had actually left to him. Second: He was already entitled to everything. His mom wanted him to be taken care of when she died if his father had ever forced him away or if he had to leave. Third: His father knew exactly how to get into the money. He'd been doing it for years.

The final email he received before calling it a night told him the options he had with this. Of course, there was always the option of getting his father arrested for stealing the money and getting access to what was left, which was still quite a lot. But John didn't want to take that route.

Sure, he could use the money to help him raise his siblings, but... He was going to college soon. He loved his siblings, maybe more than he did himself, but he simply wouldn't have the time to raise them... Maybe after college, but not during. Maybe not even then. His father was awful to John, but he treated them all well, rarely even raising his voice at them. The thought of himself being too busy for his siblings hurt and made him feel awful, but.. He was responsible. He knew what was best for them. He just missed them... He got up and stretched, Thomas and Alexander looking over at him as they ate.

"Are you alright?" Alexander asked.

"I'm fine. It's not something I really want to discuss." He didn't mind telling them about the money, he knew they weren't going to change because of it, it was what his father had done that kept him from saying anything, especially to Alexander. He may not have been mad about the Laurens Pamphlet and he may have trusted him almost completely... But that was still a bit iffy when it came to secrets like this. "What did you guys get?"

"Mexican food. Come eat with us," Thomas offered.

John nodded and moved towards them, sitting with them and eating. He needed it after the long day and he hadn't eaten all day. He ate most of what was left of the food, mumbling apologies, Thomas assuring him it was fine. "Did you guys figure out what to do this week?"

"Yeah, we figured some things out." Alexander showed him a master list of things that the pair agreed on and John smiled, choosing the most things that they could do while still enjoying their time.

"Looks like we have our days planned."

"Looks like we do." Thomas kissed his cheek. "Get some sleep, sunshine. You've had a long day."

"Alright.." John changed into some pajamas, then came back and crawled under the covers, falling asleep.

#hamilton #hamilton fanfic #alexander hamilton #john laurens #thomas jefferson #martha manning #lams #thaurens #jamilams #74 #chapter 74

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witchyinthekitchen · 6 years

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This is a Vent Post about my Mother, Please do not reblog

This post is probably gunna be all over the place/time with things that I can remember/recall so bear with me here.

-Being told to make my own food bc mom was too busy with brand new baby (I was between 5-6 so poptarts were about all i could manage. I'd asked for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.) (my brother was a VERY finniky baby. If you weren't holding him he'd scream till his face went purple.))

-Tried to share interests in Anime/manga with her, when I asked her what she felt about it she said she couldn’t get into it and that it felt like a chore. (13-15 ish)

-Told her I needed therapy bc I was having suicidal thoughts. She took me, but then took me out once I started getting upset about the things i’d been talking about in therapy with my therapist because I'd come home in a bad mood.(15-16 ish)

-Went to Mother Daughter Group Therapy with her (there were other mother daughter combos) and she stormed out in the middle of it saying that we were only attacking her and not my dad too. (was 15-16 ish)

-Got into an argument about who i was voting for in the 2016 election while on vacation at Disney World (Hint it wasn't Trump like she wanted)(24 ish)

-Tried to gaslight me about trying to get everyone together to talk wedding stuff saying how she tried but that it all fell apart. (I have texts of her canceling it the day before we were all supposed to get together.)(26)

-Gets super defensive/upset any time I talk about “other mothers” in my life (MIL, BM)

-Has been super hot and cold with me during wedding planning and making passive aggressive comments about everything: Tell him to buy new pants for the engagement shoot 'bc I dont want him wearing baggy clothes -SO's Lost over 20lbs+ for the wedding and i'm so fuckin proud of him- “I don’t want to pay for hard alcohol for SO and his friends to drink at the wedding.” As if ½ the people invited weren’t all just her friends? ((All our friends live out of state/country so half the wedding is family and HER friends/neighbors.)) "I’m sure H*(SIL) and K*(MIL) have good counsel for you on _____," (Why would you say this when i'm asking for YOUR opinion? If i wanted their opinion i'd ask them.)

-4 months before the wedding she’s trying to talk me out of my venue saying we need to go look at the ones SO and MIL had suggested.

-Wants me to keep (BM)'s relation to me a secret even though i’m pretty sure 85% of the people who know me and are coming to my wedding know i'm adopted.

-Angry that I was moving out of the house at 21 with my SO she told his mother she hoped we’d fail. (In her defense she'd just been diagnosed with breast cancer and I'd done poorly in my last semester of college so parents thought it would be a good idea to take me out of college for a semester so i could live at home and basically be at my moms beck and call while also being expected to work 2 jobs (they'd told me the instant that the semester was over that i was expected to work 2 jobs) -That's at least how I was viewing that whole situation before I moved out- )

-As a kid I remember wanting to run away a lot. (Never away to a friends house but always to a park to live under a bridge like the goblin I am (lol)) (is it obvious I use self depreciating humor to get through things that I'm uncomfortable with? haha)

-I'd always hide things from her, even small things like a puzzle book i'd bought myself from the elementary school book fairs. i even began writing my diaries in code so she couldn't read them. Not that i ever caught her reading my diaries or what not but thats how afraid i was.

-The only things that stopped me from killing myself was the distressing thought that my mother would be more upset with blood on the floor than me being gone. (It was a constant worry of mine when I was having ideations.)

-When i was getting close to graduating high school the librarians told me they had a bunch of excess old books they were getting rid of and one of them happened to be the "Toxic Parents" book i've seen several other posts refer to. I took no other books besides that one. I hid that from her too. Looking back through it i remember there was a checklist in the book and i'd filled some of it out when i was younger. I most definitely am a people pleaser.

-We've never really been able to "talk" about things together like how my dad and i do and i think she's really jealous about it.

-The only way I feel comfortable talking to her is Via Email/Text because then that way i have a copy of all the things she's said. because i often forget things. (I honestly don't know how bad my memory is or if its gaslighting but i hope its just me being forgetful and not the latter...)

-I literally cannot let my SO do the dishes because my Mom would always do the dishes/clean when she was mad and bang pots around loudly and just even those sounds set me on edge.

-Her telling me that the careers i wanted to get into (IE: the Arts/Theater/Music) wouldn't make enough money and that they'd be fine as Hobbies but not as careers.

-She's continually trying to push me into a Customer Service Job because i'm so good at making other people happy. (talked to dad about this and he says i'm a very big people pleaser who doesn't like conflicts -cue nervous laughter about wedding planning-)

-Being around her for long periods of time is so physically/emotionally draining. I know that's probably a result of always being on edge with her and I always feel bad that I feel that way.

-Because she's said she hoped I'd fail (me and my So when I first moved out) I'm terrified of telling her anything personal going on in my life for fear that she'd take it out on me or use it against me (i got super anxious/scared when she came up to see me on my end of town once because we'd be stopping at the mall where i used to work and i hadn't yet told her that I'd quit that job.)

-I want to have a relationship with her. I want us to do fun Mom& Daughter things but at the same time I'm scared of letting her get too close to me again just to have it fall apart again.

-When I moved out (21) i went VLC with my whole family before i even knew what VLC was. I barely saw them (except for certain holidays/events.) I didn't talk to my dad for about 3 years because of this and am just now recovering that relationship with him (been 5 years now since I moved out)

-After I get married my plan is to move to CO. During that time i don't remember if my mom has mentioned if she'd miss me, but i do recall she has made multiple points to tell me that my dad says he would miss me.

-I had to beg for a 16th Birthday Party. She finally caved half a year later after I'd talked to my Therapist about it.

-pretty sure i'm the SG of the family (possibly Cousin 1 being the GC because she went to same University my mom did)

-Other family members on her side have stepped in to provide financial help to me on the promise that i wouldn't tell anyone. (probably to stop any gossip of favoritism)

I Don't know if she's an N or just really bad at expressing herself but her hot and cold attitude really sets off my anxiety that i've done something to piss her off and that she won't talk to me about it for a few weeks and then acts as though nothing is wrong/nothing happened. Planning my wedding is the MOST contact we've had in 5 years since i moved out and went VLC and i've been trying to use this as a way to bond with her better but anytime i think i'm getting somewhere Something happens and she's upset again. A phrase i've found myself come into saying recently is "I can't fix something that I don't know is wrong." So i've tried to take that approach when it comes to her. I know she's an adult and can choose for herself if she wants to talk about whats on her mind. I can't force her to talk if she doesn't want to but the anxiety it causes when she gets into these moods is really debilitating. I'm terrible at letting things go (especially if i think its my fault)

I'm Not Her Therapist, but if she has an issue with me I wish she'd just tell me instead of the Silent treatment for a week.

Trigger Topics that I've learned to Avoid at All Costs:

Anything about "Other Mothers" in my life.

Politics & Racism

Anything in the Past that happened.

My moving out

Anything that paints her as a "Bad Mother"(aka this whole post probably)

This post is a mess and I'm rambling. Thanks for sticking through this Brain Dump while I process.

-Edit 2:

More things i'm recalling: For Christmas one year in front of my whole family (I was between 8-10 ish) she got me a set of underwear with the days of the week labeled on them and told me in front of everyone that "Maybe this would help me remember [to change my underwear daily]..."

One of my final years in high school I somehow managed to get a Cold Sore. My First Cold Sore ever and my lip where it broke out swelled up HUGE. I woke up the day it appeared ( a weekend thank the gods) and horrified went downstairs to tell my mom about it. I don't recall any words of sympathy other than "Cold Sores are caused by Herpes." I just remember breaking down into tears.

I mapped out a "Quiet Walking Path" that avoided all the creaky floorboards and steps in our house.

I get extremely anxious whenever I would hear my parents footsteps coming up the stairs. It got to the point that I could distinguish their steps on Carpet.

I jump/flinch (visibly) at loud noises, even if I know they are coming (movies songs ect.)

Routinely friended/unfriended me on Facebook before deleting it entirely (due to 2018 spying/hacking allegations)

I don't know if she means for these things to be hurtful but as someone who doesn't enjoy confrontation and is extremely sensitive to others feelings it just hurts y'know?

-edit 3: Attempted to talk to mom about her saying she hoped we'd fail via email. went about as well as expected. =Well, that clears a lot of things up. We only wanted you to be independent and happy, and it appears you are. End of story!

And for what it’s worth, I’ve said a LOT of things over the past 6 years that you didn’t hear about. And I’m not really sure where you heard “I hope they fail.” But I’m sure your source is 100%, and certainly not something you’d want to clarify with me.

I hope you got your apartment all squared away in Colorado. You should be under the 60-day notice by now! Woo hoo!

Let me know when you all are coming to get your stuff out of the house.

I’ll have it packed and ready for you.

-Mom

Am i reading into this too much? because it sounds like she's being hella passive aggressive about this.

-Edit 4: 7-19-18 Been venting about wedding planning being stressful on fb away from my mom since she doesn't have one anymore. I didn't realize she had fms reporting to her about my posts as she just randomly mentions via text that she wants to help me have fun while planning and that she wishes she could make it a happy time for me.

Edit 5: 9-26-18 Wedding is over finally. had our honeymoon and got moved out of our apartment back into my MIL's house. During the move we had to put all of our stuff into storage which includes Wedding gifts and thankyou notes. So Mom has been hounding me about getting them done and i've informed her several times that all of that is in storage and i havent been able to yet. She said not an excuse go buy more thankyou notes and write them all. I asked if Emailing a thank you would work, she says no must be hand written and mailed out (also who's paying for 100+ stamps: Me) Well Tonight she informs me that she's doing all the ones from her/my side and that she doesn't care if we do them for DH's side since SIL didn't send any thank you notes either. Cue big long talk with DH about all of this and he says not to worry about her being passive aggressive like this. Go and check my Email to find she sent an Email to me only with writing saying

"Dear all,

Thank you so much for attending --- wedding. Your presence was so important to me, and I know to the kids as well. Thank you also for the lovely wedding gifts you sent or brought. I know they are appreciated and will be enjoyed by the newlyweds. It was very kind and generous of you!

Unfortunately, --- is unable to send thank you notes, but I did want you to know that your gifts, and your presence at the celebration, were very important to all of us, and very much appreciated.

Fondly,

MOM"

currently I'm choosing not to respond and I wonder how our relationship is going to be going forward from all of this... I was so happy that the wedding was over so i wouldn't have to deal with this petty drama bullshit anymore but I guess thats just too much to ask for.

-She's also unfriended me on facebook again. I'm tempted to just block her to stop this wishy washy stuff from happening again.

#Personal #DO NOT REBLOG #I will block you if you reblog this #Vent for myself #i don't know what to do anymore #Mom #Mom Vent #i hope i dont have to update this anymore #but we'll see #venting post #PERSONAL VENT #PARENTS #Emotional Abuse #Mental Abuse

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makaelachanese · 3 years

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Shit is so depressing being born into a horrible world you didn’t ask to be in. Even worse when your mom is dead and your dad never gave a fuck about you. Life is so unfair, I’m here suffering and being tortured in a world I never asked to be in.. no friends or family to help me. It’s so heartbreaking having to continue to live even when you feel so much pain and despair inside your heart. I’m holding on by a thread. I’ve been homeless, betrayed by family and friends, staying at shelters and even with complete strangers. I’m only 24 and I feel so helpless, hopeless and useless. Every time I try to do better I get knocked down even more worse than before. I ask God, what did I do to deserve this life? But maybe it’s because I took my mother for granted when she was here on earth with me. But like most teenagers ma and my mom didn’t get along well, I always would become angry with her when I couldn’t get my way or hangout and go to parties with my friends but now I’m starting to realize she was only tryna protect me because no one cares about me genuinely in this world, no one is going to love me and support me wholeheartedly like she did. I lost my beautiful mom at the age of 15. She was the strongest most loving parent a kid could ask for but unfortunately Cancer took her from me so now I’m left all alone with bad people all around me.. waiting on the chance to hurt me and betray me and for that reason I never get close or let anyone get close to me because they never stay and I don’t want to hurt or damage myself no more than I’ve already become from my past trauma. My life just genuinely sucks… I got a job at Amazon which is extremely far almost 45 mins away from me and I have no transportation to get back and forth from work. My second job is at Nordstrom which is more convenient and also public transportation is available but the pay is less. I recently had to move out my apartment due to the fact that My 6 month lease is up and the person that helped me get the apartment will no longer help me to sign another lease. My credit is bad like any other young black person that handled their credit poorly in the past. But now I’m trying so hard to make upfor it. I’m a bit older soSo now I’m back stuck in the streets living from hotel to hotel and Not enough money to keep buying hotels everyday or to continue to pay for lyft just to get to my job at Amazon. It’s really overwhelming because I want to keep both of my jobs but it doesn’t seem like that will be the case. I don’t want to give up but within these past 9 years since I was 15 it seems like I’ve lost everything and everybody. I’m losing my will to live. It’s extremely hard. It’s been hard for these past years and I’m genuinely tired. All I can do is cry and pray to God for guidance and his loyal love.

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dramarising-replacement · 6 years

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This Lore Though

Ya’ll, I stumbled upon this really good piece of lore. Like holy shit how can I get on this level of detail????? Legit felt the feels though. Kudos to L for writing this gorgeous piece ;-; It sucks I can’t find the user though :((((

BOMBSHELL

Teacher -Trickster - Illusionist

I. Childhood

______ Although Bombshell was gifted with magic, cunning, and intelligence, he had difficulty bonding with other dragons. He was praised for his budding magical talents, and gained the attention of many prominent magicians in the area. He was mentored by a staunch, cold, dragon named Weiss. Weiss bombarded Bombshell from an early age with difficult assignments and exacted punishments if Bombshell failed to complete them. Weiss, as he told Bombshell, had the best interest in his student. The only way Bombshell would ever be successful was if he could be the best magician, and have it no other way. If Bombshell were not the best, then he needed to do better, or else Bombshell would disappoint his clan, and be rejected from dragon society. At first Bombshell rebelled against the intense regimes, and strict sessions by playing pranks on his Weiss, and sneaking out. Bombshell preferred using his magic to have fun, and entertain. However, due to his limited interactions with other dragons, Bombshell struggled to establish relationships with other dragons. He though about only being the best, and made everything a competition, and insulted other dragons for not being worthy. Many grew to dislike Bombshell, not only for his magical gifts, but his personality. Bombshell numbed the taunts, cold gazes, and his insecurities by pouring himself into his magical studies. He still loathed them, and disliked Weiss, but still sought his tutor’s praises. He grew to always try to be “right” and when he was told he was wrong, could easily explode and hotly try and make his point seem right. He did, however, learn how to impress dragons with his magic, and changed his approach of being disliked, to being liked, by flaunting his credentials. However, Bombshell struggled with his identity as a magician, and suppressed love for games, tricks, and to have fun. But he also wanted to be right, and approved by members of clan. Attending a prestigious magician program, Bombshell started to not care in order to balance out the strict amount of order that’d been imposed on him, and ended up relying on his sheer talent to get him through. He began to measure his worth based on how much he couldn’t study, and use his talents as a raw value of himself. This was partly due to the “friends” he made in the program, who followed a similar philosophy. He reveled in his new found freedom, but later on did very poorly and was almost kicked out. Frustrated, angered, and feeling misled, this led to Bombshell’s self exile to the Abiding Boneyard.

II. Exile and Gywnn

______ Bombshell ran away from his clan, and stumbled into the Abiding Boneyard. Scared, but confident in his magical abilities he wandered the area for many years playing cruel tricks on dragons, or cheating dragons out of their money as a coping method for his pent up frustrations. However, in times when he found himself alone he would cry, realizing how he might be alone forever and at these times coped by finding another dragon to scare off or try and shrug it off by objectifying his feelings. At some point he crossed paths with a guardian named Gywnn. Gwynn originally came from the Ashfallen Wastes and had been traversing through Sorienth for sometime. Bombshell had recently pranked a group of patrolling warriors, but didn’t escape unscathed. One of warrior managed to hit a vital point on the nocturne’s chest. Weak, and near death, Gwynn nearly passed Bombshell but saw the nocturne when she felt something prickle her forearm. Looking down she saw the injured nocturne, she took it upon herself to nurse him back to health. Early on, when he became strong enough, Bombshell began throwing sarcastic comments and other things to provoke the guardian. Which he sometimes was successful in, but other times she replied with an equally sarcastic, or flustered comment. Gwynn cared for Bombshell, and, perhaps due to her kindness or sincere personality, Bombshell opened about his past, and unprocessed emotions. Gwynn listened, nodded, and at time went on long talks about how silly Bombshell was, but that it was okay. Bombshell began feeling comfortable with Gwynn, and trusted her immensely. Though, he was always a bit skeptical why the guardian stayed. More than once he questioned, and got the same answer which was “you’re my charge, that’s all”. Their friendship blossomed, and the two became travelling companions though the Abiding Boneyard. Bombshell began to come to terms with himself more. He let himself be a bit more vulnerable at times, and tried his best to understand and listen. Thanks to Gwynn’s love, he was able to better communicate his feelings, and establish his own sense of self worth instead of having to rely on others. But this entire process of self healing took many many many years. “You are loved, my charge, and will always be loved. By me at least. Even if you’re broken, stubborn, and a jerk, you’re still good.” - Gwynn One day it came to be that Bombshell found the entrance to an exit of the Abiding Boneyard. Bombshell detected with his magic that there would be a few more twists in turns, but it eventually lead to the rim of the Ancient Wyrmwood. While Gwynn was happy to leave, Bombshell was still uncertain. He was afraid their friendship would end, or perhaps Gwynn would simply leave. He was still skeptical about the guardian’s Journey, even with her constant reassurance. He used his magic to cover the exit, and the two continued to journey a few more years before once again stumbling across the same exit. Bombshell repeated the same action he did, but it was only a few months later that they found themselves at the same exit. This third time led Gwynn to confront the nocturne. The two had an intense dispute, which they’d had disputes before, but this one was a full blown fight. It became to the point where Bombshell’s magic was affected by his explosion of emotions. The magic pushed the two apart, sending Bombshell flying across the Boneyard. Alone once again, Bombshell was seized by guilt. He spent years searching for Gwynn, and tormented by guilt, before stumbling upon the entrance of the exit once again. At this point he almost decided to turn back into the Boneyard and stay there permanently. His guilt, and desire were still part of him, and felt he deserved to stay in such a place. Standing at the exit, he thought. He had a choice, and it was his decision to go or to stay. It was at that point that he closed his eyes and dreamed. He saw Gwynn in his dream, and the engaged in a long conversation. Gwynn nudged the nocturne to choose the exit. That what happened was what happened in the past, and that staying in the Boneyard would continue Bombshell’s emotions to fester. Bombshell came to his own realization that his choice to stay meant he also had the luxury to perhaps never again see his clan. Never again see anything but a mass of bones, and lost dragons. Not all exits were closure, but Bombshell had the choice to go forward, or remain. With great difficulty, Bombshell woke. He didn’t want Gwynn to leave, but he had to go. He followed the winding exit of the Abiding Boneyard with a heavy heart, but a lighter soul. As he neared he saw the skeleton of a large dragon…that of a guardian. Pausing, he investigated and ran his claws across the bones. It was no doubt that these were the bones of his beloved friend Gwynn. Under her massive claw, Bombshell found a note. “Bombshell, Whether you find this note or not, I hope that you won’t have to read it. I hope we can see each other, and I am so sorry for the dispute that had happened years ago. I was hurt, so were you, but that dispute doesn’t mean we weren’t very good, if not best of friends. I admit I was hurt when you said I was just around because you’re my charge, and your intuition was correct; you never were my charge. However, dragons can choose things. I am a perfectly capable dragon to choose something as my charge, even if my instincts say differently. So while you weren’t chosen by my instincts, you were chosen by me. You’re a caring dragon, and even if you’ve got a huge ego, I still love your banter and knowledge. The fact we can converse is amazing, and we share so many different things, even if we’re different. I write this letter because I don’t have long to live. An oracle of the sorts told me I was going to die of a disease. I think it was cancer of some sort, and how funny it is to think that I can choose you as a charge, but have no control over my own body. I’ve tried herbs, potions, various other things when local plague dragons pass by. But I think I will succumb to something I can’t choose. We’re all fated to die I suppose, but I would hope we’re fated to meet again. I knew if I even exited the Boneyard, it would probably cover the exit, or I’d be lost at remembering which entrance was the exit. Many dragons I’ve passed by say they can find one exit, but if they turn back the same way, get lost again. I swear this labyrinth has a mind of its own. I will wait, and if I don’t see you, at least I’ll be happy hoping you’ll receive this letter. Thank you, my charge, friend, for the precious memories.” Pocketing the precious letter, Bombshell grieved for many days. Gwynn would never reach the exit, and it was unlikely Bombshell would find the exit again if he went back. While he could try levitating the bones, Gwynn was a massive dragon and Bombshell magic couldn’t levitate something as heavy as a guardian. So Bombshell left with a the letter, and departed with a heavy heart, but his soul lighter once more.

III. Return

Bombshell returned to his old clan. There were feelings of joy, happiness, and some not so much. Bombshell continues to work on his magic. He teaches magic to clanmates in the clan, and hosts magic shows, displaying his famous magic cards. With the help of his familiar, an Ethereal Trickster named Gwynn, the duo perform grand illusions, and tricks. Bombshell still pranks dragons and whips out sarcastic, witty comments. He still enjoys showing off, and squabbling over some things, but not too much. Once in awhile he visits the edge of the Abiding Boneyard by himself. Some clanmates think he’s crazy, others think that he likes to do it for his own reasons. Some don’t bother at all. Many still ask “what happened to you all those years?” Bombshell shrugs and says “I was lost, but I was found. Nothing more, nothing less.”

#praise #flight rising #cursing #lore #long post #no salt #submission

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pocketprinter · 4 years

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Charlie Munger on the psychology of human misjudgment

Speech at Harvard University Estimated date: June, 1995 Transcription, comments [in brackets] and minor editing by Whitney Tilson

Moderator: ...and they discovered extreme, obvious irrationality in many areas of the economy that they looked at. And they were a little bit troubled because nothing that they had learned in graduate school explained these patterns. Now I would hope that Mr. Munger spends a little bit more time around graduate schools today, because we’ve gotten now where he was 30 years ago, and we are trying to explain those patterns, and some of the people who are doing that will be speaking with you today.

So I think he thinks of his specialty as the Psychology of Human Misjudgment, and part of this human misjudgment, of course, comes from worrying about the types of fads and social pressures that Henry Kaufman talked to us about. I think it’s significant that Berkshire Hathaway is not headquartered in New York, or even in Los Angeles or San Francisco, but rather in the heart of the country in Nebraska.

When he referred to this problem of human misjudgment, he identified two significant problems, and I’m sure that there are many more, but when he said, “By not relying on this, and not understanding this, it was costing me a lot of money,” and I presume that some of you are here in the theory that maybe it’s costing you even a somewhat lesser amount of money. And the second point that Mr. Munger made was it was reducing...not understanding human misjudgment was reducing my ability to help everything I loved. Well I hope he loves you, and I’m sure he’ll help you. Thank you. [Applause]

Munger: Although I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment -- and lord knows I’ve created a good bit of it -- I don’t think I’ve created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with.

When I saw this patterned irrationality, which was so extreme, and I had no theory or anything to deal with it, but I could see that it was extreme, and I could see that it was patterned, I just started to create my own system of psychology, partly by casual reading, but largely from personal experience, and I used that pattern to help me get through life. Fairly late in life I stumbled into this book, Influence, by a psychologist named Bob Cialdini, who became a super-tenured hotshot on a 2,000-person faculty at a very young age. And he wrote this book, which has now sold 300-odd thousand copies, which is remarkable for somebody. Well, it’s an academic book aimed at a popular audience that filled in a lot of holes in my crude system. In those holes it filled in, I thought I had a system that was a good-working tool, and I’d like to share that one with you.

And I came here because behavioral economics. How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn’t behavioral, what the hell is it? And I think it’s fairly clear that all reality has to respect all other reality. If you come to inconsistencies, they have to be resolved, and so if there’s anything valid in psychology, economics has to recognize it, and vice versa. So I think the people that are working on this fringe between economics and psychology are absolutely right to be there, and I think there’s been plenty wrong over the years.

Well let me romp through as much of this list as I have time to get through:

24 Standard Causes of Human Misjudgment.

1. First: Under-recognition of the power of what psychologists call ‘reinforcement’ and economists call ‘incentives.’

Well you can say, “Everybody knows that.” Well I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.

One of my favorite cases about the power of incentives is the Federal Express case. The heart and soul of the integrity of the system is that all the packages have to be shifted rapidly in one central location each night. And the system has no integrity if the whole shift can’t be done fast. And Federal Express had one hell of a time getting the thing to work. And they tried moral suasion, they tried everything in the world, and finally somebody got the happy thought that they were paying the night shift by the hour, and that maybe if they paid them by the shift, the system would work better. And lo and behold, that solution worked.

Early in the history of Xerox, Joe Wilson, who was then in the government, had to go back to Xerox because he couldn’t understand how their better, new machine was selling so poorly in relation to their older and inferior machine. Of course when he got there he found out that the commission arrangement with the salesmen gave a tremendous incentive to the inferior machine.

And here at Harvard, in the shadow of B.F. Skinner -- there was a man who really was into reinforcement as a powerful thought, and, you know, Skinner’s lost his reputation in a lot of places, but if you were to analyze the entire history of experimental science at Harvard, he’d be in the top handful. His experiments were very ingenious, the results were counter- intuitive, and they were important. It is not given to experimental science to do better. What gummed up Skinner’s reputation is that he developed a case of what I always call man-with-a-hammer syndrome: to the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail. And Skinner had one of the more extreme cases in the history of Academia, and this syndrome doesn’t exempt bright people. It’s just a man with a hammer...and Skinner is an extreme example of that. And later, as I go down my list, let’s go back and try and figure out why people, like Skinner, get man-with-a-hammer syndrome.

Incidentally, when I was at the Harvard Law School there was a professor, naturally at Yale, who was derisively discussed at Harvard, and they used to say, “Poor old Blanchard. He thinks declaratory judgments will cure cancer.” And that’s the way Skinner got. And not only that, he was literary, and he scorned opponents who had any different way of thinking or thought anything else was important. This is not a way to make a lasting reputation if the other people turn out to also be doing something important.

2. My second factor is simple psychological denial.

This first really hit me between the eyes when a friend of our family had a super-athlete, super-student son who flew off a carrier in the north Atlantic and never came back, and his mother, who was a very sane woman, just never believed that he was dead. And, of course, if you turn on the television, you’ll find the mothers of the most obvious criminals that man could ever diagnose, and they all think their sons are innocent. That’s simple psychological denial. The reality is too painful to bear, so you just distort it until it’s bearable. We all do that to some extent, and it’s a common psychological misjudgment that causes terrible problems.

3. Third: incentive-cause bias, both in one’s own mind and that of ones trusted advisor, where it creates what economists call ‘agency costs.’

Here, my early experience was a doctor who sent bushel baskets full of normal gall bladders down to the pathology lab in the leading hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska. And with that quality control for which community hospitals are famous, about five years after he should’ve been removed from the staff, he was. And one of the old doctors who participated in the removal was also a family friend, and I asked him: I said, “Tell me, did he think, ‘Here’s a way for me to exercise my talents’” -- this guy was very skilled technically -- “’and make a high living by doing a few maimings and murders every year, along with some frauds?’” And he said, “Hell no, Charlie. He thought that the gall bladder was the source of all medical evil, and if you really love your patients, you couldn’t get that organ out rapidly enough.”

Now that’s an extreme case, but in lesser strength, it’s present in every profession and in every human being. And it causes perfectly terrible behavior. If you take sales presentations and brokers of commercial real estate and businesses... I’m 70 years old, I’ve never seen one I thought was even within hailing distance of objective truth. If you want to talk about the power of incentives and the power of rationalized, terrible behavior: after the Defense Department had had enough experience with cost-plus percentage of cost contracts, the reaction of our republic was to make it a crime for the federal government to write one, and not only a crime, but a felony.

And by the way, the government’s right, but a lot of the way the world is run, including most law firms and a lot of other places, they’ve still got a cost-plus percentage of cost system. And human nature, with its version of what I call ‘incentive-caused bias,’ causes this terrible abuse. And many of the people who are doing it you would be glad to have married into your family compared to what you’re otherwise going to get. [Laughter]

Now there are huge implications from the fact that the human mind is put together this way, and that is that people who create things like cash registers, which make most [dishonest] behavior hard, are some of the effective saints of our civilization. And the cash register was a great moral instrument when it was created. And Patterson knew that, by the way. He had a little store, and the people were stealing him blind and never made any money, and people sold him a couple of cash registers and it went to profit immediately. And, of course, he closed the store and went into the cash register business...

And so this is a huge, important thing. If you read the psychology texts, you will find that if they’re 1,000 pages long, there’s one sentence. Somehow incentive-caused bias has escaped the standard survey course in psychology.

4. Fourth, and this is a superpower in error-causing psychological tendency: bias from consistency and commitment tendency, including the tendency to avoid or promptly resolve cognitive dissonance. Includes the self-confirmation tendency of all conclusions, particularly expressed conclusions, and with a special persistence for conclusions that are hard-won.

Well what I’m saying here is that the human mind is a lot like the human egg, and the human egg has a shut-off device. When one sperm gets in, it shuts down so the next one can’t get in. The human mind has a big tendency of the same sort. And here again, it doesn’t just catch ordinary mortals; it catches the deans of physics. According to Max Planck, the really innovative, important new physics was never really accepted by the old guard. Instead a new guard came along that was less brain-blocked by its previous conclusions. And if Max Planck’s crowd had this consistency and commitment tendency that kept their old inclusions intact in spite of disconfirming evidence, you can imagine what the crowd that you and I are part of behaves like.

And of course, if you make a public disclosure of your conclusion, you’re pounding it into your own head. Many of these students that are screaming at us, you know, they aren’t convincing us, but they’re forming mental change for themselves, because what they’re shouting out [is] what they’re pounding in. And I think educational institutions that create a climate where too much of that goes on are...in a fundamental sense, they’re irresponsible institutions. It’s very important to not put your brain in chains too young by what you shout out.

And all these things like painful qualifying and initiation rituals pound in your commitments and your ideas. The Chinese brainwashing system, which was for war prisoners, was way better than anybody else’s. They maneuvered people into making tiny little commitments and declarations, and then they’d slowly build. That worked way better than torture.

5. Fifth: bias from Pavlovian association, misconstruing past correlation as a reliable basis for decision-making.

I never took a course in psychology, or economics either for that matter, but I did learn about Pavlov in high school biology. And the way they taught it, you know, so the dog salivated when the bell rang. So what? Nobody made the least effort to tie that to the wide world. Well the truth of the matter is that Pavlovian association is an enormously powerful psychological force in the daily life of all of us. And, indeed, in economics we wouldn’t have money without the role of so-called secondary reinforcement, which is a pure psychological phenomenon demonstrated in the laboratory.

Practically...I’d say 3/4 of advertising works on pure Pavlov. Think how association, pure association, works. Take Coca-Cola company (we’re the biggest share-holder). They want to be associated with every wonderful image: heroics in the Olympics, wonderful music, you name it. They don’t want to be associated with presidents’ funerals and so- forth. When have you seen a Coca-Cola ad...and the association really works.

And all these psychological tendencies work largely or entirely on a subconscious level, which makes them very insidious. Now you’ve got Persian messenger syndrome. The Persians really did kill the messenger who brought the bad news. You think that is dead? I mean you should’ve seen Bill Paley in his last 20 years. [Paley was the former owner, chairman and CEO of CBS]

He didn’t hear one damn thing he didn’t want to hear. People knew that it was bad for the messenger to bring Bill Paley things he didn’t want to hear. Well that means that the leader gets in a cocoon of unreality, and this is a great big enterprise, and boy, did he make some dumb decisions in the last 20 years.

And now the Persian messenger syndrome is alive and well. I saw, some years ago, Arco and Exxon arguing over a few hundred millions of ambiguity in their North Slope treaties before a superior court judge in Texas, with armies of lawyers and experts on each side. Now this is a Mad Hatter’s tea party: two engineering-style companies can’t resolve some ambiguity without spending tens of millions of dollars in some Texas superior court? In my opinion what happens is that nobody wants to bring the bad news to the executives up the line. But here’s a few hundred million dollars you thought you had that you don’t. And it’s much safer to act like the Persian messenger who goes away to hide rather than bring home the news of the battle lost.

Talking about economics, you get a very interesting phenomenon that I’ve seen over and over again in a long life. You’ve got two products; suppose they’re complex, technical products. Now you’d think, under the laws of economics, that if product A costs X, if product Y costs X minus something, it will sell better than if it sells at X plus something, but that’s not so. In many cases when you raise the price of the alternative products, it’ll get a larger market share than it would when you make it lower than your competitor’s product. That’s because the bell, a Pavlovian bell -- I mean ordinarily there’s a correlation between price and value -- then you have an information inefficiency. And so when you raise the price, the sales go up relative to your competitor. That happens again and again and again. It’s a pure Pavlovian phenomenon. You can say, “Well, the economists have figured this sort of thing out when they started talking about information inefficiencies,” but that was fairly late in economics that they found such an obvious thing. And, of course, most of them don’t ask what causes the information inefficiencies.

Well one of the things that causes it is pure old Pavlov and his dog. Now you’ve got bios from Skinnerian association: operant conditioning, you know, where you give the dog a reward and pound in the behavior that preceded the dog’s getting the award. And, of course, Skinner was able to create superstitious pigeons by having the rewards come by accident with certain occurrences, and, of course, we all know people who are the human equivalents of superstitious pigeons. That’s a very powerful phenomenon. And, of course, operant conditioning really works. I mean the people in the center who think that operant conditioning is important are very much right, it’s just that Skinner overdid it a little.

Where you see in business just perfectly horrible results from psychologically-rooted tendencies is in accounting. If you take Westinghouse, which blew, what, two or three billion dollars pre-tax at least loaning developers to build hotels, and virtually 100% loans? Now you say any idiot knows that if there’s one thing you don’t like it’s a developer, and another you don’t like it’s a hotel. And to make a 100% loan to a developer who’s going to build a hotel... [Laughter] But this guy, he probably was an engineer or something, and he didn’t take psychology any more than I did, and he got out there in the hands of these salesmen operating under their version of incentive-caused bias, where any damned way of getting Westinghouse to do it was considered normal business, and they just blew it.

That would never have been possible if the accounting system hadn’t been such but for the initial phase of every transaction it showed wonderful financial results. So people who have loose accounting standards are just inviting perfectly horrible behavior in other people. And it’s a sin, it’s an absolute sin. If you carry bushel baskets full of money through the ghetto, and made it easy to steal, that would be a considerable human sin, because you’d be causing a lot of bad behavior, and the bad behavior would spread. Similarly an institution that gets sloppy accounting commits a real human sin, and it’s also a dumb way to do business, as Westinghouse has so wonderfully proved.

Oddly enough nobody mentions, at least nobody I’ve seen, what happened with Joe Jett and Kidder Peabody. The truth of the matter is the accounting system was such that by punching a few buttons, the Joe Jetts of the world could show profits, and profits that showed up in things that resulted in rewards and esteem and every other thing... Well the Joe Jetts are always with us, and they’re not really to blame, in my judgment at least. But that bastard who created that foolish accounting system who, so far as I know, has not been flayed alive, ought to be.

6. Sixth: bias from reciprocation tendency, including the tendency of one on a roll to act as other persons expect.

Well here, again, Cialdini does a magnificent job at this, and you’re all going to be given a copy of Cialdini’s book. And if you have half as much sense as I think you do, you will immediately order copies for all of your children and several of your friends. You will never make a better investment.

It is so easy to be a patsy for what he calls the compliance practitioners of this life. At any rate, reciprocation tendency is a very, very powerful phenomenon, and Cialdini demonstrated this by running around a campus, and he asked people to take juvenile delinquents to the zoo. And it was a campus, and so one in six actually agreed to do it. And after he’d accumulated a statistical output he went around on the same campus and he asked other people, he said, “Gee, would you devote two afternoons a week to taking juvenile delinquents somewhere and suffering greatly yourself to help them,” and there he got 100% of the people to say no. But after he’d made the first request, he backed up a little, and he said, “Would you at least take them to the zoo one afternoon?” He raised the compliance rate from a third to a half. He got three times the success by just going through the little ask-for-a-lot-and-back-off.

Now if the human mind, on a subconscious level, can be manipulated that way and you don’t know it, I always use the phrase, “You’re like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.” I mean you are really giving a lot of quarter to the external world that you can’t afford to give. And on this so-called role theory, where you tend to act in the way that other people expect, and that’s reciprocation if you think about the way society is organized.

A guy named Zimbardo had people at Stanford divide into two pieces: one were the guards and the other were the prisoners, and they started acting out roles as people expected. He had to stop the experiment after about five days. He was getting into human misery and breakdown and pathological behavior. I mean it was...it was awesome. However, Zimbardo is greatly misinterpreted. It’s not just reciprocation tendency and role theory that caused that, it’s consistency and commitment tendency. Each person, as he acted as a guard or a prisoner, the action itself was pounding in the idea. [For more on this famous experiment, see http://www.prisonexp.org.]

Wherever you turn, this consistency and commitment tendency is affecting you. In other words, what you think may change what you do, but perhaps even more important, what you do will change what you think. And you can say, “Everybody knows that.” I want to tell you I didn’t know it well enough early enough.

7. Seventh, now this is a lollapalooza, and Henry Kaufman wisely talked about this: bias from over-influence by social proof -- that is, the conclusions of others, particularly under conditions of natural uncertainty and stress.

And here, one of the cases the psychologists use is Kitty Genovese, where all these people -- I don’t know, 50, 60, 70 of them -- just sort of sat and did nothing while she was slowly murdered. Now one of the explanations is that everybody looked at everybody else and nobody else was doing anything, and so there’s automatic social proof that the right thing to do is nothing. That’s not a good enough explanation for Kitty Genovese, in my judgment. That’s only part of it. There are microeconomic ideas and gain/loss ratios and so forth that also come into play. I think time and time again, in reality, psychological notions and economic notions interplay, and the man who doesn’t understand both is a damned fool.

Big-shot businessmen get into these waves of social proof. Do you remember some years ago when one oil company bought a fertilizer company, and every other major oil company practically ran out and bought a fertilizer company? And there was no more damned reason for all these oil companies to buy fertilizer companies, but they didn’t know exactly what to do, and if Exxon was doing it, it was good enough for Mobil, and vice versa. I think they’re all gone now, but it was a total disaster.

Now let’s talk about efficient market theory, a wonderful economic doctrine that had a long vogue in spite of the experience of Berkshire Hathaway. In fact one of the economists who won -- he shared a Nobel Prize -- and as he looked at Berkshire Hathaway year after year, which people would throw in his face as saying maybe the market isn’t quite as efficient as you think, he said, “Well, it’s a two-sigma event.” And then he said we were a three-sigma event. And then he said we were a four-sigma event. And he finally got up to six sigmas -- better to add a sigma than change a theory, just because the evidence comes in differently. [Laughter] And, of course, when this share of a Nobel Prize went into money management himself, he sank like a stone.

If you think about the doctrines I’ve talked about, namely, one, the power of reinforcement -- after all you do something and the market goes up and you get paid and rewarded and applauded and what have you, meaning a lot of reinforcement, if you make a bet on a market and the market goes with you. Also, there’s social proof. I mean the prices on the market are the ultimate form of social proof, reflecting what other people think, and so the combination is very powerful. Why would you expect general market levels to always be totally efficient, say even in 1973-74 at the pit, or in 1972 or whatever it was when the Nifty 50 were in their heyday? If these psychological notions are correct, you would expect some waves of irrationality, which carry general levels, so they’re inconsistent with reason.

8. Nine [he means eight]: what made these economists love the efficient market theory is the math was so elegant.

And after all, math was what they’d learned to do. To the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail. The alternative truth was a little messy, and they’d forgotten the great economists Keynes, whom I think said, “Better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”

9. Nine: bias from contrast-caused distortions of sensation, perception and cognition.

Here, the great experiment that Cialdini does in his class is he takes three buckets of water: one’s hot, one’s cold and one’s room temperature, and he has the student stick his left hand in the hot water and his right hand in the cold water. Then he has them remove the hands and put them both in the room temperature bucket, and of course with both hands in the same bucket of water, one seems hot, the other seems cold because the sensation apparatus of man is over-influenced by contrast. It has no absolute scale; it’s got a contrast scale in it. And it’s a scale with quantum effects in it too. It takes a certain percentage change before it’s noticed.

Maybe you’ve had a magician remove your watch -- I certainly have -- without your noticing it. It’s the same thing. He’s taking advantage of contrast-type troubles in your sensory apparatus. But here the great truth is that cognition mimics sensation, and the cognition manipulators mimic the watch-removing magician. In other words, people are manipulating you all day long on this contrast phenomenon.

Cialdini cites the case of the real estate broker. And you’ve got the rube that’s been transferred into your town, and the first thing you do is you take the rube out to two of the most awful, overpriced houses you’ve ever seen, and then you take the rube to some moderately overpriced house, and then you stick him. And it works pretty well, which is why the real estate salesmen do it. And it’s always going to work.

And the accidents of life can do this to you, and it can ruin your life. In my generation, when women lived at home until they got married, I saw some perfectly terrible marriages made by highly desirable women because they lived in terrible homes. And I’ve seen some terrible second marriages which were made because they were slight improvements over an even worse first marriage. You think you’re immune from these things, and you laugh, and I want to tell you, you aren’t.

My favorite analogy I can’t vouch for the accuracy of. I have this worthless friend I like to play bridge with, and he’s a total intellectual amateur that lives on inherited money, but he told me once something I really enjoyed hearing. He said, “Charlie,” he say, “If you throw a frog into very hot water, the frog will jump out, but if you put the frog in room temperature water and just slowly heat the water up, the frog will die there.” Now I don’t know whether that’s true about a frog, but it’s sure as hell true about many of the businessmen I know [laughter], and there, again, it is the contrast phenomenon. But these are hot-shot, high-powered people. I mean these are not fools. If it comes to you in small pieces, you’re likely to miss, so if you’re going to be a person of good judgment, you have to do something about this warp in your head where it’s so misled by mere contrast.

10. Bias from over-influence by authority.

Well here, the Milgrim experiment, as it's called -- I think there have been 1,600 psychological papers written about Milgrim. And he had a person posing as an authority figure trick ordinary people into giving what they had every reason to expect was heavy torture by electric shock to perfectly innocent fellow citizens. And he was trying to show why Hitler succeeded and a few other things, and so this really caught the fancy of the world. Partly it’s so politically correct, and over-influence by authority...

You’ll like this one: You get a pilot and a co-pilot. The pilot is the authority figure. They don’t do this in airplanes, but they’ve done it in simulators. They have the pilot do something where the co-pilot, who's been trained in simulators a long time -- he knows he’s not to allow the plane to crash -- they have the pilot to do something where an idiot co-pilot would know the plane was going to crash, but the pilot’s doing it, and the co-pilot is sitting there, and the pilot is the authority figure. 25% of the time the plane crashes. I mean this is a very powerful psychological tendency. It’s not quite as powerful as some people think, and I’ll get to that later.

11. Eleven: bias from deprival super-reaction syndrome, including bias caused by present or threatened scarcity, including threatened removal of something almost possessed, but never possessed.

Here I took the Munger dog, a lovely, harmless dog. The only way to get that dog to bite you is to try and take something out of its mouth after it was already there. And you know, if you’ve tried to do takeaways in labor negotiations, you’ll know that the human version of that dog is there in all of us. And I have a neighbor, a predecessor who had a little island around the house, and his next door neighbor put a little pine tree on it that was about three feet high, and it turned his 180 degree view of the harbor into 179 3/4. Well they had a blood feud like the Hatfields and McCoys, and it went on and on and on...

I mean people are really crazy about minor decrements down. And then, if you act on them, then you get into reciprocation tendency, because you don’t just reciprocate affection, you reciprocate animosity, and the whole thing can escalate. And so huge insanities can come from just subconsciously over-weighing the importance of what you’re losing or almost getting and not getting.

And the extreme business case here was New Coke. Coca-Cola has the most valuable trademark in the world. We’re the major shareholder -- I think we understand that trademark. Coke has armies of brilliant engineers, lawyers, psychologists, advertising executives and so forth, and they had a trademark on a flavor, and they’d spent the better part of 100 years getting people to believe that trademark had all these intangible values too. And people associate it with a flavor. And so they were going to tell people not that it was improved, because you can’t improve a flavor. A flavor is a matter of taste. I mean you may improve a detergent or something, but don’t think you’re going to make a major change in a flavor. So they got this huge deprival super-reaction syndrome.

Pepsi was within weeks of coming out with old Coke in a Pepsi bottle, which would’ve been the biggest fiasco in modern times. Perfect insanity. And by the way, both Goizuetta [Coke's CEO at the time] and Keough [an influential former president and director of the company] are just wonderful about it. I mean they just joke. Keough always says, “I must’ve been away on vacation.” He participated in every single decision -- he’s a wonderful guy. And by the way, Goizuetta is a wonderful, smart guy -- an engineer. Smart people make these terrible boners. How can you not understand deprival super-reaction syndrome? But people do not react symmetrically to loss and gain. Well maybe a great bridge player like Zeckhauser does, but that’s a trained response. Ordinary people, subconsciously affected by their inborn tendencies...

12. Bias from envy/jealousy.

Well envy/jealousy made, what, two out of the ten commandments? Those of you who have raised siblings you know about envy, or tried to run a law firm or investment bank or even a faculty? I’ve heard Warren say a half a dozen times, “It’s not greed that drives the world, but envy.”

Here again, you go through the psychology survey courses, and you go to the index: envy/jealousy, 1,000-page book, it’s blank. There’s some blind spots in academia, but it’s an enormously powerful thing, and it operates, to a considerable extent, on the subconscious level. Anybody who doesn’t understand it is taking on defects he shouldn’t have.

13. Bias from chemical dependency.

Well, we don’t have to talk about that. We’ve all seen so much of it, but it’s interesting how it’ll always cause this moral breakdown if there’s any need, and it always involves massive denial. See it just aggravates what we talked about earlier in the aviator case, the tendency to distort reality so that it’s endurable.

14. Bias from mis-gambling compulsion.

Well here, Skinner made the only explanation you’ll find in the standard psychology survey course. He, of course, created a variable reinforcement rate for his pigeons and his mice, and he found that that would pound in the behavior better than any other enforcement pattern. And he says, “Ah ha! I’ve explained why gambling is such a powerful, addictive force in this civilization.” I think that is, to a very considerable extent, true, but being Skinner, he seemed to think that was the only explanation, but the truth of the matter is that the devisors of these modern machines and techniques know a lot of things that Skinner didn’t know.

For instance, a lottery. You have a lottery where you get your number by lot, and then somebody draws a number by lot, it gets lousy play. You have a lottery where people get to pick their number, you get big play. Again, it’s this consistency and commitment thing. People think if they have committed to it, it has to be good. The minute they’ve picked it themselves it gets an extra validity. After all, they thought it and they acted on it.

Then if you take the slot machines, you get bar, bar, walnut. And it happens again and again and again. You get all these near misses. Well that’s deprival super-reaction syndrome, and boy do the people who create the machines understand human psychology. And for the high IQ-crowd they’ve got poker machines where you make choices. So you can play blackjack, so to speak, with the machine. It’s wonderful what we’ve done with our computers to ruin the civilization.

But at any rate, mis-gambling compulsion is a very, very powerful and important thing. Look at what’s happening to our country: every Indian has a reservation, every river town, and look at the people who are ruined by it with the aid of their stock brokers and others. And again, if you look in the standard textbook of psychology you’ll find practically nothing on it except maybe one sentence talking about Skinner’s rats. That is not an adequate coverage of the subject.

15. Bias from liking distortion, including the tendency to especially like oneself, one’s

own kind and one’s own idea structures, and the tendency to be especially susceptible to being misled by someone liked. Disliking distortion, bias from that, the reciprocal of liking distortion and the tendency not to learn appropriately from someone disliked.

Well here, again, we’ve got hugely powerful tendencies, and if you look at the wars in part of the Harvard Law School, as we sit here, you can see that very brilliant people get into this almost pathological behavior. And these are very, very powerful, basic, subconscious psychological tendencies, or at least party subconscious.

Now let’s get back to B.F. Skinner, man-with-a-hammer syndrome revisited. Why is man- with-a-hammer syndrome always present? Well if you stop to think about it, it’s incentive- caused bias. His professional reputation is all tied up with what he knows. He likes himself and he likes his own ideas, and he’s expressed them to other people -- consistency and commitment tendency. I mean you’ve got four or five of these elementary psychological tendencies combining to create this man-with-a-hammer syndrome.

Once you realize that you can’t really buy your thinking -- partly you can, but largely you can’t in this world -- you have learned a lesson that’s very useful in life. George Bernard Shaw had a character say in The Doctor’s Dilemma, “In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” But he didn’t have it quite right, because it isn’t so much a conspiracy as it is a subconscious, psychological tendency.

The guy tells you what is good for him. He doesn’t recognize that he’s doing anything wrong any more than that doctor did when he was pulling out all those normal gall bladders. And he believes his own idea structures will cure cancer, and he believes that the demons that he’s the guardian against are the biggest demons and the most important ones, and in fact they may be very small demons compared to the demons that you face. So you’re getting your advice in this world from your paid advisor with this huge load of ghastly bias. And woe to you.

There are only two ways to handle it: you can hire your advisor and then just apply a windage factor, like I used to do when I was a rifle shooter. I’d just adjust for so many miles an hour wind. Or you can learn the basic elements of your advisor's trade. You don’t have to learn very much, by the way, because if you learn just a little then you can make him explain why he’s right. And those two tendencies will take part of the warp out of the thinking you’ve tried to hire done. By and large it works terribly. I have never seen a management consultant’s report in my long life that didn’t end with the following paragraph: "What this situation really needs is more management consulting." Never once. I always turn to the last page. Of course Berkshire doesn’t hire them, so I only do this on sort of a voyeuristic basis. Sometimes I’m at a non-profit where some idiot hires one. [Laughter]

16. Seventeen [he means 16]: bias from the non-mathematical nature of the human brain in its natural state as it deal with probabilities employing crude heuristics, and is often misled by mere contrast, a tendency to overweigh conveniently available information and other psychologically misrouted thinking tendencies on this list.

When the brain should be using the simple probability mathematics of Fermat and Pascal applied to all reasonably obtainable and correctly weighted items of information that are of value in predicting outcomes, the right way to think is the way Zeckhauser plays bridge. It’s just that simple. And your brain doesn’t naturally know how to think the way Zeckhauser knows how to play bridge. Now, you notice I put in that availability thing, and there I’m mimicking some very eminent psychologists [Daniel] Kahneman, Eikhout[?] (I hope I pronounced that right) and [Amos] Tversky, who raised the idea of availability to a whole heuristic of misjudgment. And they are very substantially right.

I mean ask the Coca-Cola Company, which has raised availability to a secular religion. If availability changes behavior, you will drink a helluva lot more Coke if it’s always available. I mean availability does change behavior and cognition. Nonetheless, even though I recognize that and applaud Tversky and Kahneman, I don’t like it for my personal system except as part of a greater sub-system, which is you’ve got to think the way Zeckhauser plays bridge. And it isn’t just the lack of availability that distorts your judgment. All the things on this list distort judgment. And I want to train myself to kind of mentally run down the list instead of just jumping on availability. So that’s why I state it the way I do.

In a sense these psychological tendencies make things unavailable, because if you quickly jump to one thing, and then because you jumped to it the consistency and commitment tendency makes you lock in, boom, that’s error number one. Or if something is very vivid, which I’m going to come to next, that will really pound in. And the reason that the thing that really matters is now unavailable and what’s extra-vivid wins is, I mean, the extra- vividness creates the unavailability. So I think it’s much better to have a whole list of things that would cause you to be less like Zeckhauser than it is just to jump on one factor.

Here I think we should discuss John Gutfreund. This is a very interesting human example, which will be taught in every decent professional school for at least a full generation. Gutfreund has a trusted employee and it comes to light not through confession but by accident that the trusted employee has lied like hell to the government and manipulated the accounting system, and it was really equivalent to forgery. And the man immediately says, “I’ve never done it before, I’ll never do it again. It was an isolated example.” And of course it was obvious that he was trying to help the government as well as himself, because he thought the government had been dumb enough to pass a rule that he’d spoken against, and after all if the government’s not going to pay attention to a bond trader at Salomon, what kind of a government can it be?

At any rate, this guy has been part of a little clique that has made, well, way over a billion dollars for Salomon in the very recent past, and it’s a little handful of people. And so there are a lot of psychological forces at work, and then you know the guy’s wife, and he’s right in front of you, and there’s human sympathy, and he’s sort of asking for your help, which encourages reciprocation, and there’s all these psychological tendencies are working, plus the fact he’s part of a group that had made a lot of money for you. At any rate, Gutfreund does not cashier the man, and of course he had done it before and he did do it again. Well now you look as though you almost wanted him to do it again. Or God knows what you look like, but it isn’t good. And that simple decision destroyed Jim Gutfreund, and it’s so easy to do.

Now let’s think it through like the bridge player, like Zeckhauser. You find an isolated example of a little old lady in the See’s Candy Company, one of our subsidiaries, getting into the till. And what does she say? “I never did it before, I’ll never do it again. This is going to ruin my life. Please help me.” And you know her children and her friends, and she’d been around 30 years and standing behind the candy counter with swollen ankles.

When you’re an old lady it isn’t that glorious a life. And you’re rich and powerful and there she is: “I never did it before, I’ll never do it again.” Well how likely is it that she never did it before? If you’re going to catch 10 embezzlements a year, what are the chances that any one of them -- applying what Tversky and Kahneman called baseline information -- will be somebody who only did it this once? And the people who have done it before and are going to do it again, what are they all going to say? Well in the history of the See’s Candy Company they always say, “I never did it before, and I’m never going to do it again.” And we cashier them. It would be evil not to, because terrible behavior spreads.

Remember...what was it? Serpico? I mean you let that stuff...you’ve got social proof, you’ve got incentive-caused bias, you’ve got a whole lot of psychological factors that will cause the evil behavior to spread, and pretty soon the whole damn...your place is rotten, the civilization is rotten. It’s not the right way to behave. And I will admit that I have...when I knew the wife and children, I have paid severance pay when I fire somebody for taking a mistress on an extended foreign trip. It’s not the adultery I mind, it’s the embezzlement. But there, I wouldn’t do it like Gutfreund did it, where they’d been cheating somebody else on my behalf. There I think you have to cashier. But if they’re just stealing from you and you get rid of them, I don’t think you need the last ounce of vengeance. In fact I don’t think you need any vengeance. I don’t think vengeance is much good.

17. Now we come to bias from over-influence by extra-vivid evidence.

Here’s one that...I’m at least $30 million poorer as I sit here giving this little talk because I once bought 300 shares of a stock and the guy called me back and said, “I’ve got 1,500 more,” and I said, “Will you hold it for 15 minutes while I think about it?” And the CEO of this company -- I have seen a lot of vivid peculiarities in a long life, but this guy set a world record; I’m talking about the CEO -- and I just mis-weighed it. The truth of the matter was the situation was foolproof. He was soon going to be dead, and I turned down the extra 1,500 shares, and it’s now cost me $30 million. And that’s life in the big city. And it wasn’t something where stock was generally available. So it’s very easy to mis- weigh the vivid evidence, and Gutfreund did that when he looked into the man’s eyes and forgave a colleague.

18. Twenty-two [he means 18]: Mental confusion caused by information not arrayed in the mind and theory structures, creating sound generalizations developed in response to the question “Why?” Also, mis-influence from information that apparently but not really answers the question “Why?” Also, failure to obtain deserved influence caused by not properly explaining why.

Well we all know people who’ve flunked, and they try and memorize and they try and spout back and they just...it doesn’t work. The brain doesn’t work that way. You’ve got to array facts on the theory structures answering the question “Why?” If you don’t do that, you just cannot handle the world.

And now we get to Feuerstein, who was the general counsel with Salomon when Gutfreund made his big error, and Feuerstein knew better. He told Gutfreund, “You have to report this as a matter of morality and prudent business judgment.” He said, “It’s probably not illegal, there’s probably no legal duty to do it, but you have to do it as a matter of prudent conduct and proper dealing with your main customer.” He said that to Gutfreund on at least two or three occasions. And he stopped. And, of course, the persuasion failed, and when Gutfreund went down, Feuerstein went with him. It ruined a considerable part of Feuerstein’s life.

Well Feuerstein, [who] was a member of the Harvard Law Review, made an elementary psychological mistake. You want to persuade somebody, you really tell them why. And what did we learn in lesson one? Incentives really matter? Vivid evidence really works? He should’ve told Gutfreund, “You’re likely to ruin your life and disgrace your family and lose your money.” And is Mozer worth this? I know both men. That would’ve worked. So Feuerstein flunked elementary psychology, this very sophisticated, brilliant lawyer. But don’t you do that. It’s not very hard to do, you know, just to remember that “Why?” is very important.

19. Other normal limitations of sensation, memory, cognition and knowledge. Well, I don’t have time for that.

20. Stress-induced mental changes, small and large, temporary and permanent.

Here, my favorite example is the great Pavlov. He had all these dogs in cages, which had all been conditioned into changed behaviors, and the great Leningrad flood came and it just went right up and the dog’s in a cage. And the dog had as much stress as you can imagine a dog ever having. And the water receded in time to save some of the dogs, and Pavlov noted that they’d had a total reversal of their conditioned personality. And being the great scientist he was, he spent the rest of his life giving nervous breakdowns to dogs, and he learned a helluva lot that I regard as very interesting.

I have never known any Freudian analyst who knew anything about the last work of Pavlov, and I’ve never met a lawyer who understood that what Pavlov found out with those dogs had anything to do with programming and de-programming and cults and so forth. I mean the amount of elementary psychological ignorance that is out there in high levels is very significant[?].

21. Then we’ve got other common mental illnesses and declines, temporary and permanent, including the tendency to lose ability through disuse.

22. And then I’ve got development and organizational confusion from say-something syndrome.

And here my favorite thing is the bee, a honeybee. And a honeybee goes out and finds the nectar and he comes back, he does a dance that communicates to the other bees where the nectar is, and they go out and get it. Well some scientist who is clever, like B.F. Skinner, decided to do an experiment. He put the nectar straight up. Way up. Well, in a natural setting, there is no nectar where they’re all straight up, and the poor honeybee doesn’t have a genetic program that is adequate to handle what he now has to communicate. And you’d think the honeybee would come back to the hive and slink into a corner, but he doesn’t. He comes into the hive and does this incoherent dance, and all my life I’ve been dealing with the human equivalent of that honeybee. [Laughter] And it’s a very important part of human organization so the noise and the reciprocation and so forth of all these people who have what I call say-something syndrome don’t really affect the decisions.

Now the time has come to ask two or three questions. This is the most important question in this whole talk:

1. What happens when these standard psychological tendencies combine? What happens when the situation, or the artful manipulation of man, causes several of these tendencies to operate on a person toward the same end at the same time?

The clear answer is the combination greatly increases power to change behavior, compared to the power of merely one tendency acting alone.

Examples are:

• Tupperware parties. Tupperware’s now made billions of dollars out of a few manipulative psychological tricks. It was so schlocky that directors of Justin Dart’s company resigned when he crammed it down his board’s throat. And he was totally right, by the way, judged by economic outcomes.

• Moonie [as in Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church] conversion methods: boy do they work. He just combines four or five of these things together.

• The system of Alcoholics Anonymous: a 50% no-drinking rate outcome when everything else fails? It’s a very clever system that uses four or five psychological systems at once toward, I might say, a very good end.

• The Milgrim experiment. It’s been widely interpreted as mere obedience, but the truth of the matter is that the experimenter who got the students to give the heavy shocks in Milgrim, he explained why. It was a false explanation. “We need this to look for scientific truth,” and so on. That greatly changed the behavior of the people. And number two, he worked them up: tiny shock, a little larger, a little larger. So commitment and consistency tendency and the contrast principle were both working in favor of this behavior. So again, it’s four different psychological tendencies.

When you get these lollapalooza effects you will almost always find four or five of these things working together.

When I was young there was a whodunit hero who always said, “Cherche la femme.” [In French, "Look for the woman."] What you should search for in life is the combination, because the combination is likely to do you in. Or, if you’re the inventor of Tupperware parties, it’s likely to make you enormously rich if you can stand shaving when you do it.

One of my favorite cases is the McDonald-Douglas airliner evacuation disaster. The government requires that airliners pass a bunch of tests, one of them is evacuation: get everybody out, I think it’s 90 seconds or something like that. It’s some short period of time. The government has rules, make it very realistic, so on and so on. You can’t select nothing but 20-year-old athletes to evacuate your airline. So McDonald-Douglas schedules one of these things in a hangar, and they make the hangar dark and the concrete floor is 25 feet down, and they’ve got these little rubber chutes, and they’ve got all these old people, and they ring the bell and they all rush out, and in the morning, when the first test is done, they create, I don’t know, 20 terrible injuries when people go off to hospitals, and of course they scheduled another one for the afternoon.

By the way they didn’t read[?] the time schedule either, in addition to causing all the injuries.

Well...so what do they do? They do it again in the afternoon. Now they create 20 more injuries and one case of a severed spinal column with permanent, unfixable paralysis. These are engineers, these are brilliant people, this is thought over through in a big bureaucracy. Again, it’s a combination of [psychological tendencies]: authorities told you to do it. He told you to make it realistic. You’ve decided to do it. You’d decided to do it twice. Incentive-caused bias. If you pass you save a lot of money. You’ve got to jump this hurdle before you can sell your new airliner. Again, three, four, five of these things work together and it turns human brains into mush. And maybe you think this doesn’t happen in picking investments? If so, you’re living in a different world than I am.

Finally, the open-outcry auction. Well the open-outcry auction is just made to turn the brain into mush: you’ve got social proof, the other guy is bidding, you get reciprocation tendency, you get deprival super-reaction syndrome, the thing is going away... I mean it just absolutely is designed to manipulate people into idiotic behavior.

Finally the institution of the board of directors of the major American company. Well, the top guy is sitting there, he’s an authority figure. He’s doing asinine things, you look around the board, nobody else is objecting, social proof, it’s okay? Reciprocation tendency, he’s raising the directors fees every year, he’s flying you around in the corporate airplane to look at interesting plants, or whatever in hell they do, and you go and you really get extreme dysfunction as a corrective decision-making body in the typical American board of directors. They only act, again the power of incentives, they only act when it gets so bad it starts making them look foolish, or threatening legal liability to them. That’s Munger’s rule. I mean there are occasional things that don’t follow Munger’s rule, but by and large the board of directors is a very ineffective corrector if the top guy is a little nuts, which, of course, frequently happens.

2. The second question: Isn’t this list of standard psychological tendencies improperly tautological compared with the system of Euclid? That is, aren’t there overlaps? And can’t some items on the list be derived from combinations of other items?

The answer to that is, plainly, yes.

3. Three: What good, in the practical world, is the thought system indicated by the list? Isn’t practical benefit prevented because these psychological tendencies are programmed into the human mind by broad evolution so we can’t get rid of them? [By] broad evolution, I mean the combination of genetic and cultural evolution, but mostly genetic.

Well the answer is the tendencies are partly good and, indeed, probably much more good than bad, otherwise they wouldn’t be there. By and large these rules of thumb, they work pretty well for man given his limited mental capacity. And that’s why they were programmed in by broad evolution. At any rate, they can’t be simply washed out automatically and they shouldn’t be. Nonetheless, the psychological thought system described is very useful in spreading wisdom and good conduct when one understands it and uses it constructively.

Here are some examples:

• One: Karl Braun’s communication practices. He designed oil refineries with spectacular skill and integrity. He had a very simple rule. Remember I said, “Why is it important?” You got fired in the Braun company. You had to have five Ws. You had to tell Who, What you wanted to do, Where and When, and you had to tell him Why. And if you wrote a communication and left out the Why you got fired, because Braun knew it’s complicated building an oil refinery. It can blow up...all kinds of things happen. And he knew that his communication system worked better if you always told him why. That’s a simple discipline, and boy does it work.

• Two: the use of simulators in pilot training. Here, again, abilities attenuate with disuse. Well the simulator is God’s gift because you can keep them fresh.

• Three: The system of Alcoholics Anonymous, that’s certainly a constructive use of somebody understanding psychological tendencies. I think they just wandered into it, as a matter of fact, so you can regard it as kind of an evolutionary outcome. But just because they’ve wandered into it doesn’t mean you can’t invent its equivalent when you need it for a good purpose.

• Four: Clinical training in medical schools: here’s a profoundly correct way of understanding psychology. The standard practice is watch one, do one, teach one. Boy does that pound in what you want pounded in. Again, the consistency and commitment tendency. And that is a profoundly correct way to teach clinical medicine.

• Five: The rules of the U.S. Constitutional Convention: totally secret, no vote until the whole vote, then just one vote on the whole Constitution. Very clever psychological rules, and if they had a different procedure, everybody would’ve been pushed into a corner by his own pronouncements and his own oratory and his own... And no recorded votes until the last one. And they got it through by a whisker with those wise rules. We wouldn’t have had the Constitution if our forefathers hadn’t been so psychologically acute. And look at the crowd we got now.

• Six: the use of granny’s rule. I love this. One of the psychologists who works for the Center gets paid a fortune running around America, and he teaches executives to manipulate themselves. Now granny’s rule is you don’t get the ice cream unless you eat your carrots. Well granny was a very wise woman. That is a very good system. And so this guy, a very eminent psychologist, he runs around the country telling executives to organize their day so they force themselves to do what’s unpleasant and important by doing that first, and then rewarding themselves with something they really like doing. He is profoundly correct.

• Seven: the Harvard Business School’s emphasis on decision trees. When I was young and foolish I used to laugh at the Harvard Business School. I said, “They’re teaching 28-year-old people that high school algebra works in real life?” We’re talking about elementary probability. But later I wised up and I realized that it was very important that they do that, and better late than never.

• Eight: the use of post-mortems at Johnson & Johnson. At most corporations if you make an acquisition and it turns out to be a disaster, all the paperwork and presentations that caused the dumb acquisition to be made are quickly forgotten. You’ve got denial, you’ve got everything in the world. You’ve got Pavlovian association tendency. Nobody even wants to even be associated with the damned thing or even mention it. At Johnson & Johnson, they make everybody revisit their old acquisitions and wade through the presentations. That is a very smart thing to do. And by the way, I do the same thing routinely.

• Nine: the great example of Charles Darwin is he avoided confirmation bias. Darwin probably changed my life because I’m a biography nut, and when I found out the way he always paid extra attention to the disconfirming evidence and all these little psychological tricks. I also found out that he wasn’t very smart by the ordinary standards of human acuity, yet there he is buried in Westminster Abbey. That’s not where I’m going, I’ll tell you. And I said, “My God, here’s a guy that, by all objective evidence, is not nearly as smart as I am and he’s in Westminster Abbey? He must have tricks I should learn.” And I started wearing little hair shirts like Darwin to try and train myself out of these subconscious psychological tendencies that cause so many errors. It didn’t work perfectly, as you can tell from listening to this talk, but it would’ve been even worse if I hadn’t done what I did. And you can know these psychological tendencies and avoid being the patsy of all the people that are trying to manipulate you to your disadvantage, like Sam Walton. Sam Walton won’t let a purchasing agent take a handkerchief from a salesman. He knows how powerful the subconscious reciprocation tendency is. That is a profoundly correct way for Sam Walton to behave.

• Ten: Then there is the Warren Buffett rule for open-outcry auctions: don’t go. We don’t go to the closed-bid auctions too because they...that’s a counter-productive way to do things ordinarily for a different reason, which Zeckhauser would understand.

4. Four: What special knowledge problems lie buried in the thought system indicated by the list?

Well one is paradox. Now we’re talking about a type of human wisdom that the more people learn about it, the more attenuated the wisdom gets. That’s an intrinsically paradoxical kind of wisdom. But we have paradox in mathematics and we don’t give up mathematics. I say damn the paradox. This stuff is wonderfully useful. And by the way, the granny’s rule, when you apply it to yourself, is sort of a paradox in a paradox. The manipulation still works even though you know you’re doing it. And I’ve seen that done by one person to another.

I drew this beautiful woman as my dinner partner a few years ago, and I’d never seen her before. Well, she’s married to prominent Angelino, and she sat down next to me and she turned her beautiful face up and she said, “Charlie,” she said, “What one word accounts for your remarkable success in life?” And I knew I was being manipulated and that she’d done this before, and I just loved it. I mean I never see this woman without a little lift in my spirits. And by the way I told her I was rational. You’ll have to judge yourself whether that’s true. I may be demonstrating some psychological tendency I hadn’t planned on demonstrating.

How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist's mind? Two views: that’s the thermodynamics model. You know, you can’t derive thermodynamics from plutonium, gravity and laws of mechanics, even though it’s a lot of little particles interacting. And here is this wonderful truth that you can sort of develop on your own, which is thermodynamics. And some economists -- and I think Milton Friedman is in this group, but I may be wrong on that -- sort of like the thermodynamics model. I think Milton Friedman, who has a Nobel prize, is probably a little wrong on that. I think the thermodynamics analogy is over-strained. I think knowledge from these different soft sciences have to be reconciled to eliminate conflict. After all, there’s nothing in thermodynamics that’s inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics and gravity, and I think that some of these economic theories are not totally consistent with other knowledge, and they have to be bent. And I think that these behavioral economics...or economists are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction.

Now my prediction is when the economists take a little psychology into account that the reconciliation will be quite endurable. And here my model is the procession of the equinoxes. The world would be simpler for a long-term climatologist if the angle of the axis of the Earth’s rotation, compared to the plane of the Euclyptic, were absolutely fixed. But it isn’t fixed. Over every 40,000 years or so there’s this little wobble, and that has pronounced long-term effects. Well in many cases what psychology is going to add is just a little wobble, and it will be endurable. Here I quote another hero of mine, which of course is Einstein, where he said, “The Lord is subtle, but not malicious.” And I don’t think it’s going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what’s right in psychology.

5. Fifth: The final question is: If the thought system indicated by this list of psychological tendencies has great value not recognized and employed, what should the educational system do about it?

I am not going to answer that one now. I like leaving a little mystery.

Have I used up all the time so there’s no time for questions?

Moderator: I think that what we’re going to do is we’re going to borrow a little bit of time from the end of the day questions, and we’re going to move it and allocate it to Charles Munger, if that's acceptable to everybody.

Munger: By the way, the dean of the Stanford Law School is here today, Paul Brest, and he is trying to create a course at the Stanford Law School that tries to work stuff similar to this into worldly wisdom for lawyers, which I regard as a profoundly good idea, and he wrote an article about it, and you’ll be given a copy along with Cialdini’s book. [The article Mr. Munger is referring to is called "On Teaching Professional Judgment" by Paul Brest and Linda Krieger. It was published in the July 1994 edition of the Washington Law Review.] Questions?

Audience Member #1: Will we be able to get a copy of that list of 24 [standard causes of human misjudgment]?

Munger: Yes. I presumed there would be one curious man [laughter], and I have it and I’ll put it over there on the table, but don’t take more than one, because I didn’t anticipate such a big crowd. And if we run short, I’m sure the Center is up to making other copies.

Audience Member #2: If I had listened to this talk I might have thought that Charles Munger was a psychology professor operating in a business school. Every once in a while a micro-issue -- you told us how you would’ve deal with one of these issues, for example with the unfortunate lady See’s -- but you didn’t tell us how these tendencies affected you and what’s probably the most important, or one of the most important elements of your success, which was deciding where to invest your money. And I’m wondering if you might relate some of these principles to some of your past decisions that way.

Munger: Well of course an investment decision in the common stock of a company frequently involves a whole lot of factors interacting. Usually, of course, there’s one big, simple model, and a lot of those models are microeconomic. And I have a little list of -- it wouldn’t be nearly 24, of those -- but I don’t have time for that one. And I don’t have too much interest in teaching other people how to get rich. And that isn’t because I fear the competition or anything like that -- Warren has always been very open about what he’s learned, and I share that ethos. My personal behavior model is Lord Keynes: I wanted to get rich so I could be independent, and so I could do other things like give talks on the intersection of psychology and economics. I didn’t want to turn it into a total obsession.

Audience Member #3: Out of those 24, could you tell us the one rule that’s most important?

Munger: I would say the one thing that causes the most trouble is when you combine a bunch of these together, you get this lollapalooza effect. And again, if you read the psychology textbooks, they don’t discuss how these things combine, at least not very much. Do they multiply? Do they add? How does it work? You’d think it’d be just an automatic subject for research, but it doesn’t seem to turn the psychology establishment on. I think this is a man from Mars approach to psychology.

I just reached in and took what I thought I had to have. That is a different set of incentives from rising in an economic establishment where the rewards system, again, the reinforcement, comes from being a truffle hound. That’s what Jacob Viner, the great economist called it: the truffle hound -- an animal so bred and trained for one narrow purpose that he wasn’t much good at anything else, and that is the reward system in a lot of academic departments. It is not necessarily for the good. It may be fine if you want new drugs or something. You want people stunted in a lot of different directions so they can grow in one narrow direction, but I don’t think it’s good teaching psychology to the masses. In fact, I think it’s terrible.

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