not to be insane or anything but it really pisses me off when people say whit killed arei 💀 it is objectively never that serious but everytime i see someone come up with a theory or whatever it just shows such a fundamental misunderstanding of his character and not that I'm a veteran or anything but i just wanted to right some wrongs.

whit is not a killer. he exists in a sphere of kindness and prosperity and nothing else. people only think he's suspicious because we've been dispositioned to think every 'nice' character in danganronpa is secretly evil. whit does not have a facade, he's truly and 100% a good person.

looking back at some of his character defining moments it's so striking that he was one of the only people to give his kindness to the two people who were at the time not very nice people themselves. its striking that he doesn't reveal charles' secret in the first trial until he feels as though charles is comfortable enough for everyone to know and how he does the same thing with david in the second trial because it simply isn't his secret to tell.

he extends kindness to those who probably don't deserve it and actively is willing to put aside his own personal grievances in order to comfort someone when they’re in need. like, it's insane to me that you can look at all of that say "yep 💀 that guys definitely the killer!" HES A GOOD PERSON like literally what more do i have to say.

The Health unto Death – If such a thing as a psycho-analysis of today’s prototypical culture were possible; if the absolute predominance of the economy did not beggar all attempts at explaining conditions by the psychic life of their victims; and if the psychoanalysts had not long since sworn allegiance to those conditions – such an investigation would needs show the sickness proper to the time to consist precisely in normality. The libidinal achievements demanded of an individual behaving as healthy in body and mind, are such as can be performed only at the cost of the profoundest mutilation, of internalized castration in extroverts, beside which the old renunciation of identification with the father is the child’s play as which it was first rehearsed. The regular guy, the popular girl, have to repress not only their desires and insights, but even the symptoms that in bourgeois times resulted from repression. Just as the old injustice is not changed by a lavish display of light, air and hygiene, but is in fact concealed by the gleaming transparency of rationalized big business, the inner health of our time has been secured by blocking flight into illness without in the slightest altering its aetiology. The dark closets have been abolished as a troublesome waste of space, and incorporated in the bathroom. What psycho-analysis suspected, before it became itself a part of hygiene, has been confirmed. The brightest rooms are the secret domain of faeces. The verses: ‘Wretchedness remains. When all is said, / It cannot be uprooted, live or dead. / So it is made invisible instead’, are still more true of the psychic economy than of the sphere where abundance of goods may temporarily obscure constantly increasing material inequalities. No science has yet explored the inferno in which were forged the deformations that later emerge to daylight as cheerfulness, openness, sociability, successful adaptation to the inevitable, an equable, practical frame of mind. There is reason to suppose that these characteristics are laid down at even earlier phases of childhood development than are neuroses: if the latter result from a conflict in which instinct is defeated, the former condition, as normal as the damaged society it resembles, stems from what might be called a prehistoric surgical intervention, which incapacitates the opposing forces before they have come to grips with each other, so that the subsequent absence of conflicts reflects a predetermined outcome, the a priori triumph of collective authority, not a cure effected by knowledge. Unruffled calm, already a prerequisite for applicants receiving highly-paid posts, is an image of the stifled silence that the employers of the personnel manager only later impose politically. The only objective way of diagnosing the sickness of the healthy is by the incongruity between their rational existence and the possible course their lives might be given by reason. All the same, the traces of illness give them away: their skin seems covered by a rash printed in regular patterns, like a camouflage of the inorganic. The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating. Scarcely ever does an unhappily furrowed brow, bearing witness to terrible and long-forgotten exertions, or a moment of pathic stupidity disrupting smooth logic, or an awkward gesture, embarrassingly preserve a trace of vanished life. For socially ordained sacrifice is indeed so universal as to be manifest only in society as a whole, and not in the individual. Society has, as it were, assumed the sickness of all individuals, and in it, in the pent-up lunacy of Fascist acts and all their innumerable precursors and mediators, the subjective fate buried deep in the individual is integrated with its visible objective counterpart. And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.

This side of the pleasure principle . – The repressive traits in Freud have nothing to do with the want of human warmth that businesslike revisionists point to in the strict theory of sexuality. Professional warmth, for the sake of profit, fabricates closeness and immediacy where people are worlds apart. It deceives its victim by affirming in his weakness the way of the world which made him so, and it wrongs him in the degree that it deviates from truth. If Freud was deficient in such human sympathy, he would in this at least be in the company of the critics of political economy, which is better than that of Tagore or Werfel. 1 The fatality was rather that, in the teeth of bourgeois ideology, he tracked down conscious actions materialistically to their unconscious instinctual basis, but at the same time concurred with the bourgeois contempt of instinct which is itself a product of precisely the rationalizations that he dismantled. He explicitly aligns himself, in the words of the Introductory Lectures , with ‘the general evaluation … which places social goals higher than the fundamentally selfish sexual ones’. As a specialist in psychology, he takes over the antithesis of social and egoistic, statically, without testing it. He no more discerns in it the work of repressive society than the trace of the disastrous mechanisms that he has himself described. Or rather, he vacillates, devoid of theory and swaying with prejudice, between negating the renunciation of instinct as repression contrary to reality, and applauding it as sublimation beneficial to culture. In this contradiction something of the Janus-character of culture exists objectively, and no amount of praise for healthy sensuality can wish it away. In Freud, however, it leads to a devaluation of the critical standard that decides the goal of analysis. Freud’s unenlightened enlightenment plays into the hands of bourgeois disillusion. As a late opponent of hypocrisy, he stands ambivalently between desire for the open emancipation of the oppressed, and apology for open oppression. Reason is for him a mere superstructure, not – as official philosophy maintains – on account of his psychologism, which has penetrated deeply enough into the historical moment of truth, but rather because he rejects the end, remote to meaning, impervious to reason, which alone could prove the means, reason, to be reasonable: pleasure. Once this has been disparagingly consigned to the repertoire of tricks for preserving the species, and so itself exposed as a cunning form of reason, without consideration of that moment in pleasure which transcends subservience to nature, ratio is degraded to rationalization. Truth is abandoned to relativity and people to power. He alone who could situate utopia in blind somatic pleasure, which, satisfying the ultimate intention, is intentionless, has a stable and valid idea of truth. In Freud’s work, however, the dual hostility towards mind and pleasure, whose common root psycho-analysis has given us the means for discovering, is unintentionally reproduced. The place in the Future of an Illusion where, with the worthless wisdom of a hard-boiled old gentleman, he quotes the commercial-traveller’s dictum about leaving heaven to the angels and the sparrows, 1 should be set beside the passage in the Lectures where he damns in pious horror the perverse practices of pleasure-loving society. Those who feel equal revulsion for pleasure and paradise are indeed best suited to serve as objects: the empty, mechanized quality observable in so many who have undergone successful analysis is to be entered to the account not only of their illness but also of their cure, which dislocates what it liberates. The therapeutically much-lauded transference, the breaking of which is not for nothing the crux of analytic treatment, the artificially contrived situation where the subject performs, voluntarily and calamitously, the annulment of the self which was once brought about involuntarily and beneficially by erotic self-abandonment, is already the pattern of the reflex-dominated, follow-my-leader behaviour which liquidates, together with all intellect, the analysts who have betrayed it.

Invitation to the dance . – Psycho-analysis prides itself on restoring the capacity for pleasure, which is impaired by neurotic illness. As if the mere concept of a capacity for pleasure did not suffice gravely to devalue such a thing, if it exists. As if a happiness gained through speculation on happiness were not the opposite, a further enroachment of institutionally planned behaviour-patterns on the ever-diminishing sphere of experience. What a state the dominant consciousness must have reached, when the resolute proclamation of compulsive extravagance and champagne jollity, formerly reserved to attachés in Hungarian operettas, is elevated in deadly earnest to a maxim of right living. Prescribed happiness looks exactly what it is; to have a part in it, the neurotic thus made happy must forfeit the last vestige of reason left to him by repression and regression, and to oblige the analyst, display indiscriminate enthusiasm for the trashy film, the expensive but bad meal in the French restaurant, the serious drink and the love-making taken like medicine as ‘sex’. Schiller’s dictum that ‘Life’s good, in spite of all’, papier-mâché from the start, has become idiocy now that it is blown into the same trumpet as omnipresent advertising, with psychoanalysis, despite its better possibilities, adding its fuel to the flames. As people have altogether too few inhibitions and not too many, without being a whit the healthier for it, a cathartic method with a standard other than successful adaptation and economic success would have to aim at bringing people to a consciousness of unhappiness both general and – inseparable from it – personal, and at depriving them of the illusory gratifications by which the abominable order keeps a second hold on life inside them, as if it did not already have them firmly enough in its power from outside. Only when sated with false pleasure, disgusted with the goods offered, dimly aware of the inadequacy of happiness even when it is that – to say nothing of cases where it is bought by abandoning allegedly morbid resistance to its positive surrogate – can men gain an idea of what experience might be. The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment- industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain. That is the model of an unhampered capacity for happiness. He who calls it by its name will be told gloatingly by psycho-analysis that it is just his Oedipus complex.

Ego is Id . – A connection is commonly drawn between the development of psychology and the rise of the bourgeois individual, both in Antiquity and since the Renaissance. This ought not to obscure the contrary tendency also common to psychology and the bourgeois class, and which today has developed to the point of excluding all others: the suppression and dissolution of the very individual in whose service knowledge was related back to its subject. If all psychology since that of Protagoras has elevated man by conceiving him as the measure of all things, it has thereby also treated him from the first as an object, as material for analysis, and transferred to him, once he was included among them, the nullity of things. The denial of objective truth by recourse to the subject implies the negation of the latter: no measure remains for the measure of all things; lapsing into contingency, he becomes untruth. But this points back to the real life-process of society. The principle of human domination, in becoming absolute, has turned its point against man as the absolute object, and psychology has collaborated in sharpening that point. The self, its guiding idea and its a priori object, has always, under its scrutiny, been rendered at the same time non-existent. In appealing to the fact that in an exchange society the subject was not one, but in fact a social object, psychology provided society with weapons for ensuring that this was and remained the case. The dissection of man into his faculties is a projection of the division of labour onto its pretended subjects, inseparable from the interest in deploying and manipulating them to greater advantage. Psycho-technics is not merely a form of psychology’s decay, but is inherent in its principle. Hume, whose work bears witness in every sentence to his real humanism, yet who dismisses the self as a prejudice, expresses in this contradiction the nature of psychology as such. In this he even has truth on his side, for that which posits itself as ‘I’ is indeed mere prejudice, an ideological hypostasization of the abstract centres of domination, criticism of which demands the removal of the ideology of ‘personality’. But its removal also makes the residue all the easier to dominate. This is flagrantly apparent in psycho-analysis. It incorporates personality as a lie needed for living, as the supreme rationalization holding together the innumerable rationalizations by which the individual achieves his instinctual renunciation, and accommodates himself to the reality principle. But precisely in demonstrating this, it confirms man’s non-being. Alienating him from himself, denouncing his autonomy with his unity, psycho-analysis subjugates him totally to the mechanism of rationalization, of adaptation. The ego’s unflinching self-criticism gives way to the demand that the ego of the other capitulate. The psycho-analyst’s wisdom finally becomes what the Fascist unconscious of the horror magazines takes it for: a technique by which one particular racket among others binds suffering and helpless people irrevocably to itself, in order to command and exploit them. Suggestion and hypnosis, rejected by psycho-analysis as apocryphal, the charlatan magician masquerading before a fairground booth, reappear within its grandiose system as the silent film does in the Hollywood epic. What was formerly help through greater knowledge has become the humiliation of others by dogmatic privilege. All that remains of the criticism of bourgeois consciousness is the shrug with which doctors have always signalled their secret complicity with death. – In psychology, in the bottomless fraud of mere inwardness, which is not by accident concerned with the ‘properties’ of men, is reflected what bourgeois society has practised for all time with outward property. The latter, as a result of social exchange, has been increased, but with a proviso dimly present to every bourgeois. The individual has been, as it were, merely invested with property by the class, and those in control are ready to take it back as soon as universalization of property seems likely to endanger its principle, which is precisely that of withholding. Psychology repeats in the case of properties what was done to property. It expropriates the individual by allocating him its happiness.

Always speak of it, never think of it . – Now that depth-psychology, with the help of films, soap operas and Horney, has delved into the deepest recesses, people’s last possibility of experiencing themselves has been cut off by organized culture. Ready-made enlightenment turns not only spontaneous reflection but also analytical insights – whose power equals the energy and suffering that it cost to gain them – into mass-produced articles, and the painful secrets of the individual history, which the orthodox method is already inclined to reduce to formulae, into commonplace conventions. Dispelling rationalizations becomes itself rationalization. Instead of working to gain self-awareness, the initiates become adept at subsuming all instinctual conflicts under such concepts as inferiority complex, mother-fixation, extroversion and introversion, to which they are in reality inaccessible. Terror before the abyss of the self is removed by the consciousness of being concerned with nothing so very different from arthritis or sinus trouble. Thus conflicts lose their menace. They are accepted, but by no means cured, being merely fitted as an unavoidable component into the surface of standardized life. At the same time they are absorbed, as a general evil, by the mechanism directly identifying the individual with social authority, which has long since encompassed all supposedly normal modes of behaviour. Catharsis, unsure of success in any case, is supplanted by pleasure at being, in one’s own weakness, a specimen of the majority; and rather than gaining, like inmates of a sanatorium in former days, the prestige of an interesting pathological case, one proves on the strength of one’s very defects that one belongs, thereby transferring to oneself the power and vastness of the collective. Narcissism, deprived of its libidinal object by the decay of the self, is replaced by the masochistic satisfaction of no longer being a self, and the rising generation guards few of its goods so jealously as its selflessness, its communal and lasting possession. The realm of reification and standardization is thus extended to include its ultimate contradiction, the ostensibly abnormal and chaotic. The incommensurable is. made, precisely as such, commensurable, and the individual is now scarcely capable of any impulse that he could not classify as an example of this or that publicly recognized constellation. However, this outwardly assumed identification, accomplished, as it were, beyond one’s own dynamic, finally abolishes not only genuine consciousness of the impulse but the impulse itself. The latter becomes the reflex of stereotyped atoms to stereotyped stimuli, switched on or off at will. Moreover, psycho-analysis itself is castrated by its conventionalization: sexual motives, partly disavowed and partly approved, are made totally harmless but also totally insignificant. With the fear they instil vanishes the joy they might procure. Thus psycho-analysis falls victim to the very replacement of the appropriate super-ego by a stubbornly adopted, unrelated, external one, that it taught us itself to understand. The last grandly-conceived theorem of bourgeois self-criticism has become a means of making bourgeois self-alienation, in its final phase, absolute, and of rendering ineffectual the lingering awareness of the ancient wound, in which lies hope of a better future.

...Freedom of thought . – The displacement of philosophy by science has led, as we know, to a separation of the two elements whose unity, according to Hegel, constitutes the life of philosophy: reflection and speculation. The land of truth is handed over in disillusion to reflection, and speculation is tolerated ungraciously within it merely for the purpose of formulating hypotheses, which must be conceived outside working hours and yield results as quickly as possible. To believe, however, that the speculative realm has been preserved unscathed in its extra-scientific form, left in peace by the bustle of universal statistics, would be to err grievously. First, severance from reflection costs speculation itself dear enough. It is either degraded to a docile echo of traditional philosophical schemes, or, in its aloofness from blinded facts, perverted to the non-committal chatter of a private Weltanschauung . Not satisfied with this, however, science assimilates speculation to its own operations. Among the public functions of psycho-analysis, this is not the least. Its medium is free association. The way into the patient’s unconscious is laid open by persuading him to forgo the responsibility of reflection, and the formation of analytic theory follows the same track, whether it allows its findings to be traced by the progress and the falterings of these associations, or whether the analysts – and I mean precisely the most gifted of them, like Groddeck 2 – trust to their own associations. We are presented on the couch with a relaxed performance of what was once enacted, with the utmost exertion of thought, by Schelling and Hegel on the lecturer’s podium: the deciphering of the phenomenon. But this drop in tension affects the quality of the thought: the difference is hardly less than that between the philosophy of revelation 1 and the random gossip of a mother-in-law. The same movement of mind which was once to elevate its ‘material’ to a concept, is itself reduced to mere material for conceptual ordering. The ideas one has are just good enough to allow experts to decide whether their originator is a compulsive character, an oral type, or a hysteric. Thanks to the diminished responsibility that lies in its severance from reflection, from rational control, speculation is itself handed over as an object to science, whose subjectivity is extinguished with it. Thought, in allowing itself to be reminded of its unconscious origins by the administrative structure of analysis, forgets to be thought. From true judgement it becomes neutral stuff. Instead of mastering itself by performing the task of conceptualization, it entrusts itself impotently to processing by the doctor, who in any case knows everything beforehand. Thus speculation is definitively crushed, becoming itself a fact to be included in one of the departments of classification as proof that nothing changes.

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Opinion: Republicans unleashed a deadly vaccine skepticism. Can they now contain it?

Bad news is leading to at least a bit of good news: The surge of the coronavirus delta variant seems to have lit a fire under many Republican politicians. As the virus spreads largely in GOP regions with low vaccination rates, leaders of a party where anti-vax sentiment has run rampant have started sounding the alarm: Not getting vaccinated really can kill you.

One of the most unequivocal statements came from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “These shots need to get in everybody’s arm as rapidly as possible,” he said last week, adding a swipe at those pushing falsehoods about vaccines, who happen to include many in his own party:

“I want to encourage everybody . . . to ignore all of these other voices that are giving demonstrably bad advice.”

As Republican pollster Whit Ayres notes, McConnell, who endured polio as a child, has always embraced the power of vaccination. More surprising was a vaccine plug from Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a longtime baiter of federal authorities whose reelection campaign is selling merchandise mocking Anthony S. Fauci, the White House health adviser.

Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic

Yes, even the man peddling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” T-shirts seems to have noticed that over the past two weeks, 20 percent of all the nation’s new covid-19 cases were in his state.

“If you look at the people that are being admitted to hospitals, over 95 percent of them are either not fully vaccinated or not vaccinated at all,” DeSantis said Wednesday. “And so these vaccines are saving lives. They are reducing mortality.”

The pro-vaccine message is even reaching the heart of Trump country. “Folks [are] supposed to have common sense,” Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey said on Thursday. “But it’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down.” You might say the scolding was overdue: Ivey leads the country’s least vaccinated state.

We should cheer all Republicans joining the fight against the anti-vaccine undertow in their party — and be especially appreciative of Republican officials who have been there from the beginning.

Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus coordinator, has been resolute in trying to keep politics out of vaccination efforts, and spoke in an interview of his weekly calls with governors of both parties.

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine are among those Republicans who have been especially passionate about getting the job done, Zients said. Republican governors of Democratic-leaning states — Phil Scott in Vermont, Charlie Baker in Massachusetts, Larry Hogan of Maryland and Chris Sununu of New Hampshire — can be proud that their states are in the top 10 in vaccination rates.

Infuriatingly, there are still Republicans — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin among them — who continue to reinforce right-wing vaccine skepticism. The doubts they and others are spreading on Fox News (even if some in Fox News’s ranks, including Sean Hannity, seem to be repenting) and on other pro-Trump outlets have created a toxic vaccine gap.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that as of July 23, the 20 states with the highest vaccination rates (counting the District of Columbia as a state) all voted for President Biden.

A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of CDC data found that as of July 6, the average vaccination rate in counties that voted for Biden was 46.7 percent. In counties that voted for Donald Trump, the vaccination rate was 35 percent.

This, sadly, should be no surprise. An Associated Press-NORC poll released Friday found that among Democrats, only 18 percent were “not very” or “not at all” confident in the effectiveness of vaccines; among Republicans, 42 percent expressed such doubts.

Three states — Florida, Texas and Missouri — accounted for 40 percent of new covid cases last week.

It’s the new political geography of sickness and death.

Ayres, the Republican pollster, said the growing willingness of leaders of his party to speak up for vaccinations is a response to dangers that can no longer be ignored. “The surge is in the red states and the red counties,” he said in an interview, “and there’s a real concern about protecting the health of people who are not yet vaccinated, many of whom are our people.”

Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux pointed to the unpopularity of the anti-vaccine position generally, and especially among “red state business communities” who fear new lockdowns.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if GOP pols are hearing from business leaders: Knock it off with the anti-vax nonsense,” Molyneux said. The National Football League’s tough stand on vaccination is a high-profile example of a business alarmed about the impact of a resurgent virus on its operations.

We can be thankful that the facts are starting to matter. In recent weeks, Zients notes, the five states with the highest rates of covid cases — Florida, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri and Nevada — had a higher rate of new vaccinations than the national average.

So please, Republican politicians, keep shouting from the rooftops about the imperative of getting vaccinated. But you also need to take another virus seriously. The spread of extremism in your party is deadly — to our health and to our democracy.

Desperate but Scared to Sleep

Current song I’m listening to: ‘Hyperparadise’ by Flume

I’m writing this at 4 in the fucking morning. Jesus Christ. Sleeping pattern is quite evidently, catastrophically fucked. I didn’t write yesterday so maybe this is my subconscious punishing me for being lazy.

Anyway.

As you can probably gather from today’s title, I’m rather impatient to fall asleep, I've been trying for the past 3 hours; counting sheep, putting sounds from nature on, trying to recount that “you'll get to sleep in 3 minutes with this easy breathing technique GAURANTEED” advert I once saw on Facebook. Nothing. Fully awake. Fully and painfully aware that I’m to be up at half 7 to get ready for my 9am lecture. Delightful.

I’m not sure what's keeping me up, part of me thinks its due to just watching too much Netflix but that’s never been an issue beforehand. Though part of me thinks that part of me is afraid to fall asleep, I'll explain.

So I wrote maybe 2 weeks ago that I’d been getting pretty vivid nightmares, well it stopped for awhile, then maybe 4 days ago they came back, far worse than before. I’m literally waking up 4 times a night shaking, drenched in sweat, convinced for 30 seconds that whatever was in my dream is in the room with me. Then I slowly snap back to reality and that intense rush of fear is just replaced by steady stream of anxiety, ebbing at my mind and squeezing my heart, making it beat so fast it feels like it will burst. It’s not pleasant to say the least.

What’s frustrating is I’m not even sure what’s causing them. Is it the medication? I’ve been on them since early January and they didn't happen with the initial side effects, so why now? I don’t believe in dream analysis, it’s a bullshit Freudian esque science, I mean familiar faces pop up, usually in horrific circumstances but I don’t think it means anything per sae.

I’m kind of at whit's end at this point, I just want some fucking uninterrupted sleep that doesn't involve me waking up 5 times a night shaking like a leaf. Urgh. Anyone deal with this sort of thing before? Or manage to overcome it rather? If so please let me know.

Since I’m clearly going to be awake for awhile I may as well keep typing. Lets see, what have I done the past few days, so I mentioned my friends gig I went to the other night before I believe, met a friend for coffee today – technically yesterday but I’m still awake so do one – at this really chill coffee place called ‘Brew’. Who knew Paisley has cute coffee places, I give it a month before some tracksuit wearing yob tries to burn it down.

Honestly even if I manage to make it to this class at 9am I’m so dreading it, I’m going to look like Death woken up. I suppose I could try dunking my head in a basin of freezing water, shock myself awake, so to speak.

I’m pretty sure this actually my longest entry I’ve posted yet. Damn. I should do this more often.

However I have little else of value or really I just can’t think of anything, so I'll probably try one more time to sleep, in failing that, lie down on the road and pretend to be a speed bump.

Until next time,

Cheers

Short Story

Angus gave a grunt as he pushed up from his squat, lifting the caber from its holding post. The long timber wobbled slightly in his hands before he steadied it.  He took a few running steps before thrusting up and out with all of his strength. He watched as the long, thin timber flew through the air, the top end slowly turning to the earth, and the bottom end, the one that was just in his hands, slowly arcing upwards. The timber came crashing down to the earth in a line that was perfectly perpendicular to his front. Angus let loose a shout and threw his fists up in the air as the crowd gave out a volley of cheers.

He had received a perfect score, which was a damn hard thing to do. He was confident that, however close the others might come, they wouldn’t pull a perfect score. He watched lazily as his own brothers and sisters took their attempts, cheering loudly as the two youngest of his siblings managed to merely get a lighter caber up in the air.

Then it was time for the MacKenzie clan to have their turns. Angus watched with baited breath as Fergus repeated the steps Angus had earlier taken. As the caber fell to the earth, the judge ran over to the end of it to measure. It was so close to being perfect that even Angus wasn’t sure if it was, or if it was slightly off. After a very tense moment in which the entire crowd was silent, the judge declared a score that was a fraction under perfect. The event wasn’t over, but Angus knew he had won. Fergus’ siblings wouldn’t be able to throw nearly as well as Fergus or Angus. They did come close, though. Gie ti puckle years, thought Angus, an' they’ll be scorin' perfects reit up thaur wi' me an' Fergus. Weel, almost Fergus, he finished with a slight sneer from the voice in his head.

Angus walked over towards Fergus to congratulate him on a job well done, but when he offered his congratulations, he was met with a sneer from Fergus. “Sure, ye pretend tae congratulate, but Ah ken ye an' yer kin'. Internally, yoo’re gloatin', ye conceited crease.” Angus decided not to afford Fergus a response, and instead walked away, despite Fergus calling to his back, “Nae comeback? Runnin' awa' frae a fair barnie, ye yellow-bellied coward?”

At being called a coward, Angus froze. He could defend his name, and fight Fergus, but it would ruin the fun, light-hearted air of the games. But on the other hand, if he didn’t defend his name, he would have to live with the shame of being called a coward until he next met Fergus and had a chance to redeem himself.  He turned around and walked back toward Fergus menacingly. He stopped very close to Fergus, and muttered something in his ear that only Fergus could hear, but it must have been terrifying. The look on Fergus’s face changed from one of sneering contempt to absolute fear. As Angus walked away, he smiled satisfactorily. He had settled his score with Fergus, defended his name, and all without ruining the atmosphere of the games.

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Out on the hunting grounds, Gavenia and Iver stared at each other through the silent underbrush. They were crouched low, hiding from unsuspecting prey. Gavenia took a quick analysis of her surroundings, and spotted a large deer about twenty meters off. She silently withdrew an arrow from her quiver, and quickly notched it onto her bow. She drew back on the bow string, aimed at the deer, and let loose the arrow. She watched, pleased with herself, as the deer staggered then fell to the ground, the arrow straight through its eye.

Iver looked at Gavenia, slack-jawed. He was the best archer in his clan, and even he couldn’t shoot like that. “How'd ye dae 'at?” he asked in astonishment.

“Practice. Lots an' lots ay practice,” Gavenia responded. Then slipped her bow over her shoulder and started towards the dead deer.

“That's a beest ay a deer,” commented Iver. “Woods ye loch me tae help ye brin' it back?”

“Nae! Yoo'll try tae claeem it as yer ain kill!”

“Ah woods ne'er dae sic' a hin'!” he protested angrily, but in vain. Gavenia was already at the deer, and preparing to hoist it onto her shoulders. She tied the front and back legs together, and dropped into a squat. She hoisted the deer over her head and let it rest on her shoulders. With a grunt, she pushed up from her squat, holding onto the front and back legs of the deer to stabilize it on top of her.

She began the five kilometer trek back to the main area of the games, where she could claim the prize for her deer, and drop it off to be cooked for dinner that night. It was certainly large enough to feed both clans.

As she walked back into the clearing, there were many cheers from her fellow clan-mates, and a polite smattering of applause from the opposing clan. She was the first one back into the clearing, and it was apparent to even the crowd that the deer she carried over her shoulders was quite huge.

Gavenia walked towards the giant scale over towards the edge of the clearing, close to the outdoor kitchen. Once she had received the all clear from the judge manning the scale, she placed the deer on the scale. She watched with baited breath as the number on the scale slowly climbed: 25, 50, 75, 100 kilos. At 125 kilos the numbers climbed even slower: 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131 kilos, and it finally stopped between 131 and 132 kilos at 131.542 kilos. Gavenia gave a low whistle as the MacLeod clan erupted with noise. 131.542 was quite a hefty weight for a deer, placed at the highest end of the spectrum.

Gavenia felt a heavy hand clamp lightly onto her shoulder as a voice whispered in her ear, “Guid job, sister.” She immediately recognized the voice of one her older brothers, Kai.

“Cheers, Kai,” she responded quietly.  She let her older brother scoop up the deer and carry it over to the outdoor kitchen, following slightly behind him.

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That night at the feast, despite having a good afternoon and evening at the games, the atmosphere was tense. Angus and Fergus were at the heads of the table, glowering at each other. The rest of the MacLeod clan lined the side of the table to Angus’s right, Fergus’s left, and the MacKenzie clan sat opposite. There were grumblings and mumbles down both sides of the table, insults being fired across the table at members of the opposing clan.

Suddenly, Fergus shouted down the table, “Angus! Ur ye gonnae cut th' damn roest, ur am Ah gonnae hae tae come doon thaur an' dae it myself coz ye cannae gie yer fat crease it ay th' chair?!”

“If a' fowk woods whieest doon fur a moment, Ah woods loove tae bless an' 'en serve th' scran,” Angus called over the low din back towards Fergus with a slight glare. As a hush fell over the table, Angus said quietly with his head bowed, “We caa upon th' gods tae bless uir scran, an' tae protect an' provide honoor tae baith th' MacKenzie an' MacLeod clan.” He picked up the carving knives, and started slicing into the deer roast, juices and blood running down the sides of the roast. He put a few slices of meat on each plate and handed them over to Hamish, who passed them down until the first one reached Fergus. Once everyone in the MacKenzie clan had a plate, he started handing the plates over to Kai, who passed them down until they reached Malmuira.

After Angus had handed Kai his plate, and was getting ready to prepare his own, Fergus took a bite out of his meat, which was a complete and utter insult and dishonoring of both Angus and Gavenia. Being the procurer of the roast, Gavenia had the right to the first bite, and as the eldest of the winning clan, Angus had similar rights. Both sides of the table fell into an immediate and shocked silence. Fergus said nothing, but he didn’t have to. The look on his face was enough. Angus gave a low, deep growl as a warning to Fergus, accompanied by the question, “Whit th' heel dae ye hink yoo're daein?” but otherwise did nothing in his or Gavenia’s defense.

At seeing that his older brother was practically refusing to defend himself and his older sister, Oidache jumped up from his seat and lunged at Fergus with an ear-splitting screech. Fergus let him get a couple of hits in before merely throwing him aside with a mutter of “pipsqueak,” nearly knocking him unconscious.

At this point, bedlam broke loose all around the table. Food went flying as people lunged across the table to get at each other. Darach was the first of the MacLeods to get his hands on Fergus, and Fergus had a much harder time getting away from him then he did with Oidache. “Hoo daur ye,” Darach grunted as he grappled with Fergus. “Hoo daur ye disgrace th' nam ay uir clan, ye rude, fool-faced monster.”

Hamish jumped at Kai as Raoghnailt pushed away from the table, preferring not to fight. Kai thrust Hamish aside, and ran around the end of the table where Fergus had been sitting.  He sprinted down the MacKenzie side of the table until he came upon Iver. He threw himself on top of Iver, and brought him crashing to the ground. He pushed up and started towards Fergus, but Iver grabbed him around the ankles and brought him down to the earth. “Nae sae fast,” he grunted, belabored with the effort of wrestling with Kai, who remained fairly quiet.  

Also on the MacKenzie side of the table was Forbia, taking on both Tavia and Teva. There were many yelps and light screams from their brawl as hair was pulled and nails were scratched across faces, as well as fists thrown into each other.

Malmuira, who noticed Raoghnailt trying to sneak away from the fray, ran after her and tackled her to the ground. “Ye wimpy coward,” she muttered in her ear as she rolled on top of her, easily subduing Raoghnailt.

Ailis then jumped over the table towards Kenzie, screaming incomprehensible words, and they rolled off to the side, each holding their own. Immediately after Ailis cleared the table, Eirica lunged for Balfour. He was caught slightly off guard, but he quickly recovered and managed to evade her until he was a little ways away from the table, with Eirica calling after him, “Ye afraid tae barnie a lassie?” Balfour turned around to face her, and shouted to her fast approaching figure,

“Hoo daur ye accuse me ay fear! Aam nae afraid ay fightin' a lassie!”

Gavenia jumped at Calder, grabbing him around the shoulders. The force from her impact threw him backwards, and he fell on his back with a gasp of surprise, feet up in the air as he was still somewhat in his chair. “Ye huir!” he shouted at her as he struggled between her and his chair.

After his younger siblings had had their go at Fergus, Angus sprinted down the side of the table, weaving around pairs of fighting people. When he got to Fergus, he lunged forward, wrapping his arms around Fergus’s waist with a great, incoherent shout. The two slammed into the ground, and Angus pulled his hands from underneath Fergus and started pummeling him with his fists, breaking Fergus’s nose, knocking loose a couple of teeth, and giving him a black eye. Angus gave one final punch to Fergus’s temple, and knocked him unconscious. He rose, and with a roar, settled the brawling clans.