#Cosmic vibes phone cover

[lunarmystique2024]

Phone Case - Glowing Galaxy Cosmic Art Tough Case

Vibrant cosmic art phone case with a glowing galaxy design, providing a unique and eye-catching look. Perfect for those who love space, stars, and cosmic vibes. Ideal for tech-savvy individuals who want to protect their phone with style. Relevant for birthdays, Christmas, or as a thoughtful gift for astronomy enthusiasts.

Product features

- 3D wrap with full ink density

- UV protected for outdoor durability

- Impact resistant materials for shock absorption

- Custom polycarbonate and TPU construction

- Dual layer case for extra

Get it from Here

[14thcommander]

cosmic love || hange zoe x reader

cw: afab!reader (hange calls you princess though), nb!hange, domestic vibes, established relationship, dirty talk, shameless hange, oral sex, implied squirting, sub/dom undertones, top!hange, bottom!reader

“What are you thinking about?”

Hange’s voice is sweet, despite the intrusion. Careless, despite their nurturing intentions. 

You were mindlessly scrolling through social media – being met with posts about a former classmate traveling abroad, your cousin getting engaged, and an ad for make-up you probably don’t need, but desperately want to purchase. 

Hange is laying next to you, under the same soft covers as you. They’re wearing pajamas, and a pair of mismatched socks – it’s for luck, you wouldn’t get it, they'd say – and their thick glasses are already discarded for the night. 

You chuckle at their words, still. 

“Nothing in particular” You answer, still scrolling, however now you place a gentle palm to Hange’s hair, fingers gently caressing their scalp. “What about you, love?”

The question seems to spark a fire in your partner’s eyes, as if they had been waiting for you to ask that for the past 17 minutes you’ve been laying in your shared bed. They swiftly crawl over your side of the mattress, gently placing a hand on your wrist – at this point, your phone is long forgotten, however they still removed it out of your hand. Just in case. 

“Glad you asked, princess” Their voice sounds bright, like a shot of espresso down your throat. Hange’s touch is comfortable and inviting, the source of warmth on a cold night. Your body naturally responds to them – they straddle your lap, and you place curious hands on their hips. “Was thinking about eating your pretty pussy out before we go to sleep. Would you be interested?”

Despite the slightly playful tone in your lover’s voice, they’re being completely serious. They smile down at you – too sweet to be evil, but too wolfish to be kind. Your legs move against each other, attempting to soothe the familiar ache caused by Hange’s nasty words. 

“Hange!” You exclaim,

“Baby! I’m being serious, really want to play with your pretty cunt right now.”

Your breath hitches on your throat. This feeling is almost dizzying, how easily Hange has an effect on you. After a beat of silence, you nod silently. 

“C’mon, you know I need to hear you say it.”

Again, you feel blood rushing through your body, filled with desire and excitement. 

“Yes, please. Please, I really want that”

They chuckle. Your voice sounds almost whiney, and absolutely eager. 

“Your wish is my command.” 

Your lover kisses you, hungrily and sweetly. Hange places their elbows on each side of your head, balancing their weight on top of you. They place a leg in between yours, and you smile in between the kisses. At this point, you should be used to this, to the way they play with you. It’s so easy, they once said. You always get worked up so fast. 

Hange is used to your body by now, and how it reacts to their touch – they know you like neck kisses, and that if they caress the back of your head in just the right way, you’ll melt faster. They know you like when they bite your lip, but not strong enough to hurt you. Your partner knows that you like to hear them talk you through it, and their dirty words are the main reason you get turned on in the first place – how carelessly they say it, how effortlessly attractive they are. 

Of course, they reaped the sweet fruit of your submission after exploring your body with curiosity and selflessness. 

“Open your legs for me?” Their voice is gentle, but raspier this time. They phrase it like a question, but it feels like an order. 

Hange removes your nightgown, leaving you bare against before them. Your nipples perk up due to the chill air, and you can feel yourself getting wetter by the moment. Obeying them, you open your legs, showcasing your glossy pussy to Hange – a smile blooms on their lips, nothing short of pride. 

“Beautiful” They mumble, as they place open mouthed kisses down your body. Your skin smells like your favorite scented lotion, that you applied shortly after getting out of the shower. You feel warm, inviting. “You’re so fucking beautiful, did you know that?”

You smile, as heat blossoms on your cheeks. 

“Yeah? My pretty thing.”

Hange reaches between your legs, kissing your inner thighs. You moan, hips bucking up eagerly. Your lover chuckles, and you whine. What a sweet balance, they think. 

After a few more moments of teasing and riling you up, Hange finally gets to your clit. They start slowly, you’ll give them that – attempting to keep it cool, lapping gently at your needy bundle of pleasure. 

Their tongue is flat against your clit, often moving around it, in circle shapes. A whistle hot feeling bubbles on your lower abdomen, as you moan softly. You place your trembling hands on their head, gently gripping on their dark locks. The thing is, you know Hange’s body too – how they get turned on by your reactions, and how they adore your praise. 

“So good,” You whisper, as they suck particularly hard on your clit, before going back to lapping at it. “It feels so good, Hange.”

They blush, as they start to lick you more eagerly, getting intoxicated by your taste. Your lover’s hands grip on your thighs, fingers digging in your sweet flesh. 

Your partner’s moves are getting hungrier, a bit messier too. You’re drenched, and desperate, hips grinding against their face. They look like they’re enjoying this, taking as much pleasure as you. 

Their movements are precise and experienced, yet not robotic and automatic — their touch is dripping with love, devotion and adoration. It’s so beautiful and intriguing, almost as if your bodies will melt with each other, as you become one.

Hange likes you like this, completely at their will. They can tell you’re moving towards your orgasm, and they could ruin it – they could do it, but won’t. Tonight doesn’t feel like the type of night to play with you like that. No, they want to bring you towards the edge and push you off of it, how many times it takes to get you properly fucked out. 

“I’m close, baby. So close, please don’t stop” You whine, and Hange moans against your needy pussy. “Please, oh my god, it feels so good” 

They place a warm palm on your hip, gently caressing it, as if to say: don’t worry, I got you. 

Your lover adores eating your pussy, it’s their favorite thing to do — however they do have to recognize its one downside: they can’t spill filthy words, whispered against the shell of your ear, as they swallow your last cries with a hungry kiss. 

This time, they grip your thighs a little bit harder, fingers digging on the delicious flesh beneath them, as if to give you permission to come. The white hot feeling bubbling on your lower abdomen finally explodes, causing your body to convulse in pleasure. 

As your limbs relax and your heartbeat eases, you come down from your high – although it doesn’t mean Hange wants to stop. They give you a moment, lightly pressing kisses on your inner thighs, and whispering sweet nothings against your soft skin. 

“You were really good for me.” They whisper, smiling softly at you. “Think you can give me one more?”

[dollarbin]

Shakey Sundays #21:

Time Fades Away, Part 2

So. I headed north as promised last night, straight into L.A., Neil's very own uptight city in the smog (city in the smog), to see my famous brother make some very grown up music.

It was amazing and upsetting. Amazing in that Prairewolf are, for our current moment, what Booker T and the MG's were for 1967.

But it was upsetting in that my famous brother and his almost as famous bandmates did not obey my directive and perform Neil Young's Yonder Stands the Sinner with a generous dollop of their own wordless cosmic white man cowboy jazz funk slathered on top. Rather they played songs from their first two records.

I made some videos but have no idea how to paste them in here. If I could figure it out, you'd hear me grooving and hollering and jostling about as everyone in the room blissfully lost their minds amidst the rowdy crowd action and psychedelic vibes.

Naw, it wasn't really that kinda show. Even though Dr. Demento himself was allegedly in the room everyone just sat and nodded with appreciative thoughtfulness while they played. My buddy Greg points out that we probably looked a lot like the studious white folks in the Booker T clip. The band made no speeches and pensively sipped at their Tecates. The projected images behind them swirled and danced in time with my brother's patient yet nimble fretwork. I was filled with intensely mellow joy. Then I drove home.

It was awesome.

And yet, because Prairiewolf didn't bust out a single Time Fades Away cover, I do need to issue the following apology: yesterday's post had nothing whatsoever to do with Neil Young's reckless live album of entirely new songs from 73. Please accept my humble apologies and send all your angry feedback to my famous brother at doomandgloomfromthetomb.

I didn't understand Time Fades Away on any level as a teenager. Neil sounded cranky throughout; the pace was frantic until it was dull; there were no noticeable guitar solos (somehow I didn't notice the fairly groovy interludes on Last Dance); and even at the tender age of 16 I wanted to find David Crosby and punch him squarely in the nose for smugly interrupting the record to announce that what followed would be "a little experimental".

For reasons that are not well-founded or clear I've always associated Crosby with my middle school woodshop teacher Mr Halferty: he would not let us touch any wood in his classroom. Rather, we made keychains and sugar scoopers (as if any of had sugar barrels at home that needed accessing a la Laura Ingall's Farmer Boy) outta plastic and he drove an El Camino. On the last day of school we surreptitiously placed all our finished projects around the wheels of his sweet ride gleefully figuring that as soon as he peeled out there'd be shattered plastic everywhere.

The plan was to hide in the bushes and watch it all go down. I don't think we followed through on that part of the plan. But I felt it then and I feel it now: neither Mr. Halferty nor Crosby have any business on a Neil Young record of any kind post Deja Vu (unless they're glowing unobtrusively in the background as in Through in My Sails).

And so I didn't dig Time Fades Away as a kid.

But it's over 30 years later and I now carry Neil's cranky frantic energy on the record around with me just about everywhere I go. I berate my 11th grade students whenever they enter the classroom more than 6 seconds late or act like their phones are their friends. I drive either way too fast or way too slow. I dream of punching Donald Trump, not David Crosby or poor old Mr. Halferty, squarely in the nose.

So, these days Time Fades Away is right up my alley.

Let me count the ways:

The title track sounds like it's played by angry, drunk monkeys. I mistakenly had my turntable turned up to 45 rpm this weekend when I first dropped the needle; aside from the fact that Neil sounds like a bubbly chipmunk at that speed the song sounds basically the same: terrifying, and good.

Neil must have issued 48 different live versions of Journey Through the Past in the last decade and a half. They're all good. But on Time Fades Away's original take Neil is more plastered than on all the other versions combined.

And you know what they say when it comes to Shakey and Freezermen concerts at Vassar College in 01: the drunker, the better.

As Neil works towards and through the last chorus I feel the room spin wildly around him. It's terrifying, drunk and bleak; it's awesome.

Yonder Stands the Sinner is one of the most unhinged tracks in Young's entire oeuvre. It does not sound experimental, David Crosby; rather it sounds wonderfully insane. At 16 years old I just scratched my head and thought about playing The Joshua Tree or something else instead. Today I feel like Neil is reading the words inscribed on my very soul:

Neil Young: he calls my name without a sound.

Up next we've got L.A. I grew up there. It was alright. But this song is way better: Neil borrows much of the hook from Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown and slows it way the hell down. He's already finding his Tonight's The Night sound and groove here with Ben Keith alongside him, the steel guitar throwing shadows on every available wall of the theater. This is probably my favorite song on the record.

Love in Mind, like The Bridge on Side 2, is just lovely. Neil could nail a ballad like no one else at this point. Everything is fragile and quavering. You want to give the poor guy a hug and recommend a good therapist.

My nearly 80 year old mother talked after the show last night about how seeing her son on stage in Prairiewolf was the opposite of all the Kris Kristofferson shows she saw around LA before Kris became a household name. Seeing her drunk, vulnerable, potentially doomed and beloved cousin play live was utterly stressful. She saw that Kris was not well but that he simply had to make earnest art anyway.

I think it would have been similarly stressful to have been an alive and well Neil Young fan in 1972/3. (I was born in 76 and encountered Young as he entered his 90's heyday.) Fans on the Time Fades Away tour must have worried about whether he was even gonna make it through the show without keeling over.

Folks my age and younger have never been properly stressed out by any of Neil's Ditch era; we encountered all that wonderful music with the knowledge that he survived it all; indeed, we knew that he spun the whole era on its head and made it the foundation for his greatness rather than the soundtrack for his demise.

When it comes to great art like this record, time doesn't fade away. It morphs, it swells and it alters perspectives. Kinda like the lights and sounds I saw on stage in LA last night... And check it out: I figured out how to put in a video of it all which captures... almost nothing. But take my word for it, it was awesome!

[raedroid]

The Star Covers Meets The Soul Of The City

Part 2: The Guardian Slayers

——————————————————————————

In the middle of the night, Alex and his group walked down the long road in order to get to the Borough Theatre. It has been abandoned for years for a long period of time since the 1800s. Bruno and his group had chosen it specifically for a few reasons: it was large and empty but with a few abandoned pieces of furniture, sets and props still lying around. As they walked down the street, something caught Darien’s attention. A young guardian man on his way home from work. Darien just nodded at the boys and they snickered, much to Alex’s confusion. Darien grabs the guardian by the back of the head and slams him against the nearest wall.

“What the hell?!” The man shouted, looking at the men as they laughed. “Fine! Take everything I own! Kill me if you want to! It’s because of people like you who kill random innocent guardians that makes me feel sick!” Alex looked at the situation with uncertainty

“Darien let him go.” He ordered coldly

“Alex let the adults handle it! You’re too young to understand these guardians are gonna kill us!” Darien denied and continued smacking the man against the wall and throws him on the floor. He pulled out his pocket knife, ready to stab him but the man blasts him back with teal magic. Darien looked at him confused and the man got up and created a large teal monster

“Get away from me! And all Guardians!” He ordered, running away from the scene. Alex grabbed Darien and smacked him in the face.

“Why do you keep disobeying my orders? I told you to let him go!” Alex asked angrily

“But those creatures need to die. They are getting what they deserve!” Darien countered. The other men agreed with him, booing at Alex and calling him names. “You work for the minister so why don’t you act like it!” He mocked and walked off. They walked off laughing at him and Alex had only one option, just follow them and let it continue. What he didn’t notice was The Star Covers walking behind them, completely avoiding the confrontation

“Why is this taking place at an abandoned theatre?” Katherine asked, looking at her phone for directions

“I guess it’s for the vibes?” Tanya suggested

“What vibes? A drunken version of the Spanish Play?” Katherine asked rhetorically.

“My theatre kid heart cannot handle that thought.” Anna admitted. The others looked at her confused. “Ok I don’t like Shakespeare but I respect him. I just like the wacky hijinks that the play brought. It doesn’t make it good it just makes it memorable.”

“The fuck are you talking about?” Veena asked

“Look my uncle is Gene Simmons. The amount of confusion I grew up with should be an indicator of my mental state.” She answered. They soon saw one of Bruno’s men with a young woman walking down the street.

“It’s one of them!” Katherine alerted. The girls looked at their surroundings and ran inside the nearest building and closed the door quickly. As they did, the man behind the counter looked up at them surprised. “Oh sorry I didn’t realized the shop was closed!” She apologized

“No don’t be! Are you girls The Star Covers?” He asked curiously. “I heard about you girls. I heard you helped Kiss stop The Crimson Witch from destroying Kissteria last year correct?”

“Yeah but how did you know?” Cassie asked, suspiciously

“Oh pardon me. My name is Frank Malroser. Welcome to the Cosmic Emporium, home to all magic and fantasy games, gadgets and more!” He introduced himself and the girls looked around the shop. They saw all kinds of magic trinkets on the wall and the shelves, such as clocks, books, capes and more. It was a cute little novelty shop that had a lot of heart put into it

“I know what is happening out there right now. I spent years in the Dimensional Research Facility for years to know. I saw you hide from one of Bruno’s friends.”

“Yeah do you know what this competition is?” Anna asked, showing the bracket sheet

“Yes actually. This competition is run by Minister Edgar Solomon, who rules over several facilities in the UK. He is notorious for his hatred of Guardians and according to my research, he came from The Dark Clipse. He sets up the competition for people to gain the ultimate power and deliver it to The Crimson Witch.” He explained

“What is this ultimate power?” Anna asked again.

“It’s these.” He showed them a picture of 18 star rods and the girls inspected them “These are The Crisis Rods. They have enough power to destroy the entire planet. The minister himself doesn’t know where they are. So whoever wins the competition is supposed to go and find them for him. However I have heard that the rods were in the possession of a Guardian from long ago. His name was Nicholas Prey. But he died centuries ago so his Talentment is currently missing.”

“So do you know anyone involved in the competition?” Katherine asked. All of this information was making her incredibly uneasy

“One boy I know. Alex Burgess and his crew Darien Blankfield, George Cornwell and Patrick Ford. They are going up against Bruno tonight.” He answered. After considering her feelings over the situation, Katherine spoke up

“Well I don’t know if going up against them is a good idea. Getting information out of the competitors is gonna be difficult and those rods could be in Mexico for all we know. We should just leave this alone.” Katherine suggested. The others thought otherwise

“Katherine if we leave this alone, this city and the entire planet will go up in flames. So maybe we should think twice before unleashing the unholy fires of hell.” Veena pointed out. Katherine understood and agreed after much consideration

“Yeah stand back Frank. You can just rest here in your cute little shop.” Sara joked. Frank smiled at the girls as they leave the shop and walked out, hoping to solve this problem once and for all.

——————————————————————————

“Bruno! When are they showing up! We’re getting bored here!” Bruno and his men were waiting for what felt like forever for Alex to come. His men, consisting of Alfred, Trevor, Gustave, and Liam, were all tired of the fighting and Bruno’s terrible behaviour towards them.

“Get steel instead. It works better.” Trevor joked. The others laughed at his pun before Bruno shot up from his spot and slapped him across the face.

“This is no time for jokes! Alex will have the upper hand if we do and we can’t let him win!” Bruno stated coldly, before noticing a young dark haired woman standing on the side of the stage. “Trevor why is your girlfriend here?!” He asked annoyed

“We were on a date when you called me! I’m sorry Samantha!” He cried in desperation.

“Not the first time this happened.” She groaned annoyed.

“Get her out of here! She’s not wanted!” Bruno ordered. Samantha rolled her eyes and left the scene. “Do not mess up boys, otherwise this will be you.” He grabbed a nearby glass bottle and smashed it against the wall, causing the others to get startled. At the same time, Alex saw the group and threw another one in their direction.

“Hello! Quaint place for a friendly reunion don’t you think bubble boy!” He asked mockingly. Bruno turned around, blushing in embarrassment

“You finally showed up you prick! Let’s get them!” He ordered. His group gets ready to engage in combat until they heard a whistle. From out of the shadows, the girls slowly crept out, Katherine whistling her favourite tune.

“Sorry for sticking our noses where they don’t belong but you need to come up with a better comeback Bruno.” She mocked. The two groups looked at him confused.

“Who are you!” Darien asked

“The ones who will personally kick your ass!” Tanya answered.

“Well there’s 9 against 6. Don’t you think that’s a little bit unfair?” Bruno asked

“Yeah for you.” Veena smirked and the three groups ran into each other, brawling at each other. Sara succeeded in beating Bruno, knocking him out by throwing him into a pillar. Cassie used her ribbons to send Alfred through the roof, Tanya kept teasing them by teleporting constantly. All of them eventually knocked out all of Bruno’s team, leaving all of The Star Covers and 3 out of 4 of Alex’s team still standing. Alex soon ran off and Katherine followed him, summoning her sword to fight him.

“I must thank you for getting rid of Bruno’s squad. They weren’t worthy of the power. And neither are you.” He pulls out his cane and they duel each other for a long time, the two of them evenly matched in terms of intelligence and skill.

“Not bad. Shame you’re wasting your skill on this atrocity.” Katherine pointed out. She then grabbed him by the arm and threw him at a pillar. They soon hear sirens coming closer to the theatre, scaring everyone in the building.

“Come on let’s go!” Alex ordered, everyone running out. George grabbed the injured Patrick on the floor and carried him away from the girls.

“Where are they going?” Cassie asked. Katherine got an idea and grabs her friends

“Let’s follow them.” Katherine grabbed them and used their powers to fly off to their car, speeding down the highway.

——————————————————————————

“Sorry for barging into your house in the middle of the night. We just wanted to know everything we know about the competition.” Sara asked. They found an address that Frank had given them on their StarPhone that could give them information

“It’s quite alright.” The man of the house said. Alexander and his wife Mary were gentle enough as they hope and they were willing and able to answer questions they had

“We had members of the competition come over to our house multiple times now. It’s mostly because of our magic. We use Track Magic instead of Guardian magic because it’s easier to hide and contain.” Mary explained. Track Magic was a series of 12 types of magic that many dimensionlings use when they are training to become Guardians. These 12 were Abomination, Plant, Rune, Sorcery, Illusions, Potions, Bard, Technology, Healing, Construction, Oracle, and Beast Keeping. Mary used a healing glove to heal one of Sara’s injuries

“So if they keep attacking you, do you know where the rods are at?” Katherine asked.

“No actually. We only get our data and information from two officers, Adrien Berrium and Edward Hawkins. We also get information from Michael Pinn, the general manager of the police department.” Alexander answered. “We don’t know anything about the minister and his goals. If we did, hopefully the competition would stop.”

“We’re only trying to make sense of it all.” Sara replied.

“Don’t worry about it young ladies. You don’t need to be involved in this mess. I suggest you go home and finish up your tour.” Alexander reassured. “If you’d like, I may drive you back to your hotel. Oh wait, you have magic and you can fly back.” He laughed a bit. The girls smiled at the couple and started to head out.

“Well thank you for helping us out. If you have any more answers or information, make sure you let us know ok?” Katherine asked

“Of course. Have a good night now. And remember to watch out for Alex. He is much more than he seems for such a young boy.” Alexander warned. The girls thanked them once again and left the house. Once they were gone, Alexander nodded at his wife who immediately rushed to the phone. After dialling a few numbers, she got a call.

“It’s Mary…. Yes Mary Lewis…. Yes The Star Covers came by just then. They want to know about the minister…. They defeated Bruno’s group. I don’t know if that means they are going to the finals now or what. Regardless, I’ll let you know if we get more info on them… Yes I’ll help get those girls in his possession… Yes with Alex…. I’ll do my best Mr. Hawkins. Tell Carissa that she will take them out… I promise sir… yes thank you.” Mary hung up the phone and they both smirked at each other, knowing what will happen if things go according to plan.

The Guardian Slayers are coming alive….

[peachpitfics]

uhh okay so 🥺 and ✍🏻 (maybe some cute fluff with best friend mgg, like fwb but both catch feelings)

Hey honey, thank you so much for partaking! You’re such a lovely soul and I get super cosmic goddess vibes from you! I hope you know that I appreciate you and love you!

I hope you enjoy this lil thing

MASTERLIST

-------------------------------------------------------

You collapsed next to each other on the bed, panting frantically to catch your breath. Sex with Matthew always was a marathon and neither of you were overly fit. Matthew reached over and took your fist in his hand and shook it. “Thanks Y/n, god I needed that” Matthew sat up on the edge of your bed and began to put his pants on, “I’ll see you back at work later or?” He turned around and saw the look on your face. You knew you both had to get back to work, your lunch break was coming to an end and there was more filming to be done. You knew that this was just a casual thing, he was your best friend. And maybe it had started out that way, but somewhere along the line, it changed, and you fell hard. It was becoming unbearable; telling him you love him and trying to make sure you kept your cover. Fixing the camera on him at inappropriate times because you couldn’t help but stare in your state of longing. What Matthew had seen on your face was disappointment, and it threw him into a panic.

“I’m sorry, Y/n, was that…not good?” Matthew’s voice was soft and sincere, though slightly uncomfortable. You closed your eyes, hoping that the tears would crawl right back to where they came from, but they didn’t. Strolling down your face, you quickly tried to wipe them away. You finally shook your head, as if to let him know that that wasn’t it. “What is it then?” He shrugged his pants up his body and climbed back onto the bed, pulling you up to sit with him. Matthew held onto both of your hands and waited for you to say something. You had weighed up telling him for months, you knew you should have been honest with him, but you were scared of losing him. Matthew always said that if either of you caught feelings then your friends with benefits relationship should end. “It’s changed” You started, hoping maybe he would get it and you wouldn’t have to say it. “What’s changed?” Matthew frowned, “Something between us?”. You nodded, “Yeah…” Matthew’s body sunk, his hands squeezing yours. “Who told you?” He asked, a slight tone of sadness in his voice. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you myself, I just didn’t want to lose what we had. I know we had a deal, that if one of us fell in love then we’d call it off but-”

“In love?” You cut his rambling off. You felt a light come back to your eyes; every semblance of disappointment completely gone from your body. You clutched his hands in yours now. Matthew paused, mouth agape in shock as he realized that no one had told you anything. “You’re in love with me?” You asked him, surprise filling your tone. Matthew looked down at your hands, nodding. “Wait!” Matthew’s eyes snapped back to yours, “If you didn’t know, then what were you…”. “I’m in love with you” You said surely, rubbing his hands with your thumbs. Matthew lunged forward and kissed you with brand new enthusiasm. You had kissed a thousand times, but this time, felt like the first. Tingles spread through your lips, every nerve ending on edge as his lips crashed into yours. Matthews hands found their way to your hair as he held onto you, his tongue flicking into your mouth. Your hands wrapped around his back, feeling the muscles contract under his skin made your heart explode. Matthew pulled away, gazing softly into your eyes, “I do love you”. Matthew jumped off the bed and found his phone on your dresser, lifting it to his ear, someone answering on the other side. “Shemar, yeah hey. I won’t be back this afternoon. Y/n and I aren’t feeling well, can you let the others know. Yeah. Thanks” Matthew locked his phone and bounded back onto the bed like an excitable golden retriever, resuming a loving and tender kiss.

[whump-town]

The Shot That Tore Through The BAU

This feels unwanted and kind of dumb but I wrote it so it might as well be seen. Don’t hit me too hard because I’m just not vibing this afternoon. Feeling rather down in the dumps. (I’m not even sure this fic makes sense)

Warning: for graphic whump, language probably

Hotch gets shot

Some people are just born to fight.

There are no cosmic gifts bestowed to help shoulder the weight of the world nestled against their breasts. The stars, it seems, have just aligned, and instead of some star sign expecting a brush with love, there are just trials and tribulations. Pain.

Some people are born to hurt.

Deep aches in their lungs, fire consuming their eternities.

“I hate you!”

The air thickens and Hotch is left swept in the smoke. Lungs choking in the smog. His chest is unbearably tight. There’s a hand clenching his throat, his back pressed to the wall. His knees tremble beneath him. Weak and absent. “Go-- Go,” he manages. Can’t think. Can’t breathe. “Go to your room,” he says, eyes anywhere but the red-faced teenager in front of him. All that anger, as misplaced and cruel as it is, is aimed at him. He hasn’t got the will to fight him. To see the reason.

Jack, teeth clenched, and body shaking can’t. He’s here. He’s angry. He’s blinded. “You could have saved her,” he seethes. “If Foyet had just killed you then none of this would have ever happened!” His voice has graduated to a strangled shout. Twisted with his raw emotion. His truth. “Jessica, and mom, and me! We’d be happy. Instead of miserably stuck here with you!”

He… doesn’t--

“Look at me.”

His bones feel melted. By the collar of his shirt, he’s being shaken. Neck going limply to the left until a warm palm-- Dave. Dave’s warm palm. His neck is limp until Dave’s warm palm is placed against his freezing skin. Someone keeps calling his name but Dave grounds him.

Dave is scared.

Hotch looks to the side, jaw slacked and a soft grunting noise leaving his mouth. He can’t… he doesn’t…

“Aaron. Aaron!” Eyes rolling back into his head, Dave’s voice breaks. The fear and the emotion sinking into the desperation that they all feel. The radio cracks with the sound. Morgan shivers at the sound.

Reid falls down beside them, hands clutching at the blood uselessly. Unable to find the flow. Where’s it all coming from? Reid makes a choked sound as he finds the wound. His heart hitting the floor. “His neck,” he rasps. “His neck, he--” Reid wraps his hand over the wound. Wild fear in his eyes. “He’s not going to make it. The ambulance-- the ambulance is-- is ten minutes out!”

Dave wipes at his face with his hand. A motion meant to wipe the sweat from his brow but all it does is drag blood across his forehead. Like a broken, half-finished ritual. “What--” he shakes his head. Eyes moving frantically as he worries with his hands. “What do we do? We can’t move him.”

Hotch kicks out, a choked gurgled sound leaving his mouth as he tries to pull away from Reid’s hand. His eyes blink open, confusion laced in the dilated pupils. His foot moves, uselessly trying to find traction and push himself away.

Emily comes storming up. She comes with hellfire and a kit that seems to have come from nowhere. She grunts, throwing the red kit at Dave’s chest. She falls to her knees beside them. Her dark brows furrowed as she settles herself for what she’s about to do. “Hold him down, Reid.”

Reid shakes his head. “What?” He looks at Dave and then at Emily. “Derek,” Emily barks. “Hold him down.”

Morgan positions himself at Hotch’s head, catching Hotch’s hand when the man reaches up blindly seeking grounding. “What are we doing,” Morgan asks, paling as he watches Emily open the kit and pull out gauze. She’s wrapping it into a ball, making it look like a tampon. Forming it and shaping it quickly.

“Hold him tight, Derek,” is all she says before she throws her hips over Hotch’s. There’s no warning as she pulls Reid’s hand away from the wound. Emily starts packing the gauze in.

“Oh, God!”

Hotch comes back to them, a choked gasp leaving his pale lips. He fights against them. His knees hit Emily’s back as he tries to get away. Morgan holds him in place, his shoulder’s pinned to the ground. Tears fall down his face, pinched out of his eyes as he writhes. The veins on his face stand up, straining. His hand finds Emily’s shoulder but it only gives the softest push. Too weak to put enough strength into, unable to move her away from him.

“I’m almost done,” Emily promises, tears pooling in her eyes at the sight of her friend. “I’m sorry,” she manages, voice breaking as Hotch chokes. “I’m so sorry,” she shakes her head, roughly wiping her tears with the back of her wrist. Her actions do not reflect her words. She’s merciless, harsh as she forces the gauze into the wound. She has to be. If she can’t pack it in thick enough, she’ll stop and he’ll keep bleeding. He’ll die, right here, all over them. Slowly and, yet, so quickly.

Hotch manages to grab onto Emily’s shirt, pushing his hips to the side. It’s strength Emily hasn’t felt yet. He lifts her but she squeezes her thighs around his, he can’t get her off. “Easy, easy,” Emily grunts, steadying herself with a thrown out hand. She ends up overtop him, chest to chest. He looks terrified and she hates that she has to hurt him. “I’m almost done,” she promises when he whimpers and strangles out a cry as someone else settles their weight over his hips and she can resume her job.

She hits resistance and watches the blood still coming down his neck. Lifting her hands up they all watch and wait. One second, two… the blood has slowed. Just a little trickle of dark crimson snaking down his pale skin into the collar of his shirt. “I’m done,” she promises, leaning back over him. She wipes his tears away, shushing him gently. “It’s okay. It’s okay, I’m done. I’m done, I promise.”

He opens his mouth but he only manages the frantic sweep of his eyes. Confused and dazed. Blood coats his lips as he gasps wetly around the blood on the inside of his throat.

Morgan is sitting in blood. It’s soaked into his pants. He can’t imagine… he doesn’t know but he doesn’t want to say and jinx them but-- How are they going to make it? There is only so much luck they can push before this whole plan hits the roof? How life-saving can Emily’s plan be if Hotch is still wheezing and breathing blood into his lungs?

“Medics!” JJ screams, and they all look up. She ushers them in quickly and everyone but Reid and Emily tear themselves from Hotch.

Morgan’s knees are weak beneath him, nearly dropping him when Hotch cries out, trembling hand seeking Morgan. He’s been holding his hand this whole time. He can feel the cramp now, the blood finally getting to his fingers.

“What-- What--,” Dave pulls Emily to the side, her horrified question left unanswered as they all watch.

One medic lifts Hotch’s chin back while another prepares an IV.

“He’s choking,” Dave soothes her, going with her when she sinks to the floor sobbing. “They’re just tubing him, Emily. He’s okay. He’s okay.”

Hotch bucks away as the suction is placed down his throat, a horrible wet sound emitting from the tube as it does his job. Morgan goes without question to aide, holding his friend down. He whispers bland encouragements, his voice shaking and grip weak. He has to turn away as the silver curved blade is guided down Hotch’s throat. All he can do is offer meaningless condolences as Hotch gags and tries to scramble to remove the blade.

Morgan can’t keep up with the quick motions of what comes next. One minute Hotch is writhing and then he’s limp. Boneless. “Hotch!” He moves but is stopped quickly by an EMT grabbing his shoulder. Then he sees the quick squeeze the man at Hotch’s head is delivering onto the ballooned end of the tube.

Within a blink of an eye, Hotch is lifted away. Dark eyes, slipping shut as he passes, right hand limply hanging from the stretcher.

That escalated quickly.

As things typically go with Hotch-- they should have seen this coming.

Emily phones home and tells Jack. He’s too old to lie to, these days. A startling sort of development. Something they only just realized they don’t know how to deal with. Emily breaks the news to him. She’s sitting on the other side of the room covered in Hotch’s blood, hunched over as she speaks on the phone.

“Why would you say something like that?” she asks. JJ looks up, concerned with the tone of voice Emily’s taken with the boy. She must have found the root of Hotch’s behavior from the last few days. Whatever is, he hadn’t even told Dave. Just closed Dave’s attempts to talk to him down entirely.

“I know,” Emily soothes as she melts. The tension rolling off of her. “He knows, sweetheart.” She frowns as she lowers her head to her palm. “It’s not your fault, Jack. We’re adults. We’re a family, alright? It was an accident. You’re no more responsible than us.” She shakes her head, “just don’t worry about it, okay? We’ll call you as soon as we have something to say.” She smiles, “I love you too. I’ll tell them. Okay, bye.”

Sighing, Emily stands and rubs a hand down her face. Pulling away she grimaces, looking at her trembling blood-stained hands. God… they’ve really done this time. “They had a fight,” she supplies tiredly as she takes the empty seat between Reid and Dave. “Jack… Jack told him he wished Foyet had killed Hotch and not Haley.” There’s a fairly overlapping sigh shared between them.

Dave leans forward and puts his head in his hands.

“So he was distracted,” Morgan seethes. He’s leaned against the wall. Unable to sit or think right now. Just pace.

They’d known he was distracted. Understandably. Weren’t they all? Unable to recognize the strings bound to their friend, pulling his head back under the waves. Tired. Mad. Too caught up in their own misery to detect his. That’s not their fault but they can’t shake the thought that they should have known.

“What were they fighting about,” Reid asks softly. He’s shifted his entire body back on the chair. Drawn his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, looking at Emily now where his head is dipped resting atop them.

Emily shakes her head. Jack had sounded heartbroken. Upset with what he’d said, regardless and unknowing of the weight it had on his father. Besides, he had no way of knowing how much damage it would do. He’s a child, reckless and angry. Hotch is a grown man. As tormented and broken as he may be.

“Agents?”

The surgeon hadn’t seen the agents roll in with his patient but he’d listened to the nurse’s warning when he’d grabbed him by the arm and told him to take “special care with this one”. Now he can see why. Every human life is of great and equal importance but some people leave behind terrifying family members. His agent just happens to be one of those people.

Dave rises while the other’s hold on. JJ clutches Emily and Reid’s hand, the three of them watching intensely as Dave approaches the doctor. Morgan feels a great unease in his chest. Suddenly, his heart is pounding and he feels lightheaded.

“He’s going to be alright--” 

And, God, does it matter after that? Alive. He’s alive and he’s breathing and he could be paralyzed for all they care. He’ll still be here, with them. Grumpy and tangled and Hotch. 

“He’s got a complicated recovery ahead,” the doctor warns over their unshaken faith. 

Dave shakes the doctor’s hand, “he’s stronger than he looks. Hardheaded and stubborn as a mule.”

The doctor nods his understanding, he wants to warn them that won’t be enough. Recovery is painful. It takes time no one wants to afford it. He just smiles and nods, something tells him they know this routine well. “I understand,” he says. “He’ll need you all but I think you all need him too.” 

Then he tells them none of them can come back. Aaron needs to rest and he won’t rest if he’s being watched. That’s not as great of an idea as the doctor thinks. 

There’s a deep, terrified scream from down the hall. The doors of the waiting room do well in swallowing the sound but they’ve been waiting for hours to get some word about the Unit Chief they lost hours ago to those doors. Now, they know. He’s alive all right.

Emily doesn’t look up from her nails. They’re well past the point of bleeding, her fingertips sting and her left foot bouncing quickly with her nerves. She can’t look up. She can’t face the others in fear that she might crack and reveal more than she intends to. So instead she just… “He’s awake,” she says softly, glancing at Dave out of the corner of her eye.

The older man’s shifting in his chair, not getting up but moving his body as much as he can to see through the small window in the door. The way the scream cuts off, not dying slowly but just stopping tells them all they know. Sedating Aaron will only work superficially and Dave needs to make sure someone understands that. The sooner the better.

“Aaron--” a different doctor than before steps into the waiting room and quickly takes two steps back when he’s met with a swarm of angry looking people. He’s been doing this job long enough to understand that the force awaiting the agent he has right now in his ICU is a friendly one. However, they will not be his biggest fans. “Family of Aaron Hotchner, I’m assuming?”

Dave nods his head, wrapping his arms around his body as he looks the doctor over. “Agent Hotchner,” he corrects but it’s not flashy or anything-- it’s just to establish to the doctor who he’s dealing with. 

The doctor nods, “okay then, Agent Hotchner.” He shifts the clipboard in his hand. “Uhm,” he combs over the file. “He’s sedated right now--”

Emily cuts him off. “We know,” she says. None of them miss the half-wince the doctor fails to hide. “Unless you can keep him sedated for the rest of his life,” her tone takes on an edge that says while her words reflect dark humor she is not being funny. “You have to let someone back there.” She crosses her arms on her chest. “He hates hospitals and unless one of us is back there--”

“-- he’s going to try and get himself out.” Morgan finishes. He’s seen it himself. After Boston Morgan had stood by and watched as Haley stood selflessly by Hotch’s side for days. The only person who could take to him in his delirious, fearful state. Morgan knows plenty of people who hate hospitals but he’s never met someone who hates them as much as Hotch. He does not just hate hospitals… it’s unhinged, unwavering fear.

The doctor nods his understanding. That certainly places him one step closer to understanding everything that just happened back in the room. “He’s just been moved to a room and I can allow one or two of you back for now.” Looking at the sheer size of the group before him he’s expecting that not to blow over well.

It turns out fine.

Dave turns around and looks his group over. “Alright,” he scratches at the back of his neck. “Reid, Derek, and, JJ go back to the hotel. Get some sleep. Call Garcia and tell her he’s alright.” Glancing at Emily he motions for her to follow him. “You can come with me.” 

He doesn’t wake while Emily and Dave sit to watch.

Gently, ragged warmed in water from the sink, Emily wipes the blood from Hotch’s lips. She’s careful to keep the bandages dry. Mostly, they just sit. Wait.

Emily’s napping when she feels something hit her arm. She wakes up dazed, pushing the hair up out of her face. Normally, she might be embarrassed to be caught sleeping but she finds Hotch’s half-lidded eyes looking back at her. She’d been sleeping on his thigh, the perfect kind of boney pillow the moment could afford. “You okay,” she asks, rubbing at her eyes. In the other chair, Dave’s still out. His legs are kicked up on the edge of the bed, arms crossed on his chest. 

He motions her closer. 

“What is it,” she asks, softly, leaning down and brushing his hair back. 

“Thirsty,” he manages, croaked and pain. His voice is hardly a whisper at all. Just a broken crack. 

She pours him a small cup of water from the pitcher by the bed. Hesitating only a moment when she wonders if ice chips would be better. She doesn’t have any though so she gives him the water. She has to hold his hand, guiding it to his lips. 

She frowns as she thinks about the accident. His blood going everywhere. The stained blouse she just threw away. He’ll be okay, she knows. In two days, the world will have calmed down once again. 

Reid will be bringing Hotch books to read and the walkman he keeps in his go-bag. 

Dave will be up his ass about taking care of himself. Dotting on how Emily always listens to him, why can’t you? “Is it that hard to just listen, Aaron? Do you have to worry me to death? Can’t you just behave?” 

All the while, Emily sneaks him out of this awful room. Probably to go watch TV or outside, anywhere they won’t be found. If she’s tired of hearing them all worry and groans, then he will be too. 

Give Garcia ten minutes and she’ll have this place covered in bright things. Trolls and balloons. 

The key is Jack. No amount of snacks from JJ can save him if they don’t let him see Jack. If they don’t fix whatever was said between the two of them. Whatever it is, Emily isn’t too worried. 

“Get some sleep,” she whispers. With any luck, she’ll wake up and this will all have been a dream. 

She’s just afraid she won’t be able to forget the feeling of his blood rushing over her hands. 

[deepwaterwritingprompts]

ooh ask day! are you working on any of your own writing at the moment? what excites you about it? is your writing similar to your prompts in any way? or do the prompts fulfill something else for you?

mainly im working on getting my first novel published, which you can read about HERE. otherwise, the sequel, an adult fiction project, and an urban fantasy type YA about a town called florida. in florida. Florida, florida.

Florida project, working title BORDERLINE, is the most in line with my general prompt vibe here. a little cosmic horror, bent reality, just generally odd.

I never write stuff based off the prompts, but I DO write prompts based off my own stuff, very occasionally. for me, writing prompts is like scales for a musician. keeps my brain well oiled.

*still taking asks, no requests please*

anyway, ive been working on Florida project a lot lately. have an excerpt:

Backpage:

Lin O’Leary was born and raised in the town of Florida, Florida, tucked away into a corner of the state’s forgotten coast. All the locals know Florida is a strange place, rumored to stand on a borderline, where the veil is thin and mysterious forces wander alongside the human population. The daughter of Irish and Mexican immigrants, Lin knows you can only find trouble if you go looking for it, and like the rest of Florida’s residents, lives comfortably alongside the supernatural. This is before Momoko Kasahara disappears into thin air, frightening the town of Florida into a new, ultra-cautious existence. Five years after Momo’s disappearance, Lin is seventeen, a highschool dropout now working at a convenience store, her once vibrant town still plagued by fear. The days drag by, mundane as they come in Florida, occasionally punctuated by unpleasant visits from Bo Kasahara, brother to Momo and full time asshole. Then, one fateful late shift, Lin sees the missing Kasahara twin standing in the aisles, gone as quickly as she appeared. Meanwhile, a stranger arrives from California, claiming to be a paranormal investigator hellbent on uncovering the mysteries of Florida, and suddenly Lin is faced with a choice. Be smart and keep her head down, or dive headlong into the strange mist that so often covers Florida, to rescue Momo Kasahara, and return her town to the way she remembers it.

1. 100% humidity feels like breathing underwater.

L I N

Florida ate Momoko Kasahara on the most miserable day of the year, and washed her down with a thunderstorm. A lot of other important things happened that day, but Momo’s disappearance overshadowed them all. Momo was the coolest girl in our class. She had shiny black hair that ran down to her waist. She liked to wear a different flavor of lip gloss every day of the week, and could sing in Japanese. I was on my way home from the beach when I saw the police cars in her driveway, and her twin brother sitting on the porch, painted purple in the twilight. 

He shook his head, at me, slow, and all the sound seemed to drain out of the world. The flashing police lights distorted his face, as bright white clouds passed too quickly above us. The whole scene drove a stake of wrongness hard into my chest. Sometimes even now, I dream about it. Bo and I watching each other. The dead silence. The purple light. The too white clouds. And Momo, eaten.  For the first time in my life, I was afraid of my own town. 

My name is Lin O’leary. I live in Florida, Florida, a nothing sort of place crammed into an extra forgotten corner of the state’s already forgotten coast. Some days I can forget about Momo, and everything that happened in the hours before she vanished. Heff says I’m good at keeping my eyes closed, even when they’re open. 

I really wish he were right. 

2. Cloudy with a chance of hotdogs (haunted).

J U L I E N

I was standing in front of the worst building I had ever seen. Slab grey and full of sharp edges, additions had been slapped onto every side until it resembled an impossible puzzle piece. The front windows were crowded with signs for cold beer and hot food, but the glass itself was opaque. It was a convenience store from hell, a collection of stationary parts so nonsensical I was worried it might grow a few new alcoves if I blinked. Above the door, an unintelligible sign in complicated neon cursive flashed electric blue. There was a neon clock too, flickering wildly, just striking twelve.

I must have walked halfway across town, and as far I could tell this was the only place that sold food at all, let alone past three in the morning. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to go inside. My stomach was a mess, and haunted convenience store hot dogs could only make it worse. I fished my phone out of my pocket, but the little service I had was, like the midnight clock above me, barely clinging to existence, my map application nothing more than a collection of beige squares. There was no one around. The sky was intensely dark, a pitch black blanket of clouds. Water hung thick in the air, the night time street so quiet I could almost hear beads of sweat sliding down my already slick face. No, there was nothing for it. I needed directions. 

The bell above the door made a strange, flat sound as I pressed inside. If the building was weird from the outside, that was nothing to its interior. The shelves, tall and numerous, had been arranged like maze walls. The overhead lights were blinding, stark white, and every other tile on the floor was mismatched. Some were squares of carpet. The only thing really visible from the entrance was the register, a fortress made of dark wood and surrounded by lottery advertisements. Behind the counter, a girl was reading something intently. As I got closer, I saw it was the back of a box of oatmeal.

“Hi,” I said, adjusting the duffel bag that had been crushing my left shoulder for an hour. 

The girl nodded, but didn’t look up. She had thin black hair, pin straight and chin length. Her skin was a warm, golden brown. Her shirt said something in miniscule writing, but my glasses were a little foggy, so I would have had to practically press my face to her chest to read it, which didn’t seem like a great first impression.

“Can you help me? I’m looking for the Fahrenheit Motel. I think it’s supposed to be around here.” 

Finally, she glanced at me. 

“It’s just around the corner. See the glasses store across the street? Go straight past that and make the second left, you’ll run right into it.” 

She pointed out the window, and I realized they were one way. 

“Who built this place?” I asked. 

She shrugged. 

“We’ve had a lot of owners. Everyone adds something new.”

There was something off about her. Like we were talking, but mentally she was still 

reading the box of oatmeal. 

“I’m Julien,” I said, sticking out a hand. She raised her eyebrows before taking it. 

“Lin,” she said, with another small nod. 

Her face was round, but her features were knife sharp. I wondered what she looked like angry. Maybe that was a really weird thing to think. 

Not wanting to ask for a second set of directions, I wandered around the store for thirty minutes before returning to the counter with a gallon of chocolate milk and a bag of seaweed flavored potato chips. 

“I can’t believe you have these. I didn’t think you could find them outside of California.”

Instead of replying, Lin held up the chocolate milk. 

“There’s no fridge in your room at the Fahrenheit. You know that right?”

“I was told on the phone… ” I started.

“There’s a fridge, but it’s in the lobby, communal. Kimmy’ll drink this.” She gave the milk a little shake before scanning it. “Just warning you.”

“Thanks,” I said, as she stuffed my things in a smiling shopping bag. 

I paused on my way out.

“Goodnight,” I said, “Or, good morning I guess.” 

Lin stared at me, then glanced at the box of oatmeal and back. 

“Morning,” she said, with a sigh.

***

I followed Lin’s directions, and wound up at last in front of a long, low building sporting a vacancies sign. Even in low light I could see about a hundred sad looking plastic flamingos had been stuck all over the lawn, the bushes, even the gravel path that led to the front door. I had to pick my way around them on approach. 

There was no one at the front desk. The reception area was lit only by the green blue light coming from an enormous fishtank that didn’t seem to have any fish in it. As I approached the counter, I noticed someone had left the key to my room out for me, next to a scrap of paper bearing the wifi password. I picked up the key, old and brass, then watched the fishtank for a second, before turning around and experiencing heart failure. 

A very old woman with wiry black hair was standing there in her nightgown, arms crossed and frowning at me. She didn’t apologize for nearly sending me to my grave. 

“I’m up. I can check you in properly,” she said, shuffling past me. “I’m Kimmy, but you can call me Miss Kimmy. You got ID?” 

I dug it out of my wallet while she opened a dusty guest book. 

“The reservation is for Julien True,” I said. 

Miss Kimmy glanced at the ID I had just handed her. 

“That’s not what this says.”

“I know. It’s a stage name,” I admitted, “everything else is correct.”

She raised an eyebrow to herself, but didn’t ask any more questions. 

“Now listen,” she said finally, shutting the guest book with a snap. “I’ll be honest, there’s not much to do around here. There’s a bus runs to the state forest during the day, and the beach isn’t going anywhere. If you’re hungry that’s too bad for the most part, unless you feel like walking down to Morton’s.”

“Is that the weird looking building? One way windows?”

“That’s the one. Midnight Morton’s, never closes. This late at night you’ve got Lin at the counter, nice girl.” 

I don’t know what I would have called Lin, but it probably wasn’t ‘nice girl’.

“Thanks,” I said, glancing around for the hallway that led to my room.

I bid Miss Kimmy goodnight and lugged my things to Room 7, at the very end of the dark hall. Inside was simple, but stunningly clean, which I had in no way expected. The bed had a sunken spot in the middle, and there were a lot of paintings of tropical fish on the walls. Home sweet home. I changed into pajamas, and took a huge swig of chocolate milk before glancing at my duffel, still full of equipment. 

It could wait. I was exhausted, sweaty, and more alone than I had ever been in my entire life. 

3. Welcome to my grocery store how may I assist you.

L I N

“I want to drop out of high school,” said Roach. 

We were sprawled out on separate tartan sofas, both angled towards the ancient television. It was after midnight, and the only light in the room was coming from the nature channel.

“No you don’t,” I said. “You’re not even in high school.”

Roach was a weird little girl. Eleven years old, she wore oversized thrift store t-shirts, and big chunky glasses, and cut her own hair. I loved her the most in this world.

“Yeah, but when I get there, I want to drop out. You did.”

I sighed. 

“You’re smarter than me. You have to finish school and work in a laboratory anywhere but here. Those are the rules.” 

Roach crossed and uncrossed her skinny legs without arguing. I knew she just wanted to hear me say she was smart. 

We continued to watch the nature channel in silence. A documentary on the arctic ocean was playing, which I found devastatingly boring, but Roach was clearly glued to. I could hear dad snoring upstairs, a pleasant sort of nightly white noise, and tuned out completely until Roach clapped an inch from my face. 

“Jeez,” I started, pushing her hands away.

“You were way out there. It’s freaky.”

I had been practicing my zone out since I was Roach’s age. On my best day, I could have an entire conversation without hearing one word the other person said. Call it a life skill.

“You’re doing it again!” said Roach. “Don’t you have work soon?” 

That snapped me out of it. I looked at my watch. 

“Oh, yeah. Thank you.” 

I rolled off the couch as Roach sat back down with a huff. The arctic documentary was ending, and she picked up the changer to scroll through a long list of similar recordings. Roach loved animals, all of them, even fish that ate your insides, and grubs, and parasitic worms. Especially parasitic worms. 

“Don’t stay up too late okay?” I said, tugging gently on her massive ponytail. Roach got dad’s curly, reddish brown hair. I got mom’s.

“Mmhm.”

I glanced in the hall mirror to see if there was any food on my shirt. Then I stepped into the mosquito ridden, muggy Florida night, and headed to my shift.

***

You might be thinking: where does a seventeen year old high school dropout work after midnight? And the thrilling answer is: the grocery store, sort of.

You might be thinking: what? 

But that’s Morton’s. 

The sliding doors opened smoothly for me upon arrival, which was always a good omen. I straightened the newsstand and went to look for Barry.

My manager, a small, Dominican man who loved to party, was in the produce section with a woman I assumed was his latest girlfriend. He was chucking the moldiest vegetables into an open trashcan.

“Our fresh produce is a travesty,” I said. “When was the last time someone bought an eggplant here?”

“I’m thinking of moving the veg,” said Barry, “they don’t like the energy in this corner.”

Barry was constantly moving things around the small labyrinth that was Morton’s. At least once a month he would take an hour long stroll from shelf to shelf, while I wrote down what was going where. I made a new map of the store for every big move.

“What are you guys up to tonight?” I asked, as Barry followed me to the register, bag of moldy vegetables in hand.

“Dancing,” said his date, with an endearing round of jazz hands, as Barry broke into a stationary samba while he gave me a list of stuff to work on. He treated me to his own enthusiastic jazz hands, and a few notes of a Juan Luis Guerra song as he samba’d in the direction of the door. As it swung shut behind them, I let the intense silence of Morton's wash over me. The fluorescent lights hummed gently. The food sat well behaved in slightly crooked rows. I turned my brain down to its lowest setting, and consulted my list.

...

[just-random-obsessions]

Funny Moments In Thor The Dark World

Find Thor 1 here

Find Avengers 1 here

This is the second part of me watching all three thor movies and the avengers movie and comparing the humor pre-ragnarok to the humor in the 3rd Thor movie. And, as before, I’m writing this on my computer where the I and U keys don’t work so sorry for any spelling mistakes.

Tag List: @nikkoliferous @fyrecrafted @lokijiro @miskiett @darthxerik @icyxmischief @iamanartichoke @juliabohemian @official-and-unstable-satan @melodylnoelle @just-another-human-2019 @fandomsfanfiction @mentallydatingahotcelebrity @cateyes315 @burningarbiterheart @imnotacreepijustlikeyou @usedtobegoodfriend96 @alexakeyloveloki

Official-and-unstable-satan and fandomsfanfiction weren’t tagged sry

Anyone who wants to be added/removed to the tag list please let me know! and if I missed someone please also let me know. Sorry this post is so long

~ “Hello Mother. Have I made you proud?”

~ “Please don’t make things worse” “Define worse”

~ “I really don’t see what all the fuss is about”

~ “Just like you”

~ *That smile!!!!*

~ “I’ve got this completely under control!” “Is that why everything’s on fire?”

~ *About the Scary MonsterTM: “All yours”

~ *Thor says hi to the Big Scary MonsterTM*

~ “I accept your surrender”

~ “Anyone else?” *All the people simultaneously: NOPE*

~ “Perhaps next time we should START with the big one”

~ *Odin obviously shipping Thor and Jane* (idk I got a kick out of this)

~ *Jane awkwardly avoiding her date*

~ *Date: hi*

~ *Him awkwardly talking about his ex*

~ “And the fact that she kept sleeping with other men” “NO!”

~ *Darcy being mistaken for a waitress*

~ *Darcy mouthing “Cute” to Jane about Richard*

~ *Darcy embarrassing Jane by talking about Thor*

~ “Is there a point to all of this cause there REALLY needs to be a point to all of this”

~ “That’s what I said!”

~ “That’s what I did!”

~ “He’s not interested” “I’m interested” (Am I the only one who feels like his awkwardness was actually kinda cute?)

~ “He’s my intern.” “You have an intern?”

~ *Intern is fucking adorable like Richard*

~ “I have totally mastered driving in London!” *Has not mastered it at all*

~ *Selvig running around Stonehenge naked*

~ *Darcy keeps calling Ian ‘Intern’*

~ *Darcy calls Jane cause she didn’t wanna shout*

~ God I fucking love Darcy she’s so criminally underrated

~ “I am not getting stabbed in the name of science”

~ “It’s okay, we’re Americans!” “Is that supposed to make them like us?”

~ “We’re scientists-well I am” “Thanks”

~ “That doesn’t seem right”

~ “I wanna throw something! Jane give me your shoe!”

~ *Jane ignores Darcy*

~ “Give me your shoe”

~ “Were those the car keys?”

~ *Ian’s face when he realizes he threw the car keys to another planet*

~ *If you have to bury so many people then you’re doing something wrong you hot dumb fuck* (I mean that’s basically what Heimdall said right?)

~ “Typical” *after being left behind while Jane goes to talk to her boyfriend*

~ *Jane! Love of my life and most talented and beautiful person in the world oh how I love yo-SLAP*

~ “As excuses go, its not terrible”

~ “I know” “You do?” “Do what?”

~ *Darcy interrupts the KissTM*

~ “Um I’m pretty sure we are getting arrested”

~ “How’s space?” “Space is fine”

~ “He’s my intern… My intern’s intern”

~ “Holy shit!” (after Jane went up in the Bifrost)

~ *Heimdall calmly dodges the car*

~ “We have to do that again”

~ “Hello”

~ “What’s that?”

~ “It’s a soul forge” *No I’m pretty sure that’s a quantum field generator*

~ *Jane being ready to fight Odin for comparing her to a goat*

~ “You told your dad about me?”

~ “It must be so inconvenient, them asking about me day and night”

~ “Please meet my mother” *Jane shies away from Thor*

~ Loki casually tossing the thingamajig in the air like the cute little shit he is

~ Lord, he’s so damn pretty

~ *Kurse being like: Lol I ain’t touchin’ that boy with a ten foot pole*

~ “It’s as if they resent being in prison”

~ “There’s no pleasing some creatures”

~ *Loki calmly reading a book while all Hel breaks loose*

~ “You have my word that no harm will come to yo-” nvm bitch die

~ *THAT look between Sif and Jane*

~ *Frigga immediately seeing through Odin’s bs lies*

~ *Heimdall: I have defeated the big space ship!! The bigger one behind him: Bitch you thought*

~ “WITCH!!!!” *Now I know who Loki gets his amazing aforementioned smile from*

~ *Selvig using shoes to explain complicated science*

~ *Selvig then using pencils*

~ “Any questions?” “Yeah, can I have my shoe back?”

~ “What’s SHIELD?” “It’s a secret”

~ *Darcy’s cute af face when she sees that Selvig is in the mental hospital*

~ “Are you sure you wouldn’t just rather punch your way out?”

~ *Loki shapeshifting into the guard*

~ “Mmm Brother, you look ravishing”

~ “Costumes a bit much”

~ “So tight!”

~ “I can FEEL the righteousness surging!!”

~ “HEY wanna have a rousing discussion about truth?”

~ “Honor?”

~ “Patriotism?”

~ “GOD BLESS AMERICA!”

~ “At last. A little common sens-”Bitch are you really fucking kidding me? (What do you mean that’s not what he said?)

~ “I thought you liked tricks”

~ “I’m Loki, you may have heard of-” SLAP

~ “That was for New York”

~ “I like her”

~ *Loki gazing lovingly at Jane in the background*

~ “Betray him, and I’ll kill you.” “It’s good to see you too Sif”

~ “If you even think about betraying him-” “You’ll kill me? Evidently there will be a line”

~ “I thought you said you knew how to fly this thing.” “I said how hard can it be?”

~ “Whatever your doing brother I suggest you do it faster.” “Shut up Loki

~ “You must’ve missed something.” “I didn’t, I’m pressing every button on this thing”

~ “Well don’t hit it. Just press it, gently.” “I aM pReSsInG iT gEnTlY AND ITS NOT WORKING!!!”

~ *Thor starts slamming buttons and it starts working*

~ *Volstagg: Oh fighting is much fun- OH SHIT IM FALLING!! HELP!!!*

~ “I think you missed a column.” “Shut up”

~ “Why don’t you let me take over? I’m clearly the best pilot”

~ *Bitch I’m the one who can actually fly*

~ “Oh dear. Is she dead?”

~ *Thor knocks over a column* “Not a word”

~ “Now they’re following us”

~ “Now they’re firing at us”

~ “Yes thank you for the commentary Loki, it’s not at all distracting”

~ “Well done, you just decapitated your grandfather”

~ *Seriously, whoever wrote the escape scene is a genius!!!*

~ *Loki yelling at Thor about how thIs was a bad idea you dumb fuck- wait wtf are you doing AAAAHHHHH!!!!1*

~ “You lied to me. I’m impressed”

~ *That smile again snfnejaihfeqrqrsbdsalxdjewonjfeq*

~ “For Asgard!” YEET

~ “Nothing personal boys!”

~ “If it were easy, everyone would do it”

~ “Are you mad?” “Possibly”

~ “TADAAA”

~ “Oh yeah, my father. Eric Selvig”

~ “And these” “yeah… those”

~ “How did you find me?” “You were naked on television”

~ “I don’t get paid enough. I don’t get paid at all”

~ “What’s happening? Birds? Birds are happening?”

~ “All right are you ready?” “I am”

~ *phone rings* “It’s not me”

~ “Why are there so many shoes in here?”

~ “I’ll just text her”

~ “So who’s Richard?”

~ *Thor hanging his hammer on a coat hanger*

~ “Where are your pants?” “Oh he says it helps him think”

~ “Loki is dead” “Oh thank God!”

~ “Better get my pants”

~ “Do you even know what these things do?” “No” “…Neither do I”

~ “Ooh get the guy with the sword!”

~ “Oops”

~ *Ian’s high-pitched scream*

~ *Does car insurance cover My Car Was Sucked Into Another Planet Due To A Cosmic Event That Only Occurs Once Every 5000 Years or no?*

~ *Thor and Malekith fighting between worlds and poor little Mjolnir trying to keep up*

~ *The two of them against windows*

~ *AAAHHH*

~ *Awww! Look at the cute little Jotunheim monster! He’s so adorable I wanna pet him so much!’

~ *Darcy and Ian kissing after he saved her life*

~ “Darcy?” “Jane!” “Ian?” “Selvig.”

~ “Myuh Myuh!!”

~ *Thor ends up on the subway*

~ *The girl taking 50 photos*

~ *Thor and the woman colliding into eachother*

~ “I’ve come to accept your surrender”

~ *Malekith gets crushed by his own ship. Now that’s some lovely karma right there*

~ *Darcy and Ian go back to kissing*

~ “He kinda committed treason on our way out” oops

~ Jotunheim Puppy chasing birds

Wow I’m so sorry this was so long. But guess what? It’s gonna get even longer. Sorry, again.

So one of the differences between the first and second Thor movies is that Thor 2 has humor in the climax whereas Thor 1 doesn’t. This is because of the differences with who is the villain. In Thor 1, Thor is having to fight his brother. To quote Avengers, they “played together and fought together” for several millennia. Of course there’s not going to be any humor in it cause there shouldn’t be. The climax at the end of the movie isn’t supposed to be some epic battle between the forces of Good TM and Bad TM. It’s supposed to be tragic that he’s having to fight his own brother because Loki lost his mind due to so many factors. The last joke in the film is “You’re an amazon liar brother, always have been” “It’s good to have you back”. There’s nothing else till the end credit scene. That’s because Kenneth Branagh knew that this was supposed to be viewed at as being sad a hopeless, not some awesome upbeat battle.

Thor 2 on the other hand, is exactly that. Thor has known Malekith for.. what? 2 days? Maybe 3? His relationship and dynamic with Malekith is different than with his brother. To Thor, this is just another enemy attacking Asgard. And I’m not sure whether this was intentional or not (because I remember reading somewhere how Allen Taylor had a bitch of a time in the editing process so I think the movie came out different than he intended) but the lack of any personal relationship will Malekith means the film can make really funny jokes and still have it fit with the film. If anything, I might even argue that the humor helped the film to maintain a very nice positive vibe. Idk I can’t think of the right words to explain it but the jokes actually fit the film very well.

However, then we move on to Ragnarok. With Ragnarok, Thor is fighting his sister. While (just like Malekith) he has only known her for two days, that still doesn’t take away the fact that he is having to fight his sibling. And I’m not a film director but if I had the option of approaching this situation and taking it the Thor 1 route or the the Thor 2 route, I’d go with Thor 1. Because it’s actually incredibly tragic that Hela has been driven to insanity like Loki (though ok a different level) due to Odin’s shitty parenting. She is the horrible way she is because Odin made her that way. And that could’ve been an AMAZINGLY complex story with the audience feeling so much sympathy for Hela like we did with Loki in Thor 1, but the narrative just falls flat for two reasons. 1) Taika admitted he didn’t want the film to be emotionally complex so 2) The humor in the climax completely detracts from the seriousness of the situation.

Also, some side notes: Yes, this is edited from the original. I accidentally deleted everything and then had to go back and add everything back in. So I also had to re-tag people too. And I also added a bit more explanation at the end. I meant to do so when I originally posted but it never got done till now. Sry. Also sry that it’s so long

[shipping-receiving]

11/11/11 Meme

Tagged by @nire-the-mithridatist

Favorite OC to Write? Hmm, the only OCs I’ve written so far are unnamed characters in The Assignment, including their first handler or random babysitters (from the Centre or otherwise) and the septon who officiated their wedding. So I’ll pick the septon from that selection, but more because I got a kick out of writing how much Jaime irritated him.

Dialogue or descriptions? My comfort zone is descriptions of my characters’ psyches because my writing background is in (creative) nonfiction. But I’ve found that I get a kick out of writing dialogue that has a real emotional punch, e.g. when Jaime and Brienne argue and in the process work out their own issues.

Favorite plot twist? All the plot twists I’ve used in my fic are based on canon events in The Americans, except for the introduction of Tyrion. I’ll pick that, because I had the presence of mind to seed it very subtly in Chapter 6 before I fully revealed that he existed in Chapter 14.

Favorite cliche? I think the whole premise of The Assignment is to subvert a lot of cliches/tropes, so it’s really more the subversion that I’m interested in (e.g. how many years did they share a bed before anything happened and how can I make that believable; or, how can I write JB as the two emotionally repressed idiots that they are while still having them be much more open and communicative with each other than average). In terms of reading fic, though, arranged marriage, baby.

Favorite season? No favourites – I love/hate things about every season. (Also grew up in a place where it’s either hot and wet or hot and dry so... yeah)

Writing by hand or on computer/phone? Actually, I’ve been quite enjoying writing on my phone. It gets a bit unwieldy but when inspiration strikes, it’s right there. I’ve ever woken up and spent hours in bed just writing The Assignment on my phone because I’m too lazy to get out of bed lol.

Music while writing? I’m still confused about this, but Lana Del Rey (either Born To Die – Paradise Edition or Norman Fucking Rockwell!). I think there’s something lush and intoxicating and dangerous about the sound that has the kind of vibe I’m looking for in The Assignment, even if thematically they don’t really fit. Her songs also recede into the background quite well so I don’t get distracted by the lyrics, which I often do with other songs.

Weirdest thing you’ve ever been inspired by? I’ve been thinking about how I’ve been inspired to write about things I don’t really like to experience in real life. For example, I wrote that Jaime and Brienne drove out to the coast with the kids/Pod for their wedding, and the day before they went to the beach. I don’t like the beach very much, and while usually I would have put that dislike into Brienne’s character because I write her as an extension of myself, I decided to put it into Jaime’s instead, and then have him not mind the beach very much in the end because of how much Brienne loves it. It felt quite redemptive and hopeful to me that way, because I was sort of writing as if I could break out of my personal negativities.

Biggest no-no for a book? What will immediately make you put the book down if you see it? Sigh. This is so superficial. Terrible graphic design for book covers. It’s the reason why I’ve never gotten around to reading Elena Ferrante, although I know there are better covers out now.

What titles grab your attention in bookstores? *resisting the urge to say graphic design again* Either unexpected phrases (as in, I’d never have come across a phrase like that otherwise), or I tend to pick up things that reference something cosmic, for some reason, even if I don’t actually buy the book in the end.

Can you describe the color purple in one sentence? There is no ONE colour. There are merely shades of purple, each with a different implication.

Tagging: @it-may-be-dull-but-im-determined and @angel-deux-writes, no pressure though!

[musicallyrich]

Brotherhood Abounds Everywhere! Summerfest July 5, 2019

I’m in for an early day at Summerfest; I pull into the grounds about 1:30 p.m. and head to the U-Line Stage. As I walk up I hear The Balkun Brothers tearing out a version of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Fire’ that sounded raw and gritty in the best possible way. They continued with an original, then a cover of Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Guerilla Radio’ and finished on a fine original (as far as I knew). A young duo (guitar/drums) from Connecticut, they fall onto a similar sound as the band Royal Blood (or a harder version of the Black Keys).

Then, at 3 p.m. at that same stage the main show I came to check out…The Chris Robinson Brotherhood. I have seen them twice before, once on their second tour across the country in MN (possibly still an extension of their first tour, but it was the 2nd time in Minneapolis), and once a year or two later. Now they are 8 years into their musical lives as this band. The first two times I was largely underwhelmed by the shows I saw, nothing terrible, but also nothing in the shows that really musically pushed me to be excited by them either. They were both solid rock outings. Eight years of playing seemingly non-stop has caused this group to coalesce into the band they have become and continue to grow into. The energy from the music was palpable and had a good portion of the crowd up and dancing in the bright Milwaukee sun. This is what I’ve been waiting for this group to grow to, all the members are excellent musicians and, as usual, the ability of these guys just get stronger the longer they play together. Guitarist Neal Casal (Ryan Adams & The Cardinals, Circles Around The Sun, Hard Working Americans) and keyboardist Adam MacDougall (Black Crowes) both were fantastic when taking solos that would fly and circle until coming back to the ground, or when they were just working to comp with the rhythm section of bassist Mark Dutton and drummer George Sluppick (Robert Walter’s 20th Century Congress, JJ Grey & Mofro, GospelbeacH). With this band, Chris Robinson has found a sound replicating the California Cosmic Soul Sound (more spacious and focused on stretching out the Americana psychedelic vibe compared to the bluesier Black Crowes). The Chris Robinson Brotherhood had me up out of my seat dancing the afternoon away (and I wasn’t the only one). I look forward to trying to catch a full show from them in the near future.

As the CRB show ended just before 4:30, and that meant I was on my way to briskly walk the 1 ½ miles (that is a number I found from a reviewer for the park, I feel like it may be shorter. It is 75 acres and not very wide, though) from the Northern most stage to the BMO Harris Pavilion on the South end of the park. That is where The Spinners had started their set at 4 p.m. I walk up to the area behind the seats for the stage as they are already performing and into their set. The second song up after I got there was one of their hits ‘I’ll Be Around’ (probably my favorite song by them) and at yet another stage you have the entire crowd up and grooving with the music. For the last hour+ of the set they hit highlight after highlight. They did stop in between almost every song for anecdotes, which usually bugs me, but they were legitimately so funny it was worth it most of the time, and was obviously what their fans wanted from this group. The best was when the lead singer points at an audience member in the front row and starts a bit of a rant (paraphrased) “Now, I don’t know if they played told you this before we came out, and maybe some of you weren’t here…If you do not have our permission to take photos. If you do not have our permission to record songs out here on your phone, and you are looking to post those on the internet for anyone to see. We say (then the entire band steps up to their mics to give the verbal punishment to the crowd)…THANK YOU! He then made a joke about the older generation driving the younger kids off Facebook and continued. He also talked directly to the fan in the front row he originally pointed out for the photos, and asked (I believe it was a woman) her if she had taken him seriously when he acted mad, which she had, and made nice with her with a sincere apology and, of course, more music. The Spinners came up in the shadows of The Temptations and The Four Tops (amongst others) and had a similar sound. They put on a great show that ended about 5:45 p.m. and that was the end of my Friday at Summerfest! A great day of shows!

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Vol. 3, Number 15

Telescopes

Buttercup — Battle of Flowers

Battle of Flowers by Buttercup

Buttercup is a love-of-the-game kind of band, a trio that plays smart, tight, bubbly power pop with a psychedelic sheen. Guitarist Joe Reyes won a Grammy in 2002 for his producing work on Freddy Fender’s La Música de Baldemar Huerta but otherwise he and his bandmates — Erik Sanden and the one-named bassist odie — seem to have left little internet trail. That’s a shame because Battle of Flowers is just so very enjoyable, hooky and engaging with just enough edge to make it stick. “Acting Through Music” chimes and croons and postures like a Teenage Fanclub tune struck by a temporary obsession with “Bohemian Rhapsody,” while “I Love You (You Believed in Me)” is all twitchy, spiky romantic obsession, making fun of itself, but still fundamentally sincere. The best cut, though, and maybe the most resonant right now given what happened in Virginia/New Jersey/Maine etc. last night, is “Henry B. Gonzalez,” a paean to the old school Texas progressive who fought for equality via the filibuster (“for 22 hours, he read the Bible”). It’s the hardest rocking song of the bunch, sweet and abrasive a la Big Star, and exactly what some of us need to hear,  “When did liberal become a bad word? When did liberal become a curse? On Henry B.’s tombstone, it says liberal, it says fighter, democrat, aaaaghhh!”  Ditto to all of that, especially the aaaaaghhh.

Jennifer Kelly

 Chamomile & Whiskey — Sweet Afton (County Wide) 

With a new album named Sweet Afton and a single called “Nelson County,” Chamomile and Whiskey show a commitment to their geography. Set in the band's home region in central Virginia, the music matches, a bouncing Appalachian sound that knows where its roots are. The group – the outgrowth of collaboration between guitarist/singer Koda Kerl and fiddler/vocalist Marie Borgman – pushes back further, though, playing with the Irish connection to their area's mountain music. The phrase “sweet Afton” references not only a Virginia locale but also a Robert Burns poem and Ireland's never far. Connecting modern bluegrass with Celtic roots is not uncommon, but as Chamomile & Whiskey have filled out to a quintet including an Irish-raised banjo player, they've made it a natural connection.  

The album's at its best when it keeps itself a fun romp. The best songs here are bonfire singalongs at heart, even when the musicians' skills elevate them. As you might expect from an act that moves happily between related genres, C&W aren't a one-dimensional act. If “Nelson County” requires car windows to be rolled down, “Thalia” asks its listeners to get in their cups. “Stunt Man” closes the album with an autumnal comedown, a walk outside looking in, casting a chilly feeling wherever you are.  

Justin Cober-Lake

 Elbow — Little Fictions (Concord)

If, when they first appeared, Elbow appeared already ready for middle age, that’s arguably as much because of the fact that they’d been a band for ten years already as anything to do with their actual stylistic or lyrical choices. Still, it’s not surprising at all that aging has treated them very well, albeit this time leaving them without original drummer Richard Jupp (not that tracks like “Gentle Storm” are any less percussion focused). Guy Garvey still has a keen eye for the cutting emotional detail and a voice like a warm sweater (vocally and compositionally he’s somewhere between Peter Gabriel and the National’s Matt Berninger, to take one example before his time and one after), and nothing on the compact, quietly accomplished Little Fictions suggests they’ve lost a step, personnel change or not. You pretty much already know whether you’re interested in Elbow’s music, but anyone on the wavelengths of their sometimes quiet, sometimes gnarled songs of comfort and melancholy will be pleased to find that they persist.  

Ian Mathers

 Fraufraulein—Heavy Objects (Marginal Frequency)

MFCS G | fraufraulein - heavy objects by fraufraulein

Who plays the music and who deals with the baby? New-ish parents Billy Gomberg and Anne Guthrie had to deal with that question as they made Heavy Objects, and that circumstance offers one explanation for the tape’s restraint. While a French horn, bass guitar, digital recorder and synthesizer were all hefted during the recording session, it certainly doesn’t sound like anything heavy was played, let alone dropped. Instead distant environmental recordings negotiate for space with other recordings of hushed in-home activity — the filling of a glass or papers being moved around a table. The musical instruments are heard one note at a time, almost reluctantly, as though whoever was playing them was trying hard not to wake the kid. The result is music well suited to quiet headset listening. Pop the tape in your Walkman or the files in your phone and play them almost subliminally while you shop or stroll, and savor the moment when you can’t tell if the radio or car horn you’re hearing comes from the music or the space you’re traversing. But if you’re easily frightened, you might want to audition side two once in the safety of your home first; I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but there is one sound on it that you’d much rather hear coming from a recording than the street.

Bill Meyer

  Matthew Golombisky—Cuentos Volumes 1 & 2 cassette (Eyes & Ears) 

Matthew Golombisky gets around. He’s spent time in New Orleans, Chicago, Oakland, New York, Asheville and currently lives in Buenos Aires. The bassist has scored films, taught music and held down the groove in countless jazz, pop, and singer/songwriter settings. Despite being the director of Eyes & Ears Records, he hasn’t been particularly diligent in documenting his own music until now. This tape features musicians from Oakland CA and Chicago IL. One side is labeled West Coast, the other Third Coast, but the divide isn’t that tidy, since the California combo includes former Chicagoan/current Copenhagen resident Aram Shelton on reeds. There’s little overlap in the material (over the course of twelve tracks, just one tune gets played by both groups) or line-up (reeds/vibes/cello/acoustic bass guitar on one, trumpet/guitar/contrabass/electric bass guitar on the other), but a fairly consistent chamber jazz vibe. The absence of drums ensures that melodies and interlocking structures are clearly expressed, and whoever carries the tune the most (Shelton and vibraphonist Mark Clifford on the West coast tracks, trumpeter James Davis and bassist Jeff Greene on the Chicago ones) holds the foreground. But cock an ear, and you’ll hear plenty of give and take between the musicians.

Bill Meyer 

Harry Pussy—A Real New England Fuck Up LP (Palilalia)  

You had to be there. There’s just no way to comprehend the impact of Harry Pussy without actually experiencing their volume, aggression, and brevity in real time/volume/injury. Well, not that many people got hurt, except maybe their high-end hearing. And whether you could hear the next day or not, you can say you were levitated by the air-waves radiating away from the collision of experience of Bill Orcutt and Mark Feehan’s high-speed, convoluted riffs and drummer Adris Hoyos building-toppling drumming and mic-swallowing screams. Twenty-odd minutes and it was gone, and only the terminally clueless complained about the set length; everyone else knew they’d been mauled by angels and considered themselves blessed.

 While you had to be there to know, that doesn’t mean recordings are worthless, just inadequate to the task at hand. This LP delivers two sets in glorious speaker-trashing fidelity, one classic example from 1994 and another from 1996. The former documents a night their sound when Orcutt handles the vocals. He can’t muster her scream-power, but the way they rattle and blast off the trio’s playing is still pretty exhilarating. Charalambides guitarist Tom Carter’s liner notes alone are worth the purchase price, but this is an LP, so there’s music, thank God.

Bill Meyer  

The Heliosonic Tone-tette — Heliosonic Toneways, 

Vol. 1 (ScienSonic Laboratories)

Launched in loving observance of the half-century’s worth of rotations around the sun since Sun Ra’s pivotal Heliocentric Worlds project for the ESP label, Heliosonic Toneways, Vol. 1 is a joint venture between nonagenarian Arkestral stalwart Marshall Allen and pan-reed professor Scott Robinson. Both men are known for their fervent multi-instrumentalism, though the expansive setting finds Robinson largely abandoning his voluminous reed arsenal in favor of a different armory that includes electric piano, timpani, theremin, soundsheet, dragon drum and space magnets. In addition to his signature alto, Allen also holds court on three of the eleven pieces from behind the very same bass marimba that Ra used in 1965. The ten-piece group enlisted original engineer Richard Alderson to record the session, although Robinson is careful to point out that all of the music avoids rote derivation from its source of inspiration. Ace sidemen like trombonist Frank Lacy and bass clarinetist JD Parran kick the musical caliber up a notch with an organized band sound that compellingly conveys the cosmic without carrying over into kitsch.

Derek Taylor

 Palberta / No One and the Somebodies — Chips for Dinner (Wharf Cat/Ramp Local) 

 Palberta and No One and the Somebodies share a penchant for bizarre punk that matches lighthearted goofiness and intense attacks. Their split LP Chips for Dinner blows by in 20 minutes, but each group manages to cram in a reasonable expression of they are. No One gets the first five tracks, blending freakouts and noise with classic rock sounds and even a reference — I'm guessing — to Western use of world music. Both “Nü Metal” and “Nü Jazz” are rough send-ups of their titular genres, revealing that this record, without being lazy, is largely about the fun of making it.  

Palberta, coming out of the momentum of this year's Bye Bye Berta, does their weird take on post-punk. Nobody sounds too stable in this group (though if their “Stayin' Alive” cover is fresh in your mind, you don't want stable). It's a late-night walk through a slightly surreal city. “Pharmacy” and “Take You Away” (the latter an oddly long song for the group) narrate and seek to induce psychosis. “Nana” carries a groove, but “Call Me,” while probably in Debbie Harry's city, rolls in the grime and offers little release. The playful release shows one band still energized and another discovering joy in their lack of containment.

Justin Cober-Lake

 Shooting Guns — Flavour Country (RidingEasy Records)

Saskatoon’s own interstellar, pulverizing psych/doom unit Shooting Guns have been frying synapses for over seven years now, but it’s hard not to regard their first proper full length (2013’s Brotherhood of the Ram) as a peak, not least due to a nine and a half minute behemoth called “Motherfuckers Never Learn.” They’ve put out plenty of material since, soundtracks and splits and compilations, but Flavour Country is only their second no-other-qualifications record, and it lives up to those high standards. Opening with a couple of quick, thrashy numbers Shooting Guns set the pace immediately before before blowing it out with the bluesy, low-slung “Beltwhip Snakecharmer,” showing an enviable range and pacing. But as good as the first four tracks are, it’s the two lengthier side two explorations that really lock in and get down to business, whether that’s the steady, harmonica-fulled grind of the title track or “Black Leather Jacket”’s punishing, room melting crawl. Nothing here tops “Motherfuckers Never Learn” in the aggression stakes, but there’s plenty that indicates that Shooting Guns are in it for the long haul.  

Ian Mathers

  Willie “The Lion” Smith & Don Ewell — Grand Piano Duets (Sackville/Delmark) 

Echoing the double entendre of its title, Grand Piano Duets fulfills the promise inherent to the pairing of its reputable principals. Willie “The Lion” Smith was a recognized master who along with the late James P. Johnson and Fats Waller constituted a Holy Trinity of stride pianists. Nearly nineteen years Smith’s junior, Don Ewell embodied a later generation of stride purveyors who developed in the elder’s long shadow. The scheme to team them on record came out of a string of Toronto concerts, first with Ewell solo and later with Smith as formidable foil. Material from those meetings found circulation on the Delmark label and prompted this studio date in early 1967. A danger in these sorts of friendly dust-ups is the musicians playing over each other in the service of bombastic brinksmanship. To their credit, Smith and Ewell manage a fair share of playful and vocal fisticuffs without overstepping into obfuscating bombast or derailing insularity. Piano tandems were already old hat when this encounter of aged mentor and industrious pupil was committed to studio tape. Throughout, Smith and Ewell prove themselves a decidedly separate and tastier kettle of ivory ticklers from the Ferrante & Teicher fare that commonly constituted such ventures in the pop realm of the time.

Derek Taylor

[ravetaper]

Svdden Death Live Set - February 2020 at the Hollywood Palladium (Full Set)

Svdden Death live set recorded February 14, 2020, at the Hollywood Palladium. 90-minute audio recording. The set began at 12:30 am the following morning (Feb. 15).

Every year, someone puts together a spreadsheet of all the artists performing at EDC, with links to various live sets. In the weeks leading up to the event, I do my due diligence and try to preview as many of those live sets as possible, to discover new artists and decide which sets I want to hit. Svdden Death was on last year's list (EDC Las Vegas 2019). I scanned his live recordings and thought they sounded good – I would try to make his set. And since he would be playing the Basspod stage immediately before Snails – who I wasn't going to miss – the plan made perfect sense.

The only question was if I could get to the Basspod on time. I had only 15 minutes to get there after Chris Lake's set ended at Cosmic Meadow. I would have to circumnavigate thousands of bodies and literally jog across the Speedway to catch the beginning of Svdden Death's set.

Unfortunately, I encountered a problem. I thought I dropped the battery cover for one of my cameras, and I felt compelled to retrace my steps and search the ground for it. Of course I didn't find it. I forgot I had slipped it into a small pocket in my backpack – which I only discovered once I was back home. That delay would cause me to miss the beginning of Svdden Death.

When I finally reached Basspod and moved into position, I realize how bad I screwed up. Svdden Death was playing some really heavy tracks, and I instantly regretted I wasn't recording. But I wasn't only moved by the music. I was struck by the unusual visuals displayed on the huge LED panels.

The imagery included computer generated skulls, skeletons, demonic-looking warriors, pagan symbols, horned figures. Quite frankly, a lot of the imagery looked satanic in nature! I was intrigued. Not because I'm attracted to Satanism – I'm definitely not – but because the whole production was a novel approach I hadn't seen before, at least not in any genres of dance music. Such imagery had been used by several hard rock and heavy metal bands – Ozzy Osborn and Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, and Metallica, to name a few, and helped create many memorable – and financially successful – brands. Furthermore, this was the imagery of Dungeons & Dragons – one of my childhood passions! To be sure, videos of demons and devils and skulls contradicted the PLUR vibe that characterizes EDC, but that was one of the reasons I found it so endearing. It was so different, and so unusual in that context.

Of course, video alone doesn't make a great set. But Svdden Death was dropping tunes that were extraordinary, hard riddim and dubstep that perfectly complimented the eerie visuals. The whole experience really left a positive impression on me. To me, it was the most unique set of the weekend.

Indeed, not recording Svdden Death's set was my biggest regret from EDC 2019. I vowed to catch him again, as soon as possible.

So I was elated when I saw that Bassrush would bring him to the Palladium in Hollywood. Tickets were a bargain - $40 for GA if I recall correctly. This was a no-brainer. I secured my ticket and waited for the days to pass.

Originally, I hadn't planned on recording. I figured trying to sneak in some kind of gear would be a hassle and cause unnecessary stress. I thought I would just go to the show and enjoy the music.

But my compulsion to record got the best of me!

I can't stand the idea of missing an opportunity to record really good music! Going to a show and enjoying the moment, living in the present, sounds reasonable – I get it. But there is something in my DNA that makes me want to document things. I just love capturing the good moments of my life and having the freedom to enjoy them again and again.

So with only a few hours before show time, I decided I would go for it. But I wasn't sure what gear I would use. I could try to bring in one of my Zoom cameras. At the security checkpoint I would have to put it in the tray along with my cell phone, wallet, and keys, and hope the security guard didn't think it was a "professional" recorder, which is prohibited by the house rules. In reality, the Zoom cameras do not qualify as pro gear – they are designed for armature use. But, I didn't want to risk getting denied and having to do the walk of shame back to my car.

I had another option. I had an old Tascam mic that attaches to older iPhones. I would have to use an awkward Lightening adapter and find an app that worked with the mic – the original Tascam app was no longer supported. After searching Google, I found an app that supposedly was compatible with the mic. I downloaded, tested it...and it worked! I quickly freed a few gigs of memory on my phone and headed out the door.

I arrived at the Hollywood Palladium not long after the doors opened. Suffice to say, I got the mic through security – I was in the clear!

There were several opening acts: AHZ, Neonix, Aweminus, Phiso, and Marauda. AHZ was cool live band that played dubstep. Neonix and Phiso were good. I decided I would get into position and do a test run of the app by recording Marauda's set. The app seemed to work, no crashes or any other issues. Marauda's set was pretty good, too.

Finally, it was time for Svdden Death!

The set started strong, the music was like what I heard at EDC – deep, dark, and powerful. Sure enough, the massive screens showed images of red and white skulls, barbed wire, and ominous figures. YES!

Let me take a moment to describe how I capture the audio in situations like this. Selfie sticks are not allowed, so I have to literally hold up my arm high enough above the crowd to get a clear line of sight between the mic and the speakers. Every few minutes, as one arm gets tired, I have to switch hands. Now, if I was doing this at a nice classical music concert, that would be easy. But this is the opposite that! I am positioned in a sea of tightly-packed bodies dancing and jumping to the music. And of course, there's another interesting phenomenon seen at many dubstep shows: the mosh pit.

Every few songs, a pit opens up and the sweaty bros (and a few brave gals) do their thing – pushing, flailing, and bouncing off each other as if they were human pinballs. I myself am not into mosh pits, but I can tolerate them. If others enjoy moshing, good for them – have at it! The problem for me is that I'm standing in the middle of the floor, with my arm up in the air, trying to make a recording. More than a few times there were two pits happening, one in front of me and one in back. I'm a pretty sturdy guy, so I can usually keep my balance and stay stable. But a few times a mass of bodies slam into my area causing me to stumble. You'll be able to hear it a couple times on the recording. Luckily, I didn't get hurt, and the recording never stopped. And a few times a few observant fellows noticed what I was trying to do, leaned in and told me they "had my back", and made sure no one came crashing into me.

By the end of the night, I was covered in sweat...other people's sweat! LOL.

I guess I just want my followers to know what I have to go through to get some of these recordings – it can get pretty extreme at times. But I wouldn't have it any other way. Despite the fact that I'm twice the age of most of the audience, I love getting down there into the mass of bodies and fully experiencing the energy of the event. At least once in a while. ;)

About 45 minutes into Svdden Death's 90-minute set, there was a noticeable change. Whereas the first half incorporated some uplifting tunes by Marshmellow and other "poppy" artists, the second half had a darker and more underground sound.

And then, it happened...

For a moment, Svdden Death disappeared behind the table. Then, he reappeared...wearing a sinister-looking mask! I guess it's an elk's skull complete with horns! Seriously, it looked like something out of a Netflix horror series. It was freaky, but somehow completely appropriate. Think about all the artists that use some kind of headgear – Deadmau5, Marshmellow, and of course the dance music robots, Daft Punk. So for Svdden Death, a satanic-looking animal skull worked perfectly.

A few minutes later, I was in the throes of a particularly intense mosh pit. I had to fully concentrate just to stay upright while keeping the phone in the air. Then, I looked up and had to do a double-take.

There he was, with the animal head mask on, floating 20 feet above the DJ table, looking like the incarnation of some kind of pagan deity. He had hooked into a high wire rig and was hoisted into the air. With the lights and lasers running full blast, the sight was surreal and amazing! This was a fantastic show!

Again, I take such imagery with a grain of salt. Is Svdden Death really caught up in the world of Satanism or pagan rituals? I have no clue and I really don't care. And I doubt he is. I think it's just brilliant marketing, and it makes for a very entertaining experience.

During this second half of the show, another logo was broadcast on the screens that I didn't recognize. The text wasn't easily legible – the font looked like a mess of tangled tree roots. It wasn't until I got home that I learned about Voyd, Svdden Death's alter ego who wears the mask and plays darker variations of riddim and dubstep. So this show featured both sides of Svdden Death, and it was a perfect mix.

I consider myself very lucky. I was there that night in Hollywood, when Svdden Death sold out the Palladium. I got to see a "regular" set and a Voyd set. And I predict that Svdden Death's career is just beginning. Wait and see how he gets better timeslots at EDC and other festivals. But I was there is the early days, when he was still young up-and-coming. I was lucky.

Fortunately, the recording came out pretty good. The raw file sounded rather flat, but with a bit of tweaking and massaging, the final product sounds decent. In fact it sounds really solid. I'm listening back to it right on now on headphones, and it brings me right back to that special night. My obsession for recording live events has paid off big this time. I hope you enjoy this one as much as I do.

Listen to Svdden Death on Spotify!

Follow Svdden Death on Twitter!

Buy Svdden Death music on Apple Music!

[tanyaodebra]

You 2.2: “Just the Tip” – Of the Iceberg

“Just the Tip” opens on a fish market, because so many things about both Joe and Love are very fucking fishy. Catfish, anyone? (The penis-y title paired with a vaginal allusion has not gone unnoticed, btw.) Our resident cool girl saunters from table to table loudly demonstrating her seafood savvy, so I’m holding strong to the idea that she might be baiting our antihero to serve him on a platter. Unable to stay in reality for two consecutive minutes, Joe takes a stroll down memory lane to the moment he believes his Love story began – one whole week ago with his arrival at LAX. There he spots a celeb to whom he immediately and favorably compares himself by employing the ultimate backdoor brag, praising himself for being so humble. Must be tough to be perfect.

The next stop on Joe’s journey to Love brings us to the inception of his new identity, where the real Will Bettelheim shows just how much he deserves everything that’s coming to him by daring to bitch about GMOs and the state of animal farming in Joe’s presence. Joe has hired Will to scrub his identity, but that’s not good enough for our Joe. As usual, he wants what he can’t, or shouldn’t, have; in this case, it’s Will’s identity. In a moment of cosmic irony, Will blurts out the whole conceit for You, that no one ever suspects white guys. He quickly feels the consequences of his own miscalculation as Joe cracks his skull with a cement brick. The timeline jumps ahead close to where we left off at the end of the last episode, when Joe is trying to figure out who Jasper is and why he came looking for Will. Shocker, the guy Joe hired off Craigslist and who had to scrub his own identity is into some shady shit. Looks like Will owes Dark Web Jasper three large for services never rendered. This is no sweat for a professional book counterfeiter like Joe, especially since LA is full of dumb-dumbs who will buy anything. Something about this feels a little too easy.

Back to the fishmonger’s ball where Love, who is serving major Liv Tyler in Empire Records vibes, demonstrates that she has absolutely zero healthy boundaries by kissing Joe for the first time completely out of the blue. A sucker for “romance,” Joe takes his own slapshot in this game of tonsil hockey and gets nothing but net with the catch of the day. Uh-oh, look out. Is that… Beck lurking in the shadows? Ex-girlfriends, amirite? They just don’t know when to stay dead and buried. Lucky for Joe, she’s vanished as swiftly as she appeared. In the meantime, Joe the daydreamer has missed Love’s proposition: lunch with her friends. If memory serves, Joe wasn’t too fond of his old girlfriend’s pals. In fact, he even murdered one (RIP Peach Salinger). That Love is pressing Joe to meet her buddies so soon might be another hint that she is fucking with him. Or maybe she’s a big old roll of cling-wrap attempting to cover the world’s deepest black hole, and now he’s going for a walk on the stalk-ee side of the street. Either way, it’s pretty karmic.

Out at the dumpster behind Anavrin, an affable fellow calls out to Joe, or rather, to Will. Jasper (Steven W. Bailey) isn’t nearly as scary as we may have imagined, and it seems Joe will be able to pay up and be done with the whole messy business – that is, until Joe discovers Will owes fifty grand, not three. And here’s where the joke in the title of the episode pays off. Jasper cuts off the tip of Joe’s pinky finger, throws it on ice and keeps it as collateral for the balance of the debt, all with a smile on his face. Looks like Joe should have listened to his mentor, Ellie, when she called the guy a creep. When Joe circles back to the plexiglass prison where he’s storing the real Will, he finds a sniveling mess in dire need of his meds. Even though Will can barely function, he’s somehow able to recall a fifty thousand-dollar IOU Joe can claim. In order to hunt those ducats, Joe must cancel his lunch date with Love and her squad. Upon receiving the news, Love, who knows no bounds, returns a text with a fucking phone call. Like, I don’t believe in The Rules, but come on. Show a modicum of chill. Of course, Lonely Boy doesn’t have any boundaries either, so he finds this adorable. He comes up with an alibi blaming Forty, which Love does not seem to buy, and decides to go to the lunch anyway in the capacity of a cap-wearing creep peeping from behind a plant. To Joe’s surprise, the group decides they like the sound of him, and he reciprocates with his own stamp of approval. It seems Beck’s ghost does not approve of Joe’s happiness, because here she is again, cockblocking from the other side.

Remember Joe has a severed finger? He finally does, too. Joe must endure a noontime LA party to find Will’s debtor, Rufus, endearingly named in a nod to Penn Badgley’s Gossip Girl father. Guests at the party just will not believe that Joe is not John Mayer, and they honestly might be right. Dude looks EXACTLY like John Mayer, a true fact that I hadn’t noticed before. As he traipses around the party, he spots the celeb from the airport –  a comedian named Hendy (Chris D’Elia). Guess who else is at this party? Delilah the landlady. Small world made smaller by the fact that she knows Rufus, and also Hendy. When he notice’s Joe’s hand, Hendy recommends the same microsurgeon as Jake, which shores up Joe’s good opinion of Hendy earlier earned in a brief Google search. Delilah vehemently disagrees, storming out of the party. We learn later that Hendy raped her when she was seventeen. Delilah points to this experience as the reason she sees right through Joe’s bullshit – she knows he’s bad news and she warns him to stay away from her and Ellie. Back at the party, Joe finds Rufus who hands over a huge bag, not of money but of pills – Will’s meds.

Joe doubles back to his (or Will’s) place to tend to his wound, and of course Love turns up uninvited, and she is displeased. You guys, I fucking love soap operas. Guess who Forty is to her? Her fucking TWIN BROTHER! I live for this shit. According to common knowledge, twins share everything, so now Love knows Joe lied about his reason for bailing on her friends. While Joe spins some wild yarn in his head about doing all this crazy shit so they can be together, she whips out the dead husband card in order to emotionally strongarm Joe into being her boyfriend. And since this is exactly the type of shit Joe lives for, everybody’s favorite ghost steals the scene again, which makes Joe flip his lid. It’s like, can’t a guy do a few little murders and then live in blissful peace? Love draws the line at yelling (boy is she in for a surprise if she gets to see his true colors) and hightails it out of there. Perfect, because Joe really needs to see to that finger.

Joe meets Jasper at the storage unit. Seeing that he’s never going to raise his dough from the whimpering puddle otherwise known as Will, Jasper lunges at Joe. But Joe is a seasoned killer and he takes Jasper out lickety-split, butchering him Sweeney Todd-style and ditching trash bags filled with his ground-up body in a dumpster. Right alongside this scene, Love hacks away at a rack of lamb with a large butcher knife. As she prepares the rest of her dinner, she cracks a couple of eggs with one hand. Vivisected balls much? Joe shows up at Love’s door – even that psychopath knows to text first – and he bravely drops the knowledge he learned from Beck’s ghost; it’s not that he’s afraid of getting hurt, it’s that he’s afraid of hurting her. Love does all the heavy lifting for him and warps this loud siren into whatever she wants to hear, which is that they need to be in a relationship. Let me remind you once again that it has only been ONE WEEK. Love pulls the classic high school move of claiming friendship when her motives of partnering are so, so transparent. Both are playing this game, though, so Joe is delighted by her willingness to wait for him. Aw! Gross!

And just like that, old Joe is right back in his comfort zone – panty-snatchin’ and trophy-hidin’. This is a pretty high bar to set for episode two; Joe’s only been in LA for one week and he’s already got a body count. Can’t wait for episode three! See You then!

[killprettymagazine]

Never Again - An Edible Marijuana Horror Story

“Never again” is a phrase that you should utter with decreasing frequency as you mature: You should learn from your mistakes.  When you’re a kid, the world is full of sparkly phenomena, and you have not yet accrued enough disappointments to employ skepticism in investigating the seemingly endless sources of sparkle.  When you’re nine-years-old, for instance, you may not have yet learned that candied apples are detestable pieces of shit.  Imagine a giant apple that you can hold on a stick, like a king with a goddamned scepter, encapsulated by a reflective deep red coating.  Just the sound it must make when you bite into it, that crunch – you’re left with no choice but to force your parent or legal guardian to buy you one.  Then you try one.  It turns out that you can’t eat this magical apple like you would a regular apple, expecting each bite to be covered by a proportionate coating of candy, because hard candy doesn’t break like that; it shatters into many hostile shards of candy that annihilate your teeth.  It turns out, shards.  It turns out that if you wanted to, you could theoretically break the apple and use it as a fucking weapon.  And all that work and torture went into unearthing the most flavorless, soul-crushing apple variety: A Granny Smith.  Is it any wonder that so many of us develop trust issues as adults?

Sometimes, after experiencing a never again situation, you’re struck by a wave of amnesia and get pushed back into a neutral pre-trauma state.  Unfortunately, when this happens, the universe is burdened with the task of correcting you in a more memorable manner.

A few months ago, I suffered a bout of this type of amnesia during an ill-fated trip to a pot dispensary.  While there, I was brazen enough to pose the question, “Why don’t I ever get edibles when I shop here?” 

(As a side note, yes, I used the word “shop” in this context: While I am an avid believer in the medicinal benefits of pot, whose properties are vastly complex, visiting a dispensary sure doesn’t feel very medically official. You’d be hard-pressed to find a medication called “Alaskan Thunderfuck” at a conventional pharmacy). 

After interacting with the budtender at the dispensary - whose white lab coat, long Zen master’s beard and cosmic presence made me feel like I was talking to God - I got home and prepared for an epic night.  I purchased a ribeye that was so beautiful that I felt like I should apologize to it for the mess in my kitchen.  I was going to cook it sous vide at 130 degrees and then sear it to perfection in clarified butter.  Coltrane’s Giant Steps.  16-year-old single malt Macallan.  Porn, probably.  I ate half of one of the grown-up lozenges that I procured and risky-business’ed my way into the shower.

As I dried off with a towel, I felt the first signs of tingling in my toes; a very welcome sensation. About 20 minutes later, as I was tinkering with the immersion circulator, I still only felt the tingling.  “Shouldn’t I be giggling by now?” I wondered, “I’m preparing a bath for a steak while wearing a robe and I have a mustache.  I look like I’m about to fuck this steak.”  But my high seemed to be reaching stasis and I was not about to settle for the smooth jazz of evenings after dropping $25 on a single piece of meat.  I popped the other half of the lozenge in my mouth and proceeded with my grooming routine as the steak-bath reached temperature.

By the time the immersion circulator reached 130 degrees, a smile appeared on my face.  “That’s more like it,” I thought, “now I can honor the bull that was sacrificed for this evening appropriately.”  I would have never guessed that the next five hours of my life would consist of scrotum-gripping dread.

The first signs of trouble appeared as I removed the steak from the butcher paper in preparation for its bath.  I unwrapped the packet and stared in horror at the practically pulsating piece of flesh that I was about to consume.  I must have stared at the thing for the better part of five minutes.  “Oh, Christ,” I thought, “Not again.  I’ve already been through this – I’m not going to become a vegetarian.”  But I could not tolerate the idea of eating this steak so I wrapped it back up and returned it to the fridge, where I hoped it would be safe from whatever awful force was possessing me.  I opted for a couple of potatoes that I “baked” in the microwave.

As the potatoes cooked, which could have occupied anywhere from a few minutes to several weeks, I noticed that I could feel my heart beating in my chest without touching it.  “Does it always do that?” I wondered.  Suddenly concerned, I elected to take my own pulse; I placed my index and middle fingers on my wrist and started counting.  I kept losing my place and had to start over, again and again, which it turned out did not help my anxiety.  But I’m not a quitter; I would take my own pulse come hell or high water.  As I counted, it occurred to me that I had no clue about what constituted a normal or an abnormal pulse.  “Who do I think I am,” I thought, “a fucking doctor?”  But I continued to count for some reason.  My efforts were then interrupted by a heinously loud siren, which catapulted me out of my kitchen chair.  “JESUS CHRIST!” I exclaimed.  I no longer had to check my pulse; I knew that it was off the charts at this point.  I was on the verge of weeping from fear – then I realized that my potatoes were done.

I opened the microwave door to retrieve my potatoes, which now resembled the wrinkly testicles of a 90-year-old, and realized that I did not have enough saliva in my mouth to move my tongue, let alone to eat potatoes – the driest of root vegetables.  I shut the door, imprisoning the potatoes in the microwave.  It was time to lie down.  

“This lozenge is very, very mellow,” the budtender at the dispensary said.  “You’ll hardly notice that you’re high,” he said.  “One might not even be enough for you,” he said.  As the second half of the lozenge high-fived the first that was already reclining in a La-Z-Boy somewhere in my amygdala, I fantasized about finding that budtender, yanking him by his wizard’s beard and screaming, “IS THIS WHAT YOU MEANT BY ‘VERY, VERY MELLOW,’ YOU FECKLESS TURD?”  I wanted to strap him into a “good vibe” equivalent of an electric chair and pump him with the strongest possible current of good vibes until he exploded into a supernova of ineffectuality.  Because I wasn’t mellow, I was going to die.  I’m not using the phrase “going to die” to indicate that I was in any actual danger, nor in a histrionic Morrissey sense (…and you go home and you cry and you want to die).  No, as far as I knew, I was dying. 

I’ve danced around the rainbow of anxiety experiences in my life, including several shades located in the “bad pot trip” wavelength.  Most pot anxiety I’ve experienced, while often terrible, is usually short-lived: You smoke, the effects come on and intensify rapidly, you panic, you take a benzodiazepine (at least if you’re me) and 15 minutes later you’re back to watching cat videos on YouTube and eating pretzels.  Easy as pie.  This, on the other hand, was like some archaic form of corporal punishment – like being chained to a giant rock and then pushed off a cliff into the sea.

I was now curled up in the fetal position on my bed, my whole body trembling violently; I was a six-foot vibrator.  “W-w-when will it stop?” I might have said out loud.  The Ativan wasn’t working.  It occurred to me that I had no idea how much time had elapsed since I had placed the tiny pill under my tongue so I grabbed a small alarm clock that was on my nightstand and placed it right in front of my face on the opposite pillow.  It looked like the clock and I had just finished making love.  Then I realized that tracking time might not be such a great idea so I buried the clock under the covers and proceeded with my trembling regimen.   

At this point, my anxiety was so severe that my perception of reality started to waver; I felt like I was in a movie or a dream.  I was so scared that nothing around me seemed real and, every time I thought my fear could not become any more severe, I was proven wrong.  “Aren’t I supposed to be enlightened by now?” I wondered.  I was hitherto under the impression that if I would experience a state of fear that was adequately extreme, I would ultimately be led into a state of oceanic tranquility and be one with the cosmos.  “That Alan Watts didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about!” I thought. 

It was now 1:23 AM according to the clock that I hid under the covers.  My anxiety was not letting up and I was hallucinating.  I needed to talk to someone, preferably a human.  I needed to hear something other than my auditory hallucinations or the sound of my absurdly dry “NPR” mouth, the latter of which was really starting to grate on my nerves.  I didn’t want to call any relatives because I was worried about being chided for my weed blunder.  I called one of my friends but he was busy.  Then I suddenly remembered a recent conversation with another friend who, upon learning that I was going through a bad breakup, made the mistake of telling me that I could call him whenever I wanted if I needed to talk. 

“Did I wake you?” I asked.  “Umm, no,” he groaned in response.  “Yes, I did.”  Silence.  “I’m having the worst anxiety attack I’ve ever had.  I’m gonna die.”  “You’re not going to die.  Just breathe.”  The conversation consisted mainly of me proclaiming that I was going to die and my friend telling me that I was not dying.  He eventually tried to distract me by transitioning to other subjects but I could not focus on what he was saying.  At one point, it occurred to me that he was talking about Jeff Goldblum for a reason that was beyond my comprehension to such an extent that I considered taking another Ativan.  If I was going to die, I really hoped that my last conversation would not be about Jeff Goldblum.

After about 40 minutes on the phone, multiple references to Jeff Goldblum and several hundred “I’m gonna die’s,” I felt an internal release.  Finally, after about five hours of swimming through the rectum of the psychedelic spectrum, I was free.  I suddenly realized that my friend was still talking.  Eventually, noting my silence he asked, “You doing better?”  “I think so,” I said, “I’m starving now.”  I remembered that I still had those delicious wrinkled potatoes.  While cradling the phone on my shoulder, I walked over to the kitchen and opened the microwave door.  The potatoes looked like Guantanamo Bay detainees.  I suddenly remembered Obama’s quote, “…under my administration the United States does not torture” and started laughing maniacally.  I couldn’t breathe.  I tried to share this thought with my friend.  “I’m going to sleep,” he responded.  I continued laughing when I got off the phone.  I ate the potatoes and went to sleep, occasionally bursting into laughter in the dark. 

The next day I woke up and treated myself to a ribeye breakfast.  As I chewed the steak, I reflected on the events of the previous evening and wondered, “Was that a valuable experience?”  I concluded that it might have been but only in the crudest sense.  It would be like saying that the experience of intentionally hitting yourself in the balls was a valuable experience because it taught you not to do that.  Would you really have to be doubled in pain to figure that one out?  Still, I can say with gusto that I would sooner wipe my ass with a cactus than ever ingest another edible.  Never, ever again.

[madathockey]

Arsonist’s Lullabye (soulmate au) ♥ ( ao3 )

RATING: pg-13 WORD COUNT: 2041 RELATIONSHIP: Jake McCabe/Rasmus Ristolainen 

The experts say that you tend to find your soulmate by the time you turn 21. It’s supposed to be the last thing you do before you’re truly an adult. That really doesn’t explain why Jake is sitting here, 22 years old, and alone in his thoughts with no soulmate to be found. He heard tales of people never finding them because their soulmate died before they could meet or just some people being unlucky and not having one at all. Jake thinks he’s one of the unlucky ones, though his parents remind him that it’s possible that because his life took a different path, he just hasn’t gotten lucky yet. He thinks it’s all bullshit and is ready to live his life without one at this point.

The locker room was humming with the familiar noises. Jake was trying to focus because even though he was told he’d have a place on the team, he felt like he still needed to prove it. He could see Jack and Samson circling each other like some cosmic force was pulling them together. He heard rumors that they were soulmates, but he figured it wasn’t his business to ask. Plus, he couldn’t see any markings on them, so he wasn’t going to assume anything. He knew Tyler and Marcus were soulmates for sure. Management was quick to let him know the situation and warned him that if there were issues, he’d be shipped off. Watching them fascinated Jake because they were somewhere between a platonic and romantic bond. They acted like bros that just were really close with each other. The mark they had was easy to see too, so there was no questioning what they were. Jake quickly thought that he’d settle for a bond like that, if just so he had someone.

“The rookies are really something aren’t they?” Jake heard Marcus shift next to him.

“I’m technically a rookie too. So I guess I’m something?” Jake felt that he needed to stress that he might not be here because he’s also a rookie. He heard Marcus let out a laugh.

“Nah dude, you’re mature and composed. You also don’t have the weight of this city on you like they do.” Marcus had a point. Jake wasn’t even marked as the future of the defense core. He was just there for now and who knew where he’d be at the end of the season. He looked up and saw Jack throwing balls of tape into Samson’s hair and he couldn’t help but smile at them.

“They’re bonded you know? Once it happened management rushed to keep it a secret. I don’t think it should be one in here especially if it turns out to be a romantic bond. I don’t want to see any of those private moments and a warning would be nice.” So the rumors were true, which made me Jake feel a twinge of jealousy.

“Yeah, I don’t care what they do at home but I don’t want it getting too awkward in here.” Jake laughed and saw Tyler looking at them.

“Off to do our thing. Try to look up dude, you’re good and will stay. Plus, they can’t leave Rasmus alone for too long. He starts to get touchy and wants to fight whatever Swede we have in the locker room. Mostly Larry, but Lehner might actually jump to the challenge one of these days.” Marcus got up and walked across the room to hang off Tyler.

Jake couldn’t help but smile at the thought of Rasmus trying to pick fights. He was so quiet and kept to himself. Not that Jake noticed too much, but for someone who was so flashy and loud on the ice, he was the opposite when around the other guys. What Jake has noticed was how well dressed the Finn was everyday and wished he had half the style.

Jake gathered his stuff up and headed out to the ice. The first real game was tomorrow and he really wanted to put the work in. When he hit the ice he noticed his defence partner was chatting with Larry. It didn’t seem like they were going to fight, but he still was careful of what Marcus said. As he grabbed a puck to start a drill, he felt the cool spray of ice as Rasmus had skated over to him and stopped just short of hitting him.

“We’re partners.” Rasmus smiled and offered a gloved fist out for a fistbump. Jake obliges and just nods.

As the practice continued on, Jake felt like he was settling into his skin a bit more. He felt his skin was warmer than usual, but he dismissed it as a good long practice finally getting him into the groove.

When practice was over, he couldn’t wait to be out of his gear, so Jake started to strip the gear off him as everyone filed back to the locker room. The warm feeling wasn’t going away, even with a cooler shower to help him out. As he left the shower and headed back to the locker room, his shoulder brushed Rasmus’ arm. In that moment, he felt like his skin caught on fire yet his veins had turned to ice. What he felt on his shoulder was nothing less than of a branding iron. Then some memories started to flash in his head; A young blonde boy learning to skate on a pond, that boy as a teenager having his first kiss, and then a smiling draft day. Then Jake heard something new in his head.

“Vittujen kevät ja kyrpien takatalvi!”

That voice wasn’t Jake’s nor were those words. It had happened and he wasn’t sure what was going on or if it was even the right person.

Jake looked over to his shoulder and he saw the outline of a lion starting to ink itself on his skin. He looked up and saw a handful of stars starting to appear on the pale skin that Rasmus has. It was breathtakingly beautiful. He realized what had just happened and who the voice belonged to.

“I don’t know what you said, but I get it dude. I really get it.” Jake sighed and quickly covered his shoulder and rushed into the locker room to grab his things. He didn’t want this to be a thing the locker room knew about right away so he tossed a shirt over his shoulder and tried to make it casual. The pain from the mark wasn’t helping the case for making it casual and putting something on it only served to make it hurt more.

“I can feel that. Whatever you’re doing to it, stop” Rasmus wasn’t freaking out as much Jake thought he should be.

“I don’t know if you noticed, but it’s also hurting me and would you stop making that thought at me?” Jake winced as he put on his shirt. Rasmus was thinking how he’ll get to help Jake dress better and right now really wasn’t the time for that. There were much bigger things to deal with, like finding out if it was romantic or platonic.

“Google?” For someone so quiet, it seemed that Rasmus was coming across as more of a smartass than Jake really wanted to deal with at the moment. And no, he wasn’t going to google what kind of bond they had. That was just silly.

Jake grabbed his things and walked as quickly as he could to his car without drawing attention. He fired off an excuse about wanting to get a nap in. He was halfway across the parking lot when he felt a hand on his shoulder and a searing pain started shooting down his arm.

“WHAT DID YOU DO THAT FOR?!?” Jake couldn’t help but be furious. Rasmus knew that spot already hurt. Hell, he felt the pain himself, so why did he think it was smart to touch it?

“Sorry. I wanted to see if you wanted to get coffee?” It was posed like a question, probably so that Jake had an out. He wanted to talk about this but it was a lot for one day and he just wanted to go home.

“Or we can go to your place?” Jake was going to have to learn how to not send every single thought to him. This was bordering on creepy.

“My place is fine. Do you want to follow behind or ride with me? I can bring you back later to grab your car.” Jake opened his car door because the vibes he was getting was that they were going to ride together.

Rasmus climbed into the car and Jake realized he didn’t think to ask how his arm was feeling. He wasn’t getting any pain vibes from the Finn so it was hard to gauge if he was in as much pain. Once he started to drive, he got the courage to ask.

“How come you’re not in pain like I am? You’re sitting there all normal and I’m trying to not touch anything because it hurts so much.”  Rasmus shifted in his seat at the question. Jake almost regretted asking because he looked so uncomfortable.

“It’s not my first one.”

Jake didn’t know how to respond to that so he turned the radio on. He could feel some nostalgia riding off Rasmus, which was a bit confusing to Jake because he thought that you could only get a new mark if your previous soulmate died.

When they got to his place, he tossed Rasmus his keys and told him to head on in. Jake pulled out his phone and opened up Google.

>how to tell if a soulmark is platonic?

“I thought you weren’t going to google that.” Jake quickly pockets his phone and his cheeks start to flush a deep red. So obviously Rasmus knew what he was doing.

“I just thought I’d give it a shot. It wasn’t a terrible idea.” Jake followed Rasmus inside the house and tossed his jacket on the back of a chair.

“Was google helpful?” Rasmus was smirking and Jake had a feeling he would be dealing with a smartass forever.

“I don’t know, I didn’t get a chance to look at anything. Do you have any answers since you’ve been through this before or do you just plan on being a smartass about everything?” Rasmus smiled at him and then slowly pulled up his shirt. He then shifted his waistband a bit lower and Jake could see a black spade on his hipbone.

“I have some answers if you want to talk.” Jake nodded and they went to the couch. Rasmus put his clothes back in place, but he was giving off wistful vibes through the link.

Jake tried to send back comfort, but being new to this, he didn’t know exactly how to do it.

“Just wish them through. All you have to do is have the empathy and you can share feelings.”

Jake tried again and he saw Rasmus sink back into the couch a bit more. He’s starting to get the hang of this.

“I had another soulmate, but he didn’t die. He fell in love with someone else after he got traded so we broke our bond so he could be with them.” Rasmus sent some memories of his old soulmate to Jake and Jake understood that the bond he had before was platonic. He nodded at Rasmus.

“So it was platonic and you just wanted him to be happy?” Jake asked cautiously.

“Yes, he’s happy. We’re still good friends. The thing is, this doesn’t feel like the same as before.” Rasmus looked down at his hands and Jake couldn’t help but glance at them as well. He knew what that meant.

A romantic bond didn’t mean there would be magic right away and Jake has been with guys in the past. The NTDP was an interesting place for sure. He had to admit it was something he was interested in. He found Rasmus attractive and while he tries his hardest to not peek in the locker room, he’s stolen a few glances.

“So how do we do this? I know we should probably tell management tomorrow, but how do we do the whole ‘us’ thing?” Jake projected some feelings of attraction to Rasmus and quickly felt them reciprocated.

“We just try. We don’t have to rush anything.” Jake smiled because he knew that he could at least try. It was something he wanted for years.

He leaned forward and as he started to do that, Rasmus moved towards him. The kiss was tentative, but he felt like he was flying. He opened his eyes and Rasmus moved in again and they were kissing for real. Jake felt like his body was surging with energy and all he could think was how much he loved it.

He pulled away and looked at Rasmus. He could feel his energy being projected back and he sighed happily.

“We can try.”

[sinceileftyoublog]

Chuck Mead Interview: Hit It, Get It, and Quit It

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Context isn’t everything, but it can often shape the mood of a record. Such is the case with Close To Home, the new one from Nashville-based Americana artist Chuck Mead. Recorded in the legendary Sam Phillips Recording studio in Memphis and produced by Matt Ross-Spang, Close To Home is a record of true stories and legends, featuring with some Memphis stalwarts, exemplary of the loose expansiveness of the Home of the Blues as opposed to the concision of Music City, laden with Mead’s quintessential sense of humor and just enough sincerity to evade corniness. 

On Close To Home, there are songs of devotion that tackle both moods: For instance, “My Baby’s Holding It Down”, Mead’s sweet tribute to his wife who looks after his home when he’s on tour, is a non-traditional juxtaposition with a song like “Daddy Worked The Pole”. That one’s about a man who got a job hanging telephone wire so his wife wouldn’t have to work the kind of pole that normally comes to mind--until she started stripping so he didn’t have to work. “Billy Doesn’t Know He’s Bad” and “There’s Love Where I Come From” occupy two sides of the same coin, the former an exasperated look at a sociopathic outlaw and the latter an ode to inclusiveness, both songs in it for the good guys. The distorted country rock of “Big Bear in the Sky” references Native American lore; the title track tackles the eerie prescience of songs on the radio. But as serious as Mead gets, he’s also having loads of fun, with the bayou grooves of “Shake”, barroom piano of “Tap Into Your Misery”, and reggae blues of “I’m Not The Man For The Job”. Perhaps the most ramshackle is the old-school hillbilly burner “Better Than I Was (When I Wasn’t So Good)”, which ends with a snippet of the recording of the song itself. “Did that sound drunk enough?” asks bassist Mark Andrew Miller with an appropriate drawl.

I spoke to Mead over the phone last week about Close To Home, and my main takeaway was that his personality was reminiscent of the album itself. Friendly, engaged, unafraid to tell me when I was wrong about the record, and possessing of a penchant for quotes, quotables, and non-sequitir, Mead was a delight to talk to. He’s coming to City Winery on Thursday for The Cosmic Honky-Tonk Revue, a co-headlining tour with Jim Lauderdale and Jason Ringenberg, all backed by his band, the Grassy Knoll Boys. Read the interview below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: What about Close to Home is unique to you as compared to your previous records?

Chuck Mead: The lion’s share of what I record is in Nashville, so going to Memphis to do it is a departure. To put yourself in a different place--and there were a couple of songs we had been playing for a little while that took on a different dimension just because of where we were and the studio we were in, the Sam Phillips Recording studio he built in 1962 when he left Sun [Records]  and had enough money to do what he wanted to do. My buddy Matt Ross-Spang is a great producer and is the manager for the place now doing a lot of great work. Just tapping into the spirit of Sam Phillips, where anything can happen.

SILY: The title of the record is taken from the idea of songs that “hit close to home.” Were you playing with the idea that home is not as much a concrete place as it is a feeling?

CM: Yeah, I guess you could say that. You’re always close to home. Home is where the heart is...on the bus! Sorry, that’s a Frank Zappa quote. But it’s true, nonetheless. I think you hit on something. But that particular song [the title track] is about how some weird song on the radio explains exactly what you’re going through. How does that happen? Man. That thing you said last week that came true. It makes it seems like there’s some order in the universe when probably there’s not. It seems like it happens a lot. I don’t want to get too spacey or hippie-dippie about it.

SILY: You mentioned working with Matt. How did the record have a different instrumental vibe than your previous ones?

CM: We never had someone coming into play like during this one. Don Herron who used to be in BR549 played some fiddle. Critter Fuqua from Old Crow Medicine Show came in and played accordion. It was still very Nashville-centric, but because we were in Memphis, we got Rick Steff to play the keyboards. John Paul Keith came in and played guitar. It lent more of a local flavor to it. It led to a slightly different vibe, which is great. Doing the same thing every time would be pretty boring, don’t you think?

SILY: And the album within itself has a nice variation--speaking of which, how did you decide upon the sequencing?

CM: You know, I don’t know. I just went through different sequences the songs were in, and it just seemed to flow the best the way it came out. It’s not like we were trying to tell a long story or anything. The songs seem to go together even though there’s a lot of different kind of things on it, and I guess that’s just because it’s us.

SILY: I want to ask you about a few specific tracks. First up: Is “Big Bear in the Sky” literally about stargazing?

CM: Well, no, it’s about that particular constellation. Many different cultures have a legend that they put a bear up there in the constellation. This particular story is an Indian legend from up in Canada. Originally, the song was for the Bear Family label out of Germany. [Founder Richard Wieze] asked me to write a bear song for their 40th anniversary.

SILY: I like the juxtaposition in the track “My Baby’s Holding It Down” between “holding it down” and “holding me down.” What’s the difference to you?

CM: Well, she never holds me down. She’s holding it down because I’m not there. But she’s not holding me down at all--though she could probably kick my ass. People who travel a lot, the people at home have to take care of stuff. And when you’re home, you have to take over, because they’re holding it down the rest of the time. She’s also probably holding down her anger. [laughs] But not really. People suck it up and they get through life. That’s just kind of what that song’s about. She doesn’t need me around. I guess I’m kind of nice to have around sometimes.

SILY: It’s about your wife, presumably?

CM: Yeah. I wrote it with my friend Paul Cebar, who also travels a lot and has been married about as long as I have. But you can write only so intimate a song. It’s general. It’s a tribute to significant others who hold it down a lot.

SILY: In the song “Better Than I Was (When I Wasn’t So Good)”, at the end, when you say, “Did that sound drunk enough at the end?”--

CM: That was Mark Andrew Miller who said that. [laughs, then imitates] “Did that sound drunk enough?”

SILY: Was that the type of thing you simply left in because it was so funny?

CM: Well, yeah. When we got the rough mix of it back, and that was in there, we thought, “Well, that’s gotta stay.”

SILY: Let’s talk about “Billy Doesn’t Know He’s Bad”. In so much of traditional music, you have murder ballads where the murderer has a clear intention and a lot of agency, and here, it’s a song where you have a lot of empathy for this murderous outlaw who doesn’t know why he’s doing the things he’s doing.

CM: No, I don’t have a lot of empathy. It’s a comment on sociopathic people. They think everybody thinks exactly like them, but they don’t care. They don’t know they’re being bad. They don’t know they’re assholes. I’m not excusing anything. Billy was an asshole. He lit up his neighbor’s house for no reason! It was a comment on someone like Jesse James or Billy The Kid who were kind of glorified for the way they lived their lives. Jesse James robbed and killed people. He’s a sociopath. You try to be understanding of it. When I wrote that song--Logan Ledger and I wrote that song--it seemed like it needed something. Mark Miller said, “Hey man, I think I have a good bridge for that.” So he comes up with that middle part that takes it to a whole new level of people trying to understand the way they are, nature, and nurture. It really ties it all together. I was really happy to have that happen. It’s kind of different. Those songs aren’t usually about that. It’s usually about a guy who kills his girlfriend because she’s pregnant or something.

SILY: Do you think the instrumentation of that song was an intentional contrast to how you’re viewing the character and subject matter?

CM: No, that was just kind of the way it came out. We went through it a bunch of times. I guess Rick added a Mellotron on that song to make it more dramatic, which helped out the bridge. In that sense, I guess you’re right. But it was one of those things that evolved in the studio. When we were originally working it out, it was just us four. That’s the thing that can happen in Memphis that doesn’t always happen here in Nashville, though that’s less true as time goes on. A lot of people own their own studios and cut their records so they can take as much time as they want. I don’t have that luxury. Usually, you just go into a studio and bang it out because everybody’s so damn good. In Memphis, you like to kick it around a little bit. That’s why we were able to chase that one around the room a little while.

SILY: What’s the inspiration behind the cover art of the record?

CM: I’ve been working with Jim Herrington for a long time. He’s my best friend. He’s done all of my solo records. He did the first couple of BR549 records, too. He’s photographed tons of great people over the years, and he and I have this consistency of getting something slightly noir that doesn’t look like your average album cover. Probably one of my favorite things someone said--there was a review of the record where the guy didn’t know anything about country or Americana but was drawn to the record because he thought it looked like Bryan Ferry. He liked the record, and he said, “It’s the most curious record you’ll hear all year.” For him, I guess. I don’t seem so curious. But it’s a tribute to the mysteriousness of Jim Herrington’s photo.

SILY: How are you adapting these new songs to the stage?

CM: Just goin’ out there and playin’ ‘em. [laughs] We’ve been playin’ ‘em over in Europe. Just bangin’ it out. We really did it pretty much live right there in the studio. More than a few songs, that was the vocal I was singing while we were cutting. Of course, we did overdubs where necessary, but there’s a certain liveness you want [in order] to capture the spirit of what’s going down. But when you start playing them after a while they do take on a certain dimension?

SILY: Extending a part or jamming.

CM: We don’t do too much of that. Sometimes, we’ll cut loose. We’re not a jam band to play a song for 30 minutes, although there’s nothing wrong with that. But I like to hit it, get it, and quit it.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s caught your attention?

CM: I’m reading a Lightning Hopkins biography right now. That guy recorded a lot of songs. [laughs] He’s one of my favorites though. I just finished this novel called Country Dark that was pretty damn good, about people up in Kentucky. Listening--I’ve mostly been listening to a lot of Jim Lauderdale and Jason Ringenberg. Gettin’ ready for the tour. We all have records out. Of course I like Margo Price’s record.

Album score: 7.1/10