#Deb Field

[neweramuseum]

NEM PAINTERLY 63 - Curator Julia Badakhshan

FEATURED WORKS BY: Alexis Rotella, Cindy Zoppa-Peskin, Fleur Schim, Anndrea Lewis, Robi Gallardo, Rosalie Heller, Filiz Ak, Mehmet Duyulmus, Deb Field.

[lezet]

Deb ✽ Lezet ✤ Merzlux ❁ Jaiden Macintosh - "What's Ever Words" is out on GENETIC TRANCE (Ukraine) !!!

Deb ✽ Lezet ✤ Merzlux ❁ Jaiden Macintosh - "What's Ever Words" is out on GENETIC TRANCE (Ukraine) !!!

ambient noise, drone noise wall, field recordings, noise

[zelda-donovanboat]

Hatchetfield as a Yellowjackets (Showtime) AU - is this anything ?

i think it is but i dont have the energy to write it as a whole fic i wish i just had the fic in front of me exactly as i picture it

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Circular battery self-sufficiency

I'm coming to DEFCON! On FRIDAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

If we are going to survive the climate emergency, we will have to electrify – that is, transition from burning fossil fuels to collecting, storing, transmitting and using renewable energy generated by e.g. the tides, the wind, and (especially) the Sun.

Electrification is a big project, but it's not an insurmountable one. Planning and executing an electric future is like eating the elephant: we do it one step at a time. This is characteristic of big engineering projects, which explains why so many people find it hard to imagine pulling this off.

As a layperson, you are far more likely to be exposed to a work of popular science than you are a work of popular engineering. Pop science is great, but its role is to familiarize you with theory, not practice. Popular engineering is a minuscule and obscure genre, which is a pity, because it's one of my favorites.

Weathering the climate emergency is going to require a lot of politics, to be sure, but it's also going to require a lot of engineering, which is why I'm grateful for the nascent but vital (and growing) field of popular engineering. Not to mention, the practitioners of popular engineering tend to be a lot of fun, like the hosts of the Well That's Your Problem podcast, a superb long-form leftist podcast about engineering disasters (with slides!):

https://www.youtube.com/@welltheresyourproblempodca1465

If you want to get started on popular engineering and the climate, your first stop should be the "Without the Hot Air" series, which tackles sustainable energy, materials, transportation and food as engineering problems. You'll never think about climate the same way again:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#3kg-per-day

Then there's Saul Griffith's 2021 book Electrify, which is basically a roadmap for carrying out the electrification of America and the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

Griffith's book is inspiring and visionary, but to really get a sense of how fantastic an electrified world can be, it's gotta be Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Chachra is a material scientist who teaches at Olin College, and her book is a hymn to the historical and philosophical underpinnings of infrastructure, but more than anything, it's a popular engineering book about what is possible. For example, if we want to give every person on Earth the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, but colder), we would only have to capture 0.4% of the solar energy that reaches the Earth's surface.

Now, this is a gigantic task, but it's a tractable one. Resolving it will require a very careful – and massive – marshaling of materials, particularly copper, but also a large number of conflict minerals and rare earths. It's gonna be hard.

But it's not impossible, let alone inconceivable. Indeed, Chachra's biggest contribution in this book is to make a compelling case for reconceiving our relationship to energy and materials. As a species, we have always treated energy as scarce, trying to wring every erg and therm that we can out of our energy sources. Meanwhile, we've treated materials as abundant, digging them up or chopping them down, using them briefly, then tossing them on a midden or burying them in a pit.

Chachra argues that this is precisely backwards. Our planet gets a fresh supply of energy twice a day, with sunrise (solar) and moonrise (tides). On the other hand, we've only got one Earth's worth of materials, supplemented very sporadically when a meteor survives entry into our atmosphere. Mining asteroids, the Moon and other planets is a losing proposition for the long foreseeable future:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

The promise of marshaling a very large amount of materials is that it will deliver effectively limitless, clean energy. This project will take a lot of time and its benefits will primarily accrue to people who come after its builders, which is why it is infrastructure. As Chachra says, infrastructure is inherently altruistic, a gift to our neighbors and our descendants. If all you want is a place to stick your own poop, you don't need to build a citywide sanitation system.

What's more, we can trade energy for materials. Manufacturing goods so that they gracefully decompose back into the material stream at the end of their lives is energy intensive. Harvesting materials from badly designed goods is also energy intensive. But if once we build out the renewables grid (which will take a lot of materials), we will have all the energy we need (to preserve and re-use our materials).

Our species' historical approach to materials is not (ahem) carved in stone. It is contingent. It has changed. It can change again. It needs to change, because the way we extract materials today is both unjust and unsustainable.

The horrific nature of material extraction under capitalism – and its geopolitics (e.g. "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.") – has many made comrades in the climate fight skeptical (or worse, cynical) about a clean energy transition. They do the back-of-the-envelope math about the material budget for electrification, mentally convert that to the number of wildlife preserves, low-income communities, unspoiled habitat and indigenous lands that we would destroy in the process of gathering those materials, and conclude that the whole thing is a farce.

That analysis is important, but it's incomplete. Yes, marshaling all those materials in the way that we do today would be catastrophic. But the point of a climate transition is that we will transition our approach to our planet, our energy, and our materials. That transition can and should challenge all the assumptions underpinning electrification doomerism.

Take the material bill itself: the assumption that a transition will require a linearly scaled quantity of materials includes the assumption that cleantech won't find substantial efficiencies in its material usage. Thankfully, that's a very bad assumption! Cleantech is just getting started. It's at the stage where we're still uncovering massive improvements to production (unlike fossil fuel technology, whose available efficiencies have been discovered and exploited, so that progress is glacial and negligible).

Take copper: electrification requires a lot of copper. But the amount of copper needed for each part of the cleantech revolution is declining faster than the demand for cleantech is rising. Just one example: between the first and second iteration of the Rivian electric vehicle, designers figured out how to remove 1.6 miles of copper wire from each vehicle:

https://insideevs.com/news/722265/rivian-r1s-r1t-wiring/

That's just one iteration and one technology! And yeah, EVs are only peripheral to a cleantech transition; for one thing, geometry hates cars. We're going to have to build a lot of mass transit, and we're going to be realizing these efficiencies with every generation of train, bus, and tram:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

We have just lived through a massive surge in electrification, with unimaginable quantities of new renewables coming online and a stunning replacement of conventional vehicles with EVs, and throughout that surge, demand for copper remained flat:

https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/copper-wire-price-remains-stable-amidst-surplus-supply-and-expanding-mining-25416#:~:text=Global%20Copper%20wire%20Price%20Remains%20Stable%20Amidst%20Surplus%20Supply%20and%20Expanding%20Mining%20Activities

This isn't to say that cleantech is a solved problem. There are many political aspects to cleantech that remain pernicious, like the fact that so many of the cleantech offerings on the market are built around extractive financial arrangements (like lease-back rooftop solar) and "smart" appliances (like heat pumps and induction tops) that require enshittification-ready apps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

There's a quiet struggle going on between cleantech efficiencies and the finance sector's predation, from lease-back to apps to the carbon-credit scam, but many of those conflicts are cashing out in favor of a sustainable future and it doesn't help our cause to ignore those: we should be cheering them on!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/12/s-curve/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops

Take "innovation." Silicon Valley's string of pump-and-dump nonsense – cryptocurrency, NFTs, metaverse, web3, and now AI – have made "innovation" into a dirty word. As the AI bubble bursts, the very idea of innovation is turning into a punchline:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/

But cleantech is excitingly, wonderfully innovative. The contrast between the fake innovation of Silicon Valley and the real – and vital – innovation of cleantech couldn't be starker, or more inspiring:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

Like the "battery problem." Whenever the renewables future is raised, there's always a doomer insisting that batteries are an unsolved – and unsolvable – problem, and without massive batteries, there's no sense in trying, because the public won't accept brownouts when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing.

Sometimes, these people are shilling boondoggles like nuclear power (reminder: this is Hiroshima Day):

https://theconversation.com/dutton-wants-australia-to-join-the-nuclear-renaissance-but-this-dream-has-failed-before-209584

Other times, they're just trying to foreclose on the conversation about a renewables transition altogether. But sometimes, these doubts are raised by comrades who really do want a transition and have serious questions about power storage.

If you're one of those people, I have some very good news: battery tech is taking off. Some of that takes the form of wild and cool new approaches. In Finland, a Scottish company is converting a disused copper mine into a gravity battery. During the day, excess renewables hoist a platform piled with tons of rock up a 530m shaft. At night, the platform lowers slowly, driving a turbine and releasing its potential energy. This is incredibly efficient, has a tiny (and sustainable) bill of materials, and it's highly replicable. The world has sufficient abandoned mine-shafts to store 70TWh of power – that's the daily energy budget for the entire planet. What's more, every mine shaft has a beefy connection to the power grid, because you can't run a mine without a lot of power:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Gravity batteries are great for utility-scale storage, but we also need a lot of batteries for things that we can't keep plugged into the wall, like vehicles, personal electronics, etc. There's great news on that score, too! "The Battery Mineral Loop" is a new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute that describes the path to "circular battery self-sufficiency":

https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2024/07/the_battery_mineral_loop_report_July.pdf

The big idea: rather than digging up new minerals to make batteries, we can recycle minerals from dead batteries to make new ones. Remember, energy can be traded for materials: we can expend more energy on designs that are optimized to decompose back into their component materials, or we can expend more energy extracting materials from designs that aren't optimized for recycling.

Both things are already happening. From the executive summary:

The chemistry of batteries is rapidly improving: over the past decade, we've reduced per-using demand for lithium, nickle and cobalt by 60-140%, and most lithium batteries are being recycled, not landfilled.

Within a decade, we'll hit peak mineral demand for batteries. By the mid-2030s, the amount of new "virgin minerals" needed to meet our battery demand will stop growing and start declining.

By 2050, we could attain net zero mineral demand for batteries: that is, we could meet all our energy storage needs without digging up any more minerals.

We are on a path to a "one-off" extraction effort. We can already build batteries that work for 10-15 years and whose materials can be recycled with 90-94% efficiency.

The total quantity of minerals we need to extract to permanently satisfy the world's energy storage needs is about 125m tons.

This last point is the one that caught my eye. Extracting 125m tons of anything is a tall order, and depending on how it's done, it could wreak a terrible toll on people and the places they live.

But one question I learned to ask from Tim Harford and BBC More Or Less is "is that a big number?" 125m tons sure feels like a large number, but it is one seventeenth of the amount of fossil fuels we dig up every year just for road transport. In other words, we're talking about spending the next thirty years carefully, sustainably, humanely extracting about 5.8% of the materials we currently pump and dig every year for our cars. Do that, and we satisfy our battery needs more-or-less forever.

This is a big engineering project. We've done those before. Crisscrossing the world with roads, supplying billions of fossil-fuel vehicles, building the infrastructure for refueling them, pumping billions of gallons of oil – all of that was done in living memory. As Robin Sloan wrote:

Did people say, at the dawn of the automobile: are you kidding me? This technology will require a ubiquitous network of refueling stations, one or two at every major intersection … even if there WAS that much gas in the world, how would you move it around at that scale? If everybody buys a car, you’ll need to build highways, HUGE ones — you’ll need to dig up cities! Madness!

https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/room-for-everybody/

That big project cost trillions and required bending the productive capacity of many nations to its completion. It produced a ghastly geopolitics that elevated petrostates – a hole in the ground, surrounded by guns – to kingmakers whose autocrats can knock the world on its ass at will.

By contrast, this giant engineering project is relatively modest, and it will upend that global order, yielding energy sovereignty (and its handmaiden, national resliency) to every country on Earth. Doing it well will be hard, and require that we rethink our relationship to energy and materials, but that's a bonus, not a cost. Changing how we use materials and energy will make all our lives better, it will improve the lives of the living things we share the planet with, and it will strip the monsters who currently control our energy supply of their political, economic, and electric power.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

[venerablemonk27]

I found the Snowy Owl! Using the recent sightings reported in the area as my guide, I went driving around Dane, WI yesterday. I stopped to scan a corn field with my binoculars and spotted this guy perched on a fence post.

[ID: A male Snowy Owl sits on a wooden fence post and stares directly at the camera. He is almost entirely white, with a few brown flecks on the wings and breast. His eyes are yellow and partly closed. A light snow falls around the Owl. End ID]

I knew right away the large white bird on the post was the Snowy I was after, so I quickly grabbed my camera and got out to find a good spot to set up. Of course, as soon as I got the bird in frame he decided to fly up to the roof peak of a farm building further away. Even so, I sat down and took a few long-distance bursts in case that was only look I would get. Then I noticed that there was a house among the farm buildings. If someone was home maybe they'd let me take a closer look?

[ID: A male Snowy Owl sits on a wooden fence post and looks into the distance to the left. He is almost entirely white, with a few brown flecks on the wings and breast. His eyes are yellow and partly closed. A light snow falls around the Owl. End ID]

Just as I'd hoped, the folks living there were home and they were happy to let me onto their property for a chance at a better photo. They even pointed out a good spot behind a concrete wall where I could stand totally out of sight of the corn field. It turned out to be such a good blind that all the shots in this post were taken there. And just as we were talking, the Owl flew back down to that same fence post!

[ID: A male Snowy Owl sits on a wooden fence post and looks into the distance to the right. He is almost entirely white, with a few brown flecks on the wings and breast. His eyes are yellow and partly closed. A light snow falls around the Owl. End ID]

He was very cooperative, sitting mostly still while I fiddled with settings and let the auto-focus pick between the snow and the post. I figure he was hunting, scanning the field for little creatures. Then he did a little preening and stretched his neck before taking flight!

[ID: A male Snowy Owl takes flight. He is almost entirely white, with a few brown flecks on the wings and breast. His eyes are yellow and partly closed. His wings are fully extended upward and his shaggy legs hang down below, showing just a hint of black talons. Its eyes are closed to slits. A light snow falls around the Owl. End ID]

[ID: A male Snowy Owl flies low over a snow-covered corn field. He is almost entirely white, with a few brown flecks on the wings and breast. His wings are extended downward, showing the full pattern of white and brown flecks on the flight feathers. His eyes are closed to slits. A light snow falls around the Owl. End ID]

He didn't immediately pounce on anything, instead wheeling up toward a tree across the field. I thought he would land up there, but instead he flushed a smaller dark bird and started chasing it! Zooming in on the photos of the sortie revealed that the enemy was either a Cooper's or a Sharp-shinned Hawk. I wish I could have seen how that encounter turned out, but they flew out of sight across the field.

[ID: A male Snowy Owl chases a hawk in the distance, flying through the snowfall near a large barn. End ID]

Even without a high-speed pursuit, seeing the Snowy Owl so close was my top birding moment of the year so far. Many thanks to Dean and Deb for welcoming me onto their property and making this moment possible!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 2, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 03, 2024

Today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act, which declared that “all non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided, That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.”

That declaration had been a long time coming. The Constitution, ratified in 1789, excluded “Indians not taxed” from the population on which officials would calculate representation in the House of Representatives. In the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, the Supreme Court reiterated that Indigenous tribes were independent nations. It called Indigenous peoples equivalent to “the subjects of any other foreign Government.” They could be naturalized, thereby becoming citizens of a state and of the United States. And at that point, they “would be entitled to all the rights and privileges which would belong to an emigrant from any other foreign people.”

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, established that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” But it continued to exclude “Indians not taxed” from the population used to calculate representation in the House of Representatives.

In 1880, John Elk, a member of the Winnebago tribe, tried to register to vote, saying he had been living off the reservation and had renounced the tribal affiliation under which he was born. In 1884, in Elk v. Wilkins, the Supreme Court affirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution did not cover Indigenous Americans who were living under the jurisdiction of a tribe when they were born. In 1887 the Dawes Act provided that any Indigenous American who accepted an individual land grant could become a citizen, but those who did not remained noncitizens. 

As Interior Secretary Deb Haaland pointed out today in an article in Native News Online, Elk v. Wilkins meant that when Olympians Louis Tewanima and Jim Thorpe represented the United States in the 1912 Olympic games in Stockholm, Sweden, they were not legally American citizens. A member of the Hopi Tribe, Tewanima won the silver medal for the 10,000 meter run. 

Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, and in 1912 he won two Olympic gold medals, in Classic pentathlon—sprint hurdles, long jump, high jump, shot put, and middle distance run—and in decathlon, which added five more track and field events to the Classic pentathlon. The Associated Press later voted Thorpe “The Greatest Athlete of the First Half of the Century” as he played both professional football and professional baseball, but it was his wins at the 1912 Olympics that made him a legend. Congratulating him on his win, Sweden’s King Gustav V allegedly said, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.”  

Still, it was World War I that forced lawmakers to confront the contradiction of noncitizen Indigenous Americans. According to the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History, more than 11,000 American Indians served in World War I: nearly 5,000 enlisted and about 6,500 were drafted, making up a total of about 25% of Indigenous men despite the fact that most Indigenous men were not citizens. 

It was during World War I that members of the Choctaw and Cherokee Nations began to transmit messages for the American forces in a code based in their own languages, the inspiration for the Code Talkers of World War II. In 1919, in recognition of “the American Indian as a soldier of our army, fighting on foreign fields for liberty and justice,” as General John Pershing put it, Congress passed a law to grant citizenship to Indigenous American veterans of World War I. 

That citizenship law raised the question of citizenship for those Indigenous Americans who had neither assimilated nor served in the military. The non-Native community was divided on the question; so was the Native community. Some thought citizenship would protect their rights, while others worried that it would strip them of the rights they held under treaties negotiated with them as separate and sovereign nations and was a way to force them to assimilate. 

On June 2, 1924, Congress passed the measure, its supporters largely hoping that Indigenous citizenship would help to clean up the corruption in the Department of Indian Affairs. The new law applied to about 125,000 people out of an Indigenous population of about 300,000.

But in that era, citizenship did not confer civil rights. In 1941, shortly after Elizabeth Peratrovich and her husband, Roy, both members of the Tlingit Nation, moved from Klawok, Alaska, to the city of Juneau, they found a sign on a nearby inn saying, “No Natives Allowed.” This, they felt, contrasted dramatically with the American uniforms Indigenous Americans were wearing overseas, and they said as much in a letter to Alaska’s governor, Ernest H. Gruening. The sign was “an outrage,” they wrote. “The proprietor of Douglas Inn does not seem to realize that our Native boys are just as willing as the white boys to lay down their lives to protect the freedom that he enjoys." 

With the support of the governor, Elizabeth started a campaign to get an antidiscrimination bill through the legislature. It failed in 1943, but passed the House in 1945 as a packed gallery looked on. The measure had the votes to pass in the Senate, but one opponent demanded: "Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind us?"

Elizabeth Peratrovich had been quietly knitting in the gallery, but during the public comment period, she said she would like to be heard. She crossed the chamber to stand by the Senate president. “I would not have expected,” she said, “that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind gentlemen with five thousand years of recorded civilization behind them of our Bill of Rights.” She detailed the ways in which discrimination daily hampered the lives of herself, her husband, and her children. She finished to wild applause, and the Senate passed the nation’s first antidiscrimination act by a vote of 11 to 5. 

Indigenous veterans came home from World War II to discover they still could not vote. In Arizona, Maricopa county recorder Roger G. Laveen refused to register returning veterans of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, including Frank Harrison, to vote. He cited an earlier court decision saying Indigenous Americans were “persons under guardianship.” They sued, and the Arizona Supreme Court agreed that the phrase only applied to judicial guardianship.  

In New Mexico, Miguel Trujillo, a schoolteacher from Isleta Pueblo who had served as a Marine in World War II, sued the county registrar who refused to enroll him as a voter. In 1948, in Trujillo v. Garley, a state court agreed that the clause in the New Mexico constitution prohibiting “Indians not taxed” from voting violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments by placing a unique requirement on Indigenous Americans. It was not until 1957 that Utah removed its restrictions on Indigenous voting, the last of the states to do so.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act protected Native American voting rights along with the voting rights of all Americans, and they, like all Americans, are affected by the Supreme Court’s hollowing out of the law and the wave of voter suppression laws state legislators who have bought into Trump’s Big Lie have passed since 2021. Voter ID laws that require street addresses cut out many people who live on reservations, and lack of access to polling places cuts out others. 

Katie Friel and Emil Mella Pablo of the Brennan Center noted in 2022 that, for example, people who live on Nevada’s Duckwater reservation have to travel 140 miles each way to get to the closest elections office. “As the first and original peoples of this land, we have had only a century of recognized citizenship, and we continue to face systematic barriers when exercising the fundamental and hard-fought-for right to vote,” Democratic National Committee Native Caucus chair Clara Pratte said in a press release from the Democratic Party.

As part of the commemoration of the Indian Citizenship Act, the Democratic National Committee is distributing voter engagement and protection information in Apache, Ho-Chunk, Hopi, Navajo, Paiute, Shoshone, and Zuni.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[justmeinadaze]

Smutty request here....massage therapist(s) Eddie and/or Steve 🥴

Got me feeling all the things

Happy Ending (Steddie X You)

A/N: So this intimidated me a bit because I don't a whole lot about massages and that field. But I ran with what I know and put a spin on it. I hope you enjoy it!

Warnings: Masseuses Steddie and you and all that implies (I regret nothing), mentions of stress from the read and a broken heart, she is aware that they provide more than just massages, DP (I said what I said), they are gentle with her for the most part but their is slight allusions to Dom/Sub dynamics (spanking, some bratty behavior, and stern tones), I think that's it.

Word Count: 6244

“Trust me, Y/N, these two will change your life.”

“They’re masseuses. It’s a massage, Deb.”

“Yes and no.” You stare at your friend as you sarcastically blink in her direction making her laugh so hard she almost spits out her drink. “Yes, they massage your body but they also do…other things…to help you relax.”

“Nope. No thank you. I’m good.”

“Y/N! Wait, come on.” She reaches for you hand as you start to get up from the lunch table you two were eating at. “Listen… you remember how hard things were for me a few months ago? I was working 80-hour weeks trying to get that promotion, my mom was scolding me because I’m still not married, and then add in being broke as hell.” Your friend sighed as you placed your palm over her hand.  

“Someone suggested them and I thought ‘Hey, what do I have to lose?’ When I met them, they were so kind and gentle. I swear for a second, I forgot I was even worried about anything. And that was before the…ahem…happy ending.” You blush as you both giggle. Debbie suddenly leans in closer to you, lowering her voice. 

“They both do the massaging part but you can decide who makes your ending a happy one. Personally, I chose the tall, pretty one. Not that the other one wasn’t cute…he��s just not my type, you know?”

“You can only have one?”

Your friend gasps as she playfully hits your arm. “You whore!”

“What?! I’m just asking! More so out of curiosity.”, you shrug. “I guess not everyone is into that kind of…kink but…I mean if you’re hiring them knowing what they do…wouldn’t you want to take the opportunity?”

“Goddamn, I will never understand why Tony cheated on you.” Your eyes meet hers as she softly smiles. “You’re sweet, funny, fucking gorgeous, and apparently really open minded when it comes to ménage à trois.”

You return her smile with one of your own as you lean back in your chair. “Yeah, well, if you ever find that out will you let me know?”

****

You sigh as you enter your big, empty apartment. Tony, your ex-fiancé, was supposed to come by while you were out today with your friend to get the last of his things. Now half of your home was quite literally gone. 

As you hugged your arms around yourself you noticed a note on the kitchen counter. 

“Y/N,

I think I got everything but if I forgot something can you save it and let me know? 

This was incredibly hard for me. I love you so much, baby. Can’t we just—”

You crumple the letter without bothering to read the rest. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. You heard it all before you caught him with her that night and after you threw him out.

After grabbing a beer from the fridge, you held the card Debbie gave you for the masseuses, tracing your fingers over the number.

“Ugh! Fuck it.”, you exhale as you reach for the phone.

It rings a few times but right as you begin to rethink what you’re doing; music suddenly blares through the line. 

“Yeah! Hello?”

“Um, hi. I’m looking for the Munson-Harrington massage people…thing.”

The man on the other end chuckles as he lowers the heavy metal in the background. 

“I don’t think I’ve heard us called that before. Massage people thing… Yeah, you got one of them here. How can I help you, sweetheart?”

“I, um, my friend recommended I utilize your services.”

“Do you always talk this dirty or are we special?”

“I don’t know. Are you always this much of asshole or am I just that special.”, you growl.

The music on the other end abruptly stops and you hear movement on the other end. 

“You sound like your absolutely special. Are you a little nervous?”

You sigh as you lean against the kitchen the wall. “Yeah. I’ve never done anything like this before. Not even regular…massages. Deb, my friend, said you guys changed her life. My life kind of sucks right now.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. You don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to and you definitely don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. My friend and I just want to help you relax. Pretty sounding girl like you deserves a clear head.”

“Hm. I bet you say that to everyone who calls.”

“You’re right. I did tell the telemarketer before you that he sounded gorgeous.”

That made you genuinely laugh. “What’s your name?”

“Eddie. I’m the Munson in the name. What’s yours?”

“Y/N.” You slide down to the floor as you take another swig of the drink in your hand. “Is the Harrington part of your company there?”

“Yes ma’am, he is. Would you like to say hello?”

“If that’s ok. I don’t want to impose or anything.”

“HARRINGTON! There’s a pretty girl on the phone who would like to speak with you.”

You listen to Eddie pass the phone as he tells the other boy your name. 

“Y/N? Hey, I’m Steve. I heard you wanted to talk to me.”

“Are you an asshole like your friend?”

“I can be when I need to. Eddie! What did you do to this girl?”

“Nothing! She started it by calling and being adorable.”

“Oh my god.”, you giggle. “You guys are good.”

“And we haven’t even touched you yet.” Your breathing stuttered at his comment. He said it with so much confidence as if he already knew his hands (and services) would blow you away. “Are you still with me, honey?”

“Yeah, um, Eddie said that…we could go slow and if I didn’t want…the…”

“He’s right. We want you to be comfortable. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, Y/N. If you just want a massage that’s fine. If you just want to talk that’s fine to.”

You exhale heavily into the phone before finally making up your mind. 

“Okay. I’m free on Friday.”

############

“Shit, shit, shit!” You continue to curse as you run down your apartment building hallway. “I am so sorry I’m late! Work kept me late and—”

You froze you saw them sitting outside your door, quickly rising when your eyes meet theirs. 

“Hey, no problem.” One of the boy’s grins as he extends his hand for you to shake. “I’m Steve. This is Eddie.”

“The asshole.”, he teases as his gigantic palm encapsulates your own. 

You couldn’t take your eyes off them; they weren’t what you were expecting at all. You assumed Steve was the “tall, pretty one” your friend had mentioned but to you they were both handsome. Eddie had that kind of metalhead look you’d seen walking the streets of your town with his leather jacket and long hair. His Metallica shirt rested perfectly above his belt that was holding up his blue jeans. 

Steve looked like the everyday 80’s guy you saw in most romance movies at the theater but his smile radiated a confidence that made you feel safe. His muscle-bound arms in his polo caused a little sigh to escape your lips as your eyes traced the rest of his figure. 

“Do we…have to do a chant or something?”

You glanced at Eddie completely confused until he gestured towards the front door. 

“Oh, fuck, right. I’m sorry. My head is just…” You clumsily turn your key in the lock and allow them entry into your home. 

“Wow. This place is really nice.”

“Uh, thank you. My fiancé, well ex-fiancé, and I wanted a bigger place closer to the city since we both worked over here. Do you…would you guys like something to drink?”

“No, thank you. We appreciate the offer.” Steve smiles in your direction making your knees a bit weak. “You can have something though if you want.”

“Thanks? I mean with it being my apartment and all.”

“Ah, there’s that sass I was waiting for.” Eddie flashes you a tooth filled grin.

After pouring yourself the strongest drink you could find, you watched them set up near your living room. Your eyes continued to rake over them as they exchanged small talk with each other, allowing you some space to get more comfortable with their presence.

The phone ringing startled you as you turned to give it your attention. Before you could pick it up it routed to the voicemail and Tony’s voice flowed through. 

“Y/N? Babe, are you there? Please, I just want to talk.” Your eyes fluttered shut as you listened to his excuses. You hated being alone and this gigantic apartment was just another reminder that he wasn’t by your side anymore. You missed Tony terribly but no one in the world had ever hurt you as badly as he had. “…I swear to God, she meant nothing to me. I’m just a fucking idiot.”

Feeling a sudden warmth, you opened your eyes to meet Eddie’s as he towered over you. You glanced at Steve whose own face reflected the same sympathy as his friend. 

“…I felt so fucking lonely, Y/N. You were always at work and I felt like you never had time for me. Baby, I know what it’s like to sit in that apartment all by yourself, hurting. Please just talk to me—”

“Hey. Just so you’re aware you are a fucking idiot. She’s not sitting here alone crying her eyes out over some asshole who broke her heart. Y/N has moved on and you should to. Stop calling.”

After hanging up the phone, the metalhead turned to face you again. “I hope that was ok.”

Before you could stop yourself, you wrapped your arms around his waist, clinging to him as you sighed into his chest. His arms gradually came down to hold you to him as his cheek rested on your head. 

“Thank you.”

“My pleasure. I’m not going to lie, Stevie, we may want to reconsider taking a payment in a hug because this is quite comfortable.”

They both laugh as you pull away and smile at them. 

“We’re ready whenever you are, honey.”, Steve grins as he points towards their makeshift table.

#########

Your eyes remain glued in front of you as you listen to Eddie move about the apartment. 

“Y/N.”, Steve whispers from behind you as his breath warms your ear. “Remember, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. We can just talk if you want or we can even leave. No hard feelings. We understand how uncomfortable this situation can be especially since you don’t know us but that makes it a little bit freeing to.”

“Can, um, can I ask you for a favor?” You softly smile when you turn to look at him and he nods. “Can you…take off my clothes? I-I-I don’t think I…”, you ask, stuttering through your nerves. 

“Yeah. Yeah, of course I can. Did you want to keep anything on?”

“Is that an option?”, you giggle. 

“Sweetheart, you hold all the power here.” Eddie slides up beside his friend, now jacketless with no shoes. 

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been with anyone let alone naked in front of someone. Tony wasn’t lying about that. I’ve always been busy with work and—”

Steve gently places his index finger over your lips. “Nothing that asshole says matters. I don’t care if you were on the moon, he had no right to cheat on you.” His finger glides down from your mouth to your blouse as he begins undoing the buttons while the other man shifts behind you and unclips your skirt. 

Both garments fall effortlessly to the floor as Steve continues watching your face for any signs of hesitation or discomfort. 

“We’re going to do this one at a time, ok? I’m going to take off your bra and then Eddie’s going to remove your panties.”

Once he gets your approval, he leans over your shoulder and begins unhooking your bra from your body. You don’t know if it’s because he’s being so sweet or if it’s because his strong cologne wafts into your nostrils but something inside of you causes you to turn and softly kiss his cheek. 

Steve pulls back slightly, looking through your eyes till a small smile flickers across his lips. He and his friend had been doing this for a while but not one of them had been as tender at you had just been. He knew there was something different about you when he spoke to you on the phone and he knew Eddie felt it to when the metalhead completely turned off his music to talk to you. 

He hoped he wasn’t misreading things and took a leap of faith as he leaned forward to kiss your forehead before tossing your bra near the rest of your clothes.

Strong hands on your waist turned you so you were now facing Eddie as he sunk down on his heels, dipping his fingers under the waistband of your underwear, and delicately tugged them down your legs. The pads of his digits traced along your skin causing a little shiver to run up your spine. 

“You’re so gorgeous, Y/N.”

“I’m sure you say that to everyone.”

His grin grows as he stands up and looks down at you. “I did have a date with that telemarketer I told you about. Turns out he WAS really good looking.”

Steve smiled behind you when you laughed, gently guiding you towards their table, and helping you up as you lay on your stomach. Folding your arms above you, you rest your head on them like a pillow. The metalhead digs in a bag before kneeling in front of you again till his face was level with your own. 

“Which do you like better?” He holds up bottles to your nose and you point to one that smells like vanilla. 

“What are those?”

“Oil. Steve’s the smell guy and knows how to utilize them better than I do.” He stands up and passes the bottle you chose to his friend. 

“Honey, we’re going to touch you now, alright? It might feel a little weird at first because of the oil but if at any point you get uncomfortable and want to stop or take a break just let us know.”

“Okay.” You close your eyes, unsure of what to prepare for but when a set of hands begins rubbing into you back, you can’t help but let out a soft, low moan. “Shit. I’m—”

“Princess, this is your house. Make all the noise you want to and please don’t be embarrassed.”

“You can also talk to us if you want to. Maybe about things you’re stressed about.”

A second set of hands find your calves and a strong exhale leave your lips. “Honestly, you heard my main bit of stress.”

“Fucker Magee?”, Eddie asks. 

“Yeah.”, you giggle. “Everyone in my life thinks I’m overreacting and I should forgive him.”

“Um, we may not know the whole story but the man you were going to marry cheated on you. I think you’re reacting properly.” Steve’s hands trailed along your spine and back down to your hips. 

“I went to visit him at work and they were fucking in his office. Some pretty, young, big breasted coworker.” 

“What a bitch.” You smiled as Eddie laughed at his own comment, his palms massaging along your thighs and back down to your feet. “For how long?”

“A few months. We…we were supposed to get married next month.”

Fingers came up to firmly knead into your shoulders. “I’m sorry, Y/N.” Steve watched your lips form into a thin line before you pressed your face into your arms. As soon as you felt your emotions were in check, you turned your head back to the side. 

“That feels good actually.”

“Did you think the massage business part was just for show?”, Steve laughed.

“I mean… I don’t know. I don’t want to be rude.”

“Said the girl who called me an asshole.”

“To be fair, you were being one.” It feels almost on purpose when Eddie’s fingers slide up between your thighs just barely near your core before sliding back down your legs.

“You’re not wrong, sweetheart.”

Steve’s own hands glide up your sides, grazing the sides of your breasts before looping back around to your shoulder blades.  

“I hope I’m not being too forward but you have a beautiful body.”

“No, you’re not being too…thank you. Um, you-you can go a little higher if you want.”

“Who are you talking to, honey? Me or Ed?”

“Eddie… You can go higher to. If you want to…”

The hands on your back lifted off you as Steve came around to kneel in front of you on his heels. “How about we take it slow, huh? One thing at a time.” His palm petted your head as he moved the hair back from your face. You let out a little gasp when you felt the metalhead’s fingers slide between your folds. “Are you okay?”

You nodded as you bit your bottom lip, lifting one of your legs up the table to allow him more accesses. This man felt like a master with his fingers as he rubbed circles slowly into your clit.

“Pl-please.”, you whine. 

“Please what, Y/N? What do you need?

“Can…can I turn around? On my back.”

“Of course, pretty girl. Whatever you want.”

They patient waited for you to roll over before Eddie placed his thumb back on your nub. You watched with heavy, lust driven eyes as he stuck two of his fingers into his mouth, coating them with his saliva, and sliding them into your sex. 

“Oh wow, princess. You’re tight.” He exhaled, trying to hide the little moan that wanted to be heard. 

Steve stood back up to his full height, coming around to stand behind your head as he reached down and ran his hands over your tits, massaging them gently but firmly. 

“F-fuck.”, you whimpered. As your back arched, you could help but notice the bulge in his pants. When you tried to touch it with your palm, he jumped back like you startled him. 

“Hey. Um, you…you don’t have to do that, honey. We’re here for you.”

“You don’t want me to feel you?”

Your voice sounded so small; Steve felt his cock twitch. “I…I do…I just…you don’t have to.”

Grabbing his shirt, you yanked his lips to yours. The combination of man and mint on his tongue had you clenching tighter around the other boy’s fingers making him groan, this time much louder than before. 

“I want to.” You slid further up the table, allowing your head to hang a bit over the edge, licking your lips as the man pulls down his shorts just enough for his dick to spring free. “Jesus. I’ve never had anyone as big as you are before.”

He smirks as he subtly chuckles. “You can’t say things like that or else I’m going to cum before you even touch me.”

Your tiny hand reaches for him as he steps closer, mewling when your tongue runs along his tip. You don’t see it but the men give each other a cursory glance. This is a little out of bounds for them in the sense of they rarely ever have the women they massage service them in this way and on the off chance a client does it’s usually during the second part when they are alone with one of them in the bedroom. 

Steve continues to be gentle with you as he runs his fingers through your hair when you wrap your lips around his hard, now throbbing length. Eddie thrusts his fingers into you at a faster pace and your moans vibrate through to the boy in your mouth. 

“Goddamn, Y/N. Your mouth feels so good. Your ex is a fucking idiot.”

They both take note of your reaction, your head bobbing faster as your pussy clenches again. 

“He really is, sweetheart. Makes me want to call him back and curse that fucker out.”

Tugging your head back, you continue to pump him with your fist as your hips began to grind up into the metalhead’s hand.

“Fuck, I’m…”

“That’s it, beautiful girl. Just let go. It’s okay.” Eddie pressed the heel of his palm against your clit as he moves his fingers move at a quicker pace. The sound of your slick fills the room and after a few moments your body trembles as you cum. “Good girl. Coming like that. Geez, I’m so fucking hard right now.”

Abruptly, you sit up and grab the back of the man’s neck as you bring his lips to yours. After your release, your kisses were much hungrier and you reveled in the taste him as your hands shot down to fumble with his jeans. 

“Wait…are you sure…you don’t want Steve.”, he asks between kisses. “You’ve kinda…got him…all riled up.”

“Want both.”

Eddie froze as he pulled his head back. When you tried to chase his lips, his palms gripped either side of your face forcing you to focus. 

“Hey, you don’t have to do that.”

“Want to.” You tried to lurch forward again but he was much stronger than you, holding you in place. 

“Y/N, princess, come down from cloud 9 and really think about what you’re asking for.”

You couldn’t control the annoyed exhale or tone as your eyes met his. “Am I not allowed? I can pay you more.”

“It’s not about the money. We—”, Steve began before you cut him off.

“Want me to be comfortable. I know! I know what I’m asking for. Now, do you want to fuck me or not!?”

Ringed fingers snaked into your hair and firmly pulled it back. Something changed in Eddie’s eyes; a look he saved for partners he had in his own bedroom. 

“Control the attitude, Y/N.”, he growled. “Listen to what he’s saying. It’s not about the money and it’s not about getting off. It’s not fun for anyone here if you wake up in the morning with regret. And while this little session here IS all about you, don’t forget we’re people to. We’ve been doing this for years and no one has ever asked to take us both one right after the other.”

“I’m not asking for that either. I want you both…at the same time.” They look at each other again, unsure of what to do or say. Your hand reaches out to turn his attention back to you as you lean your forehead on his. “Please, Eddie. I know what I’m asking for. I need it. I need you both. Please, please, please.” As you keep repeating your last word, you manage to fully unbutton his jeans, glide your hand through the waistband of his boxers, and rub your palm against his cock.

His jaw falls open as your lips trail down his neck.

“I mean…if she thinks she can handle it.” 

Eddie growled again with more vigor as he lifted you into his arms and carried you to your bedroom with Steve in tow. After tossing you onto the bed, he tore off his shirt, and you marveled at his tattoos, crawling on your knees till you were in front of him again. His hands laced in your hair as your tongue descended down his chest, stopping just above his waistline to allow him to shuffle out of his pants. 

The bed dipped behind you, suddenly feeling strong palms grip your hips and lift them a bit higher into the air. Steve’s own tongue licked a long stripe through your folds causing your body to shudder pleasantly at the feeling. Eddie held the base of his cock, allowing the tip to brush against your lips. 

You opened your mouth for him and he wasted no time pushing through, groaning when your warm saliva began coating him. The metalhead was much thicker than his friend and at times you struggled to take him, gagging around his dick as he occasionally hit the back of your throat. 

The strong vibrations of your moans as Steve latched his mouth to your clit had Eddie’s own eyes rolling back as he held on to your hair tighter trying to control himself from just face fucking you till he came.

You weren’t sure if it was on purpose or not but both men were still massaging you with their palms, Steve especially. His hands rubbed and caressed firmly up your lower back, around to your stomach, and down to your thighs as his tongue flicked against your bundle of nerves. While one of Eddie’s hands remained in your hair, the other ran between your shoulder blades and around to your front to knead your breasts adding to your high. 

Your mouth came off the boy in front of you with a pop as drool dangled from your lips. 

“Yes, Steve. Please, you’re going to make me cum.”

You practically screamed as he pressed his mouth further into your core, sucking and licking until you felt the coil snap as you came. Your upper half fell flat against the mattress as you panted, smiling softly as your body continued to twitch. 

Eddie’s fingers left your hair and moved to your shoulders as he lifted you back up to your knees so he could see your face. 

“This is the last time I’m going to ask, sweetheart. Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes, Eddie, I’m sure I want you both inside of me.”

His head tilts to the side at your answer, mostly because it was said correctly, or at least how he liked his questions answered. He wondered if there was a submissive side of you that enjoyed it a bit rougher like they did. Both men NEVER brought that into the bedroom with a client and most of the time none of the women they were with never asked. 

You weren’t asking either but he imagined, like they did, that was something personal for you so you saved it for the man you were dating or intimate with. 

Eddie shook the thoughts from his head as his hand laced around your neck and brought your lips to his again. 

“Seriously, your fiancé is so fucking stupid to let you go.”

You smiled up at him and wrapped your arms around his waist as you yanked him closer to you for a hug. He could get used to this. 

“Have you ever done this before?”, Steve asked.

“This exactly, no. Have I ever done anal before? A couple of times. You may need to go a bit slow at first especially since…um…I’ve never had a man, men, as big or thick like you guys.”

You giggle when the boy exhaled again, grabbing your waist, and falling on to the bed with you on top of him. “You have to stop saying things like that. You’re going to kill me!”  

“What, do you want me to lie? ‘Oh Daddy. Your cock is average size and will definitely not split me in half.’” Your giggle turned into a full-blown laugh until you notice he had a funny little look on his face. “I’m sorry. Did I say something wrong? I was just—”

Steve leans up, cutting you off with a passionate kiss. “You’re an interesting woman. Eddie’s right. I seriously don’t understand why anyone would cheat on you. If you were mine, I don’t think I’d ever leave your side.”

“Aw…that’s creepy.”, you playfully smiled.

On impulse, he smacked your ass. They never did that first. Sometime a client would ask for a light spank but he just delivered you one he’s only given to bratty girls in his bedroom. He didn’t mean to but something about you made him comfortable.

“Shit. I…I’m sorry.” 

You shook your head, dismissing his apology as you kissed him again. Eddie reached over your shoulder to hand his friend a condom and they both hastily tore into the wrapper before sliding it on. His eyes met yours as he leaned back against your mattress and his hands gripped your waist.

“Whenever you’re ready, honey.”

Nodding, you exhaled the nerves as you tipped forward, and slowly lowered your body to his. You both moaned when his tip breached your entrance and Steve craned his neck to watch himself disappear inside of you inch by inch. 

“Fuck, baby. That’s it. Take your time.”

You heard the metalhead’s heavy breathing behind you as he stroked his cock at the site before him. The sound caused you to clench and a broken mewl left you as you pushed yourself further onto him. 

“Oh my god. You’re so…I can’t…”

His palm glided up your sides to caress your cheek. “Yes, you can, Y/N. You’re doing so good taking me already. Do you want some help?”

When you nodded, he firmly took hold of the back your neck and lowered you till your face was hovering over his. His hips thrust up to meet yours and your mouth fell open. 

“That’s it, baby. Good girl. I’m going to do it again, ok?” When you nod again, he pumped into you a couple more times till you felt him bottom out. “Good girl. Such a good girl. Jesus, so fucking tight. You feel so good, pretty girl. It’s Eddie’s turn. Let him know when you’re ready.”

After a few moments and subtly thrusts from Steve, you turned towards his friend and gave him the okay.

Hands spread open your ass and you tightened around the other man again when you felt spit hit your asshole and Eddie’s fingers massaging it in. Your body tensed slightly when the tip of his cock rubbed between your cheeks.

“Sweetheart, if at any point you want to stop, I want you to say ‘Red’ for me, alright? Can you tell me what I just said?”

“If…if—fuck—if I want to stop…say ‘red’.”

“Atta girl.”, he praised as he quickly leaned forward to kiss your temple. 

Prepared, Steve’s palms held on to your face as Eddie began to push into your body. Your head started to droop but his grip was stronger than yours. “Y/N, look at me, honey.” When you did what he asked, his thumb extended out to run along your bottom lip. “You’re doing amazing. How do you feel?”

“F-full.” The metalhead licked the pads of his fingers, looping his arm under your body to slowly and softly massage circles into your clit. “Oh my god!”

You tried to collapse against Steve’s chest but he still wouldn’t allow it. 

“Holy shit. Y/N, stop moving.”, he scolded in a firm tone before he realized what headspace he was slipping into and reeling himself back into the present. “Baby, not yet. You…you say you’ve never had anyone as big as us. I-I don’t know about, Ed but I’VE never…had a woman as tight as you.” He flashed you a small smile. “I’m trying so fucking hard not to cum right now.”

Eddie’s hair bobbed behind you and the man knew he was nodding in agreement. 

“You can—mmm—you can talk to me…like you did. I-I-I don’t mind.”

His eyes scanned over your face as your eyes closed. “Hey, I said keep your eyes open, sweet girl.” You purposely ignored him, grinding your hips forward slightly for good defiant measure. Both men grunted at the action but it was Steve who held your face tighter. 

“Look at me, now.” This time you listened. “What did I say, Y/N? Don’t fucking move. You need to be patient, little girl. Do you understand me?”

“Y-yes, I understand.” At that moment, the metalhead’s hips finally connected against yours. “You…you both can…move. Please, I need you to move.”

The man underneath you released your face and circled his arms around you as he pressed you to his chest. When they both thrusted into you at the same time, the euphoria you felt was indescribable. It was like they knew exactly what you needed and where they needed to be. Each stroke was strong and precise, hitting every nerve inside of you, and setting your body ablaze. 

“Go-go ahead, princess. You wanted—goddamn—you wanted to move so bad. Take over.” Eddie’s hand came down hard on your behind and you hurriedly (and willingly) did as he commanded. Their grunts and groans drove you crazy, egging you on as you bounced and rolled your hips as fast as you could. The obscene sound of skin hitting skin echoed in your room mixed with your whimpers of pleasure. 

It was almost too overwhelming as the ball in your belly began to wind faster and faster. Steve’s grip moved to your hips as Eddie held on to your shoulders.

“Cum, baby. Let go and cum as hard as you fucking can.”, the man under you whispered into your ear. Your forehead fell into the mattress beside his head as they both pounded into you. Their rhythm changed as they slowed, punching the air from your lungs as white blurs your vision. You scream into the bed below you as they fuck you through it, Steve lifting his hand to run his fingers through your hair.

“That’s it. Good-good fucking girl. Taking us both so well.” Eddie tilted forward, placing sloppy, wet kisses against your back as he rolled his hips. He soon followed after you, grunting loudly as he spilled into the condom. Steve, unable to hold back any longer, came as well, smacking his hips against yours and using you to milk himself dry.

#########

Eddie’s eyes blink open as his watch beeps signaling midnight. His eyes take a quick scan of the area, realizing they were still in your apartment. He and Steve were tucked under your sheets but you weren’t between them. 

“Steven.” The metalhead reached over to shake his friend’s shoulder. “Steve, wake up.”

“Huh? Wha?”

“Oh my god, you idiot. Steve. WAKE. UP.” Between each word, he firmly punched his arm causing the other man to grumble in anger.

“What?! Why are you in my room?”

“Oh, you know. I thought I could just use a nice Harrington cuddle. WE AREN’T AT HOME!”, he hisses. 

Steve rubs his eyes before Eddie’s words sink in and he bolts up right. “Shit. We fell asleep.”

“You don’t say.”

“Shut the fuck up, Munson. Where is she?”

As he shrugs, they both jump out of bed. Steve finds his clothes on the floor but the other boy struggles to find his. 

“I know I took them off here.”

“You did.” They both jump at the sound of your voice. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. I woke up before you and noticed your clothes had oil on them from when you picked me up so I washed them for you.”, you softly smiled as you handed Eddie his jeans and shirt.

“Um, thank you. You…you didn’t have to do that.”

“It’s no problem. I was hungry to I heated up some left-over pizza if you want some.”

Their eyes scanned over you as you leaned in the doorframe with a mug in your hand. You had changed into an oversized shirt with a metal band that Eddie definitely knew and some sleep shorts. Your hair was a little frayed but to both of them you looked like an angel. 

“I mean, you don’t have to. I don’t really know what the protocol is or how this works.”

“Well, to be fair, I’m not sure if you noticed but this whole thing was a bit off script for what we normally do.”, Steve grins as he nervously chuckles. He has no idea what they are supposed to do either.

You silently nodded before turning and heading back out to the kitchen as they follow behind. 

“How, uh, how are you feeling?”, Eddie asks. 

“Calm. Oddly relaxed. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve felt like this since before I got in engaged.” You hop up onto the counter before meeting their gaze. “Thank you.”

They smile as Steve heads for where their things were as Eddie grabs a slice of pizza. “I made some coffee to if you want some.”

“Did you put our table and all that way?”

“Oh, yeah. I cleaned it to. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to use a certain type of cleaner but I just used my 409. I folded it and placed it by the door with your bags. I, um, I wasn’t sure if when you woke up you’d…want to make a quick getaway.”

They exchanged a look as your head hung. 

“Why do you think we would want to do that?” When you shrug at Eddie’s question, he saunters casually over to you and lifts your chin with his fingers. “Let me rephrase. Is that what you want us to do?”

“Do you want us to leave?”, Steve reiterated. 

“Like I said, I don’t know…how this works…”

“That’s not what I asked, Y/N.”

“No…I don’t want you to leave.”

They both grin at your answer. “We don’t want to leave either.”

Eddie starts to giggle through his teeth as he jumps on the counter beside you. 

“What’s so funny, Munson?”, Steve asks as he comes to lean on the counter across from you both. 

The metalhead intertwines his fingers with yours and you lean your head on his shoulder. 

“Nothing. Just…this gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘happy ending’.”

[fatehbaz]

"defending civilization against bugs"

lol the mosquito sculpture

see Pratik Chakrabarti's Medicine and Empire: 1600-1960 (2013) and Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics (2012)

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Sir Ronald Ross had just returned from an expedition to Sierra Leone. The British doctor had been leading efforts to tackle the malaria that so often killed English colonists in the country, and in December 1899 he gave a lecture to the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce [...]. [H]e argued that "in the coming century, the success of imperialism will depend largely upon success with the microscope."

Text by: Rohan Deb Roy. "Decolonise science - time to end another imperial era." The Conversation. 5 April 2018.

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[A]s [...] Diane Nelson explains: The creation of transportation infrastructure such as canals and railroads, the deployment of armies, and the clearing of ground to plant tropical products all had to confront [...] microbial resistance. The French, British, and US raced to find a cure for malaria [...]. One French colonial official complained in 1908: “fever and dysentery are the ‘generals’ that defend hot countries against our incursions and prevent us from replacing the aborigines that we have to make use of.” [...] [T]ropical medicine was assigned the role of a “counterinsurgent field.” [...] [T]he discovery of mosquitoes as malaria and yellow fever carriers reawakened long-cherished plans such as the construction of the Panama Canal (1904-1914) [...]. In 1916, the director of the US Bureau of Entomology and longtime general secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science rejoiced at this success as “an object lesson for the sanitarians of the world” - it demonstrated “that it is possible for the white race to live healthfully in the tropics.” [...] The [...] measures to combat dangerous diseases always had the collateral benefit of social pacification. In 1918, [G.V.], president of the Rockefeller Foundation, candidly declared: “For purposes of placating primitive and suspicious peoples, medicine has some decided advantages over machine guns." The construction of the Panama Canal [...] advanced the military expansion of the United States in the Caribbean. The US occupation of the Canal Zone had already brought racist Jim Crow laws [to Panama] [...]. Besides the [...] expansion of vice squads and prophylaxis stations, during the night women were picked up all over the city [by US authorities] and forcibly tested for [...] diseases [...] [and] they were detained in something between a prison and hospital for up to six months [...] [as] women in Panama were becoming objects of surveillance [...].

Text by: Fahim Amir. "Cloudy Swords." e-flux Journal Issue #115. February 2021.

---

---

---

Richard P. Strong [had been] recently appointed director of Harvard’s new Department of Tropical Medicine [...]. In 1914 [the same year of the Canal's completion], just one year after the creation of Harvard’s Department of Tropical Medicine, Strong took on an additional assignment that cemented the ties between his department and American business interests abroad. As newly appointed director of the Laboratories of the Hospitals and of Research Work of United Fruit Company, he set sail in July 1914 to United Fruit plantations in Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama. […] As a shareholder in two British rubber plantations, [...] Strong approached Harvey Firestone, chief executive of the tire and rubber-processing conglomerate that bore his name, in December 1925 with a proposal [...]. Firestone had negotiated tentative agreements in 1925 with the Liberian government for [...] a 99-year concession to optionally lease up to a million acres of Liberian land for rubber plantations. [...]

[I]nfluenced by the recommendations and financial backing of Harvard alumni such as Philippine governor Gen. William Cameron Forbes [the Philippines were under US military occupation] and patrons such as Edward Atkins, who were making their wealth in the banana and sugarcane industries, Harvard hired Strong, then head of the Philippine Bureau of Science’s Biological Laboratory [where he fatally infected unknowing test subject prisoners with bubonic plague], and personal physician to Forbes, to establish the second Department of Tropical Medicine in the United States [...]. Strong and Forbes both left Manila [Philippines] for Boston in 1913. [...] Forbes [US military governor of occupied Philippines] became an overseer to Harvard University and a director of United Fruit Company, the agricultural products marketing conglomerate best known for its extensive holdings of banana plantations throughout Central America. […] In 1912 United Fruit controlled over 300,000 acres of land in the tropics [...] and a ready supply of [...] samples taken from the company’s hospitals and surrounding plantations, Strong boasted that no “tropical school of medicine in the world … had such an asset. [...] It is something of a victory [...]. We could not for a million dollars procure such advantages.” Over the next two decades, he established a research funding model reliant on the medical and biological services the Harvard department could provide US-based multinational firms in enhancing their overseas production and trade in coffee, bananas, rubber, oil, and other tropical commodities [...] as they transformed landscapes across the globe.

Text by: Gregg Mitman. "Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia's Plantation Economy." Environmental History, Volume 22, Number 1. January 2017. [Text within brackets added by me for clarity and context.]

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---

---

[On] February 20, 1915, [...] [t]o signal the opening of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), [...] [t]he fair did not officially commence [...] until President Wilson [...] pressed a golden key linked to an aerial tower [...] whose radio waves sparked the top of the Tower of Jewels, tripped a galvanometer, [...] swinging open the doors of the Palace of Machinery, where a massive diesel engine started to rotate. [...] [W]ith lavish festivities [...] nineteen million people has passed through the PPIE's turnstiles. [...] As one of the many promotional pamphlets declared, "California marks the limit of the geographical progress of civilization. For unnumbered centuries the course of empire has been steadily to the west." [...] One subject that received an enormous amount of time and space was [...] the areas of race betterment and tropical medicine. Indeed, the fair's official poster, the "Thirteenth Labor of Hercules," [the construction of the Panama Canal] symbolized the intertwined significance of these two concerns [...]. [I]n the 1910s public health and eugenics crusaders alike moved with little or no friction between [...] [calls] for classification of human intelligence, for immigration restriction, for the promotion of the sterilization and segregation of the "unfit," [...]. It was during this [...] moment, [...] that California's burgeoning eugenicist movement coalesced [...]. At meetings convened during the PPIE, a heterogenous group of sanitary experts, [...] medical superintendents, psychologists, [...] and anthropologists established a social network that would influence eugenics on the national level in the years to come. [...]

In his address titled "The Physician as Pioneer," the president-elect of the American Academy of Medicine, Dr. Woods Hutchinson, credited the colonization of the Mississippi Valley to the discovery of quinine [...] and then told his audience that for progress to proceed apace in the current "age of the insect," the stringent sanitary regime imposed and perfected by Gorgas in the Canal Zone was the sine qua non. [...]

Blue also took part in the conference of the American Society for Tropical Medicine, which Gorgas had cofounded five years after the annexation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Invoking the narrative of medico-military conquest [...], [t]he scientific skill of the United States was also touted at the Pan-American Medical Congress, where its president, Dr. Charles L. Reed, delivered a lengthy address praising the hemispheric security ensured by the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and "the combined genius of American medical scientists [...]" in quelling tropical diseases, above all yellow fever, in the Canal Zone. [...] [A]s Reed's lecture ultimately disclosed, his understanding of Pan-American medical progress was based [...] on the enlightened effects of "Aryan blood" in American lands. [...] [T]he week after the PPIE ended, Pierce was ordered to Laredo, Texas, to investigate several incidents of typhus fever on the border [...]. Pierce was instrumental in fusing tropical medicine and race betterment [...] guided by more than a decade of experience in [...] sanitation in Panama [...]. [I]n August 1915, Stanford's chancellor, David Starr Jordan [...] and Pierce were the guests of honor at a luncheon hosted by the Race Betterment Foundation. [...] [At the PPIE] [t]he Race Betterment booth [...] exhibit [...] won a bronze medal for "illustrating evidences and causes of race degeneration and methods and agencies of race betterment," [and] made eugenics a daily feature of the PPIE. [...] [T]he American Genetics Association's Eugenics Section convened [...] [and] talks were delivered on the intersection of eugenics and sociology, [...] the need for broadened sterilization laws, and the medical inspection of immigrants [...]. Moreover, the PPIE fostered the cross-fertilization of tropical medicine and race betterment at a critical moment of transition in modern medicine in American society.

Text by: Alexandra Minna Stern. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Second Edition. 2016.

[before-it-felt-like-a-sin]

YOOO HOPE YOURE HAVING A GOOD ONE I SAW YOU NEEDED REQUESTS TO BROADEN YOUR HORIZONS

maybe you can do something about reader taking care of shauna after soccer practice? poor va y needs her snacks and cuddles but she won’t admit it 😔

Dreams

Anon I'm not sure this is what you wanted exactly but it's just straight up Shauna fluff. It's not as long as some of my other fics but I like it for not having written for Shauna before!

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

You're sitting on the bleachers, watching the Yellowjackets, watching Shauna, practice for states. Technically, you're supposed to be getting some homework done, but it's not your fault that your girlfriend looks so good on the field.

It's also not your fault that you keep distracting her, but that's neither here nor there.

You force your eyes away from her, picking up your book for AP Lit. Frankenstein wasn't exactly your idea of a good time, but at least it was interesting. Well, more interesting than Anna Kerenina, at least.

It feels like you've been reading for only a few minutes before coach is blowing the whistle to signify the end of practice. You know you have some time before Shauna's actually ready to leave, so you stay on the bleachers. She'll come get you when she's done.

The sun feels nice on your face, and you're grateful for the warm spring air. It wasn't nearly as fun to wait for Shauna's practice to be over in early March.

"Hey. You ready?" She's standing below you, on the bottom bleacher. Her hair is pulled into a loose ponytail, still damp from her post-practice shower. She looked kind of adorable.

"Yeah." You smile, standing up and stuffing your books into your backpack before swinging it over your shoulder. She holds her hand out for you to take, and you grab it, stepping down to her level.

"Such a gentleman," you tease, hand still in hers. She smiles a bit sheepishly, and it takes a lot of strength not to kiss her senseless. It wasn't that your relationship was a secret, but you knew she probably wouldn't appreciate a big display of affection like that. Honestly, it wasn't your thing either.

"Car's parked over here." She leads you to her car, and like always, she opens the passenger door for you. It's adorable, and something you imagine she picked up from watching the rom-coms she'll never admit to liking.

"Thanks," you say, sliding into the passenger seat.

Shauna gets into the drivers side, turning the car keys in the ignition. Her music starts playing immediately. Well, not her music. The mixtape you made for your six-month anniversary. So really, it was your music.

"Thinking about me this morning, Shipman?" You ask, shifting in your seat to look at her. She blushes, clearly not expecting the question.

"You just put it on the last time you were in here. I'm too lazy to switch it."

"Suuure. Whatever you say, Shauna."

She rolls her eyes, and you laugh. It's always been so easy with her.

"We're going back to your house, right?" You ask, making sure. Not that you minded Shauna being at your house, but at hers you weren't subjected to awkward small talk with your parents. Deb Shipman was almost never home when you were over, and when she was she was kind but not prying.

"Yeah, unless you wanted to go to yours?"

"Nope, your house it is."

You sit in comfortable silence the rest of the drive, at some point intertwining your hands over the center console. It's nice. Just being there with her.

Eventually, she pulls into her driveway, parking the car. The both of you get out, you grabbing your backpack while she gets her soccer bag and her school backpack out of the trunk.

You make your way inside, knowing her house almost as well as your own. It's small and cozy, and maybe your favorite place in the world. Even if being there wasn't intertwined with being around Shauna.

She drops her bags in the front closet, and you do the same before making your way to the kitchen. It's the same ritual you do after all of her practices. You make her a snack, and she sits at the kitchen table while she talks about her day.

"And fucking Randy keeps trying to get Jackie to hype him up to me, even though he knows I'm dating you and Jackie would never. He's just so-" she cuts herself off, burying her face into her hands.

"He's a dick, that's for sure. Even Jeff isn't that bad. Why he keeps him around, I have no idea." You stand at the counter, spreading peanut butter onto celery sticks. It wasn't a personal favorite of yours, but Shauna loved them. Something about her mom making them for her when she was little.

You finish making her food, and press a quick kiss to her forehead before going upstairs to her bedroom. The two of you would sit, curled up in her bed, and eat the snack you had made. It was something easy and soft as the end of your senior year approached, and you couldn't help but already mourn the loss.

She sits down cross-legged on her bed, and you do the same. You sit like that for a while, just eating and talking. When the plate is finished, you set it on her bedside table and Shauna is immediately pressed into your side.

You laugh, wrapping your arms around her.

"You were just itching to do that, weren't you."

In response, she presses her face into your shoulder so you can't see her blushing. Even though you know that's exactly what she's doing.

"Shut up. Rough practice."

"I could tell. Tripping every five minutes. Even I'm not usually that distracting to you." You scratch at her scalp, hair still damp from her shower. How, you had no idea. The girl's hair was very, very thick. And you loved it.

She laughs, but it's a little bitter.

"I'm just kind of sick of it all. Practice, soccer, school. I want to be at Brown already. And it's not that I don't want to win states. I do. But it's getting harder and harder to pretend I actually enjoy soccer." She sounds absolutely exhausted, and you feel so bad for her.

You knew about her dislike for the sport, of course, and how she felt like she had to play, for Jackie.

"It'll be over soon. You'll win states, go to nationals, win nationals, and come home. And I won't have to sit on the bleachers waiting for you every afternoon. And you won't have to pretend to like soccer."

She just pulls you closer, nodding.

"I'll miss you, though, at Brown," she says, not sounding sad, exactly, but something else.

"Yeah, yeah. Let's not talk about college or leaving or whatever. Just enjoy the time we have." You press a kiss to her hairline, and you feel her smile into your shoulder.

Slowly, you lean back on the bed, taking her with you, until you're both lying down. She gets comfortable again, curling herself into you. You wrap your arms around her again, getting comfortable yourself.

You knew it was only a matter of time before one of you fell asleep. This was always the third part of your after-practice ritual.

"I love you," she says, looking up at you. Those eyes never failed to make you melt, as if she didn't already have you whipped for her.

"I love you too."

[aliceisaperson]

Part 3 of Making Hatchetfield Characters in the Sims 4!

This one is just a random assortment of Women in hatchet field because I got tired of making men (It's soooo hard). There's not much of a theme to these like the others.

Links to the first 2 can be found here!

1 2

Anyway! On to the actual Sims!

Miss Holloway

Woman (She's collecting all the wedding rings she's got from all her past husbands)

Melissa

Rose

Greenpeace Girl; Aka Harmony Jones

Hailey (Eyebags from staying up all night dumping ass)

Deb

Sylvia

[neweramuseum]

NEM Submissions - Jane Schultz Selections for Dec 2022

FEATURED WORKS BY: Cindy Karp, Mark L. Gentry, Sara Seldowitz, Cynthia Moskowitz Brody, Filiz Ak, Bob Weil, Robi Gallardo, Chris Schlossin, Judy Lurie Wahlberg, Andrea Gessat, Deb Field, Vicki Cooper.

[beguines]

Nationally, coal miners continually played a vanguard role. In 1897, although perhaps as few as four thousand miners belonged to the national union, two hundred thousand miners answered the UMWA call and struck, stopping 70% of national soft coal production, resulting in a national agreement with a 33% wage increase and an eight-​hour day. This victory, by many accounts, spurred other workers in the United States and Canada to organize. The leadership of the union, conservative in temperament, with an extremely militant constituency generally sympathetic to radicalism, was often of two minds. This is revealed, among other ways, by how it went about mobilizing support for the 1897 strike. Foner emphasizes that President M. D. Ratchford requested aid from Socialist Party (SP) leader Eugene V. Debs, especially in Pennsylvania, where SP organizers played an important role in aiding the strike. Taft chooses to highlight the degree to which Gompers and the AFL contributed money and organizers, playing a particularly active role in the formerly non-​union fields in West Virginia, continuing to aid the union financially, even after the strike. Both emphases, of course, are one-​sided, although each is factually accurate as far as it goes. Miners continually chafed at the conservative, class-​collaborationist orientation of the national leadership, never, however, succeeding in overthrowing it. At the 1910 UMWA convention, for example, they opposed the alliance of the AFL and former president John Mitchell with the business-dominated National Civic Federation (NCF), forcing Mitchell to resign from the NCF or lose his union membership. Although an exception had been made regarding the industrial jurisdiction of the UMWA in the 1901 Scranton Declaration by the AFL, the miners' organization as a whole continually agitated against the craft orientation of the parent organization, sponsoring resolutions, at AFL conventions, sheltering the radical Western Federation of Miners from craft union assaults, and even running John L. Lewis for AFL president against Gompers in 1921. Hatred for Lewis, however, was so intense among many radicals that some even supported Gompers against Lewis for president. The schizophrenic nature of the UMWA, exceptional militancy of miners, classwide feelings of solidarity, and sympathy for radical ideology, combined with a conservative class-​collaborationist leadership who sometimes expressed the more radical strains of the mineworkers, form a continual thread in the history of the union, playing an especially important role in the labor upsurge of the 1930s and 1940s, a legacy in which John L. Lewis fits comfortably—​which many mistakenly attribute to his idiosyncratic personality.

Miners were among the first southern industrial workers to organize. The Knights of Labor was active in coal in Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Their struggles were as militant and dramatic as those we have come to expect of miners everywhere. The 1891 Coal Creek Rebellion in Tennessee epitomizes this. When the Knights of Labor contract expired at the Briceville mine near the town of Coal Creek, the company attempted to break the union, locking out the miners, evicting them from company housing, and bringing in convicts to work the mines. Merchants and property owners who depended on miners for their livelihood, along with miners, armed themselves. When the government called out the state militia, armed miners and other workers from around the state converged on Coal Creek, disarmed the militia, freed the convicts, and burned the stockade to the ground. Armed confrontations continued to occur, including one at Oliver Springs in 1892, where train crews refused to move troop trains to the mine areas. When Jake Witsen, a Black mine leader was killed, thousands of white miners and neighbors attended his funeral. Although these struggles were eventually defeated by the mobilization of the U.S. Army and the deputizing of large numbers of vigilantes, public opinion was so aroused against the use of convict labor that the legislature—​which had initially supported convict labor by a large majority—​ was forced to abolish it. The specter of armed miners converging from around the state, supported by farmers and townspeople, and the overwhelming majority of public opinion in the state constituted one of those rare situations in which the need for social stability trumped the extra profits to be gained from the use of prison labor in the mines. Both structural and associative power reinforced each other to gain this victory.

Michael Goldfield, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s

[miss-holloday]

Things I would love to see explored in another hatchet field musical:

1. HOLLOWEANE - JUST ANY HOLLOWAY AND DUKE CONTENT

a. Holloway’s past - the deal, what she cherishes most, her beef with Wilbur

b1. Duke getting to know Miss Holiday the school guidance counselor, and OF COURSE, falling madly in love with her over the course of the show - even though it was love at first sight, but it would just get WORSE (in a good way)

OR

b2. Miss Holloway and Duke in another dimension, helping another kid, as they always do hehe

2. Webby in any form - but also both forms plz

3. Lex’ powers and the ancestry of Willabella Mukwab

4. The tree people of witchwood forest and the hatchetmen

5. Just WITCHY STUFF - allusions to Salem shit in hatchet field - good vs bad witches

6. ZIGGY, Alice, and Deb in school (and also would they know Hannah? Or Lex? Either way we could get some dynamic in there)

And basically, what I’m saying is all of this in one musical plz mhm

[katherinebotten]

Port willunga, Sellicks Hill.

After nine years, probably 15 Instagram accounts, I unfollowed Maggie Lee.

Fields

Natural hair natural hair keep it ignore Gabbriette, Amelia Gray.

Go to the river by the hills and find the mushrooms. Eat them and don’t talk to anybody.

Kill your grandmothers life partner.

Don’t eat, walk.

Stop recovering, make art. Become a prostitute. Like @ sighswoon a new age whore. Be a whore try to get Brace Belden’s attention.

Sex workers can go overseas. Regressed toxins love New York.

Mushrooms will heal perianal Crohn’s disease.

Love heals perianal Crohn’s disease.

Being a whore gets you love. Taking drugs un-virgins, un-incels. He moved on they move on I stay stuck I am unmoving like the concrete forest sculptures at the bottom of the Adelaide Freeway.

Deb Dana, Kathy Kain. Hang in there. RIP Liam.

[fatehbaz]

The Clear Lake hitch (Lavinia exilicauda chi) is a rare endemic species of minnow living only in the Clear Lake watershed of northern California, a fish that was once a “symbol of abundance” for Indigenous people. In December 2022, the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, Robinson Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians, Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians and the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake ask for immediate emergency protection of the hitch. The fish is in danger of extinction as the last observed successful breeding for the species was in 2017, and the creatures only have a six-year-long lifespan. US land management agencies say hitch numbers have “fallen to near zero.” However, in the past, there were millions of hitch in the watershed each year, and the fish was important to Indigenous food systems. Local “entrepreneurs” prefer to protect the introduced non-native bass, which voraciously preys on the endangered hitch. Clear Lake hosts dozens of bass tournaments each year, events large enough to attract international visitors. There is a past-time tradition (”hitching”) of children beating the hitch to death with baseball bats in the springtime as the hitch gather in streams to try to spawn. The hitch is also threatened by pesticides, runoff, and overuse of water for the region’s prominent local vineyards. The hitch is referred to as a “trash fish,” and some feel that this insults the importance of the fish to Pomo people.

Excerpts below from: Louis Sahagun of Los Angeles Times. “As a sacred minnow nears extinction, Native Americans of Clear Lake call for bold plan.” As published at Phys.org. 6 December 2022.

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Spring runs of a large minnow numbering in the millions have nourished Pomo Indians since they first made their home alongside Northern California’s Clear Lake more than 400 generations ago. The Clear Lake hitch glinted like silver dollars as they headed up the lake’s tributaries to spawn, a reliable squirming crop of plenty, steeped in history [...].

In all that time, the hitch’s domain, about 110 miles northwest of Sacramento, had never suffered the degradation of recent years.

Now, with a growing sense of sorrow, if not anger, the Pomo Indian tribes of Clear Lake are watching the symbol of abundance and security they call chi dwindle into extinction.

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On Monday [December 2022], they took the rare and drastic step of urging Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to use her emergency powers and invoke the federal Endangered Species Act on behalf of the Clear Lake hitch. “Bringing the chi back will require a bold plan of action devised by people with the power to move mountains,” said Ron Montez, tribal historic preservation officer for the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians. 

“I have almost zero confidence in state or federal officials to save the chi and our way of life,” Montez, 72, said. [...]

The Clear Lake hitch was designated as a threatened species under California’s Endangered Species Act in 2014. Since then, however, its numbers have fallen to near zero, according to recent surveys. 

Some causes of the hitch’s decline, however, seem extraordinarily difficult to fix: prolonged drought, mercury contamination, gravel mining, an overtaxed water distribution system, pesticides and runoff from vineyards [...], and predatory nonnative game fish. [...]

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The 2023 spring spawning season is crucial for the continued survival of the Clear Lake hitch, scientists say. That’s because the last observed successful spawning was in 2017. “Hitch have a six-year life span,” said Meg Townsend, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. [...]

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But until its fate is known for certain, Michael Fris, a field supervisor at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said his agency is unlikely to list the hitch on an emergency basis. [...] That kind of talk prompted the Center for Biological Diversity, together with the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, Robinson Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians, Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians and the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake to take their request for emergency listing to Haaland.

All involved agree that seeking intervention under the federal Endangered Species Act is an act of desperation. Only two species have been emergency-listed as federally endangered over the last 20 years: the Miami blue butterfly in 2011 and Nevada’s Dixie Valley toad earlier this year. [...]

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The hitch is a 12-inch-long minnow found only in and around the oldest, largest and perhaps most polluted and wildfire-prone watershed in California. In 2020, the Lake County region was charred by six of the 20 largest wildfires in state history. [...]

It’s been the poor luck of the hitch to require adequate stream flows in February, March and April to trek from the lake to spawning beds at the same time agricultural interests need water to defrost their vineyards.

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“An emergency listing would force people to consider alternatives to the way water is used in this region,” said Sarah Ryan, environmental director for the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians.

Beyond water flows, the prospect of emergency-listing the hitch raises other economically significant issues connected to the lake’s food chain: Zooplankton are eaten by shad, crayfish and hitch, which are favored by monster catfish and largemouth bass.

Clear Lake entrepreneurs host dozens of professional bass tournaments each year that are supported by contestants from around the world.

The most popular lures in local tackle shops are hitch replicas that cost up to $180 each. Other lures are made to resemble juvenile hitch and sold under a slogan that some people feel mocks the creature’s cultural importance to Pomo people: “The All-American Trash Fish.”

Over at [C.O.], a sporting goods store on the southern end of the lake, old-timers still talk about how local kids had a tradition of “hitching,” beating hitch to death with baseball bats for fun as they ascended streams to spawn in spring. 

They also grumble over the thought of new special protections for a nongame fish disrupting human pastimes for any reason [...].

"The reason our bass grow so big is that they love to eat hitch," mused [D.B.], owner of [C.O.]. "So, when customers ask me, 'Where can I catch the biggest bass of my life?' " he added, "I send them to places hitch hang out in."

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That kind of banter and lore suggests that unless government agencies yield to Native American concerns, they are headed for a showdown of complicated and competing values.

“The way some people ridicule hitch makes me wonder what they think about the folks who eat them,” lamented Robert Geary, cultural resources director for the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake. [...]

---

At the heart of the matter is that Pomo people [...] did not consider their native attitudes and lifestyles to be an expendable price of living in America.

Yet, their modern history is told mostly through economic hardship, rip-offs, massacres and environmental destruction.

---

Headline, image, caption, and text by: Louis Sahagun of Los Angeles Times. “As a sacred minnow nears extinction, Native Americans of Clear Lake call for bold plan.” As published at Phys.org. 6 December 2022. [First paragraph in this post added by me.]

[baberoe-archive]

there is a version of masters of the air that traces the tuskegee airmen and the 100th bomber through the war in parallel stories that merge in the prison camp that actually seriously analyzes racism at the time and as it exists today in our historicization and mythmaking around wwii. perhaps even a version that does justice to civilian resistance movements. and instead we have.

i appreciate you saying this bc i think it needs to be talked about more, but if you could link the other version you talk about? i would leant to watch it, thank you!

hi! what i actually meant in this post was that there could have been a version of this masters of the air show that did what i was talking about in that post, not that a show like that existed. i apologize for that -- i am now realizing my original post was worded very poorly 😭

from a quick google search there are two movies made about the tuskegee airmen: the tuskegee airmen (1995) and red tails (2012), though i haven't seen either. im sure books also exist, but i am not the one to ask about this. if anyone out there has more resources please share!

i will also take this opportunity to direct attention to tuskegee university's online photography collections, which has work from prominent early black photographers. i took a class on african-american photography last semester, and the tuskegee institute came up specifically when we were discussing w. e. b. dubois's display on african american life at the 1900 paris exhibition. the goal here was to directly confront the racist and dehumanizing exhibition of black and indigenous people in colonial exhibits by showing african-american life georgia, which included a number of universities including tuskegee. all the materials (i think?) are at the library of congress and available for browsing here. if you are interested in learning more about this (or black photography in general), deborah willis and shawn michelle smith have written on this exhibition and black photography more widely (deb willis is The scholar for most things black photography, and she is an incredible photographer in her own right.)

also while i'm at it. through a lens darkly (2014) is a documentary on black american photography directed by the practicing photographer, filmmaker, and scholar thomas allen harris. we also watched this for my class, and it looks at the history of black photography and incorporates contemporary artists frequently. great introduction to the field!