#Green Day phase is back. Strongly. Badly

[aeolianblues]

sorry about all the 90s music men spam. Seeing Green Day live broke something in me; new music song-to-go poll is coming your way Friday morning to make up for it 😌

[tipsydipsydo]

Pairing: Namjoon x Reader 

Gender of the reader: gender neutral

Word Count: 3.3k

Genre: pure Fluff, a tiny bit of Angst

AU: Exchange Student AU, Roommate AU, Roommate-to-Lovers AU

Warnings: Nothing too bad, but mentions of homesickness

A/N: Hello again!! After having been nonexistent for almost a month, I'm back here with a little sweet fanfic, perfect for Christmas! Unfortunately only without any Christmas feeling! I wanted to write this story for a great friend a long time ago, but school always thwarted my plans. That's why nothing came from me for so long, but perfect for Christmas I managed to get a small present ready for my dear friend and for you guys!

Merry Christmas!🎅🦌

Summary: You finally managed to spend your two semesters abroad studying in Korea! However, after some unfortunate circumstances, you want nothing more than to finally be able to fly home again. But your roommate Namjoon has some ideas to make your year abroad still wonderful...

「© tipsydipsydo」

This following story is my intellectual property and belongs only to my blog tipsydipsydo.tumblr.com!

I’ll not accept any kind of reposting, stealing or using/editing my work!

That includes reposting my content on other social media platforms too, even when you link me as the original author.

Thank you.

A shaky sigh escapes your mouth before you quickly press your lips together and press your face into the soft fur of your fluffy teddy bear, which your best friend gave you as a goodbye gift. Fortunately, this stuffed animal catches your sobs and tears, so that just only quiet and muffled noises can be heard. Your body is shaking again and again by crying and you've pulled your knees up to your chest.

At some point you no longer have the strength to keep yourself upright and let yourself plop to the side onto your mattress. You involuntarily made yourself small, as if you were a helpless baby. And that's how you feel at that moment to be honest.

You had been looking forward to your year abroad in Korea so badly in the last few months, you were accepted directly at a university in the capital Seoul for the two semesters of your studies abroad in an other country and after a long, painful search full of despair you finally had found an affordable room in a shared apartment with a young Korean man.

And now? Now that one of your life dreams has finally come true, after a few holidays in this beautiful country, to be able to live in Korea for a longer time, you want nothing more than to finally fly home in eleven months. You're homesick. You feel nothing than unbearable homesickness.

Homesickness had never been a problem for you before, rather it was wanderlust that made you crazy when you were stuck in your hometown for years and couldn't get away. During your school days you also spent a year abroad to perfect your knowledge of your second foreign language. Of course, you also had days when you longed for home, your family and friends. However, it was only a few days ... not whole weeks. You have been in Seoul for a month and there have only been a few moments when you felt not lonely and alone.

In your year abroad, you also had a host family, a highschool with a teacher for exchange students and took care of all their questions and needs. And your host family gave you a room that was discreetly furnished just for you! It's precisely in these moments that you remember the pastel green wall color of your room at that time. You just had to personalize your room a little bit, fill it with your own elements of your personal life!

You open one of your tear-glued eyes and look at the bare white wall that is opposite your bed. It's one of the three other, also white walls. Surrounded by white, lifeless walls. They make yourself feel so inconspicuous and small.

Most likely, the circumstances of how you had to shape this new phase of your studies and ultimately of your whole life make you so unhappy. You had to move to an other city for your university after finishing highschool. From your hometown to the city where your university is located. But that wasn't so tragic back then, it was far too exciting to finally move out of your parents' house and be allowed to live of your own. And everything you couldn't take with you could stay in your old room in your parents' home. But not this time.

This time you had to sell or donate most of your furniture, books, decorations, and even your clothes, since you weren't allowed to take more than two suitcases to Korea. And your parents live too far away to bring all things to them and store them there. Most of your friends are still students too and either live in a shared apartment with other students or have their own apartment but this is mostly so small that they barely have enough space for their own stuff.

So for better or worse, you had to give away almost everything that you brought back from home two years ago or that you bought yourself over the past two years. Even a large part of your merch collection from your favorite K-Pop band, so that you can take the most important gifts from friends with you.

This process had been more painful than you could ever have imagined. In short, you had to try to stuff your previous life into two suitcases and a small backpack. You have nothing more than this.

And unlike in your year abroad, you're no longer just a sixteen year old teen who has to be taken by the hand and everything has to be done for them. You're a grown up adult now and you are old enough to find your way in a foreign country on your own. Usually you are very positive and confident, not often something quickly upset you. But so many sudden changes in such a short time leaves you unsettled and with a feeling of helplessness.

The last few days in your old apartment, which was almost completely empty at that time, together with all the farewell parties with your friends leaves you depressed and melancholic. It felt like you had given up yourself and given away your entire life. Left behind with no more than two suitcases and a backpack. You felt in a strange way... homeless.

When your current roommate Namjoon received you a month ago and showed you to your room, your heart sank. A bare, sterile room with four white walls was in front of you, with a small white desk and a metal, also white bed frame with a mattress. This room reminded you of a hospital, a prison cell, a patient room of a sanatorium from a horror film. So lifeless. So cold. You got goosebumps when Namjoon left you alone in this room, your room for the next twelve months.

You don't want to feel that way. You want to enjoy your time in Korea to the fullest, live your dream and not just let this unique opportunity pass away. But every time you go to your room and are greeted by four sterile white walls, you feel like a prisoner in his cell. Like a prisoner in your own dream.

Since you'll only be living here for one year, you will try to avoid unnecessary things as much as possible. You neither have an excessive amount of money for it, nor space in your suitcase to just take everything with you. You don't want to end up throwing away your entire life again, which is why you try to be as minimalistic as possible. So that means continuing to perch in your little private prison and staring holes in these damn white walls.

A little knock on your door wakes you up from your pessimistic trance. A light blond thatch slides between the door and his frame and the owner of the blonde hair smiles brightly at you.

"Hey Y/N! I was going to order dinner from the delivery restaurant, so I was going to ask if you want somethin-"

"Wait, are you okay? You look so sad and your eyes-"

Immediately you rub your eyes vigorously, although you don't know with what goal exactly you do this, because your tears have already dried and your eyes would only swell more and become even redder.

"No no, everything is okay! Don't worry," you stutter in Korean, which you speak fluently, but with a very noticeable accent. However, Namjoon doesn't really buy your half-hearted answer, still has a worried frown between his eyebrows.

Namjoon is the best roommate you could imagine as a helpless exchange student. In your first week in Seoul he guided you through the campus of the university, showing you when, how and where you register for important seminars and deadlines, where you can find the lecture halls for your lectures. He took an incredible amount of time for you and your questions, is very patient with you and encourages you to speak Korean again and again if you automatically switch to English if you are unsure.

But that doesn't necessarily make it better, since he's also fluent in English and has almost no accent. And then he studies law, has an IQ of 148 and also scored 900 in TOEIC ... while he was in middle school! By the time you got all of this information from his friends (according to Namjoon, they were just terribly curious about you and wanted to know what kind of roommate their best friend would have for the next year ...) you were a little intimidated by this genius, You felt even more stupid with every mistake that came across your lips.

But relatively quickly, to your own relief, you discovered that your Einstein-Roommate also has his weaknesses. You shouldn't leave him on the stove unobserved, but it's the best to lock the whole kitchen with childproof locks. Therefore, he has developed into a "hunter-gatherer" Perfectionist of take-out restaurants in order to survive his studies.

While his friends, who are more talented in cooking, had strongly advised against conjuring up a welcome menu for you, Joonie can also be very stubborn. On the day of your arrival, an unbearable beep from the smoke alarm penetrated the eardrum of your ears and let you run like crazy into the kitchen, where your roommate stood with an embarrassed smile on his lips and held a charred frying pan in his hands, but with a half burned but also half-raw piece of meat in it. So far you didn't even know that something like this is physically ... chemically ... biologically ... whatever you want to call this phenomen... was even possible.

Unfortunately, after only one month with Namjoon as a roommate, you're already very familiar with the smoke detector beep sound. To your horror, you had to find out that even his fried eggs are a complete fail. And he almost made the rice cooker explode. Therefore, you have decided to be the one who defaces the kitchen, but this still takes place within a reasonable framework.

His friend Jin showed you the functions of all the kitchen appliances, where Namjoon was leaning against the door frame all the time with a pouting face. Apparently frustrated not being able to show you all of this himself.

All of this only made him more lovable and it is becoming increasingly difficult for you to interpret nothing more than a normal, friendly relationship in his nice gestures.

Just like now that he has sat down on your bed next to you and is watching you carefully.

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to, or the reason is too private ... I just want you to know that I'm here if you need me. I know we haven't known each other for a long time, but when I was abroad for a year because of my studies I know how hard it is when family and friends are so far away when you need them the most ... "

Nothing stops you and you only feel the tears running down your cheeks and you start to sob. Namjoon's eyes widen in shock and before he realizes it, he has already put his arm around your shoulder and is stroking your back, trying to calm you down somehow. He grabs a tissue from your nightstand and hands it to you, apologizing to you again and again that he shouldn't say that and in no possible way he wanted to make you cry.

After you calmed down a little bit and your tears gradually dried up, you shook your head vehemently and stuttered: "N-No, no! It's not your fault, Namjoon! I-It's just that... that I feel a little bit like I don't have a home anymore. "

Now the blonde directs all his attention to your next words and you start to tell him everything about how it came the point that you developed this questionable feeling. He listens to you very carefully, tries to understand every feeling that you convey to him through your facial expressions.

"Ah okay ... now I understand a lot, Y/N. I was wondering why your room still looks so sterile and empty after a month without any personal elements. But I didn't want to talk to you about it, maybe it’s just your personal style. ...Well. Apparently not.", he mumbles and rubs his neck.

You sigh and look at your phone, which is next to you on the bed, and take it in your hand. "When I imagine that most of my whole life is in here... contact information about my friends, my family, the last pictures of my best friends and me that we took together... I think that's kind of...extreme? Just in this little thing." Namjoon nods his head slightly and looks thoughtfully at your phone and then at his watch.

"... it's too late for today."

"What did you say, Namjoon?"

"Tomorrow is Saturday, we would have the whole day for it! Y/N you don't have any specific appointment tomorrow, do you?"

"N-No, but why do you-"

"Perfect!"

"Namjoon, it's Saturday ... Saturdays are there to sleep in. Why did you call me in the kitchen for breakfast at seven o'clock?!", you grumble and try to warm your cold hands with your cup of coffee. But Namjoon doesn't seem to be listening to you properly, he's staring too excitedly at his iPad and scrolling through some sites and making questionable notes on his "top secret" spiral-bounded notepad until he asks you out of the blue for your favorite color.

"Purple... and red. But why all this?"

"We're going to the hardware store together and you choose a wall paint! Then we clear the few things from your room into my room or put them into the hallway and paint your room! Then it doesn't look so sterile anymore!", says Namjoon and smiles at you with great satisfaction of his idea, so that the dimples in his cheeks are only more noticeable.

You almost choke on your coffee and look at it as if he went completely crazy.

"Namjoon, I don't have money to paint my walls and anyway, the rental agreement says that the walls must remain white and no new nails can be hammered into the wall!"

"So if you take the contract very seriously, the walls just have to be white again when you move out. So what you do with them between moving-in and moving-out is up to you.", retort Namjoon and grins at you.

"Joon, but that was interpreted quite freely by you, you have to admit it! In addition, you are the one here who studies law and is responsible for ensuring that the rights and laws of the individual are granted!"

"Oh, don't be like that, Y/N. There are always legal grey areas and free judicial spaces!", he chuckles and winks at you, which makes your heart jump.

"Okay, okay. You won ...", you admit and sigh.

"Don't worry about the money, I'll pay for you. I don't want you to remember your year abroad in Korea as a nightmare!"

"But you can't do that-"

"No buts! Please accept it as a gift from me. Okay? Please!"

He throws his irresistible look at you, which makes your eyes roll and finally leaves you beaten.

You were so punctual at the hardware store that you even stood in front of closed doors for ten minutes before you could storm the painting department. It was just nine a.m. when you were already pushing the furniture out of the way and spent the next four hours trying to get most of the paint on two of your walls, and not just spreading it all over each other!

You haven't laughed that much in a long time and overall, you haven't been so happy and optimistic in ages. It's really a blessing to have a person like Namjoon around. He's always up for a joke and still be able to talk to him about every kind of deep and philosophical topic.

You can hardly believe it, but now, at this moment, Namjoon seems to make you feel "home", in that way you've missed so much.

You quickly shake your head, try to get rid of this thought. Fortunately, Namjoon immediately pulls you out of your wild dreams and initiates you into the next part of his secret plan.

"Yesterday you said that almost your whole life has been in this smartphone... what's about to try to bring this memory alive and decorate your room with it! I know a small shop with a cool photo booth where you can take your photos print out in polaroid format! ... and then we stretch a clothesline from here...", Namjoon runs his finger from one nail across the room to another nail "...to there and hanging all your pictures of your friends and family on it. What do you say? Do you like the idea?"

He still asks you if you like the idea? And whether you like the idea, you love it! Before you can control your emotions, you jump around his neck and trying with all your strength to suppress your tears.

"Thanks Namjoon. I don't know how to thank you for all of this here." When you notice that you are clinging to him like a coala, you quickly let go and stumble back, you're too embarrassed to look at him.

"Sorry ... I didn't want to... sometimes I do strange things when I'm happy ..." you murmur and quickly turn away from him, pretending that the empty paint buckets suddenly become terribly interesting.

That's why you can't see his smile full of affection.

It is already late evening when you start putting your things back in your room. However, you don't push your bed and other larger furniture directly onto the wall yet, so that the wall paint can dry completely overnight. With an exhausted sigh, you put down the last box in your room before you and Namjoon can look at your complete masterpiece.

He was right. What only two colored walls, a clothesline with photos and a world map (which you will only be able to put on the wall tomorrow ... because of the wall color) could change. Your room has become so much more cozy and private for you. It's finally your room and not just any prison cell anymore!

"Y/N ... I have something else for you. Just wait a moment!"

You look after him puzzled as he disappears into his room and comes back with a large, flat, rectangular box.

"Something else for your wall ... I hope you'll like it ...", he says quietly and looks nervously at the large box. You excitedly fumble with the opening before you can open it finally and pull out a huge, oversized poster. Of your favorite k-pop band. To be more precise, of your ultimate bias. A poster from a limited edition that has been sold out for a long time.

You don't know what to say. Your cheeks turn red with excitement, but also with a bit of embarrassment, you didn't want to give the impression of a crazy K-Pop Fan.

"...T-Thanks! B-But how did you know that I-"

"... when we were printing photos together today, I looked over your shoulder and saw different folders from the band in your gallery and there was a heart behind "XY", so I thought it could be your bias ... ", he says and grins at you like a little school boy being caught by doing something forbidden.

"You are pretty good at speculating the right things..." you murmur with a little smile, confirming his guess.

He nods, still smiling, but seems to think about something else.

"Do you think I have any chance next to them? So... that you maybe would go out with me...for a coffee or so? Even if I don't look like your bias in any way and in general, if you would date anyone here because you're only had one a year here in Korea and because of the risks of a long-distance relationship and- "

"I think ... I would try it, Namjoon. Risks are everywhere. And ... I would like to try it with you," you whisper and give him a shy smile.

[Links]

My Imagines 

My Masterlist

[j-shute]

If you care about the environment, back Warren. Not Sanders.

I’m not an American, I’m a Brit. But what I’m about to say here is valid across all countries. It’s not your fault if what I’m about to say comes as a surprise to you, the main stream media have collectively failed to challenge and inform you about it. 

A while back, Bernie Sanders posted this:

This is entirely accurate. Climate change is a major issue, and we need a competent strategy to deal with it.

Bernie also posted this:

This is disingenuous. Yes, we need to transform our energy systems, but there are many ways to do that. Some fall more to the ‘pragmatic’ side, similar to the UK’s stance (use gas to end coal, while building nuclear and offshore wind). Others are on the ‘purist’ side, such as Germany (No more fossil fuel capacity, phase out nuclear, wind and solar). 

Bernie is a purist, and that’s bad.

This is the Vermont Yankee power station:

Built in the 1970′s, it produced 70% of Vermont’s (Bernie’s home state) electricity. It received an extension to run into the 2030′s but was shut down in 2014 due to being undercut by cheap gas power. 

The US reactor fleet has a 100GW capacity, and produces 20% of the countries power. It is their largest source of carbon free power. By extending the plant licenses, a common and highly regulated practice, most of them could run safely into the 2030′s, 2040′s and, in some cases, 2050′s.

Many older reactors though suffer from a financial double whammy. On one side is cheap natural gas electricity, on the other is subsidised renewables. Providing financial assistance to keep these plants open is one of the cheapest ways of stopping more emissions.

Bernie Sanders opposes any license extensions, any financial help, and any new nuclear new build.

This is a NuScale SMR

It is a mass producible small reactor that is passively safe. It CAN’T melt down. It’ll be cheap, easy to build, and has been privately financed by a set of US companies. It is one year away from passing through the US licensing requirements, with the first plant planned for operation in 2026-2027. 

Under Bernie Sanders plans, a decade of work and investment, and a potential critical tool in the fight against climate change, will be dealt a hammer blow.

But that’s not the only problem with Bernie: 

The US shale revolution dealt a hammer blow to coal, allowing the country to meet the Kyoto protocol targets without even trying. Not only is it a vital transition fuel (until the last coal plant is shut down), but it’s got a strong future in a carbon neutral world.

This is a prototype Carbon Capture power plant

Like the Nuscale SMR’s, it’s a project that’s been ticking along in the background, pushed on by private backers. It uses the Allam Cycle, named after it’s inventor, to produce electricity at the same efficiency as current gas stations, alongside pipeline ready pure CO2. 

I repeat, it’s carbon capture and storage at the same price as current electricity. This is a monster of a game changer, with the first commercial plants planned for 2022-2024.

Bernie Sanders, though, is opposed to CCS in all forms. Like nuclear, he calls it a false solution.

But couldn’t we run on renewables regardless?

Even if you feel concerned at a climate activist throwing away some of our best tools, you might feel that their drive towards the solution more than makes up for it. After all, you can run the country on wind and solar, can’t you?

Well, you can. But it’s nigh on impossible to do so.

Despite what climate activists tell you, the wind isn’t always blowing everywhere:

Above is a graph showing the change in wind production from season to season. Below is a closer look at how wind production across Europe (I couldn’t find one for the USA) can nosedive at the same time. Madrid is as far away from Helsinki as New York is from Los Angeles. Even across a continent, the wind isn’t always blowing everywhere.

Solar, meanwhile, varies everywhere according to the seasons. In northern latitudes such as the UK, a solar panel might produce ten times more power in the summer as in the winter. Even in California, solar in the summer can produce 1.5-2X what it does in the winter.

Which, in southern desert states, is good. They need little heating in the winter, and aircon in the summer. Big desert solar arrays at low latitudes are a good source of energy. Less efficient, inherently badly optimised and far more expensive rooftop solar further north (where you need lots of winter heating) are about as useful as Mao’s backyard furnaces were at making steel.

But what about batteries?

I’m sure many people will now talk about storing power. However, the idea that we can economically do this (similar to the idea that the wind is always blowing) is probably one of the most successful bits of fake news ever spun. Let me illustrate.

This is Vogtle units 3 and 4:

With a project cost of $17 billion, renewable energy enthusiasts like to paint it as a perfect example of the failures of modern nuclear.

This is Tesla’s Big battery:

Costing $50 million USD, Renewable enthusiasts like to paint it as a triumph of renewables.

The big battery stores 129mwh of electricity, which equates to $387 per kwh of storage. Or, $0.387 billion per Gwh. For $17 billion, you get 44 Gwh of storage.

Vogtle will produce that same amount of energy in just over 18 hours.

Even if you use the most expensive, finance inclusive, cost for Vogtle, it will still fill the equivalent storage potential in 29 hours.

To run a fully intermittent grid, we’d need days if not weeks of storage. Or, we could spend a fraction of that money on nuclear power, and be done.

But what about pumped Hydro?

Again, let’s use a sense of scale to explain how much you’d need. Something big, like this:

Lake Erie and Ontario are separated in elevation by 99m. Assuming you use dams and locks to turn them into a giant upper and lower reservoir, how much energy could you store?

By draining 1m of water from the smaller Ontario, and pumping it into Erie, you could store 4,600GWH of electricity.

The US uses around 2,740 per day on average. So you’d have a viable short-term store for the entire country. It wouldn’t be seasonal storage.

The equivalent storage using batteries would cost over $1.38 trillion. This is enough for 81 Vogtle plants. They would have 194GW of capacity, and produce 4196GWH a day.

Using Nuscale SMR’s at the current quoted price (which could come down if you get a dedicated assembly line going) you could get 328 GW of capacity.

What about seasonal storage?

In countries with winter heating seasons, you need a reliable source of energy or people will freeze and die. Even with Nuclear, you’re at the peak of energy requirements, so it’s uneconomical to build to that point.

Instead, you can use biogas, biomass and waste to energy. Stockpiling your fuel throughout the year, you can burn it when most needed. Even better, in many cases you can convert existing fossil fuel plants.

Credit where credit is due, Bernie Sanders is pro bio-energy (as opposed to some (even purer) greens). At the same time, he is anti-waste to energy.

So what is the point of this?

The point is that we can’t simply add ‘Wind, solar, batteries’ and get an energy system that works. There are serious technological limitations and economic realities. Long term energy storage is incredibly cost prohibitive. The wind doesn’t always blow everywhere. In any case, if we only have a short time to stop emitting carbon, why shoot your biggest contributor of green energy at the same time?

Germany lost a decade due to its closure of its reactors, and still has some of Europe's dirtiest electricity. Had they closed the Lignite plants in North-Rhine Westphalia instead, they’d of cut their emissions while opening up giant pits like the Hambach mine for conversion into pumped storage sites. I’ve done the calculations, they could run the country for half a day on that level of storage.

In contrast, France is the only developed country to turn a dirty grid into a clean grid. They did it decades ago with nuclear, but there are those in power who want to shut reactors down early. They don’t care that they can build out renewables anyway, and export the extra energy or use it for transport. They care more about killing nuclear than saving the planet.

This is why Warren is better than Sanders.

Elizabeth Warren wants a green new deal and medicaid for all, just like Sanders. Unlike him, she’s open to keeping the US nuclear fleet going. She’s open to new reactors and CCS. Both have a plan and a drive, but hers is open to more options and focuses on what the real enemy is. Bernie is a purist. Purism sounds good. But wherever you look, it’s the pragmatists that have always performed better.

I care strongly about the environment and global warming, which is why, if I could, I’d vote for Warren. Because you can’t say that global warming is the biggest threat we face and then throw away our best tools against it.

[doomedandstoned]

Closer To The End (part III)

I contend that human beings are not suited for the world we've fashioned for ourselves. Cases of anxiety and depression are practically ubiquitous, and suicide in all age groups is once again on the rise. Some will suffer mental afflictions that last years -- perhaps even for a lifetime. This is the third and final part of my story.

~By Billy Goate~

Cover art by Ruso Tsig additional art by Karl Briullov

I'm so tired of hearing that I'm wrong Everyone laughs at me, why me? I'm so tired of being pushed around I feel like I've been betrayed

We take each other's love, forget to give back Isn't it a pity, how we break each other's hearts I know we're only human and not to blame But who the hell are you to cause so much pain Why...

MEDICATION

My parents have been anti-establishment for as long as I can remember. In the climate of the 1980s, the institutions of the day were being called seriously into question. One of them was the authoritarian nature of public education (there's a reason why Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" resonated so strongly with people). It's no surprise that my family got caught up in the first wave of the homeschooling movement. Other areas of modern life began to be called into question, as well, taking the family down a dark, windy road that led into conspiracy culture, extreme libertarianism, and religious dogmatism.

This distrust of the "experts" put us at odds with the medical establishment, too. "Doctors only know how to do two things," mom would often proclaim loudly in one of her famous rants, "cut you open or prescribe you pills." Natural medicine held the keys to recovery from all ills, be it cancer or the common cold. "All those chemicals aren’t good for your body," she insisted. "God put everything we need for healing in the ground." I’m not here to knock naturopathy (I was an ardent follower of this way of life for years) nor my mother for her convictions, but there are some things that can’t be cured by Saint John's Wort and herbal tea -- major depression being one of them.

At one point, my anxiety, melancholy, and a generalized feeling of social isolation reached such a heightened state I turned to hypnotism, enamored by an obscure radio program hosted by Roy Masters and his Foundation for Human Understanding. I was too young to understand the significance of most of the bullshit he was spewing, but it was the comprehensive approach to life that appealed to me. I wanted answers -- all of them. About the only thing I got out of it, though, was learning how to make my own arm go numb through self-hypnosis.

Later, I'd get caught up in a movement of Biblical counseling that rejected psychiatry altogether. "Christ has given us all things we need for life and godliness," says the holy writ, ergo we need none other than Jesus to cure our mental ills. Furthermore, the thesis said, since "God has not given us a spirit of fear" it must mean that the root of depression and anxiety is ultimately sin against God. The answer? Confess your sins and walk by faith, not by sight. In short, pray the sadness away. All of this had limited effectiveness in coping with the claustrophobic cloud of melancholy that was constantly with me.

Cough & Windhand: Reflection of the Negative by Windhand

The stigma of psychiatry and modern medicine kept me from treating my depression for damn near a decade. Somewhere in my late twenties, after a prolonged and particularly dark depressive spell, I decided to talk to my medical doctor about antidepressants. He started me on the industry standard, the well-known and well-marketed Prozac, which became a household name in the '90s. I took the first dose at bedtime and when I woke up, I was seriously hating the daylight. Feeling extraordinarily fatigued, all I wanted to do was sleep. I called in a rare sick day from work. The next day I was feeling groggy, but well enough to return. Giving it the good ol' college try, I took Prozac for several weeks as directed, but the side-effects just weren't worth it for me. That’s when I was referred to my first psychiatrist.

It was a weird feeling sitting in the waiting room for my appointment. I felt like I’d joined the ranks of the fragile, broken, and confused, perhaps even the insane. It was hard for me to see myself sharing anything in common with the others that shared the tiny lobby. The psychiatrist who greeted me looked like a regular chucklehead -- you know, one of those sidekicks from a sitcom that's not coming to me now. (It just came to me: Glen from the Tom Green Show.) A paunchy man in his 30s with wavy dirty blonde hair parted to the side donning wire-rimmed glasses, the shrink pulled out a notebook and started asking me about my background, while he busily took notes. Turned out, the man was very methodical in his approach. Over the course of the year, we cycled through all kinds of drugs -- Paxil, Effexor, Wellbutrin, Lexapro, Zoloft, and a lot of other names I'm not remembering, before finally settling on Cymbalta.

Certainly, this was something I didn't want to share with my coworkers, much less mom and dad. The first time I told my brother I was taking antidepressants, he was outraged. “You don’t need that stuff in your body. You don’t need pills to feel good.” I don’t know what it is about antidepressant medication that offends people so badly, but some people feel it is their personal mission in life to get you off of them. Why all the evangelical fervor? Are they secretly afraid they are "nuts," too? It’s not like I’m trying to get everyone else to take my medication, but suddenly these people, well-meaning or not, are trying to get you off of your meds.

I’ve seen YouTube videos from a guy claiming that God has cured him of his bipolar disorder and he flushed all his pills down the toilet (bad idea, by the way). Then a month later, he comes back online crying uncontrollably, talking about how he feels like God is testing him and asking viewers to pray to stop Satan’s onslaught. Moral of the story: It's dangerous to let people's religious opinions and untested hunches drive the agenda for our mental health.

I'm very reluctant these days to talk to anyone about my depression, because of all the rush to judgement involved. Ironically, it's this breakdown of community that I believe is at the heart of much of our mental health issues as a society. Look at the comments on any confessional video addressing burnout, depression, or anxiety and you'll find everyone is suddenly an expert who knows so well the precise and perfect solution to your problems. Well-meaning or not, it's incredibly annoying and I'd rather not have trouble with it. Hell, it took me two years to finish this article.

Depressed people are often viewed with the same cynical dismissiveness ascribed to angsty hormonal teens. "It's just a phase, you'll get through it," you're told with the reassuring wave of a hand. Besides, they remind you, "Happiness is a choice!" Because they are feeling chipper today, they have little patience for you dampening their mood. Others call you edgy when you say the pressures of life are so great that you feel like just turning off the lights on all of it. Still others will view you as selfish for leaving the family reunion early (or not wanting to participate in holidays at all). When you spend the whole weekend in bed sleeping, they'll accuse you of being indulgent, not realizing sleep gives you a respite from the hurt, guilt, and regret of painful memories or the misery of an unstable home life. Or the well-meaning "It Gets Better!" It doesn't always get better as life moves on.

Then there are those who try to talk you off your meds, entirely (cue: the ridiculously overwrought Facebook posts). We've all been privy to those conversations that strike a conspiratorial tone about how it was really the pharmaceutical companies that led to Chris Cornell's death. "You should just get off the stuff," they argue -- be it from noble intentions or just pride from clinging to an opinion they've stubbornly invested in.

Then there are those who are convinced that since Jesus (or Buddha, Allah Oprah, Jordan Peterson or juicing) gave them an escape from their depression, certainly it is the universal cure for all that ails you. Understand that I was a committed Christian for decades. I know what it is like to feel spiritually serene and I value many of the things the church gave me as a young adult, namely the fellowship, tolerance, and love. I know the feeling of peace that comes from believing in someone who reigns over the chaos and cares about your every need -- an ultimate being who will make sense of the nonsense one day.

I don't wish to diminish anyone's faith or diminish your personal experiences. The fact is, however, that major depression is as much a physical illness as cancer is. Certainly, there are transitional feelings of unhappiness, emptiness, and despair that come from facing situations that seem out of one's control -- the nightmare roommate, being laid off from a job, losing a loved one. It's also true that in most cases, this sadness can be overcome by a new perspective, trying better strategies, or simply allowing the passage of time to do its healing work. Depression can be impacted by one's beliefs, but there is a kind of depression that exists independently of one's perspective on life.

SUICIDAL TENDENCIES

Apart from this series of articles (which took me a good two years to publish), I've stopped sharing my depression with other people. It's annoying, because most people don't know how to listen and empathize. They want to jump in with a solution that, if implemented by nightfall, just might make a difference by daybreak. It's just more hassle than it's worth. Over time, I've gone from being someone with an intense need to belong, to not caring what people think about me at all. I'll often go out of my way to avoid anything deeper than transactional relationships. Once a social butterfly, you'll find me quite the hermit these days. As a consequence, while I was once open to sharing my feelings of loneliness and despair, I rarely mention them any more on social media and practically never to my IRL friends. I would be the last person to call a suicide hotline, by the way. Judge me if you wish, but I'm just being honest. If you want to know what is going on in the head of a severely depressed person with suicidal ideation, here's a least one brain you can peer into.

There's a general consensus that suicide is a selfish decision, even a cowardly act. This was a casual opinion of my own for years, as well. Not until suicide touches someone in your life -- or when you enter its despondent realm yourself -- does the ridiculousness of that notion becomes apparent. Understand that for a person to commit suicide, they have to overcome the brain's own strong predilection for self-preservation. It's not so easy to take the step of ending your life. Something has gone terribly wrong with the brain's ability to convincingly cry, "STOP!" for that to happen.

In my worst bout of depression, following the demise of long-term relationship, I reached the point where every waking moment was sheer misery. Some call this anhedonia -- the inability to feel pleasure. Normally, when we are feeling blue, we seek out something to stimulate our pleasure receptors. That's why ice cream, chocolate, and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are popular go-tos for the bummed out. For me, it's always been music and movies. On this particular week, though, I had somehow lost the capacity to find any joy whatsoever in the usual pastimes. Anything that attempted to pacify my mood met with my contempt. The only thing I could do to escape the agony of just being alive and conscious was to sleep...and sleep I did. At first 8 hours a night, up from my usual 7. Then it advanced to 9, 10, 11, 12 hours. When dawn came, a wave of misery washed over my mind again.

Once, I woke up feeling so despondent that I knew with absolute clarity that I could end my life. Today, I could actually do it. Immediately upon this realization, I wept bitterly. I've not cried like that before or since. If anything, I've become more stoic about the idea of suicide. Don't get me wrong, my internal sense of self-preservation is still quite strong. The problem is that in moments of severe depression, that instinct is dampened. You'll do just about anything just to get rid of the feeling of misery making it unbearable to be awake.

DOOM AWAKENING

One of the most important developments in treating my depression, besides medication and therapy, was the discovery of doom. There's an old expression that misery loves company. I don't know about you, but when I listen to music it's not generally to cheer me up. No, I want my tunes to have a certain level of commiseration with what I'm feeling and going through at the time. When I discovered (quite by accident) Saint Vitus, I knew I'd found my soul food. I can't fully explain that eureka moment when Dave Chandler belted out that first downtuned note on the guitars on "Born Too Late" or when Wino joined with plaintive lyrics for "I Bleed Black." This resonated with me powerfully. It brought chills. This was medicine for my weary head, a kind of mental morphine to dull the pain. I'd come to the Roseland Theater for Down and left with Saint Vitus.

As a funny aside, my roommate (who accompanied me to the show) and I rehashed the bands of the night, giving our two cents on this or that. One thing he said still makes me smile a little inside. "What did you think of Saint Vitus?" I asked. "I don't think they're the kind of band that will withstand the test of time," he remarked. "Well," I rejoined, "they have been playing now for over 30 years and were the co-headliners on a national tour, so their sound must be resonating with a good number of people." Sure, it wasn't for everyone, but on that night my doom had come.

Every song on 'Born Too Late' (1986) so perfectly captures the malaise of the deeply wounded soul, not just in lyrics but in the whole vibe. There's a thick, smoky haze permeating the record and it reminds me a lot of what it feels like after you've poured out your heart until you've got no more tears left to cry. Come on, don't pretend you're so macho that normal human emotions elude you. It's hard to put doom into words, but I'll try: on the one hand you feel emotionally exhausted because you've emptied out all those pent up feelings of loss, fear, regret, and frustration, on the other hand there's a feeling of "reset" and it often makes things much clearer to sort through. For me, when I've exhausted all my emotional resources, I'm left with a feeling of blithe acceptance. A sense of being dealt a set of cards by the impartial hand of fate. That's the kind of vibe that Saint Vitus captures perfectly for me on this record.

I spent entire weekends on those long, wonderful rabbit trails of discovery. "Dying Inside" led me to Trouble's "The Tempter" with its oh-so-tragic central riff. Lyrically, the songs I was running across could not have been more apropos.

Pentagram, The Skull, and Candlemass were not lingering far behind. Then came the more recent monoliths of doom: Electric Wizard, Windhand, High on Fire, Burning Witch, Khanate, Pilgrim, Serpentine Path, Usnea, Demon Lung, Ancient VVisdom, Dopelord, and the NOLA sludge scene, along with lesser known but equally as powerful acts like Undersmile, Shepherd's Crook, Reptile Master, Purple Hill Witch, Witchthroat Serpent, March Funèbre, Beldam, Hooded Priest, Regress, and 71TONMAN (listen to the Spotify playlist).

Doom metal spoke to me with a sharp realism that I connected with immediately. When you have no strength left to get angry at the world, you switch your listening habits from Car Bomb to Cough. You can say, I suppose, that doom was my salvation. It kept me hanging on a little while longer. The salve of those slow, low riffs gave me a strange feeling of consolation. "We know life sucks, too. Welcome to reality." It's like being awakened to the Matrix, but feeling there's not a damned thing you can do to change any of it. Your fate is sealed. It's an honesty that is both refreshing and freeing, I suppose, though one does wish to reclaim the notion of hope.

Believe it or not, even after writing all of this, optimism is my default mode. When I'm feeling well, and even when my depression is at low levels, the needle always leans towards inspiration, creativity, even a mischievous sense of humor and an aw, shucks smile that people tend to notice. I don't want to be depressed. The problem is that severe depression can make you feel, illusion or not, like you're paralyzed from doing anything about it.

As I've experienced more and more cuts and scrapes of life, I've become increasingly numb to it all, like the massive build-up of scar tissue. Things that upset me easily in the past might still hurt, but I've come to expect them, so they have the impact of a dull table knife. Perhaps I'm becoming a nihilist, despite my optimistic tendencies. It's hard not to be. Don't worry about me, though. If anything, I want to stick around to see what's going to happen next. It's the inborn curiosity we all have inside of us -- the same thing that I imagine kept Stephen Hawking going for decades after being wrecked by a disease that cruelly mangled his body into its famously misshapen form, stealing away his most basic expressive freedoms -- save for the power of his eyes and the thoughts behind them.

I've also made a deliberate attempt to pursue treatment (both psychiatric and psychological care) for my depression, which I urge you to do if you are likewise laboring under its crushing weight. The perspective of time, coupled with a remedy for mind and body can have a significant impact on your perspective, if not your life circumstances.

THE WINDY ROAD AHEAD

Learn from your mistakes, don't dwell on them. Repeated affirmations like this one may seem trite, but they are ultimately true. You can be free from the chains of guilt and move forward, as one performer puts it, "from strength to strength."

Don't kill yourself (literally or metaphorically) for someone else or for someone else's decisions. It may bum you out that a roomie decided to take your money and run or that you were rebuffed by a long-time crush or made jobless through corporate-wide cuts. You don't own that, they do.

Walks

Get off the couch, move that bod. Something as simple as a walk down the block or a drive out of town can do wonders for your perspective. As a homeschool teen living under the strict rule of a radical fundamentalist household in rural East Texas, my one salvation were those long walks in the open field -- especially when my parents started having loud, intense fights related to my mom's own mental health. I sorted through so many of life's problems (most of which seemed much larger then than they do now) through those solitary, hour-long strolls.

I really miss that where I live now, in a more congested neighborhood, so I have to find other ways of getting away from it all (getting up and out a half-hour before the other walkers, for instance, helps). Even if I don't want to rustle myself awake and move around to do as simple a task as taking out the trash, sometimes the feeling...let me revise that...quite often the feeling follows after the decision has been made and the body is in motion.

Projects

Another piece of advice I have for coping with depression is to channel your frustrations in projects. When I'm depressed, I throw myself into my work. Hell, Doomed & Stoned started because I needed a project to pour myself into. My counselor asked me once, "If you woke up tomorrow without depression, what would be different about your world?"

She encouraged me to start with the things that were in my immediate vicinity. "Well, there wouldn't be mail strewn all over the floor. My dirty clothes would be in the hamper, my clean clothes folded and put away. I'd take the time to cook myself a meal, instead of running out the door eating a quick bite out of some package."

Good, let's make a list and start there. Do at least one of the things on your list between now and the time we meet again next week.

Talks

Despite my isolationist ways, I begrudgingly admit that talking often helps, too. Though I'm an introvert and am horrified at the idea of sharing my feelings with others, I've reached points in my depression where I was compelled to tell others about it. It's as natural to do that as to cry out when your body is experiencing jolting pain. I'm one of those verbal processors that tends to sort through my problems by talking to someone else. Often, pride or shame or lack of trust gets in the way of sharing with our family and friends, so at the very least the much talked about Suicide Prevention Hotline could actually help you gain perspective on your situation.

Journals

If you don't talk, at least journal. Again, I'm not a journaler and this is the first time in almost three decades that I've written about anything related to my depression. Role play with me. You're a scientist studying the human psyche. How would you describe those feelings you call depression? When I was first asked to describe it to a counselor, I found myself at a loss for words. She helped me with prompts:

Can you tell me what it feels like?

"I walk around feeling like a dark, thick raincloud is hovering all around me all the time."

Do you feel it in a part of your body?

"Well, yeah, I guess. The head. And the chest. It feels like there's pressure building from all around me, like my head is going to explode. My heart feels like it's going to leap out of my chest."

What's happening around you when these feelings arise?

I'd then go on to detail some recent happenings. She'd press me further to describe the kinds of thoughts racing through my head in these situations. All of this was really helpful in getting me to define this nebulous, gray malaise that was following me everywhere I went.

I don't keep a journal, per se. Something about it feels needlessly egotistical, a vain attempt to reinforce the illusion in our YouTube fame crazy world that my life is worth discovering and remembering at some point in the distant future. And yet, writing down one's thoughts can be another effective way of untangling that anxious ball of feelings that keeps me from thinking rationally about the depression I'm feeling.

Today is my birthday, but I couldn't care less. It's not about getting old. I stopped caring about that 10 years ago. It's something about celebration, specifically when the attention is on me. I can't adequately describe how contemptuous I find it. My last birthday was spent alone in an empty house and a bottle of Scotch, catching up with past seasons of Game of Thrones. I was so glad it was over and the happy birthday wishes stopped. There's nothing special about this day for me.

At some point, my family stopped celebrating birthdays and holidays. I'm not sure when it happened or why. Certainly not for religious reasons, more probably for financial ones. I grew up in a family that barely scraped by, so birthdays seemed a luxury we couldn't afford. Now, it just feels indulgent. More than that, it feels sad. It reminds me of all the disappointments, hurts, and failures of the past year. It's not as though it's all bad, of course. If nothing else my birthday gives the illusion that a chapter has turned, with new possibilities for the future. I also have to come to terms with how many people out there actually seem to care about me, maybe even love me.

And later that day, I forced myself to go to a show I was quite enthused about, but didn't factor in depression being the party pooper.

I can't account for what it is that comes over me. There are people here that genuinely like me, who probably even want to get to know me better, but I push them away. Not so much directly, but indirectly, by excusing myself to use the restroom and then changing my mind midway and just leaving the venue -- without even the courtesy of a "goodbye" to friends or a "great show" to the bands. I feel awful about it afterwards, but in that moment it's like a flood of emotional pain washes over me and it feels like I'm carrying an anchor chained around my neck. I feel the great urge to find my way to unlit corners. To look busy and preoccupied. Would it hurt me to say hello? To smile? Perhaps not, but right now my psyche is tingling like some kind of Spidey Sense telling me, "Get out of here! Just get your shit and leave...NOW."

As dour and hopeless as that may feel, just the act of writing it down afforded me a release, which incidentally I did not feel until the writing was all said and done.

Hope, a new beginning Time, time to start living Just like just before we died

Hurt, falling through fingers Trust, trust in the feeling There's something left inside There's no going back to the place we started from.

ONE MORE THING

For those of you who are wondering what you can do for a friend, family member, coworker or just someone you know casually from shows you both frequent, I couldn't say it better than one of my longtime fellow travelers in doom, who offered up this advice:

"While it's all very well and fucking dandy that there are so many people telling those who are struggling to reach out to them, I don't think people are quite understanding just how mental illness works sometimes. People quite often don't reach out, because those that are suffering from mental illness, at times, feel like they are a burden by unloading their shit onto someone else, despite the invitation to do so. It's generally the same concept that leads on to suicide.

I obviously can't speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself when I say the last thing I want to do is reach out to anyone because I feel like I am a burden and everyone would be better off without me -- and that is ultimately why I don't reach out. The point that I'm trying to get at is if you see someone struggling YOU reach the fuck out. If you don't see someone who used to be around, YOU reach the fuck out. Think about it. It's not that hard."

Well said and completely on the mark. At the same time, if you're feeling alone and uncared for, you may look at people’s lack of inquiry as more confirmation that you are worthless trash. You may interpret a busy person's slight as utter rejection. Don't worry about what others may or may not think of you. You need to take care of you, for you. The future is fickle. Your fortunes can change on a dime, so why base your self-worth and your decision about whether to live or die by how you feel right now? Ride it out, seek out help, get a game plan in play.

I say this as someone who knows how hard it can be to get mental health. I was double insured -- through my employer and the Veterans Administration -- and I couldn't get a god damned psychiatric appointment to reevaluate and adjust my meds. I called all over town trying to get in with someone. "Sorry, we're not accepting new patients" was the universal refrain. The VA would just be too many month's wait, I told myself, based upon how long it has taken me in the past to get a conventional medical appointment. In desperation, I called up my primary care doctor who asked if I was suicidal. For the first time in my life, I knew with full certainty the answer was yes. The more miserable I felt, the more I contemplated dying. If I did it, it would be something quick and sudden, I would daydream in my most despondent moment. "You need to check yourself into the hospital now," she told me adamantly. I did exactly that. I walked into the ER and told them I was suicidal. They led me to a room, had me take off all my clothes, and put on a hospital gown. I stayed in a padded room waiting for a social worker to see me. It was a desperate move, but it did pay off in getting me fast-tracked to see a psychiatrist.

One thing I learned about medication from my new psychiatrist (because he was very caring, very careful, and hence very effective at his job) is that everyone’s brain chemistry is uniquely different. There can be other issues impacting mood, too, such as thyroid, environmental stressors, sleep problems, vitamin deficiencies, and so on. Again, it’s often hard to see whether the cart is leading the horse or the horse is leading the cart, in terms of the mind-body connection. Long story short, this doctor adjusted my meds to near perfection to get me through the rare summer-long depression I was experiencing.

Just a few months later, he got hired away to work for the County and I was left back in the same boat once again. I got a great referral, but didn't realize until bills came in I couldn't pay that the doctor was out of my insurance network. Believe me, many people prefer to go without care entirely than to go into debt and I was one of them (truthfully, I still am). I went another year until I couldn't take it anymore and this time in my desperation reached back out to the VA. Surprisingly, they saw me within a week and prioritized my suicidal depression. I'm now in a good spot as a result, but it was a long, windy, uncertain road getting here. I know it's hard to find help. Sometimes you don't know what's available to you until you knock a little louder and get people's attention.

The older I get, it seems the more stubborn I am, particularly when it comes to reaching out and asking for help. Perhaps I've always been that way and am only now realizing it's become a liability. After taking off three weeks during the holidays to catch up with the many projects that were piling up around me, I realized that my depression was sometimes stronger than my will to power through and do my best work. I would find myself sitting at the computer for hours trying to get started with a story, trying to edit audio for a podcast, trying to prepare a team member's submission for publication, and every time I would find myself coming up against something painful, perhaps similar to the long recognized creative crimp known as writer's block. I describe it as an inhibitor chip in my brain that sends pain signals to my psyche whenever I contemplate moving forward.

Of course, rationally, I know it's all just a matter of the will, right? That's what those who aren't experiencing depression will tell you, at least. They don't want to go to the gym, but they make the choice to do it anyway, so why can't you just "man up" and do what needs to be done? Well, those aren't so much the messages other people give me, as they are my own conscience. The guilt itself from a day coming and going without results adds its own layer of complication to my mood. Thankfully, I have a wonderful counselor who understands and is helping me to tackle this with cognitive strategies. This, coupled with sensible medical treatment, has at least helped me to find "even flow" again.

Finally, you're going to have some bad days where you may even want to be productive, but your body feels like it's in revolt. As a creative person who loves to pour myself into as many projects as I can when I'm feeling good, it can be extraordinarily frustrating to not even feel the will to check email, open a letter, or listen to a stitch of music. Most days, I'm trying to work in concert with my body's natural rhythms. I'm more of a morning person and get my best work done between 8AM and 11AM. Anything after that is going to be hit or miss with diminishing returns. With that in mind, I have to hold back from starting new projects before the ones already on my plate are finished, because when I'm feeling good, I think I can take on the world.

This is all a part of me rediscovering what it's like to feel balanced, bright, and in love with life. It can be frustrating to have that feeling back, only to watch it wither away as the week progresses. Since I have very high expectations of myself, it's natural for me to heap guilt upon guilt for all the missed opportunities, but beating myself up only compounds the problem (it took me a long time to really get this about myself, too). Every day is a struggle, but I've decided I'm staying in the fight for the long haul.

In short: Be patient with yourself. Be fair with yourself. Be good to yourself. Remember, this too shall pass.

"Someday you're going to die, just like some day I'm going to die. But until then, you fight like hell to stay alive, you get that?!"

-- William Holden, The Earthling (1980)

[raendown]

My contribution for week 3 of KakaSakuMonth. This story loosely follows the prompt “epistolary format”. 

Summary:  It always seems to be when something devastating happens that Sakura finds out the biggest truths. She's rather tired of deathbed confessions - even if Kakashi isn't really on his deathbed and she wasn't really supposed to discover this confession.

Follow the link or read it under the cut!

She found them as they began cleaning out his apartment. He’d been in a coma for nearly a year and housing was tight around the village at the moment. Even if Sakura or Naruto could have afforded to pay the rent in his absence it was selfish to keep paying for an empty space when it was needed by so many others.

Many people offered to help pack away the Copy Ninja’s possessions to be put in to storage, some of them genuine offers of help and some of them opportunists trying to learn more about one of the most elusive nin in Konoha’s history. In the end only Gai-sensei accompanied them. He was Kakashi’s dearest friend and the only person who had been entrusted with an emergency key. As close as they had become with Kakashi over the years, not even Gai had ever been inside his apartment and they weren’t about to allow anyone else in either.

Naruto and Sakura brought boxes and storage scrolls, feeling like nothing so much as intruders while they went through things they knew they were likely never supposed to see. They learned more about the man who had become a good friend in that one afternoon than in the twelve years they had known him. They learned that many of the Icha Icha books that he carried were really adventure novels and poetry books in disguise. They learned that he had an extensive music collection with a wide variety of genres. They learned that he had more weapons hidden in more places than probably the rest of his building combined.

Sakura felt strange as she stepped inside Kakashi’s bedroom. It seemed wrong to violate his privacy like this but she supposed it was better that it be her, a friend, rather than some stranger who would toss his belongings to make room for their own. She decided to start with the desk first, setting the box down and sitting in the rickety chair to organize the papers atop the dented and aged wood.

Twenty minutes later she had cleared the top and opened the first drawer to her left to continue the task. Her first reaction was to be annoyed that the drawer was no more organized than the surface had been, with papers thrown in willy-nilly and no system or separation to sort them. Then she noticed what they were: letters. Sakura was a thoughtlessly curious girl by nature and without thinking about how wrong this was, how badly she was breaking a friend’s trust, her first instinct was to pick it up and read it.

Her eyes nearly fell out of her head when she noticed it was addressed to herself. Curious – flabbergasted – she flipped through the stacks of letters inside the drawer. They were all addressed to her, each and every one of them. Some were short, others three pages folded together. None were dated but as she set the stack on her lap and began to read through them a timeline became clear.

And tears began to fall as she read them in reverse.

Sakura That red dress? Stunning. I heard your friend Ino telling you that you should have gone with the green one but I can’t imagine anything that would look more amazing on you. Well, anything but your smile. Love, Kakashi

Sakura Congratulations. You told me to sound more enthusiastic and I couldn’t say it to you then but what I really wanted was to lift you off your feet and spin you in circles, to say it over and over until you were half as proud of yourself as I am of you. Congratulations, congratulations, congratulations. You earned this promotion and I’m so happy for you. Love, Kakashi

Sakura He didn’t deserve you. You always have been and you always will be too good for him. You deserve someone who worships you, who would bring the world to its knees for you, who understands that you’re too good of a person to want that. Divorce is never happy but neither was your marriage. Think of all the opportunities before you. I hope you smile more often now. The world is shadow and darkness and you are a shining star that lights the way for so many. For me. These are the things I wish I could have said to you tonight. I’m sorry I never have the words when I’m standing next to you. You take my words away. You take my breath and my will. The same as you’ve taken my heart. Love, Kakashi

Sakura You had cream on your lips and I wanted to lick it off for you. If it were my birthday instead of Naruto’s I would have forbidden anyone but you from eating that cake. Love, Kakashi

Sakura Come back. Come back. Come back. Come back. Come back. You are all that keeps me sane some days. How many more months before your mission is finished? It’s like each day lasts an entire year. I can feel myself sliding backwards in to old habits and the only thing that keeps my head above the water is knowing that someday you’ll come home and I will see you smile again. Love, Kakashi

Sakura I’m a terrible disgusting man, in love with someone else’s wife. Help me. Release me, for kami’s sake. I don’t want this, Sakura. I don’t want to love someone who will never love me back. I hate it. I hate this. I hate myself for falling so low. Love, Kakashi

Sakura Get out of my head. Please. You’re beautiful and kind and graceful and brave and intelligent and stubborn and everything I could ever want. But I don’t want to want this. I’m a broken old man and you’re engaged. So why is it that every time I see you I fall a little more? Love, Kakashi

Sakura I’m terrified. I think I’m in love with you. Kakashi

The longer she read the more Sakura began to cry. There were dozens upon dozens of short letters, the journey of a man falling in love without being able to say a word. Reading them backwards was like reading a descent in to madness, like watching darkness consume him.

The one that she saved for last was the most recent, the one she had found on the top of the pile. After reading through the way Kakashi had struggled with himself, these lines broke her down completely.

Sakura You will have my heart for the rest of my life. What is the point in fighting something so wonderful? You light up my day every time you walk in to a room and that will never fade. Not even as I grow old and you forget all about a jaded man who should have done so much better by you in so many things. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. And the next time, and the next time after that. I look forward to seeing all the happy places your life will take you, be it the head of the hospital, down the aisle again with a new love, or to another village following some fanciful dream. I promise to help you up if you ever need it. I promise to hold my tongue and be whatever you want me to be: a friend, a Hokage, or just an old sensei. I promise to never put this burden on you and force you to tell me what I already know. I know I can’t have you. But I promise that I will always be saying these words in my heart, every day for the rest of my life: I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you. Forever, Kakashi

The calm acceptance after fighting so hard to reject himself hit her like her own chakra-enhanced fists to the stomach. Sakura buried her face in both hands and wept, gasping and crying out until Naruto and Gai-sensei came rushing in to see what was wrong. Naruto held her and asked question after question, his voice loud and demanding and never pausing for breath let alone giving her a chance to answer. Not that she could.

Gai-sensei gently took the letters from her and read through some of them, his thick eyebrows furrowing deeper and deeper the more he read. Eventually he set them down on the desk rather delicately. Sakura looked over at him through the veil of her tears, distantly surprised to see him so calm about this discovery.

“I did not know that my rival wrote you letters,” he mumbled. Sakura gaped.

“Did you know?” she demanded. “Did you know he was in love with me?”

“He what?” Naruto shot upright, his face incredulous. Sakura ignored him.

Gai gave her an uncharacteristically solemn look. “Yes, I knew,” he said. “He did not deal with it well in the beginning. It fell to me quite often to drag him home from the bar or to hold him back from partaking in the more desperate measures. He went through a...particularly reckless phase for a while.” Talking about Kakashi, that was saying something.

Sakura covered her mouth with one hand and closed her eyes for a moment, breathing deeply.

Kakashi had been in love with her for years and she had never had a clue. She hadn’t married Sasuke until a few years after the war had ended and it had fallen apart only a few years later. She’d been single again for four more years now.

In that time Kakashi had become her best friend. She couldn’t even say it was a case of him trying to ingratiate himself towards her because she was very aware that it was usually her that sought him out, asking him to lunch and sitting next to him at social events she had threatened him in to attending. She was closer to him than even Ino. She told him all her secrets, vented to him about bad days, went to him first with good news.

And this entire time he had been in love with her without her seeing a single hint. Sakura wasn’t sure what she felt more strongly: the shock of this revelation or the guilt that her best friend had been suffering in silence without her even noticing. Sure he was a private person but shouldn’t she have picked up on some sort of sign?

Naruto was still freaking out behind her chair but Sakura continued ignoring him as she stood up. She met Gai-sensei’s eyes and for a moment they simply stared at one another without words. Then the older man broke out in to his signature sparkling grin, turning his wheelchair with one hand while thrusting out an enthusiastic thumbs up with the other.

“YOSH! I could not be more happy for you! At long last my eternal rival enters the springtime of LOVE!” Sakura blushed but giggled. Gai reached up to her face and used one thick thumb to brush away some of her tears. “Go to him,” he said, much quieter.

Sakura didn’t need telling twice. Naruto’s agitated yelling faded away as she dashed out of the apartment and headed for the stairs. The two men could finish packing up the apartment; she had a coma patient to go rant loudly to.

-

Kakashi had the sensation of rising to the surface of a deep lake when he returned to consciousness. He blinked his eyes open to the sun rising outside of his window, dawn’s first light flooding his room with gold, and sighed.

The hospital again. Whoopee.

He only vaguely remembered the battle that had put him here but what he found much more important was that a glance outside told him it was spring. The last time he had been aware of the world it had been winter. The idea that he might have been lying here for a couple months as the season changed without him knowing had him shifting uncomfortably in his bed, surprised by how weak his body felt.

He considered calling for a nurse and letting them know he was conscious. If he’d been in a coma then it was probably best to get checked out as soon as possible. And he was going to do that – really he was – until his eyes fell on the stack of paper on the table next to his bed. He would know that writing anywhere. Sakura had been here and she’d been writing letters.

Too curious to resist, Kakashi reached over to pick up the letters. He stopped halfway to stare in horror at his own arm. Where there should have been corded muscle, years of hard work and dedicated training, there was nothing. His arm was wasted like someone who’d been stuck in a bed for much longer than a couple of months. This looked like years.

Swallowing down the panic and the fear that rose unbidden in his throat, Kakashi focused instead on the letters. He forced himself to see it as information gathering, falling back in to a mission mentality to keep himself calm.

The stack wasn’t too thick and it was mostly made up of half scraps of paper ripped off of a form or out of a notebook. All of them were in Sakura’s handwriting and as he read through them, Kakashi’s emotions took leaps and plunges he wasn’t properly equipped to handle at the moment.

Kakashi You’re an asshole. Wake up you stupid man. Love, Sakura

Kakashi You never listen do you? I’m in here every day telling you to wake up and you just lie there like a lump. Wake up soon. Love, Sakura

Kakashi I can write letters too you son of a bitch now wake up so I can yell at you in person for how stupid you are. How could you never say anything? How could you think I would hate you? How could you make me find out this way? How could you leave me alone? Wake up. Please. Love, Sakura.

Kakashi I know you like to nap but two years is a bit ridiculous and if you think I’m ever going to let you forget this you are dead wrong. I can’t write flowery things like you but I can yell and you best believe you’ve got some yelling coming when you WAKE UP. Love, Sakura

Kakashi I miss you. Nothing’s the same. I’m lonely without you and I love all of my other friends but none of them are you. Will you have lunch with me today? Can I tell you all about the idiot who threw up on my brand new shoes? Love, Sakura

Kakashi Shishou says I’m not allowed to have access to your charts anymore because I thought I had found a pattern in your brainwaves and everyone made a big fuss but it’s been another month and you’re still asleep. Will I ever hear your voice again? Will I ever make you laugh again? I’ll do as many embarrassing bad impressions as you want, I promise. I can’t stand this. I need you. Love, Sakura

Kakashi How dare you make me fall in love with a man who does nothing but sleep! How dare you! I hate you! Love, Sakura

Kakashi I love you. Love, Sakura

Kakashi I think I’ve loved you for years and never realized. You’ve always been there and you’ve always been perfect but I closed my eyes and didn’t see. I looked only at Sasuke because I thought that’s the way things were supposed to be. And then he shattered my illusions so badly that I didn’t dare to look at anyone else. But you loved me the way he should have. Wake up. Wake up wake up wake up I need to tell you I love you too. I couldn’t stand it if you never got to hear it. Please don’t fade away. You can’t die thinking I never loved you back. Love, Sakura

Kakashi stared at the papers in his lap, unsure of what he was feeling. He felt overwhelmed, too full, confused. He felt joyous but an instinctive need to rein the feeling in because he was, by nature, a cautious man.

He needed to see Sakura.

Out of habit he made to sit up fully and swing his legs out of the bed. It wouldn’t be the first hospital escape attempt he had made and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. His efforts were halted, however, by what an incredible struggle it was just to sit up. Kakashi looked down at himself and his brain finally recognized that it wasn’t just his arm that was wasted. His entire body had faded away while he slept, muscle and fat melting off due to disuse and atrophying until he was left as a shell of what he had been.

He was distracted from the disgust he felt at his own body when the door opened. Soft soled shoes make light noises on the linoleum that Kakashi did not hear. His attention was immediately attached to the beautiful face of the woman who had just walked in, one hand tucking her pink hair behind her ear as she looked down at the open folder she was carrying.

Sakura’s eyes stayed on the patient file she was reading as she approached the bed, then they closed as she leaned down press a soft kiss to his forehead, once again resting on the pillow after the effort to sit up became too much.

“Good morning Kakashi,” she greeted him. “You don’t mind if I sit in here for a while do you? I can’t seem to concentrate in my office. I hate the night shift.”

With a sigh she sat down, balancing the file across her knees while she combed her fingers through her hair, taming the kinks that were ostensibly from a long night on duty. As she did, her eyes fell upon the letters still spread on top of Kakashi’s blankets and she paused, frowning.

“Eh? Who was touching my letters?” She reached out to gather them up. “Who was in here!?”

Sakura screamed like a banshee when Kakashi took hold of her fingers, jumping two feet in the air with fright. When she finally looked in to his face with saucer-wide eyes, Kakashi was smiling.

“Maa,” he croaked past a dry throat. “No one but you.”

“K-Kakashi?” Sakura stared, unmoving. Her eyes watered and when she squeezed them shut and popped them back open tears spilled out the sides. Her free hand made a familiar seal and she exclaimed, “Kai! Kai!”

“That’s insulting.”

“Kakashi!”

He grunted as Sakura fell upon him. Then he smiled and held her as best as he could while she clung to his neck, sobbing and crying out his name over and over and over. Her body collapsed beside his on the bed, somehow remembering not to put too much weight on him, and he couldn’t think of a single happier moment in his entire life than right now.

It took her a long time to pull away and Kakashi soaked in every moment of having her so close, of having her wrapped up in his arms. When she sat up the tears hadn’t even slowed but she was smiling so brilliantly he almost had to look away. Her hands came up to pet his hair away from his face, fingertips lingering on his cheekbones almost reverently as they traced along the line of his medical mask.

“You’re awake,” she whispered. “You’re okay.”

“Maa-” Kakashi tried to respond and started coughing when the dryness in his throat caused it to contract.

“Oh! Hold on!”

Sakura flew off the bed and in to the adjoined bathroom, returning a moment later with a paper cup full of tap water. He gave her a grateful smile and, without pause, pulled down his mask. Sakura nearly spilled the water and her hands shook as she held in to his lips. He grinning once he’d swallowed a few mouthfuls.

“That funny looking, huh?” he asked wryly. Sakura shook her head.

“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” she whispered unsteadily. Then she kissed him.

Kakashi groaned, falling helplessly back against the bed while Sakura pressed in to him with slow gentle kisses.

“I love you,” she murmured against his lips. “I love you, I love you, I love you. You’re awake thank god – I love you.”

“I love you too,” he said. Her kisses tasted wonderful but the words tasted better. “Haruno Sakura I love you with every fiber of my being.” She touched their foreheads together and grinned.

“I know. I read all about it.”

“Hmm, you’ll have to tell me what exactly you were doing, going through my stuff. Those were private thank you very much. But…later. Hello. I hear you missed me.”

Sakura laughed and pressed another happy kiss to his mouth so he could drink the sound of it right from her lips. “I did. I missed you so much. I’m going to yell at you later when I’m not so happy. Stupid man, falling in to a coma for two years. Don’t you ever leave me like that again, do you hear?”

“Loud and clear, my love.” He felt giddy. His body was wasted and he would likely be hospitalized for weeks more. It would take a long time to gain his strength back and even longer before he was back to anything resembling normal. But Sakura was here; Sakura loved him. He could say all of the things that he had kept locked away inside for so long and expect nothing but smiles and kisses in return.

Kakashi tugged her shirt until she came down in to his embrace again. Then he held her in his arms, buried his face in her hair, and whispered the words over and over until tears were falling from both of their eyes.

“I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you…”

[investmart007]

WASHINGTON | Trump mulls quick US pullout from Syria while advisers balk

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WASHINGTON | Trump mulls quick US pullout from Syria while advisers balk

WASHINGTON |April 3, 2018 (AP)(STL.News)  President Donald Trump expects to decide “very quickly” whether to remove U.S. troops from war-torn Syria, saying their primary mission was to defeat the Islamic State group and “we’ve almost completed that task.”

Trump’s comments, made to reporters at the White House on Tuesday, conflict with views of his top military advisers, some of who spoke at a separate event in Washington about the need to stay in Iraq and Syria to finish off the militant group, which once controlled large swaths of territory in both countries.

At a news conference with the presidents of the Baltic nations, Trump was asked whether he still favored pulling U.S. troops out of Syria.

“As far as Syria is concerned, our primary mission in terms of that was getting rid of ISIS,” Trump answered, using an acronym for the Islamic State group. “We’ve completed that task and we’ll be making a decision very quickly, in coordination with others in the area, as to what we will do.”

The mission is “very costly for our country and it helps other countries a helluva lot more than it helps us,” Trump said.

“I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home. I want to start rebuilding our nation,” he said during the appearance with his counterparts from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Trump also noted that the Baltic states are partners with the U.S. in the anti-IS coalition and “we will not rest until ISIS is gone.”

Later in the day, Trump met with his national security team to discuss Syria.

According to officials familiar with the preparations for the meeting, Trump’s entire national security team, including CIA chief Mike Pompeo, who has been nominated to be the next secretary of state, strongly advised against a hasty withdrawal from Syria. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks.

Also on the meeting agenda was the fate of some $200 million in U.S. stabilization assistance for Syria that the White House put on hold after Trump said during a speech in Ohio last week that he wanted to leave Syria “very soon.” The State Department was to have spent the money on building up the country’s infrastructure, including power, water and roads.

Trump in recent weeks has asked Saudi Arabia to contribute $4 billion for reconstruction in Syria, according to a U.S. official, as part of the president’s effort to get other countries to pay for stabilizing the country so the U.S. isn’t on the hook. The United States is awaiting a response from the Saudis, said the official, who wasn’t authorized to discuss the conversations publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

A senior Syrian Kurdish official said Trump’s comments on wanting to withdraw from Syria came at an “inappropriate time” as Islamic State militants re-emerge in eastern Syria and amid threats from Turkey.

Ilham Ahmed, a senior Kurdish official in Syria’s Raqqa province, said such a decision would clear the way for “total chaos in Syria,” endangering areas newly liberated from the IS group and empowering Turkey to move in on towns controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, backed by the U.S.-led coalition.

The main IS holdout in Syria is in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour, where momentum by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces has stalled in recent weeks as many Kurdish members of the group have shifted west to the Afrin area to fight Turkish forces. Pentagon officials have publicly raised the prospect of this giving the IS group the breathing room it needs to regroup.

Many have warned that a premature U.S. withdrawal from Syria would cede the country to Iran and Russia, which have supported Syrian President Bashar Assad. Iran’s continued presence in Syria is especially troubling to neighboring Israel, a U.S. ally that regards Iran as an existential threat.

Some high-ranking Trump administration officials urged caution.

Gen. Joseph Votel told a conference at the United States Institute of Peace that the United States would have to continue its work against remnants of the Islamic State group in eastern Syria. Votel is commander of U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations across the Middle East, including Syria.

Votel said the military campaign has been largely successful but is not over.

“The hard part, I think, is in front of us, and that is stabilizing these areas, consolidating our gains, getting people back into their homes, addressing the long-term issues” like reconstruction of towns and cities badly damaged by the fighting and by the Islamic State group’s scorched-earth tactics. “There is a military role in this, certainly in the stabilization phase.”

At the same Institute of Peace event, State Department envoy Brett McGurk said, “We want to keep eyes on the prize, on ISIS, because ISIS is not finished.”

A third U.S. official, Mark Green, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, also argued at the conference that U.S. stabilization efforts in Syria are critical to a lasting defeat of the Islamic State group.

___

By DARLENE SUPERVILLE,By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (Z.S)

___

[packernet]

New Post has been published on https://www.packernet.com/blog/2017/10/10/packers-2018-nfl-draft/

Packers 2018 NFL Draft

https://s3.amazonaws.com/seriouslysimplepodcasting/Packernet/episode%2044.mp3

*Be sure to listen to the podcast above. There was a change in the first round that I forgot so consider the first round a bonus round!*

Ladies and gentleman I’ve discovered something amazing. It’s called Fanspeak, and as a draft junkie, I’m completely hooked. It basically allows you to do a full 7 round mock draft as the Packers GM while simulating the rest of the teams draft picks. Also, it took into account all the compensatory picks so it gives you all 12 picks the Packers should be receiving in 2018. They aren’t paying me to say this by the way I’m just a draft junkie and am beyond excited.

With all that said, I decided I would use their tool to do my first ever, full 7 round, 12 pick mock draft for the Green Bay Packers with a little insight for each player. The research done on my part is cursory but consider it prep work for both of us.

Before we get started, I do want to point out that YouTube highlights are not where I do my homework. I just no longer have the time to create gifs or great plays so highlights are what you get. I would strongly encourage you to check out Draft Breakdown if you want a closer look at these guys.

Round 1 Pick 30

This is the first time I’ve watched film on Bradley Chubb and I’m shocked I haven’t heard more about him at this point. Granted PFF has Chubb at the top of their big board but for a lot of others, Chubb is your standard late first, early second player.

Perhaps that’s fair considering I see a lot of T.J. Watt in him. He is a monster of a man with enough burst off the line to beat a tackle clean but also the long arms and strength to throw a tackle off of him if need be. There is no doubt in my mind Chubb is a difference maker and if he were to fall to the Packers, the Packers would have the opportunity to draft a can’t miss day 1 starter in the first round.

At 6’4 275 pounds, Chubb would be the largest OLB on the team but his overall athleticism shouldn’t dissuade the Packers and Dom Capers from taking him. After all, if 6’7 287 pound Julius Peppers can make it work, so can Chubb. He would also be a great fit for the Dom Capers NASCAR package. Although not seen as much in 2017, Chubb would be an ideal candidate to play along the line of scrimmage in that alignment.

Looking deeper at his PFF stats for 2017, Chubb is ranked outside of the top 10 (comfortably) in pass rush productivity but that is entirely based on his low number of sacks. His total of 25 pressures is the highest of anyone I could find (I scanned 50 or so). His PRP is about the same whether he is rushing from the left or the right and is run stop percentage is ranked top 5 in the nation. In other words, the guy is a monster in every phase of the game, in every part of the field. He’s a play maker plain and simple.

Highlights

Round 2, Pick 30

I wanted so badly to draft Brandon Facyson here but the incredibly impressive play of Hamilton disuaded me. Facyson showed flashes of incredible ability at corner but how many early round picks are the Packers going to throw at corners that do some things well and other things not so well. After all it’s the not so good qualities that end up getting exploited while the positive qualities are left on the shelf.

But enough about Facyson. Shaun Hamilton is listed as a 3rd day player by PFF but this is Fanspeak day and I have to say, I’m not upset with the Packers pick. Hamilton plays with his hair on fire and his play speed is what stands out. His ability to knife through the line to make a tackle in the backfield is nearly as exciting as watching him run stride for stride with running backs out of the backfield. He is in every way a Packers ILB. Speed, speed, and more speed.

Considering how good Blake Martinez is playing against the run and how promising Josh Jones is in the Nitro package, Hamilton could slide in as the every down back and pair with Martinez or Jones depending on the situation and overall game plan.

Looking back over his career at Alabama, Hamilton doesn’t really blow you away with his stats or rankings. His tackling efficiency (19th) and yards per tackle (17th) are the only 2 advanced PFF stats that have him ranked in the top 50. So far in 2017, his pass rush productivity has gone up but overall his production has stagnated or worse.

Still, to watch him is to get get excited about him so let’s just bask in it shall we?

Round 3, Pick 30

If I did want to take a shot at a guy with a lot of upside at corner, I feel a little more comfortable going in the 3rd round, especially with a second 3rd round pick coming up.

Anthony Averett is the second Alabama player in 2 picks and it’s probably my bias at play. How can you not like Alabama players? They are fast physical monsters.

What I really like about the guy is his versatility. He plays a ton along the boundary and holds up well most times but also can impress across the middle, an area the Packers struggle.

A senior, Averett was given his first opportunity to start in 2016. Over that time he allowed 32 receptions on 64 targets, for 440 yards, and 2 touchdowns. That’s a passer rating of 82.8 when targeted. So far this year, Averett has allowed 14 catches on 26 targets for 177 yards and a touchdown. That’s good for a 72.1 passer rating.

He’s a senior but he’s young, he’s physical, and he’s getting better every day. Here’s some highlights.

Round 3, Pick 38

This pick is considered a reach by Fanspeak but I’m okay with it. Although I had to travel down the board, I passed a lot of positions that are either already stacked or have already been drafted for. Beyond that, I settled on a talent with starter potential at the end of the third that fills a massive need for the Green Bay Packers.

From what I can tell Scott Quessenberry is a prototypical guard. The kind that can not slide out to tackle, for those wondering. He great in small spaces giving up nothing in pass protection and has enough power to get push on those crucial 3rd and 1 plays. The concern comes in when we talk about lateral movement which does come into play in the NFL where interior pressure is becoming more and more prevalent (See Aaron Donald).

Over his previous 2 years, Quessenberry allowed 32 hurries, 3 hits, and just 4 sacks on 1,123 snaps giving him a pass blocking efficiency grade of 97.0. Quessenberry is holding strong at about that average in 2017 as he currently has a PBE grade of 97.1.

Here’s a little film of Quessenberry at center.

Round 4, Pick 30

I was hoping the Packers would take a shot at Teez Tabor in the draft but unfortunately he was drafted by division rival Detroit Lions. We instead got Josh Jones. I think I’m okay with that outcome.

Duke Dawson isn’t the tallest corner at 5-10 but don’t be too quick to call him a slot corner. So far in 2017 after filling in for two great corners now in the NFL, Dawson to date has allowed a 58.1 passer rating when targeted in the slot in the slot. Impressive, yes, but nothing compared to his 29.2 passer rating allowed on the boundary. The absolutely insane number comes by way of 9 receptions for 56 yards, 1 touchdown, and 2 interceptions on 138 coverage snaps.

Dawson is the kind of high upside talent that is perfect in a 2018 draft in which the Packers can take a lot of swings at the position. The lack of production at the position should give Dawson a very real shot at a starting position, despite the insane amount of bodies.

Round 6, Pick 30

The Packers attempted to shore up the offensive interior earlier and will probably need more than 1 but in the 6th round sits Ike Boettger, an offensive tackle for the Iowa Hawkeyes. Boettger is currently out with an Achilles injury which will likely hurt his draft stock, but considering the Packers are drafting for depth here, we can afford to give him rest as well as train him up for the future.

Although his 2017 season is over, there is plenty to like over the course of his career at Iowa. Over 1,164 snaps Boettger gives up inside pressure once every 113 snaps, good for top 25 in the country. He also has only given up an outside pressure once every 340 snaps, which ranks top 5 in the nation. His weakness seems to be with the bullrush, where he ranks outside of the top 100, giving up a pressure once ever 24 snaps.

Round 6, Pick 33

Although he doesn’t get much love from PFF,  Arrion Springs is an impressive athlete. Looking at his Hudl profile out of high school, Springs ran the 40 yard dash in 4.49 seconds. A time that would have probably put him in the top 20 in the 2017 draft, and would make him one of the faster corners on the team.

His shuttle time, something Kevin King dominated in 2017, would be top 5 had he jumped in the 2017 combine out of high school. Bottom line, you can expect these times to have improved since high school and with the Packers looking to add athleticism and specifically, speed, to the corner group, Springs has the physical traits necessary to develop into a great corner in the NFL.

Looking at his 2014-2016 stats, Springs had given up 75 receptions on 143 targets for 811 yards, and 11 touchdowns. He added 1 interception and 10 pass deflections. He also accounted for 84 tackles in that span.

To date in 2017, Springs has allowed 10 receptions on 26 attempts for 152 yards and a touchdown. He has no interceptions on the year so far but is only allowing a 71.3 passer rating when targeted.

Round 6, Pick 39

Frank Herron is my wildcard of the group. At 6’4 278 pounds, he is without question a 4-3 defensive end. That said, the Packers have been using a little more 4-3 this year with Clay Matthews playing as a 4-3 OLB. If the Packers are serious about employing this in certain situations, it wouldn’t be the worst idea to get a guy that can be a hybrid in those situations. He can play as a down end in a 4-3 and possibly a defensive lineman in the base 3-4, especially in passing situations, similar to how the Packers now use Dean Lowry.

PFF was of little help having no information on the now graduated Frank Herron. With that I simply have his stats to work with and rather than tell you, how about I just show you…

Round 7, Pick 24

The talented junior from New Smyrna Beach, Florida has been a standout since day 1. A three star recruit out of high school, D’Cota Dixon started for the badgers in his first year. Unfortunately, he suffered a knee ending injury after just 3 games. In 2015, Dixon picked up right where he left off starting all 13 games for the Badgers.

Starting in 2016, Dixon made the move to full time safety. As a safety in 2016, Dixon made 60 tackles, 1 sack, 4 interceptions, and 4 pass deflections.

So far this season, Dixon has racked up 39 tackles, 1.5 sacks, a pass deflection and a pick. Those number put him on track for 109 tackles, 4 sacks, 3 pass deflections, and 3 interceptions. Not bad!

Round 7, Pick 30

Last but certainly not least, in the 7th round I have the Packers drafting offensive guard, Wyatt Teller. Teller is a guy I already mocked to the Packers once before and I had him going in round 3. When I saw him sitting on the board at the end of the 7th, it wasn’t even a question in my mind he was coming to Green bay.

Currently PFF has Wyatt Teller listed as their 5th overall guard prospect, and they expect him to be drafted in day 2. For those reasons, I don’t expect this pick to be reality but who am I to doubt the mighty Fanspeak big board.

Considered to be a mauler, Teller would be an ideal candidate to stop in for Jahri Evans when the time comes for him to retire. Currently ranked as a top 5 player in run blocking efficiency, Teller could pay off in a big way in regards to getting our new batch of running backs moving a lot more north than south.

If, however, Jahri isn’t planning to hang up the boots anytime soon, perhaps Teller could replace the “jack of all trades, master of none” Lane Taylor. In addition to being a great run blocker, Teller is currently ranked in the top 10 in pass blocking efficiency, something that will come in handy when helping David Bakhtiari hold down Aaron Rodgers blind side.

[investmart007]

WASHINGTON | Trump mulls quick US pullout from Syria while advisers balk

New Post has been published on https://goo.gl/Wmc7bc

WASHINGTON | Trump mulls quick US pullout from Syria while advisers balk

WASHINGTON |April 3, 2018 (AP)(STL.News)  President Donald Trump expects to decide “very quickly” whether to remove U.S. troops from war-torn Syria, saying their primary mission was to defeat the Islamic State group and “we’ve almost completed that task.”

Trump’s comments, made to reporters at the White House on Tuesday, conflict with views of his top military advisers, some of who spoke at a separate event in Washington about the need to stay in Iraq and Syria to finish off the militant group, which once controlled large swaths of territory in both countries.

At a news conference with the presidents of the Baltic nations, Trump was asked whether he still favored pulling U.S. troops out of Syria.

“As far as Syria is concerned, our primary mission in terms of that was getting rid of ISIS,” Trump answered, using an acronym for the Islamic State group. “We’ve completed that task and we’ll be making a decision very quickly, in coordination with others in the area, as to what we will do.”

The mission is “very costly for our country and it helps other countries a helluva lot more than it helps us,” Trump said.

“I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home. I want to start rebuilding our nation,” he said during the appearance with his counterparts from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Trump also noted that the Baltic states are partners with the U.S. in the anti-IS coalition and “we will not rest until ISIS is gone.”

Later in the day, Trump met with his national security team to discuss Syria.

According to officials familiar with the preparations for the meeting, Trump’s entire national security team, including CIA chief Mike Pompeo, who has been nominated to be the next secretary of state, strongly advised against a hasty withdrawal from Syria. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks.

Also on the meeting agenda was the fate of some $200 million in U.S. stabilization assistance for Syria that the White House put on hold after Trump said during a speech in Ohio last week that he wanted to leave Syria “very soon.” The State Department was to have spent the money on building up the country’s infrastructure, including power, water and roads.

Trump in recent weeks has asked Saudi Arabia to contribute $4 billion for reconstruction in Syria, according to a U.S. official, as part of the president’s effort to get other countries to pay for stabilizing the country so the U.S. isn’t on the hook. The United States is awaiting a response from the Saudis, said the official, who wasn’t authorized to discuss the conversations publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

A senior Syrian Kurdish official said Trump’s comments on wanting to withdraw from Syria came at an “inappropriate time” as Islamic State militants re-emerge in eastern Syria and amid threats from Turkey.

Ilham Ahmed, a senior Kurdish official in Syria’s Raqqa province, said such a decision would clear the way for “total chaos in Syria,” endangering areas newly liberated from the IS group and empowering Turkey to move in on towns controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, backed by the U.S.-led coalition.

The main IS holdout in Syria is in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour, where momentum by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces has stalled in recent weeks as many Kurdish members of the group have shifted west to the Afrin area to fight Turkish forces. Pentagon officials have publicly raised the prospect of this giving the IS group the breathing room it needs to regroup.

Many have warned that a premature U.S. withdrawal from Syria would cede the country to Iran and Russia, which have supported Syrian President Bashar Assad. Iran’s continued presence in Syria is especially troubling to neighboring Israel, a U.S. ally that regards Iran as an existential threat.

Some high-ranking Trump administration officials urged caution.

Gen. Joseph Votel told a conference at the United States Institute of Peace that the United States would have to continue its work against remnants of the Islamic State group in eastern Syria. Votel is commander of U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations across the Middle East, including Syria.

Votel said the military campaign has been largely successful but is not over.

“The hard part, I think, is in front of us, and that is stabilizing these areas, consolidating our gains, getting people back into their homes, addressing the long-term issues” like reconstruction of towns and cities badly damaged by the fighting and by the Islamic State group’s scorched-earth tactics. “There is a military role in this, certainly in the stabilization phase.”

At the same Institute of Peace event, State Department envoy Brett McGurk said, “We want to keep eyes on the prize, on ISIS, because ISIS is not finished.”

A third U.S. official, Mark Green, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, also argued at the conference that U.S. stabilization efforts in Syria are critical to a lasting defeat of the Islamic State group.

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By DARLENE SUPERVILLE,By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (Z.S)

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[investmart007]

WASHINGTON | Trump mulls quick US pullout from Syria while advisers balk

New Post has been published on https://goo.gl/Wmc7bc

WASHINGTON | Trump mulls quick US pullout from Syria while advisers balk

WASHINGTON |April 3, 2018 (AP)(STL.News)  President Donald Trump expects to decide “very quickly” whether to remove U.S. troops from war-torn Syria, saying their primary mission was to defeat the Islamic State group and “we’ve almost completed that task.”

Trump’s comments, made to reporters at the White House on Tuesday, conflict with views of his top military advisers, some of who spoke at a separate event in Washington about the need to stay in Iraq and Syria to finish off the militant group, which once controlled large swaths of territory in both countries.

At a news conference with the presidents of the Baltic nations, Trump was asked whether he still favored pulling U.S. troops out of Syria.

“As far as Syria is concerned, our primary mission in terms of that was getting rid of ISIS,” Trump answered, using an acronym for the Islamic State group. “We’ve completed that task and we’ll be making a decision very quickly, in coordination with others in the area, as to what we will do.”

The mission is “very costly for our country and it helps other countries a helluva lot more than it helps us,” Trump said.

“I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home. I want to start rebuilding our nation,” he said during the appearance with his counterparts from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Trump also noted that the Baltic states are partners with the U.S. in the anti-IS coalition and “we will not rest until ISIS is gone.”

Later in the day, Trump met with his national security team to discuss Syria.

According to officials familiar with the preparations for the meeting, Trump’s entire national security team, including CIA chief Mike Pompeo, who has been nominated to be the next secretary of state, strongly advised against a hasty withdrawal from Syria. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks.

Also on the meeting agenda was the fate of some $200 million in U.S. stabilization assistance for Syria that the White House put on hold after Trump said during a speech in Ohio last week that he wanted to leave Syria “very soon.” The State Department was to have spent the money on building up the country’s infrastructure, including power, water and roads.

Trump in recent weeks has asked Saudi Arabia to contribute $4 billion for reconstruction in Syria, according to a U.S. official, as part of the president’s effort to get other countries to pay for stabilizing the country so the U.S. isn’t on the hook. The United States is awaiting a response from the Saudis, said the official, who wasn’t authorized to discuss the conversations publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

A senior Syrian Kurdish official said Trump’s comments on wanting to withdraw from Syria came at an “inappropriate time” as Islamic State militants re-emerge in eastern Syria and amid threats from Turkey.

Ilham Ahmed, a senior Kurdish official in Syria’s Raqqa province, said such a decision would clear the way for “total chaos in Syria,” endangering areas newly liberated from the IS group and empowering Turkey to move in on towns controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, backed by the U.S.-led coalition.

The main IS holdout in Syria is in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour, where momentum by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces has stalled in recent weeks as many Kurdish members of the group have shifted west to the Afrin area to fight Turkish forces. Pentagon officials have publicly raised the prospect of this giving the IS group the breathing room it needs to regroup.

Many have warned that a premature U.S. withdrawal from Syria would cede the country to Iran and Russia, which have supported Syrian President Bashar Assad. Iran’s continued presence in Syria is especially troubling to neighboring Israel, a U.S. ally that regards Iran as an existential threat.

Some high-ranking Trump administration officials urged caution.

Gen. Joseph Votel told a conference at the United States Institute of Peace that the United States would have to continue its work against remnants of the Islamic State group in eastern Syria. Votel is commander of U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations across the Middle East, including Syria.

Votel said the military campaign has been largely successful but is not over.

“The hard part, I think, is in front of us, and that is stabilizing these areas, consolidating our gains, getting people back into their homes, addressing the long-term issues” like reconstruction of towns and cities badly damaged by the fighting and by the Islamic State group’s scorched-earth tactics. “There is a military role in this, certainly in the stabilization phase.”

At the same Institute of Peace event, State Department envoy Brett McGurk said, “We want to keep eyes on the prize, on ISIS, because ISIS is not finished.”

A third U.S. official, Mark Green, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, also argued at the conference that U.S. stabilization efforts in Syria are critical to a lasting defeat of the Islamic State group.

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By DARLENE SUPERVILLE,By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (Z.S)

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