#a shifty tract

[shiftytracts]

because of this text post i've been wondering what my own ideal kink video(s) would be like. i'd love to see one where someone just like. went about normal tasks with an increasingly bloated and ornery stomach

like imagine it starts first thing in the morning with them (i'm picturing a woman so let's just say "her" from now on i guess?) coming into their bathroom, clearly having just woken up (maybe we hear an alarm from off-screen; even if not, it's clear from her messy hair and, if her face is visible, from her half-closed eyes), wearing an oversized t-shirt and boxer shorts pulled comically fardown. the shirt doesn't completely hide the shape of a round gut on an otherwise average frame. she brushes her teeth while lazily rubbing her belly. this disarranges the shirt, and that catches her eye: after she spits out the toothpaste she lifts up her shirt intentionally, to see in the mirror just how bloated she is. she looks displeased, puzzled maybe, and continues rubbing the back of one hand past her navel back and forth, the way you'd rub an itchy eye.

then we see her drinking coffee, wet-haired, in a bathrobe. she's sprawled in the corner of a sofa, having had consciously to make room for all this gut. the robe is knotted once, but very loosely and low down--not square-knotted. it looks like she halfway untied it when she sat down. her other hand is on her stomach from the start, lazily scritching. after a swallow of coffee we hear a long gurgle, and a "hm" of acknowledgment. her hand tightens reflexively on her stomach, then deliberately loosens and strokes gently up and down.

third, we see a pair of clothes folded on a desk, apparently set out the night before. her hand picks up and unfolds the trousers, not caring how this disarranges the shirt set on top of them. only her hand/forearm is in the frame, but we can tell from how she pauses that she's inspecting the clasp. we then cut to her wearing the trousers, looking in a mirror. she has a bra and underwear on, but no shirt; the bathrobe sits crumpled (out of focus) behind her. she sucks in her gut and manages to clasp and zip the trousers, doing a little dance of effort. stands still for a second or two, looking in the mirror, one hand pressed to her lower belly on one side. it looks very uncomfortable, and also pretty silly. she undoes the trousers and sort of groan-sighs, sounding more intimidated than happy. she takes a slow, deep breath through her nose (no voice), one hand over her navel. pats it slightly, noiselessly.

next we see her from behind, staring with her into her (slightly out-of-focus) closet or wardrobe. the bathrobe is back on, but open; she's got underwear and a bra on, but still no shirt or pants. apparently she's spent so long puzzling over what to wear that she got cold and had to put the robe back on. we hear her burp into her closed mouth, and see her arm rise reflexively to cover it.

finally we see her back in her bathroom. she has on a loose, summery dress--clearly not right for the season, since she's got a hoodie on over it that doesn't go with it at all. without seeing her face, we can tell she's gotten up close and personal with the mirror to see while she puts on makeup. her belly hangs over the counter, and we see uncapped mascara. her breathing is slightly labored from the effort of leaning over and concentrating. her stomach gives a long, quiet rumble; we hear her burp into her closed mouth again. she grunts in mild irritation ("mmf"), and her hand, with the cap to an eyeliner bottle balanced between its fingers, claps to her stomach and lightly kneads it. she finishes the task, caps the eyeliner, steps back from the mirror to survey her work. she rearranges the fabric of her dress in vain attempt to hide her stomach. then massages her lower belly with both hands, fingers pointed toward the center, pushing it inward then pulling toward the sides in a vaguely ovular motion. her belly gurgles more wetly and elaborately.

we see her on the toilet, digging her hands into her belly in circles. but when she gets up to flush the toilet follows her hand, so we can see that this trip accomplished nothing.

next a brief shot of her in the kitchen, setting two slices of toast in the toaster and then grabbing, peeling, eating a bite of banana. her other hand stays on her gut whenever possible. cut to an equally brief shot at the breakfast table, where she eats toast with one hand while patting her belly with the other.

back to the toilet, but from a different angle this time. we see the top of her head, hunched shoulders, knees. doubled over clutching her stomach. lots of upset gurgling. no concrete evidence either way whether she got anything done in here this time.

in her car on the way to work we see her fumbling around with her seatbelt at a stoplight, trying to make it looser around her. (the hoodie from earlier has been replaced with a blazer, whose sharp angles also clash with the dress. there's no way she can button this thing.) it doesn't really work; she ends up with her hand on her belly as a sort of protective barrier.

supercut of every significant bump in the road: every thunk makes her burp. most of them are modest, but once or twice it catches her off guard and she belches loudly, then says "ooouugh" in disgust.

some shots at work. her round belly wobbling with every step as she walks briskly with papers in hand. drinking more coffee, mind clearly on her work but one hand nonchalantly rubbing her stomach--and then another shot of her clearly regretting that coffee: visibly more bloated, slouching in her chair, stomach rumbling nonstop. holding it with both hands. readjusting position slightly in the chair, making it creak. "mmf."

we see her come out of a bathroom stall and wash her hands at the sink. her stomach growls threateningly; she freezes, turns off the water, heads back into the stall with her hands still wet.

leaning against the break-room counter while the microwave hums. its droning blends in with that of her stomach. is her belly rounder than ever, or is it just more obvious from this angle? we can tell she's on her phone, but every few seconds a crackly or splashing or blowing sound comes from her gut and she rubs it for a moment. the microwave beeps and she pulls out a personal pizza still wrapped in cellophane.

sped-up footage of her eating it while rubbing her belly under the table. coworkers' legs go past occasionally. at one point when she's clearly alone in the room the footage slows to normal pace. she has a mostly-eaten pizza slice in one hand and is lightly pressing her belly over and over with the other, testing various places. burps, resumes, then burps again two or three gentle pushes later. it speeds up again, then resumes normal speed as she pushes back her chair, sets her hands on the table, slowly pulls herself up. for a second she stands leaning on the table, belly hanging, blowing and puffing with the effort. then stands up the rest of the way and stretches her arms above her head. burps again. this one catches her off guard: her belly jiggles when her hand claps to her mouth.

the walk back to her desk, one hand on her stomach through her jacket pocket. after she dumps the cellophane wrapper and paper plate in the trash, her free hand snakes into her other pocket and onto her stomach.

view from under her desk at work of her belly and legs, which are crossed at the ankle with one foot idly swinging. sounds of typing and of swallowed burps. the typing stops, then resumes but more slowly (pecking at keys) as one of her hands appears on her belly, fingers kneading at the side of her navel. the hand disappears; the typing sounds get faster again. one last, louder swallowed burp.

then, her feet and ankles visible under a toilet stall. angry rumbles and stifled sighs.

a shot of her closing the bathroom (not the stall) door behind her. a hand balances on the shelf of her gut, and the fabric around it is slightly dark from having been massaged with damp hands. but we can hear her humming, and the hand's fingers lightly drum on her stomach. it's definitely rounder now.

she enters her car after work, apparently with a plan this time to keep the seatbelt from digging into her gut. she pulls it out real far and tries to loop it under the belly--but lets go of the strap by accident and, when she tries to pull it out again, finds it won't let her pull it out far enough. it won't reach far enough to buckle at all. she wiggles around, sucks in her gut--no dice. cut to her outside the car, having buckled the seatbelt without her under it. she crouches on the floor, lies her head and upper back flat on the seat and tries to slither up under it. gets stuck with her belly straight up in the air. cut to her standing on top of the seat (back flat against the ceiling of the car, belly hanging down), trying to squeeze in that way. but she can't figure out how to get her knees through. finally she jumps out of the car--brief cut to her stumbling as she jumps to the ground. her stomach bounces; she crosses her arms over it and burps into her closed mouth, then clears her throat--and, standing outside it, unbuckles the seat belt. clambers back into the car with a supportive hand under her belly. flops into her seat, boneless, and pants. starts the car and drives home seatbelt-less.

cut to her fumbling with the keys in her apartment door as her stomach rumbles nonstop. when the door swings shut behind her we can hear her shoes clapping the floor as she runs to the bathroom.

next we see her walking slowly in the hallway. from the sounds of her footfalls we can tell she's ditched the shoes; in place of the dress (and bra) she has on a crop top and the same (unzipped) hoodie from this morning. she's folded her leggings waaay way down under her belly and is rubbing at the itchy red marks they left higher up with the back of her hand. her other hand fumbles in her purse, apparently pulling out of it anything she'll need at home as she walks back to the front of the house to hang it up.

under a blanket on her couch, watching tv on her computer, rubbing her stormy belly.

in the bathroom again, tho not productively. camera behind the toilet, so that it's in the foreground shadowy and out of focus. we watch her come in and shut the door behind her. she has one hand cupped under her belly (pinky finger hidden under the leggings' waistband), and once the other hand's through with the door she rubs it back and forth across the top of the gutshelf. it still sounds like frequent (though distant) thunder. she turns around, pulls down the leggings and sits on the can, tho her hoodie is long enough that we don't see anything tumblr would object to. her gut's swollen enough to peek visibly past the zipper of the open hoodie though, and to seem to sit on her thighs. she puts her elbows on her knees and (one assumes) her chin on her hands. after several seconds we see her tense, then release, sigh, sit up a little, and clutch her stomach. we hear a grunt of pain or effort. when the muscles release the grumbling returns, louder, in starts. she blows air between her pursed lips in defeat, boredom. we hear her fumbling with the toilet-paper dispenser, then zoom in on it to see her pulling off the very last sheet from the roll. then pan to her cupboards as we hear her stand up, pull her leggings up, flush the toilet. the cabinet opens; there's an empty cellophane wrapper with no rolls of TP left. (her calves come into frame, blocking some of the view, but leaving this obvious.) "hrrrggggh."

cut to her on her bedroom floor before the closet mirror, shoving her heel into a tied sneaker. to catch her breath she lies back, flat on the floor with her legs in front of her. we see the underside of an unclothed belly dome, then watch her hands struggle blindly to join the two sides of her hoodie's zipper. she zips it, pushes herself up onto her hands, and sticks them in the kangaroo pocket. can see them knead circles in her gut. she burps, then mutters what sounds like either "whoa" or "ugh."

cut to her standing before the same mirror, trying to rearrange the hoodie to obscure how awkwardly it fits around this unaccustomed gut. this apparently so dissatisfies her that instead she tries unzipping it and pulling up the leggings. "mmngh." she strokes across the waistband where it chafes. there's muffintop; she tries pulling them up higher, tighter, so that barely any skin shows between the end of her top and the top of the leggings. then puts her hands back in the kangaroo pockets. throughout her stomach quietly bubbles, pops, squawks.

cut to her in the toilet-paper aisle at the grocery store. her hands are now inside the waistband of her leggings, lightly patting her stomach. we hear her stifle several burps while poring over the TP selection. then cut to her in line, hugging the package against her tummy. from this angle (profile) we can see that the waistband has inched downward a great deal, and in fact looks slanted--higher up in the back than the front. then cut to her back at home, setting the package on her bathroom counter. she's pulled the waistband all the way back down now.

cut to her in her kitchen. we see her breaking spaghetti noodles and dropping them in a pot, then standing at the stove, stirring the pot with her far hand and kneading her lower belly with the near one. where we'd expect to hear water boiling we instead hear stomach gurgles.

we see her set a bowl of spaghetti on the dining-room table and sit down in front of it. she eats one bite, then pauses, bends over her stomach, clutching it with both hands as its rumbling crescendoes. then cut to her lying on the couch with the bowl on her chest. there's a blanket between the hot bowl and her skin. one hand twists spaghetti on the fork and lifts it to her mouth; the other trails up and down the huge dome of her belly. then, the same scene a few minutes later: the bowl discarded in a blurry corner in the foreground, the blanket slipped down so the top of her stomach is exposed, both hands massaging circles into her skin under that blanket. long gurgle. burp. "mmf." bigger burp. her phone vibrates and lights up; the camera refocuses on it. she turns around and sits up on the couch to read the text.

cut to her holding her phone to her ear while curled up on the other end of the couch, knees to her chest, other hand unseen trapped between knees and gut. cut to her lying flat on the couch, knees bent. we can hear indistinct chatter through the phone. she rubs lazy circles over her navel; her stomach makes ponderous popping noises. cut to her sat on the toilet, still on her phone, laughing at something the person on the other end has said while tracing gentle circles around her navel with the index finger of her other hand. cut to her back on the couch, lying on her side. we can't see her phone but can hear chatter coming through it, as before. she sniffs congestedly, but we can hear a smile in her voice as she says, "ok, i love you, bye," and hangs up. her thighs and the lower half of her belly are covered by blanket, but we can tell she's ditched the leggings because her knees are bare. she stretches her arm above her head, belches, then sighs contentedly.

cut to her shuffling down the hallway to her bedroom, arms crossed, hoodie covering her torso and the top few inches of her still-unclothed legs. cut to her standing at the side of her bed. we see her only in the reflection of her closet mirror. the overhead light's off but a table lamp shines pale light right into the mirror. we hear her burp and then yawn into her closed mouth. she pulls off the hoodie, sets it over a chair. kneels on one knee on the bed (other foot still stood on the floor), plugging in her phone and probably pulling out earrings or putting in a retainer or something. her stomach glorps. "mm." she pats it. burps. apparently notices her reflection and turns to face it more fully. "ohh my god," she says to herself. kneads the sides of her belly with the heels of her hands, apparently moved to pity it. burps again. "oh. mm." lifts her shirt to survey the damage. "pff. wow," she says, as though to a friend who's done something stupid. then clicks off the light, with one hand still up her shirt. all we can see at last are the red-lit numbers of her alarm clock, backwards in the mirror.

finally, cut to a shot of her on her side in bed the next morning, visible from shoulders down to around the knees. pale light comes in through the window behind her shoulder; the alarm clock reads 6:59. her stomach squelches audibly. the clock's numbers roll over to 7:00 and the alarm rings. her hand snakes out from under the covers and fumbles to turn it off. then she sets it on her belly over the blanket and groans.

[nicklloydnow]

“This indestructible youth lived another eighty years, outlasting both the Weimar Republic, which he loudly opposed, and the Nazi regime, which he quietly disdained. Germany was split in two, then reunified; Jünger was still there. By the time he died, in 1998, at the age of a hundred and two, he had found a tenuous, solitary place in the German canon. He published more than a dozen volumes of empirically acute but emotionally distant diaries, starting in 1920 with “In Storms of Steel.” He wrote sci-fi-inflected novels, fashioning allegories of the terror state and spinning out prophecies of future technology. And he produced far-right political tracts that have inspired several generations of fascist rhapsodists, antimodern elegists, and élitist libertarians. (Peter Thiel is a fan.) All of this was filtered through a terse, chiselled literary voice—coolly handsome, like the man himself.

The four-year orgy of violence from which Jünger emerged mysteriously intact grants him unimpeachable authority on the subject of war; when he inserts scenes of stomach-churning gore into his fiction, he is not relying on fantasy. Recent reporting on the desperate mind-set of soldiers in Ukraine gives his diaries a haunting currency. At the same time, his mask of insouciance—he was indeed reading “Tristram Shandy” just before a bullet tore through him—makes him an infuriatingly detached witness to the suffering of others. One notorious passage in his journals evokes an Allied air raid on German-occupied Paris, in May, 1944: “I held in my hand a glass of burgundy in which strawberries were floating. The city, with its red towers and domes, was laid out in stupendous beauty, like a calyx overflown by deadly pollination.”

(…) Jünger’s writing gives off an odor of hypermasculine onanism; there are almost no women, and there is almost no sex. Among his more grating qualities is an inability to admit his mistakes: the steely aesthete is also a chameleon, adjusting his positions to the latest political circumstances. But that shiftiness exposes a weaker, more vulnerable figure—and also a more interesting one. His stories generally do not tell of war heroes; rather, they dwell on ambivalent functionaries and complicit observers. We like to think that novelists possess a special ethical strength, yet the morally compromised writer can project a strange kind of honesty—especially when his society is compromised to the same degree.

(…)

The German scholar Helmuth Kiesel, in his 2007 biography of Jünger, observes that the nineteen-year-old soldier exhibited few signs of gung-ho patriotism. His original war diaries, which Kiesel has edited for Klett-Cotta, give a clinical picture of the chaos of battle and the omnipresence of death. When Jünger arrives at the front, at the beginning of 1915, he takes in the destroyed houses, the wasted fields, the rusted harvesting machines, and writes that they add up to a “sad sight.” Later, he asks, “When will this Scheisskrieg”—“shit war”—“have an end?”

Jünger could have gathered these entries into a blistering denunciation of war, preëmpting Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front.” But he had convinced himself that the Scheisskrieg had a higher meaning. As he prepared “In Storms of Steel” for publication, he threw in all manner of sub-Nietzschean soliloquizing and militarist posturing. Senseless brutality was recast as a salutary hardening of the soul. The Scheisskrieg remark was cut, and passages like this set the tone: “In these men there lived an element that underscored the savagery of war while also spiritualizing it: the matter-of-fact joy in danger, the chivalrous urge to fight. Over the course of four years the fire forged an ever purer, ever bolder warriorhood.”

(…)

Nevertheless, Jünger stopped short of direct involvement with the Hitler movement. In his eyes, the Nazis were idiot vulgarians, useful mainly as cannon fodder in the wider assault on democracy. Antisemitism surfaces in his writings, yet Nazi race theory held no interest for him. As Kiesel points out, Jünger rejected the stab-in-the-back legend that blamed Germany’s collapse in 1918 on the skullduggery of leftist, Jewish politicians; he readily admitted that his country had lost to superior forces. You could classify him as a cosmopolitan fascist, one who saw war as essential to the development of any national culture. All the bloodshed served no real political purpose; its ultimate virtue lay in making men into supermen. During the First World War, Jünger had enjoyed occasional courtly chats with English officers, whom he considered equals.

In the mid-twenties, intermediaries sought to arrange a meeting between Jünger and Hitler. Autographed books were exchanged, but no personal encounter took place, apparently for scheduling reasons. Jünger proceeded to browse among extremist alternatives, taking particular interest in Ernst Niekisch’s National Bolshevism. In the essay “Total Mobilization” (1930) and in the treatise “The Worker” (1932), Jünger envisions a fully mechanized totalitarian state in which workers serve as soldierly machines. Spurning the bourgeois ideal of individual liberty, he proposes that “freedom and obedience are identical.” The concept aligns with the anti-liberal thought of Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, both of whom were devoted Jünger readers.

Impeccably fascistic as all this was, the Nazis could not accept any hint of Bolshevism. Furthermore, Jünger had begun ridiculing the Party for its hypocritical participation in the democratic process and for its reliance on gutter antisemitism. Goebbels, who had praised “In Storms of Steel” as the “gospel of war,” now labelled Jünger’s writing “literature”—in his mind, a grave insult. When the Nazis came to power, in 1933, Jünger backed away from public life, refused all official invitations, and buried himself in, yes, literature. In the late twenties, he had published a volume of short prose pieces, titled “The Adventurous Heart,” in which bellicosity still prevailed. In 1938, he issued a drastically revised version of that book, now offering a curious mixture of nature sketches, literary meditations, and dream narratives.

Jünger was a lifelong Francophile, and the revised “Adventurous Heart” is drenched in the decadent visions of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Huysmans, and Mirbeau. (…)

“Violet Endives” is manifestly ironic—but toward what end? It depicts a society that accepts ghastly events without comment, or with only the twitch of an eyebrow. The narrator himself makes no protest, even if he conveys to us his private unease. His closing remark carries a tinge of arch critique, yet the salesman is free to ignore it. We see the emergence of the mature Jüngerian hero: outwardly bemused, inwardly fearful, terminally uninvolved. This macabre little tale captures in miniature the strategies of rationalization and normalization that make up the banality of evil. As it happens, Hannah Arendt read Jünger closely, and credited him with helping to inspire her most celebrated concept.

(…)

When the Second World War began, Jünger did not exactly disavow the company of the “triumphant and servile.” Resuming military service at the rank of captain, he went to Paris and joined the staff of Otto von Stülpnagel, the general in command of Occupied France. One of Jünger’s duties was to censor mail, although he proved ineffectual at the task, quietly disposing of letters that contained negative remarks about the regime. He also monitored local artists and intellectuals. Picasso inquired about the “real landscape” of “On the Marble Cliffs.” Cocteau, who called Jünger a “silver fox,” gave him a book about opium. Louis-Ferdinand Céline wanted to know why Germans weren’t killing more Jews. Jünger spent his off hours visiting museums, browsing bookstalls, and romancing a Jewish pediatrician named Sophie Ravoux. His wife, Gretha, was back in Germany with their two sons.

Jünger’s Second World War journals were published in 1949, under the peculiar title “Strahlungen,” or “Emanations.” (Thomas and Abby Hansen have translated them into English as “A German Officer in Occupied Paris,” for Columbia University Press.) These diaries are the most stupefying documents in a stupefying œuvre. The episode in which Jünger watches a bombing raid while sipping burgundy has been so widely cited that German critics have given it a name: die Burgunderszene. No less dumbfounding is a passage that recounts, in obscene detail, the execution of a Wehrmacht deserter. Jünger was assigned to lead the proceedings, and, he tells us, he thought of calling in sick. He then rationalizes his participation as a way of insuring that the deed is done humanely. Finally, he admits to feeling morbid curiosity: “I have seen many people die, but never at a predetermined moment.”

(…)

“Emanations” is not all heartless stylization. The book records Jünger’s dawning realization that a new kind of evil had permeated Nazi Germany. (He refers to Hitler by the code word Kniébolo—apparently, a play on “Diabolo.”) When he sees a Jew wearing a yellow star, he is “embarrassed to be in uniform.” When he hears of deportations of Jews, he writes, “Never for a moment may I forget that I am surrounded by unfortunate people who endure the greatest suffering.” And, when precise reports of mass killings in the East reach him, he is “overcome by a loathing for the uniforms, the epaulettes, the medals, the weapons, all the glamour I have loved so much.” Even if none of this is remotely adequate to the reality of the Holocaust—stop everything, Ernst Jünger is embarrassed!—it does show traces of remorse. The émigré writer Joseph Breitbach reported that Jünger had warned Jews of imminent deportations.

Jünger’s façade of disinterest eventually collapsed. In early 1944, his older son, Ernstel, was arrested for saying that Hitler should be hanged. Jünger pulled strings to have him released. Later that year, Ernstel turned eighteen and joined the Army. He died in action in November, 1944, in Italy. For years, Jünger was haunted by the thought that the S.S. had punished him by having his son killed. (There is no evidence that this was so, but the idea was not irrational.) The entries that follow Ernstel’s death are wrenching, although anyone waiting for a grand moral epiphany will be disappointed. It takes a certain kind of grieving father to write, “We stand like cliffs in the silent surf of eternity.”

The second half of Jünger’s immense life was calmer than the first. In West Germany, the ultra-militarist reinvented himself as an almost respectable, and avowedly apolitical, figure. From 1950 on, he lived in Wilflingen, in southern Germany, occupying houses that were lent to him by a distant cousin of Claus von Stauffenberg’s. He kept up his entomological pursuits, building a museum-worthy library of specimens. He dabbled in astrology, explored the occult, and took LSD under the tutelage of Albert Hofmann, who discovered the drug. Telos Press recently published Thomas Friese’s translation of “Approaches,” Jünger’s 1970 drug memoir. His stories of getting high are just as tedious as everyone else’s, but they include unexpected touches, such as quotations from “Soul on Ice,” the autobiography of Eldridge Cleaver.

For many critics, this elder-hipster pose made Jünger all the more dangerous. Although he had retreated from his high-fascist phase, he had not renounced it, and his skepticism toward democracy never wavered. When, in 1982, he received the Goethe Prize, one of Germany’s highest literary honors, left-wing politicians staged furious protests. Helmut Kohl, a Jünger admirer, had just become chancellor, and the veneration of a martial icon was seen as a sign of political regression. Indeed, a stealthily resurgent far-right faction hailed Jünger as a forebear—attention that he did not always welcome. Armin Mohler, a founder of the so-called New Right, served for several years as Jünger’s secretary, but when Mohler criticized his mentor for concealing his archconservative roots Jünger broke off contact for many years.

There is no such thing as an apolitical artist, Thomas Mann once said. The postwar Jünger adhered to a philosophy of radical individualism, which ostensibly bars ideological commitments. In his novel “Eumeswil” (1977), he theorizes a figure called the Anarch, who rejects the state yet also takes no action against it. The book’s narrator, a crafty fixer in service to a tyrant, articulates the ethos: “I am in need of authority, even if I am not a believer in authority.” This is a feeble form of opposition, bordering on the nonexistent, and it is pitted against a generalized conception of the state that elides the huge systemic differences between, say, a republic and a dictatorship. Social-democratic programs are equated with totalitarian control. You can understand Jünger’s appeal to the modern right when you read him complaining, in the 1951 treatise “The Forest Passage,” about liberal health policy: “Is there any real gain in the world of insurance, vaccinations, scrupulous hygiene, and a high average age?” Somehow, Jünger’s fiction avoids being trapped by the poverty of his political thinking. So profound is this writer’s detachment that he manages to remain aloof from his own beliefs.

(…)

Underneath the carapace of Jünger’s writing was an obscurely damaged man. Even before he entered into the torture chamber of the First World War, he had undergone a kind of psychic dissociation, perhaps related to bullying he had suffered as a boy. He wrote of his childhood, “I had invented a mode of indifference that connected me, like a spider, to reality only by an invisible thread.” According to the literary scholar Andreas Huyssen, Jünger was always trying to compensate for the fragility of his own body—to “equip it with an impenetrable armor protecting it against the memory of the traumatic experience of the trenches.”

The Second World War inflicted a different wound, one that cut deeper. The leaders of the plot against Hitler were nationalist conservatives, often fanatically so. The author of “In Storms of Steel” was a hero to them. Jünger’s inability to support their cause, and thereby live up to his own legend, troubled him for the remainder of his life. In “Heliopolis,” Lucius leads a commando raid against a murderous medical institute that recalls Josef Mengele’s laboratory at Auschwitz. The scene reads like a fantasy of what Jünger might have done if he had joined Stauffenberg, Trott zu Solz, and company. Lucius presses a button and the facility goes up in flames: “Dr. Mertens’s highbrow flaying-hut had exploded into atoms and dissolved like a bad dream.”

In “The Glass Bees,” that self-serving fantasy is revoked. As a soldier, Captain Richard witnessed Nazi-like abominations, including a human butcher shop—a nod to the gourmet cannibalism of “Violent Endives.” Yet, when Zapparoni lures him back into the zone of horror, he capitulates. Not only does he need authority; he makes himself believe in it. Zapparoni, he claims, “had captivated the children: they dreamed of him. Behind the fireworks of propaganda, the eulogies of paid scribes, something else existed. Even as a charlatan he was great.”

Jünger described Hitler in similar terms, as a “dreamcatcher,” a malign magician. What might have happened if the two men had come face to face? In a 1946 diary entry, Jünger assures himself that a meeting with Hitler “would presumably have had no particular result.” But he has second thoughts: “Surely it would have brought misfortune.” The ending of “The Glass Bees” may be an imagining of that disaster. As such, it would be Jünger’s most honest confession of failure. When the great test of his life arrived, the warrior-aesthete proved gutless.”

“Could he have moved in another direction? He was an elegant dandy, a ladykiller, a man who could display acute sensibility and lucidity (notwithstanding his obtuseness in large areas), a penetrating observer of human conduct, especially his own. As a schoolboy of fifteen he had spent some time in England, where he was swept off his feet by Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero-Worship. Indeed, he knew English and English literature well: he translated D. H. Lawrence; he was friendly with Aldous Huxley and wrote about his work. Notoriously, he always followed English sartorial taste. Moreover, he had served as an interpreter with the United States Expeditionary Force in 1917. In contrast, he was not well versed in German.

Drieu went on to Moscow from Germany. It did not take him long to see through the bureaucracy, militarism, and uncontrolled despotism of the Soviet police state. He wondered how French liberal intellectuals could ignore Stalin’s “Asiatic dogmatism,” and he called them guilty men. Here they were, face to face with a flesh and blood hangman, and they worried about “the specter of Fascism,” as he called it. Why did he not realize that his own choice was equally ghastly? As the Latin has it: those whom a god wishes to destroy, he first makes mad. Many reasons have been adduced for this kind of blinkered selective judgment, including self-conceit and weakness, rationalism and anti-rationalism, the desire to be modern and hatred of modernism.

One important element in Drieu was an aesthetic and moral current of emotional responses and notions concerning the decay and death of civilization. This current flows broadly from the nineteenth century, from Carlyle and Nietzsche, to name two of the equivocal forebears deeply admired by Drieu. Moreover, the modern mechanistic forms of destruction employed to such terrible effect in the holocaust of the 1914-18 War, in which he was wounded, left an indelible imprint on Drieu’s sensibility. Surprising as it seems today, Drieu—just like Henry de Montherlant, another exponent of wartime heroism and comradeship—came and went at the Front more or less as it suited him.

The destructive power of the new machinery of war only confirmed in Drieu, as in so many others, the sense that a sick civilization had reached its end. Something new, “a new man,” vital, healthy, strong, heroic, had to be created. The new must necessarily be superior to the old, and certainly it would not be found in outworn liberal parliamentary democracy but in some form of totalitarian regime. For totalitarianism was “the new fact” of the twentieth century, as Drieu was to define it. Even when, under the German Occupation, he finally came to grow disillusioned with Hitler, realizing at last that the Führer had no intention of fostering principles of Fascist “renewal” in France, Drieu’s thoughts would tend to Communism rather than to General de Gaulle.

(…)

Drieu’s response to Hitler’s masterly manipulation of politico-theatrical spectacle was thus rooted not only in the adoration of power and virile health and strength but also in a form of joyous aestheticism. His political commitment to Fascism, to the Parti Populaire Français led by the former Communist working-class demagogue Jacques Doriot (with whom Drieu became disillusioned when he discovered that Doriot was being subsidized by Mussolini), and his later collaboration with the Nazis during the Occupation—these were as much aesthetic as ideological in inspiration. Paul Sérant, in his invaluable study Le Romantisme fasciste, pointed to the aesthetic element in commitment to Fascism. It is an aspect that is often overlooked.

Ever since the serious revival of Drieu’s work and literary reputation in the 1960s, a number of French critics have sought to exonerate him or, at the least, to play down his political “errors.” They have concentrated instead upon his artistic merits and upon his value as an essential witness of his era. A kind of Olympian literary or cultural attitude that only the French seem to be able to carry off with aplomb comes into play here. Besides, the fact that Drieu committed suicide in 1945, after several unsuccessful attempts to do so, has endowed him with the legendary aura of the tragically self-destructive, misunderstood artist, an aura that once fascinated Alfred de Vigny in the young poet Chatterton, and that has continued to exert its spell ever since.

(…)

The sad fact remains that Drieu’s “aesthetic vision” cannot really be separated from his political commitment: the two elements were interconnected and became in- extricably fused. Very loosely, there would appear to be at least two periods in Drieu’s political development, although he was always deeply influenced by thinkers on the Right, by “the anti-Modern, from [Joseph] de Maistre to Péguy,” as he once expressed it, by opponents of capitalism and of liberal parliamentary democracy. One period falls before the notorious right-wing riots of February 6, 1934, which almost overthrew the Third Republic; and the other after that watershed, when he announced that he was a Fascist.

(…)

In the important 1942 preface to his novel Gilles, replying to his critics, Drieu declared: “They did not take the trouble to see the unity of views beneath the diversity of means of expression, chiefly between my novels and my political essays.” He went on: “Some artists think that I have been too concerned with politics in my work and my life. But I have been concerned with everything and with that [politics] also. A great deal of that, because there is a great deal of that in the life of men, at all times, and because all the rest is tied to that.” Despite the clumsily chatty tone, what could be clearer? Professor Reck would have us believe that Drieu cared about art, literature, Paris, and politics “in that order.” He himself contradicts her in the preface to Gilles.

Certainly, there was a time when Drieu put literature first, but it did not endure. If it had, his story might possibly be an entirely different one. As with his politics so with his art, there are very roughly two periods in Drieu’s development. From an aesthetic point of view, the division falls around 1925-29, when he broke with Surrealism, the chief avant-garde literary and artistic movement of the interwar years.

What is his real criticism of the Surrealists in the three open letters addressed to them that he published in 1925, 1927, and 1929? It is that they have become salon revolutionaries who think that dreams and violent words are the same thing as revolutionary action. Worse still, they have deceived him personally by their commitment to Communism. “Surrealism was revelation—not revolution,” he insisted. Wrongly, the Surrealists have abandoned art and artistic independence for politics. How ironic it now seems: at that moment Drieu loudly proclaimed that an intellectual should not join a party. Emmanuel Berl, in his Mort de la Pensée Bourgeoise (1929), favoring the revolutionary stance of Malraux, saw Drieu’s solution then as an endorsement of the theory of art for art’s sake.

(…)

According to Professor Reck, the word “decadence” has fostered a great deal of misguided critical commentary on Drieu’s work. There is, however, no avoiding it, for the idea of decadence is central to both his artistic and his political outlook. He was obsessed by decadence, dreaded it, saw it everywhere, both outside and inside himself. As Frédéric Grover, the distinguished authority on Drieu, once pointed out: Drieu denounced the horror of contemporary civilization, finding decadence in every human activity: religion, art, sex, war, and government. For Drieu, all forms of decadence merge in sexual decadence. This was a theme on which he was an expert, through his two unsuccessful marriages to wealthy young women; his various plans to marry heiresses; his numerous mistresses, including the wife of a United States diplomat; and, throughout his life, his unbroken association with prostitutes.

(…)

What Drieu hated, besides the decadence he acknowledged in himself, was the decadence of others: the supposed materialistic outlook of Americans; the mediocre aspirations of the inferior bourgeoisie; democracy (which favored the mindless herd and, especially, the Jews); the utilitarianism of modern industrial society founded on money instead of on religious faith and on the human relationships that had supposedly prevailed in the agricultural society of the Middle Ages. Drieu was always harping on the virtues of the Middle Ages, boring Victoria Ocampo on this theme, virtues extolled by Carlyle and others. It is curious that admirers of the relations between nobleman and serf always seem to have imagined themselves as aristocrats rather than in the place of those whose existence was nasty, brutish, and short. In fine, Drieu was haunted by decadence as an aesthetic, moral, and political “fact” after the manner of his master, Nietzsche, who confessed to being more concerned with this problem than with any other.

It would be difficult to overstate the theme of decadence in the ethos of writers up to 1945: Drieu was simply an extreme example of its deleterious effects. What nobody seems to have asked—presumably because they were blinded by the metaphor of decadence and by the myth of social health and heroism—was “Who profits from this notion?” Today, it seems only too clear that ideologists of the extreme Left and Right used it and gained immensely from it, by ceaselessly repeating the refrain of the decay of Western civilization and pillorying its values. For Drieu, nothing remained for the individual but to try to create something new “in order not to die.” Having rejected various forms of “renewal” on offer, including the royalism of Charles Maurras and Soviet Communism (because he said he could never be a materialist), he threw himself into Fascism. Why did the solution have to be one of this extreme nature? It was because, in the face of nothingness and decay, totalitarianism appeared to him to be “the new fact” of the twentieth century.

The pressure of left- and right-wing propaganda about bourgeois decadence and the decay of corrupt democratic regimes (hardly contradicted in France by the scandals of the 1930s) impelled Drieu toward political commitment, despite his early advocacy of artistic independence. In his third letter to the Surrealists, he said that he had been accused of “not liking to commit myself.” The more uncertain he was, the more he felt the need for political commitment. Toward the end of his life he said that he settled for an answer in order to stop vacillating. “To live is first of all to commit oneself,” thinks Gilles, who wants to dirty his hands along with the rest of humanity. Drieu even spoke of “the fall into a political destiny” in Socialisme Fasciste. In October 1937, he explained to Victoria Ocampo how “From the moment that I am not a ‘Communist,’ that I am an anti-Communist, I am a Fascist. From the moment I bring grist to the mill of Fascism, I might just as well do it unreservedly.” Not long before he took his own life, he wrote of his regrets: “But I was set on committing myself, more than anything I was afraid of being an intellectual in his ivory tower.” Doubtless, he was far from alone in dreading such a fate. It is not difficult to see how much Sartre learned from Drieu, despite his deep loathing of the man and his actions.

(…)

Drieu wrote out of what was negative in himself. He recognized what he called in Franglais his penchant for “self-dénigrement,” and his masochism. In a remarkable discussion about Drieu with Frédéric Grover in 1959 (published in La Revue des Lettres Modernes in 1972), André Malraux spoke of this tendency in his friend. According to Malraux, Drieu was far from being the negative personage he projected in his writings. On the contrary, claimed Malraux, he dominated any gathering of leading intellectuals by his “astonishing presence” and charisma. It would seem to be essential to any discussion of Drieu’s work and attitudes to try to embrace his psychological make-up and its effect on his precarious balancing act between dreams, art, and action.

(…)

Drieu’s argument in that essay is not peculiar to his concept of pictorial art: it is, in essence, quite familiar from other writings of his about general modern decay, including his articles on circus, music hall, and theater, explored by Professor Reck. Up to 1750, Drieu asserts, man is still a solid being, as depicted by Watteau. Indeed, Drieu even finds assurance in Watteau, one of the most mysterious and enigmatic of eighteenth-century painters. What vigor, health, certainty, equilibrium, are to be found in Watteau’s Gilles! exclaims Drieu, who invites us to compare this figure with the man of 1830, completely ravaged by the rationalism of the Enlightenment and all its attendant ills. The mysticism of the Middle Ages (Drieu’s King Charles’s head or, as the French say, Ingres’s violin) has not entirely departed from Watteau’s Gilles, who still shows signs of a virility that was soon to depart. In short, Drieu’s account of Watteau’s painting cannot be separated from his views on universal modern decadence, views which lie at the core of his political stance also.

(…)

If there is a connection to be made between literary and painterly techniques—and so far I am not convinced that there is—it would have to be examined with the most scrupulous tact, with strict reference to the available evidence (and no straying beyond it), evidence considered in relation to the writer’s imagination and mental outlook as a whole. Drieu stressed the unity of his work, and there is no reason to doubt his own word in this regard. Whatever one may think of him as a human being or as a talent, he is so candid a representative of the negative and nihilistic aspects of his age that he merits no less than critical rigor tempered with justice.”

[hecticcheer]

Some cold-ridden season-two Archi/vists, plus a Mar/tin who’s just trying to be nice. Please don’t track this dirt outside whump and snz tumblr

[themandylion]

For the ask game, how would you combine accidental eavesdropping and arranged marriage with JayTim?? :)

58 (Accidental Eavesdropping) + 50 (Arranged Marriage) + JayTim.

Look, Tim didn't mean to listen in. When it comes down to it, he never means to listen in when his parents are having closed-door meetings, but let's be realistic here—if they didn't want him to listen, they would have done something about the unusually thin wall between that particular parlor and the adjacent library as soon as they learned of it.

He thinks he remembered to tell them how thin it is. Probably.

Either way, they brought this on themselves. If they didn't want him to listen in, they should have had this meeting in the parlor on the other side of the house and not the one next to his favorite study location. He was just grabbing a book from the shelf on that particular wall when he happened to overhear his father quite clearly say something about "a mutually beneficial arrangement for both parties" and "our son." At which point he couldn't just walk away and pretend ignorance, because he's not an idiot.

He's pretty focused on trying to get all the details so he can't be blamed for barely registering when the library door opens and someone else comes in.

"What are you doing?"

"Figuring out what kind of future my parents are planning for me. Now, be quiet before I miss anything." He doesn't really know Jason, but they've formed an unsteady truce in the few weeks he's been at Drake Manor as his father's newest live-in secretary.

He's unsurprised when Jason is suddenly right beside him, pressing his ear up against the wall as well. "Are they seriously trying to arrange a marriage? In this day and age?"

"I think so." Tim makes a face. He's only 24, he doesn't want to get married, let alone to some complete stranger, no matter how impressive her tracts of land. Pulling away from the wall, he buries his face in his hands. "Ugh, I hate being an only child. I bet /you never had to worry about your parents selling you off to the highest bidder."

"Well. Not necessarily." Jason gives him a somewhat shifty look. "I may have left home because the offers started coming in as soon as my brother was off the market."

"My condolences."

"Which is to say—I have a good idea of how to get out of something like this. If you're interested in trying, I mean."

Tim perks up, his previous despair falling away. "You have my attention. What do I need to do?"

[entoman-created-by-the-tallgreys]

Time fucked ? ⏱

Oh ! ... i Think the Date's are all Wrong You See as i Was Growing Up, i Went threw A lot of Odd shit very odd shifty Shit, i Used Get Locked in time loop's Like the Ground hog day Movie, 

i Used see the Cloud's race out by Window for no reason and i saw the number's on the clock race like a Stop watch And i Heard the Sound's of the people in the House echoing from all side's Many time's, and i Could not Move, i Felt like i Was Melting, Out of Reality. 

i kept skipping around and my Age kept getting tossed around from 8 year's old to 9 to 6 to 5 to 7 to 11 over n over i get called a different and the Weather would get all crazy and 

i Used to be very good at tracking My Age, even tho it is a Dumb ass thing to do, Put a Number On how old you are 

i Don't Think i'm 27, i think i'm 23 i Know it's Odd For some odd reason 4 year of my life Literally went by in a few Month's i'm also Good at tacking time to a Good enough degree and

 i feel that time is racing ever since the Mandela Shit on 2012 my time has bin skipping Jumping a lot And Hour on  the Clock Act's more like 20 Min's??? i think C.E.R.N fuck up time. 

The Week’s go By So fast, i Can’t Keep tract of them, i don’t think there are 24 Hour’s in a Day any more ??? Minuet's are Faster, Second’s are slower yet .. Skip .. if you blink it’s like 9 min’s go by ??? 

Hour’s feel like Pouring Water out a Glass and before you know 5 hour’s went by in 9 Second’s ???

[lincolncollection]

The Partisan Press — Republican Campaign Newspapers in the 1860 Election

The 1860 presidential campaign, which pitted Republican Abraham Lincoln against Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, and Constitutional Unionist John Bell, was a brief affair by 21st-century standards. The campaign began after the party conventions in May and June and ended with the election on November 6th. The candidates did not campaign for themselves—with the tradition-breaking exception of Douglas’s “visits to his mother”—so it was up to the candidates’ supporters to bring their man to the voters’ attention and whip up the enthusiasm that would produce success at the polls. Lincoln’s supporters got to work, producing biographies of the candidate; political cartoons; campaign flags, tokens, and buttons; and songs to be sung at rallies.

And they published campaign newspapers—entirely partisan weeklies that supported the Republican Party and lauded its candidate while criticizing and sometimes demeaning the opposition. The Chicago Rail Splitter is a prime example. The paper made its debut on June 23, 1860, and published 18 regular issues, ending on October 27th.

In addition, it published a special “pictorial” issue on September 30th that featured a series of cartoons lampooning Democrat Stephen Douglas.

The paper’s editor, Charles Leib, was a man with a somewhat shifting (or shifty) political history, but with his appointment as editor of the Rail Splitter, he became a vociferous Republican partisan. An advertisement for the paper promised to “handle the Split Tail Democracy without Gloves.”

And in his introduction to the first issue, Leib promised to “earnestly advocate the principles of Republicanism because they are founded in right” and to “expose the double-dealing…and…villainous schemes” of the Democrats. “There will,” he proclaimed, “be a great deal of crimination and recrimination.” And he concluded somewhat pugnaciously, “if we should incur the displeasure of any of the Democracy [Democratic Party] for telling the truth, and they should feel aggrieved, they can call at our office, at 66 Randolph Street, up stairs, where we will be most happy to give them any satisfaction they may desire. We will not, however, take back any statement we make, of the truth of which we are satisfied.”

The Republicans of Cincinnati also published a Rail Splitter, independent of the Chicago paper. The Cincinnati paper published every Wednesday from August 1st through October 17th, with a final issue on October 27th, under the editorship of J.H Jordan and J.B. McKeehan.

The Cincinnati Rail Splitter advertised itself as “devoted to facts, arguments, and incidents, which will be of great service to the Republican cause throughout the United States” in order to “take the ‘starch’ out of the ‘Little Giant’ and other Democratic ‘Dough Faces,’ and show them up in their true colors.” In fulfilling that goal, the paper would “stir up the young men of the country to activity and vigilance, and light up the watch-fires of ‘LINCOLN and HAMLIN’ on every hill.”

Unlike the Chicago and Cincinnati campaign papers, each of which cost 50 cents per issue, the Wide-Awake and Central Campaign Club Bulletin was distributed in New York City for free. 

New York City was home to numerous Wide-Awake clubs—groups of young men who supported Lincoln and the Republicans with well-organized torch-light parades featuring marching units dressed in helmets or caps and shiny caped uniforms made of enameled cloth. Parades usually ended with nighttime rallies. The clubs also sponsored indoor meetings with well-known speakers. The October 5th issue of the Wide-Awake and Central Campaign Club Bulletin details a meeting held at the Cooper Union where Thaddeus Stevens was the primary speaker.

It also includes advertisements for Wide-Awake supplies like torches, “oils for torch lights and signal lanterns,” and printed membership certificates.

While the Wide-Awake Clubs were new organizations formed for the 1860 election, the Young Men’s Republican Union of the City of New York was a more experienced group, having been formed in 1856 to support Republican candidate John C. Frémont. The Union sponsored a reading room and met regularly to hear speakers—it was, in fact, the sponsor for Abraham Lincoln’s speech at Cooper Union on February 27, 1860. The Union published a series of tracts or campaign papers between June 19th and October 2nd titled “Lincoln and Liberty!!!” The papers published excerpts from speeches and newspapers and reported on the campaign’s progress across the North.

The Union was, however, a self-proclaimed young men’s movement and formed its own Wide-Awake unit, the Rail-Splitter’s Battalion.

In Tract No. 2, the Union proclaimed that “Young Men are rallying, in great numbers and with unbounded enthusiasm, to the support of ‘Honest Old Abe’…the Young Men have every confidence in the Illinois rail-splitter, knowing that one competent to raise himself from the humblest and most obscure, to the most elevated and influential position in society, is fit to be entrusted with the reins of government, and will not hold them amiss. Lincoln is, emphatically, the choice of the Young Men, and their earnest enthusiasm will contribute largely to his inevitable success.”

Whether Lincoln’s success in 1860 was inevitable was an open question, of course, but the Republican campaign papers did their best to make it so.

[realtybangblog]

Can foreigners Invest in Real Estate in Rwanda?This is one of the questions that we get asked the most. The simple answer is yes! You can buy property in Rwanda even if you do not have Rwandan citizenship. And, even better, it is very simple and fast....

[driveincinema]

Act of Violence

Such a vast difference in funds, and pictures a male with a limp in the midst of memorial day. That’s actually the first time war was mentioned within the film. Catching sight of the man with the limp, he brought upon a hidden mystery into the mix of conflicting narratives.

As the shifty man calls, the husband had recently gone out to fish. Barreling music as the man signs everything he needs to. Hand delivering evidence to the right perceptive people. Doing everything himself shows that he has a one tract mind and nothing else to stand by his side. Trying to go at everything alone he is left with a metal gun.

The fisherman ended up finding out about the man attempting to kill him, and tried to run. Skeptical as Frank may be it gives question to what he did to the poor man. Or around him at all. Shocking his wife, it now gives a bit of tension to the atmosphere. Hearing the light trickle of water in the background gives the space eerie background noise. From the apparent description Frank was a patsy blamed for things he may not have done. Or just used as a punching bag.

Another reference to PTSD is when Frank puts down her idea for the police. Telling her it was just too much metal strain. Although with what we know now, if these problems aren’t taken care of they just get worse. Joe as we know as the supposed villain is has a different story. In the right of mind he was able to tell her what he strove through to get to this point. In one aspect you could say Frank was taking pity in other light he could be lying and running.

While talking to his wife in California he tries gaining height finding himself more important than the opposing opinion. Frank had been broken, and the others attempted to leave. Realizing that Frank had been the real villain in a taxing circumstances causes others to act. As impending death grows closer, he tries to get a drink at a closed bar. Where the bartender drinks the drink he left alone. Attempting to sell his own company to rid himself of his only mistake lead him to another chain of heavy dealings. A supposed lawyer is to help him get out of a bind Frank twisted himself into.

On top of it all he started to question himself and everything he has lived for. Did he create a nice life for himself or to cover up the guilt he feels from the war. Nevertheless it drives him to stand in front of a train with a blaring headlight looking suspiciously like a clock. As it gets closer and closer you can see his breath become greater and greater to the point where he ducks out of the way. Confirming his previous worry to only save himself.

As a result he relives the memory within a tunnel, and it seems that every memory is an echo. Shouting at random times, as the watcher gets bits and pieces of the situation. Hearing the distinguishing voice of everyone from the monologue in his head. Finally giving in to the delusion he lead himself to believe until he takes his future into his own hands.

Taking the bullet for another crime he had drunkenly set up cleansed his subconscious and helped the man that wanted to kill him in the first place. Essentially it was the only way to resolve the resounding issue’s between so many people in question. Joe was relived to see him die by someone else’s hand because he wont have to shoulder the burden of guilt or revenge any longer.

[shiftytracts]

Stop Wanting More, part 1 of 2 (T/M/A fic)

In which season-four Jon tries to quiet his hunger for live statements by gorging himself on paper ones, and Daisy tells him what she used to do when she got shaky between hunts. Part two here.

…For almost ten thousand words (~5.1k in this half, ~4.3 in the other), beeeecause of course I did.

Content warnings:

Disordered eating (mainly of the statement variety, but mentions also the literal kind)

Nausea, and brief descriptions of prior vomiting

Brief but not-ungraphic description of Jon’s (canon) Boneturning incident—so, injury, very mild body horror

Vague discussion of Daisy’s passive suicidality (in part two)

Animal cruelty and death: Daisy talks about hunting rats for sport (in part two)

—

Jon paused the tape recorder, closed his eyes, and tried to breathe. A statement’s second-to-last page was the hardest to get down. The dull ache that had begun under his ribs twenty minutes before now stretched down far enough to converge with the one in his stiff hips. His pulse throbbed in his stomach; he could feel it swell and recede beneath his hand with every beat. Nausea boomeranged up from somewhere under his navel. He reminded himself he could stop for now, finish this later—and, as always, that thought made him feel even colder than the sludge of other people’s fear pooling in his stomach. With his free hand Jon pressed Record again, and turned to 0101702’s final page. Oh, god, there was barely anything on it. Just the rest of this paragraph and then one more. He kept his eyes on the page, didn’t stop speaking its words, but fumbled blindly for another statement with his fingers.

“Knock knock,” Daisy said as she entered. “Christ—you’re still recording?”

In a flash Jon folded his hands on the table, sat up a little straighter, tried to suck in his gut. “Er—”

“Thought you said you were gonna do one more.”

“I’m almost done.”

“You’ve got another one right there.”

“I…” he considered I’m sorry, but then she’d say For what. “I don’t know what to tell you. It is my office.”

“Yeah, and your home,” Daisy scoffed—“and mine. Sort of.”

“D—did you want…? You’re welcome, to. Sit down, or….”

She did, on the arm of his couch. “I know, Jon. That’s not what I meant.”

“Okay.” To show he’d meant his welcome, Jon pushed his chair back from his desk and turned in it to face Daisy. Hopefully she’d remember he couldn’t ask What did you mean.

“I mean, don’t pretend this is work. How many statements have you had today? You don’t think that one can wait til tomorrow?”

Seven? Or would this one be eight. Jon forced himself to exhale out the portion of gut he’d been holding back since she arrived; it hurt too much to keep sucking in anyway. “A lot. I’m just.”

“Hungry, yeah.”

“Even when I’m stuffed I’m hungry.” He snarled a laugh, and set a rueful hand over his stomach like a fig leaf.

At first he’d tried sating the hunger with garden-variety food. That didn’t help much. Way back when he’d first transferred to the Archives Jon had fallen back into the old habit of forgetting to eat—which, yeah, not great, but, it did mean he remembered well how amazing it used to feel to cram down even a stale biscuit after too many hours’ inanition. All the hidden notes he’d found in yogurt and dry toast. He even remembered tearing up once at the taste of a banana, early in 2016. Before that he’d been sure he didn’t like bananas; afterward, for a short while he’d eaten one nearly every day, hoping vainly to recapture the ecstasy of banana after 14-hour fast. No luck, of course. After a few weeks he’d concluded he still didn’t much like banana as final course of healthy lunch. He’d especially disliked peeling them: how sometimes the stems bent without breaking, and the more times you tried the warmer, softer, more flexible they got. How little strings of peel still clung to the banana after you peeled off its main body, like static when you pull off a jumper. Or like the lint it leaves behind on your shirt. And the way bananas bruise, like people do. All these vestiges of its previous life—reminders it had lived to feed itself rather than him.

Since the coma, all people food—er. That was, all food intended for human consumption—tasted like that chase after a faded spark. Cloying and mushy and… organic, reminding him too much of the garden it came from. And the way it landed in his stomach was far worse. The original banana, the one Martin had pressed on him in the Archives in April 2016, had gone down like nectar, ambrosia, manna from heaven, &c.; the ones afterward, like an unwanted dessert always does. (Cloying. Mushy. A biology lesson mildly tapping its watch.) These days, though, eating regular dinner on a stomach empty of other people’s trauma felt like trying to fill up on cake. Not like cake after fourteen hours of nothing; Jon was pretty sure his 2016 stomach would have welcomed that. But like cake at dinner time. When you’re expecting, you know. Dinner. It gave him the brief, fake-seeming energy of a sugar high, and made him sick before it made him full.

Especially when he was otherwise ailing, for some reason? After Hopworth he’d treated himself to a lie down and a sandwich. The rest had helped, but he’d squandered most of the energy it gave him on the effort to keep the sandwich down. At that moment nothing, not even the coffin, had scared him so much as the thought of what it would feel like to throw up when you had only ten ribs on one side. He hadn’t expected losing them to hurt, at least not for long—had expected the rib to flow out of his skin into Jared Hopworth’s hand like an ice cube through water, which in retrospect was stupid given the testimony of Mr. Pryor in statement 0081103, but he hadn’t had time to reread that one beforehand and at the time Jon remembered only that Hopworth didn’t break his victims’ skin when he pulled out their bones. Turned out that wasn’t much comfort: he’d still had to break the ligaments attaching Jon’s ribs to his spine and chest. It had felt like a bad dislocation (four of them, technically), only instead of the feeling of bone pressing on things it shouldn’t there was an equally violating sense of tissue wallowing in holes that shouldn’t be there. He’d had this horror that if he were sick the flesh would crumple and pop where his ribs used to be, like when you try to suck the remaining water out of a near-empty bottle.

A few months after that he’d caught cold. (A point in the still-human column, Daisy had called it.) You know the first day or two of a cold, before the encroaching mucus takes out your ability to smell or taste properly, how innocuous olfactory phenomena like cheddar and laundry soap suddenly become Bad Smells, on par with the olive bar at a posh supermarket? Well, in a similar way, this one seemed to sharpen the dichotomy in his body’s opinions of people food and monster food. His lack-of-ribs had mostly healed by then though, so either vomiting with only ten ribs on one side did not cause the anomaly he’d feared, or, if it did, it hadn’t hurt enough for him to notice it in the cacophony (pucophony?) of other sensations.

(Daisy liked to play on words, so he’d been doing it more lately. This project the Eye seemed happy to help with, though in this case the suggestion arrived in his mind at the exact same moment as a reminder that, technically, the word cacophony can apply to sensations other than sound only by synecdoche.)

And then, a few weeks ago, when the whole Archives went down with norovirus… well, it wasn’t a fun time. He’d at first mistook the lethargy, weakness, trouble concentrating for signs of hunger—the new kind of hunger. Ms. Mullen-Jones’ statement about the Divine Chains cult hadn’t seemed all that bad, when he’d first recorded it. Scarier than if he’d read its events in a novel, of course; that was just how statements worked. He experienced them more vividly than stories, though less so than the events of his own life. (Because the people they happened to thought they were real! he’d told himself when he first took this job. It’s empathy, that’s all. Nope, sorry—evil magic.) When he read a paper statement these days, though, the knowledge it wouldn’t give him nightmares never quite left him. And he’d thought he was growing desensitized to the kinds of horror most people came to the Institute to report. Coming back up, though—maybe it was the fever, but god, the visions he got on that statement’s way out, of Agape and the soft, sticky hivecorpse of Claude Vilakazi’s followers—the way it made the donut he’d shoved down that morning (in a show of team spirit, god help him) come back up tasting like rotten rice wine—it was worse than the dreams. Worse, he could have sworn, than even the first time he ever dreamt Naomi Herne’s empty graveyard.

While hanging over the bowl of the Archives’ toilet waiting to see if he’d got it all up or if there was still more to come, Jon remembered thinking again of the banana Martin had given him. A few days earlier Daisy had made him watch the video of the I don’t understand this meme and at this point I’m too afraid to ask man vore-ing a banana; Jon had confessed to her, in a conspiratorial whisper-laugh, that for him vore itself had been one such meme until that very second, when the Eye had seen fit to inform him. But when applied to a banana, the term apparently just meant eating it peel and all. In 2016 Martin had broken the banana’s stem and pulled back a section of peel before handing it to Jon, so as to brook no argument. Was it really the banana itself he’d cried over? Not the gesture of friendship, when Jon deserved it so little? The thought of someone caring for him enough that when he got hangry at them they handed him a snack. Martin had been living in the Archives then, like Jon did now. Sleeping in Document Storage—a guest in a room owned by pieces of paper. Those bananas may have been the only thing that felt like his.

A Guest for Mr. Spider was about vore, technically. Not an uncommon topic in children’s literature. Some surmised that was where the fetish came from, though others maintained kinks like that were inborn, and the stories merely alerted their hosts to them for the first time. Red riding hood, three little pigs, little old lady who swallowed a fly. The Leitner touch was only the part where he drew you to his real-life lair and real-life ate you.

Looking back, that was probably the first thing he’d ever admired about Martin—how easy he’d made it look to skin a fruit. Not at the time admired, of course, but in those weeks afterward, when every banana Jon ate made him claw at the peel til his finger joints throbbed.

That stomach bug had struck the Archives with serendipitous timing, though. If he’d not found out how thin abstinence from the Hunt had made Daisy on the same day he’d barfed up a statement, Jon might not have pieced together what their combined evidence meant. Until then he’d put down his own post-coma weight loss to the fact he rarely ate more people food than a donut in twenty-four hours. Lots of avatars were scrawny, after all. Jane Prentiss, Mike Crew, Justin Gough, Annabelle Cane, John Amherst, Simon Fairchild. Jude Perry and Jared Hopworth could mold their respective fleshes however they wanted, so he didn’t count them as exceptions. True, Trevor Herbert’s bulk had struck him as odd; surely a homeless man wouldn’t waste cash on food his body no longer wanted. And what about Breekon and Hope? Did butterflies and a quartermaster’s pen and tongue sustain them? But maybe, Jon had told himself, it was like with alcohol. Maybe the avatars with more flesh on their bones had worked to develop a tolerance for (air quotes, heavy sarcasm) people food, for the sake of their physiques, or. So they could, he didn't know, eat socially? Without feeling sick, like Jon did whenever one of the others brought donuts.

Preposterously stupid, this theory seemed in retrospect. The truth was much simpler. It was like Jude Perry’d told him. She was strong and he was weak, because she fed her god with her actions, while Jon’s had had to resort to eating his flesh.

He wasn’t going back to live statements! That wasn’t an option; he knew that. He couldn’t feed his god with his actions. But he could have more paper ones. Maybe they were like the candles poor Eugene Vanderstock used to bring Agnes—the ones she’d sat over for hours. Hours and hours, inhaling the suffering that made them. They’d kept her strong enough, right? At least in body. All those people in charge of her care, all so much in her thrall—if she’d looked hungry one of them would’ve mentioned it in a statement.

During Jon’s school days, back when he was still trying to learn how to be a girl, this brief window had opened up right around age thirteen where the girls around him had enough self-consciousness to start developing eating disorders? But not enough to keep them secret. Thirteen had been this phase of, like, I’m a teenager now, see? I’ve got the teen angst now—SEE?! Where after they’d finished the day’s maths assignment, or while setting up microscope slides, one could overhear girls swapping self-harm anecdotes and tips for how best not to eat. Anne, whom he’d been almost friends with, went through two packs of chewing gum a day for a while. She would shove three or four sticks at a time in her mouth, then spit them back out into their wrappers as soon as they lost their flavor. Eventually they made her sick, and she switched to chain-sucking butterscotch discs. (Most artificial sweeteners, as the Eye now informed him, had mild laxative properties—including those used in gum.) Other acquaintances had brought comically large thermoses of coffee to school every day, and scurried to the toilet between classes. But it was another polyurious crowd that Jon kept thinking of, these days—the kids who would chug water every time they felt hungry. Trying to fill up on paper statements felt just like that.

He’d never understood that urge until now. Hunger was already a bad sensation; why would it help to add the further bad sensations of nausea and stomachache and cold? But now it made sense: feeling better was not the point. The point was to stop wanting more. He couldn’t get rid of the hunger, exactly—not in a way that mattered. Not the shards of glass in his belly, not the itch in his esophagus like a finger tapping behind his gag reflex, not the way simple motions like soaping his hands made his whole body ache. Not the sharpening of his senses to such a fine point that he jumped whenever Thérèse in the office above him shut her desk’s sticky drawer. (He hadn’t known that was what made the squeaky noise until a few weeks ago when the Eye decided he might like some office gossip. Even now he didn’t know which of the faces he sometimes passed up there belonged to Thérèse. She had no statements to make.) Nor the fog in his mind, though he tried sometimes to blame that on the Lonely. He couldn’t sate his hunger with paper statements—couldn’t make himself full, in the rosy way we usually connote that word. All warm and carefree and pleasantly sleepy. But he could cram the hole inside him with enough stale horrors that the temptation to chase down a fresh one momentarily left him.

And that was the new plan—to stuff himself with paper statements.

Tomorrow would mark two weeks since the day he’d first tried it. Brian from Artefact Storage had a statement to give him, Jon could feel—either Stranger or Spiral, it was hard to tell quite which. Something that caused paranoia. Not a great fit for that department. Good fit for a temple of the Eye, Jon supposed, remembering Tim and Michael Shelley. But Artefact Storage? God help him. He wondered if Elias had done it on purpose, hiring a paranoid man to work in a room full of objects that wanted him hurt. If so it must’ve been this one—this purpose. And on Wednesday mornings Brian manned the place all alone. Poor soul was already clinging to this job by a thread, though (so, Web…? That could cause paranoia too, as Jon well knew). Surely if Jon made him relive his trauma that would break it. Though perhaps that’d be a mercy. And but besides, two weeks ago Melanie had still lived here, and sat all morning between Jon’s office and Artefact Storage. Until she went to lunch. But by that time the woman whose laugh Jon could sometimes hear through the walls (Pooja, the Eye had since told him her name was) would have joined Brian. And it’d just be too weird, too risky, to go in and ask him about it with a third person in the room. Even if it wasn’t also evil.

So he’d read 0132210—the statement of Sierra Talbot, regarding a swimming pool whose depth changed every time she entered it—in hopes that’d make him quit thinking about the paranoid man down the hall. It didn’t, not really; paper statements didn’t take up as much of his attention as they used to. But he couldn’t get up and walk to Artefact Storage in the middle of one. When he finished and still couldn’t think of anything but Brian, he dug out another statement (this one from 1938, regarding a bad penny). Just to keep himself chained to his desk til lunch. And then a third (Liza Ho, attack of the killer seagulls). And by the end of that one he felt too heavy and cold inside to want to go anywhere but the couch. It made his stomach swell until it hurt to sit up straight, and the thought of shoving anything more inside made him feel sick—exactly like chugging water every time he felt hungry.

Basira had said maybe the Web just wanted to keep them so afraid of their own impulses they sat and did nothing so they couldn’t be puppeted. Maybe she was right. He’d never felt more like a spider, with his weak, skinny limbs and bloated stomach. Lying on the couch massaging other people’s horrors into more comfortable shapes inside him. Thank god he’d already given up tucking in his shirts, when he came back after the coma. Jon had worn the same trousers for three days in a row, now—shucked them off at the end of the day, hoping if he left them on the floor that’d convince him they were too dirty to wear again, and then slipped them back on over clean boxers in the morning. They were the only trousers he had that stayed up with the button left unfastened.

(Technically, the noun bloat refers to the feeling of weight or tightness in the abdomen. To describe a belly which has expanded beyond its typical size, one should use the word distended. Though these phenomena can occur separately, most people conflate them under the single word bloated. This trivia had seemed worthless when Beholding told him of it. But now he knew better. Every morning he woke up feeling like he’d had his whole torso replaced with the aching void of space, empty but for silver glints of pain that were the stars. And then he’d look down and find his belly still distended.)

Melanie and Basira didn’t know—at least not officially. They both seemed to have noticed how much more often lately they’d walked in on him recording, but Jon was pretty sure they suspected him less of bingeing on statements, more of pretending to record so as to avoid talking to them. He welcomed this misapprehension.

It was also possible they knew but declined to comment, since. Well, it was kind of a pathetic habit? Physically, a bit pathetic. Morally, though, such a big improvement over compelling statements by force that maybe they figured they ought to let him have it. If so he should be grateful, he reminded himself. Their pity, after all, was humiliating only in principle; Daisy’s teasing and concerned questions embarrassed him in practice.

“Enough navelgazing,” Daisy scoffed, but when Jon looked over at her he could see a smile creeping its way onto her face. “Look—finish the one you’re on, then come over here and I’ll. Tell you a story.”

“I—what?”

“Don’t know if it’ll count as a ‘statement,’” she said, with air quotes; “not much fear in it, more just.” She looked at the floor, then shrugged. “But it seems worth a try, yeah? Might make you feel better.”

“I-I, er. I really shouldn’t?” He meant in case it had a taste of human blood effect, but set his hand on his stomach again in hopes she’d think he meant he was too full.

“Yeah, you should. I want you to hear it.” Daisy shrugged again. “Think it might do you good to know.”

Jon turned back to his desk, unpaused the recording and wrapped up the statement. He’d quit bothering to record end notes on most of these—told himself he could add them in later, like he used to when he’d first taken this job. How proud 2016 Jon would have been to see how many statements the 2018 Archivist got through in a week.

He paused for a moment before standing up, to take as deep a breath as he could manage when stuffed full of paper. The end of that statement had gone down easier, since he’d had that few minutes’ break talking to Daisy, but he still didn’t love the idea of standing and walking. Especially since he knew once he got to the couch he’d be glued there by fatigue. If he didn’t pee now, he’d spend most of the night far enough into sleep to be paralyzed, but not far enough to numb his bladder. He excused himself to Daisy, promising to come right back. Then hauled himself up, with help from his cane and one arm of his chair.

Six limbs it took to maneuver this body now. Two more and he’d’ve gone full spider.

Three quarters of the way to the bathroom—that’s how long it took before the ache in his legs outpaced that in his stomach. He arrived on the toilet seat shaky and out of breath, as always. Months ago he’d given up standing to pee. When you sat you could rock back and forth, and cross your arms tight over waves of quease.

Not much came out, as was also usual lately. As far as Jon could tell, his body now required only enough water to keep his mouth from drying out while recording. Dehydration no longer made his head hurt, so, why bother. Good thing, too, he supposed—the last two weeks he hadn’t needed much non-metaphorical water inside for his body to parse that as needing to pee.

He let his trousers stay pooled around his ankles until after he’d washed and dried his hands. Then pulled up his shirt, to judge from his reflection whether they’d stay up with the fly undone. If he kept his hands in his pockets, yeah. Could you tell the difference, visually, once he put his shirt tails back down? Not for such a short distance. They wouldn’t have time to get disarranged.

It didn’t matter; Basira didn’t even glance at him on his way back, and all Institute staff who didn’t live here had gone home.

Jon opened the door to his office, said hello to Daisy but didn’t manage to look at her, and sat himself down on the other side of the couch. From the corner of his eye (or someone’s anyway) he saw her rise to her feet. “I’m gonna pee too,” she told him, picking her way toward the door; “get yourself comfortable, like you’re going to bed.”

“Where will you sit.”

“I’ll squeeze in.”

“I don’t mind leaving room for—?” Finally he made himself look up at her, in time to see her shake her head. Daisy hadn’t been strong on her feet either, since the Buried; she held herself up now with a hand on the doorjamb, elbow bent so her shoulder leant against that wrist. He regretted quibbling. “Never mind; I’ll just.”

“Really? You’re comfortable like that? You look like a sheep in clover.”

The knowledge came to him before he could ask her what that meant—complete with a nasty visual of what happens in cases acute enough to require rumenotomy. Jon swore he could feel himself swelling to accommodate this tidbit. His eye twitched in discomfort.

“Think I prefer ‘windbag,’ if it’s all the same to you.”

She made a face like that was grosser than what she had said. “You ruined my joke. I was gonna say I won’t let you have any more leaves til you look less like you might explode.”

“Sheep in clover suffocate,” Jon frowned; “they don’t explode. You must be thinking of how they cure them when—”

“Leaves. In. A. Book, Jon. That joke.”

“Oh. Yes, I see.” He made himself chuckle.

Daisy sighed and shifted on her feet. “I’ll be right back. Just lie down, alright? Like you’re going to bed.”

Jon agreed to lie down, but couldn’t decide whether to face the wall (as he would to sleep), leaving her to slide in between him and the back of the couch the way she had a few times before when she’d walked in on him catnapping, or whether he should lie on his back, where he could see her as soon as she opened the door. It was important to make sure she knew he appreciated her offer to give him a statement. Or, no—to tell him her story, he meant.

Ultimately he picked the latter course.

“You sleep like that?”

“Sometimes."

“I’ve never seen you sleep like that. You always face the wall.” Daisy crossed her arms, blew hair out of her face. “That for the tummy ache, or for me?”

“Uh….”

“Would it hurt you to face the wall.”

“No, I just.”

“Turn around, then. I’ll squeeze in,” she said again.

“I-if you’re sure.”

He rolled onto his side, gritting his teeth as the cramps in his stomach swirled in new directions. What made it slosh like that, he wondered. While he fought to regain his breath Jon watched Daisy climb up onto the back of the couch on shaking elbows and knees, then avalanche down hands- and feet-first so she fit between him and its cushions. He’d never watched her do this before—always either startled out of a doze at the sound of her thumping down next to him, or simply woken up to find her there.

“You’re just like the Admiral,” he informed her.

“True words spoken in jest,” muttered Daisy. Too quietly for him to hear what she said over the couch’s tortured creaks, but half a second after she finished speaking the words appeared before his mind, in white, all-capital letters with a black background like closed captions on the news. “That’s Georgie’s cat, right?” she said aloud.

“Yes.”

Her knee jostled the cap of his; when it made him gasp she snarled under her breath. “Sorry. Can you move your leg?”

“Yes, it’s fine, just—”

“I mean would you move your leg.”

“Oh.” He did so.

“Thanks. Ugh—you’re cold,” Daisy accused him; “where’s that blanket.” He pointed behind her to the arm of the couch where it lay folded. She shook it out, and draped it over both of them. Reached around behind him to make sure it covered his whole back. Jon tried to ignore the way his stomach lurched every time Daisy’s weight shifted against the cushions. Finally she settled next to him to catch her breath. Their foreheads touched; her stomach pressed into his, though not as tightly as the last time they’d lain like this. “Can you breathe or am I crushing you?”

“Not at all, you’re fine—in fact, if the couch cushions are chafing you too much you can—”

Daisy huffed, and scooted herself in closer to him. “That better?” She set her warm hand down right where his belly diverged from pelvis. Jon tried to keep both voice and tremor out of his exhale. Since the coffin, Daisy’s hands and feet suffered at night and after any exertion from the same excess of heat his sometimes did. So the cold inside him probably felt nice on her hand, if not to the rest of her.

(Like snuggling up to a hotel mattress, she’d described it, after the first time she joined him for a nap when he’d just had a statement. Cold, hard, covered in lumps and dents, and creaks when you roll over on it. “I’d prefer you didn’t,” he’d replied, while praying her elbow wouldn’t come any closer to the crevasse where his ribs used to be.)

“Christ you’re stuffed,” commented Daisy. For emphasis she lifted her fingers, then set them back down on his gut.

“I don’t know what you expected.”

“You won’t pop if I tell you a story?”

“Not literally,” Jon said, blinking.

“Of course not literally,” she scoffed; “you know what I mean.”

“Do I?”

“Will it make you sick. Don’t want you throwing up on me; this is Melanie’s shirt. If you ruin it she’ll hit us with her cane, and I don’t trust you to hit as hard back with yours.”

“Mine’s shorter and thicker,” he mused. “I don’t have to hit as hard.”

“Stop. Avoiding. The question.”

Jon sighed to show her he capitulated. Then thought about it. He felt cold and sick, but the idea of saying no to a statement made those feelings worse, not better. And the sharp clusters of pain in his belly were harder to sleep through than quease.

“I’ll be fine,” he decided. “It’ll help.”

“Alright. When you’re ready, ask me what I used to do when I got shaky between hunts.”

--

Read part two here.

[obscureglitch]

3. EUROPE AFTER THE ANGLO-FRENCH WAR A subtle change now began to affect the whole mental climate of the planet. This is remarkable, since, viewed for instance from America or China, this war was, after all, but a petty disturbance, scarcely more than a brawl between quarrelsome statelets, an episode in the decline of a senile civilization. Expressed in dollars, the damage was not impressive to the wealthy West and the potentially wealthy East. The British Empire, indeed, that unique banyan tree of peoples, was henceforward less effective in world diplomacy; but since the bond that held it together was by now wholly a bond of sentiment, the Empire was not disintegrated by the misfortune of its parent trunk. Indeed, a common fear of American economic imperialism was already helping the colonies to remain loyal. Yet this petty brawl was in fact an irreparable and far reaching disaster. For in spite of those differences of temperament which had forced the English and French into conflict, they had co-operated, though often unwittingly, in tempering and clarifying the mentality of Europe. Though their faults played a great part in wrecking Western civilization, the virtues from which these vices sprang were needed for the salvation of a world prone to uncritical romance. In spite of the inveterate blindness and meanness of France in international policy, and the even more disastrous timidity of England, their influence on culture had been salutary, and was at this moment sorely needed. For, poles asunder in tastes and ideals, these two peoples were yet alike in being on the whole more sceptical, and in their finest individuals more capable of dispassionate yet creative intelligence, than any other Western people. This very character produced their distinctive faults, namely, in the English a caution that amounted often to moral cowardice, and in the French a certain myopic complacency and cunning, which masqueraded as realism. Within each nation there was, of course, great variety. English minds were of many types. But most were to some extent distinctively English; and hence the special character of England's influence in the world. Relatively detached, sceptical, cautious, practical, more tolerant than others, because more complacent and less prone to fervour, the typical Englishman was capable both of generosity and of spite, both of heroism and of timorous or cynical abandonment of ends proclaimed as vital to the race. French and English alike might sin against humanity, but in different manners. The French sinned blindly, through a strange inability to regard France dispassionately. The English sinned through faint-heartedness, and with open eyes. Among all nations they excelled in the union of common sense and vision. But also among all nations they were most ready to betray their visions in the name of common sense. Hence their reputation for perfidy. Differences of national character and patriotic sentiment were not the most fundamental distinctions between men at this time. Although in each nation a common tradition or cultural environment imposed a certain uniformity on all its members, yet in each nation every mental type was present, though in different proportions. The most significant of all cultural differences between men, namely, the difference between the tribalists and the cosmopolitans, traversed the national boundaries. For throughout the world something like a new, cosmopolitan "nation" with a new all-embracing patriotism was beginning to appear. In every land there was by now a salting of awakened minds who, whatever their temperament and politics and formal faith, were at one in respect of their allegiance to humanity as a race or as an adventuring spirit. Unfortunately this new loyalty was still entangled with old prejudices. In some minds the defence of the human spirit was sincerely identified with the defence of a particular nation, conceived as the home of all enlightenment. In others, social injustice kindled a militant proletarian loyalty, which, though at heart cosmopolitan, infected alike its champions and its enemies with sectarian passions. Another sentiment, less definite and conscious than cosmopolitanism, also played some part in the minds of men, namely loyalty toward the dispassionate intelligence, and perplexed admiration of the world which it was beginning to reveal, a world august, immense, subtle, in which, seemingly, man was doomed to play a part minute but tragic. In many races there had, no doubt, long existed some fidelity toward the dispassionate intelligence. But it was England and France that excelled in this respect. On the other hand, even in these two nations there was much that was opposed to this allegiance. These, like all peoples of the age, were liable to bouts of insane emotionalism. Indeed the French mind, in general so clear sighted, so realistic, so contemptuous of ambiguity and mist, so detached in all its final valuations, was yet so obsessed with the idea "France" as to be wholly incapable of generosity in international affairs. But it was France, with England, that had chiefly inspired the intellectual integrity which was the rarest and brightest thread of Western culture, not only within the territories of these two nations, but throughout Europe and America. In the seventeenth and eighteenth Christian centuries, the French and English had conceived, more clearly than other peoples, an interest in the objective world for its own sake, had founded physical science, and had fashioned out of scepticism the most brilliantly constructive of mental instruments. At a later stage it was largely the French and English who, by means of this instrument, had revealed man and the physical universe in something like their true proportions; and it was chiefly the elect of these two peoples that had been able to exult in this bracing discovery. With the eclipse of France and England this great tradition of dispassionate cognizance began to wane. Europe was now led by Germany. And the Germans, in spite of their practical genius, their scholarly contributions to history, their brilliant science and austere philosophy, were at heart romantic. This inclination was both their strength and their weakness. Thereby they had been inspired to their finest art and their most profound metaphysical speculation. But thereby they were also often rendered un-self-critical and pompous. More eager than Western minds to solve the mystery of existence, less sceptical of the power of human reason, and therefore more inclined to ignore or argue away recalcitrant facts, the Germans were courageous systematizers. In this direction they had achieved greatly. Without them, European thought would have been chaotic. But their passion for order and for a systematic reality behind the disorderly appearances, rendered their reasoning all too often biased. Upon shifty foundations they balanced ingenious ladders to reach the stars. Thus, without constant ribald criticism from across the Rhine and the North Sea, the Teutonic soul could not achieve full self-expression. A vague uneasiness about its own sentimentalism and lack of detachment did indeed persuade this great people to assert its virility now and again by ludicrous acts of brutality, and to compensate for its dream life by ceaseless hard-driven and brilliantly successful commerce; but what was needed was a far more radical self-criticism. Beyond Germany, Russia. Here was a people whose genius needed, even more than that of the Germans, discipline under the critical intelligence. Since the Bolshevic revolution, there had risen in the scattered towns of this immense tract of corn and forest, and still more in the metropolis, an original mode of art and thought, in which were blended a passion of iconoclasm, a vivid sensuousness, and yet also a very remarkable and essentially mystical or intuitive power of detachment from all private cravings. America and Western Europe were interested first in the individual human life, and only secondarily in the social whole. For these peoples, loyalty involved a reluctant self-sacrifice, and the ideal was ever a person, excelling in prowess of various kinds. Society was but the necessary matrix of this jewel. But the Russians, whether by an innate gift, or through the influence of agelong political tyranny, religious devotion, and a truly social revolution, were prone to self-contemptuous interest in groups, prone, indeed, to a spontaneous worship of whatever was conceived as loftier than the individual man, whether society, or God, or the blind forces of nature. Western Europe could reach by way of the intellect a precise conception of man's littleness and irrelevance when regarded as an alien among the stars; could even glimpse from this standpoint the cosmic theme in which all human striving is but one contributory factor. But the Russian mind, whether orthodox or Tolstoyan or fanatically materialist, could attain much the same conviction intuitively, by direct perception, instead of after an arduous intellectual pilgrimage; and, reaching it, could rejoice in it. But because of this independence of intellect, the experience was confused, erratic, frequently misinterpreted; and its effect on conduct was rather explosive than directive. Great indeed was the need that the West and East of Europe should strengthen and temper one another. After the Bolshevic revolution a new element appeared in Russian culture, and one which had not been known before in any modern state. The old regime was displaced by a real proletarian government, which, though an oligarchy, and sometimes bloody and fanatical, abolished the old tyranny of class, and encouraged the humblest citizen to be proud of his partnership in the great community. Still more important, the native Russian disposition not to take material possessions very seriously co-operated with the political revolution, and brought about such a freedom from the snobbery of wealth as was quite foreign to the West. Attention which elsewhere was absorbed in the massing or display of money was in Russia largely devoted either to spontaneous instinctive enjoyments or to cultural activity. In fact it was among the Russian townsfolk, less cramped by tradition than other city-dwellers, that the spirit of the First Men was beginning to achieve a fresh and sincere readjustment to the facts of its changing world. And from the townsfolk something of the new way of life was spreading even to the peasants; while in the depths of Asia a hardy and ever-growing population looked increasingly to Russia, not only for machinery, but for ideas. There were times when it seemed that Russia might transform the almost universal autumn of the race into a new spring. After the Bolshevic revolution the New Russia had been boycotted by the West, and had therefore passed through a stage of self-conscious extravagance. Communism and naïve materialism became the dogmas of a new crusading atheist church. All criticism was suppressed, even more rigorously than was the opposite criticism in other countries; and Russians were taught to think of themselves as saviours of mankind. Later, however, as economic isolation began to hamper the Bolshevic state, the new culture was mellowed and broadened. Bit by bit, economic intercourse with the West was restored, and with it cultural intercourse increased. The intuitive mystical detachment of Russia began to define itself, and so consolidate itself, in terms of the intellectual detachment of the best thought of the West. Iconoclasm was harnessed. The life of the senses and of impulse was tempered by a new critical movement. Fanatical materialism, whose fire had been derived from a misinterpreted, but intense, mystical intuition of dispassionate Reality, began to assimilate itself to the far more rational stoicism which was the rare flower of the West. At the same time, through intercourse with peasant culture and with the peoples of Asia, the new Russia began to grasp in one unifying act of apprehension both the grave disillusion of France and England and the ecstasy of the East. The harmonizing of these two moods was now the chief spiritual need of mankind. Failure to integrate them into an all-dominant sentiment could not but lead to racial insanity. And so in due course it befell. Meanwhile this task of integration was coming to seem more and more urgent to the best minds in Russia, and might have been finally accomplished had they been longer illumined by the cold light of the West. But this was not to be. The intellectual confidence of France and England, already shaken through progressive economic eclipse at the hands of America and Germany, was now undermined. For many decades England had watched these newcomers capture her markets. The loss had smothered her with a swarm of domestic problems, such as could never be solved save by drastic surgery; and this was a course which demanded more courage and energy than was possible to a people without hope. Then came the war with France, and harrowing disintegration. No delirium seized her, such as occurred in France; yet her whole mentality was changed, and her sobering influence in Europe was lessened. As for France, her cultural life was now grievously reduced. It might, indeed, have recovered from the final blow, had it not already been slowly poisoned by gluttonous nationalism. For love of France was the undoing of the French. They prized the truly admirable spirit of France so extravagantly, that they regarded all other nations as barbarians. Thus it befell that in Russia the doctrines of communism and materialism, products of German systematists, survived uncriticized. On the other hand, the practice of communism was gradually undermined. For the Russian state came increasingly under the influence of Western, and especially American, finance. The materialism of the official creed also became a farce, for it was foreign to the Russian mind. Thus between practice and theory there was, in both respects, a profound inconsistency. What was once a vital and promising culture became insincere.

[americanbackyard]

I Am The Rock...

I was raised in a Republican, Conservative, Christian household. Three things I no longer identify with and haven’t in decades. I could say, like some do, that times were different then and they were. There is no doubt about that.  Republicans in office approved the creation of The EPA, and now they wish to destroy it, and the planet along with it. Republicans approved the creation of OSHA, but now could care less about the safety and well being of workers, and would gladly send the jobs overseas to get a higher percentage. They spoke of responsible spending and self reliance, but later gave us Reaganomics, Trickle Down Economics, and Supply Side Economics, all slanted theories based on the same skewed me-first policies. Where did the Republicans go?

Conservatives were always a bit shifty. Nervous Nellies that were always worried about something that had nothing to do with them. They would meet and eat and talk and balk and the rest of the community would giggle at them for being such goofs. And look at them now. All those outlandish televangelists, the nutty politicians on the fringe of reality, and the tracts passed out like heroin to the addicted, along with an entire movement unsatisfied with their own lives and willing to inflict their discontent onto others rather than solve the issues at hand, eventually turned a jittery group of grumblers into a very vocal mass of whiners and complainers who simply refuse to mind their own business while attacking anyone who minds theirs. Many that once tended to stick together and keep the circle closed are now nothing more than a selfish infection upon society, with a whole section wishing nothing but destruction upon the world of those not like them. So where did The Conservatives go?

The Christians. Yes, them... All 39,000+ denominations of them. That says a lot right there. That so many denominations are needed to satisfy the interpretation required by it’s believers, to JUSTIFY the beliefs of it’s followers, to cherry pick the scriptures for the sake of how the denomination might tweak the original source to fit it’s needs, thus convincing it’s followers that it is the one true version and NOT the others who might be seen as anything from “the confused” to being unclean heretics. The church I attended until eighteen certainly wasn’t like that, well, not until I was about sixteen. My church spoke of committing to a decent life and spreading good news to others, of gathering together to celebrate what is good, and to respect ourselves and others. It taught us not to judge but to accept, not just tolerate people who were different or who had different beliefs. Why? Because they said all were children of God. Well, we certainly don’t hear that message much now do we? We are bombarded by “Christians” who do nothing BUT judge, who refuse to tolerate let alone accept ANYTHING not of the teachings they are absorbing by whatever blasphemous pricks they allow to poison their minds, thus doing the exact opposite of the savior they supposedly exalt. So I ask, where did all the Christians go?

The Republicans, the Conservatives, the Christians, where DID they go? They DIED. Let’s face it, each of them are movements. Humongous movements but still just movements, and they change over the years, decades, even centuries. The original message changes and in turn the motivating factors are affected, but as with all movements, they always need to grow in numbers and strength, lest they fade away and be forgotten. And as such, the movement may stray from it’s creators origins, and morph into something that we would hope is something good and wonderful, but time and time again, takes another path towards something dark and inclusive, that lashes out at those it should accept rather than persecute. We’ve seen it before and quite literally should not be so surprised at what we are seeing now. From The Crusades to The Inquisition to the many translations of The Bible to the vicious message of The WBC, we see two things that shape many Christians, and their Conservative members, which of course includes Republicans, all connected at the base; the inability to be independent, which is looked upon as being without God in many denominations, thus sinful; and forced shame, the key to how some denominations control their flock. To go against the grain is an abomination against God and the congregation and shall be judged and punished with isolation from God and eternal damnation. How awful!

It’s all in selling the fear, and they all bought it. Fifty years ago they knew it and there were those who ate it up then just as now, but they didn’t have the technological means then to spread it, or receive frightening updates every day. There was an effort one had to put in to find information back then and to find whatever one wanted. One had to go to the library, and talk to people face to face, and make phone calls and go to meetings, and DRIVE. That is all gone now. What I want is SECONDS away and is there at the press of a few buttons. With little effort I can find a group that suits me and they can find me the same way. Technology killed The Republicans, The Conservatives, and The Christians. While humans have taken advantage of humans since the beginning, they now have the ultimate tool. The first human to use a rock to smash something not only learned to make something practical from it’s use, but also how to destroy and kill. And nothing has changed. 

That’s where they all went, and why people must now make a true effort like before, to return to, or create anew, the basic good without the convenient yet toxic additives the fear sellers have to offer...

[doggoneloser]

ok but also consider the intimidation tactics of this duo. tell me u wouldn’t absolute shit ur pants. first of all on the front lines u’ve got h’aanit, this big beefy woman with a bow and arrow, an axe, and a goddamn snow leopard. she looks like she could break your arm and your neck whether standing in front of u or 50ft away. and then. AND THEN

while whoever it is is occupied with h’aanit. NO ONE is going to notice shifty little therion. you’re staring the goddess of death in the face u aren’t going to notice ur wallet disappearing, especially not from mr master thief therion over here. but if it’s something more than just a robbery tactic? like if some dick is like, “yeah i’ll take you on” to h’aanit? suddenly he’s got a dagger at his throat. h’aanit hasn’t even moved. she’s just :) and therion is equally as smug with his whole “you sure you wanna try that, buddy?” and then they’d just disappear.

not to mention they would be UNTRACEABLE. they’re the ultimate stealth duo. a thief used to hiding in the shadows and blending in and avoiding been seen and plenty used to outrunning guards who outnumber him PLUS a huntress skilled in tracking, using nature to her advantage, covering her own tracts, and communicating w animals on top of all the other cool shit h’aanit is?? u cannot tell me anyone could find them if they didn’t want to be found. like. bro. i bet they have their own little hand signals too.

just therion & h’aanit man. wow.

hear me out: therion and h'aanit are literally best friends. they don't talk much, perferring to spend time together in companionable silence, but when they do talk,, oH BOY does it get deep. therion trauma dumps a bit, h'aanit finally talks about her own issues (being orphaned, frustrations with z'aanta, etc), and they let each other feel deeply. they also gossip, probably a bit too much. h'aanit mostly listens, but contributes her two cents occasionally. they love to sit in taverns together whenever they go new places, and try to guess how much money people have on them. h'aanit nearly always makes therion return it once they've found out if they were right. therion doesn't complain too much. they first bonded over linde, since therion is just mildly obsessed with cats. he was always petting her, brushing her, and giving her treats. h'aanit quickly found out he loved apples, and, with ophilia's help, started making apple treats for him. and how could therion resist?

[hecticcheer]

Hyponatremia (unfinished T/M/A fic)

Fiveish months ago I tried to write a fic based on this scenario post I made. I’m super definitely never gonna finish it, and, it just kinda trails off at the end? Also it’s very rough. Features some American measurements in brackets that I’m too lazy to convert, if that gives you an idea. But I figured I’d post it anyway on one-slice-of-cake>no-cake principle.

As for the plot... uh. Jon has a headache; Martin tries to help, but makes it worse. For *checks notes* ~4200 words. If it has one saving grace, it’s that you can mmmmostly understand it without prior knowledge of T/M/A? Long as you know Martin’s living in the Archives to hide from an evil worm monster, you should be good.

--

As usual, Jon was the first person to join Martin down in the Archives that morning, sometime between seven and eight. And, no more unusually, Martin had twelve-plus hours of nervous energy to work off, and nobody to shed it on but his boss. “Morning. Sleep well? Tim said you still had some work to do when we left for the pub, but I didn’t see you when I got back so you can’t have made too late a night of it.” (Jon shook his head.) “Shame you couldn’t join us, by the way. Elena and Clarisse and them destroyed us on geography, and Sasha says you’re pretty good on maps and that. Maybe you could’ve saved us.”

“Doubt it,” said Jon. Martin waited for him to add more to that thought, but instead he just sort of stood there. Pinched one nostril shut and inhaled experimentally through the other. Trying to figure out which one was clogged, maybe? Tim said Jon’d said he had a headache; maybe it was a sinus thing. Not that this was exactly reliable intel. On pub-quiz Wednesday Tim always regaled him and Sasha with Jon’s latest excuses not to join them. They were always bad, but some were so bad Martin suspected they weren’t so much Jon’s lies as Tim’s lies about Jon’s lies. Probably not a great idea to mention this one, then. He’d stick to the first excuse Jon had allegedly given:

“Did you finish what you were working on?”

Jon closed his eyes, for a bit longer than the average blink, but not long enough to count as a proper wince. “Not even close.”

“Oh. What… was it?”

“Cabinet of statements from 2003. Or at least, nominally from 2003, though by my count less than a third of them actually date from that year.”

“Yikes. Need any help? Extra pair of hands, or.”

“Not right now.”

“2003,” Martin mused—“are you still looking for Mr. McKenzie’s statement?”

A short, but hearty sigh. Enunciated, practically. He didn’t open his mouth until afterward, but Martin could see his nostrils flare around it. “No. Three days ago, when I started to look through the cabinets marked 2003, I was looking for Mr. McKenzie’s statement. Now I just want to find out which statements in there I can’t send straight to the discredited section.”

Jon stood in the open doorway to his office by this point, hand on the knob as if to remind Martin of his eagerness to close it behind him. Even so Martin tried to peer past him into the office, looking for a discard pile of statements he might offer to shuttle away himself. This was pretty hard to do surreptitiously, though. He’d hoped his eyes would land at once on the tallest pile, at which time he could point to it and say, Are those the discredited ones, then? But from his vantage point all the piles on Jon’s desk seemed taller than usual.

“Right,” Martin said instead; “good luck.” He smiled weakly and returned his gaze to Jon, meaning to restore eye contact before he remembered how seldom Jon looked at people’s faces anyway. At this moment both his eyes were covered by the hand not on the doorknob. It would’ve been weird, he figured, to just duck out now while Jon couldn’t even see him, so Martin told himself to wait until he opened his eyes and only then back off.

But then Jon just stayed like that, for ages, with his fingers on one temple and his thumb on the other, blocking all possibility of sight. Eventually Martin felt like he had no choice but to say, “Are you alright?—or, I mean, how’s your head, by the way? Tim said….”

“It’s fine.”

“Ssssso it—doesn’t still hurt, then?”

“I’m fine, Martin. Thank you,” Jon said, but in one of the least thankful-sounding tones of voice he had. And then he closed the door, without even waiting for Martin to back up.

—

“Thought you might like coffee this morning instead of tea. It’s got more caffeine, and, that’s supposed to help, right? Plus I remembered what you said on your birthday about tea having tannins just like wine does. Of course, for all I know coffee might too—”

“It does.”

“Oh. Well… maybe the caffeine’ll cancel it out and you’ll break even? Or, I don’t know, maybe if you already have a headache they can’t trigger one.”

Jon’s answering Hm sounded pessimistic. Sure enough, as soon as Martin had finished his sentence he said, “I’m not that lucky.”

“Probably not,” Martin agreed with a laugh. “Still, least it’s hydration. Though caffeine’s a diuretic, so if I recall correctly you only get about half, volume-wise. That mug’s about… [twelve ounces,] I’d say? So it probably counts as about [six toward your sixty-four].”

“Yes, yes,” replied Jon, picking up his bottle of water and shaking it. When he set it down again, one look confirmed what Martin had suspected from the sound it made—it was nearly empty.

“Oh hey, look at that! Looks like you’re doing a pretty good job even without…” he trailed off, realizing too late that the most logical end to that sentence was my help, and that that was a pretty pompous way to refer to a coffee he was pretty sure Jon didn’t even want. So instead he said, “I’ll go refill that for you.” And before Jon could look up Martin scurried off to the break room with it.

The water dispenser should’ve been changed yesterday. When the water got this low it took ages to fill even a mug, much less a tall bottle like this one. It startled as a trickle, and by about halfway up the bottle slowed to a glorified drip. In his mind he pleaded with the water spout not to make so much noise; promised it he’d put in a new one as soon as he’d returned Jon’s water to him, mouthed encouragements to it. Not much farther, just to the top of the M, come on, you can do it. (The bottle was an Institute freebie, with Magnus Institute inscribed on it in black-bordered green letters. Martin had one just like it somewhere in his flat. Worm bait now, he supposed.)

By the time he brought it back Jon’s eyes were on the statement in his hands. Skimming, by the looks of it, rather than either actually reading or pretending to.

Martin endeavored to set down his refilled water audibly, but not painfully loudly. But Jon’s answering “Thank you” took him so much by surprise that at the last moment his wrist jerked and the bottle fell over.

“Ah! Sorry, sorry.” It had a lid, so, not an actual disaster? Jon did snarl at him though, or at least at the noise. His hands flew up as if to cover his ears, but he seemed to reject that idea halfway through. Just closed his fists around thin air, then leant his temple on one of them and sighed through his nose. “Sorry,” Martin said again. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

Jon’s emphatic blink seemed to stand in for a nod.

“Anyway, here’s a further [sixteen ounces] for you, looks like, or thereabouts,” ventured Martin, patting the side of the water bottle with one hand while holding it down with the other so it definitely wouldn’t topple again. “I’ll just leave you to it then.”

“Mm.”

“Good luck.”

—

After his stunt with the water bottle Martin had too much distrusted himself to risk making another big noise with the door, so he’d left it with its tongue sticking out rather than latching it. This meant he made almost no sound when he entered again. The first thing he noticed was that the water in Jon’s bottle still reached the top of the M. It still sat in the same place, too—not out of Jon’s reach but far enough away (Martin had told himself at the time) not to seem an imposition on his space. Almost definitely not where one would set it if one intended to pick it up again soon. His coffee seemed to have fared a bit better though. Half empty, one might say. Optimistically.

The second thing he noticed was Jon himself, who sat with his elbows on the desk, his chin on the heels of his palms, and his fingers arranged around his eyes like fence posts. Like a child peeking out at something they’re too scared to look at directly—except that his eyes were closed.

Martin snuck back to the other side of the door and knocked on it, gently. “Hey, uh, Jon?”

He didn’t look up, and opened his eyes for only a second before shutting them again. But he did drop his hands, threaded his fingers together and set them on the table, and bit his lip. “What, Martin.”

“Er—well, I know you said you’d given up looking for Marcus McKenzie’s statement, but I just realized I never asked if you’d thought to look in the discredited section. I mean, from what he said on the phone it didn’t sound like he took his dad’s statement all that seriously, so, maybe Gertrude put it in there, as, like, corroborating evidence that it wasn’t paranormal, and McKenzie senior’s statement just got misfiled?”

“Martin, I invented the discredited section.”

“Oh.”

“Anything else you wanted to say?”

“Oh, uh, nothing important. Just wondered if you’d like me to take that mug away.”

Instead of responding verbally, Jon picked up the mug and made what seemed a valiant effort to drink a little more of the coffee inside it. From what Martin could tell, he barely managed not to grimace in disgust.

“Do you like coffee? I’m not a big fan of it either, to be honest. Oh, well. If you can’t force that down you’ve still got plenty of water there, I see. Besides, it’ll wash out the taste.” (With an actual heh heh, which came out more like a small dog panting than like human laughter.)

Dramatic, snarly sigh from Jon. “Think I’ll pass. It seems to make it worse, if anything.”

“Oh. Sorry about that; must be those pesky tannins. I’ll just take your cup now then.”

But Jon only tightened his grip on it. “Water, I meant. The coffee’s fine. Not exactly my favorite beverage in the world, but, you were right. It’s a good idea.”

“Oh. Thanks, I’m glad you.” Martin smiled, then frowned. “Wait, water makes it worse?”

“Seems to.”

“Really? Are you sure it wasn’t just—too cold, or something.”

His laugh sounded bitter, hollow—theatrically so, in fact. A perfect Ha ha ha, except he didn’t say those words, didn’t enunciate them like Sasha sometimes did when Tim made a bad joke. He just made the exact sounds they were invented to transcribe. “No, Martin. I haven’t just been giving myself a brain freeze every time I.”

“…Right, of course not. Sorry, I didn’t mean to.” For a few silent seconds Martin picked at a notch in his thumbnail, carved there earlier this morning by a stubborn paperclip. Part of him wanted to tear the nail off and have done, but he knew it would bleed if he did. Nothing to clip it with in the Archives, obviously. “Are you sure you won’t try again? This water’s quite tepid, actually, since I got it literally from the bottom of the barrel—”

“Martin—”

“Sorry, sorry. Just thought it was worth—”

“Don’t you have something better to do.”

“Er… no, actually. Pretty much finished with everything, at the momen…t. Though if you’d like to give me another assignment I’d be happy to—yeah. Do that, for you. Or I mean, for the sake of the Archives; I don’t mean it’d just be, like, busy work. Not accusing you of that or anything.”

“Are you comfortable leaving the Archives?”

For half a second Martin heard this as a hint—an offer? a threat?—that Jon meant to have him transferred to another department. Then he wondered if Jon was hinting it was time Martin found somewhere else to live. “What, like, permanently?”

“No—just as long as it takes to track down and interview Georgie Barker about her role in the statement Ms. King gave us.”

“Oh. Yeah, I think so, uh. Thank you for asking? I mean, Prentiss said she was done with me, right. At least, me personally. And she already knows I’m here, so it’s not like.”

Jon replied shortly, “Yes.”

“I’d like to listen to Ms. King’s statement first, though, if that’s alright. What’d you say it was about? The Cambridge Military Hospital?”

Another short, emphatic, nose-directed sigh. Couldn’t be too stuffed-up then, Martin guessed. “Technically, yes, though Ms. King insists the building itself had nothing to do with it.”

“Huh. What was it about, then?”

“She alleges that a woman she hired to help film one of her ghost stories peeled the skin off her arm.”

“Oh my god! I mean, did you—was she okay? Did she show you her arm? Did it seem to have—you know—skin?”

“Her own arm, not Ms. King’s.”

“Oh.” Martin sighed for himself now, though with relief rather than exasperation. Managed a tiny laugh, as well. “Okay, well, that’s. Creepy as hell, but, not nearly as bad as.”

“Mm. Nor nearly as verifiable as your version.”

“T…rue, no, I guess not. Anyway do you have the tape? I’d like to listen myself, if that’s.”

Jon pointed to a small stack of tapes on the bookshelf to Martin’s right. Sure enough, the top one had M. King, 0161704 sharpied across the label on its side. “Ah! Found it. Thanks.” He had a tape player squirreled away already; on another day he might’ve pretended otherwise, but for the moment he was too relieved not to have to make a pest of himself by asking to borrow one to worry whether the absence of that request might make Jon suspicious.

Besides, Jon seemed pretty… absorbed in himself, this morning. By the time Martin turned to face him again one of Jon’s hands had crept back up to his face, where its fingers now seemed to comb the hairs of his left eyebrow. He didn’t think he’d ever seen Jon do that before, plus doubted the hairs in question needed his help to lie flat. Jon’s eyebrows had always struck him as quite neat. Plus Martin had tried that with his own eyebrows plenty of times before the mirror in his youth, and knew it didn’t work very well even if you licked your finger—which Martin assumed Jon hadn’t. So he figured he should file this behavior in the same box as the earlier fist-clenching-to-avoid-covering-ears thing. As, like, headache-soothing for people who don’t want to look weak. Or unprofessional, or something to that effect.

This gave him a sense of foreboding when he thought too hard about it. But Martin needed so badly to keep this job, now that his flat wasn’t safe anymore. It seemed wiser not to look directly at abstract threats like that. If he could make Jon feel better then it wouldn’t matter, right? Or at least could be put off til next time.

“Are you sure you’re alright?”

“Don’t recall saying I was,” Jon muttered.

Martin winced. He had said he was alright—Martin was certain. When he’d first come in that morning, he’d said he was fine when Martin asked, and then he’d closed the door. Didn’t seem worth correcting him over it, though. So Martin just said, “Try to drink something while I’m gone, yeah? Kool-Aid, for all I care, just. You really don’t look like you’re feeling all that well. And any kind of drink other than alcohol should—oh.”

He looked up, hearing Jon swallow what sounded like a lot more than the tiny sip of coffee he’d managed before.

“Well. Great. Thank you for obliging me.”

Jon continued to gulp down water, while staring right at Martin. He paused in swallowing to breathe, but even then did not remove the mouth of the bottle from his own mouth. When he tried to resume drinking it made him cough instead, and even then he didn’t set it down.

“O-okay, well, I’m sure that’s plenty, don’t—?” Hurt yourself, Martin wanted to say, but feared that would sound patronizing. The bottle was more than half empty now. Jon paused for air again. “For god’s sake, Jon, stop—that looks like it hurts—you don’t have to—?”

At last he slammed the empty bottle on his desk—more loudly than could possibly be comfortable for a man with a headache. Leant his elbow on the table, and between pants huffed a laugh and said, “Care to refill it for me?”

On a sort of autopilot Martin chirped, “Uh—sure! No problem I’ll just,” and rushed off with it to the break room. This refill took much less time, since he’d remembered to change out the thingy. But it still took long enough that by the time he got back he worried, “You’re not going to chug this one too, are you?”

“No,” said Jon, eyes and hands both busy now with a statement hitherto hidden by his elbow. He did not reach out a hand to take the bottle from Martin.

“Okay, I’ll just. Leave this here then. See you after the, uh. Yeah.”

—

And lo, it was as he had feared. Chugging [sixteen ounces] of water did indeed make his headache worse. By ten it seemed to count turning the page of a statement as an exertion worth pounding over. True, by lunch time it seemed to have backed off a bit—until he sat back down at his desk with his fork and plate. On his way to the microwave he’d thought he must be on the mend: his head throbbed a little harder than when he’d been seated, but not so much he’d have noticed the difference had he not set out to pay attention to it. Some food, maybe an ibuprofen or two and he’d be fixed, he’d told himself.

Once he got to the break room, though, he noticed something else odd. His limbs were weak. His knees seemed made of jelly, and wobbled beneath him every time he shifted his weight; his arms were steady enough, but when he set down the pizza box on the counter after retrieving it from the fridge he felt a surge of relief, which he hardly understood until he’d transferred a slice from the no-onion half onto a plate and picked up the latter to put it in the microwave. Even these tiny movements made his arms, neck and chest ache like they do when you hold your breath too long. He leant his elbows against the counter and gulped down air until his mouth felt so dry he couldn’t bear to keep it open. Wondered if he should sit down; he felt a bit dizzy. But he had less than 30 seconds left to wait for the microwave, which he figured couldn’t hurt him.

It didn’t, but the walk back to his office did a bit. Moving his legs’ sluggish muscles made his whole body ache—again like it does when you run too long and have to stop for breath. He figured it must be in a similar spirit that his head waited til he’d sat down to unleash its onslaught. Before leaving his desk he’d grown used to thinking of his heart beat’s faint buzzy shocks like the second hand on a clock, criticizing him under its breath from where it watched behind his eyes. This was… a great deal worse than that. He tried to time the beats against the ticking of his wrist watch, but couldn’t seem to focus on that and breathe at the same time. They were fast, though, at least at first. His heart rate did seem to calm down fairly quickly, but he could swear it never got all the way back down to its earlier rate—at least not before his attention shifted from the speed to just. How much it hurt.

Was that what made his slice of pizza so tasteless? When he cut his first bite, on its way to his mouth he thought he caught a whiff of the red onions with which its tip must have shared space, and only his horror of Tim asking What was wrong with that part, then? when he brought the otherwise-empty plate back to the sink stopped him from scraping that bite off his fork and trying again higher up the slice. But when he finally forced himself to eat it? Nothing. No onion taste, thank god, but everything else too seemed… muted. Hardly worth how the exertion of chewing made his head hammer after each swallow. Jon knew the taste of food was hardly the point of eating it, but? In the absence of everything he normally liked about cheese and meat and bread and vegetables, the fact the cheese squelched in his mouth made him wish he’d never left his bed. The way leaves of soggy spinach flapped over the sides of even his neatly-cut rectangles. His stomach tightened in revulsion, so that in his throat he could feel each swallowed lump shifting from foot to foot, waiting to be let in. Not to mention how the effort of cutting it shook the whole damn table.

He told himself he could skip the crust. If Tim asked about it, Jon’d just tell him it’d gone stale. Just get through the… other part, the crumb, the filling. Between throbs the ache in his tired jaw merged with the one behind his eyes. Why didn’t it always hurt to chew? Did the pleasure of tasting food give you enough endorphins to cancel it out? Would everyone have this problem all the time if we had to live on, say, dry toast?

Right, okay, close enough. Ibuprofen now. No, you idiot—other drawer. In the fantasy versions he’d rehearsed of this moment he clapped four of them from his palm into his mouth at once, and swallowed them dry. But his blister pack turned out to have only three left. Which was fine! Just fine. Better, probably, after so little lunch.

Also, dry-swallowing was kind of a misnomer? He’d never really thought about it before, but. Turned out it would only work if your so-called “dry” mouth had spit in it. As it was the pills stuck to his tongue, leaving streaks of spicy burnt-orange when he tried to claw them back toward his throat with his teeth. When they got far back enough on his tongue he had to concentrate not to gag, and they still stuck—even when he turned his nose to face the ceiling and thumped on his chin with his hand (which, ouch)—at that point he gave up and unscrewed his water. Allowed as little of it in his mouth as would let him swallow these damn things, and wash their stains off his tongue. And it still made his head throb harder.

Jon imagined shooting whoever next told him to stay hydrated. He derived little joy from the fantasy, though; couldn’t not think of the loud, sharp noise it would make.

Returning the plate could wait, he decided; not like it would attract worms in the thirty minutes it’d take for the pills to kick in. Meanwhile he’d just… keep sorting. He took a statement off the top of the pile in front of him and blinked at it over and over, until his vision resolved into a shape he told himself hurt marginally less than the others. 9720406, Nathaniel Thorp. Christ, 1972? “Misfiled” was practically an understatement for that one. And here he’d thought Gertrude had kept that part of the century in relative good order. Still, he stuck it on the all other years pile and reached for another. 0130111, David Laylow. Nope—still not 2003. 0002610, Jennifer Wong. 0910203, Lisa Jones. 0081711, Donald Gately. 0100912, Lawrence Mortimer. 0152101, Uzma Rashid. Ha!—0030707, Seymour… Backsides. Wait a minute. Hadn’t he seen a prank statement with that name before lunch? He grabbed a stack off the 2003 pile and found… Rashid, Mortimer, Gately. Had he switched the—? Look in the unsorted pile again, he told himself. Under where he’d found Mr. Backsides’ tale he uncovered statements 0031212, 0032504, 0031809, and so on. Great. After Seymour he must’ve got mixed up. There was no more unsorted pile—not on his desk, anyway. He’d have to pull some more out of the… open filing cabinet which stood across the room with its tongue stuck out at him. Yeah, well, that could wait too. For now he’d just. Check his email.

[solargenesisnetwork-blog]

10 Simple Wildfire Survival Tips

Wildfires are quick moving and erratic. You should always be aware of wildfire survival tips. In the current years, rapidly spreading fires have turned into a genuine risk to ranges that were once thought not inclined. You can see the smoke from miles away, yet your first piece of information that there’s a woodland fire close-by is falling powder. Ideally, you will never be that close, however, in the event that you are, a shifty activity might be required.

Here are 10 simple wildfire survival tips:

Leave the region. Try not to stick around to perceive how things create. Fierce blazes are so capable, erratic, and dangerous, that even very much prepared and prepared proficient fire contenders to bite the dust when they wind up plainly caught by an onrushing burst that invades their position.

Keep up situational mindfulness. Know about what’s happening around you in all circumstances. Basic yet vital.

Pick downhill courses, not tough courses if conceivable. Fire moves speedier tough because of updrafts.

Recognize escape courses/safe zones where you could take shield if a fire came thundering through the range. Safe zones incorporate waterways, lakes (get in the water), or vast level spots out in the open far from an ignitable material. So the most secure zones are those that are downhill of the fire.

Spare yourselves! On the off chance that you are caught in a fire, get out as quick as possible. Try not to attempt to spare any of your rigging. Apparatus is replaceable, lives are most certainly not.

Remain out of gulches. Search for an escape course that leads downhill, however, don’t take after gullies, chutes or draws, as these go about as smokestacks that channel lethal warmth up the slope toward you.

Get low. In the event that the blazes are upon you, look for low ground — in a dump or the indent in a woodland street that will permit the super heated convective current to pass overhead. The lower you are the better your odds may be.

Alternative respirator. Inhale inside your dress alongside your body to secure your respiratory tract so you don’t breathe in hot gasses.

On the off chance that you can discover a territory that has officially copied over, leaving no remaining fuel to reignite, that may be a sheltered place. Be that as it may, the surrounding temperature of the signed earth, rocks and timber will feel like a broiler. Observe overhead to maintain a strategic distance from tangles and standing dead trees that may fall on you.

Emergency fire protects: if all else fails or when escape is no longer an alternative, firefighters utilize a fire shield. It’s an exceedingly versatile arch formed thwart covering to stow away under as the fire ignores. These havens claim to reflect 95% of brilliant warmth. They’re genuinely conservative and lightweight and cost $300-$400. In any case, when a mass of flame is thundering toward you at 70 miles for each hour, seeming like Hell’s cargo prepare, and live ashes are pouring down like blazing hailstones, 400 bucks won’t appear like a considerable measure. We prescribe this New Generation Fire Shelter with Case, $376.

[shiftytracts]

They're trying to decide if it's time for cake yet

[shiftytracts]

a woman in a buttoned cardigan over a loose dress containing a bloated, gurgling belly she’s proud of—not outright flaunting, but not hiding either, as she sort of enjoys the prospect of someone noticing it and finding it as funny-looking as she does. she’s at some kind of social event, for her work or for a hobby or maybe someone’s birthday party. there are whole tables of snacks here—mostly sweets. and she’s got kind of a reputation as a connoisseur (maybe her career or side hustle involves baking or judging food), so everyone wants her opinion on whichever snack they made. she loves getting to flatter people, and loves being flattered in this way too.

so she has had a lot of sweets, in the last half hour, or hour, or two hours, or however long it’s been since she got here; she tends to lose track of time in these situations, especially when she’s also had a drink or two. so many sweets her stomach feels all rumbly and kinda sour. she wishes there were more places to sit down; everywhere’s taken right now. she informs her boyfriend of all this when he arrives and asks her how the party’s going. “good,” she says, and half-heartedly stifles burps all through her report of what her friends here are up to. “also i’ve had many good snacks,” she admits, pressing her boyfriend’s hands to her swollen, noisy belly one by one with her free hand, so as to acknowledge the fetal elephant in the room. (the other hand holds a large cookie, which slowly drips powdered sugar on her cardigan and dress.)

“i can tell,” her boyfriend laughs.

she puts the whole cookie in her mouth to hold onto it with her teeth, briefly (and insufficiently) brushes off her hands, and directs his hands in circles around her stomach, unwittingly smearing powdered sugar into her clothes. “sooo many sweets.” a big burp surprises her. reflexively she bites the cookie, and catches the part of it that lops off in her hand. “too many sweets, probably; my tummy’s getting kinda frazzled i think,” she laughs. “ugh—i still want so many more though. i could eat so many more if i had some real food first,” she muses.

“so you’re saying you’re hungry?” he asks; she smiles confirmation, a little embarrassed. they talk each other into the idea of purchasing lunch across the street, then coming back. brb! me and [boyfriend] are gonna get some chipotle, she texts the host (or the friend she came with, or whoever seems most relevant).

she holds her belly through her sweater pockets all the way over, and in the line, and while she orders, rocking back and forth on her heels. after her burrito and diet lemonade she feels pleasantly full and warm, and comparatively sober. “hmm, that felt good,” she says after a string of stifled burps, leaning back against the bench and setting her hands in her pockets again; “this was—such a good idea.”

“ready to head back?”

“almost. just give me a minute to settle.”

her cardigan’s a bit too tight now, they notice when they stand back up: her dress pokes through the gaps between the buttons. she laughs and unbuttons it, stroking the area self-consciously. and on the walk back she twice exhorts her boyfriend to slow down, when she loses her breath or gets a stitch in her side.

her stomach’s been quiet for a bit, but has just started burbling again (softly, busily, not uncomfortably) when they arrive back at the party. the snacks have depleted visibly in her absence, she notes with dismay. she heads straight for the brownies, to make sure she gets at least one more before they’re gone. while there she runs into a friend, and the two of them end up standing there chatting as she absent-mindedly eats all the brownies left. she only notices when her friend says, “good brownies?” and she exhorts them to try one—only to look down and see only crumbs left.

“oops,” she says, and pats her belly, which whines as if on cue. she discovers that it aches a little, and drags her fingers back and forth across its top.

“you must be thirsty, after all that,” the friend suggests.

she says, “yeah, now you mention it,” and they wander off for more drinks.

once she’s buzzed, of course, she barely notices the fullness, and goes on grazing until everything she likes is gone—then makes herself nibble the snacks she doesn’t like, so as not to seem too biased. when she’s bit off all she can make herself chew of something very crunchy and sticky, and so sweet that it makes her guts swirl and twist with irritation, she gets another drink and resolves to find a seat, no matter in how inconvenient a location. feeling too muddled to enjoy noise and conversation anyway, she ends up wandering outside and falling asleep in a rocking lawn chair. who knows how long later, she wakes up needing the toilet; with that accomplished she heads back to her lawn chair and dips in and out of sleep for a while longer, hands on her belly through the pockets of her now-open cardigan.

finally her boyfriend wakes her up so they can go home. “hey. how you doing?”

“hmmrgh.” she burps. “sleepy.” curls a hand more tightly around her stomach as its quease slowly wakes back to life; the motion frees another burp. this one hurts her throat a little. “mmf. don’t feel good.”

“ate too much?”

“mhm.” she hunches further over her stomach.

“do you need a toilet, or a bucket, or anything?”

she shakes her head: “i’m ok.”

“ready to go home?”

she sighs; she’s ready to be home, but hates the idea of having to get up and walk to the car and say her goodbyes, and then sit in the cold car and get jostled by speed bumps and potholes all the way home. but she nods anyway.

“need me to help you up?”

“mhm.”

once she’s upright he stands before her and cradles her stomach in his hands. waits for her to come to herself as she groans and blinks her eyes used to the light. between the space all this food takes up inside her and the hiccups that interrupt her every other inhale, her breath runs uncomfortably short. her limbs ache as if she’d been running too long. exhausted by this, she leans way forward into her boyfriend’s hands. this calls forth a very long, loud belch that catches them both by surprise.

“feel better?”

“yeah.”

they amble to the car with his arm wrapped around her. the people they pass on the way there he tells goodbye for the both of them, while she blinks at the floor and burps into her closed mouth.

the car ride isn’t so bad; she ends up falling asleep, even though it’s only like fifteen minutes. she wakes up to him opening the car door for her, offering a hand to help her up. “so sleepy,” she laments, clearly angling for something. he carries her to their bed, having expected this response. brings her water, antacids, a bucket, and a hot water bottle while she falls asleep in her clothes on top of their still-made bed. not much later, when he comes to bed, that wakes her up, and she stays awake longer this time as she ponders whether she needs the toilet. decides in the affirmative, and spends so long in there, between actual business and how lazy all this food makes her feel, that eventually a knock on the door startles her awake.

“are you ok? can i come in?”

“yeah,” she says, to both questions.

he finds her bent double over herself, arms trapped between her thighs and belly. “oof. you look like you don’t feel good.”

“my tummy hurts,” she admits. “i’m ok, though. just bein slow.”

he helps her up, and massages her still-rumbling stomach from behind while she washes her hands and brushes her teeth. “still so big,” he observes.

she says “mhm,” through a mouthful of toothpaste, with a smile that the white foam dribble makes look pretty stupid. her nostrils flare in a slight laugh at the sight of her face in the mirror. she burps, and spits the toothpaste out real quick to keep from swallowing it. he mistakes her haste for alarm, for a sign of imminent puke:

“hey, shh, it’s ok, let it out.”

she shakes her head: “i’m ok. just almost swallowed my toothpaste.”

they head back to bed; he refills the hot-water bottle for her, but by the time he gets back she’s asleep again.

in the morning she sleeps in til almost noon. wakes up still bloated, still burping, belly still gurgling, but feeling pretty ok: lazy, delicate, but not sick or in pain, aside from the occasional boomerangs that signal an impending dump. she lies on her back for a while, blinking and rubbing her stomach; takes a long shower, where she soaps that area rather more than necessary, and burps without restraint, one long belch after another; enters the living room in a big sweatshirt and underwear and socks, burping carelessly as she greets him and stretching her arms above her head so that a sliver of bloated gut is briefly visible. as she returns to her original position she yawns, blinks, and slips her hands under the sweatshirt to rub the cramps out of her belly that the stretch created. they discuss their respective plans for the day as she stands there, rubbing and burping.

“how’s your tummy?”

“pretty good.”

“think you can handle a little breakfast?”

she pats her stomach, burps again, and smiles. “i can do a normal-size breakfast.”

and indeed she can: she eats precisely the usual amount of cereal and toast, at the same pace and with the same affect as always. only afterward she does lean back in her chair with an “ooh,” and place her hands on her bloated stomach.

“too much?”

she shrugs, not sure yet. “can you hear it rumbling?”

“yeah,” he laughs. he asks, “need help getting to the bathroom?”—but she’s already leisurely pushing in her chair.

she pats her belly with first one hand, then the other. “nah, i’m good.”

it takes her a while in there—he surmises she might have a nap on the bed afterwards. the next time he encounters her, she walks up behind him while he sits at his desk, presses her belly against his upper back, puts her hands on his shoulders, kisses the top of his head. feels like she’s still a little bloated, to the extent he can judge; also he hears her burp a little from the contact. but she sounds like she feels well again. “thank you for taking such good care of me.”