#and so before every show

[coffeewhiskeysleeprepeat]

I either communed with the ghost of Freddy Mercury, or I had the most vivid and detailed dream of my life.

This got long, so I put it under a cut. I could have shortened it, but this is everything I remember:

So Freddy Mercury came to my house for tea. After mocking my (american) options for tea as is his birth-rite as someone who was raised in the UK, we sat down to discuss pop culture since Freddy had passed.

A strange, and slightly disgusting transfer of knowledge went from my head to his, like he had thumped my head like a melon several times, inserted a tap behind my left ear, and slurped the knowledge out. I remember thinking his mustache tickled. This is relevant only in that Freddy was suddenly equipped with both knowledge of the media, and all of my previous thoughts on said media, and had things to say both on the combination, and the original media.

First thing he wanted to discuss was the musical RENT. He said that he was sorry that he couldn’t cover the song “glory” from the musical, but this time “for the faggots”. I could see him re-writing the verses in his head to match the original melody but make it explicitly, undeniably about queer men, but he did not share whatever was in his head with me. I told him, with more depth of feeling that I can express with words, how much I wished I could hear him sing that.

Freddy was… quiet with me about the musical other than that. He was very glad it existed, and that it had touched me, but I got the sense that I was just how he had found out about it, and he was saving his in-depth analysis for a later conversation with Andrew Larson, who wrote RENT. There was a sense, in the dream, that both Freddy and Larson needed to commiserate about not being alive to see RENT’s opening night. Freddy made a comment about Larson not dying of AIDs, but all I can remember of that comment is the wry twist his mouth made when he said it.

Next on our conversational agenda was the musical Wicked. Freddy was gleeful about it, but called them cowards for not making the love affair between Glinda and Elphaba explicit. I got up in the dream to refill our tea, and Freddy was humming defying gravity under his breath hitting notes most singers cannot hit with twenty minutes of warmup with the kind of casualness that indicated he was not fully conscious of doing it. I returned to the table to remind him that it is canon in the book, to which Freddy replied,

“Well yes, but you haven’t read the book in twenty years, so it isn’t top of mind for either of us, now is it?” And, after a pause “But I would loove to meet the Fiyero from the book.” We expressed mutual excitement at the movie, which I haven’t seen yet, and he told me to enjoy it, and report back to him. How I was supposed to do so was unclear.

We paused here, while Freddy essentially took bands/songs that exist in my head, and sorted them according to whether he liked them enough to take them back with him or not, taking my reactions to the music as guide. This was a bit fuzzy, in the dream. I essentially felt him access my personal memory of all the music I have been aware of over the course of my lifetime, and try and extract things that he wanted to take with him when he left, in order to listen to all of it.

This process would be far, far too extensive to list comprehensively, but there were a few standout moments. The song “Start Wearing Purple” by Gogol Bordello elicited a sharp grin from Freddy. The band Breaking Benjamin got a mild “Bit boring for me, but you seem to like it” and he took it with him. We debated quite vigorously about whether the original, or the cover of Swim Good was superior. I said the cover was, and Freddy disagreed. We agreed to disagree after we both raised valid points.

I never cared for boy bands, so N’sync and the Backstreet boys are simply a pack of white boys in my mind. Freddy declared half of the assembled boys “too plastic” and steered half the pack together. He declared himself “too old to truly care now, but if I was a boy when they were popular, I’d have had a good wank if these ones were out there.” And gave me a filthy grin, which I had a good laugh at. He said that Justin Timberlake (in his solo career era) was attractive, but that his solo career was boring.

He declared Chappel Roan “carried his spirit”, remarking how much he “fucking loved” Red Wine Supernova and Good Luck Babe? (is that the song title?) He added however that Chappel Roan needed to look back at Pink Pony Club, because there was something there that needed revisiting. It was unclear whether he meant emotionally, or musically, but he was confident something there was worth re-visiting.

Freddy expressed mixed feelings about the musical Hamilton. He loved the concept, but felt that it needed to pivot slightly to focus more on the Skylar sisters and Aaron Burr. He pointed out that the entire second half of the musical hinges on the death of Hamilton’s son, who we literally only hear from for the course of a single song, which to him didn’t establish enough of an emotional tie to the son. He said the first thing he would change would be to give him more stage time. I told him I had never thought of that before, and that he had a very valid point.

Then, in discussing the songs that did work in Hamilton, in which we mostly agreed, although I had a love for Satisfied that he did not share, we came to talk about “Wait for it”. And in one of the clearest moments of the dream, I said that I would have loved to hear him cover it in the last days of his life, and Freddy kind of flinched, but indulged me, and covered it on the spot.

I am going to live the rest of my life wishing I had the power to make what I heard in that dream a reality. I had goosebumps in the dream and even now as I write about it. In the musical Hamilton, the song really is about biding your time, and living and loving while still holding yourself back. Freddy said, with his rendition, Don’t you fucking dare. It became a song about grabbing life by the gonads and wringing every single drop of love and joy you fucking could, sung by a man who was taken from life far, far too soon, and it carried the pain of all of the days that Freddy could have had.

I’m tearing up just typing about it. It was transcendent. The sneer Freddy put on “wait for it” and the pain of hearing him sing “Death doesn't discriminate, between the sinners and the saints. It takes and it takes and it takes”? While standing just a few feet away from me making eye contact? My god I will never fully get over this, I am changed as a person, its fine, I am fine. Because this was a dream, Freddy was able to call the backing vocals out of the ether, and I understood, instinctively, that these were voices from his own life, starting at an early age, telling him to wait to come out of the closet, and heartbreakingly, near the end of the song, it was doctors who couldn’t help him telling him that all they could do was wait for death to take him. The chilling repeat of “Wait for it” that the song ends with took a hell of a different spin than in the show.

We took a moment, in the dream, after that in separate corners, because both of us were severely rattled. I went outside to cry and have a cigarette, while Freddy went to go look at the bookshelves.

When I came back in, Freddy remarked with some surprise that he could actually read the words in some of the books. He said that normally he could “play” music that people knew, but that books were generally incomprehensible in dreams. I timidly told him that I have at least a semi-photographic memory, so that might account for it. He said he would love to return at some point, if only to curl up with a book. I said he was free to do so, especially if I could leave him to it if I needed to. He agreed, putting a specific book which is normally in my library but isn’t at the moment back on the shelf (Fun Home, currently on loan to someone) The dream-scape lurched a little at the dissonance between those two facts, and Freddy quickly put the book down.

We got back to the music. Somehow, I summoned Gerard Way, precisely from the music video for Helena, in which he is wearing a black shirt and red tie, loosely tied. Freddy listened contemplatively to the song, then stood. He stood in front of this image of Gerard Way for a moment, then thrust his index and middle finger up, precisely hooking up under the tie on either side of the knot, while simultaneously raising his chin and staring Way down, and ever so slowly starting to guide Gerard Way to his knees. I’m a big ol’ dyke, but it was the hottest thing I’ve ever seen in my life and I could try for a thousand years and never pull that move off with so much style and that smoothly.

In my shock at just how hot and smooth that maneuver was, the image of Gerard Way vanished just as he hit his knees. Freddy seemed disappointed, but not surprised that he had vanished. He came back to the table, and we carried on talking. We discussed Glee, which he loved in theory and hated in practice, and he layed out a multiple point way to fix Glee which I agreed would make Glee amazing but I cannot remember more than a few points of the discussion.

Freddy was delighted by Living Single and absolutely dismissive of Friends. He said that if he had lived, he would have wanted to “queen it up” as the sole white re-occurring character who lived next to Max. I was skeptical, but I saw his vision.

Our conversation meandered through music, until we hit upon the career of Britney Spears. I explained the shape her career had taken, and Freddy’s face got darker and darker. He leapt up and ran out the front door angrily shouting “Elton what the fuck!” which I took to mean Elton John, but I have zero idea how or why that would connect? This is the part of the dream I find most inexplicable, but waking up and seeing a news item about how Elton John announced he was blind sure feels like Freddy went and punched his lights out.

Freddy returned, still muttering to himself, and we sat back down. I brought up my favorite TV show, Black Sails, which I think is a masterpiece, and Freddy, who had slurped up my brain, but hadn’t consciously been aware of the show, burst into sobs as he absorbed the whole thing all at once. I spent a few minutes comforting Freddy, fetching him a hanky and patting his back while he processed it.

He said “A story is true” and I followed it, “A story is untrue” and he looked up at me, as I stood with my arm around his seated form, as he said, as if in revelation,

“The story matters” I nodded, not totally understanding the point he was trying to make. Seeing this, Freddy tried again. “Our stories matter”, and this clicked it into place for me, that we were, both of us, part of a rich queer tradition. And that us telling our stories out loud in public was, by and for itself, an act of supreme love for both ourselves, and for everyone who came after us. I remember feeling awed, and humbled for Freddy to include me in that.

There was a sense that our time together was going to end soon, so I took the opportunity to have Freddy provide some (cutting) insight on the drag number I have been working on. He was totally right, I needed to play up an element I had been neglecting. The details of his critique were brutal, and 100% correct, but that stays between me and Freddy.

We sat back down at the table for a wrap up conversation before our time was up. Freddy asked after the lover he had left behind “even though I’m not supposed to”, and in the dream, I knew exactly who he was talking about, and confessed I didn’t know. My conscious mind doesn’t know the name (I haven’t looked it up yet) so I can’t hear Freddy say it either. I just hear the love and longing attached to that name.

In an effort to salvage the fact that I didn’t know what had happened to his lover (although I promised to look it up), I mentioned that I saw that Brian May had submitted his Phd thesis. This caused Freddy to burst into laughter and repeatedly say “good for him” while distractedly banging on the table . He was faintly smiling from this, when he said,

“you know, Brian and your Buddy (real name redacted, I don’t give out other people’s info on Tumblr)” I goggled briefly, wondering how Freddy knew Buddy which Freddy saw and quickly thumped his own head the same way he had thumped my head at the beginning, and I immediately understood that was how he had learned of his existence. He continued,

“They’re like sailors are to pirates. You have to have sailors, or there could be no piracy. One is a fundamental precondition of the other. They’re excellent sailors, those two. They make manhood mean something.” Here he paused and gave me a rakish grin. “We on the other hand, are pirates. We won’t ever fully understand the business of keeping a ship in tip top shape, but they’ll never fully understand what it feels like to hoist the black and go raiding either.”

I understood instinctively that the ship in this metaphor was masculinity and this struck me as a divine revelation on binary vs non-binary gender, that I was raiding the male ship (to be a drag king) and Freddy had been plundering the feminine (as a performer and a queer man) and anyone should respond to the question of “are you a pirate?” when not actively raiding a ship should always give the answer “What are you a cop?” and for the same reasons. I pointed out that Buddy was a trans man, so he had gone raiding in the past and Freddy said “who could tell the differences between the calluses better than someone who has done both?” I murmured “Different calluses” in a sense of deep wonderment, because we could tell the differences, but a cop wouldn’t know what differences to look for, because they didn’t understand the differences in how we operated.

“Darling,” Freddy stood, circling the table “There is nothing in life that doesn’t leave calluses. Make sure yours are ones that serve you.”

Recognizing that the dream was ending, I begged Freddy for proof that he was himself, and not a product of my subconscious. He briefly showed me a photo of himself holding a long haired orange cat in such a way that you could see the cats very floofy belly. He said “Brian knows.” No clue how that was supposed to prove he was in fact the ghost of Freddy Mercury and not part of my subconscious, but there you have it.

Freddy stood by the side of my chair and placed his hand on my face, and said “They would never have let me kiss you when you were a baby, because of the AIDS, but I could have. (meaning both it wasn’t dangerous at all, but we didn’t know that then and I wouldn’t have wanted to risk hurting you and the moral panic that would have also kept you away was always bullshit, and also meaning, it was within the realm of possibility that our paths might have been able to cross. Just a little bit, since I died while you were so young)” He pressed a tender, lingering kiss to my forehead like a parent would to a newborn, and said “Remember that you are a bridge (and this word started distorting the dream-scape around us) but there is no destination. You’re doing smashing.”

And I woke up. Almost two and a half hours before my alarm, and less than six hours after I went to bed.

It took me two hours of puzzling why it was the word bridge that destabilized everything, until I remembered that the GSA in my high school, its official name was Bridges. That was back in 2004, one year before I came out, and 13 since Freddy died.

[starcurtain]

Please someone redraw this with Dr. Ratio and Aventurine because this is the exact vibe they have in my head post-Penacony.

[keferon]

“Mistakes on mistakes until” ch 69 spoilers below!

Ahahahahahahah here I go again

Mistakes on mistakes until until I can draw Jazz with my eyes closed

I woke up, checked my phone, woke up for real and decided that whatever plans I had for this day yeah no they can wait a little bit kfkgnfk

Also. Consider listening this while reading. Or don't who am I to tell you what to do~

[slfcare]

the most difficult thing about growing as a person socially, as in getting out of your shell and noticing that you are, is that there will still be times when it doesn’t feel like you’ve grown at all! times when you can’t really connect with anyone around you, times when you fail to enter into an existing conversation, times when you say the wrong thing (or nothing at all when in hindsight you probably should’ve). but that’s also kind of the best thing, because that’s the thing that helps you realize that sometimes, it’s not you or your lack of skills or any shortcoming. sometimes certain environments just aren’t for you and certain people aren’t your people, and that’s okay. that’s human. it’s okay to not feel the progress you have made all the time.

[clouvu]

Save me french yuri... Save me

[viktorpartner]

Haven't been able to think about anything other than the victorian/edwardian/WW1 twink and his 80's punk almost-boyfriend for a week, send help

[bunnieswithknives]

I feel bad for neglecting Hazel so much, I do have many thoughts about her.. and also a mermaid au that im probably not going to do anything with

[currentlylurking]

every december I abruptly remember the same fic concept I've had for literal years where Johnny 13 hosts an absolute garbage Christmas Truce party. Like just the worst party ever. It was supposed to be a potluck but there's no food aside from chip dip Danny brought and ghost weed. Everyone is bored out of their minds.

Except Danny saw on the invitation (which was written on a crumpled receipt from Johnny's pocket, purely because Kitty insisted on at least that, and thrown at him mid fight) that he can 'invite whoever'.

So he'd invited Clockwork.

And as soon as Clockwork arrives everyone loses their minds because uhhhh?? hey THE LITERAL GOD OF TIME is here???

[iknowicanbutwhy]

Tfw you (currently obsessed with ISAT who never plays pokemon) play a soul-link nuzlocke with a friend (in for a world of torment) and you can't pay attention to a health bar for the life of you nor remember what types are weak to what.

Spoiler under the cut :)

Guy how did you manage to un-evolve yourself

[yippee-optimistically]

um. umm thinking about if mikey developed a like. kraang 6th sense. bc of the norman suit they obviously knew bishop was a kraang/utrom but just thinking about if, unlike mikeys usual ability to sniff out dangers and fakers (like aprils "mom") bishop and utrom just. unsettled him. its totally unintentional and he feels sort of bad but after everything in dimX he Cannot be comfortable around kraang/utrom. at least for a long time. idk!

also thinking if the brothers learned from mikeys proven abilities to sniff out these false allies, theyd maybe double check bishop with him. like "hey, mike, this guy isnt setting off any alarms, right?" and pushing past all the KRAANG KRAANG KRAANG DANGER signals hes begrudgingly like "...no. no hes good. grins"

related point... tokka vs the world you are so special to me... mikey and caseys bond is so so fun i wish we got to see a little more of it

PLSSS PLSS drop any 2012 fic recs ... im so hungry

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

💙❤️Happy Holidays!❤️💙

[cozymochi]

“Gosh, I wonder what kind of day my birthday will be… Please, please have things go my way for once...!”

happy [redacted] birthday Cecil Mugwort here’s a makeshift “cozy loungewear” iteration. but with 60% less quality control because i had second thoughts on nearly every aspect halfway through, but i was too far in and already made a commitment publicly 🫠

pretend voiceless lines were collaborated on with @/oddberryshortcake under cut. If that’s anyones speed.

Summon: “Being able to tend to my plants at the end of a long day is my favorite part of my dorm room, I can’t think of a better way to spend the night before my birthday.”

Groovification: “There goes those clocks again…It’s practically telling me to get up and start another day.”

Home: “Late nights are so peaceful.”

Swap Looks: “Ugh, I need to get my unruly hair out of my face!”

Home Transition 1: “Having Silver as a roommate isn’t so bad… If you forget the whole ‘sleeping through five alarm clocks’ thing he does.”

Home Transition 2: “It’s a little embarrassing, but I love how soft and fuzzy these pajamas are. They keep me warm all night.”

Home Transition 3: “THE Vil Schoenheit gave me eye cream for my dark circles. Does he think they look really bad? I was so nervous I dropped the bottle right after getting it…”

Home Transition - Login: “My birthdays are usually spent celebrating my twin sister’s birthday too. But here at NRC, I can celebrate my birthday just by myself. It’s nice not having to share for today.”

Home Transition - Groovy: “Nyoka Wadjet gave me some fancy looking cup as a gift. I told him it’d make a nice new home for my Ice Lilies , but he almost seemed upset I’d be using it that way. Did he just want me to let it collect dust?”

Home Tap 1: “I mustn’t let Ollie trick me into feeding him his dinner twice. Tricky ol’ bird.”

Home Tap 2: “I made sure to send my twin sister a card for our birthday. I actually got one from her today too! For once, she didn’t brag about herself in it… She even pressed a small flower into the envelope.”

Home Tap 3: “Housewarden Malleus Draconia approached me earlier. He just wanted to tell me happy birthday but I was so scared I nearly collapsed where I stood… Ahem! Of course, I still said thank you!”

Home Tap 4: “Just one more page of this ancient magical relics book and then I’ll turn in for the night. Oh, but next chapter is on amulets. Maybe a few more pages then…”

Home Tap 5: “Do I dye my bangs? No, its just a condition I was born with. It spreads a little further every year. At this rate, I’m gonna go gray before I graduate…”

Home Tap - Groovy: “I try not to stay up too late, but I can’t help it! Everything is silent, it’s just me, my bird, my books and my plants. It’s such bliss at night.”

Duo:

[CECIL]: “T-Thanks for celebrating, Nyoka!”

[NYOKA]: “It's no trouble, Cecil.”

Birthday Login Message: “Oh, you’re wishing me a happy birthday? I didn’t think you’d remember. You know, the science club pitched in and got me a new plant today. It was a pleasant surprise to know my seniors had been paying such close attention to my interests. …Hm? Is this your present? You made a card all by yourself? …This is much more thoughtful than the ill-fitting sweaters and mugs I normally get, thank you.”

[eraiyang]

the end has no end

[aenslem]

THE RAVEN Star Trek: Voyager

[navree]

genuinely would love for some of the "both parties are the same" people to name me a single election in the entirety of the twenty first century where the outcome for the country wouldn't have been better if a democrat had won

[nicollekidman]

the thing with chappell is that it’s important to be principled, it’s admirable to be outspoken, it’s a good thing that she’s saying what she’s saying in the space that she’s in. but you can’t be those things and also unprepared and unable to take care of yourself when your chosen profession is Public Person. i’ve never disagreed with anything she’s said but if she keeps taking it this hard then her team needs to figure out a way to change the way she currently operates otherwise her career is going to be short and have longterm damage