#and then this whole thing about people (anarchists) being proud of not reading theory. like that's an achievement.

[surgeratesfucko]

i hate choice based politics and activism i hate choice based feminism i hate the growing trend of anti-intellectualism and self-infantilization

[hadenodom]

On Last Week’s Incident in the Capitol

It isn’t often that I write a long, detailed opinion piece, but I feel like this time in particular is a time in which it is my patriotic duty to speak up.

Sometime late in 2019, I remember coming across an op-ed by a political commentator whose name I cannot remember.  This opinion piece highlighted the growth of extreme movements within the United States - namely AntiFa and The Proud Boys and related groups on both sides of the political spectrum - and how they’d become more bold in their violence in recent years.  It then dug back into the kind of messaging that was being boosted by Russian and other foreign intelligence agencies on social media during the 2016 election - and in this piece, the author discussed something that is often overlooked:  the social media messaging portion of Russia’s efforts during that election weren’t focused on boosting a single candidate’s campaign or even with reaching on side of the political aisle.  The messages they were boosting were, across the board, pushing rhetoric to inflame and provoke the extreme elements of both sides of our political divide and to widen that gap.  The author finished the op-ed by offering his analysis that these efforts had been effective, and that our country was in the process of being torn apart by divisive and hateful rhetoric - that Americans had been turned against Americans, and that this was going to have a destructive effect on our democracy. 

I remember reading that op-ed and being skeptical.  Sure, things had reached a fever pitch in 2016, but in 2019 it seemed like everything was calming down.  The economy was doing alright, there hadn’t been as much chaos or violence in the news, and the doomsday of Americans turning on each other over political differences seemed far-fetched.  I came away thinking that the Russians’ efforts to divide us had been in vain, and that our country was past the pains of that particularly fraught period.  We would elect someone other than Trump in 2020, and our troubles would pass.

I didn’t have 2020 vision.  I didn’t forsee the economy tanking due to a virus, streets erupting in protests over racial disparities once again, AntiFa and Anarchist elements openly looting and rioting in the unrest, and then, following a chaotic election, Trump’s supporters taking to the streets and getting violent, and then eventually descending on the capitol, fully invested in a conspiracy theory that the election had been rigged.  I didn’t forsee QAnon getting an outsize following and inserting themselves into this whole storyline.  I didn’t forsee a large portion of our society swallowing an outright lie about election fraud and refusing to believe that our democratic system worked.  I didn’t forsee any of this, and I feel like I’ve awakened in the midst of a national nightmare.  

Put simply, the situation is dire.  The potential consequences are dire.  Our nation’s population has large factions that actively believe that their opponents are *Un*-American.  The diehard Trump supporters believe that Democrats do not have the best interests of the country at heart, and most Democrats (and most Independents that aren’t leaning right) believe that Trump supporters are fascists, Nazis, traitors, and bigots.  The political rhetoric coming from both the White House and from those with large media followings has stoked these tensions and gotten them to where they are today - with a little help from Russian Social Media operations way back in 2016, which seems like a distant memory now. 

Making matters worse, these factions seem to have adopted separate realities with separate sets of facts- in one reality, the election was rigged: Covid-19 was either fake or not a serious threat: there’s a cabal of pedophiles orchestrating our government, and some guy named Q is an inside guy telling us the truth when the media won’t; Trump is either not a racist, or is only as racist as their lovely grandparents and their grandparents can’t be *that* bad.   In the other reality, the election was thoroughly secured, had a verifiable paper trail, and has been investigated to death -- and Joe Biden won by a large margin; Covid had the capacity to overwhelm hospitals and cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths if we didn’t take the proposed measures seriously; A Pedophile ring running our government is as patently ridiculous as the day is long; And Q is an obvious bullshitter who moves the goalposts every time his predictions and ‘insights’ fall flat; and finally, that Donald Trump is demonstrably racist and bigoted. 

Working on these separate sets of facts, both of these factions have come to believe that the other is everything wrong with their country - that their opponents (including everyday working-class people who support their opponents) are not patriots, are against what America stands for, and are worth lashing out at violently in the streets. 

These factions aren’t leaving with Trump, and they proved it in the Capitol last week.  They threatened for weeks to unleash violence on the Capitol.  They posted detailed plans about how they were going to intimidate our representatives - our elected voice in Congress - with violence, well in advance.  They repeatedly used phrases on social media before the attack, and shouted these kinds of phrases during the attack:  “We will not go quietly”  - phrases that all but indicated that they weren’t done just because pesky Democracy had denied their candidate a victory.  

What, then, is our course as a country as Trump leaves office in a couple of short weeks?  How will our leaders unite us?  Personally, after much reflection, I believe our elected leaders do have a duty to attempt to unite us - or to at least refrain from provoking these tensions - but I believe the real duty is upon all of us. 

It is incumbent upon all of us to remember that our fellow Americans are not our enemies - they are our neighbors, and most of us all share the same kinds problems and burdens in life.  We all look to some political philosophy that tries to meet these challenges and address them, and seek political leaders who espouse these pet philosophies.  If someone’s going through the same struggles as you and has a different idea of how to fix those problems for his or her country, they are not your enemy.  Sure, certain things aren’t up for good-natured debate - racism, xenophobia, and bigotry can be excluded.  But we should be able to discuss our problems as a country with our neighbors, and discuss differing ideas of how to solve them, without descending into vitriol and animosity.  We should be able to understand each other.  I feel that the only way to fix that is to make the effort to reach out and talk to those we disagree with.  I have neighbors, family members, and coworkers who hold vastly different political ideologies from me, and for too long, when I hear them discussing politics, I shy away from joining the conversation, because I feel like I’d be inviting that kind of vitriol and bickering into my life.  It can be uncomfortable and awkward to arrive at that stage of a conversation, where someone things you a radical leftist or a bigot simply because you dared to offer a slightly differing opinion from theirs.  Social media amplifies this, because that’s the kind of response it has conditioned us to expect - the kind of response that would come from anonymous shitpostsers on the other side of a keyboard.  But I’ve found that when I do, in good faith, step in and have those difficult conversations - and really have a conversation, rather then try to insert my opinion over their - when I sit down and listen to my friends, family, coworkers, or neighbors tell me about their issues and what they care about politically, and I then carefully consider their ideas and offer my own - I’ve found that experience vastly rewarding.  I’ve found myself able to identify with people who I’d otherwise completely disagree with, and I’ve even found that those conversations can end with a mutual understanding and even a slight change of heart on one side or the other, or simply a mutual respect.  It turns out, we’re all (the vast majority of us) interested in seeing our country and all of its people flourish and thrive, safe and secure, and passing on a better country to the next generation of Americans. 

Therefore I’m making an effort to get out of my shell and have those awkward conversations again.  We’ve all allowed ourselves to wallow in echo chambers, neither exposing ourselves to differing opinions or exposing our opinions to others.  This pandemic, combined with social media’s tendency to be a “build-your-own-echo-chamber” kit, has amplified this in 2020.  But in 2021, let’s all resolve to have those difficult conversations and to really listen to each other.  If you do it for no other reason, do it to save our Republic from being destroyed from within. 

I’ll finish this opinion piece with a quote you may be familiar with, one that I heard repeated on the radio recently and that has resounded infinitely with my soul in recent days: 

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature”

-- Abraham Lincoln

That is from Lincoln’s inaugural address in 1861.  We, as a country, failed to listen to Lincoln then.  The Civil War occurred, and it took our country centuries to recover.  You might argue that it was necessary to eradicate the institution of slavery and that slavery, as an institution, could not have been eradicated as quickly without the civil war.  I will not disagree.  But I will disagree on the idea that a coming civil war is necessary or beneficial - if we come to that point now, History will remember us as violent and shortsighted fools who destroyed their country, the global bastion of liberty and human rights, from the inside out.

[kaysreadingarchive]

Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: Part 1

Pairing: Jacob Seed x Reader, slightly John Seed x Reader x Joseph Seed

AUs: Omegaverse, werewolves

Warnings: Cursing, mention of character death, guns, mention of violence

 Word Count: 2,952

A/N: Some of you may be asking if I'm abandoning my other work. I am not. I will continue to write for both of my stories I just came up with another idea for Far Cry 5. It's still an omegaverse story because I will forever be obsessed with this au. I hope you guys enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it. Also, this is sort of a birthday present to me and I felt like we need more things to enjoy now that the world is going to hell and we honestly don't know what's going to happen.Thank you guys so much for being this patient with me and my numerous schemes. It means the world to me! And like always, give me some feedback on what I could do better or what I did alright, where you wanna see this whole mess go, or something you just don’t understand. I also really want to know what your theories are for the coming story. I always love reading your guys' analyses.

Masterlist     Omegaverse rules ---------------------------

When people imagined small-town America, they would instantly think of a tiny general store, maybe a white church. Large pastures that held grazing cattle. Hope County was the very definition of small-town America. It had a tight-knit community filled with very unique characters. Doomsday preppers, anarchists, and conspiracy theorists. It didn’t take long to notice these people. The County was full of them. You knew the moment you stepped into The Hope County’s Sheriff’s Department that things were different in your little piece of Montana.

You grew up in Fall’s End. Your parents lived here, hell, your father was even a Deputy. Your mother ran the Spread Eagle with a close friend Irene Fairgrave. Your childhood was filled with tales from your father. It was mainly him stopping the bad guy and saving the day. You and your mother both knew most of them were fake. Nothing ever happened in the sleepy town of Fall’s End.

The only bad thing that seemed to happened was your mother’s illness. It came in October as simple fatigue. She grew tired more often and she felt pain in her shoulder. The pain got worse as time went on and Aunt Irene finally took her to see a doctor, it was too late. She waited too long. She had stage-4 Chondrosarcoma, bone cancer. They tried chemo but it didn’t take well and she passed away the next summer. Your father wasn’t far behind to say it better. He had a fatal heart attack and died in the hospital.

You were only eleven when this happened. You understood what happened but your growing mind still didn’t understand that they weren’t coming back. You watched them get buried together, but you still held up hope it was a lie. A sick joke. You had nowhere to go so one of your dad’s coworkers adopted you. Earl Whitehorse was roughly in his early forties and all his children had moved out. He bought everything new for your bedroom in his ranch house. You had taken to calling him pop-pop. He really felt like a grandfather to you and he raised you as if you were his own.

When you graduated high school, you knew what you wanted to do. You wanted to be a deputy like your dad. You wanted to make him proud even if he wasn’t here. When you went to the academy outside the county you felt off. All these hotshots in your class made you feel weak. You felt like they pointed and laughed as you walked by. Look at the country bumpkin! There’s no fucking way a farmer could be a police officer! You hated your time at the academy. It felt like no one was on your side.

When you finally graduated it felt like you were on top of the world. Pop-pop came to see you and both of you celebrated by having wings and a beer at the Spread Eagle. Nothing had made you happier when you got your uniform and badge. Rook was proudly displayed on a silver name tag and Staci Pratt became your partner. Staci mainly dragged you everywhere he went, you had no say in the matter.

You got comfortable being his partner. Everyone seemed nice. Especially Joey Hudson who invited you to drinks the moment you closed the door behind you. Her partner, Danny was odd. He seemed very religious, always had a crucifix around his neck. He was very into playing bible music in his joint office. Nancy seemed very motherly. She made a routine of bringing doughnuts into work from a bakery in town. You absolutely loved her for it. You were the first one in the break room as soon as you saw her minivan park.

You shared a tiny office with Staci and he was a mess. His paperwork was scattered everywhere and he always left his empty monster cans on the floor. Other than that, he was only an asshole 70% of the time.

----

Today was a very slow day compared to most days. There was no paperwork to file nor did you feel like sorting the archives for the fifth time. You sat at your desk, playing with a wad of paper. Stacy sat at his desk downing another energy drink while his hands could barely function from the other sugar. It was absolutely silent as you went about your day. Nancy had come in that day with donuts and they were gone, so you couldn’t really eat your boredom away like you usually would. Something felt odd about the silence. It made your insides flutter and sweat began to drip from your (h/c) hair.

Something definitely felt wrong about today. Was there gonna be a big robbery or shoot out? Nah, those things never fucking happen here. A sudden knock on the door startled you from your thoughts. Joey peeked her head through the crack and gave you a smile and then looked over to Staci. He didn’t seem to notice her, stuck in his own world like usual. “Staci!” Joey suddenly yelled. He flinched and dropped his can to the floor. The green liquid spilled out onto linoleum.

“What the fuck Joey!” Staci just looked annoyed as he looked at the now spilled drink. Some of it soaked into his green uniform and pants. Joey held back a snicker as Staci reached for the tissues on his desk as his cheeks flushed red. You had to look away before you burst out laughing.

“Don’t be a damn baby, Staci. Clean yourself up and come meet me and (Y/N) in the lobby. These three weirdos came in asking for a permit to carry and Whitehorse isn’t happy.” Joey looked at you from the doorway and waved you over. You followed behind her down the small hallway and she opened the door to the tiny lobby. You could hear the yelling already. It sounded like Pops and a random male voice.

Pops never really got angry. He had control over his nonexistent temper. If he was really going at it, whoever this guy is must be a prick. There was indeed three weird-looking strangers arguing over the dispatcher desk. Nacy could do nothing but go back and forth between Whitehorse and a wealthy-looking man. His blue eyes were slitts and his beard covered lips were pulled back in a scowl. A handgun was placed on the desk with the safety on.

Two other men stood beside them. One had his hair pulled back into a man bun like a fucking hipster and his lips were pulled into an uneasy smile. The other sent a shiver down your spine and not a good one. He made you feel uneasy as his blue eyes roamed over you and Joey. His red hair was brushed to the side and he too had a full beard. What were these guys? Millennials? The redhead continued to watch you two as you made your way beside Pops, their conversation stopping for a brief second.

Whitehorse took a deep breath in and closed his eyes for just a moment. “I’m sorry, but I can’t validate your permit without a criminal records background.”

The irritated looking of the three narrowed his eyes even more than before. He opened his big mouth but the man-bun stopped him. “I’m so sorry about this sir. My brothers and I just moved here from Georgia and we’re still new to these parts, please forgive us for our rudeness.” The man slowly let go of his brother’s shoulder and pulled out a card.

“This has my phone number and name, I’ll have someone be in contact with you about John’s criminal records background.” He handed the business card to Nancy who looked at it with an odd expression on her face. “God bless you.” All three of them walked out without another word, But the red-haired brother gave you one last look before getting into the white truck outside.

“Do those three give you the creeps or what?” Joey commented as she took the business card from Nancy. She scanned over the info and passed it to you. Joseph Seed, an odd name. His cell-phone number was underneath but what was weird was the symbol in the corner. It stood out with black ink against the white paper. It looked like a cross and a name was underneath it. “The Project at Eden’s Gate, huh.” The name sounded odd on your tongue. It felt uneasy to you. Anxiety began to build in your system at what these men could possibly be.

You had never seen those three before or heard of them. They must have just moved. “Did you say the Project at Eden’s Gate? I know those guys, they bought a run-down church near the Henbane. They call it, “Eden’s Convent”. Don’t know what they want with that piece of shit but they seem to keep to themselves.” Staci’s voice pierced through the silence as he walked in, still dabbing the energy drink on his pants.

Pops said nothing as he lifted his hat and gave his head a scratch in thought. “Whatever they want, they’re gonna have to do it legally. Nacy, keep an eye on those three for me. They’re gonna go snoopin’.” It took you good second to realize he was talking about Stacy, Joey, and you and not the three stooges that walked out minutes ago. What the fuck? Did he not trust you or something? It made you kinda upset to hear someone you looked up to for so long say that. Especially when it was your adopted grandpa.

The anxiety from before slipped away as you forgot about the three brothers as the day went on. It didn’t feel like your own thoughts were torturing you for once. You got a good night’s sleep without any nightmares to scare you awake, but there was still this tugging in your chest. No matter how much you tried to clear your head, it didn’t go away. It felt like something bad was going to happen. Like, really bad.

------

A week went by before the feeling returned. Pops had just pulled into the parking lot when it felt like a stab to the gut. A little voice inside your head was begging you to turn around, but you just ignored it. When you finally got to your desk you locked it away in the deepest part of you mind and filled your fear with a cream-filled doughnut and a cup of coffee.

You slumped into your chair, staring at the computer screen as it took forever to boot up. It felt like it was mocking you by making your day worse. You would look up every once and a while from the screen to the window. Half expecting someone to be there. Only there wasn’t, just fields and cows. Before you knew it, it felt like tie was passing at the speed of light. 8 A.M. became 10.

“-N)... (Y/N)! You awoke with a yelp and glared at Staci. He hastily took his hand away, as if you were going to bite his fingers off. You had considered it many times, with him being such a fucking asshole. There deserved to be less of him.

“What Staci? What the fuck do you want?” You rubbed the sleep away from your eyes as you stretched your legs in your uncomfortable chair. You hadn’t even realized you had fallen asleep. Staring at absolutely nothing was hard work.

“The old man wants us to check out a disturbance at the Spread Eagle. One of the guys from a week ago is harassing everyone.” This was a shock to you. Pops didn’t send you and Staci on any calls before. He says he didn’t trust Staci enough to do his job, but since you were just a Junior Deputy, you couldn’t do it by yourself.

“What about Joey and Danny?” Weren’t they capable enough to do this? Joey was good at her job, but Danny was a different story.

“They’re on another call.” You only nodded and gathered your stuff. You put a can off pepper spray into your belt. You couldn’t have a gun, but Staci could. You had wondered what idiot gave him the approval to carry a deadly weapon. You had wished in the past that whoever they were, they were in jail for giving out false permits.

“Alright, let’s go.” You both walked out of the station and made the small walk to the Spread Eagle. Staci opened the door and the bell rang. Both Mary May and one of the brothers, the rich looking one, turned towards both of you. Mary May looked pissed and the Seed brother only smirked when he saw you two walk in.

“Really, Mary? You called the police on me? Haven’t I’ve been a decent customer?” His tone was cocky as he sat back in one of the stools. His expensive-looking coat was tossed over the bar and his tattooed hands were gripping onto a stack of contracts. His hands crumpled the papers as his smirk widened. His mouth said one thing but his eyes said another. He looked like an absolute asshat. A spoiled baby. It made sense now, this little shit wanted a fucking audience. He was a god damn performer.

He gave you an uneasy feeling just like his redheaded brother. But it wasn’t from being uncomfortable, it was the feeling of dread. Like he could crush your puny existence with the snap of his well-manicured fingers.

“My normal customers don’t threaten me! You’re not getting this fucking bar, John. Now, why don’t you hightail it out of my town before Widowmaker runs your ass over.” Mary May wasn’t someone to mess with especially when she had her mom’s temper. Maybe that’s why Irene and your mom got along so well.

Both of them had pictures on the counters behind the bar. A vase of fresh daisies was next to them. When you saw the picture, it felt like she was still here protecting you. Like a guardian angel.

When you were trash as a deputy, you thought of your dad. He would be so proud of you, you just knew he was with mom. Where ever they were, they were happy. It still felt so fresh and to have someone like John Seed try to tear that away from you made you feel as angry as Mary May.

“Let’s not get too hasty. How about I add another zero to the offer?” John pulled out a checkbook from his pocket and started to write. Your eyes started to get wider as the number got bigger. This guy must have been loaded. Great, a rich and spoiled scumbag.

You also noticed the symbol from before, the cross, was on the checks. But, instead of the name John Seed, John Duncan was printed on them instead. What the fuck was going on? It felt like a big conspiracy theory was unraveling and you had to know the truth.

The name Seed was something that made you feel sick. It sent shivers down your spine and your forehead broke out into cold sweats. It felt like you were doubting yourself when you heard the name. Like was a lie. It made your anxiety flare up again and it constricted your lungs. Were you going to have an anxiety attack in the middle of a call? Just your fucking luck.

“For the last time, I don’t want your fucking money!” Mary May hiss and brought a pistol out from under the bar and sat it right on his papers. John’s brown hair stood up on the back of his neck. He glared down at the contracts and brought the papers up to Mary’s eye level as he ripped them clean down the middle. He stood up from the stool, grabbing his coat jacket and stuffed the pieces into his pocket.

A voice yelled from above as the sound of boots stomping on wooden stairs echoed in the now silent bar “Get out of my bar, Seed. Go home and cry to Joe and Jake and tell them Gary said fuck off.” Gary Fairgrave walked down from the apartment above the bar, a shotgun in hand. He pointed it right at John. His nose flared out in rage as he stepped back out of Gary’s line of fire.

His blue eyes seemed to switch to something darker, something red. You blinked and the red was gone. His eyes were blue once again but filled with more anger than you’ve ever seen in a person. His neck took on a deep shade of pink that worked its way up to his cheeks. It looked like he was gonna pop a blood vessel.

“Woah, we don’t need anyone dying here.” You finally stepped in while Staci stood there with his mouth hung open. John looked over to you and his blue eyes softened just a bit before going back to glaring at Gary.

“You’ll regret this Fairgrave.” John stomped to the door and slammed it shut behind him, almost breaking it off the hinges. His threat sounded real. Not like the bluff most people gave. It wasn’t an empty threat. You just didn’t know him at all, you couldn’t tell if he would act on it. As if you didn’t find him creepy enough, he was making googly eyes at you. And the red eyes didn’t help either. You tried to tell yourself it was just a trick of the light. Like a camera flash.

But deep down you knew it wasn’t a light trick. This was real and it already felt like hell.

[planetwalker]

Reflections on 6 years of sobriety

Today, May 18th, I officially have not had a drop of alcohol in my system for six years. It has been a long road, and without the support of my family, my friends, and my therapist I would likely be dead or in prison. More that likely, dead. Also, I would like to thank a doctor I knew personally (she shall remain nameless) who risked her professional career by prescribing me medicine to keep me from going into seizures when I quit drinking the first time at twenty (for a year and a half), because of my refusal to go to rehab or do it any other way than in my house, alone. I woke myself up with an alarm every four hours for over ten days to manually check my own blood pressure and administer the medicine that would keep me alive and not convulsing, seizing, or having delirium tremens. It wasn't pretty.

My alcoholism had taken me to a depth of insanity that ended in me finally drinking nearly a 1.5 liter bottle of hard liquor a day, plus beer to wash it down. That's when your tolerance has beaten you so far into the ground that you pretty much just wake up and begin drinking again. There's just not enough time in the day to drink that much otherwise. That is no exaggeration. From about 10am until 5am the next morning, I would drink whiskey in a nearly constant way. There would often only be a half-inch of the largest bottles of liquor they sell left in my freezer by morning. A hair of the dog that bit me, which would get me to the liquor store for a fresh new dog. I think I spent about 25 dollars a day on booze for those 5 last (and worst) years after my initial relapse. That's about 45,000 dollars, more than triple what I have ever made in a year of my working life.

On this sixth anniversary of sobriety though, I'm not really reflecting on my accomplishments in the past, but I'm using it as an opportunity to talk about something far more deadly and much more hard for me to deal with, or speak about. I have to begin at the beginning, but every word of this is difficult to write, I will try my best to speak openly and honestly.

After many years of denial, after being psychologically tested at fourteen years old and severely misdiagnosed and mismedicated, put on lithium, and poisoned to a point of amnesia. After a week in a psychiatric hospital at twenty due to suicidal ideation, and after eleven more years of waiting (including these six sober years), I finally went to a psychiatrist to get a full mental health assessment, at the behest of my family. A multitude of tests, by the most progressive and up to date standards were administered by an expert clinician. I waited to hear the conclusion I pretty much have known my whole life was coming: I have Bipolar II, without a shadow of a doubt, and on the nose.

The good news: I have rote number memorization in the 99th percentile, as well as a smattering of other high-functioning brain abilities that I cannot take any real credit for. I just know how to memorize and remember things in a way that seems insane to most people. I can recite texts I read when I was ten forwards and backwards. I once made a rap out of the alphabet being recited backwards. I remember memorizing decks of randomized playing cards as a kid, just for fun, to see if I could name the last card in the deck. I found out many years later after requesting my transcripts that my IQ had been tested at fourteen as well during those psych exams and largely said the same thing, I was in the 99.975 percentile, something like 151. Unfortunately then, their only concern was me being able to "sit down and listen in school", which I found to be impossible, boring, and frustrating to the point that acting out was my only recourse. I remember refusing to say the pledge of allegiance in the 4th grade after reading a book on my own about the genocide of American Indians, and the horrors of slavery instituted by the very same people who wrote these documents. I was a little shit, too smart for my own good, and I needed to be controlled.

I was expelled from school in the 6th grade for printing out "The Devil's Cookbook" (essentially a bomb making guide, and anarchist literature), from the schools library, hundreds of pages. I went to a "democratic school" run by hippies for the rest of the year where I mostly skateboarded and flirted with girls. I spent 7th grade with my father living in South Africa, and was quickly shuffled out of middle school after arriving back halfway through 8th grade. They couldn't wait to get rid of me. My one saving grace was my music teacher named Ken Johnson, who always let me stay late after school and practice guitar, piano, singing. I don't think I could have finished that year without his support, he turned me on to great music I never would have heard. Mostly, he just got that was talented and interesting, and not just a little shit. That pretty much ended my formal education. I read manuals and textbooks in my spare time and proceeded to get my GED at 15 and tested again to receive a stamped and signed high school diploma (with honors!) from the Rockville Board of Education (the same document all my fellow graduating seniors would get at 18, after wandering the halls for four years of the hellhole I abandoned). I still think skipping high school was the smartest decision I ever made in my life. I have never met anyone who says they learned almost anything in high school except "I still have friends that I know on Facebook", which really says a lot. I was accepted into The Evergreen State College two days before my sixteenth birthday. I had not filled out the small line that asked for age on the application, and apparently nobody noticed. I flew across the country to Olympia, Washington that spring and began my studies in creative writing, ecology, and a self-created major with my friend Sky Cosby: "Liberating the voices of incarcerated youth", which we had a brilliant and very optimistic professor graciously sign off on. We called it "Celldom Heard". We threw a great hip-hop showcase in Red Square that year, as well as producing a DIY chapbook of prisoner literature. My drinking career also really took off at this time, as I was a seventeen year old on a college campus thousands of miles away from home. My gambling too, playing poker anywhere I could, often at seedy clubs and online with a pre-paid debit card, as well as hosting poker tournaments with everyone I knew and could convince to lose their money to me. I could do anything I wanted. I never lied about my age, but simply refused to tell anyone for quite a long time. Age is just a number, right? Says any self-righteous seventeen year old.

My grandiosity surely impressed people; I have been a performer since as long as I can remember (my mother always jokes that I was ready to go entertain people since I left the womb). A magician at five, playing piano and performing music by ten; writing, slamming poetry at the national championships at fifteen, it never stopped. I was in the center of the room, and I thought that meant something, not just that I was an egomaniac, sure to be on the cover of Rolling Stone by the time I was twenty-one. My parents couldn't understand why I could never get up for school, they didn't know till years later that I would put a towel under my door to block the light and stay up all night reading and writing, until about 5:30, where I would sleep for thirty minutes before my father came down the hall to wake me up for the bus. I don't know how I survived. Years pass; trying to drink my hypomania away, trying, jamming alcohol down my throat followed by NyQuil, Ambien, Benedryl, all to try to just get to sleep, that one unattainable goal I could never quite reach. At some point my dreams just disappeared into darkness. As the years progressed further, some of the darker sides of hypomania began to present themselves; impulsive spending, reckless gambling, strings of unhealthy sexual relationships, all of which were doomed to failure from the start. Anger, rage, darkness, depression, and finally, the scariest points of this last year of my life: Mixed-Episodes.

In the past year and a half, I have had to experiment with a regimen of drugs until finally finding the right dosage and medicine to help me live a functional life. And as much as people can be proud of you for conquering alcohol, it's a much harder beast to speak out about your mental illness. I remember once going on a date, and the first thing my date started talking about was her "crazy bipolar ex-boyfriend", he was an "alcoholic too, so I'm so glad you don't drink". What to even say? I'm a fucking mess, girl, you don't want to get anywhere near me, trust me. And what to do? Deny, deflect, and continue to function (sobriety will buy you a lot of time in doing this, as you can use it as an excuse that you've gotten help and are doing fine). Hypomania, actually also keeps you functioning at such a high level. I have been able to operate on about 4-5 hours of sleep for as long as I can remember. I produce music all night in my solitary zen wonderland, read about 3-4 non-fiction books a week, about topics from psychophysiology to economics to super-string theory. Memoirs about drug abuse to politics to mountain climbing. Anything I could get my hands on. People wondered at work out loud often to me "where do you find the time?!". My response was always the same: I am awake and doing things when you are asleep. My hours of extra work were from 10pm-5am. That's seven hours of intense, single-minded focus that hypomania can provide you with, and it is a very very hard thing to want to give up, especially if your depressive spells are severe, but not all that frequent.

This went on for years. I traveled the world, studied all manners of healing and spirituality, motorcycling through the dirty terrain of Cambodia at night, swerving around cattle barely visible until hitting the glint of my low-beams, yards ahead. Being chased by wild dogs on a night I was sure I was going to die and be ripped to pieces. Nothing could stop me. Ever. I was a star exploding at light speed through the galaxy, burning as bright as anything you had ever seen, but sure to collapse upon it's own weight and gravity eventually. I paid this no mind, as I had decided at about twelve that I was sure I would never make it to my 30th birthday alive. I didn't really want to. I wanted to live, hard, fast, intense, non-stop, now. I came pretty close to making that pact a reality. I'm only 31 now, but this year I finally made strides to comprehend and look deeply at who I am and what is happening to me, and what factors are chemical imbalances in my brain, rather that just my insane hyperactivity. I had never even thought to blame anyone but myself. Or thank anyone but myself. My choices were my fault. Everyone else's judgements about me were right, but fuck them, I didn't care, I'll move on to someone else who sees the good parts with the darkness hidden.

The mixed episodes began, and got worse quickly. This is where you have the intensity of the hypomania mixed with the self-hatred of the deepest and darkest depression you have ever felt. Suddenly all that energy I had to conquer the world was turned inwards into a pattern of suicidal ideation, agoraphobia, blowups with close friends, despising my family, hanging up on my father after screaming matches, all of it, more. So much more I can't even write it all down. It was the hardest time of my life, a thousand times harder than my worst days of drinking, without a doubt. At least then I had something to numb out the pain, something to try and quell the manic thoughts and get some sleep. I always used to say "drinking *is* a coping skill, it's just not a healthy one." It's true. Now, instead, I had hypersomnia, sleeping 14 hours a day, unable to get out of bed, whole weeks where I never left my house, fear of everything outside. I was so scared I bought a gun. Then I was scared that I had a gun in my house. Worried I might shoot myself, or worse, mistake some passerby as a burglar and shoot some innocent stranger. Afraid and anxious about the outside world, uncontrollable sobbing for hours at a time, the inability to pull myself out of it for more than 20 minutes before collapsing back into the despair and pain I can't describe as anything short of brutal psychological torture.

The first doctor I saw in New Orleans (who I later found out accepted thousands of dollars from big pharma, of course) told me outright that he didn't care about the tests, he was sure I had Bipolar I, which is much scarier and involves hallucinations, delusional thinking (I am Barack Obama, people are out to get me, etc.), psychosis, and far worse symptoms. He prescribed me tranquilizers that nearly killed me in the following three months. My depression worsened. He suggested I up my dosage. I declined. I am very fortunate and lucky that he was wrong about me having Bipolar I, and that I have the lesser of these two evils, and I never forget that.

That didn't matter though: my agoraphobia worsened to the point that I couldn't get into my car, could barely make it to my porch to check my mail. I didn't go grocery shopping for three months and ate chinese food ever night. Agoraphobia, means literally "fear of the public square", and comes from our (very smart) reptile brains that were afraid of the open savannah. This is because birds of prey could see us from above and pick us off while exposed without a tree to hide beneath. It is a very primal instinct, and hard to counteract. My anxiety attacks got worse and worse, the medication wasn't helping, it was making things worse, but I continued to swallow them down, convinced I was just adjusting. I was not.

My parents finally begged me to come home to Connecticut and see a doctor who was a specialist with Bipolar males of my age, and after months of fighting them off, I reluctantly agreed. And he likely saved my life. He took my off the tranquilizer immediately, and I began to experience emotions again. Not great ones, but at least something. And then I was put on Lamictal, the only Bipolar medication that has been approved for Bipolar II and come on the market since Lithium did in 1948. Lithium is the aforementioned drug that I refused to ever try again, after I was put on it at fourteen, and which cost me a year of my life I can barely recall but for hazy half-memories, lost in a sea of white noise. And to the gracious angels, goddesses, or simply to the smart psychiatrists diagnosing me correctly and providing me with a plan of action including proper medication and therapy, have saved my life.

I cook dinner every night. I went to the grocery store the other day, then the bank, then the post office. I didn't even mind. It felt kind of great. I always ask how people are doing, a habit I've always done. It's amazing how the little things can go such a long way. When I call Cox to complain that my internet has gone out again, I always start with "Hey, my name is Sam Dillon, how are you doing today?". The other night I was met with "No one has asked me that in a week". Try it, it's pretty fun. Sometimes a grocery store clerk will literally break down in tears and tell you about her bad day. That happened not to long ago too. I still go to sleep late still, up reading books, but when I'm ready to fall asleep, I drift off into the odd and vivid dreams I remember having since I was a child, the same ones that disappeared for more than a decade. I am on the path to recovery, not there yet, and as with my alcoholism, I take small steps and don't get ahead of myself.

I was born with a strange chemical imbalance, not much different that someone with diabetes or anemia or Crohn's disease or autism. The large difference is the stigma. When you are an impulsive, grandiose, gambling, alcoholic maniac, nobody gives you much slack that you can't just "get your life together", "fix your problems", or simply "stop acting this way". There is no discussion of treatment (other than AA, a religious doctrine started by holocaust-deniers, sorry AA folks), not much in the way of offering help, a lot of blame and a small amount of empathy. You can only burn so many bridges before people don't want to come near you. And I've burned a lot. Lost of a lot of good friends. Sometimes I'm amazed that most of my family still even talks to me. Some of them barely do. I understand. I empathize. I get it. I know why, even though I know they also just don't understand what I have been struggling with my whole life and simply blame me and say I "always play the victim".

I have not been easy to deal with for many, many years. Even in sobriety I have been a raging asshole to deal with at times. At the height of my hypomanic episodes I have been explosive, unpredictable, and stubborn beyond belief. Impossible to deal with. I have always been this way, in a sense, and for many years, it served me. I skipped high school completely, choosing to get my education through books, following politics and world affairs, listening to everything around me, absorbing knowledge and skills like a sponge, learning from the world and by trial and (a lot of) error. When I made a decision, there was no challenging me or changing my mind. I followed my gut to the ends of the earth and back. Nobody could have stopped me, though many tried.

So on this day I celebrate six years since I touched a drop of alcohol, I guess I would like to begin not by celebrating at all, but by admitting what I was actually trying to drink away, the hypomania, the depression. By admitting that getting to the root of a problem is often just the beginning of seeing a deeper one. That hitting rock bottom only happens when you stop digging, and try to find a way out. That stigmatizing people who are mentally ill is killing millions of people every year. That suicide recently surpassed homicide as the second-leading cause of death in teenagers each year, after car accidents. That our military veterans come home wounded in body and mind and have a suicide rate that is drastically high, with little to no mental health treatment available. Just "be a man and deal with it" leads to guns being put to heads, nooses being wrapped around throats. That we as a society must change the way we treat the mentally ill, simply as people who have an illness no more controllable or treatable alone than Parkinson's. What's the difference? There is no difference but our mind-state, that's the difference. I worked in a Psychiatric hospital for almost 7 years, and I am still amazed at the daily comments from doctors, nurses, staff in general: "Oh, she's just Borderline", "He's just an attention-seeking teenage brat", "He's just classic Bipolar, throw him on Seroquel". "She's just a Benzo-head", "He's just a fucking drunk", "If he even starts acting up, throw him into isolation and we'll put him down with a shot of B52", (this is what we called the injected cocktail of Benedryl 50 with 2mg of Ativan, the B50-2). "He's crazy as a loon". "Don't even try to talk to her". "He's just an old asshole". "Homeless grunt trying to get a free meal". "He's not nice enough, I don't think we should let his kids visit". "She's a classic cutter, let her find a paper clip and do her worst, just ignore her". Daily. During "Report", as they called it. On the floor of the hospital within earshot of other patients. Sometimes directly to a patients face. Adults, Adolescents, Children as young as four years old. I worked directly with them all. And every time I heard "YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND", I remember distinctly thinking: "You're right, I don't understand your exact nature, your exact chemical imbalance or behavioral disorder, but I refuse to not try and help you in whatever way I can. I will show you as best I can that I am WILLING to try to understand, not just that I do", because most of the time, you just don't. But you can try. Empathize. Don't be scared of us. We're your mailmen, postal workers, neighbors, bartenders, waitresses, telemarketers, local business owners, bosses, employees, co-workers, friends, family, loved ones, heroes and heroines.

Which leads me to my last thought. Last night we lost another amazing musician and gentle soul to suicide, Chris Cornell. Add him to the list of amazing artists we have lost to suicide, drugs, and alcohol over the last few years, decades, and the list is too great to comprehend. And the biggest killer of us all is the inability to speak out without being judged, I can speak to that from experience. Saying (or writing) all of this is very hard, when I could be taking myself out to a steak dinner and saying "I used to spend 25 bucks a day on booze, time to treat myself to something nice". I could be getting a relaxing massage. I used to do that. I don't anymore. Now I reflect on what comes next, what the future looks like, what I can do about it personally and globally, and what is beyond my control. I urge other members of my community, and communities around the world to speak up and speak out for themselves and those they love when confronted with the silence that permeates mental illness and awareness of all kinds.

We can't afford another Robin Williams, Chris Cornell, Aaron Swartz, Kurt Cobain, Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, et al. The thousands of unnamed teenagers and unknown mothers and fathers who have to live every day knowing their child is gone. We as the mentally ill need to speak out, and we as a culture need to speak out against the stigma, which increases mortality rates more than any chemical in our brains, of that I am sure. So, help us. Stand up for us. Yes, ask us to get help for ourselves too, and be patient when we need time, or aren't sure, or don't want to talk about it, but keep on pressing. We need the reminder, even when we don't want to hear it. We need the reminder that someone needs us on this earth, and they refuse to let us go without fighting for our lives, and without us fighting for our own.

"Most of us are acutely aware of our own struggles and we are preoccupied with our own problems. We sympathize with ourselves because we see our own difficulties so clearly. But as Ian MacLaren noted wisely, “Let us be kind to one another, for most of us are fighting a hard battle.”

Good luck and godspeed.

May 18th, 2017

Sam Dillon

[witchcraftnow]

I don’t know, sir. Was it Molotov?

This was going to become another abandoned project. Not in totality, the seeds of it would have been scattered on, but this particular iteration of what I intended to do: Go through The Invisibles issue by issue and write about it from the perspective of a practicing witch, wasn’t going to happen. But I found spontaneous cause to re-read issue #1, and it’s buzzing with such synchronicity for me at this moment that I think this is actually going to happen. Obviously, SPOILERS if you haven’t read the series, definitely for the issue currently being discussed, and possibly for the series as a whole, but I will try to preserve the overarching Mystery of the series as much as possible and only discuss what is necessary and vital for my own ongoing practice. "And so we return and begin again.” We open with pyramids and scarabs; life, death, and rebirth. And Molotov cocktails. This won’t be a close reading but a series of impressions and significances. We begin with this theme of returning, and just as I’m returning to read this, almost every “good guy” character in the first issue is in some state of time displacement. Some of this is only cryptic suggestion at this point, to be explored later (King Mob looks pretty young, how can he be “the same today” as in 1924). But the protagonist of this arc, Dane McGowan, classic “troubled youth” sees ghosts, sees “DEAD BEATLE$” Oh. Beatles, I just got that, another scarab reference. Dead Beatles, deadbeats, death and rebirth and “godhead made of living music.” This is where Grant Morrison’s magical author avatar, his “fiction suit,” does his somewhat embarrassing but even now somewhat captivating (to me anyway) “John Lennon summoning.” You can find the result of that ritual here, at a panel with Gerard Way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP22pAOVlVI This brings up two important points. One, so much of this series is about fame and aspiration, something I’ve found not to be the false consciousness or debased distraction it often assumed to be in many “spiritual” or leftist circles. Fame is a key aspect of Glamour, something any magician who uses smoke and mirrors to reach other worlds must grapple with.

The big ol’ omnibus I have of The Invisibles, released near the end of the world in 2012, opens with an introduction from Gerard Way. He describes meeting Grant Morrison at the DC Comics offices and being blown away with an immediate sense of: HOLY SHIT IT’S KING MOB!!! But by now, from his tenure in My Chemical Romance, Gerard Way is more famous than Grant Morrison has ever been, and the moment described in the introduction is echoed (perhaps more profanely, but no less powerful for it) in the above video when Grant Morrison says, “Look, Gerard Way’s getting my guitar!” When Dane McGowan sees his ghosts of “Dead Beatles,” Stuart Sutcliffe is morosely discussing leaving the band, to which John Lennon replies, “I don’t know why you’re going on about death, anyway, you’re only leaving a *band*, Stu. It’s not the end of the fucking world.” But Stuart Sutcliffe would die a few years later. And from Dane’s perspective, he’s also right to say, “Maybe we *are* dead, John. We could be dead and not know it.” The Invisibles is filled with these little moments, these nexuses in time where ships pass each other in the night, where one party “misses the boat,” and the other rides off for glory. And usually at some other moment, those fortunes reverse. Here at the crossroads. This is also where Dane re-meets his childhood imaginary friend. And it’s moments like the one described above, combined with this connection to childhood, combined with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s conviction that he as an octogenarian can heal his childhood self through his magical cinematic memoirs... that has made me think I might be able to do the same thing, and attempt time travel. Point two of the aforementioned duo: One of the reasons the John Lennon ritual is a bit embarrassing is that John Lennon was such a little shit, abusive, misogynistic, racist; contrary to the glamour he’s been given as an avatar of love. And at that, the Beatles, while significant, are pretty monumentally overrated in the big scheme of things. But at this point in the timeline, I reflect upon how much I love and find solace in the work of particular artists inspired by the Beatles (most significantly Grant Morrison and Julie Taymor), even if the position of the Beatles themselves in the canon is a bit grating at best, and counter-revolutionary at worst. And I think about a connection I didn’t think to make upon first read-through: What if Dane McGowan is intended as some kind of rebirth of John Lennon? A do-over. A chance to make the real person more like the avatar. Dane is kind of a little shit at the start of the story, and pointedly so. Nowhere near as horrific as some of the stories about John Lennon (he is still a kid at this point, after all), but certainly misogynistic and transphobic. He has to unlearn these patterns, and ultimately die as the old Dane, to progress as a magician, to become Invisible. This is one of the core arcs of the series overall. A child of poverty and neglect who becomes a Buddha. Through, I would argue, something quite similar to vanguardism. The melancholy with which the series reflects upon the various missed opportunities for a more liberatory history is countered by a bright, powerful, fearless joy that in moments is utterly convincing: time travel is possible, those lost histories can be reborn. Those alternate universes still exist in latent form, and can be brought to bear upon the present, can be made to shape Reality. Fitting then, that the issue also opens with a reflection on unity and division within the Left, Dane’s teacher explains: “We’re going to be looking at the ways in which the early links between communist theory and other radical political movements were *severed* following the revolution.” As a Marxist-Leninist myself, I may have a different perspective on that severance than some of my anarchists friends, but I think we’d agree that the Left is in many ways lesser for it. I think the USSR was vitally necessary for global liberation, and the world would be a hell of a lot worse off without it, but that doesn’t mean that the different sides of the various schisms within the Left have nothing to learn from each other. Maybe it’s time to crack open that old Bread book after all. And it’s so interesting that a Kropotkin reference should play such a key role in this issue. I had just been looking him up earlier today after witnessing a Facebook argument between Marxists and anarchists where both sides were accusing each other of not being sufficiently materialistic. And Marxism has materially *worked*. But there is always more material to be found in our failed attempts, its potential coiled tight and ready be let loose on the world. We should be realistic about our current dialectic, but it is possible, through science and magic, to travel to worlds outside it. And to bring something back. I want to conclude with a reflection on a failed effort of mine. For a long time, when I was still a practicing Buddhist, I had planned on writing and directing an ongoing film series called American Kensho. Only the first one was ever completed. I have been planning for a while on finally making a link to it public, with a message to collaborators and crowdfunding patrons about how we might reward their patience on years-delayed rewards, given the radical change in direction of my life and practice. I’m not a Buddhist anymore, though I know that path works very well for countless people around the world. And some of them may even be able to render it compatible with witchcraft. But I could not, and the Devil won out in the end. As such, the ideology of the film is no longer exactly what I’d ascribe to. I’d no longer be interested in associating the Devil with the various markers of oppression the villains in this film obviously embody, nor would it be acceptable to have only the bad guys speak in tongues. But it’s still a film I’m very proud of, and there are seeds of what I would become within it. Apple seeds perhaps, because what’s making me post this film first here rather than in that more sober announcement is the character of Julia, and striking parallels to the introduction of Ragged Robin in The Invisibles. Julia (in a comic shop no less) similarly muses on apples and Eve. And just as one of my favorite scenes in the film involves Julia reading Tarot, we first meet Ragged Robin pulling the Moon card (in a setting I can’t help let remind me of several of the locations in our film). But the card is reversed. While Julia seems to deeply believe in the Tarot, uses it urgently, Ragged Robin is listless and “thinks it’s bullshit.” While Julia, “rather thinks Eve had it right,” Ragged Robin “isn’t going to fall for that one.” But she takes the apple anyway. And this would make King Mob, who offers the apple, the Devil. “Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?”

https://vimeo.com/cell23/manifestdestiny