#basically this whole piece is a series of Ls for me

[themortaldraw]

and spring weather has finally reached me

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

Eccentricity [Chapter 9: Now I Love Your Shadow And I Love Your Curls]

Series Summary: Joe Mazzello is a nice guy with a weird family. A VERY weird family. They have a secret, and you have a choice to make. Potentially a better love story than Twilight.

Chapter Title Is A Lyric From: “Til I Die” by Parsonsfield. 

Chapter Warnings: Language, references to sex, violence, and drug use.

Word Count: 7.6k.

Other Chapters (And All My Writing) Available: HERE

Taglist: @queen-turtle-boiii​ @bramblesforbreakfast​ @maggieroseevans​ @culturefiendtrashqueen​ @imnotvibingveryguccimrstark​ @escabell​ @im-an-adult-ish​ @queenlover05​ @someforeigntragedy​ @imtheinvisiblequeen​ @seven-seas-of-ham-on-rhyee​ @deacyblues​ @tensecondvacation​ @brianssixpence​ @some-major-ishues​ @haileymorelikestupid​ @youngpastafanmug​ @simonedk​

Field Trip

“You want to go to Chicago with me?”                

I coughed, having almost inhaled a chunk of pineapple off my slice of GrubHubbed pizza. We were sitting on the grass outside Forks And Spoons under the shade of the maple trees, which were turning from jade to ruby to amber to fool’s gold, rejoining the earth they once rose from one fallen leaf at a time. It hadn’t rained in almost four days—was that some kind of record?!—and the leaves littering the ground crunched when I stepped on them, which I did purposefully and often. The breeze was soft and whispery and temperate. I could get used to this whole having actual seasons thing. “What, in like a hypothetical, at some point in my life kind of way?”

Joe smiled. His U Chicago hoodie of the day was black. “No, as in this weekend.”

“Really?”

“The Cubs have a game on Saturday, and it’s supposed to be rainy and overcast the whole time, and I just thought...” He shrugged, toying with a piece of pizza crust before tossing it to the squirrels. He’s nervous, I realized. How the hell do I have the ability to make the sexy undead Italian man nervous? “It might be nice for us to be able to get away for a few days. Away from my family. Away from Charlie. Not that I don’t appreciate the ambient noise of his snoring from the living room couch, it’s super endearing, I seriously consider dating him instead of you at least twice a week.”

“Go for it. Charlie could use a rich husband. His pension is pathetic.”

“You wouldn’t miss me?”

“I am not necessarily opposed to clandestinely seducing my sugar daddy stepdad should the occasion arise.”

Joe crossed himself like a nun passing tattooed, cursing, lip-pierced teenagers on the sidewalk. “Lord, protect me from this harlot.”

A weekend away. No Charlie, no constant and chaotic whirlwind of Lees, no Ben. I hadn’t spoken to Ben since our misadventure in the Lee kitchen; if he wasn’t avoiding me of his own volition, he was following orders to stay away. Joe claimed that they’d talked it out. I wasn’t sure if I believed him. “I accept your invitation. Although, truthfully, I’d rather get hit by a bus than watch an entire real-life, no-commercial-breaks baseball game.”

“I accept your acceptance. And I’ll throw in a visit to the Shedd Aquarium, just for you. They have baby sea otters.”

“Sweet.” I checked my iPhone. “I’m gonna be late for Chemistry.”

“Anything fun planned?”

“We’re doing a lab involving hydrochloric acid. I’m highly concerned that Ben will accidentally spill some on himself. The miraculous instantaneous healing thing might raise a few questions.”

“Hm,” Joe replied. But he wasn’t looking at me; he was looking at my bandaged hand. And he wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Joe, I’m fine.”

“Yeah.” He took a preoccupied swig of his Dr. Pepper. Solemnity never seemed right on him; it was like he was wearing somebody else’s skin. “You’ve mentioned that.”

“Hey. Mob guy.”

Now his eyes flicked to mine.                              

“No more sad spaghetti.”

“Okay.” He surrendered, took my face in his hands, gave me a kiss on each cheek and then one quick parting peck on the forehead. “You win. I’m not sad. I’m ecstatic, actually. I’m gonna be eating my weight in hotdogs and mustard-slathered pretzels on Saturday. What’s there not to be ecstatic about?”

“The fact that your license says you’re only twenty and consequently can’t get a beer?”

Joe blinked, remembering. “Fuck.”

I drained my Diet Coke, flung my pizza crust to the skittering grey squirrels—no eerie albino forest friends today—and pulled on my backpack. “See ya. Have an awesome time in Game Theory.”

“Thanks, I probably won’t!” he chimed, waving, grinning compliantly; and yet did I still sense some lingering menace of disquiet, of fear? I suspected I did. Chicago would cure everything.

Ben tensed when I walked into Professor Belvin’s classroom, ran his fingers through his unruly blond hair, peered fixedly down at his notebook and feigned obliviousness. There was already a metal tray of Erlenmeyer flasks, labeled bottles of solutions, burettes, goggles, gloves, and an unassembled ring stand crowding our small table by the open window. Autumn air poured in like seawater through cracks in the hull of a ship.

“Guess who’s gonna see the Cubs play up close and personal this Saturday?” I announced.

He pretended to have just noticed me. “...You...? But that doesn’t sound like you.”

“It was Joe’s idea. I’m acting like I’m not totally thrilled and freaking out about it, but I am. Don’t tell him.”

Now Ben was the one staring at my bandaged hand. His green eyes were large and unfocused.

“I’m fine,” I insisted.  

“Sure,” Ben returned noncommittally.

I started skimming through the packet of lab instructions and setting up our titration experiment as Professor Belvin circulated through the classroom, observing, commenting, offering suggestions and critiques. My wounded hand—still sore in the lull between Advil doses and relatively useless—was quite the embarrassing hinderance; I fumbled with a large glass flask and almost dropped it.

Ben shook his head and reached out to stop me. “Here, oh my god, this is so pitiful, sit down. Please sit down. I’ll set it up. It’s the least I can do.”

“Thanks.” I peeked at his notebook. “Your handwriting is atrocious. Haven’t you had like a century to work on that?”

“Penmanship was never at the top of my to-do list, tragically.”

“What language is that, anyway?” The phrases scrawled in black ink in Ben’s notebook definitely weren’t English. Or Italian. “Elvish? Are you a lowkey Lord Of The Rings fan? Magic and self-sacrifice and nearly insurmountable evil, I could see that being your thing.”

He smirked, struggling with the ring stand. “It’s Welsh.”

“Welsh,” I repeated, perplexed. “Welsh...like how Gwil is Welsh?”

“Precisely.”

Professor Belvin checked in on us, nodded in approval, reminded me that I was always welcome to stop by at bowling league activities, and resumed his wandering.

“Gwil still speaks it,” Ben continued. “The rest of them speak it too. At least enough for basic communication.”

“I didn’t know,” I said, fascinated, examining the long, unfamiliar words riddled with Ls and Ws and Cs. “But that must be very useful.”

“It is. Welsh is nearly a dead language at this point. It’s like talking in code. I always refused to learn it on principle...or maybe I was just being difficult. I would study other languages, Arabic, Japanese...but not Welsh. That was always Gwil’s language. Their language. It was a Lee thing. But now...”

“Now you’re sort of a Lee too,” I finished for him, smiling.

“Whatever,” Ben said, hiding behind his bangs.

I watched him as he at last tamed the ring stand, secured the burette, placed the Erlenmeyer flask. Then he began reading the labels on the solution bottles. “Guess what else.”

“What, Baby Swan?”

I grinned, showing off my unremarkable, entirely benign human teeth. “I’ll bring you back your very own U Chicago hoodie.”

That night, after a pleasantly prosaic dinner with Charlie—burgers, one veggie and one of the conventional variety, and milkshakes at Danny’s Diner—I started packing a small, Arizona-sky-blue suitcase as sparse raindrops pattered against the roof and moonlight streamed in through the open window. Then I ticked off my mental inventory.

“Jeans, sweaters, pajamas, socks...”

I pawed through the top drawer of my old, scratched dresser—the same one that had once upon a time been Renee’s—and contemplated the bra and panty options. Would my theme be comfort and practicality, or feral impenitent seductress? Friday and Saturday in Chicago would be our first nights alone together. That had to be significant, right? After some deliberation, I gathered a handful of lacy, transparent, and/or exceptionally skimpy lingerie from Victoria’s Secret that Jessica had more or less forced upon me during a shopping trip in Port Angeles last month. As I dropped them into the open suitcase, I glanced up to see the albino owl outside my open bedroom window.

“You never know,” I told the owl, shrugging.

It leered judgmentally back at me with those gory red eyes.

“Oh shut up. How many eggs have you laid in your lifetime, Casper The Unfriendly Ghost? Probably like a bazillion. Freaking feathery trollop.”

The owl had nothing to offer in its own defense.

“Why don’t you ever come around when Joe’s here? I’m sure he’d love to meet you. He’s pale and weird too. Although I like his eyes a little better than yours. No offense, Snowflake.”

The owl blinked, tilted its gaze at me, ruffled its feathers and sent the raindrops that had gathered there flying in every direction.

I slid my iPhone out of my back pocket, spun around, and snapped a quick selfie with the owl in the background. “Say cheese, Marshmallow!”

The owl immediately unfurled its wings and flapped off into the trees, vanishing.

“Huh. I guess homegirl is camera shy.” I texted my selfie to Archer, typing out with my thumbs: I am the Steve Irwin of Forks. Behold, one of my many forest friends.

Archer replied a few minutes later: WOW! Pasty and mildly disturbing. Exactly your type. :)

“Yours too, apparently,” I murmured, smiling in my empty room.

I went to my full-length mirror with the plastic, teal-colored border, briefly appraised my reflection, felt a dull swell of approval for what I saw there. The version of myself that had once been so consumed by fears of inadequacy seemed impossibly far away, maybe even fictitious, a dream so vivid I could mistake it for truth. Three things were taped across the top of the mirror: Joe’s Official Citation!! No More Sad Spaghetti!! post-it, his Official Whatever You Want Pass, and a photo of us dressed up together and standing in front of the limo in the Lees’ driveway just before the Calawah University Homecoming dance. I peeled off the Official Whatever You Want Pass, carefully folded it into a neat little square, and tucked it into my wallet.

When the rain began to pour and thunder rolled in off the Pacific Ocean, I closed my bedroom window; but I remembered to leave it unlocked for Joe.

Departure

“Got your license?”

“Yes, Dad,” Joe sighed.

“Got your airport snacks?”

Joe held up the gallon-sized Ziploc bag filled with pumpkin and white chocolate chip cookies. “We’re ready to rock.”

“Call me when you get there safe,” Mercy fretted, hugging me and then Joe. “And Joseph, sweetheart, you make sure you keep an eye on her. She’s never been to Chicago before, it’s a big city, and O’Hare is an absolute nightmare, it’s so easy to get lost...”

“I don’t think he needs any reminders, love.” Dr. Lee laid a hand on her shoulder, stroked his neatly-trimmed beard with the other, watched us with a vague and wistful smile.

Mercy went back to trimming the flowers she had spread out across the kitchen countertop, white calla lilies that she threaded one by one into a translucent sapphire blue vase. “Now don’t forget to say goodbye to your brother. He’s out back feeding the new ducks. And I expect these ones to stick around for a while, thank you very much.”

“Mom, I don’t need to say goodbye to Rami. I’ll just think it. Really loudly.” Joe rubbed his temples with his fingertips and squeezed his eyes shut. “Peace out, you nosy bastard.”

“Joseph,” Mercy pleaded.

“Okay, okay, I’ll go say goodbye. Don’t get all aggressive. Don’t take it out on the flowers.” Aggressive...what a joke. I doubted that Mercy Eleanor Lee, formerly Martin, had a single aggressive bone in her immortal body; not even the infinitesimal stapes of her inner ears or the sesamoids of her feet.

“They’re calla lilies,” she replied dreamily, tending them like children. “And they symbolize love, and beauty, and fidelity...”

My nostrils itched and burned faintly in dissent. “I think I’m allergic to them.”

“You’re allergic to fidelity?” Joe asked, raising his eyebrows. “That’s it, now you’re definitely not getting my reclaimed virginity. No ma’am. I am not hit-it-and-quit-it material.”

“Oh sweet baby Jesus,” Mercy murmured.

“I’m going,” Joe said, showing his palms in capitulation and disappearing out the back door. I dragged my suitcase to the front one, politely declining Mercy and Gwil’s offers to help.

Lucy—her bleached hair in a high half-ponytail and wearing polka-dotted black tights, combat boots, a plaid miniskirt, and an extremely Octoberish orange sweater—was sitting cross-legged on the roof of Gwil’s Volvo. God, he’s such a dad. “Have a nice time,” she chirped artfully.

I opened the hatch of Joe’s Subaru and threw my suitcase inside. “Why do you sound like you already know I will?”

“I might have some relevant clairvoyant insight.”

“No way.” I stared up at her, stunned, my hands on my waist. “But you can’t see me, right...?”

“True. But this vision wasn’t of you. It was of Joe. You just happened to be there.”

Interesting. Very interesting. “And what transpired in this vision?” A night full of hot, steamy, blissful vampire sex? A girl could dream.

Lucy closed her eyes, recalling it fondly, maybe even cherishing it. “You were sitting in the stands of a professional baseball game. I could hear the crowd roaring, the umpire’s trumpeting interruptions. Blue and white...everyone was wearing blue and white. And you were there together—Joe a vampire, you human, side by side, almost entwined—shouting to each other over the thunderous noise and laughing and pushing nuggets of soft pretzels into each other’s mouths. So happy. I’d never seen Joe so happy.” Her striking pale eyes came open. “And he’s someone who’s already rather prone to happiness, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

“I have,” I agreed.

“He’s never been serious about anybody else. I hope you know that.”

“I know that’s what he tells me.”

“It’s the truth,” Lucy insisted. “I would know if it wasn’t. Rami would know, Ben would know. Joe...he’s kind of the opposite of you. He’s always been the easiest to read. He’s the one Rami hears most loudly, the one who shows up most often in my visions. He’s clear, you know? Uncomplicated. Authentic. And what you mean to him...it’s something everybody sees. It’s a contagious sort of lightness, of joy. So thank you for that.”

And if whatever mysterious genetic switch that renders me immune to your talents wasn’t flipped, I’m pretty sure I’d look the same way. “I should definitely be thanking you,” I said. “You guys have a pretty cool existence going on here. And I’m so grateful to be invited into it.” For however long this lasts, anyway.

“None of us really invited you,” Lucy demurred. “We just let it happen.”

“So everyone knew I was coming? Because you saw it?”

“Everyone but Joe.”

“You never told him?”

“No. Not even now.” Lucy turned sharply towards the trees, as if she heard something in the soaring western hemlocks that swayed drunkenly in the wind. After a moment, she continued. “I’m not sure if I can even explain why. It wasn’t that I feared changing the timeline or something...my visions always come true regardless. Always. But I guess...” She tugged on her short half-ponytail, pondering. “I guess I didn’t want to cloud any of his decision-making, any of his emotions with the specter of the inevitable. I wanted whatever he felt for you to be completely organic. And it is.”

I considered her. “You are extremely thoughtful for someone who spends as much time shopping as you do.”

Lucy laughed in a high-pitched, almost juvenile trill, netting her fingers beneath her chin, her elbows resting on her bent knees. “I do like to shop. I didn’t always though.” She peered off into the trees again, this time pensively. “Did Joe tell you anything about my life before Gwil saved me?”

“Aside from the copious hippie jokes, not really.”

She nodded, her eyes far-away and still lost in the forest. “Gwil and Mercy are inordinately wonderful people. My biological father and mother, unfortunately, were not. And maybe they couldn’t help it, because from what I understand their parents were monsters too. I don’t think of them very often now, not even to resent them. But when I was alive I burned with it, with all that hatred, with all that bitterness. Every bruise was another log on the fire. Every screaming match or hurled plate was a splash of gasoline. So I ran away and found what I fancied to be a new family, and I lived on basement couches and out of vans and in abandoned buildings, and I explored increasingly inventive ways of putting that fire out.”

The October breeze cascaded through the trees, carrying echoes of birdsong and disembodied distant voices and the scent of pine. It reminded me of Joe.

“Chemically speaking,” Lucy said, “that first hit of heroin, that first high...it’s the best you’ll ever feel in your entire life. Nothing else will ever compare. Not skydiving, not backpacking through Southeast Asia on some Pulitzer-prize-winning journey of self-discovery, not winning the lottery, not the births of your children, not falling in love. And once you accept that, what’s the point in stopping? Everything you ever experience will live in the shadow of that needle. You’re twenty-five and you’ve already seen the endgame. You’re born, you suffer, you catch a glimpse of paradise, you pay bills and push shopping carts down the aisles of grocery stores and insipidly smile your way through your husband’s work parties until you die. What’s the fucking point? So I didn’t stop shooting heroin. And the whole time, I knew it was killing me. That’s what they don’t tell kids when they force them to make those idiotic classroom promises to never do drugs. You know it’s killing you, but you don’t care. Because it feels so goddamn good. Because it becomes the only sliver of your existence that doesn’t cut like glass beneath your skin. Sometimes you love things so much you let them kill you, isn’t that ridiculous?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer her; still, I heard my own voice: “Yes, it is.”

“It took dying for me to see that life is worth living. That there’s magic in the mundane and the frivolous. And that there’s beauty everywhere if you bother to look for it.” Lucy uncrossed her trim legs, leapt gracefully off the Volvo, and—with definite but not unkind scrutiny—pulled at the collar of my thrift shop sweater. “Even in your very, very, very misguided fashion preferences.”

The front door of the Lee house swung open, and Joe jogged out, carrying his suitcase. Gwil, Mercy, Scarlett, Rami, and Ben appeared on the porch to wave us off.

“What’d you do?!” Joe demanded, pointing at Lucy.

“Nothing,” she quipped.

“You guys gotta stop doing this!” Joe exclaimed. “You know what you’re doing, you know exactly what you’re doing, you gotta stop cornering people and forcing them to listen to your creepy tragic backstories! Nobody freaking asked!”

Lucy chuckled patiently and stood on her tiptoes to hug him goodbye. “Have fun.”

“You know it.” Joe tossed his suitcase into the Subaru and opened the driver’s door. “Ready, Baby Swan?”

“Almost.”

I walked to the wrap-around porch, climbed the steps, held my hand out to Ben. My stitches had almost completely dissolved over the past week, and the clunky impediment of bandages was no more. Joe crossed his arms and watched from beside the Subaru with an uneasy frown, but he didn’t try to stop me. He nodded to Rami, so subtly I almost didn’t notice. Rami nodded back.

“I will miss your melodramatic brooding immensely,” I told Ben. “Please do some fun family stuff while we’re gone. I’ll see you soon. Dan eich bendith.”

“Dan eich bendith,” he replied, taken aback. And then, after a moment’s hesitation, he ignored my outstretched hand and embraced me, his grasp so strong and yet so careful. His scent like crisp leaves and salted caramel and autumn sieved into a bottle unfolded in my lungs like an opened book.

“I Googled that especially for you,” I whispered. “You’re welcome.”

“I’m in awe.” His words were characteristically sardonic, but I heard warmth in them as well. When Ben pulled away, I saw that everyone else was smiling. Mercy had tears in her eyes.

I retreated back down the porch steps and met Joe by the Subaru. “Okay, mob guy. I’m good.”

He slid on his sunglasses, shook his head, flashed a proud and toothy grin. “You definitely are.”

All the way down Route 101 to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, we listened to Joe’s classic rock mixtapes and my NOAA Ocean Podcast episodes, reviewed the weekend itinerary, ran through the bare essentials for me to understand an MLB game (“Which I am totally not excited about whatsoever,” I informed Joe, who knew enough not to believe me).

When the Boeing 747 ascended above the clouds and unimpeded sunlight poured in from the other passengers’ windows, Joe put on a black sleeping mask over his sunglasses and reclined his seat, tried to nap, passed the time until he would be safe beneath the curtains of the sky again.

Somewhere over the Dakotas, as I leafed through a book about the Great Barrier Reef for my Marine Botany class, Joe’s hand bumped mine. “Hey,” he said drowsily, seriously; and I braced myself for some emotional declaration, some dire warning, some grave realization of the futility of what we agreed—almost always wordlessly, and yet unfailingly—was love.

“Yeah?”

“It’s an emergency.”

“Uh oh,” I replied, smiling now.

“Flag down the flight attendant and get some more of those honey roasted peanut packets,” Joe said. “I’m starving myself back to death over here.”

The Windy City

The bat cracked deafeningly against the baseball pitched at nearly a hundred miles per hour. It was a home run. The crowd erupted into mindless, primal shrieks of conquest; and when Joe jumped to his feet, clapping and cheering and nearly spilling his blue-and-white bucket of popcorn, I found that I did as well. I screamed for the team of a city I’d never lived in, sank back into my seat beside Joe, nestled against his chest as his right arm closed around my waist and hauled me in closer, as his left hand teased me with a soft pretzel nugget hovering just out of reach. And in that moment, I felt like Lucy, snatching Polaroids out of the space-time continuum of the present and the future and the past. There was where Joe and I were right now, of course; the day we had met each other in the nonfiction section of the Calawah University library; the dance floor at Homecoming; the first night he snuck soundlessly into my bedroom window; all those years we still had left to spend together. Not forever, but perhaps long enough.

“I like this baseball thing,” I told him over the roar of the crowd, twirling my fingers around the curling locks of dark hair that stuck out from under his Cubs cap. Or maybe I just like you.

“Whew, thank god.” Joe wiped his forehead with the back of his hand in mock relief. “Now I don’t have to break up with you.”

After the game—a 5-3 Cubs victory, close enough to keep the spectators’ blood pumping throughout—we boarded the L, held onto the metal railings as the packed train car bumped and swerved along, and disembarked in Little Italy. Historic brownstones were interrupted by a freckling of pizzerias, Italian ice stands, and sports bars spilling out shouts of triumph and despair. We were staying in the Four Seasons with a view of Lake Michigan; but we had an hour of daylight—albeit chilled, dreary, and forever threatening rain—left in our Saturday. Tomorrow would be the aquarium, and then dinner before catching our flight back to Seattle, back to the greenery and fog and eternal dampness that I was beginning to think of as my home. Had I really only left Phoenix two months ago? Had I ever really lived there at all?

“So,” Joe said as we walked under shedding green ash and black cherry trees, his arm draped across my shoulders. “Guess what the University of Chicago has. In addition to a killer Economics PhD program, which yours truly will be graduating from in approximately 2027, astonishingly aged not a single day. Maybe he’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.”

“Hideous sweatshirts?” I guessed.

“One of the best Marine Biology departments in the world. And the affiliated Marine Biological Laboratory up in Massachusetts, where they send their PhDs to do research.”

“Wait, seriously?” I stopped abruptly, the heels of my boots squealing against the sidewalk. “You mean...for me?”

He rolled his eyes. “No, for my other girlfriend who is also inexplicably super obsessed with the ocean. I clearly have a type.”

“You want me...to come to Chicago...with you...after graduation? For like...a five to seven year commitment?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Well, that just sounds...serious.”

“Huh. What do you know. I guess we’re serious after all.” He took my hand and pulled me gently forward, leading me down West Taylor Street. He seemed to have a destination in mind.

“How is this going to work for you, anyway?” I asked, beaming uncontrollably now, trotting along beside him. “Living in a place that isn’t Washington or Scotland or Alaska?” Chicago was cold and cloudy for a lot of the year, true, but few cities were Forks-level wet and sunless. Forks-level tyrannically depressing, I would have said two months ago.  

He shrugged, unphased. “Night classes. Sunglasses. Faking a chronic illness so I don’t have to leave our house. I’m really good at that one. Plus I can get a doctor’s note any time I want one. I’ve got connections, you know.”

Our house. He said OUR house.

Joe came to halt in front of a stately yet plain brownstone which now operated as a trendy bookstore, the kind that sold six dollar lattes and hosted anarchist poetry slams on Friday nights.

“Is this where we’re going to crack hipsters’ kneecaps as a bonding activity?” I asked.

“This is where I grew up.”

I looked again, studying the earth-colored stone quarried over a century ago, the wrought iron railings that framed the front steps, the rectangular windows revealing the illumination and shadows of other families’ lives. “Joe,” I said softly, leaning into him, searching for my words.

“There were eight Mazzello kids: Joseph, Charles, Mimi, Salvador, Donna, Lucia, Bianca, and Giuliano.” He rattled them off like a jingle from a fast food commercial. “And I was the oldest. So when my dad dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of his shift at the Zenith Radio factory, it was my job to step up and figure out how to keep everyone fed. I was seventeen and completely hopeless at school back then; Sal was always the smart one, the disciplined one, he ended up as a math professor at Loyola University. I was just some directionless, grieving kid who never shut up. But there was a place for boys like me in Chicago in the 1920s. The mob could get you money. The mob could turn that same incessant chatter that got you bruised at school into something useful. And the mob could give you a family.”

Joe watched the brownstone solemnly, meditatively, his hands in his pockets.

“My mom sobbed for an hour the first time I brought home an envelope full of bills with Hamilton’s face on them. She knew how I got it. But how could she say no, how could she tell me to stop? We’d never seen money like that. All my siblings could finish school. My sisters could have new dresses on days that weren’t Christmas and Easter, my brothers new shoes, Sal the glasses he needed so badly. My mother always had something to put in the offering plate at church. And once you were in the mob, it wasn’t exactly easy to leave. But they took care of their own. After I died, they sent my mother money for years, until her own children were established enough to support her. That’s when I learned that money wasn’t just something that put food on the dinner table or kept the lights on. It’s a way of showing loyalty, of giving people peace and comfort and meaningful choices in their lives. It’s how I’ve been taught to give back to the world. So I guess I shouldn’t have disparaged my fellow vampires back in Forks, because there’s a slice of my tragic backstory, Baby Swan. Now you know. And you should know everything, since we’re in this thing together. Or maybe I just want you to.”

I laid my palm against his cool and flawless face, ran my thumb lightly across his cheek. “You really are serious about me.”

“I am alarmingly serious about you.”

“Even though this thing of ours has an expiration date?” Since I can never become a vampire. Since I will never have the distinction of being a permanent fixture of the Lee coven.

“That’s not a problem for today. That’s a problem for ten or fifteen years from now, whenever you decide you want to settle down and have kids and do the whole Great American Dream bit. You’ll be sick of me by then anyway. You’ll be dying to get away from us. Hahaha, get it? It’s a pun. Dying to get away from the vampires.”

I couldn’t imagine ever being sick of Joseph Francis Mazzello. Still, ten or fifteen years felt almost as good as forever to me. Fifteen autumns, fifteen Christmases, fifteen journeys around the sun that he avoided so deftly. “Why me, Joe?” I asked, incredulous. “You could have anyone. Any human, any vampire. Why me?”

“Because you’re you,” he said simply. And his mystified dark eyes added: What kind of a question is that? “You’re smart and you’re hilarious and you actually care about the world, about where it came from, about where it’s going, about people and places and animals that you’ll never meet. You’re indomitable. You’re fearless almost to the point of recklessness. And yet you’re so kind. You’re even nice to Ben, and humans are never nice to him...they’re either horrified or confused, or they’re too busy fantasizing about him to remember that he’s a real fucking person. But you’ve always tried to see the good in him. Even when he didn’t deserve it.” Joe shook his head, marveling. “And yeah, I’ve...I’ve screwed around, full disclosure. I’ve done the hookup thing. And it was great for what it was. But I never wanted more. I never felt some gnawing, sentimental, Hallmark-channel need for connection, to understand who they were as people. And then I met you, and...I want to know every single goddamn thing about you. I want to know your favorite color, what books you read, what the hell is so appealing about pineapple pizza, what you dream of. I feel like I could never get tired of trying to understand you.”

A refrain circled through my mind like a whirlpool, dragging every other thought down into oblivion: I love him, I love him, I love him. “Blue,” I said at last.

“What?”

“Turquoise blue, like the sky in Arizona. That’s my favorite color.”

The smile, slow and wonderous, rippled across his face. He took my hand again. “Come on.”

Joe led me onwards, down a few blocks and around a corner, as the muted sun receded from the sky and the first stars took its place, pinpricks of celestial light in a blanket of violet, azure, amber, rust. He stopped in front of the Church of Saint Lawrence, established in 1902 according to the sign mounted on the brick wall that faced the street, perhaps the same church that he had once visited with his family as an impatient child, snickering with his brothers and sisters and kicking the back of the pew in front of him with shoes that never fit quite right. There was a fountain bubbling with transparent water, a statue of the Virgin Mary at the center, coins made of copper and nickel and zinc glinting through the water under corridors of silvery luminance cast by the streetlights.

“I lied about not having my own superpower,” Joe informed me mischievously, not at all serious.

“Oh, did you now?”

“Absolutely.” He opened his wallet, rooted around, pulled out a penny and handed it to me. “I can make wishes come true. So go ahead.” He nodded towards the fountain. “Make your wish.”

The penny was worn and nearly indecipherable, but I was just barely able to read that it had been minted in 1928. The same year Joe was turned. “Joe...I can’t just throw this away!”

“You’re not throwing it away. You’re exchanging it for a wish. Now wish.”

I closed my eyes, chose my wish, tossed the penny into the fountain. The plink it made when it hit the water was bright and yet mournful somehow, like windchimes, like flickering candlelight.

“Outstanding job,” Joe complimented.

He was so visibly proud, so content, so faultless. The streetlights threw shadows across the sidewalk, the fountain, the whole world it seemed. I laced my fingers behind his neck, gazing up at him. “What are we doing tonight, mob guy?”

“I’m so glad you asked. You see, we have options.”

“Let’s hear them.”

“Door Number One,” Joe began. “It’s been a long day, and you’re exhausted from the illustrious honor of witnessing a Cubs victory firsthand. So we go back to the hotel, find some shark documentary on tv, order room service, shower, and drift off into a peaceful slumber. Just like last night.”

“Not bad. How about Door Number Two?”

“Door Number Two. You’re tired, but not that tired. We go back to the hotel, find that same aforementioned shark documentary, but totally ignore it and make out instead. Maybe we even round second base, in the spirit of the Cubs. Whatever you’re up for. Then we shower and drift off into a peaceful slumber.”

“Even better,” I said, and I meant it. “And what’s Door Number Three?”

Now Joe became jittery; his eyes darted to the fountain, the church, the cars that rolled lazily by. He was so desperate to conceal his hope, to not impose any undue influence upon me. I felt infinitesimal, almost weightless drops of rain against my cheeks, my collarbones, the downy undersides of my arms. “Well, uh, Door Number Three is...it’s...well...uh...it’s...”

Door Number Three is a home fucking run. “I want Door Number Three.”

“Really? Because you don’t have to say that, you can say no, that’s completely fine, it’s more than fine actually, it’s awesome, it’s totally cool, I’m seriously fine either way, and you can obviously change your mind whenever—”

“Wait.” I broke away from him, yanked my own wallet out of my purse, found the Official Whatever You Want Pass, hastily unfolded it, and presented it to Joe. “I want Door Number Three.”

He barked out a shocked laugh, accepted the pass, studied it in disbelief. “You are full of surprises, ma’am. It took me a hundred years to find a woman like you. And I don’t think I ever will again. Makes one wonder if this whole eternity thing is all it’s cracked up to be.” He tucked the pass into his pocket and kissed me beneath the streetlights, beneath the stars. “So there’s one tiny caveat to my wish-granting superpower.”

“Yeah?”

He smiled impishly, nudging the tip of my nose with his. “You have to tell me what you wished for.” He was joking, as he almost always was; I didn’t have to tell him anything. He wouldn’t press the issue. I doubted that he was really expecting me to answer at all. And yet I wanted to tell Joe; I yearned, for once, to be as clear as Lucy had said he was.

“For you and me,” I replied in little more than a whisper. “And for forever.”

Home

The only thing that startled me was how profoundly unstartling it all was, how wholly uncomplicated, how effortless.

I didn’t feel like a different person afterwards. I didn’t feel that some latent spark of lust, of carnality had been ignited, had singed through me, had left me forever marked like the heights of children ticked off on a doorframe over decades; I felt neither ruined nor awakened, no wiser, no older, no more enlightened as to the incalculable eccentricities of the vast and enigmatic universe. I felt only happiness, and exhausted satisfaction, and a deep, dreamless peace that engulfed me like frothy fingertips of waves dragging pebbles and shells back into the sea. I felt only a homecoming that was measured not in miles but in soul.

We slept in as the morning sun rose over Lake Michigan, bought Ben a hoodie (black, of course, per his usual aesthetic) from the University of Chicago gift shop, strolled unhurriedly through the dimly-lit, relentlessly blue pathways of the Shedd Aquarium. As I stood in the glass tunnel and watched sawfish and blacktip reef sharks soar by overhead, Joe linked his arms around my waist, tucked his chin into the dip of my collarbone, kissed the slope of my jaw.

“What do you think?” he asked, perhaps a touch apprehensively. “Could you get used to the Chicago life for a few years?”

“I would be tempted to kidnap some of these guys and bring them home to live in our bathtub. But yes.”

And Joe murmured, smiling, his lips to my temple: “That’s illegal, ma’am.”

Our flight back to the West Coast took off after dusk, and there was no blinding sunlight for Joe to avoid; only immense glooms of clouds and gleaming distant stars and the unfathomable void of space, cursed with crushing pressure and darkness like the cervices of the ocean floor.

Fifteen years might not be enough, I thought, resting my forehead against the cold airplane window as the city lights died behind us, as Joe’s hand weaved through mine on the armrest. But forever sounds just about right.

Larkin

There once was a boy born in a stone cottage with a dirt floor in a vanishingly inconsequential village just west of Clifden, Ireland. It was February 9th, 1672, bitterly cold, miserably wet, and the sea was murderous with storms. His mother was illiterate, as her mother had been, and as her mother had been as well, all the way back to people who painted mammoths on cave walls with their fingers; she was thirty-three and already exhausted with living, her seven children forever underfoot, her full and ruddy cheeks perpetually smudged with dirt from the field and ashes from the fire. Her husband was a failure and a drunk, but half a day’s worth of work once or twice a week was better than none at all; and as much as she never would have admitted it, he was a tether for her in a world that was often, as she had learned, both lonely and cruel.

She gave the baby boy a name—a strong Irish name, none of that audacious English rubbish—that meant rough or fierce, just like the sea that rose and ruptured against the rocky cliffs outside. He would need to be rough to survive in this world. He would need to be fierce.

He began like all the other children had been: sweet and yet anonymous, yielding, needful, worryingly small. She rocked him absently with one arm as she stirred the stew pot with the other. She sang to him, told him stories long before he could comprehend them, tales of the Lord and the saints and all their malevolent adversaries: serpents, pestilence, demons, dragons. She tossed stray sticks to him so he could carve pictures into the dirt floor and keep out of the way as she labored with the laundry or the sewing. And he grew, and he grew; and there was nothing remarkable about him at all, that boy speckled with mud and soot and the perpetual bruises of children mostly left to their own devices, that boy with pallid skin like his mother’s and black hair like his father’s and eyes so light and vibrant a brown they were nearly gold.

The boy was a baby, and then a child, and then a young man. And his mother realized one day—all at once, as a mother does when their attention is divided among so many other lives, when the children’s analogous faces bleed into each other and even their names sometimes escape her, even those names that she had chosen herself from the stories her own mother once passed to her through threadbare whispers—that people had a habit of following him, of listening to him. That there was an ether of allure that hovered around him like the mists that clung to the precarious, crumbling cliffs that touched the sea; that there was something like what the heathens called magic. And when the war came, that boy who was no longer a boy left his mother’s stone cottage and enlisted in Clifden, lied about his age, signed his name with an X because that was all he knew how to spell. But he was sure to tell the man who handled the ledger that he did have a real name, a good Irish name, a name apt for a soldier, a name that his mother had told him meant rough or fierce: Larkin.

There are men who join wars out of loyalty, principle, love for their homes; and then there are men who join to escape their homes, perhaps to forget them entirely. If you were to consult that ledger signed in a pub in Clifden, Ireland in 1688, you would read that I fought for Ireland, for the Catholics, for Christ the Lord and all his saints. But what I really fought for was my own resurrection: to take that boy stained with dirt and ignorance, drown him in the blood of other mothers’ trivial sons, and dredge up some greater version of myself that I had always known existed, that was hidden somewhere in the netlike darkness of the marrow of my bones.

People follow me, and they always have. I couldn’t tell you why. When I called them to enlist, when I thrusted swords and pikes into their calloused farmers’ fists, when I told them they could fight and live to see their wretched homes again, they believed me. I climbed the ranks like a ladder, like a mountain made of bones. And all those other mothers’ sons laid down for me so I could walk across the bridge of their spines to what I mistakenly assumed was invincibility.

At the Battle Of The Boyne, my horse was shot out from under me. A Williamite caught me beneath the ribs with his dagger. And as I bled out, staring up at the sky and impatiently waiting for the pain to vanish as my consciousness withdrew like low tide, I became aware that someone was lifting me, holding me, spiriting me through the battlefield and then the wilderness; and that my pain, in a disconcerting turn of events, had swelled to a vicious and unrelenting inferno.  

Three days later, I woke to find that I was resurrected again, this time as something more than human. The man who turned me was blond-haired, light-eyed, agile and yet gentle, ancient and yet ever-changing.

“I thought you’d survive,” Nikolai said in a thick Slavic accent, standing over me with a kind smile. Then he helped me to my feet. “You have greatness in you. It sweats out of your pores, it’s in every word you speak. What a shame it would be for all of that to go to waste.”

He taught me everything: how to read and write, how to hunt, how to dodge the sunlight, how to survive an existence that was both theoretically endless and yet forever on the precipice of being cut short. He introduced me to the Draghi, to vampires who were remarkable for their ferocity, or their creativity, or their curiosity, or their cleverness, or all those things at once: Victorien, Honora, Elizabeth, Kestrel, Zhang, Sergei, Ana, Gwilym. And most crucially, Nikolai showed me that my human talents were magnified several times over, that his own followers were not immune to them, that there was power in collecting exceptional individuals like pieces of china stacked in a locked cabinet; and that if I could learn to climb immortal bones, the ladder never needed to end.  

You never quite get used to the power, to the invincibility, to the promise of eternity. You never take it for granted. It hits you, again and again, in ceaseless and victorious waves. Once I was a barefoot toddler who sketched dragons and Catholic saints from the stories my mother told me into the dirt floor of our drafty stone cottage. Now I live in palaces with marble floors, with spiral staircases and libraries and gold-dripping ballrooms, with unobstructed views of any sea I choose. Now I am the dragon.

My phone rang, and I checked the name on the screen. Then I answered. “Hello, beauty. How’s the other side of the Pacific treating you?”

And Liesl answered, in a soft and astonished voice: “I don’t think Lucy can read her. I don’t think any of them can.”

I could feel it again. Another wave, crashing through me like the ocean, like the unstoppable rolling of time: power and insatiability and exhilaration. I smiled in my twilight-lit study as long-dead stars rose outside and the wind howled like wolves over the East Sea. “You know what to do.”

[ciceroisthefamilycat]

I reread Shadow Kissed and Blood Promise as part of my reread (the last post on Frostbite is here)...

VA and FB are great, but SK and BP are the highlights of the series for me (not looking so much forward to SP and LS).

Before I get into that... I did reconsider something on Frostbite: I really rather hope that they have Rose manage to convey some information on their location to Adrian when he visits her dream (or even she has a second dream). And, I would like for she or Mason to suggest to Christian and Mia that they drink from their human captors- I can see Christian being totally reluctant, and them reassuring like “we won’t let you kill them and turn, but you need to be able to move”- even if Christian still refuses, I would like for Mia to at least consider it. These are things that are maybe a bit controversial (taking blood from the unwilling is not a Moroi trait), but I feel like the escape could have used just a bit more dark pragmatism. Eddie’s out of it on endorphins and blood loss, meanwhile Mia and Christian have to basically carry him despite being really feeble themselves (especially Christian after his magic use) while Rose and Mason are trying to clear everyone out. They’ve just realized after like four days, hey wow, we should have used magic sooner, I would think they would question some of their other ingrained lessons.

OK, now Shadow Kiss.

I said before a combined season for VA and Frostbite, and I still actually stand by that. But for SK (and BP) I want a full season (honestly 13 would be preferred to 10 but I’ll take what I can get).

I think one realization I had this time that maybe I hadn’t had before was that in chapter 8, when Rose and Christian go to the Feeders, it’s busier than usual- including Brandon Lazar (a member of the Mana)- I remembered well enough that Mason always showed up after a Mana “initiation” but I don’t recall putting together that  it was why Brandon, and Jesse and Ralf, were all there at the time. I also realized: the rumors that everyone was hearing about Rose and Adrian? I don’t think those arose naturally- I feel certain Jesse and Ralf (as participants in Mia’s VA campaign) were compelling people to believe Rose/Adrian were a thing, and Ralf may have passed that tidbit on to Priscilla Voda. Jesse was the first to bring up Rodrian in Christian’s culinary class, Mason (who threatened them into coming clean about the earlier rumors) has just died... it seems to me like a petty vengeance thing. And if I’m right, that’s the type of plotline that they should make more apparent in an adaptation. 

Adrian... is more pushy and discomforting than I remembered. Like, rich, white guy trying to pull this shit will rightly get criticized by show fans if they keep him as written. I’m not saying rush all of his character growth, and I have to admit I love the “Rose is in red but never in blue” scene but they’re going to have to do better with him. One solution is to focus on his and Lissa’s relationship as much as they can, because I honestly really like that friendship/fraternal relationship too and it brings out the more justified reasons for Adrian being there. Also, I’m just going to reiterate (here and elsewhere in the post) genderbend Adrian please... but if not, at least make him less “creepy young adult lurks on campus of school he didn’t even go to to hit on Rose.” Genderbending would create issues for “Tatiana wants to engage Adrian to Lissa,” unless they instead frame something like “Tatiana wants Adrian to be Lissa’s new best friend, replacing Rose and maybe helping Adrian clean up his act”, and I do buy that it could work- it doesn’t work quite as neatly at making Christian irrationally jealous when Ralf informs him of Tatiana’s wedding scheming (and the subsequent Adrian & Christian fight during the Mana initiation) but... idk, get Aaron back or something, since he comes back in BP anyway (and maybe Jesse compelled them to fight each other when he was breaking the rumors to Christian).

Moving on, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Bromance, of sorts, between Rose and Christian. This is the best of the books for that and I love it so much. Whoever plays Christian would get so much more mileage out of these scenes. The same goes for Eddie, who probably gets to shine more in SK than in any other VA book (and even in Bloodlines, where the focus on Sydrian deprives him of the page-time he deserves). Those guys are going to have some great stuff to work with, including the little bit of hurt Christian feels at Rose’s reluctance to have him as her probationary protectee. I hope she apologizes to him for that one, honestly, while I also hope she gets to throw in a one-liner about how he and Lissa aren’t allowed to ever have a nooner again (because that was a part in why she was so upset that morning and honestly... she deserved to be pissed).

Let’s see... I’m curious how they’ll portray Rose “absorbing” Lissa’s spirit darkness. Like, I wonder if they might start showing us scenes of Lissa practicing auras and then we do get Lissa healing Rose from Adrian’s perspective as he’s studying the healing. The ghosts are also going to be... intense- especially the scene on the plane. And then when Lissa breaks from the torture, Rose calms her and absorbs it, and then she goes crazy. The actresses are going to have some real challenges that I’m excited for. Including later when Rose is grieving. This book honestly has the biggest action pieces and I’m excited for it all: the visit to Court (Ambrose and Rhonda! Mia! the trial!), the Guardians’ practice attacks, the “initiaton” (uggh) and Jesse’s compulsion and then the Cabin, the Invasion (ooof- they’re going to have to trigger warning for that one), and then finally the Cave. I think the Initiation Night, The Invasion, and The Cave will each have to have their own episodes, and I think I would end the Invasion episode right before they go into the Caves honestly (though I would advise releasing those episodes together even if they do a weekly release schedule).

So my pet projects, as pertains to this one:

alive Andre? ok, I’ve given up on this one Scratch that, though I really was ready to; have him at Court (maybe Tatiana’s plotting on marrying him off to Adrian) and build up what that might mean for Lissa’s future... also if he overhears Rose mentioning this “water user from the lower school named Jill Mastrano” let us get our hints about her paternity

I really need full focus on Rose’s mental state in this and how much “they come first” is destroying her at this point; especially in contrast to that brief Mia appearance (which does have to happen) where Rose observes that the best in Mia has come out; also how special that manicure is to Rose

the aging up: I realize it makes Lissa and Lehigh work less well and it also means that instead of Rose leaving on her 18th birthday, her departure date would seem more arbitrary (even if it’s her 21st), but it’s still feasible and still what’s best from a responsible storytelling aspect

ah... this is dark... but a potential departure from the books: Rose decides to visit Jesse before she leaves (yes I realize she wasn’t even going to say good-bye to Lissa but) and makes sure she lets him know that the wards failing were his fault... that he and Ralf looked down on Christian for being the son of two Strigoi, but that when Christian had been deprived for a week of blood he still never considered betraying the dhamphir with him in Spokane. Jesse was so willing to try to compel others to lay their lives down for him... he’s a monster, not Christian. And now the man she loved, a better man than him, and about 20 people overall, are dead because of him and his actions. And she’s going to hunt monsters- he better never cross her again, or she will stake him like any other monster. But... she doesn’t realize: she accidentally killed Jesse during the Initiation rage, and Lisa (not even realizing it) resurrected him... he is now also shadow-kissed... he steps out of the gate at some point to sob, and while the wards are down... he sees spirits of those whose lives he cost

And now Blood Promise

um, I am hornier than Rose for Strigoi Dimitri and I realize this is wrong of me, I just feel the need to put that out there before I continue; also note that Dhamphir Dimitri is not at all responsible for the Strigoi’s actions and if we get that far and people start hating on Dimitri overall and pretending that he himself is an abuser I will be defending Dimka

THIS BOOK! Look, SK destroys me, but this is on another level...

for one, HI SYDNEY (my daughter) KATHERINE SAGE, you’re here and beautiful and oof I am sad about you and food but I am so happy you have Red Hurricane and your handwriting is proper and you are light and life

Ok, now: the biggest problem with this book is something I forgot about: Richelle messes up the time alignment on Lissa’s segment. Like, Rose leaves Baia on Easter Sunday when Lissa has already been at Court for a little while (even though it’s only supposed to be a weekend trip)... and then Rose has been in Novosibirsk for at least a week but Lissa and them are only just leaving Court (and it’s not multiple trips because Jill’s there the whole time). Like, they’ll have to do better with distributing plot and timelines. And granted, I get that Rose stopped looking in for a little while there (because of pain and then her addiction) but it’s a major ??? that Lissa’s weekend lasts so long (if they wanted to portray it as Spring Break, that could work). Also, please give Eddie and Christian something to do at St. Vlad’s, I miss them- if they went with the Jesse thing that could even be an element to the story (and if Jesse wakes up after kissing Aaron... lmao). I am curious how they’ll handle the differences in location in this book.

The Baia segments, and Rose with Dimitri’s family, are so fantastic, but I need Sonya to have more of a role, because I wait the way Rose kind of looks down on her <3 Also, I get that Mark and Oksana weren’t exactly eager to leave home, but I’m pissed that I don’t remember ever seeing them again in the books (also Rose could have asked Sydney to let Denis, Tamara, and them know she was alive). Actually, you know what I want? A standalone episode from, say, when Dimitri was a senior novice, maybe visiting home for a short summer break, and we see Robert Doru hanging out with Mark and Oksana, and we get some Abe and Janine interaction (and some Tatiana- why is this 60 something year old holding it against a woman 20 years her junior having a relationship with Abe?! I guess her dumbass relative who is Dimitri’s father can show up, though hopefully to get beat down), and also maybe this is around when Galina got turned in Prague... I want a flashback episode for this setting, maybe in an episode while Rose is lackadaisical in Galina’s estate, and seeding in the idea that maybe spirit can save Dimitri... but Rose doesn’t know that when an episode or so later she stakes Dimitri... (lol... sob)

Speaking of flashbacks, I would prefer if they could move Rose tending to Dimitri’s wounds during the novice-guardian practicum into the actual Shadow Kiss adaptation (because I do love the scene and we deserve that softness sooner), and instead they can do a scene of him talking about the gilded books in his mom’s house back in Baia. But I really want the snow angel scene. I can imagine the gifsets comparing it to them in the garden at Galina’s estate already. I’m curious how they’ll do the the final showdown against Avery since so much of that is... mental-ish? Hints of auras in mindscapes? Also, I kind of feel like they’ll have to give Rose a manifestation of herself that’s trying to get through to her when she’s high on the Strigoi bites. The Dimitri and Rose actors are both probably going to have some really challenging material (his will be more the physicality and coldness of Strigtri). I am looking forward to the various fights and Rose being a badass taking Strigoi down left and right, I can’t lie (I also really look forward to Nathan’s death- I will enjoy that a bit sadistically... I still want to know his last name).

As for the Lissa arc, let Andre be alive like I’ve said (even if it hasn’t really paid off until this point), and then she shows up with Jill and Andre has the very sad news for her... Dad was a cheater. Hits her spiral harder (which is a challenge considering how bad she was spiraling). Also, there’s more weight to her being annoyed with Jill rather than the irrational assumption that Christian has a thing for the poor babe, but Jill’s still blameless and ugh I feel for her in this book. I hope training with Mia was worth the trip to Hellsylvania with creepy Reed.

Oh, also I really liked Adrian in the second half of this one- I think it was because his savior complex was out in the second half for Rose and he was less “let me hit on her relentlessly.” Anyway, Janine content was also excellent (her offering to take over as Lissa’s guardian, the visit to St. Vlad’s, though why would she come from Nepal for like 4 hrs maybe of hanging out? idk), and the “I’m Zmey Jr, Zmeyette?” from Rose is one of the best lines Richelle ever wrote in this series. I want to see it delivered.

Idk, I love BP but I have fewer thoughts on its adaptation except that I want it.

[somar78]

How I Designed A Supercar Beater For Coffee Money – The Story Of The Burton Trackster

This article was written by the remarkable Daniel Burton, an inspiring young man living with Asperger’s who has spent years carefully designing his own road-legal race car. The design is now ready for testing and final tweaks before being built.

If you would like to contact Daniel regarding the Burton Trackster and you think you can help, please use the contact form on Silodrome here and we’ll connect you to him.

A Little Bit About Me

Bit of a cliché headline, but it’s true and it was born out of necessity! I happen to have High Functioning Asperger’s and due to the difficulties associated with that I cannot stay employed by a regular company. Luckily, Australia happens to have a welfare program for folks like me.

I am considered disabled by the government, so I get paid a modest sum to look after myself, my wife and my daughter. In between looking for a suitable employer and doing small jobs for my company, Burton’s Tube Worx, I put my versatility and ability to learn very quickly to good use inventing and designing things. I don’t see myself as disabled, I’m just not able to meet the status quo!

I enjoy prototyping and have developed skills and collected equipment to help me with the task. A VR helmet, a DSLR camera for photogrammetry, a Lulzbot Taz6 3D printer, a fast laptop for CAD/FEA/CFD and an old laptop for literature. With this equipment I have managed to develop a whole heap of products. Most need a prototype made, patents sought, testing performed and to be put to manufacture.

Just a matter of saving enough money or finding an investor or consortium to make them happen. It can be disheartening at times having done so much work and not being able to show people, so when I went to my first hill climb with my dad at Collingrove in the Barossa Valley, I found a new product to work on.

The hill climb was great, dad and I couldn’t stop talking about building a car of some kind. I remember there was quite some conjecture as to what kind. Dad liked the Ariel Atom and Exocet style cars. They typically run a car engine and transmission, and this seemed like a massive waste of weight for a hill climb vehicle. Not only that but the suspension kinematics were compromised by the chassis shape, a two-seater.

I personally liked the Formula Libre cars. Not just because they were the fastest, but the aero and engineering looked much more complex and interesting! Bell cranks, bike engines and chain drives. These cars made sense to me. They were made fit for the purpose of hill climb! My dad on the other hand had passengers in mind. He wanted to be able to scare mum and get sideways. I wanted to go as fast as I could up the hill, I had to make a choice on what path to take.

The Initial Concept

I ended up choosing the Formula Libre cars at first. The crazy aero and the chance to dominate with clever engineering was far too attractive and on top of all that, because my Asperger’s sometimes rules the day, the Libre cars were stuck in my head. So that’s where I began. At that stage I had a few of the needed skills for designing a car. I was a metal fabricator with a basic machining background and with something in the region of 20 years’ experience on different CAD systems, I felt like I had a good starting point for the chassis.

I ended up drawing about 8 different Formula Libre chassis’ before I realised, this was outside the scope of my skills. I was putting lifted noses, ground effect tunnels and all sorts on. Nothing looked how it should! CAD is not like pencil and paper which is guided by art and flow. CAD is driven by math and constraints so I had to tell the program how high that lift should be or how wide and long that tunnel should look. I wasn’t informed enough to make those decisions yet. It is for those reasons I shifted the design over to a two-seater that was less dependent on aero and more about learning instead.

The Learning Process

Something like 80% of the information was still outside my knowledge base and I had no clue where to start. I ended up doing the millennial thing and Googled it! I found a lot of information, too much information actually and most of it was aimed at the layman! This wasn’t going to get me anywhere! I needed hard data from a good source! Race engineering books where the next natural progression, but on my budget, very costly. I would struggle to gather one book every 2 months. That was when I found an online book depository for quite a cheap fee. Full of research papers and books to fill my appetite. It really took off from there.

I began reading while at the same time doing detailed examinations of images related to that area of the car. A picture for my brain, is like a book! I can glean far more information from a picture than I can from a piece of literature. For the average person the writing is the main information and the image is the supplement. For my brain it works backwards. The image is far more useful, and I find them easy to recall. A very handy skill for my chosen line of interests.

I ended up with a bunch of ideas in my head from this cavalcade of information and from all those years of driving and tuning virtual cars. It was gratifying to be able to tell myself that all those years of playing video games and reading magazines in school was paying off. It had informed me quite thoroughly and not much in these technical books came as a surprise to me (except all that algebra).

I was able to verify my understanding of the science behind these racing cars rather than just my assumptions gleaned from unreliable sources. It was at this stage that I began writing down a spec sheet to form the basis of my drawings. It is surprising what can be gleaned from this short list of specifications.

Designing The Supercar Beater – The Burton Trackster

After making this database of cars in the same class as mine, I looked to the rule of thirds (the track width is equal to 2/3 the wheelbase length). It is derived from the golden mean, which is a composition and ratio guideline based on the Fibonacci sequence. The Fibonacci sequence is found all through nature, from a snail’s shell all the way up to a hurricane. This is where art and maths combine, just like in the best car designs.

From my examination of my new database I landed at a wheelbase of 2560mm and a 1705mm track at first. This quickly changed to accommodate the cars modular design and I ended up finishing at a wheelbase length of 2560mm and a track width of around 1850mm. A bit more over-square than I was after but this has the advantage of less load transfer to the outside wheels allowing quicker cornering. It also allows room for a “utilities” tunnel through the centre of the car and room for two large people.

These people can have a maximum 550mm width at the shoulders and a maximum height of 6’6” or 2011mm. The average human is 460mm across the shoulders and only 5’10” or 155mm. Plenty of room for the larger person which is a common gripe. Boutique sports cars are renowned for this problem. Only designing for the 95th percentile. I prefer to have my cake and eat it too. Clever packaging is how this was eventually achieved.

Safety and comfort seem to be an after thought in a good deal of boutique vehicles. It’s an inherent part of some designs and makes them look great but leaves the occupants quite vulnerable in the event of an impact or roll over event. Even though motorsport is inherently dangerous, I felt that safety should not be sacrificed for performance. Far too many deaths have occurred, and lessons learned to ignored them! It would be an insult to the memories of some amazing men and women! This though process has guided the chassis design quite significantly. High chassis sides were a must, along with an internal divider that separates the driver and passenger compartments.

The angle of the occupant’s legs, neck and spine was also looked at. The shape and cushioning used in the seating has a marked effect on the occupant’s injury rate as show by the research paper conducted by Toyota’s WEC racing program. I chose the safest of the options which will likely be adopted in the 2021 WEC regulations. The internal carbon tub that fits inside the chassis is unfinished in the images presented. It will eventually feature a fixed moulded seat that can be tailored to suit each driver with a polyurethane foam seat insert.

This type of seating style is markedly stronger than a separate seat bolted to the chassis and keeps the driver in the optimum zone of safety under the roll over protection system. To adjust for different driver heights the pedals move to your feet on a rail system. This has the added benefit of keeping the weight balance at its optimum point no matter the driver’s weight and height.

The engine and transmission were the next fork in the road. Front? Rear? Middle-front? Middle-rear? North-South? East-West? The typical road to travel in this niche is either the mid-rear mounted East-West route or the mid-front mounted North-South route. Confused? These are all reasonably efficient ways to go for a boutique car, but after much research they all presented draw backs that were not present with a mid-rear mounted North-South configuration. Compromised suspension kinematics, compromised engine placement, driver comfort and weight balance issues were all things that presented themselves. These were all unacceptable to me and drove my choice to the rear mounted North-South configuration!

Choosing The Engine

Realistically this car can use any engine from the family of inline engines. Due to the high availability of GM LS series engines around the world it was the first engine I looked at. They are quite heavy but being a pushrod engine and having a steep V-angle they are compact. That works very well for diffuser tunnel placement and exhaust routing.

I also looked at the Honda K24 crate engine which is a good compromise between weight, power, packaging and availability. The massive unseen downside to the rear mounted North-South configuration is that a transaxle that is also a structural member is upwards of $20,000 AUD. A big kick in the budget. My prototype needed a cheaper way to get drive and power but still retain the ability to use a transaxle for road legal engines when the time comes.

I considered motorcycle engines back when it was to be a Formula Libre car. The inspiration for my idea came from a combination of Formula Libre and Formula 1000. They use a faux transaxle to contain the chain driven differential, the adjustment mechanism for chain tension and all the associated suspension mounts. I designed something very similar to this and mounted it to a torque plate/bulkhead on the rear of the chassis.

To get the packaging I was after I used a double reduction chain drive. The chain tension adjustment comes in the form of a pair of eccentric bearing mounts that rotate the secondary shaft to properly tension both chains at once. This gives room to optimize the suspension kinematics and allows a quick change of the gearing and chain tension from outside the case. By replacing the sprocket sizes up or down you get a different top speed.

The front suspension system was designed last and mounts on a bulkhead. The main reason for using a bulkhead is suspension kinematics. Normally you would design to mount near or on a tube node and attempt to drive your arms from these nodes or points to the wheel upright. These points can only be placed in certain areas before it starts looking weird from a design perspective and terrible from a kinematics perspective. To overcome this problem, I used a bulkhead and suspension mounting frame that bolts to it. This gives me complete freedom to optimise the front suspension to match the rear.

Once I finish the modelling of the vehicle, I need FEA, CFD, and suspension simulations performed on my model. There is a saying I like and feel applies here. Garbage in, Garbage out! I could do these tests myself, but I am not experienced enough to deliver a guaranteed result without correlating to some type of physical testing. A company that has experience in these respective motorsport professions will be needed. The great thing is that I have developed my model so it can change to be optimised easily.

Hopefully costing less in the long run for testing. Suspension kinematics analysis, torsional rigidity and beaming test, FIA ROPS certification and Aero optimisation are all in my sights. When the optimisation is complete, I will need to purchase some quality sim racing gear and upload the model to R Factor 2 to test drive it. This will help to tell me if all the parameters are correct and show that it performs as I expect it too. This will not only be an interesting test of the car but a verification of my design skills. Any flaws in my ideology or that of the testing companies’ skills should show up here.

Now a few things that don’t really fit into a paragraph anywhere. How much does the weight balance change when going from the bike engine to the LS engine? It goes rearward from 55% to 60% which is inside the typical range of this type of vehicle. It is also easily returned to 55% with a bit of ballast in the nose of the vehicle. How much does the car change across engine types? The suspension kinematics stay the same from the faux transaxle to the real transaxle.

The radiator configuration is situated in the nose for the bike engine and K24 engine. Side pods are added for the LS engine. Container sizes change for the engine’s ancillaries. A new torque plate and engine cradle. Rebuilt dampers with new springs. Larger discs and callipers. Etc. This entire platform allows a system for cost and skills progression. Increase power, aero or grip at a rate that is comfortable for the driver’s skill set and bank account.

The Future Of The Project

I wish I could give some kind of delivery date. But a lack of money could see this project never leave the ground! I have pushed it as a far as I can with next to nothing. At this stage I really need to find a backer that sees the potential of the car and wants to go into business. The big problem there is that people always want to change your designs intent. It would need to be someone who understands that kind of laser focused thinking. Which I feel is a rare thing. Or I need to win the lottery!

If you would like to contact Daniel regarding the Burton Trackster and you think you can help, please use the contact form on Silodrome here and we’ll connect you to him.

The post How I Designed A Supercar Beater For Coffee Money – The Story Of The Burton Trackster appeared first on Silodrome.

source https://silodrome.com/burton-trackster/

[aryapathak-ls25-blog]

Week 8: Digital Sculpture Moving Light

LS 25- Week 8

Conceptual art- questioning whether the artwork or the conception of the art that draws on other concepts ex. He had a picture of a blue light beam that was projected on a screen... is the picture the art or is the projection itself the art

 Interactive art- mobile spectator, you interact with the art... spectator actually impacts the art and the art isn’t complete until the

 Light art installations: our perception

  3.5.18

Expanded Cinema

 Cinema As Object - Sculpture

 Film/ Video Installation Art. 

 Cinema is a femoral, part of the magic or dream life of cinema has to do with that idea.

 The sense of non-objectiveness of cinema is part of its allure in a way.

 We have very little idea of how this came to be, the mark of the best classical cinema is the film that hides its own traces of coming in to its being. 

We immerse our selves in to the story lines. 

 The drive toward ultimate seemlessness becomes the object as technology of cinema continue to develop further. 

 Film and light could have a sculptural aspect to it.

 Laszlo Moholy- Nagy - Light Prop

    -How one could work with light and project with light 

    -Create objects that could alter light and change light was something he was very interested in. 

    - 

 Light Play in Black White and Grey

- Starts off with scripts of film as sculptural objects.

-  the device rotates on a motor and a projection of light is passed through a bunch of objects on the device to cause the distortion of the light to make a bunch of shadows that rotate around the projection.  

- It also goes in terms of white as well 

- and then in to grey. 

 Anthony Marcar

"Line Describing a Cone" 

 The film that is running through the projector is slowing drawing a singly line that extends and extends

the emphasis is on the beam of line that is being drawn, creates the sense of solidarity and that it becomes an object within itself.

What is light? What is the relationship between Light as a material and something as a ephemorality. 

 Film

There is a projector shining and people waving their hands in the light in attempts to make shapes. 

They see the cone given by the light as an object therefore want to pierce through it.     

  Film

A bunch of screens and multiple projectors going back and forth from reality. A very immersive environment with loud speakers.

 Watching this makes me feel like I am actually at the place they are showing on all of these screens. 

 Maybe that is the point of this film is to show the power of screens, lights and sound to help individuals feel as if they are in the place and truly immerse themselves in to the screening 

 A sense of simultaneity, people become mobile spectators, people become as they are able to move around and get different experiences. 

 Picture of a series of sculptures by Robert Irwin.

Room light sculpture

    - No light technology 

    -Only shadows and Reflections from Dawn to Dusk. 

    -The shapes change through out the room from the course of the day. 

    -The space is divided by a series of screens., this allows the light coming in to reflect in the different ways

    - some could argue this cinematic as the shapes are in motion and are changing through out the day. 

    -  This is a "Motion" picture installation. 

 Objective Art

 The View on the mind in the viewer rather than in an object

  Space as Medium

-from Medium Specificity to Site Specificity- where the work 

 Marcel Duchamp

Famously took a urinal in the men's room and place it in the gallery.

This makes us ask the question : "What is Art?: What can we distinctify as art? A kind of catalyst for the viewer to actively engage in the set of questions that become philosophical and ethical. 

 Joseph Kosuth

put a dictionary definition of meaning in the gallery as a painting and art. 

 Vague and Complex.

How do we articulate that something means something. 

 Nam Jun Pike

"Standing Shiva" 

using both traditional sculptural objects and TV Cinema to make comparisons of both perspective. 

 3.7.18

March 7th

 Jim Campbell. Moving Light Artists

  First Film he shows is hit exhibit at the NY exhibit 

Trying to show what it could feel like being mentally ill

He portrayed fire on the individuals being filmed, sometimes froze them

  Memory Recollection

A lot of tv screens

If would start from the screen on the left and delayed showed the movements moving down the line of the screens.

  Digital Watch

 A portrayal of the watch and the image of the individuals on to the watch it self.

Tried to portray a times frame and wanted to inco

rporate that aspect in to his art.

 Ruins of Light

 First public art project he created in the Phoenix Suns Arena

Captured peoples imagery and super imposed on top of still images from scenic scenes from various places in the world. 

Wanted to get rid of the taco bell and mcdonalds from the imagery 

  Created a couple of works that were dedicated to the uncertainty principle 

there was a Buddha in the cube and the closer you get to the sculpture the foggier it got so you only got to see the shadow of the Buddha.

 Untitled (for Heisenberg).

 Light projected on to the bed of salt

theory of abstraction

the more you would approach the figure the less you would see

 Anti Interactive works the more you wanted to see the less you would actually see

 Reading the Bible

The Bible hung up while some one was spelling out the bible verses.

 Cyclical Meter and Cyclical Counter

 Clock represents the flow of air coming out of this woman 

 Camera Pointed at a candle inside the Brooklyn bridge, used a speaker to amplify sounds of wind  

 He wanted to create an interactive work with no goal and not game oriented and this led to a piece of work that changes color based on peoples touch of the screen. Images only come on when there is no sound and vice versa.

 He started thinking about what goes in and out of the computer and wanted to focus on the Reconstruction Filter. 

 Ambiguous Icon

Created his own display icons 

"Running Falling"

showing it with and with out and diffusing screen.

 Fight

A boxing match in color but by filtering out the pixel structure the information is more comprehensible by brain 

88 Pixels and at the limit of percieveability.

 Fire and Freeway And a Walk 

This work defines an image simply by its perimeter with a black picture and a string of LED lights all around the perimeter. 

 Primal Perception

Not enough details to have the analytical part of your brain to work so it shuts off.

It allows a subliminal part to show in terms of interpreting the work of art 

 Motion and Rest

six  different disabled individuals walking to their gates.

the medium and tech and content all came together.

 Wave Modulation

Ocean Waves going and gradually going in to regular speed motion and eventually stopping it. It is blurry and low res so it goes from representational to abstract 

These works have a lot in common in sound.

  Home Movies

Pixels instead of facing out are facing the wall. 

There is no way of seeing the image with out the display device.

Very Low Res as well 

 Last Day in the Beginning of March

Visual Poem about the last day of his brothers life

Room that you walk in to there is a series of about 3 foot circles projected to the ground 

Not a work of visual art but more about feeling it and being there.

25 different rhythms of being there that day.

 Ocean Mirror with Fragments 

Low Resolution Technology in public art works.

UCSF for about 10 years.

Glass Wall of images made up of 49 cubes, each cube was spread out in the garden . The whole garden dances minimally throughout the whole garden. 

 In Hong Kong the ICC building

he built an imagery of an individual swimming up the tallest building. 

(Definnitely the coolest imagery I have seeen) 

BLOG POST:

This week we discussed digital sculptures and moving light. Professor Skoller discussed how part of the magic or dream life of cinema has to do with that idea that film is ephemeral; the mark of the best classical cinema is when film hides its own traces of coming in to its being, allowing viewers to fully immerse themselves in the art. Reflecting on my favorite movie of all time, Carol (2015), really helped me internalize this point. Part of the reason why I loved this movie so much was because, for about 2 hours, I felt like I was actually there, living in the 1950’s, and like I was literally a part of the relationship between the 2 main characters. We also discussed conceptual and interactive art. Conceptual art involves questioning whether the artwork or the conception of the art is really the focal point of a piece. Interactive art is art where the spectator actually impacts a piece. The art isn’t complete until they’ve seen it and reflected back on their own life. For example, McCall’s film seemed like an example of conceptual art. I found myself thinking that the point of the film was probably to show the power of screens, lights and sound to help individuals feel as if they are in the place and truly immerse themselves in to the screening, rather than to have the audience look at the actual images depicted on the screen.

In discussion, we talked about the responsibility that artists face when making a public art piece that people have no choice but to look at, which also relates to Jim Campbell’s lecture. Campbell’s first public art piece was Ruins of Light, which captured peoples’ imagery super imposed on top of still images from scenic scenes from various places in the world. I thought it was interesting how, from the readings, it didn’t seem like Campbell was super into public light installations. I’ve included a quote below:

Basically, Campbell himself seemed to be turned off by flashy light installations, yet he still decided to take on the the salesforce project, because he was thought it would be a fun challenge. He saw his work as an experiment and was interested to see how people would react; in fact, this was a common theme in Campbell’s work. One of his main goals was to create interactive work that avoided being formulaic; this was clear when he was talking about Hallucination and Digital Watch and how they didn’t elicit the response from viewer that he’d hoped it would. It seems like Campbell is very considerate when developing public art pieces and he makes sure to think carefully about how pieces will affect the public.

Here is a picture from another public art piece called Skygate, which is an outdoor 1985 stainless steel sculpture by Roger Barr, installed along the Embarcadero in San Francisco: 

[ramrodd]

COMMENTARY:

Neil Richardson, what you need to understand, as an alleged leadrship guru, is that there is your version of leadership based on 3rd Wave High Performance and there is the US Army Ranger School leadership model, which Terry Collins and I employed to put the process in motion that created the PAC Rugdy national championship. Everybody at SUD was bought into Ken Green's vison of producing test level rugby players in the Good Ol' US of A just like the teams he played for in Argentina back in his day. My role, as the resident 5th Wave High Performance guru, was to make that happen. It did  As far as I know, I am the last Sud skipper to win a tournament in the fall of 1975. I might have the timing off, but Terry can tell you. He was my Sherman to my Grant before Vicksburg.  I don't know if he understoos what I was doing, but he was my 6 until we both more less left active participation in the Sud community. Sud was my first Learning Community I can point a finger at and say "This is how it works. I's fun and easy to do.

The community is a capitaist tool AS EXISTS the first time I look at it.

What this appointment of Mulvaney means is that the big money behind Trump want to recreate the economic conditions leading up to the 2008 mortgage crises. These people what America to blow so they can pick the pieces like they did with the Resolution Trust Corporation. In terms of the dynamical processes of 5th Wave High Performance, the Resolution was a direct result of Bob Dole's 1986 Tax Reform. What they did was to remove a bunch of tax shelters that evolved beginning with Nixon's domestic program into the sort of Yupped Liberation Front vaction tax shelters like White Water that was drinving the economic recovery of America from Stagflation and blew up several strata of wealth I associate with Nixon's Affirmation Action agenda, including properties associated with S&Ls that had done a lot fo Junk Bond financing to support the growth of the Yuppie Liberation Front's rising afluence associated with the New Deal and Democrat Party. You remember that constant stream of investigatons into White Water by the Conservatives, the basis for the Crooked Hillary narrative? This was collateral damage from Bob Dole's 1986 Tax Reform. The Resolution Trust Corptoration was the strategic goal of the legislative design. The outcome was the largest transfer of wealth from the American middle class to basically the class of Olligarch's associated with the Koch brothers and Jeff Bezos flogging Trump for Paul Ryan's Ayn Rand inspired Tax Reform.

These poeple want to bow up the country, some because they are anarchists like Bannon and Newtie who like to watch things burn, like the arsonist in The Stand, but most, like the Koch brothers and Jeff Bezon, just want to privatize America because they are really smart guys, like you, the smarest guys in the room, like Enron, but greed has made them stupid.

Whatever it is that informs your attitude about greek letter fraternaties is what makes you stupd, It's a characteristic of 3rd Wave High Performance. Moral compromise elevated to high principle.

Now, when I took over as skipper in the spring of 1975, Sud was one of the top Rugby clubs in America in terms of tactical elegance and strategic efficacy. Our culture was based on attracting players at the leading edge of test level capacities on a walk-about of some sort and put on entertaining rugby while constantly training Americans by immersion on state-of-the-art international play. I was fortunate to be a part of that dynamic at the A-Level before I became skipper, and, in different circumstances, I never would have considered become captain, but we were at a crises of sustainabiity that could have stalled, if not killed, the achievement of Ken Green's vision for ever.

The crises was that we relied far too heavily on John Muir's foot to humilate our rivals with hair-breadth escapes and near disaster, We could keep the game close with the most physical, and athletic teams west of the Mississippi with our supeior understand of Rugby and it's Laws and draw them into a fatal error which gave John a shot at goal from practically aware in the same ZIP CODE as the uprights and watch the Washington assholes wilt in the face of a superior moral truth.

But, after a series of brillian seasons, our sail began to luft and not real headway towards Ken Green's vision for a SUD National Champion faded. I had played on a championship rugby team my freshman and sophomore year at Indiana and watched that focus drain awary my junior and senior year. I played with an All American, Art Stump, and with a Green Beret bootstraping a masters degree and I absorbed those quailities as performance metrics I continue to apply. Dynamical metrics. And what had happened at IU was happening at SUD and I was seriously concerned and I campaigned to be come club captain and got the job and won the tournament which was the result of the transformation process I put the SUD community through to install 5th Wave High Performance, Not to put to fine a pont on it, but I developed the club's operational performance the same way I did my platoon in Vietnam, with the help of Terry and a British Army officer who voluteered his time coarch us. I built on the existing of the club, which was exemplified by the attitudes of Kent and Trish Daniels, Peace Corps veterans from a tour in Kenya and their sort of White Mischief savoir faire, but in a stew of a totally cosmopolitan community. It was a time of a moveable feast.

Now, it took a long time for that National Champion to emerge as the fulfillment of Ken Green's vision, but it has and it was as result of a deliberate process I set in motion. After we won that tournament, I began to search for my replacement, We had the advantage of the Bottom Line as an international destination for expatriate ruggers looking for a warm hearth and conivivial society and the entire social calendar was basically a continuous focus on recruiting and you can ask Terry how that worked out. It was a wonderful time, But I knew I had to leave because I had not vision on how to build the corporate aspect of the club and, when Quinton Lawson finally arrived, I was able to get out of the way, There was an element in the club that wanted me to move a whole lot faster than I did, but I left when the future of Ken Green's vision was a assured by competent stewardship and Quentin Lawson was that man, I asked him to stand as my best man so that some day I could explain why he was part of my wedding. So I could help you become a serious leadership guru instead of a captive member of the Yuppy Liberation Front and an unintended co-conspirator with Steve Bannon and Mike Mulvaney.

Putin had nothing to do with the election hacking. If you agree with Hillary Clinton's assessment of Putin, you are part of the problem and the other side of the same cultural warfare bullshit that began between the SDS and YAF and continues with Trump voters and the Yuppy Liberation Front coalition of the Democrat party who voted for Adrian Fenty's gentrificaion agenda. It's something of a package deal. Fenty's agenda was a liberal version of privatization.

I also began to curtail my rugby in order to continue to assemble Plan B after being scare out of PLan A (a military career) by a crypto-Nazi up my chain of command in Vietnam. Plan A was to make my bones in Vietnam, marry my college sweet heart and retire as the Commanding General of Tradoc and watch the hurricanes come across Cape Fear from the picture window on the second floor of the Commanding General's quarters at Ft. Monroe,

Plan B was to get filthy rich and marry my college sweet heart, To this end, I began working on the Soviet airplane deal November 1975 and I was being purely on the come by 1977, when Terry raised $150 to keep my out of jail on the sidelines of a C Side Sud game, Terry can tell you about it, I was living in my offices in Dulles and the Soviet airplne deal, the X-Avia Project, was my path to getting filthy rich and marrying my college sweet heart and becoming even richer by doing lots of business deals witht the Soviet economy like Armand Hammer.

I was working at the leading edge of the Nixon-Brezhnev initiatives and Nixon's domestic program. Because of their hatred of Nixon, similar to your hatred of fraternities, Democrats, with the exception of Stuart Eizenstadt, have never understood Nixon's domestic program and, consequently, have bought into Reaganomics more or less whole cloth, which is why Fenty's gentrification agenda attacked affordable housing: you didn't know any better. Democrats were out of ideas when they let Reagan beat Carter (and Trump beat Clinton) and Reagan seemed to be good for their new wealth.  Nixon's domestic program was based on implementing Eisenhower's 1956 Presidential Platform and Eisenhower's 1956 Presidential Platform was an validation of, and a double-down on, the New Deal. Stuart Eisenstadt understood this and was making Nixon's domestic program work and an essential element of that program was a gentrification model based on the complete continuium of housing, which Muriel Bowser finally embraced as the theme of her administration, and not the truncated Trump version of gentrification employed by Fenty and his Yuppy Liberation Front warriors.

You see, I worked for Elizabeth Falcon's Housing for All campaign, which restored the original intent of gentrification through her determination to capitalize the Housing Production Trust Fund with $100 million commitment for affordable housing, I live in a building with long-term financing from the Housing Production Trust Fund as a direct result of the Housing for All campaign, I testified before Bowser's economic committee when she was running for mayor. I didn't vote for her or Fenty, but it was nothing personal and she is doing the right thing in terms of the corruption of the original intent of Nixon's gentrification. If we hadn't gotten that financing through the TOPA process, the house would now be either a Air B&B for the Yuppy Liberatin Front Sharing Economy or very expensive condo's for young, upperwardly mobile members of the Yuppy Liberation Front farm team. Without that room, I am a homeless veteran.

Which is why you need to understand, as an alleged leadership guru for the Yuppy Liberation Front that there is your verion of 3rd Wave High Peformance leadership and the 5th Wave High Performance leadership model of the US Army Ranger School . You aren't broken, but badly oriented, which is easy to fix. I've sent you The Leadership Secrets of 5th Wave High Performance. We can do for America what I did for Sud American de Rugby in 1975. Ask Terry Collins what he remembers.

But, here's the larger thing, the first thing Democrats, including Hillary, need to do is recalibrate their understanding of Putin's agenda. American needs to take his "Sovereign Democracy" agenda seriously.  We were working at the leading edge of what has become Sovereign Democracy with the X-Avia Project in 1975. Armand Hammer led the way on that, to some degree, but George Soros was doing similar work in the Warsaw pact countries, espeically Hungary, at the same time. Vietnam had completely crippled the Soviet economy: if your business model is based on conquest and plunder, but the conquest fails and there is no plunder to cover even the cost of the investment in conquest, you're fucked. That's what Nixon and Brezhnev were trying to fix and Putin is still working on the problem

What Ken Burns Vietnam (as an example of the Oliver Stone version of Vietnam) is that, when the military was talking about a war of attrition, it had nothing to do with body counts. That was Hanoi's decision: uncountable cost. Vietnam was a battle in the larger Cold War and the war of attrition was against the Soviet economy. We lost Vietnam, fair and square, but achieved a win-win when Gorbachev pulled the plug on Marxism.  The problem is, because Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, agree with Hillary Clinton about Putin, we are losing the war against the Deep Agenda backing Trump and proposing Tax Reform in order to put Reaganomics on steroids. For the Soviet Union, Vietnam was like the battle of Borodino for Napoleon: it was a battle he coudn't afford to fight and a battle he couldn't afford to lose. We fought, we lost, no more Soviet Union.

Now, that's not a popular opinion about Vietnam amoung the Yuppy Liberation Front.

Anyway, the people who control the selections for the American Eagles Rugby Team employ the same 3rd Wave High Performance model you use, This was a problem with American rugby in 1975: it was dominated by draft dodgers who selected people to play test matches based on their ideas of what transcendent performance required. I protested against the staus quo selectors as skipper by asking three players, John Muir, Art Weber and Mike Green, to not play on the Potomac select side because the politics of the PRU was producing inferior rugby and that continues to bubble up to the Eagles, who are slowly becoming a credible test competitor. If I could have been a player/coach at that point in the same way I was at SUD, the All Blacks would becoming to America to challenge the Eagles for possession of the World Cup. That's the difference between your model of leadership and mine.

And, as you come to see this, the fraud of Reaganomics will become evident> Muriel Bower is headed in the right direction with the Housing for All version of gentrification, which is an element of the economics of Jesus as defined by Mark 9:37.  It's a paradigm shift that will crush Trump and all he represents.

And it will begin to spill over into Putin's Sovereign Democracy in constructuve ways far more efficacious than the current carrot-and-stick approach of sanctions.

Just ask Terry Collins.

[gwdbp]

G&W Incorporation and Dune Park Construction: Part One

  I will skip a lot of railroad history about Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Illinois.  If such history becomes relevant, I will update the blogs or posts as necessary.  To get a sense of pre-modern day NWI and Illinois, check out http://oprt.org/history-1.htm.

There are numerous moving parts to the begins of railroad history in Northwest Indiana.  I will be very careful with how I describe them and to be as accurate as possible.  Also, you may see me interchange the name a lot from “The G&W” to “DPB”.  Just note that I am referring to the Dune Park Branch.

NWI looked slightly different back before the G&W was built.  Before the railroads, trails were used for wagon trains and foot travel.  The trails were first created by Natives, and subsequently acquired by legal and illegal means by the Federal Government and private enterprise.  Plank roads were laid out on a lot of these trails.  The plank roads later became track beds for the major railroads, more-or-less.

I am not quite sure but I believe that the Buffalo & Mississippi Railroad was the first railroad in the region, being chartered February 6th, 1835.  It was not built west that far beyond Michigan City.  Its name was change to Northern Indiana Railroad (NIR) on February 6th, 1837 and it ran from the eastern boarder of Indiana to Michigan City and southeast from Michigan City to LaPorte.

Michigan Southern Railroad (MS) planned to use NIR’s line in its push to Chicago, and operations began November 30th, 1850.  The MS & MC mergers continued to accelerate throughout the mid-to-late 1800′s.  There were numerous name changes, so numerous that I will not waste time listing them all in this post.

As far as I can surmise, rivals Michigan Central (MC) & Michigan Southern Railroad (MS) were the first two major railroads to cross NWI and access Chicago, with MC being the very first, being maddeningly aggressive with MS in its push from Michigan to Chicago.  MS had to use some legal trickery in order to cross more than three miles into Indiana.  MS & MC were able to build their connections to Chicago through a series of mergers with smaller railroads into themselves.  

Here’s a photo of railroads and pipelines dated 1900.*mistakenly labeled 1850

Let’s get a little bit closer.

You can see by 1900 there were several railroads coming through the area.  The DPB is apart of this, but it’s running through the southern portion of where US Steel sits today.  This is a detail that I believe most people don’t realize, and it will have severe consequences for the G&W in the future.  

In spite of MC’s aggression, MS’s fortunes changed.  NIR eventually merged with MS to form Michigan Southern & Northern Indiana Railroad (MS&NIR) in 1855.  The Cleveland, Painesville and Ashtabula Railroad (CP&A), which did not operate in Indiana, leased the Cleveland and Toledo Railroad (C&T) in 1867.  CP&A changed its name to Lake Shore Railway (LSR) a year later and in 1869 LSR merged C&T into itself.  That same year, MS&NIR merged with LSR to form the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway (LS&MS).  

These strategically important series of mergers allowed for the LS&MS to extend from Chicago to Buffalo, NY... as well as whatever ROW’s it had in Michigan and elsewhere in the Midwest.

And finally, the final piece of this puzzle.  In 1877 New York Central & Hudson River Railroad (NYC&HR) took notice of the LS&MS.  It bought majority stock and became the owner of the entire LS&MS system.  This led to the creation of the new New York Central Railroad (NYC).  This action would leave NYC as top dog in the region, with MC being a rival.

Now - let’s talk about Indiana Harbor Railroad (IHR) and Illinois, Indiana & Iowa Railroad (II&I) or (3I/Old Three I/3 Eye Route).  The 3I was a successful coal running railroad that terminated in Churchill, SE of Ladd, IL (southwest of Joliet).  3I built the portion of the line that went from Streator, IL to South Bend, IN.  Only a small segment of the Indiana line is still in use.

The photo below shows a line map.  The blue line is the Norfolk Southern (NS) Kankakee Route.  This is a part of the old 3I Kankakee Belt.  The red lines indicate portions of the line that are now abandoned.  I bring it up because the 3I line used to connect to the Chicago line via the Kankakee Belt @ South Bend.

IHR - different from the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad -  was incorporated April 17th, 1896 in Illinois.  In 1901 Indiana Harbor (now East Chicago), a city, was constructed to accommodate the Calumet region’s shipping needs, centered around IHR.  MC and LS&MS financed the endeavor.  In 1905 IHR purchased track from MC in the Calumet District of Chicago, and track that lead to Union Stock Yards. MC & LS&MS obtained whole stock in IHR October 31, 1907, changing the name to Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad (IHBR).  This brought the IHR into the NYC system.  NYC made Charles W. Hotchkiss General Manager, as Hotchkiss was the creator of the IHR.  

Now this bit is confusing Firstly... on August 9th, 1906 NYC merged the 3I with IHR and the Danville and Indiana Harbor Railroad to form the Chicago, Indiana and Southern Railroad (CI&S).  YET on the other hand, IHR was reorganized into the IHBR.  The confusion comes into play because I’ve read in other forums people who’ve said that IHR was completely different from IHBR, and I find that to be highly unlikely.  The IHR is only different from the IHBR in the sense that IHBR was brought into the NYC system through MC & LS&MC's capital stock ownership.

CI&S stock was owned by Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway (LS&MS) as well as Michigan Central Railroad (MC).  Bear with me.  CI&S’s stock was owned by LS&MS and MC.  New York Central (NYC) owned stock in both LS&MS and MC.  Get it?  Got it?  Good.

Here’s the critical part.

MS were the ones who originally built the line that would later become the DPB.  It had track laid that ran west through the north end of Gary.  I believe it was called the Indiana Harbor Lake Shore Line (or branch) or something close to it. 

This can be proven by looking at a map.  Here is the one claiming to be from 1850 again.  I say claiming because on this map it’s labeled LS&MS - yet LS&MS wasn’t incorporated until 1869.

Top right corner - that would be be Baillytown (present day Burns Harbor).  You can clearly see where MC ran into Hobart and MS ran westward into Gary (wasn’t Gary then). The MS line ran exactly along the same route the DPB is now.  It was not built by IHR, though IHR could have operated along the MS/LS&MS later on before being reorganized into IHBR.  You’ll see what I mean below.

We move the map further west and you can see the path that LS&MS took through Gary.  MC’s route can also be seen.  See the shaded area at the center of the photo labeled “New Stock Yards”?  That’s the property that will later become US Steel.  It is unknown to me who first deemed this area to become stock yards before US Steel got involved.  Little known fact: There was a lighthouse on the US Steel shoreline.  It was first lit in 1837.  There is a newer lighthouse built in 1911 that is still in use today but not publicly accessible.

When US Steel bought this property, the LS&MS ran right through it on the southernmost end of the shaded area.  LS&MS had to remove a large section of its Lake Shore track, in 1904 - before the steel mill was built.  Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O) also had to remove their tracks, but it was not cut off like LS&MS was.  We’ll get to that in a future post.

CI&S founded the Gary & Western Railway Company (G&W) the same year construction of US Steel commenced.  Some accounts I’ve read say that the G&W was a purely CI&S venture with NYC, others say basically that the G&W was a subsidiary of US Steel and was operated by CI&S.  I can’t say either way - a big grey area there.  Until proven otherwise - I’ll say that G&W was a subsidiary of US Steel and US Steel worked with CI&S to build it.  I seem to remember reading this somewhere, but I can’t remember the source.

According to the ‘Biennial Report of Fred A. Sims Secretary of State of the State Of Indiana for the Fiscal Term Ending September 30, 1908’ - on October 6th, 1906 the G&W received $200,000 in stock.

According to an Indianapolis Star article published Sunday, October 7th, 1906 - Articles of Incorporation were drafted with Secretary of State Fred. A Sims the day before - October 6th, 1906.  It stated as follows:

“Gary and Western Railroad Company, to build nine miles of track in Lake County as part of the Chicago, Indiana & Southern Railroad - capital stock, $200,000.”

G&W rebuilt the LS&MS line through Gary, moving it to the south of US Steel and elevating its route to avoid grade crossings.  The G&W DPB was a single track, standard-gage, steam railroad.  It’s westernmost end begins at Gibson Yard in Hammond, Indiana, heading east through Ivanhoe Junction in Gary, curling north over Route 12/20 (5th Avenue).  The eastern portion of the elevated line reconnected with the remaining portion of the original IHR/CI&S line east of Gary Works at a point known as “G&W Junction”.  From this junction, the G&W continued east, terminating just west of the area known now as Burns Harbor at a huge sand pit.

LS&MS is who is cited most often for the creation of the DPB, but it is evident that CI&S, maybe in conjunction with US Steel, was the one responsible for reconnecting it after it was removed.  It’s hard to nail down exactly when the original track bed was lain by MS between Burns Harbor and Chicago but I estimate that MS did so at least 50 years prior to the construction of US Steel.

This is nowhere near the definitive story of RR history in NWI, but as far as the Dune Park Branch is concerned, this can shed a lot of light.