#but now i am mostly fine and the existential dread is gone

[senadimell]

[whydoeseverythinghurt]

Someone tell me Lower Decks gets better

Edit: So I am hearing good things from very angry people, and I think that means that it’s fine.

I know that a lot of people like Lower Decks, and I think in isolation, I would be one of them, but this is supposed to be Star Trek, right? I like Rick and Morty’s particular brand cynicism, and hopelessness, and I know a lot of the people working on Lower Decks come from there, but that just isn’t Star Trek.

Disclaimer: I only saw the first episode, so most of this can be discounted if that isn’t an accurate depiction of the show as a whole.

Star Trek started off as a ‘perfect’ utopian future, that was about what its creators thought we should aspire to. But from the get go we are shown that there are many issues with it, and that it is a utopia because someone is always fighting against the bad actors, working to improve life, and deal with all those issues. Star Trek is about reform from the inside.

Kirk and Spock both think the Admiralty, the Starfleet Code of Conduct and even the Prime Directive are needlessly restrictive, so what do they do? They find loopholes.

Spock tells Commodore Decker that he won’t stand for the endangerment of the crew, and if he wants to call it mutiny he can do so the second they get back to civilization, where Spock will be allowed to plead his case. Kirk is told that all the Court Martial business can be swept under the rug if he’s willing to give up his pride, and he says no. He forces them to have to go through the process, so that he can plead his case, but also to demonstrate that the system should work, it shouldn’t ignore issues.

Picard and River find out that the Admiralty are being controlled by worms, and take it upon themselves to stop the damage that they are doing. (Such a Star Trek sentence, I know.)

Deep Space Nine as it progresses makes the show about how the ‘utopia’ is based on colonialist ideals, and leaves behind the most vulnerable in society. In the beginning this is done with the justification that if they help the people suffering and being discriminated against, then they may lose a potential ally, or gain an enemy. The government decides that it isn’t worth the risk, and let’s people suffer.

But Deep Space Nine is not just as amazing as it is because of the Holocaust metaphors, its also because it pushes at the moral fabric of the Federation. It asks the question “What happens when push comes to shove, and your perfect society descends into war?” And it shows the fallout, and it shows the toll on people’s lives, and it shows that even when you aren’t living in a perpetual state of war it’s very difficult to go back.

Voyager asks “What happens when no one is looking? What happens when all you have are your ideals and morals that come from a society you are no longer attached to (that we as the audience know, no longer exists)? Do you sacrifice your morals so that you can get back to your utopia? In fact, do you sacrifice your ideals for your utopia as a whole. Or would sacrificing them make it something other than a utopia?”

Haven’t seen all of them yet, so: Discovery says “What happens when you make the wrong moral judgment (or depending on interpretation, the right one, but no one allows you to go far enough)? What happens when you are the scapegoat that they blame an entire war, on? Even one that has brewing since before you were born. What do you do when they place the blame squarely on your shoulders, and solely at your feet? What do you do when the one person who gave you a chance to prove yourself turned out to be lying the entire time, and actually wanted you to be what everyone else thought you were? 

“What do you do afterwards? How you trust someone again after that kind of betrayal? What do you do when some goodie two shoes, who has never seen the horror that you have, comes waltzing in and trying to apply their morals to your life? How could they possibly win your trust?” That one gets a definitive answer, they show their convictions, even when no one is watching, they say, “we have to do the right thing.”

It goes on to ask several others, (from what I know) which are in some ways similar to later seasons of Deep Space Nine, “What do you do when the utopia you loved and fought and bled, and that people died for, is gone? How willing are you to fight to get it back?”

Lower Decks introduces a character who sees the moral failings of Starfleet, shows them to other people and then encourages them to give up, and not try to make the situation better. They have influence, and could easily seize power, but what do they do? Nothing. They watch as people who should not be in charge remain in power and do nothing about it, and discourage anyone who wants to try. They don’t want things to be different, they want to rebel against their parents. And that’s it, not corrupt institutions, not bad protocols, or worse people in charge. They want their parents to notice them.

That is not Star Trek. Star Trek is about hope in the most dire of circumstances. It’s about persevering and going against the odds, even when you know you’re probably going to die anyway, but you still have to try. 

It is about not just fighting for yourself, but for your family, your people, your crew, caring about the faceless and the nameless, the ‘lesser’, those that cannot fight for themselves. Standing up to and against the institutions which did the wrong thing, which did not protect the people they should have. (The waters get muddy with the different framings of the maquis, but you are meant to be sympathetic to their ideas, and morals, if nothing else.)

Nihilism has its place in Star Trek, (a cynical outlook can be seen as one of the most common character traits across series.) Existential dread has its place too, but it has to be tempered with that hope. And that hope isn’t unwavering, in fact most characters at one point or another lose it, briefly or for longer periods of time, but in those moments they rely on those around them to keep the faith. They continually pass the torch of whose responsibility it is. One of the most important things is that there is always someone who has hope. 

And I would probably like Lower Decks if it seemed at all willing to explore the idea, “Well, what do you do when hope is completely lost? What do you do what there is no one left? And the thing you love is a shell of either what it used to be, or what it aspired to?”

Instead, all that is left of a green character who has never encountered that adversity and has their ideals forcefully beaten out of them. The central authority in their life tells them how they are wrong to cling to them (and then that person is demonstrated to be right.) I would be interesting to see the story if they wished to explore a slow dawning realization that hope is really lost, or even asked, “What do you do when there is nothing to hope for? And no one left to have that hope?”

To me it seems like they heard about Star Trek from parodies, and wanted to make jokes, so they set its central themes on fire, and then didn’t want to explore the implications. Just play in its dead carcass, and don’t you dare think about what it once was.

I know that Enterprise had its issues, but most people say that it improved greatly with the last season (besides the last episode), and say that it could have done more and been better if the network would have just kept it around a bit longer. People have their criticisms of Discovery and Picard, but I get the impression that they truly are labors of love.

Lower Decks gives me the feeling that it is just a blatant cash grab made by people who didn’t know, or understand the property and just had to do something with it. I know that their is diversity in the series, but I wish that I could say definitively that that the woman in the burka was actually meant to show the same sentiments as Chekhov in the Original Series. (As I remember seeing someone suggest as a viable option for how the New movies could handle Anton Yelchin’s death.) My thoughts right now is that it’s just an attitude of “Well, Star Trek is about diversity in thought, culture, and race, so we should make the characters diverse, because it’s a utopian future, right?” With no intention to to continue the way of dealing with current issues through allegory.

I hope I’m wrong. As far as I know it is a good show, but right now I don’t think it’s a good Star Trek one. 

(Although again take that with a grain of salt, because I have seen so little, and I didn’t particularly like the Orville, or what I’ve seen of it. Mostly, because it felt clunky, unnatural, boring and like they took half remembered plot points/storylines and placed new characters into them. The heart was there, but the thought didn’t seem to be.)

Tl;dr: Can someone tell me if Lower Decks has the characters fight back against Starfleet, or the bad elements in it? Or even if it explores why that isn’t an option? Why they have lost all hope?

[thenightling]

I’ll be your mirror (A Sandman fan fiction)

This story is a shameless Fluff piece written while listening to “I’ll be your Mirror” by The Velvet Underground on repeat.  This is sort of Dream of The Endless working through an existential crisis.  

  I’ll be your Mirror

             The pale figure of Daniel Hall moved through the empty private chambers of The Castle at the heart of The Dreaming.  

This ancient, and stone-looking, fortress was a monument to pure creativity, pure imagination. Sometimes known as Ghost Castle it seemed fitting that that the current aspect of Dream (who often answered to the name Daniel) actually resembled something of a ghost.  He was pale white, as white as milk, and his hair was just as white, just as soft and cloud-like, as the rest of his ethereal form.  His hair was curly and untamed, much like the black hair of his predecessor, the now deceased aspect of Dream, Morpheus.            Daniel’s eyes were black as pools of midnight water, with two twin star pupils.  He could have been the boyish and more youthful looking twin of the previous embodiment of dream.                Daniel wore an egg-shaped emerald amulet, the only sign of color upon him.  Otherwise he was a mostly white, and wispy entity wandering his private chambers. He moved silently and with some private sense of purpose.   Dream of The Endless is something like a great, faceted jewel.  And each facet is a different incarnation- an aspect, an autonomous entity that is both connected to, and yet separate to the whole.

             Daniel knew he was only a fragment and not the whole of what is Dream of The Endless and yet there was no real sense of comfort to that strange loneliness that ate at his all-too human-like heart.   He often felt he was too human.  Had his predecessor dealt with such a burden?  He tried to recall.  Yes.  Why, yes he had.  But only toward the end…            You would think the link to that old, deceased, aspect of Dream of The Endless would be gone but that was not necessarily the case.  Not only had Daniel inherited all of his memories but he had done something, something that he was fairly certain most did not know about…            Daniel had been conceived and gestated for over two years in a mortal woman’s womb in The Dreaming.  Though his mother had some divine aspect within her, and was considered something of a “metahuman” herself, Daniel had seemed human enough at the time of his birth, despite the peculiarities of his gestation and his poor, naïve, father having been the manipulated soul of a deceased human…            Where had the other aspect of Dream been during Daniel’s gestation?  Well, for most of it he had been imprisoned in a crystalline cage in a mortal’s cellar.            In his early form Daniel had appeared to be a normal human baby.  Blond haired, blue eyed, with a peach-tone flesh that wasn’t as it was now, this milk-white.  The only one who had recognized him for what he truly was had been Himself, that is to say, the active aspect of Dream, Lord Morpheus.            Now looking pretty much nothing like that mortal baby, the adult and distinctly non-human Daniel Hall, this aspect of Dream of The Endless, recalled well their first psychic communications with one and other.  It was the only time he truly felt a deep and profound bond to another, when he stared into Morpheus’ eyes and felt that link there between them.  Of course there had been some connection to his mortal-esque mother but this was different.  What he felt toward this other aspect of self was like staring into a reflection of his very soul.               When he “Spoke” with Morpheus it was like communing with his own subconscious. There was such an understanding and appreciation for the truth that it comforted him to know he was there. Though to tell which had been comforted by the other’s presence was difficult to say.

When Morpheus had “Died” as Dream of The Endless, Daniel rose to power, taking his predestined form and his mind flooded with the repressed, and hidden knowledge and memories of over ten billion years of consciousness. Now he felt like the very heart of an intricate web, he knew each fiber as it stretched from himself and through The Dreaming.  

He had a psychic link to every sentient entity he had ever created within The Dreaming, including ones created by his previous-self (whom he could recall having been, like a human reincarnation).

The loneliness had been terrible in those first few moments as Lord of The Dreaming, despite his sudden psychic awareness and knowledge.   And one of the first things he did was something others might find unspeakable…

           Meanwhile, in another part of The Dreaming…

           “I walk across the dreaming sands under the pale moon: through the dreams of countries and cities, past dreams of places long gone and times beyond recall.”

           In his darkest and strangest hours, when Morpheus had thoughts he scarcely would admit to himself he wondered that perhaps Loki, Lucifer, and all the other iconoclasts of the various pantheons were right in their rebellion. They wanted to leave and so they did. There was no dramatic final exit. They didn’t dread abandoning responsibilities as he did. If only he had the bravery or selfishness and carelessness to do as they had done…but these thoughts were along the lines of words he would never dare utter, not even to himself. He was dead now, right? What did it matter? He had escaped his role in the most absolute fashion possible…

           Morpheus walked along the beach of Hob’s dream in the perpetual eventide. This was, for him, his Heaven, his sanctuary. And almost every night he would walk and speak with his friend who always steadfastly refused Death’s gift. How he admired Hob’s fortitude. And how he, himself, liked it here. He was at peace here. Eternally residing in the dream of a friend wasn’t the worst way one could spend an existence after being an Endless. And yet sometimes he felt certain old aches, like a mortal who had lost a leg and missed it terribly.            His existence as Dream of The Endless was over but Morpheus had been recreated as a Dream Entity.   Now free from the burden of being Dream of The Endless, he did not envy the self that had to reign in his place.  In fact he found himself pitying him. And sometimes he felt that his new purpose, his new reason to be, was to simply reassure Daniel as no one had for himself- to remind him that he understood.  That he knew how he felt.  That he was not alone.  And most importantly, perhaps, that he forgave him for all his faults and short comings…

             Daniel walked to the mirror mounted over the vanity table in his private rooms.  The door to the room vanished behind him.  He wanted to be alone with his brooding thoughts.    Daniel stared into the mirror, trying to decide who or what he was.                Who was he?  And where did he belong?  Was he the boy Lyta Hall had cradled in her arms or was he the man who would govern The Dreaming for eons to come and who had always governed The Dreaming?   He felt world weary and weak.   He doubted himself and his abilities as Dreamlord.   He sighed heavily.  Sometimes he just wished he was that innocent child once more simply so someone would hold him and comfort him and tell him everything would be okay.              A figure stepped behind Daniel, soundlessly and as shadowlike as Daniel was ghostlike.  Daniel was only briefly startled by the sudden presence of his deceased self in the chamber with him.  He knew better than to ask how Morpheus had come to be there. Morpheus might have been deceased as Dream of The Endless but as a dream-entity he was very much free from that burden and knew his way around The Dreaming and especially his old castle.  And he knew how to enter where only Dream would enter.                The two – the living Dream of The Endless and the “Dead” Dream felt such a relief in the other’s presence as if all pressure had been lifted.  But each was too proud to admit how much he needed the other in that moment.                          “What am I?” Daniel asked in his lingering sense of personal uncertainty. It was the question he would never ask anyone other than himself.              “You are you.  You are Dream.”  Morpheus assured him as if that was all the answer he needed.            Daniel nodded.  He seemed a little shaky but the other figure placed a bony hand on Daniel’s narrow shoulder.  Daniel’s garments wavered, shifted.  And his white robes became a fine, gauzy, white, toga, just as Morpheus’ own gothic, wizard-like robes shifted into an identical black toga.              The two looked like matching halves of a yin-yang standing there in front of the great oval mirror mounted over the vanity table.              “I am here.” Morpheus assured him in his own imperfect way of trying to comfort himself.  “I am here.”  He did not begrudge his posthumous existence. He knew why Daniel needed him.  The silent need that they both had, it was that same need that had invited a certain cat that had been mistaken as another aspect of Dream, to come save the universe. That was a different adventure that both knew in their heart but could not actually, consciously, directly, remember, not really.            “I will be for you what was never there for me.” Morpheus assured him.              Daniel took a ragged breath.  “I didn’t… I wasn’t sure you would…”            “That I would forgive my own existing?   Daniel… It was my plan.  I knew I had to change or die.  I chose both.  I knew what you would do because you are me.  How could I begrudge it?”            Daniel turned his head.  Morpheus had released his awkward grip on the shoulder of his other self.              “This is where we both belong.”  Daniel said.  It was a statement but it was also a plea, a secret, hidden plea.  He feared being rejected by himself.            “Perhaps.”  Morpheus said, knowing Daniel understood what he meant.            “We are all things within The Dreaming.” Daniel said.  “The wind, the rain, the sunset, all of it.  It’s us.  And I don’t actually –need- anyone.”  He lied and he knew his other self knew he was lying.            “But there is a difference to be able to talk and hear a voice respond that has felt and knows your burden.”              “I don’t want to be alone.”  Daniel said.  “You’re just going to leave again, retreat back into your dreamscape and leave me to bear it…  We’re not the same.  You’re free where I am not.”            Morpheus’ expression darkened, his frown deepened. “No.   No, I’m not as free as I thought I was.  You are my burden now. I am my own burden.  Because…  No matter where I go… there I am… And you need me.  I… am responsible.”            Daniel looked at him, uncertainly, blinking his black, glassy eyes.  “You would… stand with me?  So I don’t have to be alone?”            “I am here, am I not?  Yes… I have died.  And …changed.”  He loathed admitting that more than once.  “But things are different now.   There are two of us…  We need not stand alone any longer.”             Daniel looked at him, at his other self, and there was no resentment. There was no sense of old guilt for forcing him to exist.  He knew that he understood why he had done it.  They forgave each other.   And they were both home.    

           “No one else would ever accept me if I showed them all of who and what I am.” Daniel confessed.  “Not even… Not even my mortal mother.  She could never understand.   There’s so much darkness in me...  And it has always been there.  Always, even before I was Daniel Hall. I am so very afraid of …of my own darkness.”             Morpheus gave him a trace of a bitter smile.  “You are afraid others might see your mind, your secret heart, and judge you for it?  You are afraid they will see the corruption, cruelty, and unkindness?”             “Yes…”             “Daniel, I was far crueler than you ever were.  Don’t burden yourself…”              “But sometimes I-“                “Shhhh.”  Morpheus said.  “It’s what you do, not what you think that defines what you are.  You don’t bear that darkness alone.  It’s what you choose to do despite the darkness that matters. Pretend to be kind- and act on that pretended kindness.  Behave the way you think a kind creature should act.  It is good enough to pretend, to play the part.  You are good enough.”               “How- how can I do that?  I barely know how to be you.”               “’Me.’” Morpheus corrected.  “How to be ‘me.’  You are not my shadow.”                Daniel shook his head and raised his hands to his face, placing his palms over his own eyes.    

            Morpheus was not very good at physical intimacy except with lovers and even then there was some question as to his ability to express affection but when it came to himself he made the exception and reaching out he took a hold of each of Daniel’s hands, cupping his hands with his to gently ease down his hands.  “Please put down your hands.   Don’t worry. I see you for what you really are. You are not something terrible. You are Dream and you are …beautiful. Surely you see it?”              “How can you possibly see good in me when you don’t even see it in yourself?”  Daniel asked.         Morpheus was taken aback by the question as if Daniel’s very words had slapped him.  “I…”        “I have done terrible things.  I have hurt people.”  Daniel said. “Why do you think I am so much better than you?  Why? How could I be better than you when I AM you?  At least you never killed except in defense of The Dreaming!  I…  I killed and it was for malicious reasons. I thought I was being honorable but I was just being cruel.”

            Morpheus knew what he was talking about. He had always known. He knew about Daniel’s lover, Ivy, Rose Walker’s daughter.   Desire’s great granddaughter.   And he knew that when a bachelor party, besotted by alcohol, had made lewd comments about Ivy, Daniel had driven them all, in a pleasant dream-walk, into the ocean…

            It had been cruel.  It had been brutal.  It had been something Morpheus had thought beyond his own capacity but he sometimes surprised himself. And he also knew he had to forgive himself. Daniel had been burdened with being Dream of The Endless all alone and it was effecting his mind.              Daniel clenched his hands into fists.  He looked so vulnerable to Morpheus, so tired, and so frail.  “Damn you!  Damn you for leaving me here and making me be you!”  Daniel said with his head bowed.  Their thoughts were shared between them as they had been when Daniel had his mortal, infant, form.                

          Morpheus slowly walked from Daniel and the vanity mirror that had reflected them this entire time.  Now Daniel’s was the only image in the mirror as Morpheus walked to a sofa that had not been in the stark room a moment before.            He sat down slowly, heavily, despite his slight build.           “I should never have done this to you…  It was wrong of me.”

        Daniel was surprised.           “All I did was subject another self to the same burden that I fled from in allowing you to become Dream of The Endless, and letting myself die.  I see now there is only one way to rectify this wrong…”               Daniel blinked several times and walked over to the sofa.  He sat down next to him.   Daniel knew what he meant to do.  “Are you certain?  After all you went through to extricate yourself?”                Morpheus nodded slowly.  “Yes, I am certain.  I must do this.  It will just be an endless cycle unless…”            Daniel placed a hand over Morpheus’ “Unless we share the burden… together.  Support one and other…  be there for each other…”            Morpheus looked at him.           “Balance one and other.”   When Daniel lifted his hand there was now something in Morpheus’ palm. It was the ruby dreamstone amulet he had re-created shortly before his own destruction. He looked down at it with a nod.                With an almost ceremonious act of raising it, Morpheus lifted the jewel pendant up, and over his head.  He lifted it over his mop of black, wild, hair and let the amulet hang from his neck, lightly against his chest.            Now Daniel offered the pouch of dreamsand.  Morpheus saw it had been exactly duplicated though which was the duplicate, the one he would claim, or the one Daniel kept, it was impossible to tell.

          “Ovid wrote of three Oneiroi.” Daniel said. “But I think we have both had enough of three-in-one.  And perhaps two is enough.  Don’t you think?”

        Morpheusn as Morpheus was done securing the pouch to his hip Daniel took his hand again.  He liked holding his hand and he knew Morpheus liked it too even if they were both too proud to admit it out loud.          “Promise me,” Daniel said, “promise you will help me through my own darkness.”         “I will try.  I’m not sure I can.”  Morpheus said, uncertainly.        “You can,” Daniel said “Because you already are.  We… already are… for each other.”          “Which one of us is the reflection of the other?”

            “Does it matter?”             “No.  Not anymore.”

                      The End.

[callmeblake]

Frank Iero, New York, NY, June 2019 (X)

Aug 29, 2019, 09:10am

Frank Iero May Just Be His Own Puppet Master

Photo Credit: Audrey Lew

Interview below the cut

Derek Scancarelli

Contributor

Hollywood & Entertainment

I am a music journalist living in New York City.

Frank Iero is breathing deeply and fighting off nausea. This isn’t uncommon for the 37-year-old guitarist and vocalist, given his predilection for debilitating anxiety. But on this occasion, it isn’t pre-show jitters.

“Oh my god, I hate this f*cking boat,” Iero says, as the docked vessel on which he sits knocks against a pier in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Iero and his band, The Future Violents, just finished an intimate Saturday matinee show as fans sweat, sang and caught a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty.

It had been about 16 years since Iero and his now defunct band, My Chemical Romance (the band broke up in 2013), first performed on water. In July of 2002, the band released its debut album, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. In October of 2003, the soon-to-be emo heroes performed alongside New York Hardcore legends Sick Of It All at an aquatic gig booked by New Jersey college radio station WSOU. And in June of 2004, My Chemical Romance released Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, the band’s platinum-selling breakthrough record. In a matter of two years, Iero’s life changed dramatically.

In 2019, Iero still hasn’t found his sea legs, but a lot more has changed. He’s fathered three children, released three full-length solo records (including 2019’s Barriers), and survived a near-death experience. And as he gets older, he finds truth in life’s greatest clichés.

“Time flies, it just screams by,” Iero says. “You think you’re appreciating the time, but it’s easy to take it for granted. It’s a shame.”

But Iero is trying his hardest to pay attention to the little things, especially when it comes to family. He and his wife, Jamia, have three children together: nine-year-old twin daughters, Cherry and Lily, and a seven-year-old son named Miles.

“It’s wonderful to see them evolve and come into their own,” Iero says. “But it’s funny how personalities are innate. We shape the way they experience things or teach them the ropes, but for the most part, I’ve found that we are who we are when we’re born.”

From the start, Iero has seen an even split in the twins’ personalities. Cherry, he says, most behaves like her mother, whereas Lily possesses her father’s attitude.

“Some of the sh*t I hear coming out of my daughter's mouth,” Iero says laughing. “My God! It’s stuff I think but never say — they don't know to be ashamed yet! It's amazing and honest and pure. And I know exactly where she's coming from because I feel the same way.”

As part of fostering a relationship of trust and honesty, Iero has been age-appropriately transparent with his kids about the 2016 accident that almost killed him, his brother-in-law and guitarist Evan Nestor and his manager Paul Clegg.

While unloading gear from their van in Sydney, Australia, a city bus crashed into the group and their vehicle. In a 2017 interview with MTV, Iero recounted, in vivid detail, the moment he was dragged underneath the bumper of the bus, the screams of his brother-in-law, and the blood pooling from his manager.

Although Iero was able to walk into an ambulance carrying one of his friends, the scene was a spectacle overrun with emergency personnel — they even landed a rescue helicopter in nearby Hyde Park. Despite serious injuries, amazingly, there were no fatalities.

When Iero returned home from the hospital, he explained to his children that he was in a car accident, but that it was a singular freak incident.

“You don't want to lie,” he says. “They're getting older. Their friends and their parents are on the internet. They're asking questions. It does get back to them.”

Iero was as honest as possible, but avoided any gory details. He was also conscious that it wouldn’t be long before he would travel for work again — and he didn’t want to scare his kids any further.

Almost four years later, residual damage from the crash is impossible to ignore. Nestor has nerve damage in his leg that may never be corrected. Clegg’s leg and knee have undergone multiple surgeries, but are in poor shape. And Iero still has a tear in his shoulder that hurts every time he plays the guitar. Despite the pain, he’s afraid to undergo surgery.

“I was lucky enough to walk away and still play,” Iero says. “If I were to test fate again and go under the knife, if something were to go wrong… to let that be taken from me … no, I can't.”

On some days, the emotional toll of surviving such a traumatic accident weighs more heavily. Iero describes his recovery as non-linear: some days he feels collected and in control, other days the memory rushes back into his mind.

After his new band finished recording Barriers, Iero and his team went back to Australia for appointments pertaining to the accident and corresponding litigation. As soon as he exited the plane, Iero felt like he’d returned to the horrific scene. For the following week, he was barraged by an unending state of panic.

“You go through these instances of PTSD,” he says. “You never know what's going to trigger and send you all the way back to the beginning with recovery.”

Iero greatly underestimated how difficult his return to Australia would be. When navigating to a doctor’s office near where the accident occurred, he couldn’t bring himself to walk down the street. And suddenly, he felt surrounded by buses.

“I don't know if this is true,” he says. “But it felt like every other car on the street was one of these f*cking buses. They were everywhere. It was frightening. I couldn't do anything. I was shaking like a leaf.”

Despite the traumatic flashbacks, Iero continues to reflect on that day. In the promotional run for Barriers, he discussed the accident at length. And on the record itself, he addresses the complicated ripple effect it’s had on his entire sense of self.

“I don't think it needs to define me,” Iero says. “But it was something I needed to talk about on this record. It's not something I could sweep under the rug. But do I want to dwell on it every day and relive it? No. But I think about it constantly. I feel the pain constantly. It's on my mind.”

In recent interviews, Iero has tended to frame a few philosophical takeaways from his ordeal. In simple terms, the first idea is that he’s found a new lease on life — that everything happens for a reason and he’s been given an opportunity to seize the day. The second philosophy is much darker, a sort of survivor’s guilt compounded with fear and existential dread. The third and most abstract consideration is closest to Simulation Theory — where Iero has the ability to control his own artificial timeline.

Sometimes, Iero questions if actually died that day. He wonders: Is this all real?

“It’s hard. No one can tell you what to believe,” he says. “But you come to this realization, ‘Well, this is real to me, the hand I was dealt, so I have to make the best of it!’”

Through the acceptance of uncertainty, Iero surmises that he just may be his own puppet master.

“If this is a figment of my imagination,” Iero says. “If this is all in my head, then I am the master of my own destiny. If I want to do something, I can manufacture it. And if it's not the case, then at least it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe putting positive vibes out into the universe is beneficial. If we didn't make it and we're just going through this weird labyrinth in my mind, I can do anything I want.”

And lately, he’s been doing just that. Call it sorcery or the power of positive thinking, but Iero is motivated. For Barriers, he was able to assemble a dream band, The Future Violents (different lineups of his backing band have previously gone by The Cellabration and The Patience), featuring his brother-in-law Nestor on guitar, Thursday’s Tucker Rule on drums, Murder by Death’s Matt Armstrong on bass, and Kayleigh Goldsworthy on keyboard.

The theme of the album — and his own internal dialogue — mostly relates to tragedy and timing. Did the universe have a course set out for him? Or was he just some random victim?

“The crazy thing is that you didn't do anything wrong,” Iero says of the accident. “Yet, all of this stuff was taken from you and you have to make these decisions. You get angry a lot.”

He continues: “These random, abrupt, violent actions. Do they happen to us? Or for us? I wouldn't have been able to make this record if it didn't happen. And it made me realize a lot of things about myself. Am I happy it happened? No. But I'm happy where I am right now.”

Iero views Barriers as an exercise in vulnerability. If the aftermath of his accident taught him anything, it’s that success was meaningless to his character, but adversity helped him grow. For the first time, addressing childhood trauma helped Iero expose himself in a way that felt freeing.

“When you put something to song, it gives that memory weight,” Iero explains. “If you never talk about it, it's almost like it didn't happen. There's a fine line between relinquishing that power to this memory, situation or trauma, or holding that power over it and creating your own narrative from it.”

Barriers also intertwines Iero’s childhood experiences with his current perspective as a father. This go around, he felt comfortable writing about his parents’ divorce — the couple split when he was three and divorced when he was seven.

He looks back on the unpleasantness of the process and his consequential understanding of his mother’s issues with addiction, depression and mental illness. On his 2016 record, Parachutes, Iero first referenced his mother’s struggles and his own liability to inherit her traits. He’s still horrified by the idea of predeterminism.

“When you're a young kid being surrounded with it, it doesn't feel right,” Iero says. “You're not happy. You're scared. You're constantly concerned for your parent. It’s almost as if you become the caregiver.”

He continues: “Then you see yourself falling into these patterns that you were witness to and maybe in a roundabout way were taught. That addiction, that depression, runs through you. It's easy to fall off that cliff. I don't want that for my kids and I need to stop this cycle. Like this sh*t stops with me. Whether it be I get okay, or I f*cking turn my lights out.”

It’s this sort of tongue-in-cheek use of concerning language that keeps Iero’s fanbase enthralled, yet somewhat on edge. Take for example, in the comment section for his video “Young & Doomed,” some diehard fans are troubled by his repeated use of the words “hurt myself again.” While he’s surprised to hear about the response, he counters that the record is ultimately meant to feel uplifting and positive, even if addressing dark topics.

“I don't think that we should strive for perfection,” Iero says. “This idea that we should all have this perfect life and be pretty and purse our lips to post a picture on social media is bullsh*t. The things that make us unique are important.”

He continues: “Sometimes we're our own worst enemies and we hurt ourselves. Those scars, though, are important. They're beautiful. ‘Young And Doomed’ is a call to arms to celebrate the things people think are wrong with us.”

Now, Iero just hopes his story and music inspire fans to try, fail and try again.

“You don't find out who you are unless you get a scar and get hurt,” Iero says. “You should be hurt, hurt other people, and learn that it feels terrible to hurt someone else. You should feel sorry for it and make amends for it. These are important lessons to be a better person. You find out who you truly are by attacking things that scare you the most.”

Frank Iero is currently touring Europe with Laura Jane Grace & The Devouring Mothers.

[scatteredstoryteller]

Just some thoughts

I’m going to take a moment to type something up OOC here. Going to be honest, it includes some trigger warnings so it will all be below the read more for those who don’t want to read about it.

Today I had a thought, well... Actually just a few minutes ago.

Right now, I am happier than I have ever been.

It honestly struck me as an odd thought. Have I really never been this happy before? Right now, in this moment... Have I never felt anything like it before?

I can honestly say, no.

I want to say this last year has been a journey, but really it’s been just over a year now.

To those who don’t know me, or don’t know a lot about me... I will admit honestly, I have had suicidal thoughts. There have been things in my past that are incredibly dark, and coupled with a crippling social anxiety that I’ve had since I was a child. Life has not been the kindest to me, but I also recognise it has not been the cruellest either. As a person, I know also I have not handled it the best I could have.

I mean, I went on a completely self destructive spiral. Every day I would wake up in the morning with existential dread at having to go to work. Hit snooze on my alarm until I was about to be late for work and then dash in when my anxiety was about to burst because I was about to be late. (Anxiety logic... Don’t want to do the thing because it’s the worst thing in the world, up until being late for the thing is the worst thing in the world?) The work itself wasn’t bad honestly, but I had to deal with a lot of people and the anxiety gremlins in my head blew it out of proportion constantly. (They still do if I’m being honest - I just recognise it better and cope with it better now). I would go home, every day, thinking of tying a noose and hanging myself just so I wouldn’t have to go back and do it again. I also did some really stupid things, luckily... Mostly to myself.

I can pinpoint in May last year was particularly bad - as through circumstances I lost someone very dear to me for a few months (not death, just we couldn’t be in contact for a while). They were honestly my lifeline for a little bit, helping me work through my suicidal thoughts, my anxiety and when I felt like cutting myself they were incredibly supportive and helped me through so I didn’t actually go through with it. When circumstances took them away from me for that period of time, I had to learn to cope by myself and to me, that seemed like an impossible mountain to climb.

Then I realised... I don’t have to do it alone.

I reached out to old friends who I hadn’t spoken to in forever. People I knew had always had my back but I was too anxious to get back in touch with them before. I mean, what if they forgot about me? What if things have changed? What if they secretly hated me and are glad I was gone??? What if, what if, what if?!?!?! (Anxiety gremlins, grrrr. You’re the reason we even lost touch in the first place, get out of my head already!!!)

Not only did they welcome me back with open arms, but I started to recognise things about myself. I started to separate myself from the anxiety from the first time in my life. I mean, when it’s always been a part of you it’s easy to add it to your identity, and it still is part of my identity somewhat, but... I can recognise the thoughts produced by it now. I can cope with things I was never able to cope with before - like talking to people over voice chat was impossible for me before and now I can do it!

There have been so many positive things, and negative things but right now I am in a place where I can cope with things I was never able to before. I started taking strides towards recovering my physical health, by getting a surgery I really should have gotten a few years ago. I got fired from my job (but I kind of count that as a positive because I can really focus on my health right now and also... yeah the whole it making me suicidal stuff? Pretty sure I’m better off without that job!). I have made a whole host of new friends, that I actually spoke to first in a few cases! (Take that anxiety! Though I’m still working on this!) I made this tumblr and started actually posting things on it! (Whaaaat? Posting things publicly?!) I have even been coping better with the negative things in life... For example, my uncle died a couple months ago... To be honest, that was hard. It’s the first time that someone really close to me has died. For the first time in my life, I cried in front of strangers. Then I had to stand in the receiving line and I got hugged by like 100 people... But... While usually being hugged by like 100 people (most of whom I have no idea who they are) is one of the things that would set of my anxiety... I was fine.

There’s a lot of reasons why I have come this far, and I know a lot of it has been self improvement on my part. I know I still have a long way to go to, hopefully, get some of the anxiety gremlins more out of my head (though I doubt they’ll ever be fully gone) and I know there are times where I’m going to feel depressed again... But now, I have tools to cope with it.

My friends, my partner, my family... They have all been absolutely amazing and there are more people that have helped me through this than I could list. I really do hope they know who they are. Some of them have helped more than they will ever know without even realising it and I’m forever grateful to those who have stuck by me through the good and the bad, and I hope I will be able to talk more with them! I will do my best to keep reaching out, though at times the gremlins will stop me, or life being busy in general... (I hope to make more new friends too, if I can get past the gremlin barrier!)

To those friends who have stuck by me, and to those I have in future: Thank you. All of you. You amazing and special people. I can never say thank you enough or let you know just how much I care about all of you. (Goddamnit I will give you all the squishiest of hugs if I can! I don’t care if the gremlins don’t like it D<)

To finish off something that became a lot longer than I thought it would... I’m sure there will be ups and downs coming... For the first time in my life though? I’m looking forward to the future.

[gittetj]

I very seriously don't know what to do with my life. I don't mean that in a sense of existential dread, I mean it in the completely practical sense that I feel like I have to do something so I can preserve my goddamn sanity, but I don't think I have any particularly good options.

I've been properly back at work for a week after about 2 months where I first went on sick leave because I was so physically stressed my doctor told me I should probably do that, then came back for a couple of weeks while work was at its most quiet due to summer vacation, then went on vacation myself - and boy it has not been a fun week. Nothing bad has happened, it hasn't been particularly busy, but I am completely worn out and have had to deal with some of the worst sensory overload I've gotten in a long time every day. I came home earlier tonight and had a major breakdown and literally slammed my head into a wall because it's unbearable, I'm so tired it physically feels like my brain is tearing itself apart.

Because I've been gone for a while where I've been feeling fine it's also the first time in a long time I can clearly see what's happening to me. It always goes like this: I do more than I have the energy for because work and life happens -> I get tired -> I don't have energy for anything other than work so chores and commitments start piling up -> I get stressed from not being able to keep up -> I get frustrated because there's no room to do the things I actually want to do -> If I do what I feel like doing instead of piled up chores I get even more stressed because now there's a bigger pile of chores -> If I only do chores then I'll go crazy and skip right to the end of this chain -> I feel isolated because there's too much noise in my head for me to communicate with other people -> Noise noise noise -> Sensory overload -> Panic attacks and/or executive dysfunction -> Feeling immensely overwhelmed, hello suicidal thoughts -> Mood swings (mostly towards depression).

It's so fucking destructive that things that are theoretically good, such as having a job I'm happy enough with, keep sending me down this same lane because I just can't seem to keep up with it. The same thing happens in other areas like being social or managing my personal projects, although not as consistently since I don't have to do those every day. I just can't do very much and that makes it hard to do anything at all.

It's so difficult to exist in this threshold between being a functioning member of society and a total wreck because nobody really gets it and there's nobody you can really ask to help because it's not like it's a crisis situation, it's just your life, it never ends. Once in a while somebody will tell me they think it's impressive I can keep a close-to-fulltime job and it hurts me deeply, please don't remind me that in reality I can't, I'm just slowly killing myself because I don't know what else to do. I feel like it’s either this or just completely give up.

And since I don't know what to do of course the easiest thing is to ignore that there's a problem in the first place. Like I can feel myself doing right now. Because acting like a crazy person is just something I do once in a while right, haha, it's funny if you look at it from the right angle, amusing, and now it's the weekend anyway so plenty of time to wind down before we do it all over again next week, right? Everyone probably feels like this, this is probably normal, no big deal.

It's just not sustainable, you know? But I’ve been doing it for years. I'm tired.

[vanessaxyvonne]

Sugar Pink Liquor, Liquor Lips | V + NV

When: June 20th, 2021

Where: Circle Bar ; Vanessa's Penthouse

Warnings: Alcohol, Vomiting, Angst, Pregnancy mention (no, no one's pregnant)

Featuring: @niklausvondra

Texts from Circle Bar

Vanessa:

I know you hate meeee but I'm drunk rn

niklaus:

I don't hate you and why are you drunk?

Vanessa:

I’m celebrating!!!

I did a great thing again

niklaus:

Well glad to know that you're willing to text me drunk

but I don't hate you--my sister on the other hand

Vanessa:

I’d text you sober but like it’s complicated

I know I’m the treacherous slut

it’s why we can’t be together which isn’t fair but you know I’ll wait for you in the next life if you still like me

niklaus:

You're not a treacherous slut

there's just bad blood and nicole needs to get over it

You really think we will meet again in the next life?

Vanessa:

I am, Nick. That’s what I’ve always been. And she can tryy but she will always see me as the monster okay?

yeah, but!!!!! You gotta find me in the next life this time okay?

niklaus:

listen, Nicole is grown woman and it’s been years if she can’t get over it, then you move on. You have a company and better friends

Yes, I’ll find you

Vanessa:

that means I lose you too

I wish we were in our new lives right now, I bet it’s better. We’d be happy

niklaus:

news flash, I am my own person. If you cut ties with Nicole for good then you won’t lose me

Who knows, life could be cruel

Vanessa:

you promise???

life without you is crueler

niklaus:

yeah

Vanessa:

I almost did something stupid and my friends would’ve been so upset with me

niklaus:

what did you do

Vanessa:

well I did it anyways

I drank more ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

niklaus:

oh my god

why am I not surprised

you do realize you’re going to be hating yourself in the morning, right?

Vanessa:

I knowww

I gotta numb the existential dread somehow

can you pick me up? I promise I won't puke or hit on you

niklaus:

Where are you

Vanessa:

I'm at Circle bar

niklaus:

awesome, I’m down the road at a friends. I’ll be there in ten mins

Vanessa:

Okayyyyy

thank you nick

Nessa sat outside the bar in the waiting area and because of her charm, she made friends with the bouncer who kept her drunk self safe until Nick arrived. Of course, she was trying her hardest not to completely pass out when she perked up at the familiar green eyes and lop-sided dimpled grin. "Niiick!" She drawled out excitedly. "I'm so glad you're here!"

niklaus vondra.

After leaving a friends home, the disappointment in their eyes as he left made him chuckle, making way over to where Vanessa was at he walked along the side walk and saw her sitting there, he nodded his head. “I said I would come and grab you, I have an Uber waiting,” he held out his hands for her to take.

Vanessa grinned as she took his hands with a big smile. "My hero!!" She said with drunken excitement. "D'you know what? I left the fuzzy tiara that one of the really super nice bachelorettes gave to me. I'm so gutted but I can't go back," She rambled. "Also, I'm a bit tired."

niklaus vondra.

”You look hammered,” nick smiled and helped her up, reaching up to lightly pat down her hair and held out his arm. “We’ll get you some food and tuck you right into bed. Then you should be good to go.” He reached to hold onto her and lead them away from the entrance.

“Yes, yes I am,” She retorted. “I wanted to be hammered and railed but that didn’t work out. The gal had a jealous boyfriend. Who knew?” Nessa giggled as she took Nick’s arm and stumbled alongside him. “Ooh I really want bagels, are there any bagel shops open this hour, you think?”

niklaus vondra.

Nick swallowed down the jealousy, reminding himself he had no right and that he was just coming from one of his ‘friends’ places before getting her. “That lad is probably cheating on the side if he allowed you to flirt with him,” he pointed out and laughed, “Bagels? I highly doubt it.”

Vanessa looked over at Nick and laughed. "No no no, silly. I was hitting on his girlfriend and she flirted right on back and even held my face and called me a goddess but the lad got a bit butt hurt because I might've gotten her a bit flustered," She drunkenly rambled with the brightest smile. "Ugh. I wanted a bagel. What should we go eat, Niklaus?"

niklaus vondra.

”Oh, now that makes more sense, no wonder….” He thought out loud and laughed, “should’ve offered a threesome, a win for all three people.” opening the door and assisting her into the Uber. “We can always grab in and out?”

"It does, doesn't it?" Nessa giggled at the thought for a moment and sighed. "I don't like sharing, that's the issue. I've tried it before, it didn't work out," She shrugged and carefully slid into the Uber. "Hmmm, okay. Burgers sound great right about now, yeah?"

niklaus vondra.

”Really? I find it all the more fun,” he shrugged, but that was most likely due to enjoying the attention on both ends. He often wondered if it was due to his disorder or the fact he craved attention and wanted to try something different. “burgers and fries? Yes.”

"Well, that's 'cos you're you," Nessa poked at Nick's chest with a smirk. She then followed up with, "I just like the attention on me and I know the other person won't give me their full attention. So if it's just me and the other person, I'll command attention easier. Plus...makes the escape easier in the morning." She let out a small sigh and rested her head on Nick's shoulders. "Burgers and fries sound amaaazing! We used to do that all the time, remember?"

niklaus vondra.

Nick laughed, he remembered vaguely of her always wanting attention, especially in the bedroom but he wasn’t about to make that commentary. “Are we going to take a walk down memory lane?” He laughed and asked the driver if he could stop by in and out. He tried to not show affection towards her, to make it easier on both of them, but it was getting hard with her touching him and trusting him.

A giggle bubbled up from Vanessa as she said, "Well why not? I'm drunk and I'm feeling a bit nostalgic on the mention of In N Out. Besides, it's been years since I've last gone." There came the first admission there. Now the logical part of her wanted to sit up straight and shut up and opt to just go home, but between the mixed alcohol and her own emotions, things were bound to spill out of her. "Just humor me for a moment, will you?"

niklaus vondra.

Niklaus shakes his head and slowly caved in, “Fine…but just so you know, once we start bringing up embarrassing memories, I’m out.” He joking said as he pulled out his phone to see messages, ones he didn’t want to look at nor respond too, placing it back into his pocket, Nick glanced over at Nessa.

"I promise, no embarrassing stories, we'd have to mutually be drunk for that one," Nesssa pointed with a knowing grin. "Do you remember..." She began and then hiccuped, "Do you remember when we would sneak out at times just to get ice cream at that one parlour?"

niklaus vondra.

Nick laughed at the memory, “Yeah, I should have known you would be a bad influence,” he teased, “I do remember the sweetness of the ice cream that I don’t think I could eat today.”

"Me? A bad influenceeee? Poppycock! You were the one that convinced me to start sneaking out," Nessa nudged Nick with a cheeky grin. "Wait, really??? D'you lose your sweet tooth?"

niklaus vondra.

He laughed at her, “Oh please, one time and you’re a goner since then.” He shake his head toward, flashing her a lopsided smile and shrugged. “Taste buds change as you get older.”

"One time? Now you're definitely bluffing! You always pitched the sneaking around to get ice cream until I caught on!" She shot a look over towards him. Her own smile matching his lopsided grin...she missed that smile and all she wanted to do was kiss that smile, but luckily, she still had that sense to hold her back. "What do you prefer now?"

niklaus vondra.

”I think it’s a tie between crepes and lemon squares.” He admitted, it was wild to think he once had a sweet tooth and now, now it was like he didn’t care much for it, he placed it on it being an age thing but maybe once she left things just tasted bitter.

“Ooh very Parisian! You’ve got a bit of a tart tongue. I like that.” Nessa giggled as she went to reach for Nick’s hand, mostly to play with his long fingers. Any little detail or thing kept the drunken designer curious. “It’s your turn to say a memory and don’t say you don’t remember ‘cos it’s repressed. None of our experiences together was traumatic—well until the end. That’s definitely a bit fuzzy.”

niklaus vondra.

Nick smiled, “what can I say, if life is going to be bitter, at least make it bittersweet.” He shrugged, at least that was the motto he was going for in the least. As she played with his fingers, he didn’t pull away and allowed her to distract herself but when she asked to mention a memory, he stayed silent. He wanted to play it off, wanted to make some silly joke but knew that would be impossible. “I guess…when we were trying to reach Nicole how to drive and she almost killed us,” he decided to bring up.

“I like that motto,” Nessa beamed excitedly. “Reminds me of that one song…a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. It’s bittersweet,” she nodded in agreement. She continued to play with his fingers, paying attention to every detail. It almost felt like a flashback to years ago. When he spoke again, she looked up to him and she giggled. “Oh bloody hell, that was terrifying. The way she slammed on the brakes and we went lurching forward. I’m surprised the seat belt didn’t strangle us!” She responded incredulously. “I miss those days.”

niklaus vondra.

Nick softly laughed, “Yeah and to think she got her licenses,” he let out a sigh and nodding his head. “They were good memories, but I have hope that one day things can go back to normal or at least everyone make up.”

"Oh my god, right? That's a miracle that she did, but I'm glad she did," Nessa giggled and let out her own sigh. "They were!! Wait really, you do?" She looked over at him. "What makes you so sure?"

niklaus vondra.

”I think at some point you just grow up and learn to forgive what you’ve done in the past. I mean it can be a lot to come to forgiving and I know my sister, she will come around maybe not right now but she will.” Niklaus held hope for Nicole to get over the past, especially after finding out the actual reason and perhaps get on good terms with Vanessa again. He knew that their breakup hurt Nicole a lot and he hated the fact it was because of his selfish reasons.

“Hmmmm, I’d say that makes sense yeah. She’s a bit stubborn but, she’s still got a good heart. It’ll take her a bit…when she’s ready. She knows where to find me so we can cry together,” Nessa pointed out with the most bubbliest giggle. It was a laugh that reminded her of her younger self for a moment but she shook off the thought. “By the way…I do have something to confess ‘cos there was this wild scandal of me and a pregnancy test and bloody hell, everyone thought I was expecting and d’you know what? I wasn’t! Trixie, actually had a pregnancy scare from her ex back in college. The paps spun it to a whole different thing, though.”

niklaus vondra.

Hearing her ramble, he had a soft smile on his face, it felt like old times when she was drunk and he was of course taking care of her. But hearing the confession had him stiffen, he remembered seeing the tabloid and did something completely stupid but he later found out why he made impulsive decisions. “oh…so that’s what that was…here I thought you got knocked up, guess it would’ve been better to ask you than assume.”

Nessa could feel Nick's body freeze up for a moment while she played with his fingers, so carefully, she linked her fingers with his and looked up towards him. She was crossing that line to comfort him. "Nuh-uh. Never ever. My career was just taking off, I couldn't do that, you know? Funny part is, I had just gotten my IUD implanted like days ago and I had to release those forms to the press. That was probably the most violated I ever felt in the spotlight, but you know," She shrugged.

niklaus vondra.

Nick nodded his head, he remembered that night clearly, recalled the tabloid days later and the sense of regret but now he just came to terms with everything. He was fine with being by himself, it was less of a hassle. He wondered if he would ever want a family, he didn’t exactly have the best role models but at least he could be the best uncle. “Tabloids would do that to you…I’m sorry you had to go through that by yourself.”

Nessa didn't bother mentioning the other specifics as to why she had the IUD because of her crazy obsessive ex who tried to anchor her down, she was far too drunk to care about that. However, she didn't see herself much of a motherly figure, especially after practically raising her little brother. The thought of motherhood terrified her...the thought of stopping her career for motherhood was even more terrifying. "They doooo sadlyyyy. Don't worry, I gave them another thing to talk about a week later when I dumped my ex during fashion week. I sound so jaded, I swear!"

niklaus vondra.

Nick couldn’t help but to laugh at her response, it appeared that nothing rarely ever stops her from reaching her full potential each and every time. “I mean, without that passion, you wouldn’t have made it to where you are.” He pointed out, “besides, nothing screams revenge than being successful.”

A giggle bubbled up from her lips and she sighed, “Ah, I’d ‘spose you’re right. All that passion became success and that was my most righteous revenge.” She sighed once more, “It sucks, sometimes. Cos everyone waits for me to fuck up. It adds this immense amount of pressure, you know?…I miss talking about these things with you. Our fears, our hopes, our accomplishments. I have to be bloody drunk to get all of this out of my system ‘cos my sober self would just…put up a wall.”

niklaus vondra.

He realized that he too missed these sort of talks himself, he once tried to hold a conversation like this with his sister but instead it turned more into a lecture. With Vanessa, it was a soothing moment where she didn’t second guess his choices and he didn’t with hers. “It’s okay, sometimes we are too afraid to admit things, alcohol just seems to enjoy bringing all that forth.”

Vanessa nodded in agreement to Nick. “Yes it does. Very much so!! So…I do believe it’s your turn again,” She giggled, wiggling her eyebrows. That was the dynamic she loved and missed between them two. There was no questioning, there was no judgement. There was, instead, encouragement and calm. It was what she missed the most with Nick.

niklaus vondra.

”My turn for what?” He jokingly said before stopping to hear the driver announced they were there to order, “what did you want again?” He asked Vanessa, his window rolled down to place an order.

“Ah ah ah, don’t play coy with me, Niklaus,” Nessa playfully scolded until they arrived to In N Out. “Hmmm I want a hamburger with fries and a sprite, pleaseeee,” she said with the cutest smile.

niklaus vondra.

Nick ordered their order and they went back to waiting in line, “Anyways, do you plan on going back to Paris for that fashion week or did it past? I feel like there’s always fashion week somewhere. Unless I’m just clueless.” He laughed, he knew that it was due to him not being able to stay on one subject for long, he kept the window down to breath in the cool air.

“Perhaps…it’s not until October and you know Santa Monica loves to go all out for Halloween. I’d have to see, but if I doooo, I’ll be sure to take pictures….or you know perhaps sober me will be on better terms with you and we could go,” Nessa drunkenly offered with a smile. “You’re not clueless at all, I’m glad that you keep up!” She beamed excitedly. “Ugh it feels so nice outside. I might fall asleep on the balcony when I make it back home.”

niklaus vondra.

”We are not letting you pass out on the balcony…that’s very dangerous,” he stated very firmly, the thought of her accidentally hurting herself or something worse. “We can leave the window open for you while you rest, I’ll stay until you are sleep talking, how about that?”

Her eyes widened at Nick’s quick assertion and she shrugged. “There’s a futon sofa I always collapse on that’s there, I never go near the edge,” She sighed, knowing there’d be no arguing with him in her state. “Okay, on one condition though. You have to play with my hair like you used to do when I was drunk to help me sleep.”

niklaus vondra.

Nick couldn’t help but to laugh at her demand, “fine, I’ll do just that so you can sleep. But please don’t puke, cleaning up after puke is the worse.” He jokingly stated, lightly caressed her hand in his and lightly patted the back of her hand.

“I won’t, don’t worry. It’s been a very very verryyyy long time since that’s happened. I think when the window opened it would’ve hit,” Nessa giggled. “Why are you so to me after all these years?” she asked as she rested her head on his shoulder again.

niklaus vondra.

Sometimes he wished that he didn’t have to speak, but here she was, asking questions in which he tried to divert everything. He didn’t have it in him to deny her the answers nor had it in him to even be remotely mean to her. “I’m not a complete dick head as to what people seem to believe I am.”

Nessa being Nessa always asked the hard questions whether she was sober or completely drunk off her ass. She wanted to know and dive deeper as to why Nick treated her so well even after all this time. She shook her head and sighed, “Nooo, that’s not what I mean! You’ve always been sweet, despite what anyone says. I just don’t get why now. I’d think you know, you’d hate sober me by now. I mean, well, me. ‘Cos I’m not the little princess I was and you fell for that one…well—“ she paused for a moment and then said, “At least I think you did. I dunno. Nicole said I was delulu about it.”

niklaus vondra.

”Delulu? Are you trying to say delusional?” He asked amused as hell with her drunk talk, the driver drove off once he got the food and he grabbed the bag, handing out food for her and looked at her, “if Nicole said those, you do realize she was just saying that to hurt you, surprised you haven’t noticed since you two were once so close.”

“Yeah! That word!!!” She giggled, shaking her head. Her eyes lit up at the food and she did an excited wiggle when she took the burger and carefully opened it up to take a bite. “I know she did, but I just wanted to know, since you know…we never got to say it. Tragic, innit?” She took another bite of her burger and sighed.

niklaus vondra.

Nick took a piece of fry and chewed on it, “Ness…why do you keep bringing up the past?” He asked, “I thought you moved on?” Maybe he was hoping she moved on, wanted her to not be stuck on him, he was nothing compared to the empire she grew. He had his own demons he had to deal with but it was a never ending battle for himself.

“Because it came back,” Nessa said as she took another bite. She wound up wrapping it back up as the question sank deeper. “I can’t let my past haunt me, so I ask questions so I can sleep at night. Soooo, if this is you’re way of saying you’ve moved on, then you know, we can be done with it and I can walk home,” She responded rather stubbornly. At this point, she wasn’t sure if she’d make it home walking but, the question stung. “I have moved on. Multiple times. Neither of them worked out as you can see. Thanks for the bloody reminder,” she huffed.

niklaus vondra.

He knew he should have kept his mouth shut but seeing her acting like this, it made him realize that they both were hurting. Just finding ways to cope differently, but almost similar. “I’m not saying it to get you feeling guilty or anything, it’s just…every time I see you intoxicated, you bring up the past. I don’t want to see you stuck in the past…as for you doing things multiple times…it just means you have shit taste in people.”

The logical side of Nessa knew two things, one, both of them were experiencing a nostalgic type of hurt and two, he was right. And even then, the drunk and incredibly stubborn side of her couldn’t see reason. “Because I’m drunk, Niklaus and the only thing I remember from us, is the past we have no present! So excuse meee for getting nostalgic but I’m not bound to the past,” She spat out. At his next comment she could feel the tears burning her eyes. It was true…but it didn’t hurt any less. She got quiet afterwards and unlinked their hands to wipe the tears that began falling. “Just drop me off here. I’ll walk. I don’t care how far I am, I’ll walk until I make it home. I’ll figure it out, I always do.”

niklaus vondra.

Nick silently cursed, the driver meeting his eyes in the review mirror, in which he shook his head as looked outside to see they were getting close to her place. “I’m not letting you walk home alone, especially at night.” He stated firmly, maybe he was stubborn but he would be stricken with worry of the idea something happening to Vanessa.

Nessa simply glared at Nick through her tears and didn’t say another word. She simply turned her body towards her own window. The drunken angry tears just kept coming and she kept sitting there stubbornly wiping them away and trying to even out her breathing. Sure, she was acting like her typical drunken primadonna self, but what he said really did hurt.

niklaus vondra.

Nick felt his high leave, and felt sobriety kicking in, in which something he wished he didn’t have to feel. But he did feel guilty for snapping at her like that, seeing her wipe away her tears stubbornly, Nick sighed as he placed all the food back into the bag and felt the car stop. He muttered thanks to the driver and go out to follow after Vanessa when he knew fully well she would tell him to leave her alone.

As soon as the car came to a stop and she heard the car doors unlock, Nessa stumbled out of the car and to her penthouse building as she continued wiping tears and stifling her sobs as she took a hold of the door. She could hear Nick’s footsteps behind her. She gripped onto the door handle mostly to hold her balance as she sobbed out loud now. “Leave me alone!” She could feel the anger rising in her chest, “It wasn’t my fault that you all pretended to love me!” She turned around, the anger and hurt apparent in her eyes as the purple stained tears continued to fall. “I’m put together again. I’m not broken. Yeah, I wanted to know why you hurt me and yet, you do it again! What did I ever do to you?!” She asked, stumbling towards him and poking at his chest. “I did nothing to you! I did nothing!!!”

niklaus vondra.

Nick held onto the food, he allowed her to lash out at him, he knew that she needed to get this off her chest. Yet he also knew, no he wanted her to hate him, maybe some part of him thinks he deserves it. He was the one to ask the questions, piss on her effort to fix things between them. So many maybes running through his head. “Did I say you were broken Vanessa? Fuck sakes, I just asked a simple question because you kept bringing up memories—which exactly what they were—memories.” His voice raising as he matched the same energy with her, Niklaus could feel those emotions he struggled to keep back, but seeing her like this…accusing him of not loving her, it pained him. “I moved on—I thought ‘oh we can be friends, it won’t hurt anyone’ but clearly we can’t even do that!”

Vanessa shook her head, "No, you said I just picked shitty people and I didn't pick to be heartbroken so many times! I never chose that, I never wanted that. You asked a simple question and I gave you a simple little answer and that was because that's all we have! We don't have anything else but memories!" She could feel her voice going hoarse from yelling, or was it from the crying, or maybe the alcohol. She couldn't remember, but all she could feel was this immense amount of anger. This is why she couldn't get drunk...she was far too vulnerable. "You can't be friends with people you hurt until you can be brave enough to face that you've hurt them and you can't even do that! You just fucking run!" She echoed right on back. She was going to make another statement until she felt her mouth water and she took a breath turned around, walked a few steps, towards the bushes, and puked.

niklaus vondra.

He was about to say something back when he saw her run off and the sound of puking made him wince. He knew that was going to kick her in the ass tomorrow. Sighing as he walked over towards her and set the bag down beside him and grabbed her hair, while rubbing her back with the other hand. “Vanessa, let me get you inside.”

All it took was emotions for her to get sick, how lovely, she thought to herself. She was just lucky enough to not have done it in front of Nick or on her outfit, at least. Even then just as she finished, she felt a hand take her hair to hold it back from it getting gross and a soothing back rub. As much as Vanessa wanted to protest stubbornly, she sighed. "Okay...fine," She said hoarsely as she lifted her head up pitifully and carefully reached over to the bag to grab a napkin to wipe her chin with a saddened look.

niklaus vondra.

He felt a small smile appear on his face at her defeat, he nodded his head and helped her up, walking them toward inside. “Okay, c’mon…”he said softly, his voice almost a whisper but deep enough, Niklaus could feel the urge to comfort her but the idea of taking advantage of her under the influence didn’t sit right with him. But he knew he wouldn’t be able too when sober. Once they reached inside, he helped her toward her bedroom, setting the bag onto the counter.

Nessa followed Nick inside, holding onto him to steady herself and keep herself from falling. It was a struggle, but she would make it there soon. It was a strange comfort knowing Nick was still there despite hurting each other’s feelings just moment ago. Once they made it inside her apartment and to her bedroom, she sprawled across the bed. “Thank you…” she muttered.

niklaus vondra.

He chuckled as he took her shoes off and nodded his head, “I wasn’t going to let you stay passed out in the streets, I’m not a complete dickhead.” He said and placed the shoes down nearby, helping her get comfortable before grabbing a trash bin and set it beside the bed. He got up to go into the kitchen to grab water and a bottle of pain meds before sitting down at the edge and pat her leg. “Okay, you should be set for the morning, garbage near you and water right on the night stand along with meds.”

Vanessa let out a rather dry chuckle and shook her head tiredly, "You could have and I wouldn't have blamed you." She watched Nick from taking off her shoes and getting the pain meds for her and water, and it didn't click to her as to why he was so nice to her, even after hurting her...even after she hurt him. She didn't say anything at first when he came back and told her the game plan, she just gazed at him, blinking slowly. She wanted to bring up the hair thing, but finally the sober part of her held her tongue in that aspect, which made the drunk part of her tear up again. She quietly nodded and curled up towards her blankets and turned away from him.

niklaus vondra.

He watched her turn away from him, a small sigh escaped his lips, he tried to say something—anything to make the matters less terrible then where they were at now. But words were said and he was at his limit from becoming a complete douche. “Feel better in the morning,” he said softly and stood up from the mattress, grabbing the food from the counter to place in the fridge.

There was a moment where part of her wanted to tell him to wait, but the other part wanted to tell him to fuck off. She was caught in between the two, but managed to softly mumble out a "thank you", as she sniffled lightly, making it clear she was still upset...but holding on strongly to her pride.

[maelstrom3]

My last post got erased, so maybe that’s a good thing. It was just a rant about insecurity and stuff. Last night we went on a date and it was really good. We parked at her job and luckily she  knows the area so she  lead us to the sandwich shop. Right off the bat she was really energetic and friendly in a way that kind of reminded me of mom. The conversation was constant and there was laughing and whatnot. She’s a big loud laugher, which I like. I can’t tell if she’s being overly polite and laughing harder than she wants to but whatever it is it works. We chatted about a whole bunch of stuff, there was thunder she loves thunder and lightning too. She went on a trip to Kenya to help poor people but they sent her to a resort with John travolta? She went to West virginia for some volunteer thing. We picked up the sandwiches and it was funny because she placed the order under her name and I thought she had put it under my name haha. We walked to the reflecting pool. I talked a lot about my bad dating skills and awkward momements. I spent a lot of time telling her these things that might have been an overshare but she seemed really receptive to all of them and valued that I was being vulnerable. I don’t like that dynamic to be honest, I don’t want her to be my therapist. I’ll try and moderate that and make sure it’s all in the name of levity. It mostly was but perhaps a bit of it was more to defend myself and give reason to the ways that I am. Like prefacing a story with a statement. We went ot the reflecting pool and ate sitting on the stones next to it. THe summer rolls were a disaster to eat and we watched ants feast on the fallouts of mine. It was definitely not pretty, I was pretty hungry and not eating very politely but she laughed and enjoyed it. She asked me if I was an insect what insect I would be. I couldn’t come up with anything. It’s a hard questions, either because I don’t know myself, don’t want to describe myself accurately/only want to use positive descriptors, and/or the dificulty in ascribing qualities to bugs. She said I was a stick bug because I was... I can’t remember lol. Maybe I was cool or osmething, I really can’t remember. She asked me what I thought she was and she thought I was going to say ant but she was the opposite. I said jumping spider because she’s an individual. I guess to add on to it she’s energetic/lively and has personality and is likable. Maybe I tried to hard on it haha. I also didn’t want to be complimenting too hard. We finished up and were going back to her job to put the sandwiches in the fridge to get them later. We washed up and as we were leaving a spanish looking family were coming to the door and she let them in, they said they were there to clean and she let them in. I cracked a joke about not throwing my food in the fridge away because I wanted to break the tension of a couple coming out of a workplace after hours. She started to wonder if she just  let people in to rob the place haha. She texted Linda about it and apparently it was fine. We went to the Famished Frog/Caps and had cocktails. I had a raspberry gin blossom one and she had some blueberry lemonade thing. They were kind of awful and completely unmixed. The table was slippery anywhere water would touch because of residual soap. We talked for about 2.5 hours. She was telling me stories about Cooper/Collin from 4th grade (her first heartbreak and the say Collin found out nobody cared if he went missing). She asked me which character I was from Rick and Morty and described herself as Mr.Meseeks because she’s always trying to hard to help and make situations okay, her being loud, and existential dread hahahah. I was telling her when I had the epiphany from reading East of Eden of how these people from a different time and place had the same problems as me and she roasted me or discovering ‘empathy’ and the universal human experience. She told me a story of how in Ireland she was at an Air BnB with a lady named after some goddess, ends with ‘id’, and she kept finishing her tea to be polite and the lady kept refilling it, and the next day the lady made her three whole pots. I was beaming at her the whole time. She’s funny and smart and entertaining and thinks I tell stories funny and can laugh at herself and me and the people around us. I don’t have to be nervous about being myself because she’s magically on the same page.I think she’s attractive, but her mind is just a massive turn on. It makes me feel inadequate, like she’ll eventually find out I can’t keep up. But that hasn’t happened yet and it’s not helpful to worry about it. We left after the closed. I wanted ot kiss her at one point and grabbed her arm and leaned it but it just didn’t happen, she didn’t seem to catch it. Right as they were closing a girl standing by us slowly poured her drink out, then quietly dropped it to the group even though there was a garbage right by. Erin was quietly losing her shit at this ‘garbage person’. I guess that’s where I got confused, at some point she started to turn into Amara. Hilarious overflowing cauldron of sarcasm and resentment towards stupid people. Jesus christ that’s who I am too. We went ot he bathrooms and were in the Famished Frog when it was closed and empty and she said it was a childhood dream of hers. We left and she gave me a tour of the town. I held her hand and she made jokes about it and was weird about it- I asked if I wasn’t supposed to and if it wasn’t okay, I said I just wanted to it was just a feeling and she let me. She has really slender fingers. That lasted till she pointed out a stump that had hollowed and asked why it was hollow. I didn’t know where I stood and didn’t push it but I wanted to. I walked closely and let my hand be there and available just incase but we didn’t hold hands for the rest of the night. I can’t tell if she’s not affectionate or just wasn’t at the same place as me. I would grab and touch her periodically, I did the hug from behind thing. She didn’t resist but she didn’t reciprocate. We walked and talked more and eventually got back to the cars. We went inside her office and chatted briefly. Its a really nice office. We went to the back and sat in her trunk and watched people through the windows and talked. It had ebbs and flows, she asked me what my favorite part of the date was... I can’t remember what I said. Maybe the girl pouring out her drink. I told her a lot of times I was having a really good time. I don’t know if that played in my favor but I was emotionally open throughout the night. She's hard to read. She got onto a thing about how she hates morristown and were joking about it being awful, it really reminded me of Amara. In the light she started to look like who she looked in her Bumble profile. I said something about how I don’t know how she looks. I like her face. She texted me later making fun of me for saying I didn’t know what she looked like. Maybe this is all the dynamic, she’s emotionally guarded and I’m the one who is open and vulnerable.  Eventually she said we should get going and I told her my least favorite part of the date was when I tried to kiss her and it didn’t happen. She said she didn’t realize and I think I sort of asked if we could kiss. Something weird happened and she like moved out of the way, kind of like Lauren. I walked away dramatically about how I’m cursed and came back to her and this time I fucked it up and dodged her kiss and she gave me shit and then we finally kissed. Like moths bumping into  a light bulb haha. It was  nice, it’s weird how you can’t describe how to french kiss but you know how to do it. I gave her shit for still holding onto her stuff and she immediately dropped everything to the floor and like really kissed me. Like a really grabbing kiss. We talke very briefly afterwards and she gave me the song ‘Holocene’ to listen to, I wanted her to listen to I WIsh You Were Here. I had played the song Echo briefly before. I drove home and wasn’t totalyl sure where I stood honestly but I had asked her what her favorite part of the date was and she said all of it. The whole date was a good feeling. It was fun and she made me feel good. She said she would go on a second date so we have to figure that out. I’m trying to figure out how much to text and communicate, she has been unresponsive for some time but  honestly the texting thing is annoyin. Liek do you have to have a running conversation the whole day? WHADYA SUPPOSED TO DO? I’m leaving now to go to a barbeque at Andrews neighbors, Kara should be there. It’s ironic I’m meeting her after having gone on a date with Erin. I’ll go just to make the connection but I hope things work out with Erin, I’m kind of smitten.

[xtruss]

We’re Approaching a Level of Manufactured Mass Hysteria and Herd Mentality That Not Even Goebbels Could Have Imagined

"There comes a point in the introduction of every new official narrative when people no longer remember how it started"

— Covid-1984 | CJ Hopkins | Anti-Empire.Com | May 5, 2020

“It’s all right there in black and white. They aren’t hiding the totalitarianism … they don’t have to. Because people are begging for it. They are demanding to be “locked down” inside their homes, forced to wear masks, and stand two meters apart, for reasons that most of them no longer remember”

There comes a point in the introduction of every new official narrative when people no longer remember how it started. Or, rather, they remember how it started, but not the propaganda that started it. Or, rather, they remember all that (or are able to, if you press them on it), but it doesn’t make any difference anymore, because the official narrative has supplanted reality.

You’ll remember this point from the War on Terror, and specifically the occupation of Iraq. By the latter half of 2004, most Westerners had completely forgotten the propaganda that launched the invasion, and thus regarded the Iraqi resistance as “terrorists,” despite the fact that the United States had invaded and was occupying their country for no legitimate reason whatsoever. By that time, it was abundantly clear that there were no “weapons of mass destruction,” and that the U.S.A. had invaded a nation that had not attacked it, and posed no threat to it, and so was perpetrating a textbook war of aggression.

These facts did not matter, not in the slightest. By that time, Westerners were totally immersed in the official War on Terror narrative, which had superseded objective reality. Herd mentality had taken over. It’s difficult to describe how this works; it’s a state of functional dissociation. It wasn’t that people didn’t know the facts, or that they didn’t understand the facts. They knew the Iraqis weren’t “terrorists.” At the same time, they knew they were definitely “terrorists,” despite the fact that they knew that they weren’t. They knew there were no WMDs, that there had never been any WMDs, and still they were certain there were WMDs, which would be found, although they clearly did not exist.

The same thing happened in Nazi Germany. The majority of the German people were never fanatical anti-Semites like the hardcore N.S.D.A.P. members. If they had been, there would have been no need for Goebbels and his monstrous propaganda machine. No, the Germans during the Nazi period, like the Americans during the War on Terror, knew that their victims posed no threat to them, and at the same time they believed exactly the opposite, and thus did not protest as their neighbors were hauled out of their homes and sent off to death camps, camps which, in their dissociative state, simultaneously did and did not exist.

What I’m describing probably sounds like psychosis, but, technically speaking, it isn’t … not quite. It is not an absolute break from reality. People functioning in this state know that what they believe is not real. Nonetheless, they are forced to believe it (and do, actually, literally, believe it, as impossible as I know that sounds), because the consequences of not believing it are even more frightening than the cognitive dissonance of believing a narrative they know is a fiction. Disbelieving the official narrative means excommunication from “normality,” the loss of friends, income, status, and in many cases far worse punishments. Herd animals, in a state of panic, instinctively run towards the center of the herd. Separation from the herd makes them easy prey for pursuing predators. It is the same primal instinct operating here.

It is the goal of every official narrative to generate this type of herd mentality, not in order to deceive or dupe the public, but, rather, to confuse and terrorize them to the point where they revert to their primal instincts, and are being driven purely by existential fear, and facts and truth no longer matter. Once an official narrative reaches this point, it is unassailable by facts and reason. It no longer needs facts to justify it. It justifies itself with its own existence. Reason cannot penetrate it. Arguing with its adherents is pointless. They know it is irrational. They simply do not care.

We are reaching this point with the coronavirus narrative. It is possible that we have already reached it. Despite the fact that what we are dealing with is a virus that, yes, is clearly deadly to the old and those with medical conditions, but that is just as clearly not a deadly threat to the majority of the human species, people are cowering inside their homes as if the Zombie Apocalpyse had finally begun. Many appear to believe that this virus is some sort of Alien-Terrorist Death Flu (or weaponized Virus of Mass Destruction) that will kill you the second you breathe it in.

This is not surprising at all, because, according to the official narrative, its destructive powers are nearly unlimited. Not only will it obliterate your lungs, and liquidate all your other major organs, and kill you with blood clots, and intestinal damage, now it causes “sudden strokes in young adults,” and possibly spontaneous prostate cancer, and God knows what other medical horrors!

According to all the “scientists” and “medical experts” (i.e., those that conform to the official narrative, not all the other scientists and medical experts), it is unlike any other virus that has ever existed in the history of viruses. It certainly doesn’t follow the typical pattern of spreading extensively for a limited period, and then rapidly dying down on its own, regardless of what measures are taken to thwart it, as this Israeli study would seem to indicate.

Also, “we have no immunity against it,” which is why we all have to remain “locked down” like unruly inmates in a penitentiary until a vaccine can be concocted and forced onto every living person on earth. Apparently, this mandatory wonder vaccine will magically render us immune to this virus against which we have no immunity (and are totally unable to develop immunity), which immunity will be certified on our mandatory “immunity papers,” which we will need to travel, get a job, send our kids to school, and, you know, to show the police when they stop us on the street because we look like maybe we might be “infected.”

Germany (where I live) is way out in front of this. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the federal government plans to introduce a coronavirus “immunity card” as part of its “Infection Protection Law,” which will grant the authorities the power to round up anyone “suspected to be contagious” and force them into … uh … “quarantine,” and “forbid them from entering certain public places.” The Malaysian authorities have dispensed with such niceties, and are arresting migrant workers and refugees in so-called “Covid-19 red zones” and marching them off to God knows where.

Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot … the germ and chemical warfare researchers at DARPA (i.e., the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) have developed some new type of fancy blood test that will identify “asymptomatic carriers” (i.e., people who display no symptoms whatsoever). So that will probably come in handy … especially if the “white supremacists,” “Red-Brown extremists,” and “conspiracy theorists” keep protesting the lockdown with their wives and kids!

And these are just the latest additions to a list of rather dystopian examples of the “brave new normal” official narrative that GloboCap is rolling out, right before our very eyes (which the OffGuardian editors have streamlined here and here, and which continues on Twitter). It’s all right there in black and white. They aren’t hiding the totalitarianism … they don’t have to. Because people are begging for it. They are demanding to be “locked down” inside their homes, forced to wear masks, and stand two meters apart, for reasons that most of them no longer remember.

Plastic barriers are going up everywhere. Arrows on the floor show you which way to walk. Boxes show you where to stand. Paranoid Blockwarts are putting up signs threatening anyone not wearing a mask. Hysterical little fascist creeps are reporting their neighbors to the police for letting their children play with other children. Millions of people are voluntarily downloading “contact tracing applications” so that governments and global corporations can monitor their every movement. In Spain, they bleached an entire beach, killing everything, down to the insects, in order to protect the public from “infection.” The Internet has become an Orwellian chorus of shrieking, sanctimonious voices bullying everyone into conformity with charts, graphs, and desperate guilt-trips, few of which have much connection to reality. Corporations and governments are censoring dissent. We’re approaching a level of manufactured mass hysteria and herd mentality that not even Goebbels could have imagined.

Meanwhile, they’re striking the mostly empty “field hospitals,” and the theatrical “hospital ship” is now gone, and despite their attempts to inflate the Covid-19 death count as much as humanly possible, the projected hundreds of millions of deaths have not materialized (not even close), and Sweden is fine, as is most of humanity, and … just like there were no WMDs, there is no Virus of Mass Destruction.

What there is, is a new official narrative, the brave new, paranoid, pathologized “normal.” Like the War on Terror, it’s a global narrative. A global, post-ideological narrative. It’s just getting started, so it isn’t yet clear how totalitarian this show will get, but, given the nature of the pilot episode, I am kind of dreading the rest of the series.

Source: Consent Factory | Russia Insider

[stephhannes]

is march madness the same thing as seasonal depression?

most days are normal, i function.  i wash my hair, i go to the grocery store, i have conversations without forgetting what i was saying in the middle of a sentence. i accomplish the tasks i need to do without struggle, i go to bed at a reasonable time, and i sleep for a normal amount of hours.

and some days i’m paralyzed. i’m too sad to move. i look at old pictures for hours and i read through old conversations until my eyes are blurry and i play the same voicemail on repeat. on the worst of these days, i sleep so long that i get texts from people asking if i’m still alive.

one-third of the year, persephone has to return to hades.  one-third of the time i just, disappear.

nathan used to describe my depression as a “disappearing act” so maybe i did learn something from working at a magic show, after all.

every once and awhile i’d have a handful of days where i’d have just enough good energy to go to work, and anything more than that was too emotionally taxing, i was too exhausted to be a functional person. i never realized that it was obvious to other people when i was really struggling- but as soon i’d start to snap out of it, nathan would always say, “wow welcome back, i missed you.”

there’s a scene in it’s always sunny in philadelphia when a timeshare salesman asks dennis if he’s ever been to florida, and he responds with, “been there? ….not physically.” we had a version of that joke at the theatre- were we at work? well, physically yes, but mentally we were all astral projecting to a place with less magicians.

that was me on the bad days. physically i’d be at the apartment, but mentally i was astral projecting to a place where i was less depressed. i still have days like that, the only problem is that now i don’t have anyone around that notices and i’ve caught myself sometimes losing like a week to my depression. but for the most part, i don’t have the really bad days anymore.

it’s a step up from when i felt like a visitor in my own body almost full-time.

i never posted a blog about what my february looked like, mostly because i did nothing for the entire month. i stepped foot out of my home three times. my step counter will tell you that i averaged 159 steps the entire month, and there were actually 6 days where i took 0 steps. there were only three days where i took more than 80 steps. here’s the graph to prove it- 

 +++

it feels weird to finally have an answer. months ago, when nathan’s autopsy initially came back inconclusive, i had resolved that we probably just wouldn’t know what happened. and 12 weeks after that when toxicology came back clean, i was even more steadfast in my belief that we wouldn’t get a clear-cut answer. realistically, there was a part of me that knew there has to be some kind of answer- but i was completely okay with never actually getting it. and then we got it.

i’ve always really hated when someone dies and then everyone’s reaction is “oh be sure to hug the people you love! u never know when something could happen!” it’s like how i hate the people who use valentine’s day as an excuse to make up for the other 364 days a year they don’t do anything nice for their partner. i’ve always been very intentional in my relationships, making it abundantly clear how i feel about people constantly. i always write dumb love letters to my friends, i’ve always been the person who gets drunk and is immediately like HEY I LOVE YOU to every person in the room with me. i think a lot of times when someone dies, people feel a specific regret of “oh i wish i had told (person) how much i love them” but like, it was borderline disgusting how affectionate nathan and i were.

he’d leave for class and then 30 minutes later he’d text me and be like, “hey i miss you.” or like, he’d fall asleep and i’d text him some dramatic ass paragraph about how much i love him, like this one from august 2nd- “hi you’re asleep right now but even though you keep snoring real loud i love you a lot. thanks for asking me to marry you. i know that neither of us were really the type to even like consider marriage in the past but i’m really glad that we get to do this. you’re my favorite person and getting to spend the rest of my life with you (with the added tax benefits) is really all i’ve ever wanted. so far you’ve been a pretty great fiancé, so i guess i’ll keep you for at least a lil longer. i am so glad that i’m yours because you’re such an incredible partner. anyways, i’m sorry that i’ve been gone a lot lately, i’ve missed you a lot but hopefully soon things will be back to normal and i’ll be back to snoring in your ear all night. ok goodnight i love you i’m excited to hang out with you this weekend.”

so on one hand, i feel great because even though i have like 5 new suitcases of baggage- at least i won’t have to check the “shoulda been more open about my feelings” bag. but on the other hand, after finding out what had happened i still had an existential crisis/panic attack when i was reminded that “oh life is fleeting and can just be taken away randomly and nothing truly matters and what am i doing here and why did this happen all i’ve ever done is be a good person but that doesn’t even matter and death is imminent please send help”

one night when i was drunk, i remember telling one of my friends that i feel like i’m immortal. but not in the cool, “i’m a 7000 year old witch,” way but in the “i’m plagued by the curse of immortality where i have to watch everyone else that i love die,” way. i remember feeling like this after my dad died, but now i’m just convinced.

+++

the best thing about march is that it’s truck month. the worst thing about march is that when it’s over, truck month ends and april starts. i’ve been dreading april for the last seven months. the 10th is nathan’s birthday, the 26th is mine, the 30th is our anniversary and it’ll also be the 1 year anniversary of our engagement. i knew that going to new york was something that i needed to do at some point during april. and luckily the only window where it’s reasonably priced to fly there falls at the end of april. so from the 23rd to may 7th, i’ll be back. it’s partially because cody’s been begging me to come back and i miss her but also because i can’t imagine being anywhere else during that time. the last time i was in nyc was back in november, and i was still in a pretty bad place then. so i’m excited to return now that i’m significantly less of a shell and more of a person. i’m setting my expectations for myself very low: if i make it through the two weeks without crying in public, it’s a success.

+++

you know that inspirational quote that’s (definitely not factually true) something like “Every single cell in the human body replaces itself over a period of seven years. That means there's not even the smallest part of you now that was part of you seven years ago.”?

i think that’s me- but with dyeing my hair blue. like clockwork, somehow, basically every 7 years i dye my hair blue. and it’s always marked some Life Change. the first time i did it, i was 10 years old- that was the first time i’d ever dyed my hair. we used a semi-permanent dye and it got all over everything, including my skin, and i looked like a smurf for a week. the second time was eight years later, the day after high school graduation. and the most recent time was the other day, six years later.

i don’t know what it means, but if i was more of a romantic i’m sure i could come up with some deep metaphor. i’ll just stick with the fact that i put off dyeing my hair blue because of how hard it is to maintain, how it gets everywhere, and how hard it is to get rid of.

+++

i feel like the tone of this was overwhelmingly bleak, but i promise i’ve been doing better. i’ve even started applying for jobs recently. it’s almost like i’m trying to get my shit together! i got rejected for a job as a copywriter at bumble, and then a day later one of my tweets got like 300 likes so i’m sure they’re really regretting turning me down now. it’s fine, i’m not bitter. 

[ah17hh]

I have absolutely no idea what to do via /r/polyamory

I have absolutely no idea what to do

I've been with my NP (Adam) for 7+ years, non-mono from the start and poly for 6+ of them, and was with my other serious bf (Jay) for 3+, much of which he functionally lived here as well.

My relationship with Jay has been tumultuous from the start, to say the least. Neither of us is super emotionally stable, he's an alcoholic (and a really nasty drunk), and I have a history of dating abusive drunks, and the PTSD to show for it. We were amazing together, except when we were a toxic mess, which was becoming more and more frequently as he tried (unsuccesfully) to stay sober. He crossed the line into full-on abusive one too many times, and I finally ended things for good. It sucks, because if he ever could have been happily sober we were amazing together, but at this point I'm done done.

Adam and I are complicated. We are best friends, wonderful roommates, and definitely family. We click intellectually, and share a lot of ethics and a weird sense of humor. He is, since my mom died, basically my only real family. The problem is that on other levels we absolutely don't click. Sex with us has always been complicated. Its good, but the chemistry isn't there for me, and nor can he seem to figure out how to navigate actually turning me on, despite effort on both ends. I'm extremely sexually driven, and while he isn't quite as extreme he is pretty sexual as well. I also have a pretty crazy, and fairly traumatic, past life that is a million miles away from anything he has any point of reference for. He knows, but on a very fundamental level he is never going to get that part of me. He has buried 2 elderly grandparents, and an sick uncle. I've buried virtually everyone I grew up with except for 2 friends, including most of my old loves, one of them my first real love, and all of them either by violence, suicide, or overdose, excluding my mom (that was surprise cancer). In some ways he is the center of my world, in other ways he is a million miles away. He has also been in a depressive funk that has gotten progressively worse over the past 4+ years, and has done virtually nothing about it. When he isn't at work (at whichever shitty job he currently hates, and he quits and repeats the cycle) he's a stoned lump on the couch. I'm not unempathetic, I have type II bipolar that I manage without meds, so I know depressive apathy all too well. We have absolutely opposite ways of reacting to it though. My bipolar was early onset, and I've been fighting that black hole for my life for basically my entire adult life. I will tear my life apart if I have to for the dopamine kick to break out of that gravitational field. He wallows in it. It probably doesn't help that his baseline personality is very laid back, and fairly unambitious, where as mine is the polar opposite. At our best we balance one another out nicely. At our worst I'm a whirlwind of chaos and emotion that he can't find his footing while navigating, and he's a black hole of apathy that slowly sucks me into its gravity.

For the past 3 years the things I really need that weren't there with Adam I was getting from Jay, and it kind of worked. I still needed them with Jay, especially a willingness to actually do things together, and we have had the talk many times, but the best he has right now is a grudging willingness to come along for the ride. A lot of the things I love most, like travel and the outdoors, he enjoys occasionally in small doses, but thats it. I knew that to an extent my relationship with Jay was also (poorly) patching widening holes in my relationship with Adam, and they both knew it too.

It felt like my life was on pause waiting for Jay to get his shit together, and now that that's done its become painfully obvious how much its still on hold, either waiting for Adam to do the same, or trying to drag him along or carry him. I still don't feel like I have an actual equal partner in most regards, be it financially, or socially, or emotionally. I don't want to lose Adam, because I do love him to death, but I can't keep doing what I'm doing now, and changing this is going to go beyond having this conversation for the 500th time.

A month ago I met a guy halfway across the country (somewhere I have always wanted to live) on tinder. We made a ridiculously inpulsive plan for me to come visit for 10 days, and 2 weeks to the day after we started talking I was on the plane (no, I'm not in the US). Should have gone horribly, right? The guy is everything I didn't even know I needed, and everything I want. The guy also is decidedly not poly, though how that will play out with my being poly remains to be seen. We have, bizarrely, mostly avoided the subject. What was supposed to be...I don't know what it was supposed to be, but it turned into him coming here a month from when I left, then me flying out again, and us talking about my moving in.

I don't need to make a decision now, but it feels like I do. And the decision isn't even so much this guy, its leaving to pursue some long-paused dreams, to live in my dream place, to snap out of this haze I've been stuck in. The guy is kind of the icing on the cake (I think). My NP would be fine with me living there 50/50, and its actually potentially viable work-wise, but I don't know if that would work with the guy, or for me. I should add on that I am having a horrible time with the LD thing, especially in a new relationship that I am way over invested in for the duration. I've done the NRE crazy many times before though, and I have never felt like this about someone. Its not the giddy he's perfect NRE, its the feeling I had when I started my career, the one that actually fit me like this was what I was made for. I know what sucks about him, I know whats going to bother me, I know he isn't my all-inclusive ticket to unending happiness. But fuck, for the first time in my life I can see how forever might actually look without drowning in existential dread. This feels like a chance I can't pass up, and it also feels like I shouldn't be trusting my own decision-making with everything that is going on, but shit is always going on. I feel like I've been stuck in place because nothing ever feels stable enough to make big decisions, or big changes, like I never feel stable enough, because I am miserable because I'm stuck.

If you made it this far, thank you. I don't know what I'm looking for, besides outside feedback, and a sounding board. What should I be asking myself? What am I missing? How do you know if its a stupid time to make a decision because you're frustrated and miserable, or if you absolutely need to make a decision because you're frustrated and miserable? I think I know what I need to do, but I'm terrified to trust myself (a lifetime of having every decision you make framed as a symptom, and of having to second guess every decision in case it really is a symptom, will do that). I am, for what it's worth, stable mental health-wise at the moment.

Submitted August 17, 2020 at 05:51PM by Missscarlettheharlot via reddit https://ift.tt/3iMAkUr

[ghostingnovel]

Chapter One

The little girl choked on dry, filthy air, gulping in ash and smoke. It hurt so much as it filled her tiny lungs. But she couldn’t stop - she continued to claw at the door. Her hands were already burned badly from trying to pull open the handle, so she threw the whole seventy pounds of her weight at the frame. It didn’t budge. The flames continued to draw closer, licking her with sharp tongues. She could smell her hair burning. She might have been crying, but the air was so hot that the tears turned to salt before they left her eyes.

“Daddy!”

 She continued to throw herself at the door - five, six, seven times. Her daddy was in there. She had to save him. She kept throwing herself, screaming, burning.

Then it hit her. She didn’t know what “it” was – it might have been fire, it might have been ice, it might have been a truck. But whatever it was, it threw her back from the door, sending her tiny body skittering across the burning carpet onto the tiled kitchen floor.

 She’d wanted to scream. She’d wanted to fight the fire. She’d wanted to save him. But little Samantha could do none of those things – instead, the flames flickered out into sudden, endless black.

Sammi had been afraid of fire ever since her dad died in one. Even now, with just this small bonfire, Sammi could feel her heart pounding a little too fast and her breath coming a little too shallowly.

 She didn’t say anything, of course. It had been almost twelve years since the fire, and the dozen or so therapists she’d had since then had encouraged her to deal with her fear constructively instead of avoid it. But she still averted her gaze from the dancing flames, pulling her blanket more tightly around her shoulders. She could still hear it, though: the crackling and popping as the flames hungrily licked and bit the brittle kindling.

 It was the noise that bothered her most. It reminded her of the crunching of bones.

 “Hey pumpkin, you’re going to miss out on the s’mores.”

 Sammi looked up. Her Uncle Sam – yes, really, and you bet he owned a hat embellished with the American flag for the holidays - waved a stick with two golden-brown marshmallows at the end. In his other hand, he held a box of crackers and a half-eaten bar of chocolate, all of which he offered.

 “Whaddya say? Want one or two?”

 “Two, of course,” Sammi responded quickly, flashing a hungry grin. “And extra chocolate.”

 “Two s’mores with extra chocolate coming right up.”

 Sammi watched as her uncle carefully scraped the marshmallows off the stick and sandwiched them between a slab of cracker and a slab of chocolate. In the flickering firelight, he looked a lot like a scarecrow: His face was mostly obscured by a fishing cap, but his hair stuck out like sticks of straw at odd angles around his face, except in the back where he’d tamed the mane into a stubby ponytail. His beard was equally patchy, and overall he shared a scarecrow’s long, thin frame – except in his stomach, where he’d developed a noticeable beer gut. His long legs sprawled out, reaching towards the fire from the log he sat on. From this angle, she noticed that he wasn’t wearing any socks. The rest of his outfit was similarly shabby or nonexistent: His jeans were patched and too short, his hiking boots were falling apart, and most likely the flannel shirt he was wearing was meant for someone four or five sizes bigger than him. His coat was missing – probably because he’d forgotten to pack one.

 None of this was surprising. On a normal day her uncle usually wore a suit, so he’d probably borrowed most of what he was wearing specifically for this camping trip. Nonetheless, Sammi got the distinct impression that, right now, he’d look right at home strung up on a pole in the middle of a cornfield.

 “What’s taking you so long, old man?” she teased, standing and carefully skirting around the fire to sit at the opposite end of the log her uncle was sitting on, “Come on, I’m hungry.”

 “Give me a hard time and I’ll accidentally drop yours on the ground and make you toast your own damn marshmallows.”

 “Are you threatening me?”

 The scarecrow man grumbled, “I’ll do worse than that if you keep harassing me. Now get over here, your s’mores are ready and they don’t taste as good if you let them get cold.”

 Uncle Sam continued to grumble and mutter well after Sammi had taken her s’mores, but Sammi was still thankful for the grizzled old man. He pretended to be rough, but he was always good to her. From the moment that he’d taken Sammi and her brother in, he’d always done little mindful things - like make her s’mores for her because he knew she was afraid of fire. This camping trip was also one of his little mindful things: Even though he didn’t like camping, and that Sammi didn’t particularly like camping either, he’d dragged them out to the middle of nowhere so that they could get a bit of quiet.

 After all, in places like this there were rarely any ghosts.

 “Hey Sammi, you’ve been staring. Seeing dead people or just pondering the universe?”

 Sammi blinked, then yawned, stretched, and licked her fingers of melted marshmallow goo.

 “Nah, no dead people, just a mild case of existential dread.”

 Uncle Sam grunted. “We better get you back into the city then. The place is so damn noisy that you can’t hear yourself think, so you don’t have to worry about existential dread and things like that.”

 “As long as we get to sleep here first. I’ve been dying to get a solid six hours of sleep for weeks.”

 “That was the original plan, but still, you’re paying for it if a bear or a mountain lion scratches up this RV,” her uncle nodded, scratching his patchy beard before standing up and dusting his jeans of ash and dirt. “Hey, come help me clean up, wouldja? I could use some of your magic mojo on these dishes.”

 Sammi shifted nervously. “Or we could, you know, wash them. With water. And soap.”

 “No can do, little miss. The R.V. has a busted sink. I got over a hundred bucks off that way, this thing turned out to be a real bargain,” Uncle Sam grinned, looking very proud, like he’d pulled off a very clever business transaction.

 Sammi sighed. Of course. Her uncle was a goddamn cheapskate.

 “The real bargain here is you bargaining on my magic to actually prevent you from getting Salmonella.”

 “I believe in you. And if you do poison me I’ll just take the medical expenses out of your work pay.”

 “You don’t pay me.”

 “Fair enough. Better not mess up, then.”

 Soon enough, Sammi plopped down in the middle of a large circle made up of all the pots, pans, utensils, and extra dishes that had gone into making dinner. The ground was surprisingly damp. Unfortunate for her butt, but good for what she was about to do. She waved her uncle away as she focused.

  After a minute of quiet concentration followed by a couple words of bad Latin, water began to seep, then bubble, then pool up from the ground, until there was enough water to envelop the dishes in a thin liquid film. With a little more effort, the dishes lifted gently, maybe two or three inches, off the ground and began to vibrate gently within their individual bubbles. She held the spell until sweat began to bead on her forehead, then let the water fall off the floating dishes and seep back into the earth. Unfortunately her concentration broke when the cold water splashed her legs, and the dishes came crashing back down, too.

 Dammit.

 Her uncle blinked. “Graceful.”

 “You get what you paid for, and you paid me nothing. At least everything’s still in one piece,” Sammi replied, stretching her stiff, wet legs and standing up, “Okay, I’m tapped out. We’re drying them by hand. And by ‘we’ I mean ‘you’.”

 “Like hell I am, you dropped them. Do another spell. Or get a towel, if you can find one.”

 Sammi grumbled something obscene enough to make her uncle smile.

 “See? I knew it was fine to get the R.V. with the broken sink,” Uncle Sam grinned. Despite what he said, he did go and dig up a couple towels and begin drying a dirt-smudged pan. When Sammi didn’t immediately respond, he nudged her purposefully with a plate.

 “You’re sulking,” he said seriously, “Stop it. Hey, even if you dropped it all at the end, you’ve gotten a lot better at that one – you didn’t used to be able to wash and levitate at once. Hell, I remember when levitating more than one thing at a time was a gamble.”

 “Well, it’s easier out here. I’m better at controlling water when I’m just pulling water from the ground and not dealing with a pressurized city water main,” Sammi shrugged, taking the plate and gathering the other dishes into a beach towel. She noticed something odd, though, and added, “Hey, did you put out the fire already?”

 “Oh yeah, I took care of that while you were doing your spell thing. Wasn’t too hard to stomp out.”

 Sammi blanched a little at the image of her uncle sticking his foot directly into the fire – which, when she’d seen it, didn’t quite look small enough to stomp out. “I could have done that one. That spell’s easy.”

 “It’s fine, kiddo. I want to feel at least a little useful while my niece is cleaning dishes with her brain.”

 “It’s a miracle that you didn’t set your pants on fire.”

 “I knew that if I did something stupid that you’d have a spell or two to help me out, so I wasn’t worried about it,” Uncle Sam replied, waving a hand dismissively. Sammi was uncomfortable with how confident he sounded in her. He always was too confident in her magic, and she hated it. But she didn’t say anything – just shot a disquieted glance toward the smoldering remains in the fire pit.

 Some of the embers still glowed.

Several hours later, after everything had been put away and her uncle was snoring loudly in the R.V., Sammi slipped back outside, walking to the empty fire pit and sitting at the edge of a log with a thick blanket wrapped tightly around her shoulders. The embers were dark now, dissolved into a lifeless pit of black dirt and white ash. The sounds of the night bounced around the forest, birds and unseen animals calling back and forth in greeting and warning. Sammi didn’t mind them – compared to the constant noise of the city, where both the living and the dead constantly clamored in her ears, the forest was downright tranquil.

 Sammi sighed, stretching her legs. Dead leaves shifted and crunched under her feet, and dirt found its way into her flip flops and between her toes. The air was cold, with enough of a dry bite to warn that Fall would soon give way to the first days of Winter. The cold settled on her exposed skin and bit at her ears. She pulled her blanket tighter. It wasn’t thick enough armor to protect her from the elements for very long, but for now it kept her warm.

 Sammi’s eyes were drawn to the dark contours of the encampment. Moonlight scattered shadows across the ground; they crouched in the edges of the clearing, staring out from the gaps in the trees’ canopy and from behind rocks and logs. A light breeze stirred the leaves across the campsite in a low, skittering rattle.

 It was almost winter. So, it had already been a year since she’d come home – since she’d dropped out of college and moved back in with her uncle. Thinking about it made her stomach turn, memories of red ink across assignments and email notices blurring her vision. She’d tried to go back to school. She really had. At first, she’d even been an excellent student. At first, she’d loved it there. She’d loved learning, she’d loved her professors, and she’d loved just being good at something. But how was she supposed to listen in class when a dead girl wept in the back row? And how was she supposed to study when, every night, she could hear the ghosts wailing outside her dorm room? How was she supposed to make friends when she could hardly hold a conversation, too distracted by the constant murmuring of the hundreds of extra students that no one else could see?

 She became isolated. Eventually, she began to miss class. Assignments slipped between the cracks. She couldn’t concentrate in the lectures or on the readings, and the material became more and more foreign to her. Soon enough, the weight of it all, the sheer enormity of the fact that “none of it mattered, they were all going to die anyway” crushed her into her bed for hours, then days, then weeks without a single message from the outside world. Well, besides the automated emails telling her that she was failing.

 Then her uncle showed up at her door and pulled her, sick and half starved, from the wreckage she’d made of her normal life. He’d never said a word about what happened. He’d just brought her home, made some phone calls, and told her to take a shower and get some sleep because she was starting work at his bar in the morning. And start work she did. She and her uncle never talked about what happened again.

 Even if her uncle didn’t bring it up, though, Sammi couldn’t stop thinking about it. On nights like this, the guilt filled up her skull until she felt like the bones would burst from inside-out. She kept imagining clawing her way through her skull to relieve the pressure – but the pressure wasn’t real. It was all emotional pain. She still couldn’t stomach that she had failed. Shame wasn’t something that she could swallow; instead, it sat in her throat undigested all these months. She’d wanted to do well. She’d wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps and get a job in the normal world, despite her magic. She’d wanted to be more than just a penniless witch.

 And, worst of all, she’d really loved studying physics.

 Are you really ruminating on this again? You have to think of something else at night, it’s getting exhausting.

 Sammi’s expression immediately shifted from one of melancholy contemplation to the wrinkled disgust of someone smelling sour milk. Not now. She looked around her log, searching the shadows of the clearing for the speaker.

 Wrong direction, Samantha. I’m right here.

 Sammi turned back to the fire pit as the ashes began to swirl, taking on a life of their own as they spiraled into a small tornado of black and white specks. They expanded outward, creating limbs and a head out of black columns of ash and debris until a figure stood, inconcrete and tenuous, in looming judgment.

 Despite the sudden appearance of the towering figure, Sammi regarded him with a mix of annoyance and the bone-deep exhaustion that she’d cultivated from years of being haunted by the… thing in front of her.

 “Aren’t you supposed to be like, dead or something?” she asked dryly, digging dirt out from under her fingernails and flicking it through the specter’s insubstantial body. The thing shifted away from the dirt. It would have grimaced if it had a face.

 If you’re going to insult me, at least invent some fresh insults. Your banter is almost as insufferable as your lamentations.

 “Then don’t listen to my thoughts.”

 Oh, if only that were an option.

 “Pass on. That is an option.”

 The thing shifted angrily, expanding to be taller, the seething ash moving closer to her face as it hissed, You’re well aware that I can’t pass on until my killer is discovered – something that you, by the way, have neglected to pursue for quite some time now.

 “Dad, it’s been twelve years. There’s zero evidence from any investigation, natural or paranormal, that you died in anything more malicious than a house fire. They have checked probably ten times now. I have checked ten times now. Just give it up.”

 Sammi glared angrily at the figure and, when it didn’t retreat back into the fire, she cut her hand through the ash that made up its head. The ash collapsed lifelessly onto her legs and the figure recoiled, reassembling itself from a safer distance.

 This the other reason she hadn’t been able to concentrate in college – or make friends in high school, or middle school, or frankly any time in her life since she’d become an orphan. That whole time – the whole twelve years since the fire, since her father’s death, and since her forced rehoming to the apartment above her uncle’s bar – she’d been haunted by her father’s ghost, who sat idly by to critique her every move and thought until the day she could avenge his death.

It was like a bad version of Hamlet.

 “You know, you haven’t come out and bothered me for a while. I was beginning to think that you’d actually moved on to the next life,” Sammi continued, looking away from the towering figure of ash to brush the ash off her lap. “Were you busy, or were you just waiting for a moment that you could do a dramatic entrance?”

 I was trying to engage in some eternal rest, Samantha, but that’s difficult to do when I’m filled with the sensation of constantly being on fire.

 “Like I said, move on. All the doctors recommend that if a burning sensation lasts for more than twelve years that you should find your closest Reaper and go to the afterlife,” Sammi suggested coldly, “I’ve even got Diana on magical speed dial, ready to go.”

 As I mentioned, your cleverness has long since ceased to be charming.

 “And your presence has long since ceased to be fatherly,” Sammi replied bitterly,” Seriously, you’ve given me Daddy Issues that would make Freud do a double take.”

 The creature, her father, recoiled, his phantom limbs moving as if she were a particularly offensive pile of dung that he’d just stepped in.

 That’s ghastly, Samantha, he reprimanded, You know your brother would never talk to me like this.

 Oh, here we go. Every time – every goddamn time his ghost appeared – her little brother was bound to be dragged into the conversation somewhere as a stark comparison for all the things she wasn’t doing. Samantha loved her brother, of course, but according to her father, her brother would have already solved his murder. Her brother had the heart of a true magician, even if he didn’t have the gift. Her brother wasn’t insisting on sullying the family name with their pernicious apathy.

 A rueful smile split Sammi’s lips. “Good, go haunt him then. Oh, wait – you can’t. I’m the only child who can see ghosts. Guess you’re stuck with the inferior sibling.”

 You’re better than this, Samantha. Can we speak like civilized magicians?

 Sammi paused, glaring into the empty eye sockets of the ashen figure, but eventually, reluctantly, relented. She never won with anger. It wasn’t worth it.

 “Can I help you, dad?”

 The figure deflated in what Sammi took as relief, reducing in height until its head was eye level with hers. Its long arms rested on the ground, supporting it. In this light, the swirling ash that made up its limbs reminded Sammi of swarming locusts.

 I was paying attention when you were using your magic earlier with the dishware. Your ability to use multiple spells at once has improved.

 “Thanks. Like I said though, it’s easier to use nature-based magic when we’re in nature,” Sammi shrugged, finally relaxing a little. She leaned back into her log with both arms propped behind her. “In the city there’s a lot more feedback and unnatural noise. Using magic out here is easy by comparison.”

 True, but you’re selling yourself short. You’re improving.

 “Thanks.”

 You could be an excellent practitioner – you have the raw talent to be one of the best.

 “That’s a little overstated, but thank you.”

 So why aren’t you practicing?

 Sammi stiffened, looking away from the figure as she bit back an angry reply. She should have been wary the moment he started complimenting her. He knew damn well why she wasn’t practicing.

 “I don’t want to be an ectomancer, dad. I don’t want to work with dead people my entire life.”

 You don’t have to be an ectomancer like I was, Samantha, he replied gently, though you have to admit, you have the gift.

 “I can’t. Seeing and hearing dead people I can handle but…” Sammi trailed off, shivering under her blanket as she thought back to times she’d tried more advanced ectomantic magic.

 “It just doesn’t feel right, dad. It’s too close to necromancy. I don’t want to risk breaking the First Law of magic. What if I accidentally go too far?” She asked, shuddering from thoughts that were far colder than the temperature. “What if I wake up one day and there’s a Paragon knocking –“

 Samantha.

 Sammi immediately fell silent. The figure shifted, the columns of ash stirring to rest closer by her side and leaving a trail of debris from the fire pit. The holes forming the figures eyes were hardly expressive, but her father continued in a gentle tone:

 You are blurring the lines between ectomancy and necromancy. There is a distinct difference between communing with spirits and raising them – and, of course, I would never let you do that. As long as I remain here, anyway.

 He paused. Sammi didn’t fill the silence. When her father moved, his figure sounded like a rain stick, or grains of sand falling down a wooden pipe. It was hard to see anything in the ashes that reminded her of what her father used to look like. Sometimes, Sammi wished that her father could appear more human.

 But, of course, he couldn’t. After all, when you die in a fire, there isn’t much human left to work with.

 When her father spoke, his voice was soft and very hesitant, as if he was carefully choosing his words or deciding if he should speak altogether.

 Samantha, I know that having my presence haunt you – that sharing your mind with me – is not easy for you, he began. She didn’t like his tone. It wasn’t one she’d heard before, and at this point in their relationship, she’d been under the impression that she’d heard all his tones.

 “I mean, it’s definitely, uh, not normal, even for people like us,” Sammi shrugged, watching him warily.

 Practitioners, you mean?

 “Yeah, us spooky types.”

 Yes. ‘Us spooky types’. Anyways, Samantha – it is not easy for me either. I can still feel the flames, every moment of every day. I… can still imagine having my limbs and my flesh but I cannot use them. I cannot exist outside your body, so my independence is negligible at best. And… Samantha, you are aware that I’m tired. I’m aware that you are too.

 Sammi nodded slowly.

 Samantha, you already told me to once tonight. I think it would be best, for both of us, if I passed on.

 Sammi knew that these were the words she had always wanted to hear. She knew that she wanted, no, needed this to move on – but she still couldn’t help the stone that slid into her stomach and settled deep, deep into her gut. What was the feeling? Loneliness? Rejection? Fear? Now, after all these years, Sammi couldn’t even remember being alone in her head anymore.

 She needed this. He needed this. The two of them could barely tolerate sharing a mind at this point.

 But what would she do without him?

 The uncertainty stung. Even with all the bitterness that had built between them, even though they couldn’t speak to each other without hurling insults, she still loved her father. She thought the feeling was mutual. And even if their time together hurt, it was a familiar hurt. It was their hurt. It was the only thing that had never changed, and a tiny, selfish, idiotic part of her was afraid of letting it go.

 “Yeah – I mean, probably,” she mumbled, her voice sounding surprisingly noncommittal even to her own ears. She looked away, casting her eyes downward toward her dirty feet. This didn’t do much when her father could read her thoughts, but she wallowed in the illusion of privacy. Instead of stating how she actually felt, she simply teased, “Do you think they’ll still accept you into the afterlife after all these years?”

 Of course, I’ve never heard of an expiration date on the collection of souls, and I studied it extensively in life. Furthermore, many ghosts have existed for decades, even centuries, before passing on.

 “I was joking, dad.���

 I know. I was joking with you, too.

 They lapsed into silence. Sammi thought. She swallowed. Her father’s ghost shifted in the midnight breeze.

 “I thought you couldn’t pass on until you found out who killed you,” Sammi finally said. “What’s with the sudden change of the rules?”

 The rules have hardly changed, her father explained matter-of-factly, the ash that made his body collapsing inward on itself as if sighing or deep in thought. I have simply, after all these years of contemplation, discovered that I may have to settle with another kind of peace. Otherwise I may never pass on, and I also fear that you’ll never have the chance to live a life of your own. I… I’ve accepted that. I cannot be so selfish.

 “Wow. That’s big.”

 Yes, it is. But it’s necessary.

 “So… are we breaking up then?”

 Even if the figure lacked eyes, she could feel her father’s look. Samantha.

 “Sorry. It’s just. Uh. Wow.”

 Your constant eloquence never ceases to amaze me.

 “Okay, nevermind. You said you were passing on, right? You can do your thing now.”

 I will, I will. But first, there are two things I need to be at peace.

 Sammi’s expression immediately lost any sadness that had been clinging to it, replaced with a glacial stare built by over a decade of trying to do the impossible for her father and failing.

 “I can’t solve your murder. It was a house fire.”

 Not that. I just said it wasn’t that, her father snapped before calmly continuing, Just listen. Honestly, this is my last will, I would expect you to show more respect.

 He cleared his nonexistent throat, a gesture that sounded natural but looked bizarre coming from the swirling pillar of ash. Did he still have vocal chords? She wondered idly. Does he need to clear his throat? Or is it just for effect?

 “First, I want you to practice. Strengthen your magic. Promise me you will. You’re an incredibly gifted practitioner – you could perhaps be chosen for the counsel one day, if you move beyond your attitude. You’re my legacy, and that incredibly potent ectomancy of yours is a gift, Samantha. Even if it doesn’t always seem to be.

 Secondly, I know that the case of my murder is many years too cold to rekindle –“ Sammi stifled a comment about kindling and the fiery circumstances surrounding her father’s death “- However, that day I lost something very precious to me, besides my life. Do you remember my old pocket watch?”

 Honestly, Sammi didn’t. She still screwed up her face as if she was trying to remember it though, and concluded that, yeah, her dad had been the kind of person in life that would carry something like a pocket watch around – even in life, he was a stuffy old bastard that belonged in Victorian England and not the twenty-first century. She nodded. It didn’t help since her father could see into her brain if he chose to and would know that she was lying, but luckily her father continued anyway – probably perfectly aware that she had no idea what he was talking about.

 “As you remember, then, it was a wedding gift from my father. Inside was a photo of your mother and I.”

 “Wow. That’s shockingly romantic of you.”

 “Yes, I had my moments, and I loved your mother deeply,” her father replied offhandedly before continuing:

 “I’m certain that this watch was not destroyed, Samantha – I put every ward, protection spell, and fortifying potion that I could think of on that watch so I would never lose it while I was working. So, to pass on, I would like my watch back. Is that a fair request?”

 Compared to solving an unsolvable murder, it was. Sammi still felt some fear about her father moving on – a fear, she assumed, like the fear of a child watching their parent remove the training wheels from their bike before launching them down a hill – but her dad needed eternal rest. She needed mortal rest. So she nodded, trying to think of where the Hell this pocket watch could be.

 “Alright. Then it’s settled, I suppose,” her father said firmly, the ash and smoke figure he embodied straightening once more into a towering pillar.

 “Practice your magic. Utilize me for as long as you have me. Grow stronger. Find the watch. Then I’ll pass on, and leave you to live your life.”

 The figure nodded again, and then – quite literally – vanished in a puff of smoke.

“Whatever you say, dad,” Sammi murmured, her voice drifting alone into the cold night air. She stared down into the fire pit, waiting for the ashes to swirl back to life or the coals to glow. They didn’t. They sat there, just like the air, the ground, and Sammi – cold, and a little bit lifeless.

 “Whatever you say.”

“Hey Pumpkin, and I could charge a baggage fee on your eyes. You sleep okay?”

 Sammi yawned, stretching as much as she could in the passenger seat of the R.V. Her legs kicked up – for once being short was a point in her favor, as it meant she still had some leg room despite sharing floor space with her backpack and several half-full bags of chips.

 “Yeah, I’m just missing my morning coffee is all. I can’t believe I forgot to pack it.”

 “We can stop at another gas station if you promise not to spill anything.”

 “Nah, don’t bother. They don’t usually have creamer that I like.”

 “See, that’s the problem with you. You’re too picky. Me? I like all coffee – black coffee, coffee with sugar, instant coffee. As long as it’s caffeinated, you should learn to appreciate coffee of all types,” Uncle Sam lectured, gesturing grandly enough that Sammi worried that he’d veer into the other lane. Her uncle batted her hand away the moment Sammi instinctively reached for the steering wheel, scowling.

 “That’s the other problem with you, too nervous. If you had any more nerves you’d just be a nervous system and nothing else. Relax, kid – we’re in the middle of nowhere and we haven’t seen another car for miles. Take in all the nature. Enjoy the great outdoors.”

 “Uncle Sam, until this trip you literally hadn’t left the city in over a decade because, and I quote, ‘who needs goddamn mountains when you’ve got a real toilet, a beer, and direct TV’.”

 “Watch your language now – that’s vulgar.”

 They lapsed into comfortable silence, watching the distant mountain peaks shift slowly between the gaps of trees as they made their way to the foothills and back toward the large five-lane freeways of civilization.

 That is, until Sammi screamed, jolting upright. Her uncle slammed on the brakes in response. The tires of the R.V. made an ugly shriek, metal protesting against the screaming brake pads as the massive vehicle bounced on the poorly paved backroad, casting up chunks of asphalt and gravel.

 “Samantha, what the hell was –“

 Her uncle began to swear, but he stopped the moment he saw his niece’s face. Sammi sat, shaking a little. Her face was stark white at first, but she quickly turned red, embarrassment flooding her features. Her uncle’s features softened.

 “Saw a ghost, huh?”

 “Yeah. I’m sorry, that was a really stupid reaction,” Sammi apologized, pulling the hood of her thick sweater over her eyes. “I mean, you’d think that I’d ever seen a ghost before, right? It’s not like I see them all the time or anything.”

 “It’s fine, kid. I get it. You weren’t prepared.”

 “Still. It was dumb. I was dumb.”

 They got back on the road, the R.V. bumping along. Sammi didn’t say anything else. Her uncle put on the radio after the silence stretched the distance from companionable to awkward. For over an hour and over sixty miles, the only sound was the riffing of classic ‘70’s and ‘80’s rock hits, with the occasional groan of the R.V. hitting a pothole, until finally:

 “Hey, Uncle Sam?”

 “Yeah, pumpkin?”

 “Why do you think I can’t turn my magic off like other ectomancers do?”

 Her uncle fell silent for a long moment. He of course didn’t know the answer – he wasn’t even able to use any magic, he just knew people who did. But he knew that his brother, Sammi’s dad, could turn his magic off. Sammi’s dad didn’t have to see ghosts if he didn’t want to. Honestly, Sam had never heard of anyone with any kind of magic that hadn’t been able to not use it. In fact, from what he knew, keeping one’s magic going around the clock was horrifically taxing on a person’s body, and was probably why Sammi was so damn small and sick all the time.

 Oh, Sammi. The poor kid always saw, and heard, and sensed ghosts. It’d been that way since her father died, and no practitioner they’d talked to could explain why.

 “Hey kid, let’s stop and get some food at the next exit,” he said, avoiding answering the question. “Maybe they have an IHOP or something. You can get that coffee you like.”

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