#cause Beard misses America

[fangirl-k8ee-ladyknight]

Is there/can there be a fic where for a team night, Richmond goes to see Deadpool and Wolverine and Collin loses his shit over welshpool?

1) Colin nearly crawls into the lap of whoever is sitting next to him in the theater with excitement.

2) Jamie giving Roy shit about “if the wolverine bloke can still look like that at sixty, what’s your excuse?”

3) after listening to Colin rave about welshpool (and the rest of the team rave about the movie in general), Roy sets up a friendly with wrexham so Colin can meet welshpool.

4) none of the team knows that Roy sets up the meetup but Jamie suspects and is adorable about it.

[sergeantbarnessdoll]

I have a request of a quick smutty piece for bearded Steve rogers. Y/N has been missing her boyfriend and she finds him sitting like this during an avengers party… and the rest I’ll let you work on that. 🥹🥹❤️🥵😏 take your time.. of course! 💖🩷🩷🩵🤍

Want You » Steve Rogers/Captain America

Pairings: Boyfriend!Steve Rogers x Girlfriend!Reader

Summary: Y/N has been missing Steve a lot lately.

Warnings: Smut (18+), language, dirty talk, kissing, hickeys, fingering, (f receiving), unprotected sex, praise kink, pet names (honey, sweetheart)

I hope you like it and thank you for requesting!🩵🩷 @katherineswritingsblog

Written on my phone so sorry if there’s any mistakes or typos.

GIF IS NOT MINE! Credit goes to the creators.

MINORS DO NOT INTERACT!!🔞

DIVIDER IS NOT MINE! Credit goes to @firefly-graphics

You walked through the Avengers Compound to the main room, looking for your boyfriend. You saw him across the room, sitting in a chair with a drink in his hand and talking to Bucky. You walked over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. Steve looked up at you and smiled. He lifted your hand and kissed it.

“I hope I’m not interrupting.” You say, looking from Steve to Bucky.

“No not at all. I was about to get another drink.” Bucky says, standing up. “It’s nice to see you, Y/N.” He smiles before walking away.

“You too, Bucky.” You smiled back.

Steve motioned for you to sit on his lap which you did. He wrapped his arm around your waist, holding you close to him.

“I was wondering where you were, sweetheart.” Steve says.

Steve’s eyes scanned your dress, loving the way it looks on your body.

“I missed you.” You say with a pout.

“I missed you too.” He says.

“No, I missed you.” You say.

You leaned in, kissing his lips. Steve tightened his grip on your waist. You pulled away, looking into his eyes and biting your bottom lip.

“Let’s go somewhere private.” You say in almost a whisper.

“You read my mind, sweetheart.” Steve says.

You two stand up, hand and hand, leaving the main room to go somewhere more private. You guys found a dimly lit supply closet and went in there quickly before anyone seen you two. The second the door shut, Steve kissed you hungrily and backed you up so your back was against the wall.

“Want you.” You say against his lips.

“You’ll get me, honey.” He says.

He moved his lips down to your neck. You gasped when you felt his teeth nip your skin, hard enough to leave a hickey. His beard scratched your skin in the way you love so much.

“Fuck me please.” You begged.

“Fuck, alright.” He sighs.

Steve unbuckled his belt and undid his pants while you took your panties off and bunched your dress up above your hips. You watched as he pulled his cock out of his boxers. His tip leaking with precum. He picked you up, wrapping your legs around his waist. He rubbed his cock in between your wet folds, coating his cock with your wetness. He blindly found your entrance and slowly slid his cock inside of you, inch by inch causing your jaw to drop. Steve thrusts were slow and loving, which you love, but you wanted more.

“Faster!” You begged.

Steve didn’t need to be told twice. His hands got a better grip on your hips before he started fucking you faster. The sound of skin slapping filled the room.

“Oh my god, yes!” You moaned, throwing your head back against the wall.

Your hands gripped his shoulders, your nails digging into the material of his button up shirt.

“You feel so fucking good, honey.” Steve says in your ear.

Steve placed his lips on yours, kissing you hungrily. You put your hand on the back of his head to intensify the kiss.

“I missed you.” You say against his lips.

“I missed you too.” He says.

His fingers found their way down to your clit and began rubbing it. You gasped and threw your head back.

“Fuck yes, Stevie!” You moaned.

“Missed this, didn’t you, sweetheart?” Steve says.

“Mhmm so much!” You moaned.

“I missed it too.” He says pants.

His fingers rubbed faster on your clit causing your pussy to clench around his cock.

“I’m not gonna last long if you keep doing that.” Steve moans, tilting his head back.

His thrusts got faster and his fingers rubbing your clit made your orgasm come closer and closer.

“Stevie, I’m gonna cum!” You whimpered.

“Cum for me, sweetheart.” Steve whispers in your ear.

That’s was enough to send you over the edge. His name left your lips as you came. Steve’s grip on you tightened when he felt his orgasm nearing.

“Shit!” Steve curses, leaning his forehead against your shoulder.

You felt him cum inside of you, painting your walls. His thrusts came to a slow stop. You guys took a moment to catch your breath before he pulled out of you. Steve gently put you back on the ground and you two got redressed. You were about to open the door, but Steve cupped your cheeks and kissed you passionately.

“Round 2 later?” Steve asks.

“You read my mind, Captain.” You grinned against his lips.

-Bucky’s Doll

[officialleehadan]

On Embassy Grounds

Hello darlings! today's story was brought to you by SLK! Darling, thank you so much for all your support!

Prompt: On Both Sides, with the Old Powers coming in.

+++

It had been a long time since the last gathering of Old Powers. So long, in fact, that Andrei wasn’t one of them himself. He was an active Power, but he came in at the request of his old mentor, Boris, better known back then as Cannonfire. He was a metal-based Power like Andre, and one of the few back then who could teach Andrei the ropes.

Boris was dead, taken by cancer some years back. Andrei wished he was still around. He missed his old mentor, and he would have been glad to have the man at his back.

No use wishing for what he couldn’t have.

The room was arranged by Vengeance, who kept an embassy handy in the city he once terrorized. It was, Andrei suspected, largely a matter of amused spite. Vengeance was easily entertained by upsetting the people who would love to do something about him, and who couldn’t touch him without starting an international incident. There wasn’t a country in the world that would stay quiet about another world leader being grabbed on embassy grounds, no matter who that person was.

His embassy, however, also boasted a large, neutral space for them to get together for a discussion about what was going on in their community.

“Ven, it’s good to see you again,” Andrei greeted Vengeance with a firm handshake and a clap on the shoulder. Vengeance was a very tall man who boasted a healthy tan from his small, tropical country in South America. It didn’t hurt that he was from South America himself, and embraced the land of his family whole-heartedly. His hair was longer than it had been the last time Andrei saw him, and he boasted both a very fine suit, and a very fine beard. “Thanks for coming so far.”

“I told you, if you ever needed help, to call me,” Vengeance told him seriously, and shook Belle’s hand next. She knew him, of course. He had hosted them for a vacation two years back, and Belle was close friends with his wife, Elena. “From your call, I should have come sooner.”

“We needed cause,” Andrei assured him in return and followed his friend into the wide meeting room, where the rest of their motley crew, villains, heroes, and civilians, were all gathered. It wasn’t a big enough room to need a microphone, so Andre didn’t bother with the podium that dominated one side of the room. “Hey, quiet down you lot! Is everyone here?”

“We have a couple more flying in tonight, but we’ll fill them in later,” Remedy spoke up from her chair. She was heading up the Hero side of the room. There were a lot of old enemies in the room, but everyone who answered the call knew there were more important things than their rivalries. Vengeance sat across from Remedy, heading up the Villains side as one of the oldest, but also one of the most powerful of the Powers in the room. If one of the villains caused a problem, he would handle it. “Go ahead and get the party started.”

“Right,” Andrei said and looked around the room. He knew most of the people in the room. Had fought some, and fought alongside others. Some were enemies of his and had killed friends and allies. He could let all of that go under the current threat. “Most of us were too young for the last meeting of thee Old Powers, and I’m glad for that. It means we haven’t had to deal with a problem like this in a long time. Thank you all for coming.”

“When someone puts out the call, we come,” Ruinous said from Vengeance’s right hand. His Power was terrakinesis, and he made a true danger of himself in California some decades ago. After Vengeance, he was the oldest villain at the table, and retired after losing both his legs to a freak car accident. Andrei called him personally, in case they needed to crack a prison. Between his own power over metal and Ruin’s stone-shaping, there wasn’t a building in the world they couldn’t rip apart. “What’s the problem, Evensteel? Takes a big problem to get everyone involved like this.”

“Junior Powers are being kidnapped,” Andrei said grimly and was darkly pleased when the murmurs around the table silenced into a hard, angry silence. “I don’t have a full list of names, but the most recent is my apprentice, Jackhammer. Brickmaker was there for his kidnapping. I was occupied with Vapor.”

“Someone jumped me from behind and hit Jackhammer at the same time,” Brickmaker said. He, of course, was present because he was furious at the attack, and about ready to level a city if it came to that. Between him and Ruinous, they had the stone-shaping completely covered. Andrei was glad to have them both. “I was awake about long enough to see him bundled up. Don’t know who got him but they were fast, and they were professional.”

“Dreamsurge has admitted to, and previously attempted to, take Jackhammer from me,” Andrei told the collected Powers, who were muttering again, but now in a decidedly hostile way. “I assume she is involved, and so is whoever she’s working for. That’s the first step. Who is running this, and how many of our kids have they grabbed? Reach out. Friends, allies, informants. We need to find them before we can get them back.”

“I’ve already started reaching out through my government’s information network,” Vengeance said, and traded nods with a few of the other Powers, who worked with various governments. “I’m happy to make this an official inquiry with the United Nations as well if we need to escalate.”

“I’ll back you,” Peace Lily said from across the table. She was a healer like Remedy, and worked with the United Nations, arranging aid missions. If there was anyone who could get the world’s eyes on the Powered Coalition, it would be them. “We all have informants. No one leaves the community without making sure we have eyes and ears to keep us posted. But Evensteel, what will you be doing while we lead the search?”

“I’m going to be the target that keeps them distracted,” Andrei said, and allowed himself a smile that made the Powers who knew him shiver in sudden alarm. Most of the Powers around the table were old enough to remember the last time he taught a lesson. Two of them, Monstertruck and Wildgrowth, both retired rather than keep fighting Andrei after that. He traded nods with them. Their enmity was long over and he was glad they answered the call.  “It’s been a while since I let everyone see what I’m capable of. If anyone here has friends in the Coalition HQ, it’s time to get them out. When I’m done, it’s going to be a pile of rubble and I’m going to be damn sure our kids aren’t hidden under our noses.”

+++

On Both Sides: (FULL COLLECTION)

Sanctuary Order

Home Safe Home (Subscriber Only!)

Sanctuary Enforced (Subscriber Only!)

Truth Truth Lie

New Hero (Subscriber Only!)

Rescue Team

Building Structure

Kidnapping Babies (Subscriber Only!)

Tag Teamwork (Subscriber Only!)

Light Saved (Subscriber Only!)

Call the Uncles (Subscriber Only!)

Metal Web Warnings (Subscriber Only!)

Useful Destruction

Old Enemy Returned (Subscriber Only!)

Metal Fight

To The Death

Recovery Time 

Phone Tree Awakened (NEW!)

On Embassy Grounds (NEW!)

+++

MASTERLIST

[mariana-oconnor]

The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax pt 1

Well, that title is a little different from the usual ones.

“The bath!” he said; “the bath! Why the relaxing and expensive Turkish rather than the invigorating home-made article?”

So Watson has been to the Turkish baths? As part of a 'alternative' lifestyle. Right. Got it. Okay then.

Nice to have an introduction of Holmes teasing Watson with deductions about him.

“One of the most dangerous classes in the world,” said he, “is the drifting and friendless woman. She is the most harmless and often the most useful of mortals, but she is the inevitable inciter of crime in others."

I'd like to congratulate Holmes here on giving such an incredible example of victim blaming. Just, beautifully done. Pure, unsullied victim blaming. And in such a way that it blames all single female victims. Bravo.

"There is one correspondent who is a sure draw, Watson. That is the bank. Single ladies must live, and their passbooks are compressed diaries."

I assume that this is specifically vs married ladies who would not have to handle their own money, but the way it's phrased does make me chuckle. Because no one else must live except Single ladies, and no one else uses banks.

"Besides, on general principles it is best that I should not leave the country. Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes."

Lestrade when Sherlock goes away.

So Holmes is just sending Watson on holiday? Is this just because Watson's feeling rheumatic and old? Is there even a case? Historically, though, Watson has never done all too well on his own - at least according to Holmes. He usually misses every piece of information Holmes would like him to get.

Marie Devine, the maid, was as popular as her mistress. She was actually engaged to one of the head waiters in the hotel...

That explains the money given to her, then.

He connected the sudden departure with the visit to the hotel a day or two before of a tall, dark, bearded man. “Un sauvage—un véritable sauvage!” cried Jules Vibart.

Do we have anyone else's word about this other than the maid and her waiter's?

Only one thing Jules would not discuss. That was the reason why Marie had left her mistress.

So it... wasn't to marry him? That seems like a reason to me, but I don't really know, I suppose. I would have assumed she just left because she wanted to get married to someone who loved in Lausanne. It would definitely be easier if she didn't have to leave Lausanne whenever Lady Frances wanted.

While there she had made the acquaintance of a Dr. Shlessinger and his wife, a missionary from South America. Like most lonely ladies, Lady Frances found her comfort and occupation in religion. Dr. Shlessinger's remarkable personality, his whole hearted devotion, and the fact that he was recovering from a disease contracted in the exercise of his apostolic duties affected her deeply. She had helped Mrs. Shlessinger in the nursing of the convalescent saint.

These people seem suspicious. But I can't say why. Maybe just because they seem too religious to be true. A disease contracted in the exercise of his duties? It just kind of feels like a scam to me. Maybe I'm wrong.

“None; but he was an Englishman, though of an unusual type.” “A savage?” said I, linking my facts after the fashion of my illustrious friend.

I mean... objection: leading the witness springs to mind. Don't give a person a description, ask them for a description, Watson.

Already the mystery began to define itself, as figures grow clearer with the lifting of a fog.

I'm pretty sure you're just creating a whole new smoke cloud to add to the fog so you can see even less, but sure.

I'm not 100% convinced this savage wasn't Holmes himself in disguise, but I am a very suspicious person.

In reply I had a telegram asking for a description of Dr. Shlessinger's left ear. Holmes's ideas of humour are strange and occasionally offensive, so I took no notice of his ill-timed jest...

I don't think that was a joke, Watson. I think he actually wanted to know about the guy's ear.

“You are an Englishman,” I said. “What if I am?” he asked with a most villainous scowl. “May I ask what your name is?” “No, you may not,” said he with decision. The situation was awkward, but the most direct way is often the best.

You've already been fairly direct, Watson. Running up to a random person and declaring their nationality without even stopping to say bonjour is kind of rude.

And now you're getting attacked.

“Well, Watson,” said he, “a very pretty hash you have made of it! I rather think you had better come back with me to London by the night express.”

I mean, I hate to say I told you so, Watson but I really did tell you so. Holmes, why do you let Watson go unsupervised when he never manages to do what you want? I know Lestrade would pine without you, but I'm sure he could cope for a few weeks. Probably.

Current theory is that Holmes only sent Watson so he could get some fresh Alpine air. As to what happened to Lady Frances, I have no idea. But I think maybe the 'savage' is on her side, not against her.

[thebibliomancer]

Universe X #1

Which, uh, it’s good that the X is huge and placed behind Universe. When the title is in all caps and with poor spacing it reads as UNIVERSEX.

Which is probably not happening. Universex only happens when Eternity and Kismet get some quiet time together.

Anyway, we have a cover giant cosmic dead Mar-Vell, living child Mar-Vell with Cap’s shield, the circus-tier new X-Men, Wyatt Wingfoot Redwing, gorilla Hulk and child Banner, Namor the Half-Human Torch, May Parker Venom with the eye-watering costume, and Vision maybe? Are any of them relevant to this issue? Or do they just have to go somewhere on the big picture all the covers make? Yes.

Last times in Universe X: Mar-Vell was reborn as baby and between him and his dead self still in the afterlife, he has Big Plans. Part of which involved resurrecting Invisible Woman from Mr Fantastic’s arm.

Also, there’s something going on with the multiverse that Aaron Stack, Machine Watchman, has to look into. And saving Earth from the Celestials last series has just caused severe climate disruptions as the planet has tilted weird on its axis.

Child Mar-Vell has gone from being raised in secret to Atlantis, moved to Latveria to help resurrect the Invisible Woman, and is now in a frozen New York with Captain America to start off an epic fetch quest.

Cap is here because he really needs a new purpose. Democracy is basically dead. America has a marshal instead of a President and the climate change and food shortages mean that order has sort of broken down. Cap is here because he’s an old soldier and Mar-Vell has promised to end war as a concept.

Which, hmm, might be an ominous thing to declare. Especially since he also declared he was going to save everyone, whether they liked it or not. But let’s see where he’s going with this.

Where he’s going with this is an old woman wrapped in a familiar blue blanket being mugged by some bandits that think they need the warmth more.

And then the blanket eats them. Because the blanket is Cloak’s cloak and the old woman is Dagger.

Cap saves one of the dinguses but the rest get eaten.

Mar-Vell convinces Dagger to give him the cloak by telling her that Cloak is fine in the afterlife and is talking her up. Dagger then turns into a being of pure light and fucks off.

I have so many questions and Universe X will either never answer them or belabor the answers.

I do have to say that Mar-Vell looks pretty rad in such an oversized Cloak cloak.

On Mar-Vell’s scavenger hunt list, he also has the Orb of Agamotto but unfortunately it's missing. And Marv doesn’t want to deal with that right now. But they still have to go the Sanctum Sanctorum to borrowsteal some tomes of Strange’s.

Where the two find: no tomes, no Wong watching Strange’s body, no Strange, and just a ton of Mindless Ones. Also, a depersoned Loki.

So a little explanation. Earth X revealed that the Asgardians were a tier 3 empowered people, some alien race that also had their genetics manipulated by the Celestials. They had evolved to the point where they were incredibly powerful reality warpers but also incredibly susceptible to outside perception. Loki was the evil trickster Loki because someone expects there needs to be a Loki and he should be an evil trickster because the stories say so.

This Loki has stripped himself of almost every bit of his former identity. He doesn’t want to be trapped in preconceptions, that’s why he’s glad Cap didn’t recognize him. And presumably why he regresses a little when Cap stresses what a villain Loki is.

So this is neat follow-up to the revelation last series. And it also gives Cap and Marv their next destination. The magic books they’re looking for were hidden by formerly Captain now King Britain.

In another plot thread, Latveria.

Reed is feeling pretty good with his wife not dead anymore. He shaved off his sorrow beard and changed out of his sorrow Doom armor.

And then Pope Immortus comes calling.

I have no idea why he’s a pope now.

But he’s here to make the case that Reed should NOT try to cure the mass terrigenesis mutation of humanity.

As far as Immortus is concerned, humanity’s destiny is to spread throughout the stars. Reed protests that no, that’s dumb and bad. For one, with Earth undergoing a climate crisis, humanity needs to work together to resolve it and the increased aggression of the inhumaned humans makes that kind of cooperation impossible. Which leads to point 2: an aggressive empowered Earth exodus would be conquest. Inhumanity would spread throughout space and subjugate all other peoples. Making some sort of Universe X, I guess, but nobody title drops. Cowards.

Pope Immortus darkly warns Reed that with his cooperation or not the Human Torches will be extinguished within a year.

I have almost no idea why Immortus is in this story, taking this role. Almost no idea.

Busiek’s Avengers Forever came out the same year as Earth X and had as a big plot point that Immortus was shepherding the 616 timeline to a future where humans dominate all of space, thanks to a proliferation of superpowers. I’m guessing Earth X writer Krueger was a fan and wanted to weave that into what he was doing.

In another other plot thread, Peter Parker is a cop now.

You hates to see it.

He’s also over his depression from Earth X so his personality has fully returned to jokey Peter.

I don’t know how to feel about it. It is character development but it’s development back to quo, making it feel unlikely that Peter will have any more development in this. But he’s going to get an entire tie-in focus issue so I hope there’s something for him.

Anyway, one of the plot points from Earth X was that Black Bolt set off the Terrigen bomb to turn all of humanity into Inhumans so the Attilan Inhumans could live amongst them without getting the treatment mutants get.

That was a plot point but this is the first we see of some of those Inhumans in plain sight. And they are dicks. They’re trying to raid the limited food supplies in New York on the basis that they’re original Inhumans and therefore deserve it more.

Cop Peter tries to stop them but what really resolves the situation is Spiders-Man giving the unruly Inhumans a vision of bountiful food and luring them off to join Immortus’ flock.

Finally, Aaron Stack. He has a long conversation with Uatu in the issue’s appendix. And wow, it is good to have this incredibly toxic relationship happening again. Uatu is such a dick! But it’s more interesting to read than the new narrator duo of Nighthawk and Gargoyle. And having usurped Uatu already, Aaron is only taking the abuse because Uatu has information he wants.

Uatu tells Aaron that his devices showed Franklin!Galactus Franklin’s Days of Future Past death because they were responding to Aaron’s need for an answer to satisfy Galactus and showed him another universe.

Which leads Aaron to another question. Why is Nighthawk having visions of Aaron digging up under the Kree ruins on the Moon? And for that question, Uatu is more cagey and insulting about what might be found there.

So Universe X is throwing a lot of puzzle pieces on the table and right now it’s hard to see what single picture it will come together to form.

Mar-Vell’s plans in the afterlife and his scavenger hunt in life. The multiverse. Pope Immortus. The threat of Inhumanity spreading to the stars. Earth still being doomed. A lot.

[jamietwat]

Ya know. Your version of the yoga moms very much strike me as they'd get behind shipping Royjamie as soon as they find out they're sharing a girlfriend.

Lol im imagining one of them as a retired engineer just pointing out triangles are stronger than v's when pressure is applied.

Roy’s going to think he’s being so subtle and normal about Jamie as if it isn’t just a matter of time after the yoga mums meet Jamie before they send Roy something off his own social media like “Does this mean we can stop pretending the three of you aren’t obviously dating?”

Also Roy is far too worried about what they’d think about polyamory as if he doesn’t watch dating shows where everyone’s dating everyone with them

But really there’s going to be a point where it’s

Yoga Mums 🤝 Colin 🤝 Trent 🤝 Rebecca 🤝 Beard 🤝 Isaac all knowing exactly what’s going on and just not outright saying anything about it because they haven’t directly been told and they’re clearly not supposed to know and they don’t want to be the one that causes whatever Roy’s reaction to them knowing would be (except for Trent who is more playing dumb around Jamie and Keeley)

And then there’s Ted off in America without a clue in the fucking world and at one point he’s gonna be on a video call asking Beard about anything new that he’s missed and Beard’s just like “Well, Roy and Jamie are dating now” after they’ve already told the team and Ted’ll start laughing and be like “good one, Coach” and then have to panic backtrack so fast when Roy pops into frame with an especially angry face and asks “What the fuck are you laughing about?”

[karlie-what-you-want]

i wanna know your take on this but i thought of this in the shower last night:

one of the main references to “joe” in taylors music is the “hes poor” joke. with paper rings, the rubies she gave up in maroon, the life she gave away in midnight rain, etc. but i think it relates back to her fame. fame = money and with her being the poster heterosexual good-girl for america, she makes sooo much money off of people seeing her that way. with the failed coming out during the lover era; if she were to have come out she would be giving away that perfect american dream life that is clearly important to her (in miss americana she has an entire segment about how she is obsessed with being good and not getting in trouble). which in turn means giving away her money and her fame because realistically so many fans would not be fans anymore if she came out. she talks a lot in her songs about how she was so willing to give it all up to be herself (to be with karlie) and to live her life freely. then the masters heist happened, causing her to lose money from her music because of something she can’t control. in my opinion, this caused her to have a reality check on what it would really be like if she came out. the loss of money and fame: what she has worked so hard to have in her life all because of something she can’t control (being gay). i think it all hit her what she would really be giving away if she came out. because of champagne problems and the constant marriage rejection plot in her music i think she got scared and backed out of coming out. then karlie moved on and truly started being with josh kushner, taylor got sad, on and on.

what is your take on this? does that even make sense? am i just gay and crazy?

There are some parts of this take that I really like! I have often pondered the masters heist, lover era, and the failed coming out. I think a lot of us have wondered the full reasons for why the loss of her mastered could have delayed a coming out for THIS long, and while any reason is valid, I think your take grasps the nuance in a way that I haven’t seen many others explain eloquently.

Perhaps at that time, she got a taste of what that kind of loss could be like and in turn lost her nerve. I’m sure there are other things that factored in as well, but I think you’re right, that it’s much easier to say you’re ready for something until it’s staring you in the face (til someone’s on their knees and asks you). So in addition to the numbers game that any big league celeb would be playing when coming out, Taylor might have also just thought “Wow, after the hell of losing my masters, I really don’t need the emotional toll of losing fans or having people say hurtful slurs at me.”

The one thing I have to question is the idea that Karlie would go from being Josh’s beard to marrying him for real. This doesn’t seem reasonable to me. I am of the belief that while Taylor and Karlie have clearly experienced hardships as a couple, they are still together and happy. That’s why Taylor keeps referencing Karlie in her art, and it’s how Karlie knows enough to keep hinting at Taylor’s projects before they’re announced or revealed.

I truly do not think that one could start off being contractually obligated to fake a relationship with someone and then fall in love with them for real, and I don’t imagine Karlie doing that out of spite either. Not to mention that Josh is actually married to a man named Mikey Hess 😅 If you have time for a quick google search (or better yet, tumblr search) on that couple, I highly recommend. It’s a fascinating little rabbit hole with a lot of verifiable evidence.

Thank you for the thoughtful message! This was a great read.

[alarrytale]

Hello Marte!

A little ask for you as I just want to understand it all completely - why was H saying "We're all a little bit gay, aren’t we" that big deal? He said it after years again during my show in Vienna which also makes me wonder if it was because he knows his "iconic" quotes and how popular it became or it´s just his sublte way to express he´s gay but if he´ll say it every other show it won´t be that big deal.

Also wondering about the missing English breakfast while on tour gif from like 2013-2014? Hope you´ll remember which one I mean, it was from some interview on red carpet I guess, H was wearing beige jacket and he´s holding microfone and fonding like crazy while looking down to the floor. What was the context and why it was such a big deal for larries? I know that Louis said he has a proper english breakfast and how happy it made him for some interview last year while touring in US but that gif with H was during 1D so Louis was with him all the time.

And my last question. How do you think Louis deals with H stunting when it comes to him doing pda with those women? We know they both were really jealous about each other in the beginning and it breaks my heart both of them had to deal with their closet this way and went that far with acting straight that they had to do pda. But imo it´s worse with H ´cause he´s a big celebrity with his womanizerTM image and him doing pda always end up in tabloids ´cause we all are meant to see it. Idk but it makes me really sad whenever I saw him kissing his stunt and that´s not how gf harries like call it "you´re jealous ´cause it´s not you, he will never date you" but it´s just makes me so weird to see him go this far and cross this intimate line and I just don´t want to see him doing this while I´m just a random person but...how Louis must feel? And especially during that awful 2 years of h*livia when she was clinging on him like crazy thinking she can actually make him fall in love with him, the yachtgate 2.0 when she touched him while he was almost naked, he had to kiss her etc. Idk how hard it can be for H but imo it´s much worse for his real partner.

Hi, anon!

It was a big deal because it was the first time (and one of the only times) he's said the G-word (gay). He also basically admitted to being gay. He hid it behind a claim that everyone is a little bit gay (that's just not true). I think he said it because he knew he could get away with it (it did create plenty of headlines though).

About the english breakfast incident. I think you're mixing things up a bit. 1D was performing on Good Morning America in november 2013. They were interviewed on stage between songs, and they were asked what they miss the most when they're away from home. Louis answered a good fry up and started to explain everything that's needed to make a perfect English breakfast.

We all know he can't cook for shit, so someone at home most be cooking this for him to miss it. Harry looked particularly guilty lol. It's just domestic!larry and confirmation that H cooks breakfast for L. H also confirmed he was single in this interview, so it was good times.

I think L deals okay with H stunting and doing PDA with women. I think it was harder for him in the beginning. I also think it's harder for him when H isn't getting along with the beard or when fandom buys into the stunt. I think both H and L approach their stunts like an actor. For all we know it's rehearsed, discussed and maybe they even got intimacy coordinators involved. H knows how hard it felt when L was stunting with E, so they've both gone through it and know how the other one feels. I think L is busy doing his thing and he isn't exposing himself to the stunt articles, narrative and pictures. Why would he? If seeing pics of H doing PDA is hurting him, or he's seeing H hurting while doing it, he won't look. He knows how this goes and is used to it by now.

[itr0ars]

the shriek of tetanal wind chimes, grammatically incorrect swahili inscribed into the politically incorrect dream catcher threatening to give her a concussion and a half, alert all possible threats to cady’s position. her steps come to a screeching halt. she is a half inch taller than decreed by mother nature yet feels as though the room’s artificiality will consume her at any moment leaving her a half-inch-tall pile of sequins on the floor. 

mara banks is real in the sense that she has a mouth that is moving and there are noises coming out of her mouth. mara banks is real in the sense that there’s news footage flashing through cady’s mind with the saturation and sensationalism cranked up to one thousand and while the tabloids may not tell all, the photographs tell cady that there’s something going on. mara banks is real in the sense that there is an ancient sticky note on her parents’ refrigerator barely responding to the life support of various natgeo stickers telling her that america is filled with violence and hate and everyone’s on opioids and if cady squints in this stupidly bright neon light the tattered curves and edgy contours of mara’s body become that sticky note.

@childactress — ❛  you're completely out of your element here, aren't you?  ❜ ( accepting. )

" miss banks, " she manages to greet through chattering teeth. there’s a smile on her face, but it’s one of obligation and recognition (are those synonymous?) rather than the non-red-stained arrangement of canines that would suggest significant reassurance. not that she isn’t happy to see mara. not that she wouldn’t be happier seeing the ghost of christmas future. “ i am in all my elements right now, actually. darwin saw me and was like, wow, girl, i was totally wrong about evolution ‘cause it took you one generation to get this cool instead of millions. but he said it all through his giant beard so you probably didn’t hear him. ”

‎‎ “ look, two negatives make a positive. i’ll be fine. ” if there is one element she is forever familiar with, it is that of distraction. “ do you, um, do you need help with that? ”

[goblin-phannie]

writing my ted lasso predictions down here so i can refer back to them if i’m (a) completely wrong or (b) absolutely right and i can show off

- ted’s big reveal and truth to rebecca is gonna be that he’s leaving to go home to america to spend more time with his son (we saw how much the reveal that his son misses him affected ted when his mom told him so this makes a lot of sense, it’s also expected to be the final episode so it nicely bookends his time in england)

- this is gonna leave the head coach of richmond position open for either beard or more likely nate to take over, thus giving richmond a fantastic coaching lineup for their final match of the season

- the match in question will obviously be between richmond and west ham and whilst it will likely be close for that sweet drama richmond will win out in the end, probably with goals from jaime, colin and sam

- this will be the final part of trent’s book about the team and he will likely read an excerpt to the team at some point to encourage or praise them/ted

- rebecca is going to finish her character progression by helping out bex and rupert’s old assistant to take him down and i think her and bex will end up going to the game together in richmond colours. maybe keeley joins them at some point for a girlie squad moment

- speaking of keeley, she and roy will obviously get together again, more than likely with support/blessing from jaime to round off his character arc and the trio’s relationship with each other

- all the richmond boys go and celebrate in may’s pub after the game and we have a final shot of everyone - ted, nate, rebecca, leslie, keeley, roy, the lads etc enjoying themselves eating and drinking for the final scene. maybe colin finally introduces his boyfriend to them as the person he’s dating and trent looks over them all like a proud dad

- then we all cry cause it’s over :((

[calypso-finale]

Seventy Seven.

I haven’t seen the kids since I come back, Robyn has been in Barbados since and hasn’t even attempted to come back at all, but I did talk to her and she is back today but I’m going Vegas, Oakley birthday trips and I was invited to come, I wasn’t going to deny not going because I got an invite and my daughter is splashing out a lot and I said relax but she said it’s whatever, so I am going there and going to turn up. Robyn has got a face on with me when she is the one that said what she said, how is this even my fault it makes me laugh to think. I came back a week ago and she was still in Barbados so what was that even about, she can’t holler about it when she was still in Barbados at the time, I came back to spend time with the kids but she will say it’s my fault for leaving and I honestly don’t care, she has her chance to come back but just complained on the phone about nothing, Ti is staying behind in Barbados because she’s feeling a little upset about things and then Taylan is staying too, Imani is coming back at least but if I was depressed I wouldn’t go to Barbados because those people are depressive on their own. I am not arguing with Robyn we haven’t even fell out, this whole thing is just a disagreement, things happen, and adults have disagreements. This whole thing isn’t us falling out but I’m sure Robyn will push it to them, my main concern is Rylee. I just don’t want her to feel like she doesn’t want to consider moving back to America if something happens to him, I feel she will get a better support network, but she won’t agree to it, I feel like that Oakley will be ok, that five year plan he will pull through, I have a good feeling. He just got to be hopeful about it all, I think the surgery went well so what makes him think he can’t beat this, he can. It was caught early but we never know in life, my ears perked up I think they are back now actually so this will be drama. I mean I won’t cause anything because I am going to act like everything is fine, I know that will annoy her even more, but I refuse to just argue about nothing.

Emi came running to me when she saw me “woah, woah! Little miss wobbly” picking her up “my fat little momma you missed daddy?” She pointed at Robyn “mommy” letting out an oh “you miss mommy instead but what about me” kissing her cheek “Barbados sucks dad” Junior said “why?” I questioned “because I couldn’t play any football! Momo said I was being too loud and whatever” oh he is moody “alright son” he’s walked off “what is wrong with your brother?” I asked, “mom hit him because he said to momo a bad word” letting out an oh “that is not good, go and get your brother for me” turning to the door and seeing momo is here, oh we in for a shit ride “oh you’re here” I said “hi to you too” she said “what happened with Junior?” I asked Robyn “ask him, he shouldn’t be swearing that’s what!” I groaned out walking off, these kids. Making my way to the games room, he ran into there of course he did but I mean he can’t be swearing at Monica either way, that can’t happen “dad said he wants you!” Raihan spat “no!” He spat back, moving Raihan to the side “Junior” Emi is playing with my beard, she is trying is trying pull at my beard actually “Junior, come here. Shut the door Raihan. Either you stay here, or you go out” I said to him, he closed the door “what is wrong? Speak to me” I asked him “what? Nothing is wrong” he shrugged “but you swore at your elder and we don’t do that so why?” He needs to explain himself “because she just talks! And then you never there dad, mom says she is upset and stressed out and then momo said you’re not good and never was and then she told me off and I said fuck off she is rude! You are never there dad! Mom is upset because you aren’t there” he spat “apologise to Momo and your mom, is that what your mom dad? Your face” he nodded his head “if you was there dad this wouldn’t have happened, it’s annoying. And you both argue, I hate it” he sobbed out and my heart fell for him “don’t cry” wrapping my arm around him “why aren’t you there?” He sniffled “because your other siblings are also going through things too, I’m sorry” I apologised to him “it’s hard but I did tell you kids I would be away, you can’t be mad at me now” I get I was away but I can’t help it “you need to apologise, I don’t care what you was feeling, you do not disrespect elders” he needs to be told, clearly Robyn already hit him but needs to know.

I have been spoilt by my girlfriend really, and the fact she flew out all my friends with us and her friends, but we couldn’t just allow her to do that, I said I couldn’t anyways, so we agreed that we go halves on the jet, and she got us a penthouse suite. I am so excited, the Bellagio is amazing, but I feel like maybe she is doing too much for me, like I don’t deserve it “what happened to you last night?” Rylee asked “oh yeah” I laughed “man I was just tired, jet lag you know” Rylee pulled a face “we have been here two days now, what you mean? You just be dazed and then half way through sex you did it again and then, you just turned around and fell asleep” I laughed “lot on my mind sometimes, what can I say. It’s just draining to me that I have a lot on my mind then trying to contend with the day ahead, by time night comes I’m tired, it’s nothing big or bad you know but I apologise” she peeped me acting off like that “yeah I peeped you, you know I never liked a man with a man bun or long hair” I shrugged “I’ll be losing it though won’t I, least I’ll be hairless” her face dropped “you didn’t have to switch it to that did you” rubbing my leg as I shrugged “I’m just saying, I just grew it out” getting up from the bed “yeah well I was just saying I don’t like a man with a man bun, it’s just first for me and then you had to mention you will be losing it anyways, you didn’t need to do that Oakley you know that upsets me” oh now she is going to complain “it’s whatever Lee, don’t need to like care about what I said, I am saying it about me really aren’t I” she frowned at me and I frowned back but laughed “it’s fine, but like my hair is long I don’t know, I will cut it maybe before you know, I just yeah, this is why I be wearing hats but at home I don’t, I didn’t know it annoyed you” I didn’t “it doesn’t, I am just jealous, you have bundles” I chuckled “alright, I see how it is” she is funny, I can’t help it but I do have a lot of hair and I like to grow it out, maybe I will let he braid it before we go to Atlanta, that might be a good idea.

Lee’ friends are just like her, I just be sat here watching them because they talk a lot and I don’t know how their men deal with it, I think they talk more then Lee “can you put this in the bin please” I said as Lee walked by me “here” placing my half eaten apple in her hand “you’re very quiet” Diji said “I think your friends are here” Lee said “that is just me, I be just people watching” I smiled “that is not a bad thing but you are so quiet just watching” I grinned “I know, wonder how Rylee likes me, I was quiet before she even met me. Like my fans would make memes out of me for standing because I just be watching, I don’t say anything until needed, that is me” Dapping Wadz “this is my boys Wadz if you haven’t met him” I pointed “oh hi, we met before. You forget” I laughed “yeah, yeah, you did . My bad” Wyge and the rest of my friends sat down “you all look like you ready to go on the rob” looking at them “it’s hot you know” Antony complained “trust me, well we can just scope out some things, meaning a break away from Lee” I knew she was coming, Wyge looked at Rylee “she causing issues?” he asked, looking at Rylee “issues, the only thing causing issues is his man bun he has created. Just look” she lifted my hat off my head, my boys are used to me “yoo, this is nothing. You ain’t seen the full package. You ain’t seen a seventeen year old Oakley, oh my god, Wyge. His long hair, remember he dyed his hair” rolling my eyes “he had blonde in his hair” Rylee side eyed me “don’t you dare” she pointed “I was young!” I defended “I can’t lie Oakley you look cute with a man bun, stop hiding it” Lillian complimented “see a woman with taste, Lee is just boring” Rylee swatted Lillian “don’t encourage him” shaking my head “Oakley been that kid where they didn’t know if he was white or not, he left school and he was bulky, like the guy had stomach and he was chubby. He just hit eighteen and he just went skinny, guy was sunk. Mental” I shrugged “Juke is still fat though, I don’t know” I shrugged “life, maybe pre-journey to cancer” the whole room groaned out “you got what?” Diji asked “Colin and Diji don’t know” Rylee said “well I am sure you can tell, I am going to go with the boys for a while, be back” Diji is shocked, like mouth open “bro what? You got what” getting up “he has skin cancer” Colin gasped “he makes sly comments about it, idiot” walking over to Rylee to touch her face and she swatted me “lowering the tone ass” Halle spat “I am so sorry, no what. He is the coolest guy” I will leave Rylee to it.

I can’t lie, it is a little warm over here “thank you” Antony got me a drink “you can sit in the sun?” he asked, “why can’t I?” I asked “nah, I am just saying can you?” he sat across from me “I don’t know” I laughed “I suppose I can, I mean whatever. I don’t know” I sighed out “stressed out of my ass but still trying to have fun” I mumbled “I love you bro” I smiled at him “I love you too” I mumbled “stressed about what” I sighed out “life, you know wanting to do what is best for me and wanting to do that tour. Then I realise that, I will be losing hair, going out with no eyebrows. Maybe if I delay the treatment” he kissed his teeth “fuck no, you dumbass. Fuck that life, it’s nothing. Just like relax it, you may not lose a thing” I shrugged, Wadz and Wyge sat down “talk to this dickhead man, you heard him” Antony pointed “delay treatment over some tour, fuck off” Wadz laughed “he ain’t doing shit like that, you know. Ybeez ain’t fucking announcing shit, this is why he ain’t said shit, you can’t do that” chewing on my bottom lip “that is it though, I have bills to pay, I have shit to do” I pointed out “we are hustlers! We always been hustlers, fuck that shit. Your clothing line, that shit will be pushed, don’t worry. Don’t fucking piss me off with your antics”  I sighed out “aren’t you Central Cee? Oh my god, you are” looking up at this white lady and a few friends “I don’t know, am I?” I said, she got big boobs I give her that for a white woman, I just turned my head “I love your music” looking at Wadz “Wadz you are so cute” I laughed “you here for Wadz” I said “Wadz is the real star here init, go on” the boys all laughed “I am just trying to eat right now” he is a trip “he is looking for a woman though” sitting up on the chair just laughing.

The fact my boys can get girls, they can have fun then I am all for it “I really cannot believe you here in the beach club just drinking water” I shrugged “I am Muslim didn’t you know?” I laughed “you’re such a liar” I chuckled “you never know though; you like my friend Wadz. He is a good guy” I smiled “I mean he could be a good guy but the guy we want to speak too is you” letting out an oh “mhmm well that is a shame, I am a taken man. You said you like my music right, what is it? If it’s Doja then you can go” Wyge snorted laughing “oh wow, you are so mean, but I like that erm, Obsessed with you” I grinned “I wrote that about my girlfriend, if you sing it then maybe I will take a picture with you, you been asking” I pointed “you do this with every girl” shaking my head “just some, it’s like a test you know. The real fans” she scoffed “you drive a hard bargain Cench, is your name really Oakley?” I laughed “you know me then, wow, ok. It is, I have my license on me I think” digging into my pocket, grabbing my driving license “look” she came over “oh my god, your name is fully Oakley” looking at her and her boobs are in my face, I moved back “yeah, yeah. That is it” putting it back in my pocket “imagine moaning that out loudly” I busted out laughing “I don’t know, I have to ask my girlfriend that, she is ok with it” I shrugged “you like to add in your girlfriend don’t you, like some added spice” I smirked “mhmm I do” nodding my head “I knew your government now so get up” she placed her hand on my shoulder “I wanted you to perform though” I frowned “you playing me, you British boys are not good people” I chuckled “nah I will get up” standing up “Wyge, let her friend take the picture before she doesn’t leave me alone” he is all into her friend now, her friend got up and got her phone out “I will take it on mine and send it” taking in a deep breath and stood next to her “are you scared to come near me, oh my god” she said “nah but still” I just laughed “I ain’t ever going to see you again so you need to make it look like we just got married” I pulled a face “nah, nah. Not like that now” I chuckled, she pulled me in for a hug “relax now” I laughed, moving her arms from around my neck “just simple picture, this girl is moving mad” Wadz laughed out “relax with my friend” Rimz actually spoke up, he never does “I am, tell him” she hit my arm “he right, you need to relax. You got it now” looking at Antony “moving mad bro” he said.

I need a big nap before I even go out again, I am tired “fuck bro, these American girls. They are on it!” Antony said behind me “they are” Rimz placed his hands on my shoulders “she was wanting you bad and you kept saying, my girlfriend” I laughed out “she didn’t get it, I am like my girl. I have one” shaking my head “she wanted you bad” I shrugged “but compared to Rylee, like my girl is bad as fuck and I know y’all agree” Rimz nodded his head “she is, I would be the biggest simp. This is why I know you are” I laughed out “can’t help it you know, I am a simp with her. But I am going to have a big nap, see you boys later. Tired” dapping them all “don’t be doing anything mad with those girls now” I know they going to be up to no good now, unlocking the door to the suite “you know us bro” Wadz laughed, pushing the door open and walking inside. I need the biggest nap right now, making my way through the living area to go into the bedroom but Rylee popped up “what’s up? You had a good day with your girls” I asked, she looks pissed off “I did have a good day until I see you on the shade room with a white woman, walking around with a whole bunch of girls right, beach club too” letting out an oh “that was for the boys, not me” I defended, is she serious “why did you at one point grab her shoulder to bring her closer to you!? I am not fucking dumb, don’t make me mad” oh she is serious “what you mean? I literally asked her if she was feeling my friend and she then said no me, I said I have a girlfriend so no” I don’t see the issue when I wasn’t even caring for her like that “don’t fucking lie to me!” She barked coming over to me pointing “don’t fucking lie to me, I saw the videos and images you was all over her like a bad fucking smell, why was you both walking side by side, her boobs all out too” I didn’t know I was going to get this shit “woah, don’t grab my face like that” pushing her hand away from “I ain’t done anything, I literally told her I have a girlfriend. Lee what the fuck” grabbing her hands “don’t hit me!” I spat holding her hands in mine “you’re a fucking liar and the videos all say the truth! You make me look a fool, everyone says I can do better, I am better then you. They are right, and you think you can play on me I ain’t that young girl anymore” she lost her damn mind “then why you with me? Do better, go for it Rylee. I am not keeping you to be with me, you better then me then go and find your better. I am not your pity, talking about everyone says who cares what anyone says clearly that has been harbouring inside of you and now you use that card. You’re moving mad” she has lost her mind “I am not blind, even the people that were there were in the comments was saying how you was” I frowned “because I was laughing!? Do I just stay silent” she has pissed me off now “nah you don’t be with half naked women!? It’s that fucking simple, I put up with your shit. I am the one there for you, I am the one doing shit for you, I am the one here for you at this age when everyone knows I am bigger then this” she is so full of shit “you chased me” I added “because I knew at that age I could have you, that’s how easy you were. Let me go now, you let me manipulate you. I am not a stupid young girl anymore, you tell me how you could pull a girl like me? Kenza is an exception but she couldn’t deal with you, you are only good for that white girl you was playing with you will never get another like me, trust me. You think some from the streets could get me, I got you. You’re punching” letting her hands go, nodding my head “least you got that off your chest mhmmm” walking around her, going into the bathroom, looking into the mirror, she has scratched my face too. I can’t lie, I would be lying to myself to say that didn’t hurt me, it did hurt me because I do love her.

Knocking on the door of Wadz room, I swallowed hard “you back?” Looking behind me “uh yeah” I smiled at Colin “look bro I am so sorry to hear what you got” nodding my head “it’s fine” smiling at him “you cut your face” nodding my head “yeah I just fell” the door opened “see you around” walking into his room “I could be having a good time with a female!?” He spat “can I crash here” I asked, turning to him “erm you have a suite? The hell you want want my double bed” he asked, rubbing my face trying not to cry as I turned around “what happened?” Sucking it up “I laughed with a female that’s what, she hit me you know” his face dropped “and then she just said everyone said I can do better and I can, just being hurtful as shit. I mean of course she’s going to repeat what everyone is saying, I mean everyone thinks that but it’s whatever. Can I just crash here” Wadz is shocked “she low-key mentioned the age thing and this is over nothing. I did nothing” leaning forward placing my hands on my knees trying not to cry “I’m good, she flipped you know. I ain’t good, she really hurt me. I knew it, but it’s fine. No I’m good” I stepped back “I didn’t think she would do this to you? I’m legit shocked for you, I’m sorry” shaking my head “don’t be, it’s what it is, it’s fine. I mean someone keeps telling you that you better then that you going to think it, also in a way. She don’t need to take care of me like that, it’s get out of this shit card” Wadz hugged me “I got you. I’ll be there for you, I’ll hold you up” wrapping my arms around him “I ain’t got many left bro, they all leaving me” I managed to say “to the very end bro, I got you” nodding my head “leave her though, she’s still the mother of my child so erm” moving back from the hug “keep things normal please” wiping my tears “things ain’t normal, she laid hands on you and told you that she is better then you, and you ugly. Her mother was ok to say you got cancer when you didn’t have it, her whole family talking on the low and she is too, I can’t be normal” Wadz is pissed and I don���t blame him “allow it, just please” I shook my head.

[hellsitesonlybookclub]

It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 37-38 End

CHAPTER XXXVII

HIS beard had grown again—he and his beard had been friends for many years, and he had missed it of late. His hair and mustache had again assumed a respectable gray in place of the purple dye that under electric lights had looked so bogus. He was no longer impassioned at the sight of a lamb chop or a cake of soap. But he had not yet got over the pleasure and slight amazement at being able to talk as freely as he would, as emphatically as might please him, and in public.

He sat with his two closest friends in Montreal, two fellow executives in the Department of Propaganda and Publications of the New Underground (Walt Trowbridge, General Chairman), and these two friends were the Hon. Perley Beecroft, who presumably was the President of the United States, and Joe Elphrey, an ornamental young man who, as "Mr. Cailey," had been a prize agent of the Communist Party in America till he had been kicked out of that almost imperceptible body for having made a "united front" with Socialists, Democrats, and even choir-singers when organizing an anti-Corpo revolt in Texas.

Over their ale, in this café, Beecroft and Elphrey were at it as usual: Elphrey insisting that the only "solution" of American distress was dictatorship by the livelier representatives of the toiling masses, strict and if need be violent, but (this was his new heresy) not governed by Moscow. Beecroft was gaseously asserting that "all we needed" was a return to precisely the political parties, the drumming up of votes, and the oratorical legislating by Congress, of the contented days of William B. McKinley.

But as for Doremus, he leaned back not vastly caring what nonsense the others might talk so long as it was permitted them to talk at all without finding that the waiters were M.M. spies; and content to know that, whatever happened, Trowbridge and the other authentic leaders would never go back to satisfaction in government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits. He thought comfortably of the fact that just yesterday (he had this from the chairman's secretary), Walt Trowbridge had dismissed Wilson J. Shale, the ducal oil man, who had come, apparently with sincerity, to offer his fortune and his executive experience to Trowbridge and the cause.

"Nope. Sorry, Will. But we can't use you. Whatever happens—even if Haik marches over and slaughters all of us along with all our Canadian hosts—you and your kind of clever pirates are finished. Whatever happens, whatever details of a new system of government may be decided on, whether we call it a 'Cooperative Commonwealth' or 'State Socialism' or 'Communism' or 'Revived Traditional Democracy,' there's got to be a new feeling—that government is not a game for a few smart, resolute athletes like you, Will, but a universal partnership, in which the State must own all resources so large that they affect all members of the State, and in which the one worst crime won't be murder or kidnaping but taking advantage of the State—in which the seller of fraudulent medicine, or the liar in Congress, will be punished a whole lot worse than the fellow who takes an ax to the man who's grabbed off his girl.... Eh? What's going to happen to magnates like you, Will? God knows! What happened to the dinosaurs?"

So was Doremus in his service well content.

Yet socially he was almost as lonely as in his cell at Trianon; almost as savagely he longed for the not exorbitant pleasure of being with Lorinda, Buck, Emma, Sissy, Steve Perefixe.

None of them save Emma could join him in Canada, and she would not. Her letters suggested fear of the un-Worcesterian wildernesses of Montreal. She wrote that Philip and she hoped they might be able to get Doremus forgiven by the Corpos! So he was left to associate only with his fellow refugees from Corpoism, and he knew a life that had been familiar, far too familiar, to political exiles ever since the first revolt in Egypt sent the rebels sneaking off into Assyria.

It was no particularly indecent egotism in Doremus that made him suppose, when he arrived in Canada, that everyone would thrill to his tale of imprisonment, torture, and escape. But he found that ten thousand spirited tellers of woe had come there before him, and that the Canadians, however attentive and generous hosts they might be, were actively sick of pumping up new sympathy. They felt that their quota of martyrs was completely filled, and as to the exiles who came in penniless, and that was a majority of them, the Canadians became distinctly weary of depriving their own families on behalf of unknown refugees, and they couldn't even keep up forever a gratification in the presence of celebrated American authors, politicians, scientists, when they became common as mosquitoes.

It was doubtful if a lecture on Deplorable Conditions in America by Herbert Hoover and General Pershing together would have attracted forty people. Ex-governors and judges were glad to get jobs washing dishes, and ex-managing-editors were hoeing turnips. And reports said that Mexico and London and France were growing alike apologetically bored.

So Doremus, meagerly living on his twenty-dollar-a-week salary from the N.U., met no one save his own fellow exiles, in just such salons of unfortunate political escapists as the White Russians, the Red Spaniards, the Blue Bulgarians, and all the other polychromatic insurrectionists frequented in Paris. They crowded together, twenty of them in a parlor twelve by twelve, very like the concentration-camp cells in area, inhabitants, and eventual smell, from 8 P.M. till midnight, and made up for lack of dinner with coffee and doughnuts and exiguous sandwiches, and talked without cessation about the Corpos. They told as "actual facts" stories about President Haik which had formerly been applied to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini—the one about the man who was alarmed to find he had saved Haik from drowning and begged him not to tell.

In the cafés they seized the newspapers from home. Men who had had an eye gouged out on behalf of freedom, with the rheumy remaining one peered to see who had won the Missouri Avenue Bridge Club Prize.

They were brave and romantic, tragic and distinguished, and Doremus became a little sick of them all and of the final brutality of fact that no normal man can very long endure another's tragedy, and that friendly weeping will some day turn to irritated kicking.

He was stirred when, in a hastily built American interdenominational chapel, he heard a starveling who had once been a pompous bishop read from the pine pulpit:

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.... How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy."

Here in Canada the Americans had their Weeping Wall and daily cried with false, gallant hope, "Next year in Jerusalem!"

Sometimes Doremus was vexed by the ceaseless demanding wails of refugees who had lost everything, sons and wives and property and self-respect, vexed that they believed they alone had seen such horrors; and sometimes he spent all his spare hours raising a dollar and a little weary friendliness for these sick souls; and sometimes he saw as fragments of Paradise every aspect of America— such oddly assorted glimpses as Meade at Gettysburg and the massed blue petunias in Emma's lost garden, the fresh shine of rails as seen from a train on an April morning and Rockefeller Center. But whatever his mood, he refused to sit down with his harp by any foreign waters whatever and enjoy the importance of being a celebrated beggar.

He'd get back to America and chance another prison. Meantime he neatly sent packages of literary dynamite out from the N.U. offices all day long, and efficiently directed a hundred envelope-addressers who once had been professors and pastrycooks.

He had asked his superior, Perley Beecroft, for assignment in more active and more dangerous work, as secret agent in America—out West, where he was not known. But headquarters had suffered a good deal from amateur agents who babbled to strangers, or who could not be trusted to keep their mouths shut while they were being flogged to death. Things had changed since 1929. The N.U. believed that the highest honor a man could earn was not to have a million dollars but to be permitted to risk his life for truth, without pay or praise.

Doremus knew that his chiefs did not consider him young enough or strong enough, but also that they were studying him. Twice he had the honor of interviews with Trowbridge about nothing in particular—surely it must have been an honor, though it was hard to remember it, because Trowbridge was the simplest and friendliest man in the whole portentous spy machine. Cheerfully Doremus hoped for a chance to help make the poor, overworked, worried Corpo officials even more miserable than they normally were, now that war with Mexico and revolts against Corpoism were jingling side by side.

In July, 1939, when Doremus had been in Montreal a little over five months, and a year after his sentence to concentration camp, the American newspapers which arrived at N.U. headquarters were full of resentment against Mexico.

Bands of Mexicans had raided across into the United States—always, curiously enough, when our troops were off in the desert, practice-marching or perhaps gathering sea shells. They burned a town in Texas—fortunately all the women and children were away on a Sunday-school picnic, that afternoon. A Mexican Patriot (aforetime he had also worked as an Ethiopian Patriot, a Chinese Patriot, and a Haitian Patriot) came across, to the tent of an M.M. brigadier, and confessed that while it hurt him to tattle on his own beloved country, conscience compelled him to reveal that his Mexican superiors were planning to fly over and bomb Laredo, San Antonio, Bisbee, and probably Tacoma, and Bangor, Maine.

This excited the Corpo newspapers very much indeed and in New York and Chicago they published photographs of the conscientious traitor half an hour after he had appeared at the Brigadier's tent... where, at that moment, forty-six reporters happened to be sitting about on neighboring cactuses.

America rose to defend her hearthstones, including all the hearthstones on Park Avenue, New York, against false and treacherous Mexico, with its appalling army of 67,000 men, with thirty-nine military aeroplanes. Women in Cedar Rapids hid under the bed; elderly gentlemen in Cattaraugus County, New York, concealed their money in elm-tree boles; and the wife of a chicken- raiser seven miles N.E. of Estelline, South Dakota, a woman widely known as a good cook and a trained observer, distinctly saw a file of ninety-two Mexican soldiers pass her cabin, starting at 3:17 A.M. on July 27, 1939.

To answer this threat, America, the one country that had never lost a war and never started an unjust one, rose as one man, as the Chicago Daily Evening Corporate put it. It was planned to invade Mexico as soon as it should be cool enough, or even earlier, if the refrigeration and air-conditioning could be arranged. In one month, five million men were drafted for the invasion, and started training.

Thus—perhaps too flippantly—did Joe Cailey and Doremus discuss the declaration of war against Mexico. If they found the whole crusade absurd, it may be stated in their defense that they regarded all wars always as absurd; in the baldness of the lying by both sides about the causes; in the spectacle of grown-up men engaged in the infantile diversions of dressing-up in fancy clothes and marching to primitive music. The only thing not absurd about wars, said Doremus and Cailey, was that along with their skittishness they did kill a good many millions of people. Ten thousand starving babies seemed too high a price for a Sam Browne belt for even the sweetest, touchingest young lieutenant.

Yet both Doremus and Cailey swiftly recanted their assertion that all wars were absurd and abominable; both of them made exception of the people's wars against tyranny, as suddenly America's agreeable anticipation of stealing Mexico was checked by a popular rebellion against the whole Corpo régime.

The revolting section was, roughly, bounded by Sault Ste. Marie, Detroit, Cincinnati, Wichita, San Francisco, and Seattle, though in that territory large patches remained loyal to President Haik, and outside of it, other large patches joined the rebels. It was the part of America which had always been most "radical"—that indefinite word, which probably means "most critical of piracy." It was the land of the Populists, the Non-Partisan League, the Farmer-Labor Party, and the La Follettes—a family so vast as to form a considerable party in itself.

Whatever might happen, exulted Doremus, the revolt proved that belief in America and hope for America were not dead.

These rebels had most of them, before his election, believed in Buzz Windrip's fifteen points; believed that when he said he wanted to return the power pilfered by the bankers and the industrialists to the people, he more or less meant that he wanted to return the power of the bankers and industrialists to the people. As month by month they saw that they had been cheated with marked cards again, they were indignant; but they were busy with cornfield and sawmill and dairy and motor factory, and it took the impertinent idiocy of demanding that they march down into the desert and help steal a friendly country to jab them into awakening and into discovering that, while they had been asleep, they had been kidnaped by a small gang of criminals armed with high ideals, well-buttered words and a lot of machine guns.

So profound was the revolt that the Catholic Archbishop of California and the radical Ex-Governor of Minnesota found themselves in the same faction.

At first it was a rather comic outbreak—comic as the ill-trained, un-uniformed, confusedly thinking revolutionists of Massachusetts in 1776. President General Haik publicly jeered at them as a "ridiculous rag-tag rebellion of hoboes too lazy to work." And at first they were unable to do anything more than scold like a flock of crows, throw bricks at detachments of M.M.'s and policemen, wreck troop trains, and destroy the property of such honest private citizens as owned Corpo newspapers.

It was in August that the shock came, when General Emmanuel Coon, Chief of Staff of the regulars, flew from Washington to St. Paul, took command of Fort Snelling, and declared for Walt Trowbridge as Temporary President of the United States, to hold office until there should be a new, universal, and uncontrolled presidential election.

Trowbridge proclaimed acceptance—with the proviso that he should not be a candidate for permanent President.

By no means all of the regulars joined Coon's revolutionary troops. (There are two sturdy myths among the Liberals: that the Catholic Church is less Puritanical and always more esthetic than the Protestant; and that professional soldiers hate war more than do congressmen and old maids.) But there were enough regulars who were fed up with the exactions of greedy, mouth-dripping Corpo commissioners and who threw in with General Coon so that immediately after his army of regulars and hastily trained Minnesota farmers had won the battle of Mankato, the forces at Leavenworth took control of Kansas City, and planned to march on St. Louis and Omaha; while in New York, Governor's Island and Fort Wadsworth looked on, neutral, as unmilitary-looking and mostly Jewish guerrillas seized the subways, power stations, and railway terminals.

But there the revolt halted, because in the America, which had so warmly praised itself for its "widespread popular free education," there had been so very little education, widespread, popular, free, or anything else, that most people did not know what they wanted— indeed knew about so few things to want at all.

There had been plenty of schoolrooms; there had been lacking only literate teachers and eager pupils and school boards who regarded teaching as a profession worthy of as much honor and pay as insurance-selling or embalming or waiting on table. Most Americans had learned in school that God had supplanted the Jews as chosen people by the Americans, and this time done the job much better, so that we were the richest, kindest, and cleverest nation living; that depressions were but passing headaches and that labor unions must not concern themselves with anything except higher wages and shorter hours and, above all, must not set up an ugly class struggle by combining politically; that, though foreigners tried to make a bogus mystery of them, politics were really so simple that any village attorney or any clerk in the office of a metropolitan sheriff was quite adequately trained for them; and that if John D. Rockefeller or Henry Ford had set his mind to it, he could have become the most distinguished statesman, composer, physicist, or poet in the land.

Even two-and-half years of despotism had not yet taught most electors humility, nor taught them much of anything except that it was unpleasant to be arrested too often.

So, after the first gay eruption of rioting, the revolt slowed up. Neither the Corpos nor many of their opponents knew enough to formulate a clear, sure theory of self-government, or irresistibly resolve to engage in the sore labor of fitting themselves for freedom.... Even yet, after Windrip, most of the easy-going descendants of the wisecracking Benjamin Franklin had not learned that Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" meant anything more than a high-school yell or a cigarette slogan.

The followers of Trowbridge and General Coon—"The American Cooperative Commonwealth" they began to call themselves—did not lose any of the territory they had seized; they held it, driving out all Corpo agents, and now and then added a county or two. But mostly their rule, and equally the Corpos' rule, was as unstable as politics in Ireland.

So the task of Walt Trowbridge, which in August had seemed finished, before October seemed merely to have begun. Doremus Jessup was called into Trowbridge's office, to hear from the chairman:

"I guess the time's come when we need Underground agents in the States with sense as well as guts. Report to General Barnes for service proselytizing in Minnesota. Good luck, Brother Jessup! Try to persuade the orators that are still holding out for Discipline and clubs that they ain't so much stalwart as funny!"

And all that Doremus thought was, "Kind of a nice fellow, Trowbridge. Glad to be working with him," as he set off on his new task of being a spy and professional hero without even any funny passwords to make the game romantic.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

HIS packing was done. It had been very simple, since his kit consisted only of toilet things, one change of clothes, and the first volume of Spengler's Decline of the West. He was waiting in his hotel lobby for time to take the train to Winnipeg. He was interested by the entrance of a lady more decorative than the females customarily seen in this modest inn: a hand-tooled presentation copy of a lady, in crushed levant and satin doublure; a lady with mascara'd eyelashes, a permanent wave, and a cobweb frock. She ambled through the lobby and leaned against a fake-marble pillar, wielding a long cigarette-holder and staring at Doremus. She seemed amused by him, for no clear reason.

Could she be some sort of Corpo spy?

She lounged toward him, and he realized that she was Lorinda Pike.

While he was still gasping, she chuckled, "Oh, no, darling, I'm not so realistic in my art as to carry out this rôle too far! It just happens to be the easiest disguise to win over the Corpo frontier guards—if you'll agree it really is a disguise!"

He kissed her with a fury which shocked the respectable hostelry.

She knew, from N.U. agents, that he was going out into a very fair risk of being flogged to death. She had come solely to say farewell and bring him what might be his last budget of news.

Buck was in concentration camp—he was more feared and more guarded than Doremus had been, and Linda had not been able to buy him out. Julian, Karl, and John Pollikop were still alive, still imprisoned. Father Perefixe was running the N.U. cell in Fort Beulah, but slightly confused because he wanted to approve of war with Mexico, a nation which he detested for its treatment of Catholic priests. Lorinda and he had, apparently, fought bloodily all one evening about Catholic rule in Latin America. As is always typical of Liberals, Lorinda managed to speak of Father Perefixe at once with virtuous loathing and the greatest affection. Emma and David were reported as well content in Worcester, though there were murmurs that Philip's wife did not too thankfully receive her mother-in-law's advice on cooking. Sissy was becoming a deft agitator who still, remembering that she was a born architect, drew plans for houses that Julian and she would some day adorn. She contrived blissfully to combine assaults on all Capitalism with an entirely capitalistic conception of the year-long honeymoons Julian and she were going to have.

Less surprising than any of this were the tidings that Francis Tasbrough, very beautiful in repentance, had been let out of the Corpo prison to which he had been sent for too much grafting and was again a district commissioner, well thought of, and that his housekeeper was now Mrs. Candy, whose daily reports on his most secret arrangements were the most neatly written and sternly grammatical documents that came into Vermont N.U. headquarters.

Then Lorinda was looking up at him as he stood in the vestibule of his Westbound train and crying, "You look so well again! Are you happy? Oh, be happy!"

Even now he did not see this defeminized radical woman crying.... She turned away from him and raced down the station platform too quickly. She had lost all her confident pose of flip elegance. Leaning out from the vestibule he saw her stop at the gate, diffidently raise her hand as if to wave at the long anonymity of the train windows, then shakily march away through the gates. And he realized that she hadn't even his address; that no one who loved him would have any stable address for him now any more.

Mr. William Barton Dobbs, a traveling man for harvesting machinery, an erect little man with a small gray beard and a Vermont accent, got out of bed in his hotel in a section in Minnesota which had so many Bavarian-American and Yankee-descended farmers, and so few "radical" Scandinavians, that it was still loyal to President Haik.

He went down to breakfast, cheerfully rubbing his hands. He consumed grapefruit and porridge—but without sugar: there was an embargo on sugar. He looked down and inspected himself; he sighed, "I'm getting too much of a pod, with all this outdoor work and being so hungry; I've got to cut down on the grub"; and then he consumed fried eggs, bacon, toast, coffee made of acorns, and marmalade made of carrots—Coon's troops had shut off coffee beans and oranges.

He read, meantime, the Minneapolis Daily Corporate. It announced a Great Victory in Mexico—in the same place, he noted, in which there had already been three Great Victories in the past two weeks. Also, a "shameful rebellion" had been put down in Andalusia, Alabama; it was reported that General Göring was coming over to be the guest of President Haik; and the pretender Trowbridge was said "by a reliable source" to have been assassinated, kidnaped, and compelled to resign.

"No news this morning," regretted Mr. William Barton Dobbs.

As he came out of the hotel, a squad of Minute Men were marching by. They were farm boys, newly recruited for service in Mexico; they looked as scared and soft and big-footed as a rout of rabbits. They tried to pipe up the newest-oldest war song, in the manner of the Civil War ditty "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again":

When Johnny comes home from Greaser Land, Hurray, hurraw, His ears will be full of desert sand, Hurray, hurraw, But he'll speaka de Spiggoty pretty sweet And he'll bring us a gun and a señorit', And we'll all get stewed when Johnny comes marching home!

Their voices wavered. They peeped at the crowd along the walk, or looked sulkily down at their dragging feet, and the crowd, which once would have been yelping "Hail Haik!" was snickering "You beggars 'll never get to Greaser Land!" and even, from the safety of a second-story window, "Hurray, hurraw for Trowbridge!"

"Poor devils!" thought Mr. William Barton Dobbs, as he watched the frightened toy soldiers... not too toy-like to keep them from dying.

Yet it is a fact that he could see in the crowd numerous persons whom his arguments, and those of the sixty-odd N.U. secret agents under him, had converted from fear of the M.M.'s to jeering.

In his open Ford convertible—he never started it but he thought of how he had "put it over on Sissy" by getting a Ford all his own— Doremus drove out of the village into stubble-lined prairie. The meadow larks' liquid ecstasy welcomed him from barbed-wire fences. If he missed the strong hills behind Fort Beulah, he was yet exalted by the immensity of the sky, the openness of prairie that promised he could go on forever, the gayety of small sloughs seen through their fringes of willows and cottonwoods, and once, aspiring overhead, an early flight of mallards.

He whistled boisterously as he bounced on along the section-line road.

He reached a gaunt yellow farmhouse—it was to have had a porch, but there was only an unpainted nothingness low down on the front wall to show where the porch would be. To a farmer who was oiling a tractor in the pig-littered farmyard he chirped, "Name's William Barton Dobbs—representing the Des Moines Combine and Up-to-Date Implement Company."

The farmer galloped up to shake hands, breathing, "By golly this is a great honor, Mr. J—"

"Dobbs!"

"That's right. 'Scuse me."

In an upper bedroom of the farmhouse, seven men were waiting, perched on chair and table and edges of the bed, or just squatted on the floor. Some of them were apparently farmers; some unambitious shopkeepers. As Doremus bustled in, they rose and bowed.

"Good-morning gentlemen. A little news," he said. "Coon has driven the Corpos out of Yankton and Sioux Falls. Now I wonder if you're ready with your reports?"

To the agent whose difficulty in converting farm-owners had been their dread of paying decent wages to farm hands, Doremus presented for use the argument (as formalized yet passionate as the observations of a life-insurance agent upon death by motor accident) that poverty for one was poverty for all.... It wasn't such a very new argument, nor so very logical, but it had been a useful carrot for many human mules.

For the agent among the Finnish-American settlers, who were insisting that Trowbridge was a Bolshevik and just as bad as the Russians, Doremus had a mimeographed quotation from the Izvestia of Moscow damning Trowbridge as a "social Fascist quack." For the Bavarian farmers down the other way, who were still vaguely pro-Nazi, Doremus had a German émigré paper published in Prague, proving (though without statistics or any considerable quotation from official documents) that, by agreement with Hitler, President Haik was, if he remained in power, going to ship back to the German Army all German-Americans with so much as one grandparent born in the Fatherland.

"Do we close with a cheerful hymn and the benediction, Mr. Dobbs?" demanded the youngest and most flippant—and quite the most successful—agent.

"I wouldn't mind! Maybe it wouldn't be so unsuitable as you think. But considering the loose morals and economics of most of you comrades, perhaps it would be better if I closed with a new story about Haik and Mae West that I heard, day before yesterday.... Bless you all! Goodbye!"

As he drove to his next meeting, Doremus fretted, "I don't believe that Prague story about Haik and Hitler is true. I think I'll quit using it. Oh, I know—I know, Mr. Dobbs; as you say, if you did tell the truth to a Nazi, it would still be a lie. But just the same I think I'll quit using it. ... Lorinda and me, that thought we could get free of Puritanism!... Those cumulus clouds are better than a galleon. If they'd just move Mount Terror and Fort Beulah and Lorinda and Buck here, this would be Paradise... . Oh, Lord, I don't want to, but I suppose I'll have to order the attack on the M.M. post at Osakis now; they're ready for it.... I wonder if that shotgun charge yesterday was intended for me?... Didn't really like Lorinda's hair fixed up in that New York style at all!"

He slept that night in a cottage on the shore of a sandy-bottomed lake ringed with bright birches. His host and his host's wife, worshipers of Trowbridge, had insisted on giving him their own room, with the patchwork quilt and the hand-painted pitcher and bowl.

He dreamed—as he still did dream, once or twice a week—that he was back in his cell at Trianon. He knew again the stink, the cramped and warty bunk, the never relaxed fear that he might be dragged out and flogged.

He heard magic trumpets. A soldier opened the door and invited out all the prisoners. There, in the quadrangle, General Emmanuel Coon (who, to Doremus's dreaming fancy, looked exactly like Sherman) addressed them:

"Gentlemen, the Commonwealth army has conquered! Haik has been captured! You are free!"

So they marched out, the prisoners, the bent and scarred and crippled, the vacant-eyed and slobbering, who had come into this place as erect and daring men: Doremus, Dan Wilgus, Buck, Julian, Mr. Falck, Henry Veeder, Karl Pascal, John Pollikop, Truman Webb. They crept out of the quadrangle gates, through a double line of soldiers standing rigidly at Present Arms yet weeping as they watched the broken prisoners crawling past.

And beyond the soldiers, Doremus saw the women and children. They were waiting for him—the kind arms of Lorinda and Emma and Sissy and Mary, with David behind them, clinging to his father's hand, and Father Perefixe. And Foolish was there, his tail a proud plume, and from the dream-blurred crowd came Mrs. Candy, holding out to him a cocoanut cake.

Then all of them were fleeing, frightened by Shad Ledue—

His host was slapping Doremus's shoulder, muttering, "Just had a phone call. Corpo posse out after you."

So Doremus rode out, saluted by the meadow larks, and onward all day, to a hidden cabin in the Northern Woods where quiet men awaited news of freedom.

And still Doremus goes on in the red sunrise, for a Doremus Jessup can never die.

[katzirrart]

ASK AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE... also thank you, I try very hard for cute njkfgh but also THANKS I MISS PEOPLE ENGAGING WITH ME LOL

Puts this under a cut for you because it is...long, friend!

My phone crashed after I got ALMOST DONE typing this and I'm so sad... onto the PC I guess. At least now I can reference a specific video :D

For reference; I'm in my early 30's so I was like growing up with Sailor Moon hitting TV for the first time with seasons R-SuperS and it was a BIG DEAL at the time. I watched it religiously up until SuperS hit, then school kinda clashed with the time slot, so it was mostly the tail end I caught of it. I rewatched it in my 20's but never... finished it because work... watching a 200 episode, monster of the week anime wasn't really... holding me at the time. Recently my girlfriend and I decided why not check out the new dub because I wanted something on I could draw to!!

I see a lot of people dog on the redubbing of it, and so I started to kinda... look into comparison videos of characters/voices to see just how BAD some might be - I also was worried that...ya'know, maybe my nostalgia glasses for Sailor Moon especially, of all things, could cause me to be overly critical of it? So I kinda...went in preparing myself to give it a solid chance to sit with me lol I think that mindset helped me appreciate the actual WORK that went into it -

Like, being a kid who grew up on the internet from 1995 onward, and you had to DIG for half the shit we had back then... I grew up with intimately knowing the struggles Sailor Moon had getting over here in some ways... I knew I was going to respect it TECHNICALLY even if the dub annoyed me in the end! So that's kinda my personal intimate experience with SM :0??

I'm a huge fan of older 70's, 80's and 90's anime and a lot of that is the WEIRD charm of the voice acting some times in dubs? Also the style GOSH, but the voice acting is either HORRENDOUS or iconic as hell.

But I also grew up with Brooklyn Molly, and Linda Ballentyne's Usagi being a thing and uh... they're something. The latter is a nightmare to me LMAO... so I'll give anything a chance.

I'm gonna reference a video for the three voice actors, I linked hopefully to each's segment :0 BUT UH, this person did these videos up through S, and it was SUPER COOL to reference these and kinda COMPARE CONTRAST some of them with my girlfriend when we watched recently!! A FUN COMPANION TO THE SERIES TBH!! :0!!!

In R we get the really iconic voice Tracey Hoyt had. Rini~ had this weirdly little deep and monotone voice. It was iconic to her, and I liked that, but I... hated how she did emotions. Hated it. So much. Which I think is where it really starts - it's 100% voice acting issues honestly. Writing too.

There's a few scenes that stick with me in my memory of being like shut the fucK UP?? and one is the flashback to Neo Tokyo when she trips in the rain. She's asking her parents for help and crying about PLEASE HELP ME!! And something about what Tracey does is she does VOLUME = EMOTION in a way. I don't like how flat her lines feel. I don't like how she does emotional readings at all and it's so WEIRD to me looking back on it now? I wasn't like some SNOB as a kid, I just... I dunno :0 I knew I didn't like her.

ALSO ANY TIME THE BLACK MOON CLAN GOT HER CRYING AND HER MOON ALL BAT-SIGNAL MODE UH.... her screaming/crying is NOT GREAT :D Super dislike it, and it made me hate her a lot LMAO???

In S we get Sugar Lyn Beard [Stephanie Beard].... our SQUEAKY Rini~ Uh. This is the one that most people remember, she did her for the rest of the show. So S and SuperS. Uh. S is my favorite arc. Manga. Anime. CHEF. KISS. I love the scouts, the plot, the fucking ROGUE GALLERY~

I was like... in the trenches with the wild shit this was when it hit america. I was like on Sailor Moon forums and shit ... I WAS SO STOKED ABOUT HOTARU...

Hotaru's plotline and her relationship with Chibi Usa, however fans see it, is so near and dear to my heart. And to a degree I have a nostalgic fondness for Sugar's performance, but I also don't like it at all. In that video at like 10:39 or something we get her just saying Hotaru's name over and over and like HER VOICE IS SO BALLOON LIKE AND WATERY IN WAYS that I just usually felt annoyed? She's two clicks from being that warble cry filter to me...

Which might be why I really liked the redubbing, Sugar is who we have through the REAL BIG CHIBI USA IS THE STAR SEASONS and we have this voice that just feels so.... idk it's weird how much I nose wrinkle at it.

It feels... idk, like I said, I'm by no means a voice actor/performance snob, but in the face of everyone having beefs with a redub I felt did a good job it's VERY curious what people go up to bat for? :0 Different strokes, different folks or whatever! :D

She sometimes feels like she's just...reading a line - but it's also this strange little lilt and hnh~ that happens at the end of a lot of lines? It's interesting to dissect I guess!! I never put TOO much thought into why I disliked her, I just... did for majority of my life and now I surprisingly found myself being like hey that's my GIRL???

To be honest though the whole uh... reign of Linda Ballentyne as Usagi was difficult for me LMAO Like I straight up WOOF... but that's me, she might be someone's favorite Usagi lol But it made those seasons hard at times.

In the new dub we get.... Sandy Fox. I think she hits this EXCELLENT mid point between the two. It's high and kiddish, and she has an interesting tone and lilt? I love how she does emotions with Chibi Usa and it just MAN. IT BE HITTING RIGHT. She was the biggest improvement to me in the casting and performance, and IT MADE THE REWATCH SO SMOOTH TO ME HONESTLY, BECAUSE SHE BECOMES SUCH A MAIN CHARACTER TOO.

I also think the writing being redone helps more in the grand scheme of things too!!

Like, for all the shit the redub gets, I was REALLY happy to have names fixed, lines fixed, dialogue reworked, VOCABULARY added, THE MUSIC FIXED - ALL THE BELLS AND WHISTLES.

I found some of the dumb shit like Chibi Usa's O CHRONOS~ lines to be silly, but a FONDNESS for the fact they decided NO. We're gonna DO THE THING. Like, hell yeah, man!! I can fuck with a team getting the rights and PROBABLY GETTING INTO ANIME AND WHAT THEY DO, BECAUSE THEY GREW UP ON THIS ONE - like can you IMAGINE that being your passion project in life is to get into the industry to advocate for REDOING THE ONE ANIME from your 80's/90's childhood that was treated like Sailor Moon was?

ADVOCATING FOR STARS TO FINALLY BE SEEN BY AMERICAN AUDIENCES NOT ON CRUNCHY PIXELATED REALMEDIA VIDEOS YOU DOWNLOAD THROUGH SKETCHY FORUMS AND STUFF...

Like that's so NEAT TO ME LMAO... I'm not a fan of the season but there was something deeply settling in my heart to like... know where I was as a kid on the forums watching videos of it with no subtitles, or fan subtitles and seeing it on a STREAMING SERVICE, cleaned up, crisp, with SPOKEN ENGLISH.... like idk it's silly but that was so... idk. My heart felt a lot of happiness for that? It was a treat, just for me LOL

But!!! It also is to the benefit of the redub that they got to do it all at once! One voice actor per character as much as they could help it, and just have that CONSISTENCY. Having an actor KNOW their character and roll forward with it, versus getting the show season to season, and having contract issues and having to get someone new in the seat, who maybe doesn't get the role right in the long run.

It's also kinda sweet to think the people doing it, and a lot of the new faces in voice acting these days, got into it BECAUSE of growing up on things like Sailor Moon!! There's weird levels to the redub that kinda hit me in my heart like that. I still like and enjoy how clunky the OG dub is, and I like the japanese sub of course, but there's something very SWEET about the care that has actually been put into the new dub, y'know?

Preservation of media and stuff too!! I'm big on that topic, and the redub was a team seeing opportunity to FIX a weird editing job where so much was SCRUBBED...

It's wild the hate I see when I think there needs to be some celebration for what it achieved, honestly. At 12, I never thought I'd SEE all of SM dubbed, or ACCURATELY. I grew up on Mixx comics SM manga where she was BUNNY, and watching the Dic dub, like I never thought I'd see the UPHEAVAL to revise and FIX the americanization.... SHIT IS SO FUCKING COOL TO ME.... HOW CAN I NOT THINK IT'S WORTH PEOPLE'S TIME and effort??

Again, to each their own opinion but I think there's a certain...view people need to have about what some shows like SM go through and how cool it is, it got to be fixed and to BE a passion project in doing so, you know? I was originally in the camp of OH WOW... WHAT A LAZY CASH GRAB, VIZ... but... nah dog, nah. Not anymore.

That healed some weird part of my childhood I didn't know needed it? LMAO...

BUT UH, let me get off that tangent of being soft about that shit. I'm sure there's some bullshit people could tell me about how difficult it was or how insensitive shit was - which honestly idk I think the redub handled a LOT of things very interesting and well... but this post isn't about WAXING POETIC about the redub.

The point is; that video was a REALLY COOL resource to me. My mind remembers things different a lot, so hearing the comparisons was REALLY fucking cool and it really highlighted what a GREAT JOB Sandy did as Chibi Usa honestly!! I loved her a lot, and that... helped a lot.

I guess as a kid, my annoyance with the script of R-SuperS and my lackluster care of Chibi Usa as a character made me just find her tedious and annoying. Why are we focusing on her~ this show is called Sailor Mooooon lol

But in R, sure she's a little brat and man IS SHE A BRAT... and I found myself disliking her still, but I wasn't annoyed because how she sounded. She was annoying because she's a spoiled little kid, who... I as an adult can see kinda what she's been through better with her parents, y'know? I can sympathize better now than I did at like...10/11 LOL

With S... I really grew to LOVE her because they started to really focus on her being a brat, but she's a little older now. She's little sister energy now. Y'know, we all forget she's like 900. She spends 900 years pretty much being....4? 5? Wild. No WONDER she's a fucking brat??

But with S we see her MAKE FRIENDS...!!!!! FRIENDS HER AGE!!! We see her meet Hotaru, and we see how much like her MOM she is. Her dad too! She's got a big heart, and a firey side, just like her parents and it's nice to see that come out in her determination towards Hotaru and being her friend and ENRICHING HER LIFE. Fighting for that friendship!! And I ADORE THAT. And a lot of that, again, didn't always come through because how the scripts and voice acting were handled.

I mean even in that video we HEAR some of the script changes, there was so much CONTEXT added to various scenes it's interesting! To me at least :0

S really benefited from the redub, I'm sorry fans of the OG but fuck. That shit was painful no matter WHAT and I think honestly... I grew to love the S redub the MOST ESPECIALLY HOW THE WITCHES WERE HANDLED, FUUUUUUUUUCK!~!!! AUGH. MAN!!!! Love.

I just... I dunno. We got a really good performance on her, and like it really helped the character arc SHINE in what a kind hearted girl she's gonna be growing into? It's not flippant and weird like it is in the OG, it's sincere and there's a sort of childlike not...wONDER BUT?? The vibe is BETTER??

But... SuperS is really where it started to solidfy. I mean, I joke a lot about her being GASP.... THE ORIGINAL HORSE GIRL and I am not immune to my childhood self being so heart eyes at the MERE AESTHETIC OF HER AND HELIOS, GOSH... but like, yo. That character growth in SuperS is FIRE.

She... has this day dreamy/lovely sort of vibe to her, she's experiencing first love and we're dropping the obsession with Mamo because of it, we're experiencing her having real deep questions about the world around her and people's hearts - and these are conversations she's having with someone who isn't a senshi. She's having these conversations and thoughts with her new ethereal friend. I can't imagine some of these topics with Usagi.

I love her, but she's so... unserious to a point? She has her moments, but with Chibi Usa it can be this coin flip of mocking her, or being serious, y'know? And like... she really starts to be mature beyond her years at times, she'll say things that are so wise seeming and it's our reaction and the senshi too... to be like whoa what did you say? She becomes very selfless, and yet a streak of selfishness still lives in there that all children have... and overall we really see her become a kind hearted lady. She becomes her title; Small Lady. And I love that.

I love that so much. Just how tender she is as a character in SuperS. It's so GOOD.

She comes a long way from the selfish demanding brat in R, but she's still Chibi Usa. She's still got those moments of being a defiant BRAT but.. she's sweeter. Grounded?? She's becoming a person her mom and dad can be proud of, she's becoming someone that would make her hero and ours; Sailor Moon, proud of her.

And I kinda love that by the end. She's gonna fulfill that role some day, y'know? Why SHOULDN'T we like her. Why shouldn't we acknowledge all the text and subtext about her character in those kind of ways. AND THAT MIGHT BE MY OVER ANALYTICAL ASS BUT LIKE...

A good performance carries a character's writing!

I mean, I even as an adult saw things to relate to with my own childhood I hadn't thought before which... I dunno. Steps to liking characters is relating to them, or having something resonate right? Something about sometimes saying things that shouldn't be coming out of a child's mouth, that's advice to people easily almost ten years her senior... yeah.

SORRY FOR THE LENGTHY POST... but yeah just uh... Sandy Fox did a LOT of good for the overall performance and read of Chibi Usa, and that video REALLY highlights that for me, and the script work and love from the team to do right by how Sailor Moon was edited for American soil paid off, and just... being able to appreciate things in a different way than when I was a kid did a lot for just...seeing what a good character arc that little brat gets!!

She's a wonderful little spunky dork, and I love her now where as before I just felt eye rolls incoming when I saw her!

-pet owner voice- my widdle pwincess....

Finished Sailor Moon with the girlfriend recently and have to admit the new dub honestly made me like Chibi-usa a thousand times more ;w;

[whileiamdying]

Allen Ginsberg, Master Poet of Beat Generation, Dies at 70

by Wilborn Hampton April 6, 1997

Mr. Morgan said that Mr. Ginsberg wrote right to the end. ''He's working on a lot of poems, talking to old friends,'' Mr. Morgan said on Friday. ''He's in very good spirits. He wants to write poetry and finish his life's work.''

William S. Burroughs, one of Mr. Ginsberg's lifelong friends and a fellow Beat, said that Mr. Ginsberg's death was ''a great loss to me and to everybody.''

''We were friends for more than 50 years,'' Mr. Burroughs said. ''Allen was a great person with worldwide influence. He was a pioneer of openness and a lifelong model of candor. He stood for freedom of expression and for coming out of all the closets long before others did. He has influence because he said what he believed. I will miss him.''

As much through the strength of his own irrepressible personality as through his poetry, Mr. Ginsberg provided a bridge between the Underground and the Transcendental. He was as comfortable in the ashrams of Indian gurus in the 1960's as he had been in the Beat coffeehouses of the preceding decade.

A ubiquitous presence at the love-ins and be-ins that marked the drug-oriented counterculture of the Flower Children years, Mr. Ginsberg was also in the vanguard of the political protest movements they helped spawn. He marched against the war in Vietnam, the C.I.A. and the Shah of Iran, among other causes.

If his early verse shocked Eisenhower's America with its celebration of homosexuality and drugs, his involvement in protests kept him in the public eye and fed ammunition to his critics. But through it all, Mr. Ginsberg maintained a sort of teddy bear quality that deflected much of the indignation he inspired.

He was known around the world as a master of the outrageous. He read his poetry and played finger cymbals at the Albert Hall in London; he was expelled from Cuba after saying he found Che Guevara ''cute''; he sang duets with Bob Dylan, and he chanted ''Hare Krishna'' on William F. Buckley Jr.'s television program. As the critic John Leonard observed in a 1988 appreciation: ''He is of course a social bandit. But he is a nonviolent social bandit.''

Or as the narrator in Saul Bellow's ''Him With His Foot in His Mouth'' said of Mr. Ginsberg: ''Under all this self-revealing candor is purity of heart. And the only authentic living representative of American Transcendentalism is that fat-breasted, bald, bearded homosexual in smeared goggles, innocent in his uncleanness.''

J. D. McClatchy, a poet and the editor of The Yale Review, said yesterday: ''Ginsberg was the best-known American poet of his generation, as much a social force as a literary phenomenon.

''Like Whitman, he was a bard in the old manner -- outsized, darkly prophetic, part exuberance, part prayer, part rant. His work is finally a history of our era's psyche, with all its contradictory urges.''

Allen Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926, in Newark and grew up in Paterson, N.J., the second son of Louis Ginsberg, a schoolteacher and sometime poet, and the former Naomi Levy, a Russian emigree and fervent Marxist. His brother, Eugene, named for Eugene V. Debs, also wrote poetry, under the name Eugene Brooks. Eugene, a lawyer, survives.

Recalling his parents in a 1985 interview, Mr. Ginsberg said:

''They were old-fashioned delicatessen philosophers. My father would go around the house either reciting Emily Dickinson and Longfellow under his breath or attacking T. S. Eliot for ruining poetry with his 'obscurantism.' My mother made up bedtime stories that all went something like: 'The good king rode forth from his castle, saw the suffering workers and healed them.' I grew suspicious of both sides.''

An Authorization For a Lobotomy

Allen Ginsberg's mother later suffered from paranoia and was in and out of mental hospitals; Mr. Ginsberg signed an authorization for a lobotomy. Two days after she died in 1956 in Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island, he received a letter from her that said: ''The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight in the window -- I have the key -- get married Allen don't take drugs. . . . Love, your mother.''

Three years after her death, Mr. Ginsberg wrote ''Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956),'' an elegy that many consider his finest poem.

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village,

downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

the rhythm, the rhythm -- and your memory in my head three years after -- . . .

''Kaddish'' burnished a reputation that had been forged with the publication of ''Howl!'' three years earlier. The two works established Mr. Ginsberg as a major voice in what came to be known as the Beat Generation of writers.

Mr. Ginsberg's journey to his place as one of America's most celebrated poets began during his college days. He first attended Montclair State College. But in 1943, he received a small scholarship from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson and enrolled at Columbia University. He considered becoming a lawyer like his brother, but was soon attracted to the literary courses offered by Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling, and switched his major from pre-law to literature.

At Columbia he fell in with a crowd that included Jack Kerouac, a former student four years his senior, Lucien Carr and William Burroughs, and later, Neal Cassady, a railway worker who had literary aspirations. Together they formed the nucleus of what would become the Beats.

Kerouac and Carr became the poet's mentors, and Kerouac and Cassady became his lovers. It was also at Columbia that Mr. Ginsberg began to experiment with mind-altering drugs like LSD, which would gain widespread use in the decade to follow and which Mr. Ginsberg would celebrate in his verse along with his homosexuality and his immersion in Eastern transcendental religions.

But if the Beats were creating literary history around Columbia and the West End Cafe, there was a dangerous undercurrent to their activities. Mr. Carr spent a brief time in jail for manslaughter, and Mr. Ginsberg, because he had associated with Mr. Carr, was suspended from Columbia for a year.

In 1949, after Mr. Ginsberg had received his bachelor's degree, Herbert Huncke, a writer and hustler, moved into his apartment and stored stolen goods there. Mr. Huncke was eventually jailed, and Mr. Ginsberg, pleading psychological disability, was sent to a psychiatric institution for eight months. At the institution, he met another patient, Carl Solomon, whom Mr. Ginsberg credited with deepening his understanding of poetry and its power as a weapon of political dissent.

Becoming a Protege Of the Poet Williams

Returning home to Paterson, Mr. Ginsberg became a protege of William Carlos Williams, the physician and poet, who lived nearby. Williams's use of colloquial American language in his poetry was a major influence on the young Mr. Ginsberg.

After leaving Columbia, Mr. Ginsberg first went to work for a Madison Avenue advertising agency. After five years, he once recalled, he found himself taking part in a consumer-research project trying to determine whether Americans preferred the word ''sparkling'' or ''glamorous'' to describe ideal teeth. ''We already knew people associate diamonds with 'sparkling' and furs with 'glamorous,' '' he said. ''We spent $150,000 to learn most people didn't want furry teeth.''

The poet said he decided to give up the corporate world ''when my shrink asked me what would make me happy.'' He hung his gray flannel suit in the closet and went to San Francisco with six months of unemployment insurance in his pocket. San Francisco was then the center of considerable literary energy. He took a room around the corner from City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's bookstore and underground publishing house, and began to write.

During this period, Mr. Ginsberg also became part of the San Francisco literary circle that included Kenneth Rexroth -- an author, critic and painter -- Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan and Philip Lamantia. He also met Peter Orlovsky, who would be his companion for the next 30 years.

His first major work from San Francisco was ''Howl!'' The long-running poem expressed the anxieties and ideals of a generation alienated from mainstream society. ''Howl!,'' which was to become Mr. Ginsberg's most famous poem, was dedicated to Solomon, and begins:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. . . .

Mr. Ginsberg read the poem to a gathering arranged by Mr. Rexroth, and those present never forgot the poem, its author or the occasion.

Mr. Rexroth's wife privately distributed a mimeographed 50-copy edition of ''Howl!'' and in 1956, Mr. Ferlinghetti published ''Howl! and Other Poems'' in what he called his ''pocket poets series.''

With its open and often vivid celebration of homosexuality and eroticism, ''Howl!'' was impounded by United States Customs agents and Mr. Ginsberg was tried on obscenity charges.

After a long trial, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem was not without ''redeeming social importance.''

The result was to make ''Howl!'' immensely popular and establish it as a landmark against censorship. The outrage and furor did not stop with the sexual revolution. As late as 1988, the radio station WBAI refused to allow ''Howl!'' to be read on the air during a weeklong series about censorship in America.

There were almost as many definitions of Beatniks and the Beat movement as there were writers who claimed to be part of it. As John Clellan Holmes described it, ''To be beat is to be at the bottom of your personality looking up.'' But if the movement grew out of disillusionment, it was disillusionment with a conscience.

Mr. Ginsberg tried to explain the aims of the Beats in a letter to his father in 1957: ''Whitman long ago complained that unless the material power of America were leavened by some kind of spiritual infusion, we would wind up among the 'fabled damned.' We're approaching that state as far as I can see. Only way out is individuals taking responsibility and saying what they actually feel. That's what we as a group have been trying to do.''

On another occasion, he described the literary rules more succinctly: ''You don't have to be right. All you have to do is be candid.'' Mr. Ginsberg was nothing if not candid.

As he wrote in ''America,'' another 1956 poem, which took aim at Eisenhower's post-McCarthy era:

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing

America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956

. . .

America this is quite serious

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set

America is this correct?

. . .

Mr. Ginsberg said the poets who formed the prime influence on his own work were William Blake, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and Williams. He declared he had found a new method of poetry. ''All you have to do,'' he said, ''is think of anything that comes into your head, then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.''

His disdain for poetry's traditional rules only gave ammunition to his critics. James Dickey once complained that the ''problem'' with Allen Ginsberg was that he made it seem as if anybody could write poetry.

Traveling Widely For Two Decades

Mr. Ginsberg used the celebrity he gained with ''Howl!'' to travel widely during the next two decades. He went to China and India to study with gurus and Zen masters and to Venice to see Pound. On his way home, he was crowned King of the May by dissident university students in Prague, only to be expelled by the Communist Government. He read his poetry wherever he was allowed, from concert stages to off-campus coffeehouses.

He was in the forefront of whatever movement was in fashion: the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960's, the anti-Vietnam war and anti-C.I.A. demonstrations of the 1970's, the anti-Shah and anti-Reagan protests of the 1980's. In 1967 he was arrested in an antiwar protest in New York City, and he was arrested again, for the same reason, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. He testified in the trial of the so-called Chicago Seven.

Through it all, he kept writing. After ''Kaddish'' in 1959, major works included ''TV Baby'' in 1960, ''Wichita Vortex Sutra'' (1966), ''Wales Visitation'' (1967), ''Don't Grow Old'' (1976) and ''White Shroud'' (1983).

In his celebrated career, Mr. Ginsberg received many awards, including the National Book Award (1973), the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished poetic achievement (1986), and an American Book Award for contributions to literary excellence (1990).

In 1968, Cassady died of a drug overdose. Kerouac died of alcoholism the next year. By the mid-1970's, Mr. Ginsberg had helped start the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., a Buddhist university where he taught summer courses in poetry and in Buddhist meditation. He also was becoming one of the last living voices of the Beat generation and the keeper of the flame.

In 1985, Harper & Row published Mr. Ginsberg's ''Collected Poems,'' an anthology of his work in one volume that firmly established the poet in the mainstream of American literature. The poet again made tours, showing up on television shows, but this time he was in suit and tie offering a sort of explanation of his work.

''People ask me if I've gone respectable now,'' he said to one interviewer. ''I tell them I've always been respectable.''

During another interview, he confessed: ''My intention was to make a picture of the mind, mistakes and all. Of course I learned I'm an idiot, a complete idiot who wasn't as prophetic as I thought I was. The crazy, angry Philippic sometimes got in the way of clear perception.

''I thought the North Vietnamese would be a lot better than they turned out to be. I shouldn't have been marching against the Shah of Iran because the mullahs have turned out to be a lot worse.''

But despite his suit and tie, the censors continued to look over Mr. Ginsberg's shoulder. During the interviews, David Remnick, then of The Washington Post, accompanied him to CBS's ''Nightwatch.'' A producer, unfamiliar with the poet's work, asked if he would read something on the show.

''How about reading that poem about your mother?'' she suggested.

'' 'Kaddish,' yes. Time magazine calls it my masterpiece,'' Ginsberg replied. ''But I don't know. . . .''

The poet pointed to a word in the poem he doubted would make prime time. As Mr. Remnick reported, the producer's eyes glazed over and there was a long silence.

''Your mother's . . .?'' the producer said in horror.

''Couldn't we just bleep that part out?'' the poet offered, always helpful.

''No,'' the producer said.

''It's O.K.,'' the poet replied. ''I've got other poems.''

Social Conscience Plus Sex and Drugs

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

-- From ''Howl!'' (1955-56)

America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia

I'm addressing you.

Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time magazine?

. . .

It occurs to me that I am America

I am talking to myself again.

-- From ''America'' (1956)

And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers -- and my own imagination of a withered leaf -- at dawn --

Dreaming back thru life, Your time -- and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse,

the final moment -- the flower burning in the Day -- and what comes after,

looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city

a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed --

like a poem in the dark --

. . .

O mother

what have I left out

O mother

what have I forgotten

O mother

farewell

-- From ''Kaddish'' (1959-60)

. . . Kansas! Kansas! Shuddering at last!

PERSON appearing in Kansas!

angry telephone calls to the University

Police dumbfounded leaning on

their radiocar hoods

While Poets chant to Allah in the roadhouse Showboat!

Blue-eyed children dance and hold Thy Hand O aged Walt

who came from Lawrence to Topeka to envision

Iron interlaced upon the city plain --

Telegraph wires strung from city to city O Melville!

. . .

Thy sins are forgiven, Wichita!

-- From ''Wichita Vortex Sutra'' (1966)

[katieslondonadventures]

                                                 Christmas play

This Christmas play is about a group of friends from America having Christmas dinner and one of their friends is late, causing them to worry. Transportation had stopped, which Mark was not aware of and he had no way of getting into the city, so he had an adventure trying to get to his friend's house. 

Sarah: Where is Mark? We can’t start our Christmas feast without him!

Jenny: Maybe we could just have a little taste?

Sarah: No!

George: It's alright Sarah, relax. I’m sure he will be here soon. 

Sarah: John is never late, he is always early actually. Where could he be? Maybe I should call him?

Jenny: Ah he will be fine. At least it's not snowing.

George: It rarely snows here, but the freezing rain is so much worse. 

David: Guys, I’m trying to sleep. Could you keep it down in there?

Sarah: your best friend is missing and all you care about is sleeping?

David: Sarah, stop being so dramatic he is most certainly not missing.  

George: Jenny, looks like you spoke too soon. 

Jenny: Yay! It's snowing! The first snow all season on Christmas. Can you believe that?

David: That wonderful jenny. Now if you could kindly stop squealing I would like to finish my nap before we eat. 

Sarah: no one is eating until Mark gets here. Guys, I'm really worried. 

George: You know what, it has been over an hour and Mark still isn’t here. Sarah, now I give you permission to worry.

Sarah: AHHHHHH!

David: Gosh, Sarah, he said worry not wail. 

Jenny: That is what she does when she has totally lost it. Should we go out and look for him?

Sarah: Yes! Let's go! Let me grab my coat

Mark: woah Sarah, where are you off to, so quickly. You almost nearly took me down. 

Sarah: Mark, where in the world have you been? I am so glad you are alright!

Jenny: Yeah Mark, way to make us nervous.

David and George: Mark! Time to eat!

Mark: Thanks for the hugs, those are awfully kind, but no need. I am alright. 

Jenny and Sarah: What happened?

Mark: Alright everyone sit down, I could use a warm drink. 

George: I will make you some hot chocolate. Just wait to start your story, man.

Mark: Oh, thanks, this is delicious.  Well, I was on my way over when I realised that transportation does not run on Christmas day here in the city. So I started walking along, frozen to the bone, when a man in a little red car stopped me. He had a long white beard and a little red nose, with a smile that warmed my heart. 

David: dude, you met the real life Santa!

Mark: Seriously, I think that I did. He said he would drive me to the flat here, but we just had to make a few stops along the way. 

Jenny: What kind of stops?

Mark: He was delivering presents. 

George: NO WAY! That was Santa. 

David: Who else is coming? 

Sarah: We shouldn't have anyone else, no clue. 

David: I’ll get it. Guys! It's Santa!

Santa (random man): Sorry to bother you children, my car wouldn't quite start and it was a bit chilly outside, could I come in for a cup of tea? Also, I come bearing presents!

George: Let him in dude, it's Santa!

[thebibliomancer]

Earth X #2

I’m seeing a couple Things, a Giant-Sized Thing, a bearded Doom, and a whole lot of Kirby krackle. This issue must focus on the Fantastic Four.

What does this Bad Future have in store for the first family of Marvel? Nothing good, probably.

First of all, yes, Uatu is still being a massive prick. To Aaron Stack specifically and also just in general.

When Uatu is recapping the concept of the Fantastic Four for Aaron/the audience, he scornfully calls Reed’s concern for Ben Grimm something that limited Reed.

I thought Uatu liked the superheroes of Earth but he’s had a bad couple years, getting mysteriously blinded and all. Still though.

The Inhuman royal family shows up on Ben Grimm’s doorstep on their quest to find the missing prince.

Ben is actually retired from the superhero game. Retired and married to Alicia with two mini Thing children.

Alicia herself was affected by the mass empowering event. She’s got Kirby krackle eyes and can imbue life in her sculptures.

The Inhumans ask what the heck happened to the Fantastic Four while they were gone and Ben shares the sad story.

The mass empowering caused food shortages. I dunno if it’s because everyone needed so many more calories or whether the supply lines were just disrupted.

Consequently, countries began fishing EVEN MORE to feed their citizens. Which was related to the ocean and so pissed off Namor.

When the UN met to discuss the food crisis, Namor asked for a seat at the table. But the UN didn’t recognize Atlantis as a real place and told him to fuck off.

So Doom was easily able to recruit Namor in a scheme to attack the UN and hold the food supply hostage.

He who controls the hamburgers, controls the world.

Captain America and the Fantastic Four jumped into action to stop them. And Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, decides he’s got Namor.

Except Namor has him.

Namor kills Johnny. Right in front of Franklin. Who I guess has never had to really reckon with death.

(You brought him to the battle? You couldn’t get a babysitter or something?)

Enraged, Franklin uses his reality manipulation powers to wish Namor was constantly on fire.

The burning fish man flees screaming into the ocean, leaving the Terrific Three and Captain America to confront Doom.

Doom tries to bargain for his life against a FURIOUS Sue by claiming he knows what caused the mass empowering and he knows how to fix it.

Reed rejects the notion in disbelief because the mass empowering, what fucked the world, was caused by an experiment he was running to use vibranium to bring free energy to the world. Surely!

Vibranium altered the whole of humanity on a cellular level! That’s the explanation Reed believes!

(I have some doubts, given Doom suggested an alternative theory existed but never explained it.)

And then Doom exits scene pursued by Sue and both seemingly explode.

In grief, Reed takes over as Doctor Doom. Moving into Doom’s castle in Latveria and wearing Doom’s armor and working ceaselessly on trying to fix the world.

He works with equally shut-in and beardy Tony Stark over video chat but Tony is losing hope this is a problem they can fix. That maybe this is just the new normal and they’re obsolete.

These are the thoughts Tony thinks if he goes too long without shaving.

Also, in the issue, Captain America in his flag toga and Wyatt Wingfoot break into the crashed Helicarrier to use Nick Fury’s flying car to get to California to investigate the new Red Skull.

(The background info of last issue suggested that Nick Fury is dead but that there are tons of his old Life Model Decoys causing trouble around the world.)

The all-new all-different Daredevil finally appears. He’s the daredevil for a circus, the man without fear because nothing can kill him.

I cannot fathom so far why this new Daredevil gets so much focus. He appeared on the cover of issue 1 despite not appearing in person. There were posters of him in the backgrounds of some scenes in issue 1 and the Thing children were watching him on TV. And now he gets a whole extended sequence at the circus where the audience is invited to shoot flamethrowers at him.

Then minions of the Red Skull show up to kidnap the audience.

Hi Domino, Sunspot, and Sandman.

Guess there’s going to be some spot the cameo with Red Skull’s crowd.

Back of the book worldbuilding info: the mutated world has been great for some people. The Moloids enjoy surface tourism and revere Reed as a saint on the assumption he caused it.

The Skrulls and Kree have refugee populations on Earth after their forever war reduced both empires to a cinder.

And although the mutants were blamed for the mass empowering event, they blend in far too well to catch hate anymore.

Other popular theories were: the government caused it, a curse caused it, and evolution caused it.

So I’m assuming that none of those are correct and neither is Reed’s theory about the vibranium energy project being the cause.

There’s so many issues left. And this is the big mystery. The correct answer surely is not on the table yet.

So to sum up: Avengers dead, half the Fantastic Four dead, Captain America is wearing a toga, Norman Osborn runs America, mind control alien squid on the loose, and a new Red Skull causing trouble.

Earth X is a mess.