#cold pressed mustard oil near me | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

ashintheairlikesnow · 3 years ago

Note

I’m not sure if you have something planned for this already but wouldn’t it be the height of irony if Tooley got monched on by a starved Chris when he forgot to drug him? Just opens the door and whoops! He eaten!

CW: Whumper death, drunkenness, some dehumanization, blood drinking, bit of gore, vampirism, some very light catholicism

New York City, 1936

KING EDWARD VIII ABDICATES THRONE British Monarch to Wed American Socialite Wallis Simpson

Tooley kicks at the sodden, half-frozen newspaper stuck to his shoe, grunting with the effort it takes to dislodge it. His hands are buried deep in the pockets of his thick woolen coat, and he ignores the envious stares of others whose threadbare outfits are patched, whose gloves are little more than rags wrapped around their not-quite-frostbitten fingers.

Instead, he pulls his scarf up higher, tucks his chin beneath its knitted warmth, and finally manages to send the scrap of paper with its water-stained black-and-white image of a stern-faced soon-to-be ex-king and his Baltimore lover into the street, where it sticks in a puddle and soaks clean through.

The old-timers say a heavy rain is coming, citing their aching joints and bones. It's been a wet winter already, and the absolute last thing New York needs is more rain.

Tooley plans to be holed up in his nice warm little house for the whole of it. He's sold three paintings in a month, and he can spend the next few weeks on the next one until his hands want to drop right off his wrists without having to distract himself with petty concerns like money.

The liquor bubbles warm inside him, and even with the frigid air he's broken a sweat along his back, trickling to his waistband, almost a tickle. He stumbles a little, catches himself, coughs out a laugh as the cold air burns deep into his lungs. It can't penetrate the hazy heat of the drink, though.

Mel's always has the best whiskey, and Tooley has the green these days to pay for the very best indeed. He's spent what might be a whole month's pay - if he weren't the luckiest artist in New York - in a single night.

You might say he's made a deal with the devil.

He pulls the brim of his fedora down, shielding his brow from the bit of freezing moisture speckling his cheeks. He struggles not to giggle like a child.

"Got a bit to spare for a hungry man?" A rasping voice calls out from an alley as he passes. "Help me feed my family, sir? I'm out of work, sir! Got three little ones with hungry bellies!"

Tooley ignores him.

There are crowds like that everywhere these days, always pressing for help, for a little something more and more and more. Men out of work, men in bread lines, women with tired faces and sad children. He's had just about enough of it.

They're calling it a depression, and he finds the term apt enough, considering it seems the whole country's been tumbled into a hole and can't find its way out.

He'd take his muse to Europe and paint there if it weren't for the echoing tension that bleeds over across the sea. Every nation he's idolized for their arts is trying to posture at each other. Rattling sabers while the people sigh heavily and keep washing their laundry, like always.

Tooley was a child when the Great War tore his own family apart - losing an older half-brother to the pointless trenches, a father to the mustard gas that ate his lungs to pieces, a mother to her desperate, sharp grief at her husband and stepson's loss.

The War had rendered him alone in the world before he was even twenty, though he'd been too young to hardly understand it and it had had nothing to do with him.

Wars were for rich men to send poor men to fight in, and Tooley is hoping to have enough wealth to maybe just float right past a new one, if the rumors beginning to swirl came true and Europe is going to erupt. Surely, though, no one would let a second war as horrible as the last happen.

Surely not.

Still, even so, he can simply disappear if they try to call him up to fight. He has no one left to lose, after all. No one to fight for, no one to care for. No one but his pretty little model, all locked away, his to keep.

Tooley takes a sharp left and the streets begin to change from the harsher gray of the city proper into neighborhoods, houses crammed tightly together. It's not the best part of town - Tooley's parents weren't the wealthiest, and he doesn't live like a gentleman, he's got no need to, it's not how he thinks a proper artist should live anyway. Have to keep up the image of the nearly-starving creative genius, after all.

There are still lights in some windows, despite the late hour. Tooley isn't the only one drunk at midnight and still moving.

It's a mile or so from the start of his street to where his house is nestled between two others, close enough he could reach out his kitchen window and touch the brick of the home next door. He smiles a little. His nose aches with the cold at the tip of it, but that's nothing to worry himself over.

He's home.

It takes him four tries to unlock his front door, the key jabbing into wood and brass too far to one side or the other. He laughs, breath puffing white clouds into the air, his ears burning with the cold where his hat doesn't quite cover them.

Good thing he's not with a woman, tonight, if his aim's so bad with just his hands.

The thought makes him laugh harder, nearly a guffaw, loud enough that he's sure he's woken a neighbor or two. It's not the first time.

Finally, the key slides home and the lock clicks and Tooley moves inside. The house is chilled in the entryroom, but as he slides his coat and fedora off to leave them on the coat rack and moves into the kitchen, towards the back, he can feel the warmth slowly trickling from the ticking radiators along the walls.

He's due for a coal delivery in the next couple of days, and boy, he's going to need it with the weather the way it's been.

Tooley heads for his perfect little secret, the vampire held in the backroom, once a sort of servant's bedroom for some family that had owned the home even before his own parents did. It's his studio, now, and the place where the little vampire boy is kept.

He unlocks that door, too. A key, a deadbolt, a little sliding lock at the top for added safety.

"Here, kitty kitty kitty," He slurs, and laughs again, delighted at his own little joke.

There's a scrape and a rustle, and Tooley steps back to let the vampire boy move forward, out of the freezing unheated room - Tooley only turns the radiator on in there when he himself is working, it's not like dead things care about being warm after all - and into the kitchen proper, with its little two-person table.

The boy is looking dirty - he's due for a bath, long overdue honestly. Good things he doesn't sweat enough to stink.

His hair hangs lank in his eyes, closer to dark copper than the new-penny shine Tooley prefers. There are smudges along his cheeks, marring his perfect freckles. He's draped in a sweater patched badly where his elbows have worn holes right through, pants that are tied with a rope since Tooley sure isn't going to waste money on a belt for a corpse.

"Is, did, did you, um, did you bring me food?" The vampire boy looks up at him, eyes glinting a little in the dimness, that unsettling cat-like glow-in-the-dark effect. His little fangs flash, too. "I'm... I'm, I'm hungry, Tooley."

"I know you are, bloodsucker."

"It's, it's been, um, it's been weeks, Tooley-"

"I know, I know. Shut your trap." Tooley ruffles his hair, then pulls his hand back with a grimace as he remembers how dirty and greasy it's gotten, walking away to go to the sink and wash his hands. "We'll get t'that. I met with someone very important at th' bar tonight, and first things first, you and I are going to celebrate."

The boy moves slowly, staying half-crouched - he's been hit before, when Tooley didn't want him to stand all the way up. He settles himself against the wall, head tilted to the side. His cheekbones cut sharp angles in his face, edging down to his narrow chin.

Those big green eyes follow Tooley everywhere he goes.

"Celebrate what?" He asks, and Tooley wonders just how old the ridiculous little thing is. He'd said early aughts, hadn't he, on when he was turned? So he'd be, what, in his forties really?

Funny.

Was he locked up during the Great War?

He's still a pretty teenager, but he's probably closing in on fifty. Tooley's twenty-some years younger and looks infinitely older, in his own estimation.

Tooley should look into vampirism, seems an excellent way to hold onto your looks, doesn't it? He wonders if the boy knows how to turn him. They could make beautiful work forever...

Hm.

Something to ruminate over when he's hungover in the morning.

"New commission. I'm taking a few weeks off, give us both a break, but I've got the basic details. I'll pick up a broad, get her all set up for modeling, we'll make us a mint, sweetheart." He moves to the counter, picking up the half-full bottle of gin he keeps there, taking a swig and grimacing, coughing. There's a rattle in his lungs these days he doesn't like much.

"You'll, you'll kill her?" The vampire watches him. He looks hungry, with all those sharp lines emphasized, as though he were a painting himself still in progress, with the outline still written in graphite showing through the colors. He's pale, painted in wash, not yet turned to vivid velvet intensity with oils.

"'Course. You think any of my models would stay alive anywhere near you?" He laughs at the very idea, missing the vampire's little flinch as he turns away. He pulls a loaf of bread from the breadbox, already starting to stale but that's all right, he's going to toast it over the stove anyway. The world swims around him from the liquor, and he catches the counter with one hand to keep himself upright.

The feeling brings another laugh out of him.

The little vampire smiles faintly in echo of it. He has to work to get the stove to gas, narrowing his eyes as it struggles, sputters, before finally a little flame flares up. Just enough to give off a little heat for the toast.

"Fuck. Drank too much. Or not enough." He laughs again, and pulls a knife from the knifeblock, the sharp serrated thin blade best for slicing through the heavy sourdough he buys from a woman down the block. Bit of toast, pat of salted butter, that'll get him through to morning when he can head down for eggs and bacon at Paulie's diner.

Maybe he'll even buy some extra for the hungry men who hound around the doors. He can be a philanthropist.

As he slices, the knife slips off the stale, hard crust and cuts right through the back of his hand, a long line immediately welling with bright red blood. He groans, irritated, and sets the knife down, turning to run cold water over it as the pain flares bright, but slightly muted from his drunkenness.

There's a rustle behind him, and Tooley's mind only belatedly begins to allow alarm to trickle through the warm fuzz of the gin and whiskey. He slowly turns around.

Where the vampire boy had been curled against the wall, a bundle of skinny bones and too-big clothes, there's... nothing.

Tooley glances to one side and sees the boy crouched on the floor by the edge of the lower cabinets, his hands pressed into the ground. He moved five feet in less than a second.

His eyes are flared, wide and with pupils burying the iris in black. He clicks, softly, tongue against teeth in an inhuman way.

Click-click-click-click.

click-click-click.

How'd he move so fast?

"Shit," Tooley whispers. "When's the last time I fed you?"

The vampire doesn't answer, only stares, unblinking, muscles tensing and relaxing, tensing and relaxing. He clicks again.

His lips pull back from his teeth and those fangs that seem so cute and little on every other day suddenly look long, like daggers, dripping a shimmering venom to the ground.

Tooley tries not to blink, too, but his eyes dry and dry and dry and eventually he can't help it. His eyes close, a fraction of a second, and flare open right away.

Not fast enough.

The vampire leaps and Tooley grunts at the impact of the small bony body against his own, his lower back smacking into the line of the counter with a flash of pain. The bread and knife both clatter to the ground.

Panic comes, but it doesn't help. He's still groping to get at another knife when the vampire's fingernails dig into his scalp, grip into his hair and jerk his head to the side to bare his throat.

"Hungry," The vampire boy hisses. "Hungry, Tooley. Hungry."

"I-I know, just, just don't blow your wig, gimmee a minute, I can get you something, just hold on-" Tooley's voice is thin from the harsh angle his neck is being held at, and he swallows, seeing in a bleary haze the way the vampire's huge eyes are focused on the movement of his adam's apple, the bob of his throat.

Can he see the blood pulsing there?

He puts his hands up against the vampire's chest to try and push him off, but it's like pushing against rock. He thinks about painting the vampire as a kind of young Prometheus for a dandy from Boston, tied naked to a rock to be pecked at by eagles, and wonders if the mythological man ever tried to push the rock itself, and if it failed as miserably for him as it does for Tooley now.

"There's blood in the shed out back, just let me go and I'll grab it for you." He pitches his voice soothing and slightly patronizing, like speaking to a whining dog. "Okay, kitten? Just two minutes and you'll be fed, right as rain."

The vampire pauses, hesitates, and Tooley feels his hands working at Tooley's hair and one shoulder, like a cat kneading into your lap before they settle. His little stray. His breathing starts to ease, his heart to slow down, the first rush of panic subsiding.

The world still spins a little, but the rush of adrenaline is settling things into something more solid, wiping away the liquor.

"I'll put you back in your room and go get it for you, it's right outside, good and cold," Tooley coos, and realizes too late it isn't what he should have said.

"There's blood right here, and and and, and, and it's living," The vampire boy says, eyes wide and inhuman, and he's absolutely gorgeous. "Your, your, yours is hot."

Tooley would paint him like this, all feral instinct overwriting the living corpse of an anonymous Irish immigrant who died dozens of years ago. A metaphor, maybe, for the way some of the children who come here lose all their European culture and get boorishly American, and-

The vampire bites down, and all thoughts of art and culture flee from Tooley's mind.

The liquor holds off the pain so long the venom hits before he even feels the way those sharp teeth have breached his skin. He goes limp, dropping in a heap to the floor. He thinks he hits his head on the loaf of bread before it knocks into the floor.

They feel about the same level of hardness.

The knife is right next to his head, lying there, shining in the yellowed lamplight, with its carved wooden handle.

All he has to do is move his hand a few inches to reach it.

Just a few inches.

He tries, desperately, to tell his fingers where to go.

The vampire sucks hard at the wound in his neck, pulling blood from his veins like a man drinking an egg cream after a long hot day's work, and Tooley groans. He can feel the press and pull without the pain, and it's the strangest thing he's ever felt. Stranger than those he's gone to bed with.

The venom makes his limbs feel like stones, weighed down to motionless. He struggles even to swallow saliva, to take a deep breath. His heart never races again with panic. He isn't able to feel it any longer.

Those sharp little fingernails dig hard into his shoulders, the weight of the vampire settled on him, straddling him. A little flirty thought - at least buy me dinner first - makes its way across his mind, barely coherent, slow as molasses.

The vampire starts up his soft rumble, the vibration filtering in through into Tooley's body. It seems like it makes him feel even more frozen, heavy as the ocean and weightless at once.

His eyes are on the ceiling, and he realizes how long it's been since anyone cleaned the corners where cobwebs have grown and grown. They need swept away.

Funny how he never noticed before. Too busy with his art.

There's a moment where Tooley is surprised to look down at himself, as if he's floating somewhere near the ceiling staring down at his own open eyes. When he needed not to blink, he couldn't stop himself, but now the body he is looking at just stares and stares and stares, unseeing, unblinking, unbreathing-

Oh.

As soon as the realization hits, Tooley's awareness of himself as a body he can observe is gone.

There is darkness, and then a point of terrible final light. He feels the grasping of bloodied hands.

And he's gone.

The vampire drinks until the blood stops pumping, until the heart beneath his kneading hand is still. Then a rough tongue laps at the wounds, finding the last few droplets there that still sing with life.

The vampire pulls back, skin flush with life, no longer white as snow. His freckles stand out, scattered like constellations of stars over his skin. The dead man beneath him has all the paleness he had before, they are switched, swapped death for life.

He wipes the blood from around his mouth and looks slowly upwards, breathing in deep gulps he doesn't need but which feel so, so good.

He moves to the stove, to turn it off, but he doesn't quite turn it off all the way. An odd smell fills his nose and the vampire's nostrils wrinkle, but he doesn't know what the scent is, and he simply pulls Tooley's coat on before he leaves, door unlocked.

A few minutes later, a man with his hands over a barrel fire looks up to see a redheaded teenager in a woolen coat far too large for him move under a streetlamp, pausing to look up at it as if surprised by how bright its light is.

He blinks, and the man squints.

The young man's mouth is open, as if scenting the air by letting it roll over his tongue. Before the man can quite understand what he is looking at, the boy's mouth closes and he turns to look at the man. As his eyes shift from being lit by the lamp to draped in shadow, though...

They glow.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," The man whispers, crossing himself hurriedly. "Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, b-be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil-"

The boy looks right at him, head tilted. The flames of the barrel flicker, hissing a little when raindrops start to fall. His lips pull back from his teeth and there are an animal's fangs there, plain as day.

The man feels pure horror at the sight of a demon walking free and unfettered in New York City. He grabs at the cross he wears around his neck and holds it out, his voice trembling. "May G-God... rebuke him, we humbly pray-"

"I, I, I hope that works for you," The boy says, and his voice is soft, and there's almost a lilt of the old country there that the man recognizes, not quite his own but not far off. "It never d-did for, um, for me. Don't worry. I'm... I'm full. You're, you're, you're in no danger from me. When, when, when, when... when did you come here? To this place?"

The man swallows around a lump in his throat, and yet he finds himself compelled to answer honestly. "Two years past, give or take. Came with m'wife and baby girl."

"From where?"

"... Kerry," He says, against his will. He can't seem to hold back the words. "And my wife grew up in County Cork."

The boy smiles, and his horrid teeth disappear when his lips press together. He looks for all the world like any other young man, a bit skinny perhaps and in need of a good meal or three, but no danger to anyone.

But the man has seen the demon that he is, and he finds himself grateful for the fire between them and the cross still in his hand, the shield of St. Michael and the cloak of Christ Himself.

"My, my, my, my parents were from County Cork," The demon boy says, lightly. His lilt is slightly stronger. "Wonder if we're cousins, your your wife and I. Maybe so. Stay home, um, after dark. Don't, don't, don't work when the sun is, um, is down."

The boy turns and walks away.

The man realizes with a start that in the midst of a chilly December night, the boy's feet are utterly bare. He steps over ice like he could walk on water.

There was blood smeared on the back of his coat.

The man flinches as he hears a sudden boom, close enough that he feels it in his chest as well as hearing the sound. A moment later a woman runs by shouting that a house has caught flame, to call for help.

The man looks back at the way the boy went.

He's gone.

@mylifeisonthebookshelf @insaneinthepaingame @keeper-of-all-the-random-things @burtlederp @finder-of-rings @newandfiguringitout @astrobly @endless-whump @pretty-face-breaker @gonna-feel-that-tomorrow @doveotions @boxboysandotherwhump @oops-its-whump @cubeswhump @whump-tr0pes @downriver914 @whumptywhumpdump @whumpiary @orchidscript @nonsensical-whump @outofangband @what-a-whump

117 notes · View notes

cherry-glade · 4 years ago

Text

all that is in a name

pairing: aged up!damian wayne x fem!reader

summary: you come to him, and his name is on your hand like you’re showing off to the world that you’re his. damian doesn’t know if he can handle it.

warnings: just a whole lotta sweetness, implications that reader is of south asian descent, unintentional love confessions.

a/n: i am very, very nervous about posting this, but i’ve procrastinated for way too long, so i hope whoever ends up reading this enjoys it!

w/c: 2876 words

Damian notices it as soon as you greet him at the door with a smile and a kiss to his cheek, the rich colour of mehndi on your hands. You’re holding a plastic bag in your hands which he takes from you as you toe your shoes off and then follow him into the kitchen.

“Wedding food,” you explain when he looks through the bag and finds various sweet dishes, as well as little boxes of food and slices of wedding cake. He remembers you telling him about a distant relative’s wedding, remembers expressing his remorse about not being able to accompany you because of prior commitments.

“Thank you, Y/N,” he says, pressing a kiss to your knuckles before you both try your best to fit the food into the fridge and then head up to his bedroom after you’ve had a glass of water to quench your thirst.

“I’ve missed you,” you say once you’re there, both curled into each other, and there’s a pang in Damian’s chest. You haven’t seen each other in a while, and it’s mostly his fault, because of missions, but he knows you understand.

“I missed you too, dearly,” he responds, squeezing an arm around your waist as he presses his mouth to your forehead in a chaste kiss, lingering there for a moment so he can breathe in the scent of your shampoo.

You part after a moment or two and Damian’s eyes fall to the second bag dangling from your fingers, smaller than the first. He looks to you, a question on his tongue, but you know him and so you beat him to it.

“The last time I wore mehndi, Cass saw and wanted me to put some on her too,” you explain, reaching into the bag and pulling out a handful of mehndi cones. “So I brought some today for us to try out on her.” His heart warms at the kind gesture, and then he remembers that you’re wearing mehndi too, dark against your skin, and wants to see more of it.

“Show me,” Damian requests, looking down at the deep reddish brown staining your nails and palms. You sit down on the rug with him, placing the bag down beside you and hold your hands out in front of you with your palms up like an offering, an offering Damian will gladly accept.

He carefully takes your hands in his and studies the dark swirls on your skin, the flowers and curling lines and then—letters. Small and almost delicate, tucked away underneath the petal of a flower, but they’re definitely letters spelling out his name.

“Damian?” He hears you say, and looks up to see your face, concerned as your eyes scan over his body like you’re checking for injuries of some sort. “What’s up? You’re not hurt, are you?” You ask, frowning at him.

“It’s my name,” he blurts out, thumb tracing reverently over the letters, and your hands tense up almost imperceptibly, then start to tremble in his. Damian looks up at you, concerned when you avoid his eyes and just stare down at your joined hands, face pale other than the blotchy redness high in your cheeks.

“It’s nothing, really, just a joke,” you try to play off with a wavering smile, but Damian can see right past it. You’re nervous, maybe even a little scared, and it worries Damian because he’s quite certain he hasn’t done anything to frighten you, watching carefully as you try to tug your hands away, but he holds on tight.

His eyes scan over your face, looking for any tells other than you biting your lip and blushing even more each time you meet his eyes or see his name on your hand, and that’s when it hits, and Damian can feel his own face turning red at the implication.

“It’s not—it was my cousin’s idea, not mine,” you begin to explain, still not looking at him, looking at anything but him like you can’t bear to see his face as you say it. “It’s just a little wedding tradition in our culture, where the bride has mehndi applied, and then her future husband’s name or initials are hidden somewhere in the patterns and—”

“And then the groom tries to find it,” Damian finishes your sentence, unable to meet your eyes for fear of you running away after seeing the look in his eyes, the want, the desire to someday take part in this tradition with you.

It scares him, how much he wants of you. With you. But it thrills him too.

“If I’d known beforehand, I wouldn’t have let her do it, I promise,” you swear, and as hard as you might try to hide it, your voice is definitely trembling. “I only noticed afterwards, and if I’d tried to get rid of it, that would’ve just ruined the artist’s hard work and the rest of the design.”

Damian looks up at that, blinking. “Why?” is all he can get out, throat tight. His voice comes out sounding like he’s being strangled because of all that he’s holding back.

You frown, still looking down at your hands. Your cheeks are still red, and Damian wants to kiss you so badly, until they’re a rosy pink instead. “Because it’s all very intricate and close together, so trying to wipe if off would just smudge it all,” you say, clearly misunderstanding what he’s asking you.

“That’s not what—Y/N,” Damian starts, pulse racing. He’s pretty sure he’s sweating a little. He hopes that you can’t smell it. “Why would you want to get rid of it?” Damian asks, irrationally terrified that maybe you don’t want the same things he does. That you don’t want him as much as he wants you.

You finally look up at Damian with wide eyes. “I—we’re not—I guess I just assumed that it would be a bad idea to keep it there,” you say slowly as your eyes flicker over his face, hesitating on the last few words like you’re not sure that you actually want to say them to him.

He should say something. Anything.

You assumed wrong. It wouldn’t be a bad idea. I want this. I want you.

I love you. Always.

But instead, all that comes out is, “You know how to apply mehndi yourself, yes?”

You frown and nod, a confused look on your face at the sudden change of subject.

“I want you to put some on me. Please,” he remembers to add onto the end, and you reward him with a gentle smile, even though Damian can tell that you still don’t understand what he’s thinking.

“You’ll have to fetch me a pair of scissors then, and a few tissues. Maybe a ball pin too, if you have any,” you say as you turn away to fetch a mehndi cone, bag rustling.

Damian takes that as a dismissal and goes to follow your instructions, coming back to find you waiting for him with one of his pillows on your lap, the back of it facing up. You take the scissors from him and snip off a tiny section from the cone, then use the sharp end of the pin to pry it open slightly before holding it near the top and applying gentle pressure until a steady flow of mehndi flows from the open end of it onto a tissue.

“Right or left?” Damian looks away from your hands and into your eyes. You must be able to tell that he doesn’t know what you’re talking about, because you grin as you clarify that you’re asking which hand he wants it on. He places his left hand on the pillow.

He may have trained himself to be ambidextrous, but he uses his right hand more out of habit, and would like the stain, your stain, to last as long as possible.

“You want it on your palm or the outside of your hand?” You say as you wipe the tip of the mehndi cone off and lift his hand into your own, studying it like you could find the secrets of the universe within the lines of his palm.

“Outside,” he says.

You look up at Damian with a quirked eyebrow. “Sure? What if I mess it up?”

“I trust you,” he says.

Damian swears his heart skips a beat when your mouth curls into a fond smile as you press a kiss to the centre of his palm before flipping his hand back over and placing it onto the pillow again, fingertips tracing over his scarred knuckles. “Any type of design in particular? I can freestyle or we can look up pictures on the internet if you’d like.”

“I trust you,” he repeats, and settles down to just watch as you trace out the lines of an intricate flower onto his skin, stopping in between to rub the feeling back into his hand once it starts to feel cold and a little numb. The designs on his fingers are a little simpler but no less beautiful, and each and every dot and swirl is practically perfect.

Somehow, you’ve managed to get a little bit of mehndi on your own finger. But you don’t know this, so it smudges onto your skin when you reach up to scratch the side of your nose, leaving a dark little smear on your cheek. Damian rushes to pick up a tissue and wipe it off so that the stain left behind is as faint as possible, a light orange in colour.

He ends up just looking at your face as you finish off the design, nose wrinkled in concentration, so doesn’t realise you’re done with him until he hears his name being called. Damian looks up to see you smiling at him as you wave your hands with a flourish over his.

“All done. You like it?”

“I—it’s beautiful.” He struggles to meet your eyes. “You’re very talented, beloved.”

You blush and smile even wider until your eyes are crinkling at the corners. “Thank you. Just leave it on for a while now and take it off in the evening, maybe even tomorrow morning if you’d like it to be darker. If you leave it on overnight, you’ll need to wrap your hand in cling wrap, then scrape it off in the sink, but don’t use any water.”

“But—”

“Oh, and if you want it to be darker, once you’re sure it’s completely dry, you can use a cotton ball to dab a mixture of lemon juice and sugar over it, then once it’s scraped off, rub mustard oil on your hand,” you remind Damian as you place the mehndi cone down, not even realising you just cut him off.

“Y/N, it’s not done just yet,” Damian says, breathing in deep and summoning the courage he seems to have lost after looking into your eyes.

“Oh?” You’re frowning, a quizzical little smile playing on your lips. “I’m pretty sure it is.”

“No,” he says, and his voice must be harsher than he’d expected because you just blink at him before frowning even harder, smile completely gone. It makes Damian’s heart hurt.

“Why not?”

Damian looks down at his hand, at your hard work, and notices that the centre of the flower is blank, which gives him an idea. “I want your name on me too,” he says, and it’s almost painful for Damian to be so honest, even though the truth never comes to him more easily than it does when he’s with you.

You stare at him for a while, not understanding. “I want your name on my hand,” Damian clarifies, using his free hand to turn yours over and trace over the letters of his name as he looks straight into your eyes.

“Damian,” you splutter as you try to take your hand back. He lets you this time. “This isn’t a joke. You doing this. I can’t—”

“Please,” he says softly, begs. Damian doesn’t usually beg for things. “It doesn’t have to be your whole name. It can just be your initials,” he tries to bargain.

“There’s nowhere to—”

“You can do it here,” Damian says, eagerly pointing to the empty centre of the flower. “Please, beloved,” he says once more in the hope that you’ll give in to his pleas.

You swallow thickly and pick up the cone again, holding his hand steady as your own fingers tremble their way through tracing your initials onto his skin, and then you let go of him like you’ve burnt yourself as he stares down at his hand, fingers hovering just above it.

“Is that okay?” You ask, uncertainty evident in your voice. He doesn’t answer, too mesmerised by what you’ve just done.

“Damian.”

Still no answer.

“Damian—”

“It’s perfect,” he cuts you off. “I love you.” Your head snaps up and Damian immediately realises his mistake. “It. I love it.”

Fuck.

That didn’t come out right, but... fuck it.

“I love you,” Damian confesses, and he’s not going to look away from you now that the truth is out. He refuses to hide it any longer. Your eyes are wider than he’s ever seen them, and his heart is about to leap out of his throat.

“You... love me?” You repeat, and for some reason, you look shocked. Like it’s a surprise to you that Damian ended up falling in love with you, though it shouldn’t be. Damian’s quite certain that it was basically inevitable.

“I love you,” he confirms, and your face softens.

“You love me,” you repeat, with the softest of smiles. “And I love you. That’s quite convenient, isn’t it?”

Damian’s breath catches in his throat. “You love me?” He asks, just to be sure. He’d be embarrassed by the way his voice cracks if it weren’t for the fact that he’s waiting for you to say those words again, to reassure him that this isn’t just some dream of his destined to turn into a nightmare—it’s reality.

“I do,” you reassure him, and Damian’s heart swells until it feels like it’s almost too big for his chest, far too full of love to be contained by something so very small.

“I see,” he breathes out shakily, and you snort at him, eyes shining with laughter and—and love.

“You’re such a dork,” you murmur, fond. You lift a hand to cup his cheek and Damian leans into it, eyes fluttering closed for just a moment before opening again. “I basically took part in a wedding tradition for you. What about that says I don’t love you?”

“Nothing. I was just... being silly, I suppose,” Damian whispers as he leans in close enough for your noses to brush, making sure to move his hand out of the way so nothing smudges. Your eyes close as you smile, bright enough that Damian has no choice other than to smile back at you, even if you can’t see it.

His fingers come up to circle your wrist, his own eyes closing as the two of you gently press your foreheads together, and then his hand is moving to keep your palm pressed to his face, fingers tangling together.

You both sit there in a comfortable silence, just existing together for a while. Damian can’t stop smiling every time he opens his eyes to peek at your face and finds you looking right back at him. His love for you makes him feel giddy with happiness, as it should.

Soon enough, his siblings come to bother the two of you. First, it’s Richard, coming to coo at how cute you both are and almost forgetting that Damian’s hand is still wet when he pulls you into a hug. And then it’s Cassandra, silently waiting for you to attend to her too with a pleased smile on her face as she notices the way you’re both looking at each other, unwilling to be parted.

Eventually you give in though, pulling Damian to his feet and opening the door for him even though he has a free hand. Perhaps it’s because you know that he wants to hold yours. Perhaps it’s because you want to hold his too.

You all gather in the kitchen, where Timothy is already waiting with a mug of steaming coffee in one hand and a tablet in the other. He lets go of both though to greet you with a hug, complimenting your own mehndi. It’s as you and Cassandra are settling into chairs and scrolling through designs on your phone for ideas that Timothy notices Damian’s hand, attentive as always.

“Is that—?” He starts to ask, looking down at your initials. Damian looks over to you, laughing at something Richard has just said as you check how much mehndi you have left in your open cone, probably wondering if you’ll have to use another one.

It might have been unintentional on your part, but you unabashedly wear Damian’s name on your hand like you don’t care about the possible consequences, if there are any, of showing people that you’re his.

“Yes,” Damian answers, turning back to face his older brother.

He’s not afraid of letting the world know that he’s yours either.

#damian wayne #damian wayne x reader #damian wayne x fem!reader #dc #sfw #my fic

222 notes · View notes

orgoheartindia · 4 years ago

Link

Buy wood pressed oil at best prices. Pure and chemical-free cold pressed oil, Groundnut, sesame, gingelly, mustard and coconut oil.

1 note · View note

stevemoffett · 5 years ago

Text

Pandemics Don’t Get a Cute Pun

Being Afraid

It’s been twenty-one days since I’ve spoken to another person in the flesh. Before that, I had gone for seventeen days. And before that, a week.

The first week of no contact began when I said goodbye-for-now to my co-workers. I decided to wait to go to the grocery store until that first wave of people had passed before I tried going. On my last grocery trip, I had decided to “stock up” in case I had to isolate for a little while, and so, having no idea how disruptive the situation would become, I bought a whopping three boxes of spaghetti and one big jar of sauce.

My all-spaghetti diet ran out by Monday, March 23rd, and I had nothing else edible in the apartment. So, even though it wasn’t cold, I put on my jacket (to limit my skin-to-air exposure), a baseball cap (to stop myself from scratching my head, a nervous habit), and my glasses (I stopped wearing contacts to avoid touching my eyes). By March 23rd, the CDC and WHO had not yet recommended wearing gloves or masks in public. But I already had gloves at home (you never know when you’ll need nitrile gloves), and I had two masks that I had to wear when I was around someone who was immunocompromised earlier this year, so I put one of the masks and a pair of gloves on. Then I drove to the store.

The local store was letting about twenty people in at a time. There was already a line forming, just five minutes past opening. I walked to the end and we all stood waiting about six or so feet apart from one another.

Nobody made conversation. In people-watching moments like these, I associate whatever behavior I see with the general attitude of wherever I am, even if there is no such stereotype: Ah yes, that reserved Texas stoicism I’ve heard so much about.

When I got into the store I pulled out a cart and walked stiffly. The night before, I had gone on the store’s website and written a list of the items I needed, grouping them by what aisle they were in. I was going to snake my way through the store one time, get in line, and leave.

A complicating factor of doing it live was that there were lots of people to avoid. During an ordinary cold season, I usually watch out for people near me who might be sick. If they look like they may possibly be sniffling or flushed, I take a breath, hold it, and let it out through my nose slowly as I pass them. Here in the grocery store, I did this every time I walked past people in the aisles, and for extra protection, I scrunched my eyes shut.

There were signs posted limiting the amount of each product you could buy. No more than four boxes of pasta at once, for example. The pasta shelf was totally cleared out except for whole wheat pasta, so I took four boxes of that. I bought three eight-pound bags of dried pinto beans, a couple of bags of rice (I’d heard that beans and rice together make some kind of magical combination where you can avoid protein deficiencies even if you don’t have any meat), a big bottle of canola oil, butter, four big jars of spaghetti sauce, a bunch of hot sauce, ketchup, tofu, and frozen vegetables. The meat aisle was almost completely picked over—I managed to get two pounds of ground turkey from there, though. I didn’t get any eggs because I enjoy them too much; I knew that it would be better to make a clean break from them until after things got back to normal than to agonize over eating the last of them.

In line, I had an extremely full cart. By contrast, an old man in shorts behind me had about four things in his, and he wasn’t wearing gloves or a mask.

I heard him say, in a very low voice, “Stupid motherfucker.” Maybe he said, “Stupid motherfuckers,” plural, but I felt like it had to be at least be partially directed at me.

The teenager who rang me up seemed relaxed. I felt demographically exposed. Now that I am middle-aged, I am very aware of my interactions with teenagers. If movies are any lesson, there are about six million ways that I can make an encounter with one of them a) awkward, b) creepy, or c) both.

“Have you seen many other insane people dressed like me?” I asked, cringing behind the mask since I had already failed point a).

“Not many,” she replied.

“Well, thanks for being here,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”

“No problem! I’m getting paid a lot to be here!” She said.

When I got home, I decided to take everything up to my place in multiple trips. Climbing up and down the stairs for each trip, though, I started to sweat. When I came in with the last of the bags, I set them on the floor and took my gloves off. I could feel a bead of sweat dripping down my forehead. If it got past my eyebrow and went into my eye, then maybe some of the virus that had landed on me from contaminated grocery store air would be carried into my eye, and that would be Game Over.

I hurried to the sink, tossing the gloves into the trash and ripping a paper towel off the roll. I crumpled it and pressed the part of the wadded-up towel that hadn’t touched either hand over my closed eye.

As the sweat was wicked away from my eyebrow, I felt my fingers moisten and I thought, Could any germs from my hand travel back through this sweat bridge and into my eye? It was true that I had been wearing gloves, but maybe I hadn’t taken them off carefully enough and I’d touched my wrist, or the outside of one of the gloves, and not noticed. I had also grasped the side of the roll to rip the paper towel off. Had I contaminated the edges of a bunch of sheets farther into the roll, too? Could I even be sure I’d properly bunched the paper towel I was holding to my eye without having touched the eye-facing part?

I decided to text all of this uncertainty in a big run-on paragraph to my brother. He responded, “I think you’re fine.”

After blotting the sweat, I got the bright idea to sanitize the frozen vegetable bags I’d bought before putting them in the freezer by spraying them with bleach. I brought them out to my balcony so that I could spray everything down indiscriminately. I sprayed all the bags, waited a couple of minutes, then started wiping them off with a fresh paper towel.

As I wiped the bags, I noticed that they were not airtight; there was a series of little pinholes all over the bags in what seemed like regular intervals. I assume that this was a design feature of the bags. But I could see that the bleach spray was disappearing into the holes, which meant the cauliflower and broccoli inside were absorbing it.

I realized then that I had inadvertently poisoned all of my vegetables. I tossed them in the garbage and thought again of what the old man behind me in line had said.

Now I had no source of vitamin C. I’d thought that there might be vitamin C in meat, but there is not. You get it mostly from leafy greens, a few fortified foods, and citrus fruits. I checked online and found that if I got zero vitamin C, I had at least four weeks until I got scurvy. This meant that I couldn’t go longer than four weeks before my next grocery trip. It was a relief to know that I had a date where re-stocking was mandatory, because if there wasn’t one, I might have felt overly cautious, enough to start rationing my food so that it lasted as long as humanly possible, and I’d lose an unhealthy amount of weight by cutting my calorie intake down to the minimum 1200 a day.

But without a vitamin C source, that wasn’t necessary. I certainly had enough food to last me for four weeks, as long as I was strict. I wouldn’t be able to have any cheat nights, but I also wouldn’t go hungry.

I sprayed the bleach on the faucet handle and the soap dispenser, and left the non-perishable food—Sriracha sauce, ketchup bottles, mustard, oatmeal, spaghetti sauce, and boxes of spaghetti, all standing upright—out on the floor between my refrigerator and the front door. I’d wait another 72 hours before handling them, and even after that, I would wash them with soap before use (except for the cardboard spaghetti package).

Those first few days were extra paranoid because I knew that it was possible I had already been infected. A few nights, I woke up around 3 to use the bathroom, and as I passed my upward-pointing non-perishables there on the floor, they looked less like food items and more like a bed of nails, or like stalagmites deep in a cave: hostile, and waiting for me to trip.

If I cleared my throat several times within a couple of minutes during the day, I got worried. If I sneezed or felt congestion when I woke up, the anxiety would percolate in the background until the symptom went away. I began sniffing my toothpaste to make sure I could still detect mint, since the news had come that smell loss was a common symptom.

But all of this was a distraction from the real sources of my dread: my parents and sister. My parents are old and my younger sister is frail. Each of them has at least one comorbidity waiting to gang up on them if they were infected. They all live together, and my sister requires enough close monitoring that if one of them gets it, they will all get it.

My father has had a particularly distressing habit that he likes to trot out from time to time over the last decade, but since his stroke, he’s doubled his efforts. What he does is personify the small voice in my mind that prevents me from getting back to sleep at 3 AM.

He called me the other day, just to talk. And mostly, the conversation went as normal: I tore my hair out at his and my mother’s relative (to me) disregard for proper exposure limiting, and he gave me his latest movie or TV show recommendations.

After I tut-tutted over another unnecessary trip somewhere both he and my mother had taken recently, he responded, “Yeah, that’s true, it is a risk. Well, you know, if one of us gets this, then all of us will. And we might all die.”

He let the words hang there until I responded, with as little emotion as possible to show him that he wasn’t winding me up, “Sounds like it’s a good idea to be even more careful, then.”

As I said, he’s made a habit of nihilistic portending for the last ten years. The problem is that I am always trying to banish those thoughts when they’re still merely thoughts, but then he just blurts them out, which makes them real. Does he not understand after almost forty years that no matter how irrational, uninformed, or biased a father’s words can be, they are still taken to heart by the son?

And he says these things, but then he doesn’t change his actions in kind. If he believed that the situation were that serious, wouldn’t he be battening down the hatches instead of making flimsy excuses to go to the grocery store? Does he really need to get that steak because he has a coupon? Does he really have to go there for Kandy Kakes because they’re buy two, get one free? Is it really worth rolling the dice each time?

I did ask him this directly, and he replied, “Well, we have to live.”

He meant “live” figuratively—I knew that they had enough bland food there to last them a long time. I asked him, “So the difference between ‘living’ and ‘not living’ is going to the grocery store?”

The frustrating contradiction is that for a generation so insistent on austerity being the “tough love” that the world requires, my parents sure don’t want to be austere. When I had trouble getting a job just out of undergrad, I was told to “pound the pavement,” carrying my resume with a suit on and applying to places in person, because it would be “more impressive” than applying online. The most frequent criticism of theirs was that people my age are lazy softies who can’t do anything for themselves. My dad, who had been a mechanic in his adolescence, liked to repeat a joke about my and my brother’s lack of mechanical knowledge: “If Steve had a nut, and [my brother] had a bolt, the two of ‘em wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get them together.”

Yet, if anything ever has been, this is the time for austerity: you shouldn’t make any unnecessary trips for indulgent foods. Instead, stick with the bland, nutritious diet that will last a long time, and stay away from public places. You can truly turn the risk almost down to zero that way, by being austere.

I think that my parents (I can’t speak for their entire generation, just them) have two aversions to properly responding to the virus. The first is that hiding inside one’s house is not what courage looks like. Courage is going out and showing the virus that they won’t be cowed so easily! Staying in, by contrast, is living in fear and surrendering. But it’s not true. The virus can’t be “shown” anything because it is a cell-invading machine. It isn’t trying to cow them, or “try” anything at all, for that matter. It is only spreading. It’s also confusing because the other great fear of our time is terrorism, and in cases of terrorism, that is the right attitude to react with.

To explain their second aversion to responding prudently to the virus, I believe that at a certain age, you just feel entitled. If you’ve had a life like most people’s then you’ve had your share of happy times, but you’ve also had your share of awful ones. And at this point, almost seventy years in, you probably think, the painful parts ought to be mostly over. You don’t deserve to be cooped up in the house right when retirement, really the only good part of senior citizenship, is beginning. Therefore, you deserve to be able to go out and do things. Unlike the timid young, you simply don’t have the time to waste inside.

While I can understand both aversions (as well as a younger person is able to, that is), I can still disagree with them. And I can still get extremely angry when my parents show this behavior.

For that reason, I am not without my own nastiness. I’m sure my mother didn’t appreciate the time I said to her on the phone, “I want you to remember you said that when they’re hooking you up to a ventilator,” after she told me she’d gone to the Starbucks drive-thru that morning. I mean, yes, what I said was truly ghoulish, but I said it out of love. And, desperation.

Because the 3 AM nightmare that I have lately is the one where I send my usual text to my mom asking how they’re all doing, and she texts me back, “Well, [my younger sister] woke up with a little fever, but she’s fine, she’s fine…”

I hear the horror stories. Funerals that have to be attended via the Zoom app. Final goodbyes said over Skype or FaceTime. People dying at the hospital, all alone. I know that it is naive to hope for this, but I still want to be one of those families that just dodges it entirely, you know? Just completely lucks out.

Even though I know those horror stories I keep reading are a textbook case of selection bias (you don’t hear about the vast majority of cases, where a person gets kind of sick but then recovers and is fine), if I want to do some simple panic math, here are the numbers.

-A reasonable infection rate over the whole US population, based on the R0 value: 50%.

-The chances that if one of the three vulnerable people in my family gets it, all three will end up infected: nearly 100%.

-The chances of them dying, given their ages/comorbidities (I’ll be more optimistic with this statistic): 15%, for each person.

Here are the likelihoods for the optimistic scenarios:

-None of them get it. That’s 50% x 50% x 50%, which equals 12.5%.

-They all get it, but they all survive: ~87.5% x 85% x 85% x 85%, which equals about 53%.

That doesn’t represent complete coverage of the probability space, since there are minor variations in what could happen, like each of them could theoretically be infected from an outside source and then give it to only one of the others. But as an estimation, it covers the most major scenarios decently.

So then, to get the probability of the “bad scenarios,” in which at least one person dies, you take the complementary percentage: 100% - (53% + 12.5%) = 34.5%.

Am I really looking at about a one in three chance that one of my immediate family members will die, to say nothing of my grandmother, sister, brother, sister-in-law, niece, and nephew? Hopefully not. The more time that goes by with them not getting infected, the more information healthcare workers and scientists can get about proper treatment courses and possible new medications. And if we go long enough (over a year) without getting infected, we might be able to be vaccinated.

In addition to the nasty pictures I paint for them over the phone if they don’t properly isolate themselves, I have also tried to exploit the older generation’s defensiveness. With a relish that was all part of the act, I told them that there was an alternate name for the disease floating around online, “The Boomer Remover.”

The other term I’d heard, The Boomer Doomer, I refrained from telling them about. My reasoning was this: while The Boomer Doomer is flippant and insensitive, the word “doom” is still scary. So, the phrase “Boomer Doomer” admits some of the disease’s weight and suggests a small amount of seriousness in the mentality of millennial-and-younger generations. That wasn’t good enough.

No, The Boomer Remover was the one I told them about because in addition to being disrespectful, it is downright adversarial. “The Boomer Remover” sounds like a cleaning product. It casts the virus as part of the young’s artillery in the culture war. And it casts the boomer generation as vermin. The name brings to mind fears that older generations must all share since the beginning of time: you will soon be gone, and your absence will be celebrated. Maybe, I thought, their defensive attitudes could be redirected to something more constructive, like making the effort to keep themselves healthy.

It seemed to do the trick. They were more conscious of avoiding exposure to infection after I said it. I don’t know if they really were persuaded by The Boomer Remover—it’s possible that they just got more information from the news around the same time—but they did cut out more unnecessary trips, which relieved me. Not down to zero, but fewer than before. I still don’t accept the unnecessary trips they take, though, and I spare no opportunity to remind them of that.

Coping, Sub-Optimally

I am lucky in my personal situation. To some extent, I can work from home. I have joined the legions of Zoom users. Keeping rigidly to a telework schedule, I have made sure that my sleep schedule hasn’t changed by more than a half hour, and I still look forward to the weekend, even though I don’t go anywhere Saturday or Sunday. The library is closed, and most of my attendees don’t have the Internet, so I can’t run my book club. I can exercise, but after hearing my downstairs neighbors furiously pound on their ceiling during one of my workouts, I’ve had to figure out how to do silent cardio so I don’t have to run through the neighborhood every other day.

One thing that I’m experiencing seems to be something that a lot of others are, too: an unfortunate confrontation with my previous excuse-making. If I had an hour extra in the day, I used to say, I would cultivate a new skill and get really good at it.

After a reliable isolation routine had been set here in my apartment, I found that I did have an extra hour each day, since I didn’t have to commute. I could wake up a half hour later because I didn’t have to drive to work, and when I stopped working for the day, all I had to do was sign out. I could still exercise, still make dinner, and still unwind before bed, so my post-work day was similar, but I gained one more hour I could use as I pleased. What have I done with it?

I am not a gamer. After about six years of not playing any games at all, I bought myself a Nintendo Switch and the newest Zelda game when I graduated in 2018 as a self-gift. I played Zelda over eighteen months. It’s a long game, but the average time you’d have to spend per day to finish the game with only moderate quest completion over that many months is low.

Playing Zelda was like a being able to eat a filling meal whenever I happened to crave it. In-game, I found the environment to be so pleasant that when people in real life asked me if I’d done any hiking lately, I’d almost respond, “Well, no, but I have done a fair bit of hiking and mountain climbing in Zelda.” If I went a couple of weeks without playing, it would take only a minute or two to remember what I’d been doing when I turned it on again. Overall, it might be the best game I have ever played. And it seems like it would be the perfect game for these times, if I were playing it anew.

But lately, the game-playing I’ve been doing over the past few weeks shows a much different mindset—one I haven’t really experienced since I was an undergrad student.

When I was in college, the adjustment to living away from home took a long time, and as a result, freshman year was sort of a wash. I didn’t do well in my classes, my suitemates were all upperclassmen I couldn’t really relate to, and it was hard to make friends in the huge introductory lectures with no assigned seating. I spent nearly the whole year playing video games in my room every evening, ordering pizza after pizza after pizza.

The game I remember playing most was a first-person shooter called Quake 2. I had tried the original Quake when it came out in 1996, but at that time it was too graphics-intensive for the family computer to run. Now, though, Quake 2 was the cooler-looking game, and my new laptop could have run either one easily, so I got Quake 2.

If I could sum up the highlight of freshman year, 2003, it would be: It is 10 PM. It is Friday night. There is a pizza on my desk, only two slices eaten so far. There is me, twenty-five pounds heavier than I am now. I am listening to Zwan, the short-lived Smashing Pumpkins-led supergroup. Quake 2 is blasting on my laptop. Somewhere far away, my future wife shivers for seemingly no reason.

After freshman year, I made a bunch of friends, and some of them became my closest friends, and from that happy vantage point, freshman year looked even more bleak. I resolved that I wouldn’t play Quake 2 ever again. In fact, I decided that from then on, I would think of the intense urge to game, especially first-person shooter games, as a kind of emotional canary in the coal mine.

But now in 2020, stuck in the relative comfort of my nice apartment and isolated from my family, and with the extra time that isolation was granting me, I started looking online for a new game to play.

My computer is fine but is also nothing impressive, processor-wise, so I can’t run a modern game on it. I felt too intimidated to play one anyway, having been out of the loop for so long. So, I searched for “retro FPS games,” and found a game called Dusk. Dusk, the game’s description said, was made in 2018, but was “meant to look like a shooter from 1996.”

I bought it and did nothing else outside of work except eat, squeeze in workouts, and play the game. It only took four evenings, but I finished it. And after that, the gaming urge from freshman year was fully back.

Similar circumstances, similar results. If I didn’t dig up Quake 2, it was only out of a pitiful sense of pride; re-downloading it would mean that symbolically, I hadn’t changed at all since freshman year. So instead, I bought Quake 1, and I’ve been playing that ever since I finished Dusk.

It turns out that since 1996, there has been an online Quake 1 fan community that regularly cranks out game modifications, so there are literally thousands of user-made levels to play in addition to the original game. And the mod levels are all free, as long as you’ve paid for the original game, which costs only five dollars. As a result, nearly every night after work, exercise, and dinner, I turn on a 24-year-old video game (with a fan-made mod that sleekens those chunky graphics up a little bit) and play it until bedtime.

First, I played through the game at normal difficulty, saving after every tough set of enemies (this practice is called “save scumming,” and is frowned upon in the Quake community). Not wanting to be bogus, after I finished it that way, I immediately started replaying the game, this time on Hard difficulty and only saving one time per level. I haven’t made it through the entire game again this way yet, but I’ve also played a bunch of fan-made levels to see what the tinkerers have come up with in the last couple of decades.

Have you ever been so completely uninterested while listening to someone explain their hobby to you that you felt a little bit guilty, but you also felt bad for the person, for being so lame? That’s how I feel right now, re-reading what I’ve just written. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t one of those I-am-quitting-my-addiction-through-the-healing-power-of-writing entries—in fact, I stopped writing this several times to play Quake, even looking up strategy videos on YouTube when I got stuck—but I acknowledge that this is not a good use of my time.

Right now, I could finally be getting those guitar skill fundamentals I’ve always wanted. I could be (getting closer to) finishing all songs I’ve written, or writing new ones. I could be working on an actual short story, or a novel, or something, to point to as a positive thing that came out of this whole crisis, and yet, all of those roads end up in the same place: worry town.

In another way, my laser-focus on playing a game like Quake makes perfect sense. It is similar to a game I already know how to play—it’s not one of the new shooters my computer couldn’t run and I probably couldn’t understand. And it lacks any need for deep thinking. Your goal in Quake is to get to the other end of the level, and if you could try to kill everything you see on your way there, that would be cool too.

If I were playing Zelda, I’d be all the way inside my head thinking about my family as my character’s horse galloped past waterfalls, sunsets, and windblown grassy fields. But in Quake, I don’t have to keep track of my inventory, my life meter, my resources, experience points, magic spells, stamina, side-quests—anything. If I’m still shooting and moving, I can still win. There’s no time for my mind to wander because there are monsters around every corner. And at the end of the level, nothing needs to be committed to memory.

Is it weird that I can’t remember anything about the actual game Quake 2, which I spent months playing as a freshman, except for how it felt to play it? Well, that, and the sparse game dialogue: some enemies would call you “trespasser” or “intruder” just before they tried to stab or shoot you, and there’s a level about midway into the game where you make your way through an elaborate torture factory and you see your comrades all being sawed to pieces, but the only thing they cry out is “It hurts,” “Let me out,” “Make it stop,” or “Kill me now.”

The time I spent playing Quake 2 and the time I’m now spending playing Quake 1 almost seem like one of those cheesy explanations of wormholes you see in science fiction movies. What’s the shortest way between these two points on this piece of paper? someone asks. A straight line, someone answers, and the person who asked the question shakes their head and folds the paper so the two points meet.

Life at thirty-five still feels young—I don’t have that fear of replacement yet. But I do have a new awareness of how dangerous it is to get stuck in a rut. Talking with my family over the phone in the past few weeks, I said that I was afraid that I had become “complacent enough that I could wake up one day and realize that I’m forty-five, with nothing new to show for it.” There are plenty of things I know I’m now too old for, ways of acting, ways of dressing. And my life so far is starting to have a true feeling of accumulation to it. Thinking back on it is like looking down a mountain hiking trail, with confusing turns, switchbacks, and even blind offshoots. Some of it is obscured by the trees, lost from memory. It all seems impressively far. Looking forward again, the mountaintop is still in the distance, but now it looms.

In between the previous paragraph and the one before it, I found out that my high school film teacher, Mr. Truitt, passed away. I had mentioned him in my entry about starting a book club, and in it I’d said that I’d modeled my method of discussion on the one from his film class. I now seriously regret that after all of this time since high school, I never used the very small amount of time it would have taken to tell him how much his class and influence meant to me. And, it is an embarrassing kind of regret—an obnoxious feeling, having taken him so much for granted. I’d always meant to contact him some day, but ordinary life took the foreground, and if I spent twenty minutes thinking of what I would write in a letter to him, I’d forget about it twenty minutes after that.

Just as indecent is my poring over his obituary with the obvious question on my mind that anyone has about any death in the past two months.

If something can be drawn from this entry, I hope it would be this: don’t forget to let people know how much you appreciate them. Life is long, but it never feels long enough. And the absoluteness of death is one of the scariest things about it.

3 notes · View notes

stupendoustrashmagazine · 5 years ago

Text

Prelude

Tonight the act of naming fell through the floor.

We speak permeable solids inflected by light

Move indistinctly: palate of windshield

Crosshatch hop-cross’d with Ovidian shift,

faux forest, treat’d with colors from closet

Plait plat in a plot to track flotillas down,

Hot air balloons up, celebrating distant

Prairie fair. Farmer’s burnoff coils tall

Ash columns, formations above turbines white.

Learn to kill that hunger for thunderhead drift.

Can follow on foot synapse, taste confit,

Sketch figure, set type, code python on limb,

Design legend for—scratch the map, lost.

I want the aura to aural irrespective of sense

the quartet of styrofoam boats & balloons

of plastic bags forgiven along with conductor,

for it to catapult group out open window,

An aria, moved, moving, with others. The spleen

Racket, melange dischord allowing

harmony’s plural means of resolution.

Pipe seams bead’d with silver solder &

Dreams warp’d with passion’s endurance.

The trespass into yard with inflatable pool

where algal sideburns pastoralize

a celebratory drowning ritual.

Come back. Help me frame Matisse (guilty

Strokes), rust the iron, damper temperment

Unclothed. Spill the hamper & sing it,

that magnolia

We’ll stay long enough for faith in

each other’s visions. For something beyond

earthly suffering. Sucked dry wax & cone.

It is unfortunate, the dragonflies are

Purple & beautiful, abdomen metallic

terrae, nodes aggregate, curvature &

husk. Nearby: a field of lightning. The stroll

through it risked no electrocution.

Cull’d from material body leads to matter again.

Association of associations.

Together, we’ll erase strip malls frosting away

In our chests, but we won’t be able to stop the ivy

From terraforming, maturing towards strangulation,

A form of survival. Walk a while into notional

Forest, ash grey hit with newborn beetles,

No radar, cobalt blue tinted dark green.

Skykomish in Summer

In Goldbar Washington boys crossed

river with driftwood staves feet

slick-step between slime & rock,

underbelly of serpentine but liquefied,

algaal nets stretched between toes,

Like scales without edge—stiffened

Cold after crossing were caverns

shadows hold, shield from radiation,

& though they couldn’t admit this

touch was what they most wanted,

schizoid clouds temporary shelter

against frenetic sun, there in those

caverns the kids dove into pools

Spun in schools of spit & current

Slippery grips grit on bank’s cove

tangle of nets, sunken conflagrations

Their bodies pressing against the wake

a force there, a quiet endlessness

sound beckoning shape, the inky jar.

Repossession (1.)

Spring seeds fibrillate, sap drools.

Muddy lawns: aftermath of an approach.

Easter-green paint cracks, reveals cedar siding,

Disintegrates, falls to foundation’s edge close.

One could ask who lived here. Do most times

even though it’s’no secret. They lost it, left

We cut & to the porch fasten 2x4 handrails

(Suing a bank’s a better investment), step

Inside.Maple floorboards, worn-out testimony.

Each creak releases things outside in-

terpretation or language. Bathtub’s got

Concrete top pour’d but unfinish’d

punctured lining by PVC tubes like reeds

for lungs underwater, covered in mud.

The second story framing’s exposed, drywall

crumbs caked, spackle pocks & joint compound

in gnarled clutches grab remains, fading.

Electrical wires in knots, pigtails,

Copper diminished in conduit. Empty

centers of things usually covered, then valued.

There is then the business of the yard

children’s toys—truck beds blue on body

red, bouquets of acrylic flowers, the

eyeball amanita thrombosis, marbles

½-cover’din mud.Dolls, ropes, figurines.

We clean out a carport barn, trash,

automotive parts, motor oil, glass, aluminum.

Kinetic images sequence, make time elastic,

Revelations flaw; in sensorial beatitudes, a kind of wreckage,

Sight is a museum of things seen, they’re hostages:

Beneath the house, thousands of aluminum

Cans, vinegar, rat nests in an old tent,

Dust so fine it’s crystalline. We rake & bag for hours.

Outside, a doll hung from rhododendron

Its face torched, head cocked to the side, clothes

Missing, darling buds of May hooked at the armpit.

My boss talks about rural zoning laws

As we back out of the emptied house;

The wet half-acre prairie grass fenced-in & barbed

Waits for another debtor; we head again toward emptiness.

Repossession (2.)

In the truck. Behind us, trail-rattle

& typical thrash. My boss tells me

About the gem we’re about settle in.

It’s like wading through bodies, I think.

The metaphor breaks immediately.

The driveway could be a fractured jaw—

I cut the grass with our Kubota mower.

The shed is fifteen feet away from the tracks

& an old sawmill spits nothing under sky.

Deadly nightshade drifts vascular across cedar

Siding, grey lead-based flakes fall in wet, cut weeds.

The red berries barrage, their Plathian pitch.

The mother-in-law’s a converted shed,

Its floor’s center sags, linoleum squares

Sepia-toned & checkerboard in easy encryption.

I bleach & scrub the toilet, pour antifreeze in.

The makeshift porch’s missing walls on all sides:

Top hat Styrofoam insulation & DuPont

Foam curdled, cumulous, mustard & rust. I push open

The house’s door. Carpet bubbles carcinoma grey,

Whole sections swell a foot from level ground.

I taste urine & ammonium. Dust gets on our skin.

I grab my razor knife, “Rip in.” He laughs.

The carpet weighs twice what it should, I stack

Pieces on the lawn. The carpet pad has fused

In a foam matrix to subterranean linoleum.

I stab & lever it with a toothed roofing shovel.

D the cleaner & I stop. We just look at it.

Snowflakes, quite idiosyncratic, urea crystals, dust.

Maybe a year or so buildup from cats or dogs.

The bedroom the same. I laugh this time.

Tobacco stains headway, riverine drawings on walls.

Sappy window trim. Popcorn ceiling meteorologist:

Sheet of cottage cheese about to hail.

I go outside to sneak a cigarette near the tracks.

We shovel the crystal uric acid into buckets.

Makes me think about molecular records.

An atomic record forever void its narrative.

I pull up tack strip with a roofing shovel.

They’re like reeds, I think. We leave it

Mowed, gutted, clean. It’s quiet here near the tracks.

Sparrows. He starts the truck. Dust all over us.

We pass past things along with clouds.

We head to the dump. I unload. He reminds us

He hates dealing with the public.

Stamp

Over there in rotting field

Grows some storm with an eye

Toward an oak

One could say is trembling

But accounting for wind

Really it moves from force

& force alone while metastatic clouds

Mid-west median June appraise

Landscape of prairie

& steel beams two-by-foured

In rows holding up a smattering,

Maybe just a platter of

Figurative three-tab shingles—

An economy of pigs, feed, birds, too:

It’s pulmonary, the bristles

Horizontally dance, thistles

In multiplication, an armory

Rucksacking its strength

Gripping seams & susceptible glue

Undone un-doing year

After year—from behind

One window of nondescription

A home chatters, clapboards flap,

Scratching like molars,

A singular flash gives rise

During descent—cast-iron

Frying each cornea clean—

Leaving in singular manner

Carbonized stump, something

That doesn’t even look

For an original impulse

A root that once gripped

Mineral & dirt, an uneven pitch

Of earth left without

A stamp or reason for being.

1 note · View note

navmifoods · 5 years ago

Text

Kacchi Ghani Mustard oil: Benefits & Nutritional Value

Some ingredients cannot be excluded from the kitchen. They are essential and add extra flavor to our food. Indian food has some amazing ingredients that are imperative for cooking. Mustard oil is one such ingredient. It takes a bit of time to get used to it due to the pungency but when you overcome this initial barrier you will soon start loving its unique taste.

A bit about…

View On WordPress

#best cold pressed mustard oil #cold pressed mustard oil #cold pressed mustard oil for cooking #cold pressed mustard oil for hair #cold pressed mustard oil india #cold pressed mustard oil near me #cold pressed mustard oil price #kacchi ghani #kacchi ghani mustard oil #kachchi ghani ka tel #kachchi ghani oil #mustard cold pressed oil #organic cold pressed mustard oil #wood pressed mustard oil

0 notes

moshein95-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Why You Never See Cold Pressed Oil Manufacturers In India That Actually Works

If you need not await the oil to turn out to be absorbed then a skin cream containing the oil is an outstanding selection. Black seed oil hair evaluations are difficult to return by, so we chose to check it. Utilizing oil with right hair packs can produce the hair shiny, highly effective and shiny. Subsequently, as it's effective to safe our pores and skin from dangerous UV rays, moreover, it protects and moisture our hair if we are in daylight. Nearly all of the oil presses bought by AGICO may be present in hot pressing configurations too. Additionally a wonderful supply for it pulling. Cold-pressed oil is regulated in various elements of the planet. Olive oil for cooking goes to be the best determination for you and your loved ones members. For dressings and dishes where the flavor of the oil will play a significant position, it is normally superior to other cooking components. Once it will get filtrated it leads to a shiny yellow color with a slight aroma of contemporary cucumbers. As a result of refined vegetable oils generally tend towards oxidation when you cook dinner with them, you would like to avoid potentiallyrancid oils as a lot as you are able to. Natural chilly pressed oils tend to have lower smoke level and are not best for very deep frying. cold pressed oils in India Rain, specifically, can induce rust and valve damage. Chilly pressed castor oil is made in a selected process that is both long and in depth. There is a single Gas Pump to the bottom of the system. Natural chilly pressed oils have a tendency to have lower smoke level and are not acceptable for very deep frying. If you want to be extra specific, you possibly can communicate along with your doctor or naturopath about stool sampling. Due to this fact the oil's flavor and dietary high quality stays the same. Identical to each of their products, it's a all-pure oil that includes no further substances. A much better method to produce oils is by expeller urgent. With the extra advantage of a number of flowers comes the benefit of further sunflower seeds. Truly, the warmth could be useful and make a larger quality oil. Except for being a fantastic different for cooking, cold pressed mustard oil is wonderful for massage functions too. As soon as you choose whether or not you desire a refined or unrefined coconut oil, you will want to determine on which methodology of extraction suits your tastes and functions.

The Secret of Successful Cold Pressed Oil Shop Near Me

Going past the extraction methodology, it's also wise to contemplate the caliber of the oil prior to extraction. The very first chilly press, for the reason that time period indiciates the the very first press of the olive using a chilly press procedure. Up to the point of solvent extraction, the follow is corresponding to the conventional pre-course of solvent extraction strategy. Within the place of using CO2, our special extraction method is completed utilizing organic ethanol. The chilly refers back to the temperature choice of the fruit on the time that it's crushed. Once more there are some wonderful ones out there however the ones which really work are not prone to be that between brands. Make certain you drink 8 or more glasses of water every day, which is advisable. You are ready so as to add the oil to completely different dishes, use it like a cooking medium, or some folks devour it as is. The oil may also help with firmness and elasticity. In terms of utilization, it may be applied directly on the skin. If you are trying to find the very best chilly pressed Rosehip oil in your face, you must know that Rosehip oil is superb for varied skin difficulties and circumstances. General, if you're searching for the most effective cold pressed Rosehip oil to your face and totally different components of your skin however in addition on your hair and nails, then the aforementioned choice of natural rosehip oils will help you select the one which can flip into an asset to your skin care regime. It is crucial, however, to opt for a reliable model once it involves flavored oils and butters, as they could be enhanced chemically. Sesame seeds and oils are really helpful objects which are used for different causes. Refined oils are far more processed than virgin oils, and thus do not present as a result of many vitamins. Nearly all of the oils utilize a centrifugal technique. A cool, moist washcloth is the very best treatment for itchiness that is a consequence of some sort of allergy. It is very important to deal with itchy eyes rapidly, as leaving your eye untreated can result in additional complications and boost your chance of eye injury. Truly, acquiring an itchy sensation in the vicinity of the eyes is quite a typical drawback and one which might be very frustrating and uncomfortable. Virgin oils on the other hand are ones which have been extracted on the second pressing. The principle level is that there aren't many nutritional components that require enteric coating. Usually, in case you are not interested by making enormous quantities of deodorant, a bit of vial of important oil is all you have to start. Now as far as supplements go they are not that different from each brand. Unique oils are acceptable for different skin sorts so knowing some basic truth about base oils may help you find the most applicable product for your skin. Some individuals have a number of bowel actions day by day, and other men and women have just a single bowel motion each day or go every different moment. Then a hot moist washcloth set on his face after a few minutes to open the pores and skin pores. Do not over-wash Should you should clear your face several occasions each day, make sure you utilize a moisturizing or oil-based mostly facial cleanser. Learn the following concepts to seek out out what you could possibly do to help your pores and skin all year long.

youtube

1 note · View note