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xaracosmia · 1 year ago

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ꕥ — WELCOME TO MARE COSMIA, CIARÁN CALLUM STEWART. 🌗

ꕥ — OOC INFORMATION;

name / alias: Monet age: 24 pronouns: She/They ooc contact: @thebankery on twt other characters in xc: Philomena Roxbury, Prince Papillon, Obanai Iguro, Kellon Bishop

ꕥ — IC INFORMATION;

name: Ciarán Callum Stewart age: 125 (25 human years) pronouns: He/Him series: OC canon point: N/A

app triggers: Death/Immortality

personality: Ciarán is a dick. But a well-meaning one. Like, most of the time.

Ciarán is a proud nerd and fighter. He knows that these hobbies usually don’t go together and he takes pride in it. His favorite things to do are puzzles and beat ass. He appreciates the logical, exact, measured aspects of life, and if he had it his way the entire world would just be a game of chess where you get to punch your opponent if you win. He likes to, AND ALWAYS WILL, do things perfectly. There’s no room for mistakes in Ciarán’s world. Not from others, and not from himself. All of his fighting moves are carefully calculated and all of his inventions are cleanly crafted.

His strict standards don’t exactly make him impossible to deal with, though. He’s an extrovert. Though most of his socialization comes from his spars, he still enjoys spending time with other people without making them bleed. He’s just picky about who he keeps as company. The rude, direct way that he talks to people usually weeds out the people that he doesn’t want to befriend anyway.

Ciarán has few friends and likes it that way. It annoys him that he still feels emotions the same as everyone else, so he’s careful about who he’ll give his heart to. Despite the way he tries to separate logic and emotions, he’s someone that feels deeply and makes a lot of decisions based on that.

His sense of humor is sparse and his willingness to do silly goofy things is low. Ciarán likes to conduct himself in a certain way. He’s not going to make a fool of himself. It’s easy to make him yell, complain, and lose his temper though. So he usually ends up making a fool of himself regardless.

something your muse struggles with: He’s more rude than he is blunt. Finds it hard to lighten up at times.

your muse’s greatest strength: Hard worker and pretty damn smart. Good leader. Focused.

history / background:

Ciarán was born to unknown parents and left at an orphanage. Unbeknownst to them, he wasn’t a normal baby.

Ciarán’s planet was split into eight main regions, usually referred to as ‘worlds’ due to how different they were. There was little to no consistency between all of them despite all being part of one landmass. Magic was only found in one person, the queen, and objects, like magic crystals, enchanted forests, potions, dragons, and everything else that you could think of. But humans weren’t magic. That was unheard of.

Unfortunately the queen died before she could birth an heir. People from every world began trying to rise up to be the new leader. This lawless powerplay lasted for a year and abruptly ended when seven babies were born.

Ciarán (and six other random babies) had unique abilities that were obvious from birth. A baby Ciarán could grab and bend the fabric of reality itself, know things about people that no one could feasibly know on the first meeting, and move land just by drawing a new map. He and the other babies, one from (almost) every world, also had powerful magic similar to the late queen’s.

Unfortunately Ciarán was given to an orphanage at birth and his powers weren’t discovered until he was eleven months old. Up until that point, he was raised by the sole owner of the orphanage, a sixty-nine year old woman named Caoimhe. On that fateful day he threw a normal baby tantrum and grabbed at the air in a way that seemed to bend reality itself. Caoimhe instantly recognized it as the late Queen’s magic. The news spread quickly, and the orphanage was flooded with people claiming to be the biological parents of Ciarán. There was only one problem — Royals don’t have human DNA. They couldn’t prove anyone to be his real parent. After months of unwanted attention, bribes and even threats, Caoimhe declared herself the mother and the eleven month old agreed. As much as he could, anyway. No one could argue. Caoimhe became the new queen of their kingdom.

Ciarán had a good life growing up. Friends, money, power, travel, and a strong connection with the six other babies who were being raised in similar ways. He was very aware that his existence had brought peace to the kingdoms and from a young age he took this responsibility very, very seriously.

Only seven babies were born though. There was still a kingdom on the outskirts waiting for their magic. While the other worlds thrived, they were stagnant, waiting to become a part of the new world. Back to that later.

Ciarán was a precocious, lanky, kind of awkward kid. He took a lot of things way too seriously and didn’t smile or laugh often. He got into fights. He got into arguments. He got into trouble. He got into the books. Ciarán genuinely enjoyed STEM and spent most of his time either mastering every weapon that he could or inventing things. He surprised everyone by somehow managing to be both a nerd and a successful fighter. He started off by learning from his knights, and by 13 he was training them. Despite his love for The Spar, he kept his kingdom’s previous name — The Technology Kingdom. They were innovative, always ahead of the curve, and impossible to outdo. That’s the reputation that he wanted, anyway.

Ciarán was a well-loved king. Sure he was rude and short with people, but he cared about them. That was undeniable. They liked him so much, in fact, he never had any pressure to get an heir. He had a partner or two over the years but they never lasted. Years and years and years passed by of relative peace between the worlds. As he got older, his mother aged, and he seemed to stop.

When Ciarán was twenty-five his mother was ninety-four. He never really thought about her age before — she was always old. He couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t. But when he woke up one morning and she didn’t come down for breakfast he knew that she was gone. Unwilling to face it, he went about his day as normal, completely engrossed in his work, so focused and closed off the castle workers couldn’t bring themselves to ask him about it. Her funeral was the next day and it was a kingdom-wide event. He didn’t go.

Time seemed to be moving differently to him. He never knew how to explain it, but he knew — he was immortal now, and his only living family was gone.

Now at (technically but not mentally) 125 years old, Ciarán is an even tougher ruler than he was before and even harder to befriend. He still had the other six magical royal friends, at least, and some of them even had descendants. Ciarán kept pursuing his work and maintaining his kingdom. His powers are mostly micromanaging and keeping everything in working order. He’s essentially the ‘coder’ of the world and has the ability to bend reality to a certain extent. He was more than happy to just keep ruling and maintaining the world with no heirs.

One day his ex took an interest in a citizen from the still unnamed, unruled kingdom. Ciarán instantly took notice and kept a close eye on them. A non-royal invading the royal family wasn’t going to go well. He didn’t need special magic to know that. And he’d be damned if his perfect system was messed with in any way.

powers / abilities:

Stat Reader - Ciarán can see everyone’s stats. This includes their full PREFERRED name, current pronouns, species, age (including immortality and maturity age if applicable), inventory (only items currently on their person), occupation(s), height, weight, natural and current hair and eye colors, and vitals (including injuries, diseases, allergies, past surgeries, and anomalies). He looks through a magical visor to do this, and others can look through it if he lets them.

1-Up - He can give someone a temporary extra life! If you die, all of your status effects and injuries will be cured, and your health will be completely restored. He can only do this every 5 hours, and doing it puts him out of commission for 30 minutes.

Reality Bender - Nerfed because he’s not in his original world, but he can bend reality like the warp tool. It doesn’t work on people. Ex: If there’s a table in front of him with a can of soda on it, he can twist it like ♻ This wouldn’t break the can or table but it would make the can slide around, depending on how he bends it.

Inherent abilities: Ciarán is not human. He’s considered A Royal in his world, and they’re magical beings with special physical properties. Magic might affect him differently than it would on a human, depending on what it is.

- He can’t get human illnesses or diseases.

- Immortal in age, but he can still die (he only has one life left…)

> His Fighting Skills Are OP. Just Being Honest. <

Skilled Fighter - His highest stats are shit like evasion, agility, avoidance, speed, and perception, but his others are nothing to sneeze at. He can hit hard and take a hit. His win-to-loss ratio is basically 1000-0.

Weapon Expert - He can use any weapon exceptionally well except for a gun (or anything like it) because they don’t exist in his world.

items / weapons:

Insane Weapon Collection - Literally every weapon that you can think of minus guns. His favorite of every category. Not listing all of them. Includes sword, bow, mace, halberd, dagger, bow staff, nunchucks, chakram, etc etc etc. No shields, sheaths, or armor or anything though.

Photo Album - A thin but well taken care of book. Has A Group Picture (Ciarán, Kellon, and a mysterious third guy(?)), A Picture of His Ex That He Needs To Get Rid Of, and A Picture of Mommy.

Bracelet His Ex Made For Him - dude

starting ability: Stat Reader starting item: Photo Album

extra:

6’5”, bi, wears nothing but black and white (and clear)

His hair is so long because he challenges people to cut it during a fight. It’s been a literal century since someone has managed to.

All of his clothes are like the bare minimum to cover as much skin as possible

This is so his nurses could easily access/tend to injuries, but it’s mostly because he can’t be assed to put together real outfits.

He seems to be mildly monochrome. Even his blood is slightly desaturated.

yeah kellon is one of his bffs im having an arc

discord id: 00prionnsa

#xc application #mare cosmia #mun: monet

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tanoraqui · 4 years ago

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Tag meme: counting.

#also that island they mention...it’s the one tiberius tried to offer in exchange for the featherweave #she fucked all of them within the space of like two weeks but not all at once #i love three (3) telepathic human shaped dreamer wasps #i love how bow is on here four times #3rd place as ever goes to ‘my parents both died in palace intrigue by the time i was five. did you think you were dealing with amateurs?’#death weed and sixty nining #this is still. in seven seasons. the corniest fucking thing josh ever does #eighth doctor #it's been approximately one point nine million years since i wrote this #which clearly tends to be done in delineated and agreed upon territories withi which each has a monopoly #eleventh doctor #twelve internally: bitch i am scifi #tumblr #math #tag meme #in fairness world of fuve gods was first but i went with thr funner five #doctors only when no strong second option

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weirdcrocodilelady · 4 years ago

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it’s 3:10 am and I have no life so I decided to mathematically document the shittiness of Death Note’s female representation

Disclaimer: Death Note is still my second favorite anime of all time and my third favorite TV show of all time (1 and 2 are Soul Eater and Friends, in case you were wondering). I appreciate most of its male leads and adore some of them. I don’t dislike any of the female characters in this show, even Misa. (Should I make a full post about why I like Misa? No. No, I shouldn’t. I’ll probably do it anyway.) Also, Naomi. Just...❤️Naomi.❤️

In preparation for this post, I binged the anime* for the [CLASSIFIED]th time and made a list of all its male and female characters in separate lists. A character’s inclusion on the list depends on whether they meet the following criteria:

1. They have a name that is spoken out loud at some point (alibis count; if they are only given a first name or a last name alone, that also counts);

2. They speak at least one line.

This allowed me to weed out most unimportant background characters as well as all the names written down in the various Death Notes. However, as you will see, some very minor characters still made the list.

*I’m just doing the anime this time, not the manga. I have and love the manga but didn’t feel like going through the whole thing for this. My doglike devotion to completely pointless research only goes so far, people.

Here are the male characters we encounter across all 37 episodes (in order of appearance, but not necessarily official introduction by name):

Light. Ryuk. Sudo. Ryo. Takuo Shibuimaru. Soichiro. Matsuda. Watari. L. Lind. L. Tailor. Mogi. Raye. Kiichiro Osoreda. Aizawa. Ide. Ukita. Kitamura. Demegawa. Koki Tanekabara. Gelus. Ooi. Takahashi. Kida. Higuchi. Hatori. Namikawa. Mido. Shimura. Aiber. Roger. Mello. Near. Mason. Larry Connors. Commander Rester. Eddie. Gevanni. Sidoh. Armonia Justin. Kal Snyder. Pedro Kollet. Dwhite Godon. Jose. Mikami. Matt.

Same criteria, female characters:

Sachiko. Sayu. Yuri. Naomi. Misa. Rem. Takada. Weddy. Yumi. Eriko. Nori. Lidner.

That’s 45 male characters and 13 female characters. If I did my sixth grade math correctly, that means 77.6 percent of the cast is male, compared to only 22.4 percent female. The women whose names are in bold are those whose involvement in the story hinges on her having a personal connection to a male character, either as a family member or a significant other/love interest. Yes, I did the math for that too. SIXTY-NINE POINT TWO PERCENT of the women in Death Note are heavily defined by their relationship to at least one man.

(Yeah, I know, 69. Shut up.)

Now, just for kicks, let’s narrow it down to only characters who appear and speak in more than one episode.

Men: Light. Ryuk. Soichiro. Matsuda. Watari. L. Mogi. Raye. Aizawa. Ide. Ukita. Kitamura. Demegawa. Ooi. Takahashi. Kida. Higuchi. Hatori. Namikawa. Mido. Shimura. Aiber. Roger. Mello. Near. Rester. Eddie. Gevanni. Sidoh. Pedro. Kollet. Godon. Jose. Mikami.

Women: Sachiko. Sayu. Naomi. Misa. Rem. Takada. Weddy. Yumi. Lidner.

That gives us 34 men and 9 women. 79.1% men, 20.9% women. 66.7% of those women are defined by their connection to a male character.

I haven’t even touched on all the other smaller, but still significant crumbs of sexism in Death Note, such as how the entirety of the ICPO meeting in Episode 2 is male. The Japanese NPA is intimately intertwined with the plot, yet we never once see a single female police officer.

Naomi Misora, apparently one of the FBI’s top agents, left her job to get married and (plan to) have kids.

Kiyomi Takada is said to be one of the most intelligent and powerful women in Japan, having graduated from a very prestigious university, yet the only time we see her in school is when she disrupts a lecture to have a relationship check-in with her man meat.

Adult!Sayu gets hit on, gets kidnapped, gets traumatized, then is forgotten for the rest of the series.

Rem throws her life away for love.

Takada agrees to throw away her core values and career for love.

Weddy’s cleavage.

Lidner’s cleavage.

Cosmé Misa.

It genuinely breaks my heart that a series I love so dearly, and that has played a significant role in shaping my morals and beliefs for almost half my life, is so cold, flippant, and downright disrespectful to my entire gender.

#death note #eecmidford #not kuro

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maaaddiexo · 4 years ago

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The Within Series | Legolas Greenleaf

Book 1: The Devil Within - 1.6

Mainlist | Serieslist

Nyx of Tyndall does not know love or kindness. Cursed at a young age by a jealous witch, Nyx has lived a life of solitude and death.

Until Gandalf the Grey requests her presence and uncontrollable skill in assisting a young Hobbit across Middle-Earth with nine others to destroy a ring so powerful all fall victim to its evil.

Not only must Nyx face Orcs, demons, and creatures she’s never seen before, but also the devil inside. Controlling the devil is the key to finding freedom in a spell that can’t be broken. But it will not be so easy for Nyx when every obstacle she faces pushes her to an edge she cannot return from.

Chapter Six

Through the woods they ran. The sun had barely begun to rise when they heard the screeches of the Nazgûl once more.

“Hurry!” Strider shouted from the front of the line, Frodo thrown over his shoulder. His skin had paled and small groans came through his lips every time he was jostled around.

“We’re six days from Rivendell,” Sam replied. “He’ll never make it!”

“Have faith,” Nyx said, though she feared Sam was right. “If he can withstand the Ring he may be able to stay off the poison in his veins long enough.”

They moved as fast as they could until the next sunset, finding refuge in thick foliage, surrounded by three trolls that had once been turned to stone. Nyx touched one gently. “Bilbo turned these to stone sixty years ago. Gandalf told me about it when I was younger.”

“How did he turn them to stone?” Merry asked as he wrapped an unconscious Frodo in an extra blanket. The poor Hobbit had begun to shiver.

“Trolls cannot stand sunlight. They will turn to stone if any sunlight touches their skin. Bilbo saved the entire company from being eaten that night. It was the first time he proved himself helpful to Thorin Oakenshield.”

“He’s waking up!” Sam shouted. “Look, Frodo. It’s Mister Bilbo’s trolls!”

Frodo could only moan and groan, his eyes enlarged and his skin a pale blue. All of the veins in his chest were visible. Sam touched his cheek.

“Mister Frodo? He’s going cold!”

“Is he going to die?” Pippin asked worriedly.

Strider looked sadly at the Hobbits. “He is passing into the Shadow World. He’ll soon become a wraith like them.”

Frodo gasped painfully again, and the Ringwraiths screeched in response. The noise came from all around them.

“They’re close!” Merry gasped.

“Sam? Do you know the athelas plant?”

“Athelas?”

“Kingsfoil.”

“Kingsfoil? Ah, it’s a weed.”

“It may help to slow the poison,” Strider said. Sam nodded and moved to leave but Nyx stopped him.

“I will go. I know what the plant looks like and where to find it. Besides, I am still uneasy from last night. I believe some time away from people may help calm me down.”

Strider hesitated and then nodded. “Alright. Don’t stray too far. There is another plant, echinacea. I will search for that.”

Nyx nodded and the two left the Hobbits alone and moved into the woods, searching for their respected plants. Nyx had just found hers when she heard a new voice. Not a wraith, but a woman.

“What’s this? A Ranger caught off his guard?”

Nyx grabbed her scythe. “Drop your weapon.”

“It’s alright, Nyx,” Strider said. “She is an old friend. Only having fun.”

The woman stood up straight and sheathed her sword, revealing porcelain skin and pointed ears. An Elf. “My name is Arwen. I bring no harm, but it is my job to patrol the borders. When we heard of Ringwraiths, I was sent out further to investigate.”

“Our friend, Frodo, he was stabbed with a Morgul blade,” Nyx said. “Can you help him?”

“Not here.”

“He’s this way,” Strider said. They returned to camp, Arwen with her white horse. Frodo’s head rolled to the side when they approached, but Nyx was unsure if he was truly seeing them.

“Frodo,” Arwen whispered. Frodo’s lips moved but nothing came out. Arwen said something in Elvish Nyx could barely hear. I have come to help you. Hear my voice. Come back to the light.

The Hobbit’s eyes rolled to the back of his head as some colour returned to his face.

“Who is she?” Merry whispered as Arwen knelt beside him.

“She’s an elf,” Sam said in awe. He had never seen an Elf before.

“He is fading,” Arwen whispered.

Nyx knelt on the other side of Frodo, ripping up the plant she’d gone out to find. Arwen pulled back Frodo’s shirt to examine the wound, revealing purplish and black veins stemming from the wound. After chewing on the plant, Nyx placed the plant over the wound, cooing at Frodo as he gasped in pain.

“He is not going to last. We must get him to my father.”

The three stood up and Strider picked up Frodo, moving to place him on Arwen’s horse.

“There are five Wraiths behind you. Where the other four are, I do not know.”

“They’ll be back,” Nyx said. A sense of dread filled her heart.

“Let me take him,” Arwen said.

“Arwen,” Strider sighed. Something in his eyes told Nyx that Arwen was more than just a friend to him.

“I do not fear them.”

Strider conceded, moving to let her mount her horse. “You must ride hard. Don’t look back.”

“Wait!” Nyx moved past Strider, reaching into Frodo’s pocket for the Ring. It immediately felt heavy in her hand, calling out for the devil within.

“Nyx!” Strider said harshly. “What are you doing?”

Nyx ignored him, stringing it onto the plain chain hidden underneath her dress. “Giving them a better chance.” Nyx moved to Strider’s horse, mounting it with ease.

“But they saw his face at the watchtower!” Merry shouted.

“Exactly. If the Ring is separated from the one who once had it, it will buy Arwen some extra time.”

“Nyx,” Strider warned. She looked down at him.

“I was telling you the truth the other night. I don’t want the Ring. But Gandalf believed that Frodo is destined to carry the One Ring. And if he is, he needs to be alive to do it.”

“Does it not call to you?” Strider asked softly.

“It does,” Nyx admitted. Already she could feel her resolve weakening against the curse. “But the evil inside me wants the Ring for itself. It does not want to give it away.” She tightened her grip on the reins. “I will see you all in Rivendell. With the Ring.”

“We need to hurry,” Arwen said. Nyx nodded and the two took off together. They rode through the night just like Strider had said – hard and fast. They did not stop at daybreak and they did not stop for food. At one point, when they had to cross a river, they let the horses drink momentarily and eat some grass by the shore, but then they were off again.

“How is he doing?” Nyx yelled as they rode through a meadow.

“The athelas isn’t working anymore!” Arwen replied. They both spurred their horses to go faster. The meadow ended just as suddenly as the forest began and the Ring around Nyx’s neck felt heavy with evil. Something churned inside her.

“They’re here!” she shouted to Arwen before pulling her horse away from the Elf and Hobbit. The Ring burned under her dress, begging her to take control of it. Give it to the Nazgûl. And the evil inside of her begged her to put it on and use it for herself. Nyx screamed aloud, forcing herself to stay true to her journey and dodged the trees. Hooves sounded loudly behind her and Nyx knew the Nazgûl were upon her. Through the trees to her left, she saw Arwen with a Ringwraith on either side of her. Normally, Arwen would have been able to fight them off. But Frodo was fading and she had to hold onto him to keep him on the horse.

“I cannot outrun them!”

Nyx reached for the necklace, pulling it over her head and dangling it in front of her. She didn’t have to say a word before the two Ringwraiths turned to her and left Arwen alone. “Go, Arwen!”

Nyx weaved through the trees as Arwen galloped straight ahead. They were almost at the border of Rivendell; Nyx could feel the magic in the air. The trees thickened and the air became colder as Nyx neared the riverbank. She could barely hear the trinkling of water over her laboured breath and heavy heart. The trees broke on the edge of the riverbank, and across the way she could see Arwen. She joined her side and together they watched to see if the Nazgûl would cross.

They screeched at the touch of the water.

“Give it up,” one growled.

Nyx held up the necklace while Arwen unsheathed her sword. “If you want it. If you want him, come and claim him.”

The Ringwraiths waded into the water on their horses and Nyx moved back. Arwen looked around them, muttering elvish under her breath. Nyx chanced a glance at Frodo. He was wheezing now, and green liquid was dripping from his mouth.

Something rumbled in the distance and all parties looked upstream as a tsunami of water came rushing at them. Wordlessly, Nyx moved to the shore and watched as something reached out from the rushing water.

“Horses?” she wondered. They trampled the Ringwraiths without hesitation, washing them and their horses downstream. Nyx smiled in delight, turning back to Arwen and Frodo only to see the two of them on the riverbank.

“No, Frodo!” Arwen cried. “Don’t give in.”

Frodo wheezed softly and Nyx dropped to her knees, pushing his sweaty curls out of his face. “Frodo…”

Arwen pulled the Hobbit into her, tears falling freely as she cradled the boy. “What grace has given me – let it pass to him. Let him be spared. Save him.”

Frodo gasped for air, but his eyes were still enlarged and the whites of his tinted red. Nyx looked at Arwen. “What did you do?”

“I gave him a little more time. Come on.”

Nyx mounted Strider’s horse and they were off once more. From the dirt came a stone pathway and stone arches overhead. Elves in armour watched as they raced past them but did not try to stop them. An Elven horn was blown somewhere behind them.

Arwen stopped in a round stone courtyard, and they dropped to the ground as a man with Arwen’s hair and bright blue eyes approached them.

“Arwen.”

“He’s been struck with a morgul blade. He needs help,” Arwen said. The man nodded and touched her back. Arwen hurried down the corridor on the right. Nyx moved to follow her but an arm prevented her from doing so.

“It has been a long time, Nyx of Tyndall.”

Nyx dropped into a quick curtsey. “Lord Elrond.”

“You carry more evil with you during this visit. What has happened?”

Nyx touched her sternum where the Ring rested. “Not here. And tell your men to expect more company. A Man and three Hobbits.”

Elrond nodded and led Nyx to the Council Room. “Tell me everything that has happened.”

Nervously, Nyx pulled the chain over her head and placed the ring on the table. It felt too heavy in her hands for just a ring.

“That cannot be,” Elrond gasped. The two stared down at, dread in their stomachs. “The Ring of Power has been found.”

Part 1.7 ➺

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dumbwaystodeviate · 6 years ago

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@skyewillows This found its way into our DMs rather than asks, hence I’m tagging you.

Content warning for visiting graves and thus off screen minor character death (Cole and Gavin’s mother).

Humans were illogical. That was the truth of the matter and nothing could convince Sixty otherwise. If they would actually make sense and have a clear path of action, principles and morals then he might have seen the benefit of deviating and nor resisted so much. To make matters even worse, Connor and Nines had taken it upon themselves to try and educate him, enlighten him in the flawed logic of humans to encourage Sixty to stop weeding his red wall and just let it crumble under the ivy trying to grow across it.

“Fine,” Sixty relented, “explain to me why cemeteries are full of flowers. Why bring something dying to the already dead?”

Both Nines and Connor jumped at the chance to explain and Sixty reared away from their enthusiasm to interface.

“This is a rather personal topic, an interface would be more suited than words,” Nines reassured him and gallantly allowed Connor to show his explanation first.

The images and feelings which filtered through weren’t exactly logical and they were heavily shrouded in feelings which Sixty couldn’t quite parse. There was a grave, Hank stood next to it sombrely, the flowers were freshly laid.

“I still miss you every day, little buddy,” he murmured softly. “It’s been a few years but you still live on in my memories.”

His hand linked with Connor’s and, with a final, sad smile, he turned to head out of the cemetery.

“So, you see,” Connor jumped at the chance to explain before Sixty even had a chance to process it and decide whether he had a question, “we leave flowers because even though they are no longer with us, the flowers are symbolic that their memory is very much alive.”

It was a strange habit and Sixty looked to Nines for confirmation that this was at least a common, standardised thinking in humans. When Nines couldn’t quite meet his eyes, Sixty braced himself to be confused and let down as he reached a hand for an interface.

He was greeted with a similar image, a cemetery but this time, rather than Hank, it was Gavin standing there. His hands were constantly moving, adjusting a bouquet of flowers one way or another as he prattled on.

“There were her favourites. Well, she loved all flowers but for some off reason, the ornamental cabbage was the one she loved the most. Said it always helped her work up a good appetite.”

Nines’ voice drifted through the memory, “Your mother was a peculiar woman.”

“Well,” Gavin looked up from where he was kneeling, “why do you think I turned out the way I did?”

The interface stopped and Sixty blinked rapidly, trying to process it all.

“So you’re telling me humans leave the favourite plants of the deceased to show that they are still being thought about?”

The excited and proud smile Nines shot him was enough to make Sixty sigh. Humans most definitely made zero sense. He allowed himself to look at his red wall again, it was covered in ivy and bees buzzed around the slowly crumbling wall.

“You know,” Connor and Nines appeared in the space with him through a sneaky interface, “I think you already knew about plants and death. Why else would your own systems be commemorating your machine-hood with your favourite plant?”

Denial was quick to Sixty’s tongue, how he didn’t have a favourite plant but it was too little too late. With an almighty crack, the wall fell down under the weight of the ivy and Sixty was left staring at the world anew.

#dbh 60 #dbh connor #dbh nines #dumb ways to deviate #prompt fill #leader of the rebellion #cw: minor character death aftermath

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clairenchanted · 5 years ago

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the one about the pandemic.

it was summer. i fucking hate summer.

i don’t hate the earliest morning in summer -- when there’s still the faintest hint of a chill from the night. it’ll burn off in an hour, and i’m never awake enough to really appreciate it, but i can convince myself that the day won’t be so bad when it’s not that hot yet and i’m not sticky and burdened by the sun.

i always remember the parts of the day when it’s an unseasonable temperature: spring nights that are too cold, winter afternoons that get too hot for layers of sweaters. the mornings in the summer when i can feel the breeze off the harbor. i felt it that morning and that’s why i remember it: that i had to get up, and when i did the light was at a strange, low angle, glittering around my ankles, bouncing against the buckles of my new sandals.

people were out. it’s brooklyn; people are always out. they’re out when i get back from the bar at one in the morning, and at not-quite-eight in the morning they’re out. a few of them -- jogging, walking a dog, getting to the subway to go to work. i didn’t go to the subway. i went to the post office to pick up a certified letter that i was worried would be some sort of time sensitive thing i’d missed a deadline for.

the whole walk, i worried. i don’t normally walk there -- it’s just a little too far and i have too little mail and even less that requires a post office. but i didn’t want to take a bus one stop. so, i walked.

by my apartment, i can smell the honeysuckle. it grows a block down, by the shoreline, where there’s just a bike path and a park and the highway and then, finally, the bay. the further away i got, the less i smelled it, until it was finally gone and it was just the summer city awfulness: trash and exhaust and the ugly things i don’t like to think about. and weed. a lot of fucking weed. i’m extremely sick of the smell of weed. i walked away from the honeysuckle and through the trash stink and thought about the what ifs.

it could be something about my employment -- a notice i didn’t give back in time. something disciplinary. did i do anything fireable? did i miss a class i was meant to teach? does a student hate me enough to ruin my life? i could be walking towards my firing without even knowing it. --- is it a letter from a friend that needs to be sent certified because it’s coming from far away? probably not. definitely not. that’s not something that could happen. i don’t get things in return like that, because i hold candles when i should be putting them out and saving them from melting.

i worried, and i self pitied, and i wallowed. there’s some feeling that comes with the neighborhood’s familiarity -- some physical thing settling warmly in the pit of my stomach when i see the sights i’ve been seeing for almost all of my life, from when i lived with my family, what i see now that i’m grown and have a little apartment not a ten minute drive from my childhood home. i could walk these streets blindfolded, and on every block i see something: the bus stop i took to high school. the place i walked with my friend for hours because we didn’t want to go home and let the day end. where we got italian ices. where i got my first bike.

the letter turned out to be a repeat of a confirmation e-mail i’d gotten a week ago, no action necessary. on the way back, i went half a block out of my way and got the largest iced coffee i could. it was sweet with vanilla and sweetener, and stayed cool in my hand even as the day warmed up. by the time i got back, my drink was melting and i could smell honeysuckles again, and it was only a quarter to nine. sunlight streamed through my window, spilling over the hardwood with a deep, golden glow. i had the whole day ahead of me.

for fifty five days these past two months, i have not left my apartment building. it’s now day sixty seven, and i have gone on two walks in the past two weeks. after both, i had a panic attack. i scrubbed my hands until they bled. i took a shower immediately, and i have taken my temperature at least five times a day. i’ve been quarantining for over two months, completely alone. no roommates, no work, no family, and when i walk i wear my mask and gloves.

when it started, i had at least three panic attacks every day. they ebbed off a little, then came back in my sleep. i haven’t slept more than an hour at a time in over two months. i wake up from my sleep gasping for air, crying and screaming as i try to force air into my lungs. i started throwing up again -- involuntarily. voluntarily, even though that, too, is fairly involuntary, because eating disorders are like that.

i went out for an hour today, just to walk. i was thinking about last summer, with my dunkin’ donuts iced coffee and the golden early mornings, and i realized with a jolt that i had been inside so long that i hadn’t been there to see the trees go through their pink blossoms stage. i thought, just for a moment, that i could remember what it felt like -- to be out, when it’s not too hot yet. to feel the sun, to smell the honeysuckle. to exist, for a moment, in the person that i was last summer. in the world that person lived in.

i have been so staunch in my convictions about how to live responsibly that i have gotten into a fight with my father every time we’ve been on the phone. don’t take your mask off and only put it on when you pass people on your walk -- you’re supposed to treat it like raw chicken and not touch it once it’s on. and birdseed’s not an essential item! you’re not going to the bird lady to buy seed! and our comfort isn’t as important as staying alive. i’m not coming home, and you’re not going out. i have showed my parents, over facetime, how to wash their hands. i have holed up in my apartment and have ducked out of the way of neighbors and people on the street. i have monitored my symptoms and have unfollowed as many news outlets as i can. i have muted anyone on social media posting about the deaths -- the destruction. the warnings. i am following them all and every time i see these things, i feel irresponsible and in terrible danger, despite the fact that i have been lucky and smart and terrified into behaving above and beyond what’s expected.

it has kept me alive, probably, and maybe my family too. and it has eroded me from the inside out.

this is not to complain. this is not to want something different or else. this is, singularly and only, the first time i have processed my grief. survival has been more important than my mental health, to me. this is what i told myself, over and over. this is what i remind myself when i wake up shrieking, convinced that i cannot breathe, pacing my apartment at four thirty in the morning, waiting until dawn so the sun can protect me from the shadows at night.

i hadn’t thought, until now, about all the little things, because they weren’t important. smelling the honeysuckle and going to the post office and getting an iced coffee. these are luxuries -- but i understand now that they are also memories i cherish, because they are the small, merciful moments of happiness that i have built my survival upon like bricks shoring up a seawall.

i am drowning. this is not a protest; i will give my life before i demand a country return to normal, when that normal isn’t real and the most vulnerable lives are at stake. but personally, quietly, with every passing day, i am drowning. i find other little things now: sitting by the window when it rains. lighting a candle. writing, here and there now.

but the wall cannot be built up as quickly as it has come down, while i have stubbornly looked away from it, and the sea is rushing in.

the tide is only ever coming in.

#coronavirus tw #writing #survival #writeblr

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konmarkimageswords · 5 years ago

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After I'm gone, some of you will seclude yourselves in the forests and mountains to meditate, while others may drink rice wine and enjoy the company of women. Both kinds of Zen are fine, but if some become professional clerics, babbling about "Zen as the Way," they are my enemies.

Forests and fields, rocks and weeds - my true companions. The wild ways of the Crazy Cloud will never change. People think I'm mad but I don't care: If I'm a demon here on earth, there is no need to fear the hereafter.

Every day, priests minutely examine the Dharma And endlessly chant complicated sutras. Before doing that, though, they should learn How to read the love letters sent by the wind and rain, the snow and moon.

Stilted koans and convoluted answers are all monks have, Pandering endlessly to officials and rich patrons. Good friends of the Dharma, so proud, let me tell you, A brothel girl in gold brocade is worth more than any of you.

Ten days in this temple and my mind is reeling! Between my legs the red thread stretches and stretches. If you come some other day and ask for me, Better look in a fish stall, a sake shop, or a brothel.

Studying texts and stiff meditation can make you lose your Original Mind. A solitary tune by a fisherman, though, can be an invaluable treasure. Dusk rain on the river, the moon peeking in and out of the clouds; Elegant beyond words, he chants his songs night after night.

A thatched hut of three rooms surpasses seven great halls. Crazy Cloud is shut up here far removed from the vulgar world. The night deepens, I remain within, all alone, A single light illuminating the long autumn night.

I like it best when no one comes, Preferring fallen leaves and swirling flowers for company. Just an old Zen monk living like he should, A withered plum tree suddenly sprouting a hundred blossoms.

A poet's treasure consists of words and phrases; A scholar's days and nights are perfumed with books. For me, plum blossoms framed by the window is an unsurpassable pleasure; A stomach tight with cold but still enchanted by snow, the moon, and dawn frost.

The lotus flower Is unstained by mud; This single dewdrop, Just as it is, Manifests the real body of truth.

Coming alone, Departing alone, Both are delusion: Let me teach you how Not to come, not to go!

Dimly for thirty years; Faintly for thirty years, - Dimly and faintly for sixty years: At my death, I pass my faeces and offer them to Brahma.

Ikkyū Sojun (1394-1481, self-named: 'Crazy Cloud') was an eccentric, iconoclastic Japanese Zen Buddhist monk and poet. He had a great impact on the infusion of Japanese art and literature with Zen attitudes and ideals.

Ikkyu's poetry is irreverent and iconoclastic, bitingly critical of false piety, hypocrisy, and formalistic religion. His poetry is often frankly erotic, sometimes humorously so. Yet it manages to reach an immediacy and insight that is the essence of Zen practice. Ikkyu was appointed to be the head priest of the great temple at Kyoto, but he renounced the position after just nine days, denouncing the hypocrisy he saw among the monks around him. In a famous line from one of his poems, he told his fellow monks they could find him in the local brothel instead. Though clearly not of an ascetic temperament, Ikkyu was a poet, calligrapher, and musician who viewed the world with a deep insight that permitted no pretense, favouring direct truth over religious and social facades.

https://allpoetry.com/Ikkyu-Sojun

https://www.poemhunter.com/ikkyu-sojun/

https://www.learnreligions.com/ikkyu-sojun-450209

https://terebess.hu/zen/mesterek/IkkyuStevens.html

https://terebess.hu/zen/mesterek/ikkyu.html

https://www.lionsroar.com/love-letters-sent-by-the-wind/

https://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/Poets/I/IkkyuSojunIk/index.html

https://www.japanpowered.com/japan-culture/sex-zen-and-poetry-the-life-of-ikkyu-sojun

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berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

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JACOBIN MAGAZINE

Labor movements emerge from class conditions. This seems easy enough to accept but too general to provide solutions to US labor’s problems. If we turn to history, it would be hard to argue that major advances or retreats were caused by just one factor — be it economic, political, or organizational — rather than many. Most important labor histories, from E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class to Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive, center on the idea of multiple causality, or what Louis Althusser called “overdetermination.” These authors drill down beneath quantitative indices of social change to the qualitative dimensions of everyday life. They find — again and again — that cultural practices, such as “blue Monday” among nineteenth-century craftsmen, or “disco sucks” events in the 1970s, helped accelerate or inhibit working-class action.

So far, however, most of our contemporary thinking on union decline and renewal has sidestepped this question (with notable exceptions, like the work of Paul Buhle). We focus heavily on unions’ internal structures and organizing strategies while integrating accounts of political economy, labor law, and worker demographics. A common, unstated assumption is that if only the right organizing model, legislative reform, or economic conjuncture presented itself, workers would burst forth in a new wave of membership and militancy. What is left unexamined are the ways precarious employment and the rise of a host of substitute activities have reshaped workers’ practices, identities, and their willingness to take collective action.

In 2015, I went to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, with these questions in mind. It was a storied center of textile production in the early twentieth century and of militant, social-democratic unionism in the 1930s and 1940s. But it had fallen on hard times, suffering the ravages of deindustrialization and failed attempts at renewal, though over a longer time frame than Flint or Detroit.

My visit was not purely academic. During my teens, I had lived in a neighboring town where people looked down on Woonsocket. Earlier, growing up near Lowell, Massachusetts, I spent almost every school trip touring its textile museum’s sanitized version of mill life. And before that, my grandfather and his generation had worked in Rhode Island mills. Though decades removed, his family’s culture still bears the marks of hardship, solidarity, and relative gender equality imprinted by that first wave of industrial capitalism.

When I walked Woonsocket’s largely empty Main Street with its iconic “Bienvenu” sign and scattered former factories, therefore, it was with more than a detached analytic gaze. I spoke with many residents — sixty, so far — and asked them about things I knew: work, wages, unions, politics. Everyone had something to say.

Artie, a forty-eight-year-old out-of-work carpenter told me, “These are hard times, bro. I’ve probably built a million houses, I’ve been a productive part of society, and for what? Some fucking asshole up in Boca Raton?”

Theresa, a forty-two-year-old single mother who had escaped an abusive relationship only to find a cold shoulder on the job market relayed her experience: “I filled out an application and they weren’t hiring anybody who didn’t have a college degree. They wanted people who are ‘future-oriented,’ they don’t want riff-raffs.’’

And Amanda, a mom in her twenties who had moved from Massachusetts for the cheap rent, recounted similar struggles applying for aid: “They denied me every single time saying that I make too much money. But when I open my fridge, I have no milk — like, I can’t afford to get it. I feel like I am always stuck under something. I’m stuck under the things that I can’t have.”

Deprivation was not hard to find. Nor were expressions of resistance and favorable views of unions. But beneath economics lay a deeper source of suffering that I was ill-equipped to understand. It provided both joy and pain in ever-shifting doses, and though more private in practice than union or political activism, it had clear social dimensions. I am speaking, of course, of opioid addiction.

Artie, who came from a “drug addict family” and said, “I do drugs and smoke weed,” was also adamant that “I’m not a heroin head; I’m not a fucking junkie.”

Theresa, who was on methadone when we spoke, found that heroin “helped me do what I’ve got to do. It gets me get through the day. If I could afford it, I would still be doing it.”

And as Kevin, a twenty-nine-year-old former convict and meat-packer explained it: “A few of my friends passed away this year because of the dope. Everybody is doing it — everybody. It’s the culture.”

Drug use and abuse were pervasive in the lives of Woonsocketers — their own, their friends’, their families’. It was a practice more immediate than wage exploitation and the struggle against it more salient than that against employers or the state.

At the level of culture, where identity is formed socially through channeling desire, substance dependence seemed to have replaced wage dependence, and recovery to have replaced unionism. This dynamic, buttressed by the confluence of union decline and overdose death at the national level, confounds most approaches to union renewal. It suggests that workers’ loss of power is no longer simply a deficiency to be corrected, but a problem that has bred its own answers. Responding to these answers in a way that overcomes shame while tapping the moral energy of recovery should be a central task of union activists.

Figure 1: Union Decline and Overdose Death Rates in the US, 1973–2016

Figure 2: Union Decline (1983–2016) and Overdose Death Rate (2016) by US State

Pearson’s coefficient = 0.33; p-value = 0.017 Sources: Hirsch and Macpherson 2018; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2017.

Precarious Work, Distant Unions

When one thinks of New England labor, Woonsocket doesn’t usually come to mind. Places like Lawrence, Lowell, or Fall River might come first, followed by Manchester, Worcester, or Providence. Indeed, Woonsocket is diminutive compared to these peers: its population peak of 50,000 in 1950 was less than half of theirs.

But its primary industry — woolen and worsted textiles — had a longer, skill-dependent shelf-life than cotton-centered production. While those better-known cities’ labor movements were hobbled by the early flight of cotton in the 1920s and experienced the 1934 textile strike as a rearguard defeat, for Woonsocket it inaugurated an impressive rise of worker power under the Independent Textile Union (ITU).

The wolf finally came for woolen and worsted too, as employers headed south in the 1950s. But the intervening years allowed Woonsocket’s mostly French-Canadian working class to take part in the CIO upsurge and taste its material gains.

“[T]hese workers,” argues Gary Gerstle in his seminal history, “made the city … into what Fall River and then Lawrence had once been — the bastion of organized labor in New England.”

Under the leadership of Franco-Belgian socialist Joseph Schmetz and American-born Lawrence Spitz, the ITU organized 84 percent of Woonsocket’s workforce, achieved record wage gains, and sought to wrest control of daily life from employers and the clergy with an ambitious cultural program that Gerstle calls “working-class Americanism.” Though delayed by ethnic insularity and church-enforced piety, class, in something close to its Marxian form, happened in Woonsocket.

And class has continued to happen there, in ways less liberating. Unions have largely evaporated and work, for many, has become intermittent and low-wage. Jobs were something subjects endured and were compelled to constantly seek but were not a stable source of bonding or identity. Even more so unions: none were current members and only a handful had ever been, though many had relatives who were.

The unifying experience of work, once central to the formation of union consciousness, was broken if not absent entirely.

April’s history was illustrative. “I dropped out in ninth grade,” she told me, “and from there I’ve done all kinds of small tedious jobs like babysitting, mostly retail and customer service. That pretty much sums it up, that’s my life. Most of it has always been short term.”

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #jacobin #jacobin magazine #prescription drugs #class oppression #poverty

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newt-grundy · 7 years ago

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For some reason or another, I’m still fuckin kickin. Kickin so hard right through the belly button. Run this shit a second time, run it twice, second life. But this time without my boy, rest in peace, six six nine. Mower blade on my foot, only got three toes. Smack my lips in the heat, why I taste playdough? Smoking white nigga shit, sleepin in a tunnel. Say they ain’t no body, so I’m talkin to the shadows. Ain’t got cash cream, instead it call gelato. Blood clots in my jeans, girl I’m shootin hallow. Bullet stash with the beam, pale is my moto. Wicca eyes on both sides, twisting right to Anglo. Think I smell dessert, but it’s your head in the oven. Chop your tits, to a mince, nipple dime a dozen. Handle bars, sour brown, making me feel nuthin. Babtist shit ain’t making sense, you say imma own cousin? I could walk these fire coals, that’s the state I’m buzzin. The state vs. Grundy, and Grundy ain’t winnin. Person whale took my girl, woe is me, I hate the world. Which leaves me to lose nothing if I lose my rumpin dime, in your spine neck crumpet, got crime crumble and lactic. Bitch, he deserve it, cold wrap in plastic. You deserve it too, but your plank is different. Floater in your eye with the waves are torrent, with the rotate orbit of the thumb print serpent.

Nirp or die bitch, keep your eyes to the side, sixty five cents make a dollar get high, start spinnin, cut it up, bust it out, then hit it. Hurry yo ass, don’t get me fixin. Stop playin where the rose at? I don’t know shit, do my pockets look flat? I told you that shit spent homie, but you don’t listen, watchya don’t trust me. Think I been pickin? It’s stuck to the bottom of the boat, but we can’t float with families round ya know? They’d sniff or spot the glow, so pack ya shit up gotta go. Gotta find a box to occupy, light up in the trash, stunk to high heavens rise. Snipe a butt on your way I got shakes from bud cakes. Let us fix this state, because I need a head change.

But sour went south, plastic cross in my mouth. Tongue my teeth leakin drano, warm puss poppin out. Twitch knuckles stuck gummy, panic driven, need money, cure my vertebrae breakin crooked lousy and runny. Dread drops the clouds, cancel out the sunny side overhang on the route, tumble weed roll, viper vengeance and dust tolls, to eat through my skin, larva freedom bustin out. I thought I could maintain control, but now I start to doubt. My main vein once plump and prominent is shriveled like a raisin in a drought. I’m crackin here man, the air’s movin too quick, I can’t catch my breath. I miss my baby brother, I haven’t seen him since, my skin was flushed and relaxed; now it’s taught to a pinch. Situation getting fucky, what she’s saying don’t make sense. I know it’s just a come down but this one’s sure a bitch, I don’t know if I can handle it, but If I don’t then I’m dead. I miss when I was comfortable sleepin in a warm bed. Now the grass is wet matted dog shit, and covered in insects. Dry under the bridge, next to nazi tags and dirty rigs. Tie my pack to my bibs, wake up with a fuckin knife in my neck. From out the blue, a disturbing invite of death, no one to call, no one to help, my thoughts rapid flyin, colliding in my head, this is hell.

Panic swelter I’m swoonin.

Cut my ankle lose inches.

Pop the bag, slip the moon in.

Burn shards, fuck riches.

(Home bum death squad homie)

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freelanews-blog · 6 years ago

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Breeding Science Students

🎼🎼🎼 Won ti po chemical po, awon mo science students Kosewe, kosegbo, kosewe, kosegbo Kosewe, kosegbo, kosewe, kosegbo Won ti po'mi gutter po, oju ti dirty🎼🎼🎼 The popular hip hop artiste, Olamide a.k.a Baddo, is one musician that has sung songs on drugs and people are torn between accusing him promoting drug abuse and creating awareness about the scourge. Olamide is one musician I like any time, any day and any mood I find myself. So, forgive me if it appears I am going to be subjective in this regards. Personally, I believe he has done more in creating awareness of the vibrant, even thriving ‘drug abuse industry’ out there by people of all ages, all socio-economic standing, religions, across all ethnic divides. This abuse takes the form of people using different pharmaceutical and psychochemical substances- pawpaw leaves, Indian Hemp Marijuana--igbo, heroin, Tramadol, alcohol, cough syrup and ‘omi gutter’ (some go as far as inhaling gases from sewage soakaway/septic tanks) included, among others. My focus, however, as it has been since I started inundating you with my thoughts on children, is on how they are readily getting into drugs these days. That is where the title from Olamide’s song, Science Students, comes in. Society seems to be creating a time-bomb, a tsunami it is seemingly oblivious of. From parents to friends, opinion moulders to celebrities, etc., through our actions, inactions, reactions, negligence, silence and complacence, we are complicit in ‘breeding science students’ and creating juvenile junkies at an alarming rate. Olamide’s Science Students are actually the army of growing junkies and drug addicts in our society today. In recent times, a BBC documentary brought to the fore the very endemic nature of this scourge in Nigeria How so? A disturbing video surfaced on Facebook some days ago. A mother who presumably carried her child-a boy, for nine solid months; a mother who I feel should naturally want the best for her child; a mother who should strive towards making her child ‘somebody’ in life, was feeding him a bottle of Hero lager. For those who don’t know, Hero is a beer brand from the stables of SABMiller Plc. The proud mother in the video was quick to tell onlookers who seem to have a kind of bemused amusement at the ‘child drinking prodigy’s prowess, that her little boy, who is not more than four, consumes two bottles of that lager at a sitting! For an adult I know pegging the limit of his beer consumption to three bottles at most, I must certainly doff my hat even though it is for something I consider very negative. Yet another video showed a man from one of these East Asian countries feeding a toddler beer. This toddler has grown to like the 'beverage' so much that she (I think it’s a girl) will not drink from her feeding bottle. For the avoidance of doubt, these little children are already into drugs. A few years back, I told a group of people that alcohol generally is a drug. “No way,” they disagreed. So I had to unearth Wikipedia’s definition of what drugs are: “A drug is any substance (other than food that provides nutritional support) that, when inhaled, injected, smoked, consumed, absorbed via a patch on the skin, or dissolved under the tongue causes a physiological (and often psychological) change in the body. Key words for me there are physiological and psychological change. When beer is consumed, does it cause physiological and psychological change? The answer is a definite yes! Now that we have established that fact, I go back on track. I have seen what drugs can do to adults first hand, let alone what it can do to children. I can relate an experience of a young boy who had the unfortunate experience of getting addicted to smoking cigarettes at a very young age. He was barely seven when he began to smoke it. Something that started as ‘catching harmless fun’ with playmates using sticks of grasses in the cold of Jos, Plateau State, soon blossomed into trying a real cigarette one day, and the rest, as they say, is history. To maintain his newly found addiction, he had to steal from both parents to make ends meet. He graduated to finishing a pack in less than two days at a time! Unfortunately for him-or so he thought at that time, he got caught. Interestingly, and according to the young adult, his father who had beat the addiction to cigarettes was on hand to guide me out of the habit. The process, I assure you is a tale for another day. Now, you will agree with me that these children have been led to drugs by the very people God has made their custodians, their parents. If you follow Pastor Tony Rapu, a medical doctor, filmmaker, life coach and the Senior Pastor of the House of Freedom and the works he does with drug abuse victims on Instagram, you will understand that the problem at hand is endemic! No one is spared, no matter the disposition, bias and echelon of life they belong. Some of the victims he worked on were runaways from very rich families. Permit me to share a very insightful and of course, incisive account from an unknown author. The source, Whatsapp: I'm probably one if not the youngest here so permit me to speak up. I attended Kings College Lagos and graduated in the 1990's. A lot of our parents had no clue how some of us were already drunk by 10am in school or how we smoked a pack of Benson and Hedges per day at age 15. They had no clue how we scaled fences from our Victoria Island campus to Bar beach in the mornings to smoke weed and visit prostitutes at Lekki beach, literally waking them up to lay with them. I smoked weed once at age 16 for the first time when a classmate named Danjuma took us to Bar-beach and introduced us to it. That day happened to be my last time by some stroke of luck or my mother’s prayers. For some weird reason I despised the uncontrolled actions of my friends after we returned to school and vowed not to be like them. I was told I didn't smoke the weed well hence my calmness so I was invited back the next day but I declined. Danjuma never finished school. Mo is dead. John is a nuisance till date and a full junkie. Atu who was raised at 1004 is roaming the streets of the Island raving mad. This all started in 1994. This is 25 years after and it's amazing how naive some parents are- end of story. The truth is, drugs abuse has evolved assuming different dimension. Interestingly however, the peer pressure and influence still remain. Children have a daunting task in school facing peer pressure influence to do drugs. Songs, movies and television programmes are not helping matters. With more internet connected mobile phones at hand and the fast rising presence of children on social media (some parents actually encourage their children to use more of it), among others, parents have their work cut out for them. As the times gets harder, parents, like the hunter that must learn to shoot without missing, need to do more, become more vigilant and take more interest in the affairs of their children. As a psychologist myself, the major work of parenting is done by the time the child is 13 years old, even though they only become confident enough to show their true character much later. The truth of this position is one I can readily relate to. During an enlightenment engagement, I was at a loss on how I would pass ‘sensitive’ information on drug use and sexual health to most of my students who will come from the junior classes. You can imagine my shock when I found out that my trepidation was unfounded as many of my students have crossed the Rubicon as far as these issues were concerned! Imagine my students schooling me on the new ingenious ways of getting ‘high’! The truth is these children, at some point, know so much more than we give them credit for and they have seen or even experienced more than we imagine possible! As a child, I knew much more than my parents gave me credit for. We need to be extra vigilant and engage our children like never before not in arguments but from a place of knowledge about repercussions of certain actions. Drug abuse prevention starts with parents learning how to talk with their children about difficult topics. Equip them enough to be able to answer any question friends may ask in a bid to sway them or bend them to do their bidding. Believe me, this is very important. It makes absolutely no sense to lie to them. They will try to find out from their friends and then expose your lies. As an example, a young innocent boy, let us call him Tayo, once asked his mom where babies came from. Without hesitation, she told him that when couples get married, they pray to God every day and when they are asleep in the night, an angel drops the child at their house before they wake. He believed her story wholeheartedly- why wouldn’t he? His mother will not lie to him… or so he thought. Well, it happened he entered into an argument with his friend, whose father recently remarried after the death of his mother. He gave him the graphical details of what married couples do before they have children. How did he know? He peeped when his parents were at it. Other friends corroborated his story, and that was it! So Tayo came into the conclusion that if he needed genuine answers to his questions, his friends will readily provide them. Also, parents should learn to become their children’s best friends… listen to them and talk to them. I have vowed to become my own children’s best friends because mine were not to be. My father is over sixty and retired, yet, when I talk with him, I punctuate with ‘sir’ and still hold this air of formal reverence for him. I have never hugged that man-now this was never a problem. Thankfully, I didn’t grow to become something negative but I was never able to share things I consider sensitive with him. Do help your child make good choices and good friends. Children are more easily influenced by those they move with. Help them choose their friends. As a child, I never liked that my parents chose my friends for me: but today, I am grateful they did as some of the persons they warned me against ended up on the wrong side of society and the law. Teach your child different ways to say “No!” and mean it. More importantly, you as their parents are the strongest influence that they have. There is no guarantee that your child will not do drugs, but drug use is much less likely to happen if you provide guidance and clear rules about not using drugs, spend time with them and avoid using tobacco or other drugs yourself. Popular American Novelist, James Baldwin once noted that children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. How fittingly true! More importantly, after we have done all these, we must pray for them too. It's a tough time to be a parent but it was never easy in the first place. I hope you enjoyed and learnt from this week’s reflections? Please leave your comments below or reach me on ….. Enjoy the week(end). Read the full article

#angelsfield #KingsCollegeLagos #Olamidea.k.aBaddo #omolayooseni #PeerEducationTrainer #SABMillerPlc #VictoriaIslandcampus

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bloojayoolie · 6 years ago

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Adam Sandler, Alive, and Animals: Johnny Boy 'limbo', Marston Arthur More Organ Holland Hoseas Before Broseas swagalicious crunchy outside, self-deprecating chewy center - "how many licks does it take the squad's favorite disaster scrappy damsel squares up at a moment's notice can never seem to get their shit together to get to the center of my depression" goth jock dropout just wants to settle down - - dumbest smart person alive - denies being moe - "wanna know how I got these scars- wait where are you going" - makes 50+ post twitter threads nobody reads just needs a break - "Actually, correlation is not causation" - thinks they're charming, is actually charming - constantly forgets their age - "back in my day - only one who knows what the fuck they're talking about incredible artist, thinks their stuff is 'okay' still needs to shut the fuck up - one shot, one kill - "once I go viral it's over for you hoes" - has a 'Home Is Where The Heart Is' welcome mat-liked by practically everybody - productive procrastinator can never hold down a relationship - Instant Uncle, Just Add Baby suffers from chronic pushover syndrome "no questions, dammit, no questions" - jokes hit too close to home - Good bad influence - weed friend Make It Work Guy Fieri Will Billiamson Bad Santa -always knows what to play at a party - adopts everyone on sight - great with kids, great with animals, wants to hold your baby - scientific evidence good girls want bad boys - tsundere - burns salads - "have you eaten today" - owns etsy account, too busy to make anything - punches self for fun - professional alcoholic - always needs to borrow money - terrible drunk, never remembers what happened that night walks around the house in their underwear gives great hugs needs seven showers group's unexpected therapist patronus is secondhand embarrassment just wants to be part of the family "MCDONALD'S! MCDONALD'S! MCDONALD'S!"* is the party cultured, well-traveled and stylish; made for Instagram - *gestures to all of you* "we need to do something about this" - always starts drama, yet always seems to avoid it bad taste in literally everything, banned from recommending outings - will always have squad's back iron constitution, never gets sick - "say that to my fucking face" - may seem Mad, is actually Sad petty *pulls up in drive-thru, orders single starts the day with horoscope readings - Chaotic Loyal black coffee, leaves t" FUCKS.EXE STOPPED WORKING 'mSorry Ms. Jackson tOh) Bastard Millennial Green Hat McGuy "join team chat" - fashionable at all times, even when going to the grocery store can't do crime if you ain't cute -only dates fictional men won't leave the house for days need lives on cow tales and TVTropes says they can hold their liquor regularly tells squad to hydrate can't actually hold their liquor too nice for own good living boke and tsukkomi routine to shut up yesterday social interaction, naps for ten years it's basic hygiene and laying beneath the stars -"please stop talking" exhausted after two minutes of maybe they're born with it, maybe soft spot for animals, slow dancing cooler than you . living proof the scariest people frat brotryhard nerd gem fusion come in the nicest packages graceful loser, even more graceful winner - "what day is it again" nobody sees clapbacks coming until it's never learned how to drive every day is roast session day - "I'll roast you, I'll roast them, I'll roast me fuckin' self" - Has never completed No Nut November sings in the shower - adores Linkin Park late - "are you ready yet" "almost" - allergic to idiots Adam Sandler Regina O'George Let Me Speak To Your Manager - retired mom friend, back from retirement ages every time someone references a vine instead of responding normally - smokes sixty packs a day Goof Troop social norms are for dweebs just wants to play videogames - No Drama? No ProblemTM -"Local Mean Girl Refuses To Be Toppled From Throne" - loses shit over small things -THIS close to cutting someone and snack in peace shoves people in lockers to show affection forgets not to swear in front of other never forgets a birthday shaped like a friend only one in squad who can cook only one in squad who can drive people's children the queen of throwing down "fuck, sorry about that" given up on romance savwy businessowner resident gossip big problems are Whatever - needs therapy - Favorite Songs Are 'Find Me Somebody- smells amazing To Love' And 'Before He Cheats' common sense frequently left on read - hasn't seen most popular movies - a matryoshka of pain - wishes you didn't look like a dump truck knows Wicked by heart - only one in squad who does taxes Songs Are unforgiveable weeb - villain origin story is that stubborn chin hair that keeps growing back - always says 'gg' after every game incredible skin care regimen - "just drink more water" award winning sailor mouth - Big Hair, Don't Care "What's My Age Again" by Blink 182 World's Saddest Violin Bullshit Magician Expletive Noises Looks like a million dollars, is probably worth a million dollars - family person, loves everybody keeps Twitter on private - meows back at their cat - extroverted introvert -feels guilty for not logging into Animal Crossing for nine months thinks existence is kind of funny invented the word 'dapper - the living embodiment of when you try your best but you don't succeed' - just wants to be loved and cherished -great with animals, never scratched the life of the party, when they're not launching into drunken diatribes -smartest smart person alive -stays up until three in the morning thinking about the meaning of life - an essential addition to any squad - reads at 10,000 miles per hour wants to stab Banksy hates stan culture hoards comfort food beneath their desk gets sentimental over their Neopets used to hoard Beanie Babies - hates answering the phone - silently lurks in Twitch chatrooms - needs more friends - stylish drunk with two hollow legs - never fails to speak their mind great at impressions -not-so-secretly depressed - regularly confuses main for private "just forget I said that haha" preserves their right hook for justice - stared into the void, got bored quotes movies when provoked - "That's just, like, your opinion, man." the most perfect teeth Baby Boy...Baby Talk Shit, Get Hit Mr. Krabs A Dog - soft outside, softer inside - never ashamed to cry - weak spot for pups, needs to pet every dog they see -only one of the squad that's been punched squad's resident cheapskate needs to seriously reconsider things trolling game out of control A dog - never seems to accumulate debt, also never tips the waiter took college prep in high school - can't fight to save their life - surprisingly terrifying comebacks - multilingual gg ez clap" oves Bon Iver, Death Grips and Beyonce equally - Kappa Kappa KappaRoss CoolStoryBob workplace's local kissass likes to give gifts to sad friends living embodiment of a flower crown talks during movies home life is a mess - needs a vacation, too self-conscious - doesn't flush toilets in public bathrooms to take one - adopted by everybody - "Oh, I won't report you...yet" believes they were born in the wrong era - has never yelled once - in love with the smell of old books - wishes on stars when no one's looking leaves breadcrumbs in butter a well-rounded tool - nobody knows why they keep getting invited"Poverty is a state of mind." champagnesuperhoeva: red dead redemption 2 tag yourself masterpost now all in one spot for your convenient bullshit needs tag your chronic pain, tag your panic attacks, tag your existential crisis I am all of these yet none of them at the same time

#funny #lol #humor #memes #meme #memehumor #dank memes #funny pics #rolf #lmao #Adam Sandler #Alive

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goswagcollectorfire · 5 years ago

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CARL’S BLOG: CLEBURNE COUNTY ITS PEOPLE, VOL. 2, The People of Edgemont, Arkansas

Author’s Note: This concludes the early history of Edgemont, Cleburne County, Arkansas. In my history of CLEBURNE COUNTY AND ITS PEOPLE, I tried to seek out the early settlers of each community in the new county, and last county formed in Arkansas. There are several other well known families, but there was not room to recognize everyone who contributed to the growth and development of Edgemont. I hope you who have been reading these stories enjoyed reading of relatives and friends of the pass. You will notice there is lots of genealogy in these stories. If you had relatives included in these stories fill free to use any of the data I’ve written about. It took me four years to research and publish CLEBURNE COUNTY AND ITS PEOPLE, VOL. 1, AND 2. There will be more to come on other settlements in days to come. Enjoy! Carl J. Barger, Author

3-22-20: CLEBURNE COUNTY AND ITS PEOPLE, VOL.2: The People of Edgemont, Arkansas.

W. Morgan (1870-1952) W. Morgan was born on November 2, 1870, in South Carolina. He moved to Arkansas with his parents as a child and lived in Edgemont for seventy-two years. He was educated in an one-room school house in Edgemont. After growing to adulthood, he married Miss. Nesy B. Gadberry on December 21, 1893. They celebrated their fifty-eight wedding anniversary on December 21, 1951 at their home in Edgemont. W. W. Morgan was a member of the Christian church, a member of the Eastern Star, a Mason, a master and secretary of the Sam Williams Lodge for several years. In 1951, Mr. Morgan received a fifty year-member citation for being one of the oldest members of the lodge. Mr. Morgan was perhaps one of the most widely known citizens in Cleburne County. He was very active in the community. He served as postmaster at Edgemont for several years and served on the Edgemont Board of Education for twenty years. He was one of the county’s most respected citizens and a Christian gentleman whose character was impeachable. He was well read and was interested in current events. He was particularly interested in the welfare of his community and his fellowman. He never hesitated to take a stand on issues which he believed to be clean and wholesome. On Monday June 28, 1952, W. W. Morgan died unexpectedly at his Edgemont home. He was eighty-one years old. At the time of his death, he was survived by his wife Mrs. Neasy B. Gadberry Morgan of the home; two sons, Dewey W. Morgan of England, Arkansas, and John C. Morgan of Searcy, Arkansas; three daughters. Mrs. Lee Luker of Searcy, Mrs. Pearl Myatt of Heber Springs, and Mrs. Alice Stafford of Edgemont; a sister, Mrs. Celia Rollins of Edgemont; eight grandchildren and a great-grandchild. Funeral services were conducted by Rev. Roy Henderson of Augusta, Arkansas, at the North Crossroads Church. Special music was by a quartet, Bynum Stark T. L. Turney, Oran Beasley and Jackie Pettit. Interment was North Cross Roads under the direction of the Masonic Lodge of Edgemont and Olmstead Funeral Home of Heber Springs. Pallbearers were members of the Masonic Order of the Edgemont Lodge.

Neasy B. Gadberry Morgan (1893-1959)

Neasy B. Gadberrry Morgan was born in Eglantine, Van Buren County, Arkansas, on December 21, 1893. She and her family moved to Edgemont where she lived out her life. She was the widow of W. W. Morgan who was postmaster of Edgemont for many years and joint owner of a large mercantile store in Edgemont with his brother-in-law, William Barnum. The mercantile business flourished for many years when Edgemont was booming with activities of the lumber and stave industry. She and W. W. Morgan were parents to three daughters and two sons. Mrs. Morgan was a member of the Church of Christ. She was a charter member of the Edgemont Chapter, Order of Eastern Star and was chaplain of the chapter for many years. Her gentle and engaging personality endeared her to friends, and her ability to retain her youthful interests and graces as the years advanced were remarkably stimulating to friends. On Saturday February 7, 1959, Mrs. Neasy B. Gadberry Morgan, widow of W. W. Morgan and one of the oldest citizens of Edgemont community died at her daughter’s home in Edgemont. She was eighty-seven years old. Mrs. Morgan was preceded in death by her husband, W. W. Morgan, on June 28, 1952, and three sons. At the time of her death, she was survived by three daughters, Mrs. J. S. Luker of Searcy, Arkansas, Mrs. Alice Stafford and Mrs. Pearl Myatt of Edgemont, two sons, Dewey W. Morgan and John C. Morgan of Edgemont; two sisters, Mrs. I. L. Johnson of Farmersville, Texas, and Mrs. John McEntire of Higden; eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Funeral services for Mrs. Morgan were held at the Olmstead Funeral Home chapel under the directions of Rev. J. R. Newman. Pallbearers were E. L. Stanfield, Olan Barger, Dr. J. S. Luker, O. B. Morgan, Floyd Stafford and Everett Bradford. Interment was in the Shiloh Cemetery by Olmstead funeral home of Heber Springs, Arkansas. William F. Rollins (1905-1942) William Fletcher Rollins was born on April 5, 1905, to Robert H. Rollins and Celia Rollins of Edgemont, Cleburne County, Arkansas. William was a lifelong resident of Edgemont, Arkansas. He was one of five children born to Robert and Celia Rollins. His siblings were Anis Pauline Rollins, Floyd Rollins, Maris Rollins, and Ruth Rollins. William was educated in a two-room schoolhouse in Edgemont. After reaching adulthood, he was employed with the Missouri and Arkansas North Railroad as a bridge carpenter. On November 26, 1930, he married Miss Pearl Thompson of Cleburne County. To this marriage union were born five children. On Saturday morning, November 15, 1942, William Fletcher Rollins, age thirty-seven was fatally injured near Miller when a motor car derailed. The accident occurred at 8:55 A.M. and he died at the Estelle Hospital at 11:15 A.M. William, accompanied by other members of the bridge crew, was in route to work when the motor car ran into a split rail, wrecking the car and pinning William underneath a push car which was attached to the motor car. At the time of his death, he was survived by his mother, Celia Rollins of Edgemont; his wife, Pearl Thompson Rollins of the home; and his five children. He is also survived by one sister, Mrs. Leonard Gribble of Heber Springs; and one brother, Floyd Rollins of Edgemont. Funeral services were held at the family home at Edgemont Sunday afternoon by Rev. G. W. Norman of Heber Springs, assisted by Rev. Weed, pastor of the Edgemont Baptist Church. Interment was in the Davies Special Cemetery, Fairfield Bay, Arkansas by Olmstead Funeral Home of Heber Springs, Arkansas. Homer Dee Smith (1901-1980)

Homer Dee Smith was born on April 26, 1901, at Shiloh, Cleburne County, Arkansas. He was the son of William P. Smith and Kelly Maude Stark of Shiloh. Homer was educated in the Edgemont community schools and spent his entire life in Cleburne County. Homer was a retired farmer and a member of the Church of Christ in Higden, Arkansas. He was active in community events and was known widely throughout Cleburne County. On Friday, July 11, 1980, Homer Smith went to be with his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He died at his home in Edgemont at the age of seventy-nine. Those surviving Homer were his wife, Ella Mae Smith of the home; four sons, Alfred Smith of Higden, Dewey Smith of Edgemont, Victor Smith of Little Rock, and Bobby Smith of Vilonia; one brother, Ervin Smith of Heber Springs; two sisters, Mrs. Norma Fox of Heber Springs, and Mrs. Purdy Murphy of Kokomo, Indiana; twelve grandchildren; and ten great-grandchildren. Funeral services for Mr. Smith were held at the Church of Christ in Higden, Arkansas. Ed Inman officiated at Mr. Smith’s last rites. Interment was in the Shiloh Crossroads Cemetery by Olmstead Funeral Home of Heber Springs. Mr. Smith’s grandsons were pallbearers for the funeral. Eliza Thomas Stanfield (1872-1964) Eliza Thomas Stansfield was born in the state of Indiana on July 4, 1872. His parents were Bedford Stanfield and Helen Shields Stanfi eld. He spent most of his life in Cleburne County. He married Miss Sally J. Ash, also of Indiana, in 1893. They lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, for several years before moving to Cleburne county. Mrs. Stanfield died July 17, 1958, sixty-five years after their marriage. Mr. Stanfield settle at Edgemont in 1908 when that town was the center of a flourishing timber industry. He was active in the lumber, sawmill, and banking business there for many years before moving to Cleburne county. Mr. Stanfield was a man of remarkable stamina, who served as county engineer until he was eighty-nine. His young assistant surveyors often commented that his agility in climbing the mountains and rough terrain day after day offered them a challenge in endurance. Mr. Stansfield was active in all phases of Masonic work. He was made a Master Mason in Cincinnati in 1906, and in 1956 he was honored by the Grand Lodge of Arkansas with a fifty year emblem. He was a thirty-two-degree Mason and a Member of the Arkansas Consistory at Little Rock. Mr. Stanfield had been a member of the Sam Williams Lodge No. 89 at Edgemont for more than fifty-six years and had filled every post in the Lodge from worshipful master down. He was equally as active as a member of the Order of Eastern Star and had filled every office in the chapter. He had been a member of the Edgemont Christian Church for many years. On Friday, June 18, 1964, Eliza Thomas Stanfield passed away in the Heber Springs Hospital. He was ninety-two years old. He is survived by two sons, E.T. (Lovell) Stanfield, a retired U. S. Air Force Colonel of Heber Springs and the Rev. O. E. (Omer) Stanfi eld, a Presbyterian minister at Dardanelle; six grandchildren, ten great-grandchildren, three great-great-grandchildren, and a legion of friends who shared in the generosity of his long and upright life of good citizenship and service to his fellowmen. Funeral services were held at the Olmstead Funeral Home Chapel in Heber Springs. He was one of Cleburne County’s oldest a most prominent citizen. The Rev. Fleet Cook and Mr. Charles Dowdy offi ciated at the final tribute. Interment was in the City Cemetery with graveside honors by the Masonic Lodge.

Published by cjbarger

I am the author of SWORDS AND PLOWSHARES; MAMIE, AN OZARK MOUNTAIN GIRL OF COURAGE; CLEBURNE COUNTY AND ITS PEOPLE, VOL. I &II; DARK CLOUDS OVER ALABAMA; BLUE SKIES OF EL DORADO, sequel to DARK CLOUDS OVER ALABAMA; ARKANSAS HILLBILLY, ONE MAN'S MEMOIR OF A BLESSED LIFE, and soon, SONS OF WAR. Be looking for SONS OF WAR in the next few months on Amazon.Com. and Barnes&Noble.Com.View all posts by cjbarger

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sandiegodjstaci · 5 years ago

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The Hipster's Guide to Classic Country Music

Let’s face it…if your mountain man beard, microbrew fetish, and pipe collection are no longer enough, classic country music can help you get to the next level of hipster (so can a pair of Wrangler jeans). My name is DJ Staci, the Track Star, and I grew up on country music. I lived on a 5-acre llama ranch just outside of Seattle during the grunge era…do you see how there’s a hipster seed in there? I knew I was not your standard redneck when, at 14, my dad’s hunting drew me towards vegetarianism (celebrating 26 meat-free years now). At 18, I pierced my nose and moved to southern California where I could eat tofu, get feminism tattoos, and vote for democrats in a diverse, shame-free environment…but that country music seed definitely grew roots throughout my childhood. In fact, during my 20s, I escaped my days of drinking expensive juice and visiting organic farmer’s markets by honky tonkin’ every week. I would go line dancing at the Brandin’ Iron Saloon in San Bernardino (the biggest & best honky tonk a.k.a. country bar west of Gilley’s…and watch John Travolta & Debra Winger in “Urban Cowboy” if you don’t understand either of those references).

Memes from We Hate Pop Country

Unfortunately, country music withered up and died after the 2000s. After DJing at the world’s largest country music festival (Stagecoach–the country cousin of Coachella), I had to stop listening to country music on the radio. The so-called country you hear on the radio today is known as “pop country” by country music purists (those of us who prefer classic country or “real” country). The artists who “ruined” country music are people like Taylor Swift, Sam Hunt, Florida Georgia Line, Thomas Rhett, & Luke Bryant (and many others). Follow “We Hate Pop Country” on Facebook to learn more.

If you like “Wake Me Up” by Avicii, “Honey I’m Good” by Andy Grammer, “I Will Wait” by Mumford & Sons, “The Country Death Song” by the Violent Femmes, “Easy” by Sheryl Crow, “Wish I Knew You” by the Revivalists, “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show, or Philip Phillips, classic country will be a great fit. If watching the movie Walk the Line turned you into a Johnny Cash fan, rest assured there is plenty more music like that out there. If you resonate as a defiant outsider or a feminist or a government-hating pothead, classic country music welcomes you with open arms! Classic country is outlaw music–pure and simple. It was created by people who knew they were on the outskirts of mainstream society and unshakingly flipped it the bird à la Johnny Cash at San Quentin (below).

Johnny Cash after photographer Jim Marshall asked him to do a shot for the warden (San Quentin Prison – 1969)

Did you know Loretta Lynn, who sang the feminist anthem “The Pill,” & Jack White from the White Stripes, who also has some killer bluegrass tunes, created an album together? Did you know Johnny Cash has covered songs by Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode? Have you heard Lady Gaga’s country roads version of “Born This Way?” Did you know Beyonce has a kick ass collab with the Dixie Chicks (the girl-power Texas band who was banned from country radio for saying they were ashamed that George Bush is from their home state) called “Daddy Lessons”? Did you know the black lead singer of Hootie & the Blowfish bailed on the band so he could start a solo country music career (country fans know him as Darius Rucker)? Did you know when I DJ classic country parties, I have to ask the client if swear words are OK?

Do I have your attention now? I thought so. Let’s continue 🙂 You’ll love the country artists as much as you love their music–I promise.

Justin Timberlake & Chris Stapleton performing together at the 49th Country Music Association Awards

THE KING OF COUNTRY MUSIC

First, let’s start with the forefather of all country music kick-assery: Hank Williams. Hank signed to MGM Records in 1947 and his twangy anthems changed country music forever. He was famously fired by the Grand Ole Opry in 1952 after one of many no-shows. He lived a turbulent life that his son Hank Jr sings about in his cornerstone song “Family Tradition.” In true rock star style, Hank Sr. died of heart failure brought on by prescription drug abuse and alcoholism in 1953. Hipster-friendly Hank Williams songs include:

I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry

Hey Good Lookin’

Jambalaya (on the Bayou)

Tear in my Beer

Your Cheating Heart

TOP 125 CLASSIC COUNTRY SONGS FOR HIPSTERS

Pour yourself some Popcorn Sutton’s Tennessee White Whiskey (that’s legal moonshine for you city slickers) & get ready for some serious drinkin’ music free of “Friends in Low Places,” “Achy Breaky Heart,” “Boot Scootin’ Boogie,” “Old Town Road,” and “The Git Up.” I’ve includes lots of notes & trivia about the playlist songs because we hipsters can’t just enjoy music in a vacuum…we like to sound like a seasoned expert when putting on a playlist for friends, yes? I’ve included standards as well as a number of “B sides” that will even impress country music enthusiasts…you know the kind of people who still say “Country Western.”

Pin me! Share me! Tweet me!

18 Wheels & a Dozen Roses, Kathy Mattea

9 to 5, Dolly Parton

A Boy Named Sue, Johnny Cash

All My Exes Live in Texas, George Strait

Amarillo by Morning, George Strait

Are You Ready for the Country, Waylon Jennings

Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?, Waylon Jennings (Referring to Hank Williams Sr.)

Back Where I Come From, Kenny Chesney

Bed You Made for Me, Highway 101

Before Country Was Cool, Barbara Mandrell

Born to Boogie, Hank Williams Jr. (Hank Sr’s son)

Chattahoochee, Alan Jackson

Church on Cumberland Road, Shenandoah

Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta Lynn (Watch her biographical movie “Coal Miner’s Daughter” staring Sissy Spacek!)

Coat of Many Colors, Dolly Parton

Copenhagen, Chris Le Deux (Yep, chew killed this underground country singer with a cult following. His catchy, hilarious love song to Copenhagen chewing tobacco is like a country version of “Can’t Feel My Face” or “Mary Jane.”)

Copperhead Road, Steve Earle (Listen carefully…After coming home from war, this soldier gives up on the family tradition of making moonshine because he realized when he was in Viet Nam that he could just grow weed instead.)

Country Boy Can Survive, Hank Williams Jr.

Country Club, Travis Tritt

Country Roads, Take Me Home, John Denver (Lucky if I get through this one without tearing up…)

Cowboy Take Me Away, Dixie Chicks

Crazy, Patsy Cline (Sadly, the anthem of Battered Woman’s Syndrome…Patsy was in a violent marriage at the height of her fame. Written by Willie Nelson.)

Cripple Creek, Earl Scruggs & Lester Flatt

Devil Went Down to Georgia, Charlie Daniels Band

Digging Up Bones, Randy Travis

Dixieland Delight, Alabama

Down at the Twist & Shout, Mary-Chapin Carpenter

Dueling Banjos, Roy Clark & Buck Owens

El Paso, Marty Robbins (After writing this song, Marty Robbins was flying over El Paso & had a revelation that he was the cowboy in the song in a past life…so he wrote “El Paso City” about that experience.)

Elvira, Oak Ridge Boys

Every Little Thing, Carlene Carter (Yep, June Carter’s daughter…she called Johnny Cash “Stepdad.” Roseanne Cash’s “Tennessee Flat Top Box” is also a good one.)

Family Tradition, Hank Williams Jr (A proud nod to his famous father…”Put yourself in my position–if I get stoned and sing all night long, it’s a family tradition.” When you hear this song at a honky tonk, know the customs! When Jr sings, “Why do you drink?” The crowd shouts back “To get drunk!” When Jr sings, “Why do you roll smoke?” The crowd shouts, “To get high!” When he sings, “Why must you act out the songs that you wrote?” The crowd shouts, “To get laid!”)

Fancy, Reba McEntire

Fishin’ in the Dark, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

Flowers on the Wall, Statler Brothers

Folsom Prison Blues, Johnny Cash

Fool-Hearted Memory, George Strait (His first of SIXTY #1 hits–the most in country music history! Too many for this list but do check them out.)

Get a Rhythm, Johnny Cash

Guitars & Cadillacs, Dwight Yoakum (One of the few west coasters on the list…from Bakersfield, California — also a vegetarian!)

Have Mercy, Judds (A female country duo–mother & sister to famous actress Ashley Judd!)

Highway Man, The Highwaymen (The Highwaymen are Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, & Kris Kristofferson.)

Hillbilly Rock, Marty Stewart

Honky Tonk Man, Dwight Yoakum

Hooked on an 8-Second Ride, Chris Le Deux (Pronounced “Le Doo”)

Hot Rod Lincoln, Commander Cody

I Ain’t Livin’ Long Like This, Waylon Jennings

I Love a Rainy Night, Eddie Rabbitt

I Think I’ll Just Sit Here & Drink, Merle Haggard

I Walk the Line, Johnny Cash

I’m No Stranger to the Rain, Keith Whitley

If You’re Gonna Play in Texas, Alabama

If You’ve Got the Money, Willie Nelson

If Your Heart Ain’t Busy, Tanya Tucker

It Only Hurts When I Cry, Dwight Yoakum

Jackson, Johnny Cash & June Carter

Jolene, Dolly Parton

Jose Cuervo, Shelly West

Kaw-Liga, Hank Williams Jr. (Hank Sr also does this one.)

Lay You Down, Conway Twitty

Long Time Gone, Dixie Chicks

Louisiana Saturday Night, Mel McDaniel

Luckenbach Texas, Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson

Mama Tried, Merle Haggard

Maybe It Was Memphis, Pam Tillis

Meet Me in Montana, Dan Seals

Midnight Girl in a Sunset Town, Sweethearts of the Rodeo

Mountain Music, Alabama

Mud on the Tires, Brad Paisley

Mule Skinner Blues, Dolly Parton

My Kind of Girl, Colin Raye

Next to You, Shenandoah

No Time to Kill, Clint Black

Nobody Wins, Radney Foster

Norma Jean Riley, Diamond Rio

One Piece at a Time, Johnny Cash

Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line, Waylon Jennings

Orange Blossom Special, Johnny Cash

Pancho & Lefty, Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard

Papa Loved Mama, Garth Brooks

Past the Point of Rescue, Hal Ketchum

Pick-Up Man, Joe Diffie

Play Something Country, Brooks & Dunn

Redneck Girl, Bellamy Brothers (During the corresponding Redneck Girl line dance, when the song says, “A redneck girl got her name on the back of her belt,” dancers shout, “Bullshit! Bullshit! F— you!” When the song says, “She’s got a kiss on her lips for her man and no one else,” dancers repeat, “Bullshit! Bullshit! F— you!” When the song says, “A coyote’s howling out on the prairie,” dancers howl. Finally, the song says, “First comes love, then comes marriage.” After “love,” dancers interject, “Then sex!!!”)

Ring of Fire, Johnny Cash

Rockin’ With the Rhythm, Judds

Rodeo, Garth Brooks

Rough & Ready, Trace Adkins

Saturday Night Special, Conway Twitty (Yes, the same guy they famously poke fun at on “Family Guy”–see below)

Sin Wagon, Dixie Chicks

Smoky Mountain Rain, Ronnie Milsap

Sold, John Michael Montgomery

Some Girls Do, Sawyer Brown

Song of the South, Alabama

Stampede, Chris Le Deux

Stand by Your Man, Tammy Wynette

Straight Tequila Night, John Anderson

Streets of Bakersfield, Dwight Yoakum

Sweet Dreams of You, Patsy Cline

Tempted, Marty Stuart

Tennessee River & a Mountain Man, Alabama

Thank God I’m a Country Boy, John Denver (He’s an outspoken vegan and & rep for P.E.T.A #MeatlessMondays)

That Kind of Girl, Patty Loveless

That’s My Story, Collin Raye

That’s What I Like About You, Trisha Yearwood (She’s married to Garth Brooks & is a celebrity chef with a reality cooking show.)

The Gambler, Kenny Rogers

The Pill, Lorettta Lynn (Also check out her cover of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walking.”)

The Race Is On, Sawyer Brown (or any of the older versions)

The Thunder Rolls, Garth Brooks

Ticks, Brad Paisley

Tight-Fittin’ Jeans, Conway Twitty

Tonight We Ride, Tom Russell (We played this at my dad’s funeral…definitely a “b side.”)

Tougher Than the Rest, Chris Le Deux

Tulsa Time, Don Williams

Two Feet of Topsoil, Brad Paisley

Walkin’ After Midnight, Patsy Cline (Check out the Cyndi Lauper cover!)

What Was I Thinkin,’ Dierks Bentley

When You Say Nothing At All, Keith Whitley (Alison Krauss’ version might be more popular though…)

Whiskey, If You Were a Woman, Highway 101

Why Not Me, Judds

Wide Open Spaces, Dixie Chicks

Will the Circle Be Unbroken, dozens of versions

Wrong Side of Memphis, Trisha Yearwood

You Ain’t Woman Enough, Loretta Lynn

You Really Had Me Going, Holly Dunn

You’ve Never Been This Far Before, Conway Twitty

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There are a few current country artists with that classic country sound: Chris Stapleton, Brothers Osborn, some Miranda Lambert (try “Gunpowder & Lead” or “Little Red Wagon”), or Cody Jinks.

If you’re afraid country music is too white, straight, or conservative for you, check out Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush,” Maddie & Tae’s “Girl in a Country Song,” the Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl,” Los Lonely Boys’ “Heaven,” Kacey Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow,” Big & Rich’s “Love Train,” Garth Brooks’ “We Shall Be Free,” John Anderson’s “Seminole Wind,” or anything by Charlie Pride, Cowboy Troy, k.d. lang, or Freddie Fender.

If you enjoy a good DJ mix, I’m not the only one doing creative things with country music–check out DeeJay Silver, DJ Sinister’s Country Fried Mix, VDJ JD, DJ Bad Ash, or DJ Hish (who I was on the roster with at the Stagecoach Festival and the Moonshine Miles Festival).

Film enthusiast? In addition to watching Johnny Cash’s biographical Walk the Line, you can also try some of these country cult classics: Coal Miner’s Daughter (about Loretta Lynn), Urban Cowboy (with John Travolta & Debra Winger), Pure Country (starring George Strait), Sweet Dreams (about Patsy Cline), Eight Seconds (with Luke Perry)…as well as anything starring Dolly Parton (like 9 to 5 or Steel Magnolias) or Kris Kristofferson (like A Star Is Born or Blade). Dwight Yoakum has a few famous cameos as well (like Sling Blade or Crank). But the real question is: are they “acting” or just “acting natural”? Once you understand that reference, you officially get a gold star in the hipster country music Olympics!!! (Leave me your thoughts in the comments below.)

If you enjoyed the Hipster’s Guide to Classic Country Music, I urge you to explore bluegrass and folk music. And, yes, I know not every “staple” classic country jam is on the list (again, comment below). I also have my Guitar-Infused Country & Classic Rock Wedding Cocktail Hour Playlist and Ultimate Bluegrass Wedding Cocktail Hour & Dinner Music Playlist you can scope out. Some say “crank it up,” but, around here, we say “Hank it up!” Enjoy your hip classic country tunes!

LISTEN TO THE HIPSTER’S CLASSIC COUNTRY PLAYLIST

Check it out on YouTube or Spotify.

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Like DJ Staci's vibe? Stalk her wedding DJ services below! shshsh...

GIVE IT TO ME BABY

#dj staci playlist #General Playlists #Music &amp; Mixes

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ciathyzareposts · 6 years ago

Text

Shades of Gray

Ladies and gentlemen, come and see. This isn’t a country here but an epic failure factory, an excuse for a place, a weed lot, an abyss for tightrope walkers, blindman’s bluff for the sightless saddled with delusions of grandeur, proud mountains reduced to dust dumped in big helpings into the cruciform maws of sick children who crouch waiting in the hope of insane epiphanies, behaving badly and swamped besides, bogged down in their devil’s quagmires. Our history is a corset, a stifling cell, a great searing fire.

— Lyonel Trouillot

What’s to be done about Haiti?

Generations have asked that question about the first and most intractable poster child for postcolonial despair, the poorest country in South America now and seemingly forever, a place whose corruption and futility manages to make the oft-troubled countries around it look like models of good governance. Nowhere feels James Joyce’s description of history as “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” more apt. Indeed, Haiti stands as perhaps the ultimate counterargument to the idealistic theory of history as progress. Here history really is just one damned thing after another — differing slightly in the details, but always the same at bottom.

But why should it be this way? What has been so perplexing and infuriating about Haiti for so long is that there seems to be no real reason for its constant suffering. Long ago, when it was still a French colony, it was known as the “Pearl of the Caribbean,” and was not only beautiful but rich; at the time of the American Revolution, it was richer than any one of the thirteen British American colonies. Those few who bother to visit Haiti today still call it one of the most beautiful places of all in the beautiful region that is the Caribbean. Today the Dominican Republic, the nation with which Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola, is booming, the most popular tourist spot in the Caribbean, with the fastest-growing economy anywhere in North or South America. But Haiti, despite being blessed with all the same geographic advantages, languishes in poverty next door, seething with resentment over its condition. It’s as if the people of Haiti have been cursed by one of the voodoo gods to which some of them still pray to act out an eternal farce of chaos, despair, and senseless violence.

Some scenes from the life of Haiti…

…you are a proud Mandingue hunter in a hot West African land. But you’re not hunting. You’re being hunted — by slavers, both black and white. You run, and run, and run, until your lungs are near to bursting. But it’s no use. You’re captured and chained like an animal, and thrust into the dank hold of a sailing ship. Hundreds of your countrymen and women are here — hungry, thirsty, some beaten and maimed by your captors. All are terrified for themselves and their families, from whom they’ve been cruelly separated. Many die on the long voyage. But when it’s over, you wonder if perhaps they were the lucky ones…

The recorded history of the island of Hispaniola begins with the obliteration of the people who had always lived there. The Spanish conquistadors arrived on the island in the fifteenth century, bringing with them diseases against which the native population, known as the Taíno, had no resistance, along with a brutal regime of forced labor. Within two generations, the Taíno were no more. They left behind only a handful of words which entered the European vocabulary, like “hammock,” “hurricane,” “savanna,” “canoe,” “barbecue,” and “tobacco.” The Spanish, having lost their labor force, shrugged their shoulders and largely abandoned Hispaniola.

But in the ensuing centuries, Europeans developed a taste for sugar, which could be produced in large quantities only in the form of sugarcane, which in turn grew well only in tropical climates like those of the Caribbean. Thus the abandoned island of Hispaniola began to have value again. The French took possession of the western third of the island — the part known as Haiti today — with the Treaty of Ryswick, which ended the Nine Years War in 1697. France officially incorporated its new colony of Saint-Domingue on Hispaniola the same year.

Growing sugarcane demanded backbreaking labor under the hot tropical sun, work of a kind judged unsuitable for any white man. And so, with no more native population to enslave, the French began to import slaves from Africa. Their labor turned Saint-Domingue in a matter of a few decades from a backwater into one of the jewels of France’s overseas empire. In 1790, the year of the colony’s peak, 48,000 slaves were imported to join the 500,000 who were already there. It was necessary to import slaves in such huge numbers just to maintain the population in light of the appalling death toll of those working in the fields; little Saint-Domingue alone imported more slaves over the course of its history than the entirety of the eventual United States.

…you’re a slave, toiling ceaselessly in a Haitian cane field for your French masters. While they live bloated with wealth, you and your fellows know little but hardship and pain. Brandings, floggings, rape, and killing are everyday events. And for the slightest infraction, a man could be tortured to death by means limited only by his owners’ dark imaginations. What little comfort you find is in the company of other slaves, who, at great risk to themselves, try to keep the traditions of your lost homeland alive. And there is hope — some of your brothers could not be broken, and have fled to the hills to live free. These men, the Maroons, are said to be training as warriors, and planning for your people’s revenge. Tonight, you think, under cover of darkness, you will slip away to join them…

The white masters of Saint-Domingue, who constituted just 10 percent of the colony’s population, lived in terror of the other 90 percent, and this fear contributed to the brutality with which they punished the slightest sign of recalcitrance on the part of their slaves. Further augmenting their fears of the black Other was the slaves’ foreboding religion of voodoo: a blending of the animistic cults they had brought with them from tribal Africa with the more mystical elements of Catholicism — all charms and curses, potions and spells, trailing behind it persistent rumors of human sacrifice.

Even very early in the eighteenth century, some slaves managed to escape into the wilderness of Hispaniola, where they formed small communities that the white men found impossible to dislodge. Organized resistance, however, took a long time to develop.

Legend has it that the series of events which would result in an independent nation on the western third of Hispaniola began on the night of August 21, 1791, when a group of slave leaders secretly gathered at a hounfour — a voodoo temple — just outside the prosperous settlement of Cap‑Français. Word of the French Revolution had reached the slaves, and, with mainland France in chaos, the time seemed right to strike here in the hinterlands of empire. A priestess slit the throat of a sacrificial pig, and the head priest said that the look and taste of the pig’s blood indicated that Ogun and Ghede, the gods of war and death respectively, wanted the slaves to rise up. Together the leaders drank the blood under a sky that suddenly broke into storm, then sneaked back onto their individual plantations at dawn to foment revolution.

That, anyway, is the legend. There’s good reason to doubt whether the hounfour actually happened, but the revolution certainly did.

…you are in the middle of a bloody revolution. You are a Maroon, an ex-slave, fighting in the only successful slave revolt in history. You have only the most meager weapons, but you and your comrades are fighting for your very lives. There is death and destruction all around you. Once-great plantation houses lie in smouldering ruins. Corpses, black and white, litter the cane fields. Ghede walks among them, smiling and nodding at his rich harvest. He sees you and waves cheerfully…

The proudest period of Haiti’s history — the one occasion on which Haiti actually won something — began before a nation of that name existed, when the slaves of Saint-Domingue rose up against their masters, killing or driving them off their plantations. After the French were dispensed with, the ex-slaves continued to hold their ground against Spanish and English invaders who, concerned about what an example like this could mean for other colonies, tried to bring them to heel.

In 1798, a well-educated, wily former slave named Toussaint Louverture consolidated control of the now-former French colony. He spoke both to his own people and to outsiders using the language of the Enlightenment, drawing from the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, putting a whole new face on this bloody revolution that had supposedly been born at a voodoo houfour on a hot jungle night.

Toussaint Louverture was frequently called the black George Washington in light of the statesmanlike role he played for his people. He certainly looked the part. Would Haiti’s history have been better had he lived longer? We can only speculate.

…and you are battling Napoleon’s armies, Europe’s finest, sent to retake the jewel of the French empire. You have few resources, but you fight with extraordinary courage. Within two years, sixty thousand veteran French troops have died, and your land is yours again. The French belong to Ghede, who salutes you with a smirk…

Napoleon had now come to power in France, and was determined to reassert control over his country’s old empire even as he set about conquering a new one. In 1802, he sent an army to retake the colony of Saint-Domingue. Toussaint Louverture was tricked, captured, and shipped to France, where he soon died in a prison cell. But his comrades in arms, helped along by a fortuitous outbreak of yellow fever among the French forces and by a British naval blockade stemming from the wars back in Europe, defeated Napoleon’s finest definitively in November of 1803. The world had little choice but to recognize the former colony of Saint-Domingue as a predominately black independent nation-state, the first of its type.

With Louverture dead, however, there was no one to curb the vengeful instincts of the former slaves who had defeated the French after such a long, hard struggle. It was perfectly reasonable that the new nation would take for its name Haiti — the island of Hispaniola’s name in the now-dead Taíno language — rather than the French appellation of Saint-Domingue. Less reasonable were the words of independent Haiti’s first leader, and first in its long line of dictators, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who said that “we should use the skin of a white man as a parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen.” True to his words, he proceeded to carry out systematic genocide on the remaining white population of Haiti, destroying in the process all of the goodwill that had accrued to the new country among progressives and abolitionists in the wider world. His vengeance cost Haiti both much foreign investment that might otherwise have been coming its way and the valuable contribution the more educated remaining white population, by no means all of whom had been opposed to the former slaves’ cause, might have been able to make to its economy. A precedent had been established which holds to this day: of Haiti being its own worst enemy, over and over again.

…a hundred years of stagnation and instability flash by your eyes. As your nation’s economic health declines, your countrymen’s thirst for coups d’etat grows. Seventeen of twenty-four presidents are overthrown by guile or force of arms, and Ghede’s ghastly armies swell…

So, Haiti, having failed from the outset to live up to the role many had dreamed of casting it in as the first enlightened black republic, remained poor and inconsequential, mired in corruption and violence, as its story devolved from its one shining moment of glory into the cruel farce it remains to this day. The arguable lowlight of Haiti’s nineteenth century was the reign of one Faustin Soulouque, who had himself crowned Emperor Faustin I — emperor of what? — in 1849. American and European cartoonists had a field day with the pomp and circumstance of Faustin’s “court.” He was finally exiled to Jamaica in 1859, after he had tried and failed to invade the Dominican Republic (an emperor has to start somewhere, right?), extorted money from the few well-to-do members of Haitian society and defaulted on his country’s foreign debt in order to finance his palace, and finally gotten himself overthrown by a disgruntled army officer. Like the vast majority of Haiti’s leaders down through the years, he left his country in even worse shape than he found it.

Haiti’s Emperor Faustin I was a hit with the middle-brow reading public in the United States and Europe.

…you are a student, protesting the years-long American occupation of your country. They came, they said, to thwart Kaiser Wilhelm’s designs on the Caribbean, and to help the Haitian people. But their callous rule soon became morally and politically bankrupt. Chuckling, Ghede hands you a stone and you throw it. The uprising that will drive the invaders out has begun…

In 1915, Haiti was in the midst of one of its periodic paroxysms of violence. Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, the country’s sixth president in the last four years, had managed to hold the office for just five months when he was dragged out of the presidential palace into the street and torn limb from limb by a mob. The American ambassador to Haiti, feeling that the country had descended into a state of complete anarchy that could spread across the Caribbean, pleaded with President Woodrow Wilson to intervene. Fearing that Germany and its allies might exploit this chaos on the United States’s doorstep if and when his own country should enter the First World War on the opposing side, Wilson agreed. On July 28, 1915, a small force of American sailors occupied the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince almost without firing a shot — a far cry from Haiti’s proud struggle for independence against the French. Haiti was suddenly a colony again, although its new colonizers did promise that the occupation was temporary. It was to last just long enough to set the country on its feet and put a sound system of government in place.

When the Americans arrived in Haiti, they found its people’s lives not all that much different from the way they had lived at the time of Toussaint Louverture. Here we see the capital city of Port-au-Prince, the most “developed” place in the country.

The American occupation wound up lasting nineteen years, during which the occupiers did much practical good in Haiti. They paved more than a thousand miles of roadway; built bridges and railway lines and airports and canals; erected power stations and radio stations, schools and hospitals. Yet, infected with the racist attitudes toward their charges that were all too typical of the time, they failed at the less concrete tasks of instilling a respect for democracy and the rule of law. They preferred to make all the rules themselves by autocratic decree, giving actual Haitians only a token say in goings-on in their country. This prompted understandable anger and a sort of sullen, passive resistance among Haitians to all of the American efforts at reform, occasionally flaring up into vandalism and minor acts of terrorism. When the Americans, feeling unappreciated and generally hard-done-by, left Haiti in 1934, it didn’t take the country long to fall back into the old ways. Within four years President Sténo Vincent had declared himself dictator for life. But he was hardly the only waxing power in Haitian politics.

…a tall, ruggedly handsome black man with an engaging smile.

He is speaking to an assembled throng in a poverty-stricken city neighborhood. He tells moving stories about his experiences as a teacher, journalist, and civil servant. You admire both his skillful use of French and Creole, and his straightforward ideas about government. With eloquence and obvious sincerity, he speaks of freedom, justice and opportunity for all, regardless of class or color. His trenchant, biting criticisms of the establishment delight the crowd of longshoremen and laborers.

“Latin America and the Caribbean already have too many dictators,” he says. “It is time for a truly democratic government in Haiti.” The crowd roars out its approval…

The aspect of Haitian culture which had always baffled the Americans the most was the fact that this country whose population was 99.9 percent black was nevertheless riven by racism as pronounced as anywhere in the world. The traditional ruling class was the mulattoes: Haitians who could credit their lighter skin to white blood dating back to the old days of colonization, and/or to the fact that they and their ancestors hadn’t spent long years laboring in the sun. They made up perhaps 10 percent of the population, and spoke and governed in French. The rest of the population was made up the noir Haitians: the darker-skinned people who constituted the working class. They spoke only the Haitian Creole dialect for the most part, and thus literally couldn’t understand most of what their country’s leaders said. In the past, it had been the mulattoes who killed one another to determine who ruled Haiti, while the noir Haitians just tried to stay out of the way.

In the 1940s, however, other leaders came forward to advance the cause of the “black” majority of the population; these leaders became known as the noiristes. Among the most prominent of them was Daniel Fignolé, a dark-skinned Haitian born, like most of his compatriots, into extreme poverty in 1913. Unlike most of them, he managed to educate himself by dint of sheer hard work, became political at the sight of the rampant injustice and corruption all around him, and came to be known as the “Moses of Port-au-Prince” for the fanatical loyalty he commanded among the stevedores, factory workers, and other unskilled laborers in and around the capital. Fignolé emphasized again and again that he was not a Marxist — an ideology that had been embraced by some of the mulattoes and was thus out of bounds for any good noiriste. Yet he did appropriate the Marxist language of proletariat and bourgeoisie, and left no doubt which side of that divide he was fighting for. For years, he remained an agitating force in Haitian politics without ever quite breaking through to real power. Then came the tumultuous year of 1957.

Daniel Fignolé, the great noiriste advocate for the working classes of Haiti.

…but you’re now a longshoreman in Port-au-Prince, and your beloved Daniel Fignolé has been ousted after just nineteen days as Provisional President. Rumors abound that he has been executed by Duvalier and his thugs. You’re taking part in a peaceful, if noisy, demonstration demanding his return. Suddenly, you’re facing government tanks and troops. Ghede rides on the lead tank, laughing and clapping his hands in delight. You shout your defiance and pitch a rock at the tank. The troops open fire, and machine-gun bullets rip through your chest…

One Paul Magloire, better known as Bon Papa, had been Haiti’s military dictator since 1950. The first few years of his reign had gone relatively well; his stridently anticommunist posturing won him some measure of support from the United States, and Haiti briefly even became a vacation destination to rival the Dominican Republic among sun-seeking American tourists. But when a devastating hurricane struck Hispaniola in 1954 and millions of dollars in international aid disappeared in inimitable Haitian fashion without ever reaching the country’s people, the mood among the elites inside the country who had been left out of that feeding frenzy began to turn against Bon Papa. On December 12, 1956, he resigned his office by the hasty expedient of jumping into an airplane and getting the hell out of Dodge before he came to share the fate of Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. The office of the presidency, a hot potato if ever there was one, then passed through three more pairs of hands in the next six months, while an election campaign to determine Haiti’s next permanent leader took place.

Of course, in Haiti election campaigns were fought with fists, clubs, knives, guns, bombs, and, most of all, rampant, pervasive corruption at every level. Still, in a rare sign of progress of a sort in Haitian politics, the two strongest candidates were both noiristes promising to empower the people rather than the mulatto elites. They were Daniel Fignolé and François Duvalier, the latter being a frequent comrade-in-arms of the former during the struggles of the last twenty years who had now become a rival; he was an unusually quiet, even diffident-seeming personality in terms of typical Haitian politics, so much so that many doubted his mental fortitude and intelligence alike. But Duvalier commanded enormous loyalty in the countryside, where he had worked for years as a doctor, often in tandem with American charitable organizations. Meanwhile Fignolé’s urban workers remained as committed to him as ever, and clashes between the supporters of the two former friends were frequent and often violent.

The workers around Port-au-Prince pledged absolute allegiance to Daniel Fignolé. He liked to call them his wuolo konmpresé — his “steamrollers,” always ready to take to the streets for a rally, a demonstration, or just a good old fight.

But then, on May 25, 1957, Duvalier unexpectedly threw his support behind a bid to make his rival the latest provisional president while the election ran its course, and Fignolé marched into the presidential palace surrounded by his cheering supporters. In a stirring speech on the palace steps, he promised a Haitian “New Deal” in the mold of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s American version.

The internal machinations of Haitian politics are almost impossible for an outsider to understand, but many insiders have since claimed that Duvalier, working in partnership with allies he had quietly made inside the military, had set Fignolé up for a fall, contriving to remove him from the business of day-to-day campaigning and thereby shore up his own support while making sure his presidency was always doomed to be a short one even by Haitian standards. At any rate, on the night of June 14, 1957 — just nineteen days after he had assumed the post — a group of army officers burst into Fignolé’s office, forced him to sign a resignation letter at gunpoint, and then tossed him into an airplane bound for the United States, exiling him on pain of death should he ever return to Haiti.

The deposing of Fignolé ignited another spasm of civil unrest among his supporters in Port-au-Prince, but their violence was met with even more violence by the military. There were reports of soldiers firing machine guns into the crowds of demonstrators. People were killed in the hundreds if not thousands in the capital, even as known agitators were rounded up en masse and thrown into prison, the offices of newspapers and magazines supporting Fignolé’s cause closed and ransacked. On September 22, 1957, it was announced that François Duvalier had been elected president by the people of Haiti.

Inside the American government, opinion was divided about the latest developments in Haiti. The CIA was convinced that, despite Fignolé’s worrisome leftward orientation, his promised socialist democracy was a better, more stable choice for the United States’s close neighbor than a military junta commanded by Duvalier. The agency thus concocted a scheme to topple Duvalier’s new government, which was to begin with the assassination of his foreign minister, Louis Raimone, on an upcoming visit to Mexico City to negotiate an arms deal. But the CIA’s plans accidentally fell into the hands of one Austin Garriot, an academic doing research for his latest book in Washington, D.C. Garriot passed the plans on to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, who protested strongly that any attempt to overthrow Duvalier would be counter to international law — and who emphasized as well that he had declared himself to be strongly pro-American and anti-Soviet. With the top ranks of the FBI threatening to expose the illegal assassination plot to other parts of the government if the scheme was continued, the CIA had no choice but to quietly abandon it. Duvalier remained in power, unmolested.

He had promised his supporters a bright future…

…before a shining white city atop a hill. A sign welcomes you to Duvalierville. As you walk through the busy streets, well-dressed, cheerful people greet you as they pass by. You are struck by the abundance of goods and services offered, and the cleanliness and order that prevails. Almost every wall is adorned with a huge poster of a frail, gray-haired black man wearing a dark suit and horn-rimmed glasses.

Under the figure are the words: “Je suis le drapeau Haitien, Uni et Indivisible. François Duvalier.”

Everyone you ask about the man says the same thing: “We all love Papa Doc. He’s our president for life now, and we pray that he will live forever.”

Instead the leader who became known as Papa Doc — this quiet country doctor — became another case study in the banality of evil. During his fourteen years in power, an estimated 60,000 people were executed upon his personal extra-judicial decree. The mulatto elite, who constituted the last remnants of Haiti’s educated class and thus could be a dangerous threat to his rule, were a particular target; purge after purge cut a bloody swath through their ranks. When Papa Doc died in 1971, his son Jean-Claude Duvalier — Baby Doc — took over for another fifteen years. The world became familiar with the term “Haitian boat people” as the Duvaliers’ desperate victims took to the sea in the most inadequate of crafts. For them, any shred of hope for a better life was worth grasping at, no matter what the risk.

…you find yourself at sea, in a ragged little boat. Every inch of space is crowded with humanity. They’re people you know and care about deeply. You have no food or water, but you have something more precious — hope. In your native Haiti, your life has become intolerable. The poverty, the fear, the sudden disappearances of so many people — all have driven you to undertake this desperate journey into the unknown.

A storm arises, and your small boat is battered by the waves and torn apart. One by one, your friends, your brothers, your children slip beneath the roiling water and are lost. You cling to a rotten board as long as you can, but you know that your dream of freedom is gone. “Damn you, Duvalier,” you scream as the water closes over your head…

And now I have to make a confession: not quite all of the story I’ve just told you is true. That part about the CIA deciding to intervene in Haitian politics, only to be foiled by the FBI? It never happened (as far as I know, anyway). That part, along with all of the quoted text above, is rather lifted from a fascinating and chronically underappreciated work of interactive fiction from 1992: Shades of Gray.

Shades of Gray was the product of a form of collaboration which would become commonplace in later years, but which was still unusual enough in 1992 that it was remarked in virtually every mention of the game: the seven people who came together to write it had never met one another in person, only online. The project began when a CompuServe member named Judith Pintar, who had just won the 1991 AGT Competition with her CompuServe send-up Cosmoserve, put out a call for collaborators to make a game for the next iteration of the Competition. Mark Baker, Steve Bauman, Belisana, Hercules, Mike Laskey, and Cindy Yans wound up joining her, each writing a vignette for the game. Pintar then wrote a central spine to bind all these pieces together. The end result was so much more ambitious than anything else made for that year’s AGT Competition that organizer David Malmberg created a “special group effort” category just for it — which, it being the only game in said category, it naturally won.

Yet Shades of Gray‘s unusual ambition wasn’t confined to its size or number of coauthors. It’s also a game with some serious thematic heft.

The idea of using interactive fiction to make a serious literary statement was rather in abeyance in the early 1990s. Infocom had always placed a premium on good writing, and had veered at least a couple of times into thought-provoking social and historical commentary with A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity. But neither of those games had been huge sellers, and Infocom’s options had always been limited by the need to please a commercial audience who mostly just wanted more fun games like Zork from them, not deathless literary art. Following Infocom’s collapse, amateur creators working with development systems like AGT and TADS likewise confined almost all of their efforts to making games in the mold of Zork — unabashedly gamey games, with lots of puzzles to solve and an all-important score to accumulate.

On the surface, Shades of Gray may not seem a radical departure from that tradition; it too sports lots of puzzles and a score. Scratch below the surface, though, and you’ll find a text adventure with more weighty thoughts on its mind than any since 1986’s Trinity (a masterpiece of a game which, come to think of it, also has puzzles and a score, thus proving these elements are hardly incompatible with literary heft).

It took the group who made Shades of Gray much discussion to arrive at its central theme, which Judith Pintar describes as one of “moral ambiguity”: “We wanted to show that life and politics are nuanced.” You are cast in the role of Austin Garriot, a man whose soul has become unmoored from his material being for reasons that aren’t ever — and don’t really need to be — clearly explained. With the aid of a gypsy fortune teller and her Tarot deck, you explore the impulses and experiences that have made you who you are, presented in the form of interactive vignettes carved from the stuff of symbolism and memory and history. Moral ambiguity does indeed predominate through echoes of the ancient Athens of Antigone, the Spain of the Inquisition, the United States of the Civil War and the Joseph McCarthy era. In the most obvious attempt to present contrasting viewpoints, you visit Sherwood Forest twice, playing once as Robin Hood and once as the poor, put-upon Sheriff of Nottingham, who’s just trying to maintain the tax base and instill some law and order.

> examine chest The chest is solidly made, carved from oak and bound together with strips of iron. It contains the villagers' taxes -- money they paid so you could defend them against the ruffians who inhabit the woods. Unfortunately, the outlaws regularly attack the troops who bring the money to Nottingham, and generally steal it all.

Because you can no longer pay your men-at-arms, no one but you remains to protect the local villagers. The gang is taking full advantage of this, attacking whole communities from their refuge in Sherwood Forest. You are alone, but you still have a duty to perform.

Especially in light of the contrasting Robin Hood vignettes, it would be all too easy for a reviewer like me to neatly summarize the message of Shades of Gray as something like “there are two sides to every story” or “walk a mile in my shoes before you condemn me.” And, to be sure, that message is needed more than ever today, not least by the more dogmatic members of our various political classes. Yet to claim that that’s all there is to Shades of Gray is, I think, to do it a disservice. Judith Pintar, we should remember, described its central theme as moral ambiguity, which is a more complex formulation than just a generalized plea for empathy. There are no easy answers in Shades of Gray — no answers at all really. It tells us that life is complicated, and moral right not always as easy to determine as we might wish.

Certainly that statement applies to the longstanding question with which I opened this article: What to do about Haiti? In the end, it’s the history of that long-suffering country that comes to occupy center stage in Shades of Gray‘s exploration of… well, shades of gray.

Haiti’s presence in the game is thanks to the contributor whose online handle was Belisana.1 It’s an intriguingly esoteric choice of subject matter for a game written in this one’s time and place, especially given that none of the contributors, Belisana included, had any personal connection to Haiti. She rather began her voyage into Haitian history with a newspaper clipping, chanced upon in a library, from that chaotic year of 1957. She included a lightly fictionalized version of it in the game itself:

U.S. AID TO HAITI REDUCED TWO-THIRDS

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Oct. 8 — The United States government today shut down two-thirds of its economic aid to Haiti. The United States Embassy sources stressed that the action was not in reprisal against the reported fatal beating of a United States citizen last Sunday.

The death of Shibley Matalas was attributed by Col. Louis Raimone, Haitian Foreign Minister, to a heart attack. Three U.S. representatives viewed Mr. Matalas’ body. Embassy sources said they saw extensive bruises, sufficient to be fatal.

Through my own archival research, I’ve determined that in the game Belisana displaced the date of the actual incident by one week, from October 1 to October 8, and that she altered the names of the principals: Shibley Matalas was actually named Shibley Tamalas, and Louis Raimone was Louis Roumain. The incident in question occurred after François Duvalier had been elected president of Haiti but three weeks before he officially assumed the office. The real wire report, as printed in the Long Beach Press Telegram, tells a story too classically Haitian not to share in full.

Yank in Haitian Jail Dies, U.S. Envoy Protests

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (AP) — Americans were warned to move cautiously in Haiti today after Ambassador Gerald Drew strongly protested the death of a U.S. citizen apparently beaten while under arrest. The death of Shibley Talamas, 30-year-old manager of a textile factory here, brought the United States into the turmoil which followed the presidential election Sept. 22 in the Caribbean Negro republic.

Drew protested Monday to Col. Louis Roumain, foreign minister of the ruling military junta. The ambassador later cautioned Americans to be careful and abide by the nation’s curfew.

Roumain had gone to the U.S. Embassy to present the government’s explanation of Talamas’ death, which occurred within eight hours of his arrest.

The ambassador said Roumain told him Talamas, son of U.S. citizens of Syrian extraction, was arrested early Sunday afternoon in connection with the shooting of four Haitian soldiers. The solders were killed by an armed band Sunday at Kenscoff, a mountain village 14 miles from this capital city.

Drew said Roumain “assured me that Talamas was not mistreated.”

While being questioned by police, Talamas tried to attack an officer and to reach a nearby machine gun, Roumain told Drew. He added that Talamas then was handcuffed and immediately died of a heart attack.

The embassy said three reliable sources reported Talamas was beaten sufficiently to kill him.

One of these sources said Talamas’ body bore severe bruises about the legs, chest, shoulders, and abdomen, and long incisions that might have been made in an autopsy.

A Haitian autopsy was said to have confirmed that Talamas died of a heart attack. The location of the body remained a mystery. It was not delivered immediately to relatives.

Talamas, 300-pound son of Mr. and Mrs. Antoine Talamas, first was detained in the suburb of Petionville. Released on his promise to report later to police, he surrendered to police at 2 p.m. Sunday in the presence of two U.S. vice-consuls. His wife, Frances Wilpula Talamas, formerly of Ashtabula, Ohio, gave birth to a child Sunday.

Police said they found a pistol and shotgun in Talamas’ business office. Friends said he had had them for years.

Before seeing Roumain Monday, Drew tried to protest to Brig. Gen. Antonio Kébreau, head of the military junta, but failed in the attempt. An aid told newsmen that Kébreau could not see them because he had a “tremendous headache.”

Drew issued a special advisory to personnel of the embassy and U.S. agencies and to about 400 other Americans in Haiti. He warned them to stay off the streets during the curfew — 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. — except for emergencies and official business.

Troops and police have blockaded roads and sometimes prevented Americans getting to and from their homes. Americans went to their homes long ahead of the curfew hour Monday night. Some expressed fear that Talamas’ death might touch off other incidents.

Calm generally prevailed in the country. Police continued to search for losing presidential candidate Louis Déjoie, missing since the election. His supporters have threatened violence and charged that the military junta rigged the election for Dr. François Duvalier, a landslide winner in unofficial returns.

Official election results will be announced next Tuesday. Duvalier is expected to assume the presidency Oct. 14.

The Onion, had it existed at the time, couldn’t have done a better job of satirizing the farcical spectacle of a Haitian election. And yet all this appeared in a legitimate news report, from the losing candidate who mysteriously disappeared to the prisoner who supposedly dropped dead of a heart attack as soon as his guards put the handcuffs on him — not to mention the supreme leader with a headache, which might just be my favorite detail of all. Again: what does one do with a place like this, a place so corrupt for so long that corruption has become inseparable from its national culture?

But Shades of Gray is merciless. In the penultimate turn, it demands that you answer that question — at least this one time, in a very specific circumstance. Still playing the role of the hapless academic Austin Garriot, you’ve found a briefcase with all the details of the CIA’s plot to kill the Haitian foreign minister and initiate a top-secret policy of regime change in the country. The CIA’s contracted assassin, the man who lost the briefcase in the first place, is a cold fish named Charles Calthrop. He’s working together with Michael Matalas, vengeance-seeking brother of the recently deceased Shibley Matalas (née Tabalas), and David Thomas, the CIA’s bureau chief in Haiti; they all want you to return the briefcase to them and forget that you ever knew anything about it. But two FBI agents, named Smith and Wesson (ha, ha…), have gotten wind of the briefcase’s contents, and want you to give it to them instead so they can stop the conspiracy in its tracks.

So, you are indeed free to take the course of action I’ve already described: give the briefcase to the FBI, and thereby foil the plot and strike a blow for international law. This will cause the bloody late-twentieth-century history of Haiti that we know from our own timeline to play out unaltered, as Papa Doc consolidates his grip on the country unmolested by foreign interventions.

Evil in a bow tie: François Duvalier at the time of the 1957 election campaign. Who would have guessed that this unassuming character would become the worst single Haitian monster of the twentieth century?

Or you can choose not to turn over the briefcase, to let the CIA’s plot take its course. And what happens then? Well, this is how the game describes it…

Smith and Wesson were unable to provide any proof of the CIA’s involvement in Raimone’s killing, and they were censured by Hoover for the accusation.

The following Saturday, Colonel Louis Raimone died from a single rifle shot through the head as he disembarked from a plane in Mexico City. His assassin was never caught, nor was any foreign government ever implicated.

It was estimated that the shot that killed Raimone was fired from a distance of 450 yards, from a Lee Enfield .303 rifle. Very few professionals were capable of that accuracy over that distance; Charles Calthrop was one of the few, and the Lee Enfield was his preferred weapon.

Duvalier didn’t survive long as president. Without the riot equipment that Raimone had been sent to buy, he was unable to put down the waves of unrest that swept the country. The army switched its allegiance to the people, and he was overthrown in March 1958.

Duvalier lived out the rest of his life in exile in Paris, and died in 1964.

Daniel Fignolé returned to govern Haiti after Duvalier was ousted, and introduced an American-style democracy. He served three 5-year terms of office, and was one of Kennedy’s staunchest allies during the Cuban missile crisis. He is still alive today, an elder statesman of Caribbean politics.

His brother’s death having been avenged, Michel Matalas returned to his former job as a stockman in Philadelphia. He joined the army and died in Vietnam in 1968. His nephew, Shibley’s son Mattieu, still lives in Haiti.

David Thomas returned to Haiti in his role as vice-consul, and became head of the CIA’s Caribbean division. He provided much of the intelligence that allowed Kennedy to bluff the Russians during the Cuban missile crisis before returning to take up a senior post at Langley.

What we have here, then, is a question of ends versus means. In the universe of Shades of Gray, at least, carrying out an illegal assassination and interfering in another sovereign country’s domestic politics leads to a better outcome than the more straightforwardly ethical course of abiding by international law.

Ever since it exited World War II as the most powerful country in the world, the United States has been confronted with similar choices time and time again. It’s for this reason that Judith Pintar calls her and her colleagues’ game “a story about American history as much as it is about Haiti.” While its interference in Haiti on this particular occasion does appear to have been limited or nonexistent in our own timeline, we know that the CIA has a long history behind it of operations just like the one described in the game, most of which didn’t work out nearly so well for the countries affected. And we also know that such operations were carried out by people who really, truly believed that their ends did justify their means. What can we do with all of these contradictory facts? Shades of gray indeed.

Of course, Shades of Gray is a thought experiment, not a serious study in geopolitical outcomes. There’s very good reason to question whether the CIA, who saw Daniel Fignolé as a dangerously left-wing leader, would ever have allowed him to assume power once again; having already chosen to interfere in Haitian politics once, a second effort to keep Fignolé out of power would only have been that much easier to justify. (This, one might say, is the slippery slope of interventionism in general.) Even had he regained and subsequently maintained his grip on the presidency, there’s reason to question whether Fignolé would really have become the mechanism by which true democracy finally came to Haiti. The list of Haitian leaders who once seemed similarly promising, only to disappoint horribly, is long; it includes on it that arguably greatest Haitian monster of all, the mild-mannered country doctor named François Duvalier, alongside such more recent disappointments as Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Perhaps Haiti’s political problems really are cultural problems, and as such are not amendable to fixing by any one person. Or, as many a stymied would-be reformer has speculated over the years, perhaps there really is just something in the water down there, or a voodoo curse in effect, or… something.

So, Shades of Gray probably won’t help us solve the puzzle of Haiti. It does, however, provide rich food for thought on politics and ethics, on the currents of history and the winds of fate — and it’s a pretty good little text adventure too. Its greatest weakness is the AGT development system that was used to create it, whose flexibility is limited and whose parser leaves much to be desired. “Given a better parser and the removal of some of the more annoying puzzles,” writes veteran interactive-fiction reviewer Carl Muckenhoupt, “this one would easily rate five stars.” I don’t actually find the puzzles all that annoying, but do agree that the game requires a motivated player willing to forgive and sometimes to work around the flaws of its engine. Any player willing to do so, though, will be richly rewarded by this milestone in interactive-fiction history, the most important game in terms of the artistic evolution of the medium to appear between Infocom’s last great burst of formal experiments in 1987 and the appearance of Graham Nelson’s milestone game Curses! in 1993. Few games in all the years of text-adventure history have offered more food for thought than Shades of Gray — a game that refuses to provide incontrovertible answers to the questions it asks, and is all the better for it.

In today’s Haiti, meanwhile, governments change constantly, but nothing ever changes. The most recent election as of this writing saw major, unexplained discrepancies between journalists’ exit polling and the official results, accompanied by the usual spasms of violence in the streets. Devastating earthquakes and hurricanes in recent years have only added to the impression that Haiti labors under some unique curse. On the bright side, however, it has been nearly a decade and a half since the last coup d’etat, which is pretty good by Haitian standards. You’ve got to start somewhere, right?

(Sources: the books Red & Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change 1934-1957, Haiti: The Tumultuous History — From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation by Philippe Girard, and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History by Laurent Dubois; Life of June 3 1957; Long Beach Press Telegram of October 1 1957. My huge thanks go to Judith Pintar for indulging me with a long conversation about Shades of Gray and other topics. You can read more of our talk elsewhere on this site.

You can download Shades of Gray from the IF Archive. You can play it using the included original interpreter through DOSBox, or, more conveniently, with a modern AGT interpreter such as AGiliTY or — best of all in my opinion — the multi-format Gargoyle.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/shades-of-gray/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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athertonjc · 6 years ago

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Eleanor Perenyi: an Appreciation and Reconsideration by GR Editor

Guest Post by Constance Casey

Meeting Eleanor Perenyi in print was like having someone understand and appreciate my toil, and relieving me of guilt for failures. In gardening, anyway.

A friend gave me her Green Thoughts back in the early 1990s (it was published in 1981) when I was a lowly apprentice to a Washington, D.C. garden designer with high standards and demanding clients. (“I want 100 white clematis going up the wall across from the pool, and I mean blue-white, not ivory.” or “The wedding is next week; we’d like an arbor of pink roses.”) The giver, not a gardener, loved the Andrew Marvell lines that gave Perenyi her apt title.

Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade.

Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden consists of 72 essays, arranged alphabetically – asters and annuals through perennials to weeds and women. (A loose arrangement, no awkward stretch to pull in an X or a Z.)

Her alphabet closes with a bang – “Woman’s Place”, in which Perenyi digs into the unusual topic of sexism in horticulture.

Women, as she sees it, were fooled into retreating to the flower garden and taking on the tedious chores like weeding and deadheading. The problem goes back to hunter-gatherer pre-history. When men retired from hunting, women, who had been the first gatherers of herbs, greens, roots, and seeds, were limited to flowers – “Of all plants the least menacing and most useless.”

The chore-assignment has persisted over the ages. The gardener La Quintinie, Perenyi reports, in charge of Louis XIV’s potagers, recommended hiring married men because the wives would be available for weeding, as well as cleaning and scraping out pots. Perenyi muses that, like so many repressions, the move to confine women sprang from fear: “Men were always half in terror of women’s complicity with nature and the power it gives them.”

Perenyi’s knowledge came from 30 years of amateur experience in her Stonington, CT garden, where she was the sole authority, the designer as well as the pot scrubber. She did have some help – youths requiring close supervision. But we know she was willing to sling 50-pound bags of dehydrated cow manure, and take scissors to snip a tomato hornworm in half – “a disgusting business, but much safer than spraying.”

F in her alphabet is for failure, and she tells her readers that some things are not worth the trouble. Do not bother with Chinese tree peonies. These woody plants bear the supremely gorgeous silky flowers of Chinese art, but they are stingy, slow, and capricious about blooming. She sticks with the far less demanding herbaceous peony, sumptuous, fragrant, and floriferous.

Do not, she warns, attempt to replicate the garden plans of British plantswoman Gertrude Jekyll. (There was a moment, 1970s to 1980s, when every Anglophile American gardener wanted to follow her lead.) Jekyll is a true heroine and pioneer in design, but Perenyi tells the reader to remember that Jekyll herbaceous borders were 100 feet long, with something gloriously in flower nine months a year. Many of the gardens she designed were south of London, in warm temperate counties with average annual rainfall of 55 inches. In any case, a third of Jekyll’s plants were removed and replaced in the course of a summer by a battalion of skilled gardeners.

Perenyi is not as prescriptive and severe about color combinations as Jekyll. The labels on Perenyi’s dahlia tubers fell off and, when replanted, a pink flower popped up among the yellows. “Obviously one tries to avoid the worst (which for me was an old scarlet poppy next to which mauve foxgloves invariably sowed themselves) but I don’t think it’s necessary to plan a herbaceous border down to the last forget-me–not.”

Her gardens were more inclusive than those of her fellow homeowners in Stonington. A neighbor noted that Perenyi seemed to have a penchant for “the conspicuous.” “She meant vulgar”, Perenyi decides, adding, “it hasn’t escaped my notice that mine is the only WASP garden in town to contain dahlias, and not the discreet little singles either.”

She’s very firm about avoiding the use of pesticides, weed-killers, and almost any soil additive. Resist the pressure from the nursery manager to buy chemicals, or the crowd-pleasing petunias loading garden center shelves. This stinging dismissal popped up in reviews of Perenyi’s book and then in her obituaries.

“They are pretty, very pretty – and as hopelessly impractical as a chiffon ball dress. Rain soils and bedraggles them.” Perenyi knew her fabrics, chiffon and others; before retirement she was an editor at Mademoiselle and a contributor to Harper’s Bazaar.

Perenyi’s voice is an antidote to the genteel and sentimental tone of many garden writers -vinegar (white balsamic), not honey. Gardening is much more than those un-menacing flowers. Perenyi takes immense pleasure in plant material breaking down. In her compost heap bushels of yard and kitchen litter turn into to “something like devil’s food cake.” It’s on the topic of soil enrichment when she remembers “smoking piles of straw and manure on our Hungarian estate” that we first learn about her dramatic past, and why she bears a Hungarian last name.

Traveling in Europe with her parents, Eleanor Spencer Stone, 19, met Zsigmond Perenyi, an Oxford-educated Hungarian aristocrat twice her age, at a diplomatic dinner. After a very short courtship they married and went to live in his family’s castle in the province of Ruthenia, formerly Hungarian, but under Czech control in the 1930s. For a while the couple had a kind of paradise – albeit a feudal paradise. The young American baroness oversaw the cutting gardens, orchards, and distillery with the help of faithful servants.

The two were cast out of Eden when World War II began. Zsigmond was conscripted into the Hungarian army and Eleanor retreated to the U.S. to bear their first child in safety. She and Zsigmond never lived together again. In her 1947 memoir of her time in Hungary – More Was Lost – (reprinted by the New York Review of Books Classics), she says simply, “we receded into different dimensions.”

Why, after working as an author-editor, raising her son Peter, and entering her sixties, did she sit down to write this book?

“Gardens like mine,” she writes, “which go by the unpleasing name of ‘labor intensive,’ are on their way out and before they go I would like to contribute my penny’s worth to their history.”

That prediction is not as accurate as her others. She would be pleased, nearly 40 years on, at the growing number of people happily performing many kinds of horticulture-intensive labor. Having no battalions of gardeners and under-gardeners, many 21st century gardeners have found the pleasure in turning the compost, cutting back the fading perennials, removing deadwood, and slicing hornworms. She would be particularly pleased that more and more gardeners are moving away from using pesticides and herbicides.

A strategy she used for avoiding pesticide use was to plant short rows of different vegetables interspersed with herbs and flowers to discourage methodical attack by insects. She was surprised to see many suburban gardeners spreading weed-killing lawn mixtures next to a vegetable garden: “A garden is a world, and its parts are not separable.”

With a bit of baroness-hauteur, Perenyi writes, “Gardening is so little esteemed in this country that I can’t imagine where or how someone who wanted to study it would go for instruction.”

Dahlias from the author’s garden

Gardening in public places, for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (my best job ever) was proceeded by an apprenticeship and then a Brooklyn Botanic Garden certificate. My garden now is private; three hours’ drive inland from Perenyi’s coastal town. Farmers and gardeners in my county are bedeviled by a pest larger than the tomato hornworm – deer. The creatures have modified our choices; more ferns and aromatic herbs. For the moment, the herbaceous peonies Perenyi admired are unappealing to deer.

Reading Green Thoughts is like talking to a kindred spirit, a benign ghost, over coffee. I wish she could see the change in New York’s Central Park, which, when she wrote, was “atrociously vandalized.” A gardener would leap to agree with her that autumn is the best time to work outside. She savors the season when, “heavier dews presage the morning when the moisture will have turned to ice, glazing the shriveled dahlias and lima beans, and the annuals will be blasted beyond recall. These deaths are stingless. I wouldn’t want it otherwise.”

Here’s a soothing green thought: Gardeners, Perenyi noted, tend to lead long lives. She was born in 1918, and died in 2009. Someone who believes in composting as fervently as she did knows that all flora and fauna are headed for decomposition. Charming, knowledgeable, and intelligent writing, however, survives.

Constance Casey was an assistant gardener for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation for six years. Long before that, she was an editor at the San Jose Mercury News and a national correspondent for Newhouse News Service.

Eleanor Perenyi: an Appreciation and Reconsideration originally appeared on Garden Rant on September 7, 2018.

from Garden Rant http://www.gardenrant.com/2018/09/eleanor-perenyi-an-appreciation-and-reconsideration.html

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