#doc the female hysteria is getting to me!

[onehundredgar]

P-

*wheezing sounds*

Happy pri-

*hacking coughing*

Happy pride month! Ignore the delicate white handkerchief tastefully spotted with blood in my hand.

[watermelinoe]

any day now if i could stop being so unemployable

[himbos-hotline]

22. How organized are you with your writing? Describe to me your organization method, if it exists. What tools do you use? Notebooks? Binders? Apps? The Cloud?

7. What is your deepest joy about writing?

3. What is your writing ritual and why is it cursed?

37. If you were to be remembered only by the words you’ve put on the page, what would future historians think of you?

22. How organized are you with your writing? Describe to me your organization method, if it exists. What tools do you use? Notebooks? Binders? Apps? The Cloud?

Okay so. I am not that organised...not really anway. But

I plan my AUS in a notebook- each notebook has its own AU in.

I use either a notepad and pencil if im away from my laptop or discord or I dont wanna share the idea yet. Or discord with my big sibling in our DMS or if its a meredith and mark idea its into a group DM @plooto-the-doc and @ithunderstorm have together. Or just into a google doc filled with random notes.

I use google docs to write all my work in cuz its easier to send over to people to edit or I write directly into the notepads. It really depends where I am and how I feel.

7. What is your deepest joy about writing?

I love making people feel things. I love watching the words fall like raindrops and people hanging off every one with bated breath. I love the pictures in my mind falling into words on the page. I love dragging my own emotions from the deepest pits of my heart onto the page until theyre bleeding. I like writing and writing despite it being a fickle mistress, likes me back.

3. What is your writing ritual and why is it cursed?

I will write what I want, when I want, I have no timeframe. Like it is currently 5:32 am. I have to be awake to get ready for the hospital in two hours. I have not slept at all. I am planning an entire AU as we speak. I literally cannot keep ideas in my head and its cursed because I will think WAY to far ahead.

37. If you were to be remembered only by the words you’ve put on the page, what would future historians think of you?

"this person has strokes and calls it art. We admire dem for that." I think historians would think that I was a troubled little female [not a girl] who suffered from hysteria and threw ink at the page until it stuck. they'd think that we are deeply troubled but from that charcholed ground beautiful flowers grew- stubborn and strong.

[wilfcrd]

@ anin asking about At the dead of night, from what I understand through game play, it's more like jimmy is possessed by a ghost/ supernatural causes, and not mental illness. BUT they do call in a doctor to talk to jimmy, but the doc seems more of the 'what is wrong with my patient and how can I help/encourage him to make progress' than a 'clearly this man is insane and needs to be tied down immediately' (think like how they used to two chicks into asylums for 'female induced hysteria' bs). BUT BUT the doctor does try to force jimmy/forces Jimmy to take a sedative when he becomes a danger to himself and others. And jimmy says stuff like 'he made me do it' and he threatens like a lot of people/manipulates them through fear. So, its ultimately up to you, but I hope this helps a little with your decision making progress! And remember, you're wonderful the way you are! Mental illness is serious but it never makes you a monster! (I have depression and anxiety, which is completely different, but like, I see you. I get it, I've done research and bunk, I promise you arent anymore of a monster than I am, and I hope you never have to feel that way!)

^

[jae-canikeepyou]

Im looking for good Jaehyun angst and I stumbled upon your blog (thank god through Heartstrings) 😚 I read the rules too so can I request a prompt with “There’s only one me, you can’t find anyone else like me.” Thnaks!

prompt title: hold on

a/n: heartstrings is probably my best work for angst 😚 anyway, you’re in time bc i’m in the mood for angst ;-; hope this fits your liking.

[14:24] “there’s only one me, you can’t find anyone else like me.”

the proud, happy, bragging but sweet sentence from you had jaehyun grew weak. he was just talking with you minutes ago as you drove on your way to meet him. ears ringing to a silence when it might be your last ever words.

his chest heaved in deep, slow inhales and exhales whilst he tried his best to walk through the plain and bright white corridors. his pained heart hammered so hard he felt like he was going to explode. johnny and doyoung followed him from behind, in support if ever the dimpled man collapse in shock.

she can’t be.. he repetitively told himself, staring at the endless square tiled floor beneath him as he walked quickly to find you. there were too many to recognise you. a stretcher then was rolled in at the entrance and jaehyun was in a state of panic and hysteria.

“a female in her early twenties, b.p 90 over 40, another car crashed into her.”

“get an intubation kit and help me move her on my count.”

grief spread his body as fast contamination would. he didn’t want to believe it was you, but it was confirmed when the label wrote out the letters of your precious name. just like anyone would act, he hesitated to step forward, but then he had to because he wanted to know if you were alright, if you were hurt.

or worse, if you weren’t breathing.

“jae, she’ll be fine.” johnny comforted his best friend, who was now breaking in tears seeing your unconscious body with a brace and dressing wrapped around your neck and head respectively. tissues upon tissues damped with your blood, changed and changed by new ones as soon as they got in contact with your skin. medics on call tended to your wounds, saying terminologies jaehyun couldn’t understand.

his friends watched him touch the glass, the only thing separating the both of you. the rest of them asked him to sit down, but he couldn’t stay put. your voice was the only one entering his mind, following the screeches of the colliding vehicles and metal meeting metal. there was silence for a while, yet jaehyun knew the air was quickly changing when several more staffs had entered the room.

“okay what’s her status?”

“her pressure’s dropping. we did an ultrasound but we need to get her to c.t now.”

“got it. i’ll tell the o.r. we’re heading there.”

all sorts of emotions had struck jaehyun in the most strong impact yet. he bit his lips and held the windowsill, it was slowly kicking in, the reality of all this. you both had everything planned; build a family, grow old together, little did he know it was going to be cut short.

doyoung stood beside him, his hands rested on his shoulders. “jaehyun, y/n’s a strong person. she’ll fight through this. the doctors said to wait and sit-”

“i can’t sit down! i can’t lose her..” he combed his hair in frustration, later groaning in small sobs when he saw his friends softened their eyes. “i’m sorry. i just- i- she’s everything to me-”

beeps from the machine made their heads turn to you, the staff already doing the c.p.r as you were unresponsive. jaehyun’s lips wavered and tears started to fall. he tried to enter the room, yet was stopped soon he took the first step. “doc, save her, please! i can’t lose her-”

“we’ll do the best we can sir, but please step back from the entrance so the staff can have access.”

he looked back at your figure. fear injected him when they continued pumping your chest. chants of ‘stay with me’, ‘clear!’ and ‘keep bagging’ didn’t give a glimpse of hope or signs of life.

“hold on baby.” he let go of the door frame, johnny and doyoung just right behind him. after few minutes of waiting and pacing back and forth, he wanted to muffle out the distress of the staff and the electronic sounds of the equipment, but it was soon replaced with a long monotonous ringing he wasn’t hoping to hear. at this point, his world came crumbling down. surroundings turned into white, just how his face turned pale. other than sadness, blame was all he felt. his voice struggled to escape, unaccepting the reality.

he shouldn’t have called you.

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

👀

here’s a stab at the beginning of some f/f smut from The Big Gundown between the two female characters who never meet and don’t have actual names, the Widow and the Brokston-Miller daughter (she’s in the credits as Kate but I don’t think anyone actually says her name), and bc this contraption (pic below) continues to delight me. the whole thing will probably never see the light of day bc i made myself Very sad while writing it. not edited even a little bit, just straight from the doc and slapped in here

She’d brought half the desert into this poor woman’s house, she thought, trying to steady her hand so she wouldn’t break the teacup trembling down into the saucer. 

The woman, Nieves, was trying to get her shutters up by herself in the middle of the storm they’d limped out of, phaeton axle broken. She’d refused to stay in the house where her father and her husband lay in boxes, and thought she could beat the storm. 

Something had clearly happened- she was the only one there, half the windows were broken, there were bullet holes everywhere. She was a small, determined figure in widow’s weeds and a beautiful pashima, unyielding. 

The only things this woman had to be helpful with were too many horses and a dangerously light gig, under a tarpaulin to protect its cheerful yellow paint from the sand.

“More tea, my dear?” and the widow herself appeared at her elbow, startling her and causing her to put her teacup in the saucer with a rattle louder than she intended. She wasn’t used to having people pour her tea. She’d only drunk it with her father on Sunday afternoons, and he always made her serve. She nearly teared up in relief that she’d never have to do that again. 

Nieves silently offered her a beautiful silk lace-edged handkerchief. Kate looked up, startled. “This is too pretty to cry into.” 

Nieves slunk down into a chair, beautiful dark eyes locked with her own really way too intensely. “Things are made to be used.”

Kate ended up pouring out the whole story and sobbing ungracefully into the tiny handkerchief, soaking it through. How her father had married her off for a business opportunity. How her husband was a monster. How they’d rushed her down here and then disappeared and then died. How she couldn’t stay in the strange house where her father and husband lay in boxes. How she needed to be home, in the safe comfort of familiarity. She still couldn’t say how relieved she was to be free of them, but the freedom was terrifying. 

She finally stopped hemorrhaging the stress of the past week, and sniffled. “There are so many decisions.”

Nieves caught both her hands and the poor handkerchief between them. “Then stop making decisions. You’re my guest, let me be in charge.”

Kate stared back in confusion. 

“You’re wound so tight with grief you’re going to snap. They’re going to say you have hysteria and sideline you again like your father did. If you want to be free, you need to look like you’re in control.”  

Kate had known some of her mother’s friends who she never saw again, because of chronic hysteria. She’d heard of the methods of treating hysteria, whispered among her peers in the rustling quivery gossip of garden parties.  She blushed just as she always did at those parties, and Nieves had never seen anything so pretty. 

“But I- there’s no doctor here,”

“It’s my duty as your hostess to help.”

[alitheamateur]

The Grind- Chapter 27

Warnings: Violence. Language.

I had put it for a week time of vacation from the office beginning three days from fight night. I wanted, more so needed, to spend hours upon hours at Temple Fitness racking up as much ring practice as possible, making time with my parents slim while they visited. I was barely maintaining weight, so lavish dinners were out of the question, and I had no intentions of slacking to attend a game, or other local sights with them, no matter how much I fought myself internally. However, with The Pilot being one less worry for a few days, I could work out early, notching several devoted hours under my belt, then cut out around late afternoon for some family time with Colt and my visiting parents.

Today, despite my steadfast arguments, they came in to observe how my routine played out with training. Tia was available for the day, so the crew and myself decided it’d be best apt for my now crucial preparations to let her play into the role of sparring partner. Stepping in with Colton was better suited for educational, phycological reasons seeing as he was the most seasoned member of my corner roster. But with Tia, a fellow female, things could get more physically involved, and squaring up with her would simulate more relative to the possibilities with my unfamiliar opponent.

“Well, were you surprised when you saw your parents? You had to suspect him doing all that.” Tia spoke while mirroring some of my stretches.

“I was absolutely clueless, T. I’m actually sorta glad they’re here, to be honest.”

“The fucker pestered me all week about ‘making sure I do this’ and ‘don’t forget to say that.’ He was wound tight, I know that.” she rolled her eyes with a puffing exhale.

I was warmed at the realization of how seemingly decent the usual ignitable pair had worked together to execute the planning without a hiccup. But, I strategically kept the sappy gushes inside my own private thoughts, knowing Tia would whine and baulk at the subject. Throughout training, Colton and she kept on their most polite behavior (well, ‘best behavior’ for those two thick-skulled, impetuous individuals, let’s say) and only nearly killed the other once. The tumultuous exchange was something vaguely involving the weight of gloves, and Colton wanting to trim the bout down to only 3 rounds. Cal snarled that the two of them should just have it out in the cage and settle things the only way they knew how, and end the ongoing ‘dick measuring contest’ as he put it, for everyone’s sanity.

“Well thanks, Tia. For helping him out and doing your part. I’m sure he’s grateful.” I assured her lightheartedly, turning back to face her as she followed me under the dipped open ring rope.

“He gave me 50 bucks, and he may’ve even said ‘thank you’ or somethin’. It’s whatever. I did it for you, LC. Not him. So, don’t start with those doe-y eyes.” She spat lightening defenses behind baring teeth.

Tia and I danced our usual relaxed waltz around each other when Willow gave the go-ahead, Colton standing arms crossed on the outside of the ropes, and my parents seated in cushioned stools from the therapists’ office. Riled grunts, and the forceful air whips of efforted swings fell upon listening ears as my partner tested me with slivered eyes. I kept my hands fastened meticulously near my nose to protect it from any unforeseen assaults and ducked quickly to try and take Tia’s legs. With my face now downward turned and arms opened to attack, my skull was only for a fleeting second left unprotected, leaving me to suffer the costs.

The bridge of my nose was met to Tia’s apparently very solid kneecap, and my teeth nearly gnashed my gummy-like tongue in half. A black explosion resembling an abstract firework filled my retinas, and suddenly I got the irresistible urge to nap. Unconsciousness threatened me, but by some luck I only teetered the line and never fully fell into its’ caress. Once the haze cleared and colors were recognizable again, a crimson flow dispersed like melted butter underneath my rested, near lifeless body.

“WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT, TIA?!! FUCK!! Have you lost your damn mind?!” Colton’s stinging shrieks echoed through the entire gym like a wild, murderous banshee.  

He verbally attacked Tia with persevering hysteria, spitting venomous strings of saliva into her detached, cold face. I couldn’t swear to it, but I was pretty certain those thumping veins on both sides of his neck were almost rupturing beneath his flesh. This was the wicked, sinful anguish that he always cautioned me was living inside him, and it had clawed it’s way to the light of day for the world to see.

“She’s gotta be more careful than that, Ritter. I was just trying to make her understand what could happen to her. She needs to understand that Katrina wants to hurt her, she’s gonna be out for blood. It was harsh, but I’m not sorry.” Tia shrugged haphazardly upon her explanation. Her words resonated just enough to piss me off to extreme measures, and make complete, and total sense.

I’m not even sure Colt comprehended her controversial explanation, nor the fact that she was even talking at all, as he hurled his weight in entirety to the ground beside me. He pulled off his t-shirt, doubling it as a rag to soak up some of the blood pool I was gurgling face down in. I sat up without assistance and felt undeniably woozy trying to hold up my head that now felt like the weight of a bowling ball. This instance was the closest I’d ever came to being knocked out, and I tried to process all the strange aftereffects while my fiercely concerned boyfriend gently moved my noggin around by the chin to observe the motion of my eyes.

“Livvy, baby? Hey, look at me, okay. Do you know where ya’ are? What’s my name, sweetheart?” He stroked repetitively on top of my head, clearing the hair from my eyes.

“I’m fine, Colt. Calm down, I don’t even think it’s broken,” I faked a smile hoping to lower the intensity of his brimming adrenaline.

Upon rising onto my own two very unsure feet, I fell dizzily into the wall of Colton’s warm-fleshed chest, and heard a gasping wince come from my perceiving left. Mom was standing at the foot of the ring, resting one hand there to balance her alarmed body, and the other squeezed over her mouth to try and kill the desire to sob. A collision with another player on the court, or the routine ‘floor burn’ to the knees had been common happenings throughout my childhood. But, seeing their flesh and blood, only child being unforgivingly rocked to the face by a bare, violent knee was a sight any parent would struggle with.

“Cal, grab the doc for me, will ya’?” Willow gestured a thumb to the direction of the Temples’ on-staff physician’s office down the hall. “Think we oughta go ahead and have her checked for concussion symptoms.”

“Ah, for fucks sake. Everybody needs to calm the hell down! She’s fine. Just give her a minute to get her bearings. You feel ok, Liv. Right?”

Was she trying to convince me, the other obviously concerned witnesses, or herself? My thoughts may have moved through my head at the speed of hot glue oozing stubbornly from the tip of a gun, but moving, nonetheless. I tried rationalizing with Tia’s abrupt, reckless attack, and the more I searched for some sense on the moment the angrier I grew. My match was one hand count of days away, and she thought reasonable to risk breaking my nose, or giving me an unnecessary concussion? It was irresponsible, thoughtless, and frankly downright asinine. Fury, combined with the pulsating echoes of pain from my throbbing nose, and the effort it took just to try and use simple brain power had me feeling like a smashed bug on the grill of a semi.

“Take me home, Colt. Please… I need a bath, and a bottle of anything to put me out for 36 hours.” I whined, erratically batting my eyelids trying to adjust to the seemingly now high voltage lighting of the room.

Any healing wounds I may have recognized up to this point between Colton and Tia was a very distant memory now. My fearless mate would shred anyone who he may have viewed as even a potential enemy, much less an individual he just witnessed almost knock me needlessly unconscious.

“We gotta have doc check ya’ out, Liv. He can probably get ‘chu somethin’ for the pain, too.” Colton answered softly, continuing his attempts to clean the crusting, web of blood all over my face and crane of my neck. “Then, I promise I’m gonna take you home and put you straight in the tub for a soak in some’a those fizzy things you always buyin’, ‘ight?”

The hurt of my swelling nose was too much of a distraction for me to completely bask in all the ways I knew my loyal man would be coddling me the upcoming days.

 Amidst the doctors’ perpetual astonishment, I passed his exam and questioning with flying colors, and he dismissed me that night with the green light to go about my evening as normal. Thankfully, despite my nose not being in fact broken, he instructed me to ice as much as I could physically stand and prescribed me a gentle painkiller for the soreness and headaches to come. Tia lingered idly in the training room until I packed up for the evening and let my panicked with concern mother hold my hand through the exit. I didn’t so much as bother her with a second look nor give her the satisfaction of a goodbye, still feeling grudgingly nauseous with her very inexistence.

The nose injury came with barely noticeable plum-shaded bruising in the corners of my eyes that covered easily with a thicker application of concealer. The swelling had ceased due to the repetitive regime of icing and anti-inflammatories, so I didn’t have to see the light of day looking like a complete ogre. Weigh-ins were the first excuse I had to force Colton to allow me out of the house after remaining under his watchful, loving eye, and the smothering care of my parents as well. I not dare complain or push aside their gracious concerns for me, so I politely smiled, thanked, and kissed the obvious appropriate party and focused on the fight.

The event of my weigh-in was no where closely related the ones I was used to writing about for work, and probably wouldn’t even be categorized as an event to begin with. There was no hype or advertising buzz floating around the streets for the fight between Kat and myself, so a big to-do with our weight checks seemed definitely unnecessary. Colton suggested a simple meeting at Temple Fitness with a well-respected referee from Pittsburgh, my team, and my opponents the Friday  evening before we were scheduled for a dance in the cage.

My parents arguably agreed to wait back at the house after I reasoned we’d only be gone for a couple hours, give or take. Mom insisted on concocting my favorite pot of always delicious jambalaya for a late dinner after my numbers had been approved for competition. My mouth seeped in anticipation with thoughts of the steaming pot as we made the turn into the gyms’ lot around 7:00 that evening.

“What the hell is she doin’ here, Liv. Did you tell ‘er to come?” Colton scowled and spat seeing Tia’s car parked near the street light in the parking lot. I felt his grip under my fingers stiffen at the mention of her name.

“She’s probably just here working out. Or, Willow mentioned it to her. Either way, just let it be, babe. Please? Let’s just do what we came here to do and get out calmly in one piece. Deal?”

His silence amongst bull like puffing from his nostrils alluded those weren’t exactly his intensions if Tia decided to make herself known tonight. A short-film of the two hotheads beating each other bloody looped in my mind.

“Ritter………” I pressured him sternly, demanding he agree to my terms.

“I hear you, baby. But, I’m tellin’ ya, if she starts that mouthy shit I ain’t promisin’ ya’ I can control myself.”

We parked, and I marched straight for the locker room for one last bathroom break before stepping up to the scales. I felt confident in the discipline I kept with my diet, and my dedicated hours on the weights, but now that the moment had arrived, self-doubt rolled in like a spring thunderstorm. I shed whatever bladder continents I had left, my windbreaker, and the capri sweats I was wearing before heading to join the waiting bodies.

The cranked temperature of the A/C caused me to shudder off a cold-chill as the spandex shorts and sports bra exposed me to the cool air. Amongst Willow, Colt, Cal and regretfully Tia were four unrecognizable faces. Everyone chatted informally, broken into a few swarming huddles except two. The two pouting bodies stood caddy-cornered from the other, wide-stances and hands crossed into their armpits. Tia and Colton were so much alike, and both too blindly obstinate to see it.

I went trembling with nerves to Colton’s side, as Willow quickly hastened to him as well.

“Bex wants us to take the first weigh if that’s alright with you guys?” She asked kindly and professionally. She had played a hugely important role in my fight-preparation, but upon his re-entering to the picture, let Colton somewhat run the show knowing I probably felt most comfortable in his molding hands.

“Up to you, Livvy baby. If you want her to step up first, just say the word and I’ll make it happen.” Colt turned to face me, warming my chilling arms with his enormous heater like hands.

“I mean, I guess it’s alright. I… I don’t mind.” I looked to smile crookedly at the murmuring bodies across the room.

Colton approached who I concluded to be the official he invited as the unbiased party in the matter and shook his hand kindly with a relaxed meeting. The two men nodded their heads with words I couldn’t make out and parted ways with Colton returning to my nervously tapping feet, and the ref stepping to Katrina and her coach.

“’Ight, it’s nothin’ to get all fuckin’ antsy about, baby girl. All you gonna do is step up on the scale, he’ll call out your official weight and we’re all done. Simple as that, okay? You were at 129 or so this mornin’, right? So nothin’ to worry that big ol’ head about.” He gestured with his hands, steadily explaining the cut-and-dry process to come.

My bare feet treaded lightly towards the smile of the friendly man planted next to the upright standing physicians scale. My shoulders tensed and appeared to coil higher into my stiff neck as every set of eyes in the room landed on me. Mimicking what I had seen Colton and many other competitors do, I pushed the airy content from my lungs, and stepped upon the scale one foot at a time. He tapped gently on the pointer, careful to ensure his reading would be accurate before announcing the crucial number.

“Looks like you’re set at 129.5, Miss Elliott. You guys wanna come take a look?” He offered a firsthand sight at the scale with me standing on it for Katrina, wanting no speculation of funny business on fight night. But, she passed the opportunity and instead began shedding any extra clothing weight she could.

“Way to go, LC. Even down at couple pounds since we started this shit. I see you, girl!” Tia was on my heels with empty praise, talking towards the back of my head since I refused to give her the satisfaction of acknowledgment.

Colton stood at attention holding open my jacket and sweats, as Willow gave my shoulders a quick squeeze of support.

“What’s on the post weigh-in menu, Liv. All fighters got that craving while they’re training. Whatcha’ gonna reward yourself with, babe?” She smiled proudly.

“Oh, it’s gonna be somethin’ fulla’ carbs knowing this girl, Willow,” Tia butt in. Willow only looked with a blank, awkward glance, still very much sensing the tension within the Ritter-Elliott-Larkin camp.

“Tia, just fuck off, ‘ight. Liv may be too nice to say it, but we both know I sure as hell ain’t. She don’t wanna talk to ya’, and frankly, I don’t know why the fuck you’re even here.” Colton held off best he could, bless his heart. But her forced comments into our conversation only amped him further to unleash on her.

Tia’s smile turned to a sneer in an unapproving reaction to her once again mortal enemy’s comment, and eyeballed me searching for some sort of back-up, or teammate in the matter. Normally, I’d be the ‘Switzerland’ regarding matters of the heart between she and Colton. But, the desire to defend her right now just simply wasn’t present.

“Willow mentioned it to me. And if Liv doesn’t want me here, I think she’s grown and perfectly capable of telling me that herself. Asshole.”

“I don’t want you here.”

My quick snap admittance looked to hit her like a sack of bricks. The flesh tone of her face heated like the igniting of fiery embers and her nails seemed to pierce the inside of her palms between clenched, wrathful fists.

“I don’t want you here, and I think it’s best of you just stay out of my corner Saturday night, too. Willow and Colt can handle it just fine.”

Truly, I wasn’t as fitful with her as I let on, but for my mental sanity on fight night, I figured it best to just squander any possible altercations between she and Colton now. The two of them intently bickering outside the cage would only distract me, and I’d end up with double the damage that Tia caused. This time, Colton was genuinely lacking fault, so it indeed wouldn’t be fair to shove him from ringside.

“You don’t fuckin’ mean that, LC. This whole thing was my idea to begin with.” she protested with gritty objection.

“Hey Colt, you and your girl wanna come check the scale before she steps down?” The ref interjected.

“Yeah, that’s be great. C’mon, babe.”

I slid into my shoes, and disregarded Tia wholly.

TAGS: @torialeysha @eap1935 @mollybegger-blog @littleluna98

[sneasler-appreciation-blog]

"Gaëtan Dugas loved to fly. Adopted by a large family in the Quebec City suburb of L’Ancienne-Lorette, he grew up next to the airport, watching planes take off and wishing he were on board. He trained as a hairdresser, but once airlines lifted the ban on men doing the work of “stewardesses,” he found his dream job. He became one of Air Canada’s new cohort of male flight attendants.

It was 1974. Dugas was a wildly handsome, flamboyant and utterly promiscuous 22-year-old surfing a jet stream of sexual liberation. It was an era when flying was still glamorous, people smoked on planes and the horizon of casual, carefree sex appeared limitless. With a bleached-blond coif and the pants and shirt of his uniform re-tailored to be skin-tight, Dugas wore his gay pride to work. He shared makeup tips with his female colleagues and competed with them to pick up the hottest male passengers. By the end of the decade, the Air Canada flight attendant with the cute French accent and men in every port was a minor legend, known from the airline crew lounge to the bathhouses of New York and Los Angeles.

In 1980, he was diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a previously rare skin cancer that would become the mark of AIDS. In the LGBTQ community then, it was known as the mysterious “gay cancer,” with no indication it was contagious. Two years later, Dugas was living in New York and undergoing chemotherapy when Bill Darrow, an investigator for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), interviewed him about his sexual activity for a cluster study of men afflicted by AIDS. Dugas was extremely co-operative. Estimating he’d had some 750 sexual partners in the previous three years, he gave Darrow a list of 72 contacts from his address book and became Patient 57 in a CDC study of linked cases. Released in March 1984, the same month that Dugas died of AIDS, Darrow’s study planted the seed that would lead the media to falsely demonize Dugas as Patient Zero, arch-villain of an epidemic that would eventually kill more than 700,000 people in North America.

And it all began with a typo.

When Darrow published his report, Patient 57 was renamed Patient O, with the letter “O” standing for “Out-of-California.” Somewhere along the paper trail, the “O” got confused with a zero. Adding to the confusion was the fact that Dugas was the study’s “original” patient, placed at the centre of the cluster diagram, between patients from L.A. and New York. Darrow stressed that there was no evidence that Dugas had infected the others—never mind that he’d introduced AIDS to North America as Patient Zero. But that was the sensational claim made in 1987 by San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts in his bestseller about the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On. Cementing Dugas’ legacy as a monstrous degenerate, the book provoked a spate of lurid headlines, and later a cheesy HBO mini-series. It was a textbook case of “fake news” that “went viral” before either term was even coined.

In 2016, scientists debunked the Patient Zero myth with a conclusive study of blood samples that showed Dugas’ virus was unrelated to others in his cluster. By then, it had been established that the HIV/AIDS virus, which likely originated with African primates, had been circulating in North America since at least 1970, and that its incubation period was three or four times longer than the one or two years between sexual contact and illness in the CDC cluster.

Now, Killing Patient Zero—a powerful documentary by Canadian filmmaker Laurie Lynd that premieres at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival this month—sets out to clear Dugas’ reputation once and for all, while challenging the urban legend that he was a sexual predator who deliberately infected his lovers.

Based on Richard A. McKay’s landmark book, Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic(2017), the film features 38 interviews with friends and colleagues of Dugas and Shilts, as well as doctors, scientists and gay men and women who lived through the epidemic, notably the sardonic Fran Lebowitz. They include Darrow, who laments how his study was skewed, and Michael Denneny, Shilts’ editor and publisher, who takes the blame for igniting the Patient Zero hysteria with a shameless publicity ploy to sell And the Band Played On.

Denneny recalls a PR woman coming into his office in tears on a Friday afternoon, saying no one wanted to cover the book. “I panicked and called up an ex-boyfriend who happened to be a publicist,” he says. “He suggested the following, which I thought was extraordinarily clever. The story of Patient Zero is only mentioned in 11 pages. He said, ‘You pull this material out and present it to the New York Post, a miserably homophobic newspaper. This story has everything you want. It has beauty, it has depth, he’s an airline steward and, best of all, a foreigner. They’re going to eat it up.’ ”

Shilts hated the idea, calling it yellow journalism. But Denneny eventually talked him into it, arguing it was the key to getting his groundbreaking work about AIDS onto the national agenda in a Reagan era of deep denial. The Post broke the story with the headline, “The man who gave us AIDS.” And the New York Times, which had refused to review the book, would publish 11 articles on it over several weeks. Dugas’ family, horrified to see Gaëtan so cruelly exploited, refused to co-operate when 60 Minutes came looking for interviews. They’ve stayed out of the media ever since.

What’s remarkable is that the prime movers of the Patient Zero myth were all gay and progressive—the publisher, the publicist and Shilts, who died of AIDS in 1994. It wasn’t just the straight world that craved a scapegoat. And two decades before he made Killing Patient Zero, Lynd admits that Shilts’ book had a huge impact on him as a young gay man. “It woke me up,” he told Maclean’s. “I was living in New York and had blinders on—I was so lucky I didn’t get AIDS—and I bought into the whole Patient Zero thing.”

His filmmaker friend John Greyson was more circumspect, however—he had the prescience to puncture the myth with his surreal musical satire, Zero Patience, a small Canadian film that premiered the same week in 1993 as Philadelphia, the AIDS drama starring Tom Hanks.

Greyson, among other subjects in Lynd’s film, points out that Dugas’ promiscuity wasn’t as freakish as it sounds in the context of the times. Between rising up against persecution in the Stonewall riots at the end of the ’60s and being decimated by AIDS in the ’80s, the 1970s represented a brief window of delirious freedom for the gay community. “We thought that sex was good for you,” says Lebowitz, marvelling at the male capacity for racking up anonymous encounters. “New York was an orgy. To me, it seemed you couldn’t possibly have sex with so many people.” Putting things in perspective, Denneny says, “If you scored two nights a week, that meant you didn’t score five nights a week, so you felt frustrated.”

No one disputes that Dugas was an overachiever and may have played an unwitting role in spreading the AIDS virus. But the most sinister accusation was that he did so with psychopathic intent, as a kind of “Typhoid Mary.” In interviews, Shilts went so far as to compare him to Jack the Ripper and serial killer Richard Speck. Lynd, who suspects Shilts was tortured by “internalized homophobia,” tries to undo the damage through testimony from those who knew Dugas as a kind, generous soul who was singled out only because he was such a co-operative patient. Like many early AIDS victims, Dugas persisted in having sex during his illness because there was no proof that it was sexually transmitted. But because his co-operation helped prove that it was, Greyson sees him as a hero, and as a gay man boldly immune from guilt and shame who “epitomized a politic of deep pleasure.”

A fellow flight attendant, Elaine Watson, remembers Dugas as someone who was “ahead of his time—he was who he was; he didn’t pretend to be straight, he didn’t pretend to be anything.” Another close colleague, Gaetane Urevig, has fond memories of a joyful soulmate who used to tell her, “One day, I’ll be a star.” Gaëtan Dugas didn’t live long enough to find out the sad consequences of his idle prophecy. But, as his legacy finds a warmer spotlight, he may have finally scored some long-overdue redemption.

[firstdraftpod]

Ep 199: Robin Wasserman

First Draft Episode #199: Robin Wasserman

Robin Wasserman, New York Times bestselling author of adult novel Girls on Fire, as well as young adult novels The Waking Dark, The Book of Blood and Shadow, Hacking Harvard, The Cold Awakening series, the Seven Deadly Sins series. Her next novel, to come out with Scribner, is Mother Daughter Widow Wife.

Links and Topics Mentioned In This Episode

Robin loved Diane Wynne Jones and Stephen King as a kid, particularly Salem’s Lot, The Stand, and It. (Robin wrote for The Atlantic about, “How Stephen King Saved My Life”)

Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer, mathematician, and astrologer, about whom Robin would gladly talk about forever. (And I would listen!)

Robin wrote her senior thesis about Dr. Timothy Leary, who co-conducted studies known as the Psilocybin Project, which sought to test whether psychedelics could cure the emotional pain of Western man. Leary was fired from Harvard when the ethics of his studies came into question, and went on to continue promoting the use of psychedelics as a thought leader in the 60s counter-cultural movement. Leary has written extensively about his philosophy, including in books like The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, his book with his partner in the experiments, Richard Alpert* (now known as Ram Dass); his autobiography, Flashbacks; and Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. Many have written about him, including The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment, compiled by the archivist Jennifer Ulrich; and Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In by Robert Forte.

*Of interest to me is that the TV show LOST paid homage to Ram Dass by naming a character Richard Alpert

David Levithan, who has and does host a regular drinks night for New York authors of young adult fiction. Robin went to one of these gatherings and met John Green before Looking for Alaska won the Printz.

Kurt Cobain was the lead singer of Nirvana, the band that broke open grunge. Cobain died by suicide in 1994. If you’re interested in Cobain, or Nirvana, or the grunge scene generally, I personally recommend Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge by Mark Yarm, and the documentary Montage of Heck by Brett Morgen (about which Robin wrote, “The Art of Resurrection: Montage of Heck,” in the Los Angeles Times Review of Books).

The Satanic Panic was a phenomenon in the 1980s, wherein millions of Americans feared that an underground cult of Satan worshipers were practicing rituals and committing crimes. Robin particularly recommends Richard Beck’s We Believe the Children, which covers the phenomenon of, specifically, day care workers being charged with horrible accusations of child abuse. I’m obsessed with this phenomenon, and there are a ton of other podcasts that do a great job explaining it:

For a broad overview, the Stuff You Should Know podcast released an episode about The Satanic Panic

The Satanic Panic is a multi-part, deep dive into the phenomenon and many of the cases that came to define it (and their resources page isn’t to be missed)

The McMartin Child Abuse trial was one of the most massive and egregious examples of the Satanic Panic as a community-seizing exercise of hysteria. Both WNYC’s The Takeaway and Generation Why have devoted episodes to exploring the case. Documentary filmmaker Penny Lane (whose most recent film, Hail Satan?, is awesome) went on KCRW’s The Document to discuss the case, and the phenomenon.

Robin was inspired, in part, by an event of mass hysteria that afflicted dozens (of mostly high school cheerleaders) in LeRoy, New York, a phenomenon covered in the New York Times and Slate. Robin wrote about the phenomenon for the Los Angeles Times Review of Books (“Girl Trouble”), which is a non-fiction piece on the history of hysteria and a review of The Fever by Megan Abbott. Another book written about that phenomenon is The Cheerleaders by Kara Thomas (listen to Kara’s episodes of First Draft here and here).

The West Memphis Three was another case of hysteria leading to false convictions, in which three men in West Memphis, Arkansas were held responsible for the deaths of three young boys. The trial was controversial, and the three convicted men were released after serving more than 18 years in prison. The case is covered in a modern classic of documentary filmmaking, a trio of docs that begins with Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills.

The concept of “kindred spirits” put forth by Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery led Robin to some dysfunctional concepts of female friendship as a young woman

Holly Black, who Robin calls “the queen of life modeling exercises” (listen to Holly Black’s First Draft episode here), asked her to write out what author she’d like to be. Robert Cormier and Neil Gaiman were among the many different answers to that question. Robin threw out that she’d like to be a cross between Michael Chabon and Joss Whedon.

What/If, the TV show that Robin wrote for, is now available to watch on Netflix!

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[watermelinoe]

ayyy shoutout to the “we don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with you” syndrome. I spent like 600 bucks to see a rheumotologist and have them take their lil bone pictures for them to be like. eh. probably fibro? idk. see you next year!

yes I hurt all the time. yes I’m in my early twenties. no doctors are not suddenly and magically helpful.

ughhh that fuckin sucks, i'm sorry. when i went mine didn't even take pictures lmao, he just lectured me abt the sleep disorder i've had my entire life (non 24 hr) and said rheumatologists don't treat fibro anymore bc they've realized it doesn't belong in that field of study. of course, none of the other fields want it lmao

fibromyalgia is real insofar as the pain is real but as a diagnosis it's code for "we didn't care to look into this further :)" it's like walking into the doc's office saying hey i hurt everywhere and the doc says that sounds like hurt everywhere disorder. try being less stressed. that'll be $400.

so many doctors treat it as the latest female hysteria bc they don't want to acknowledge that pain can be caused in ways we don't understand yet. we actually barely understand pain at all, and the doctors either don't care abt treating it or they've been steamrolled by the opioid fear machine that presents no realistic alternate treatments. it's still important to go to the doctor, every one is different and you could hit the jackpot. but also be prepared to go in with your chronic symptoms and get "yeah it be like that sometimes lol"

[yespoetry]

Stay Mad, Make Shit, Get Joy, Work Hard

By E. Kristin Anderson

It’s easier to be mad than to be depressed.

In March I was so goddamned mad that I woke up mad and I went to bed mad and I was mad in my nightmares and everything I saw made me mad and I just kept looking at it because if I was mad I couldn’t feel the things that made me want to jump off an overpass into MOPAC.

I have bipolar disorder. It’s a lot. I also have a rare autoimmune disease which, while currently in remission, has left my mind and body wrecked. The trauma wrecked me. The treatment wrecked me. The disease wrecked me. I’m a 35-year-old woman who lives her life exhausted, anxious, and in pain, but somehow I manage to get up and do things every day.

I get dressed. I put on makeup. I eat meals. I run errands. I care for my animals. And as often as I can, I write.

In March I went to AWP in Tampa. I had a good time (aside from all the goddamned stairs, like, seriously AWP) (also the cockroaches in my hotel room…seriously, Florida?) and while I was there I had this dream about [CENSORED] with Dave Grohl. I tweeted about it. I laughed about it with friends at the conference. But more, I felt something new but vaguely familiar.

Stay with me here. I promise this is moderately relevant.

On my way back from AWP, listening to Foo Fighters records on the iPod kept safe in my bra, I realized that I had omitted my childhood hero in my current writing. I have recently fallen in love with Foo Fighters’ more recent albums and I was rediscovering things from when I was younger that I wanted to write about. But if I was going to do this I wanted to approach it with techniques I hadn’t used before. While I often work with found materials in my poems, it was important to me that—if I indeed was going to write tribute pieces to Foo Fighters—I was going to do it in a way that was worthy of the material I was planning to use—their albums.

Working with song lyrics is tricky. With any found poetry, you need your poems to diverge enough from the original material that it is not recognizable as someone else’s work. With song lyrics, this can be exceptionally difficult from both a craft and a legal perspective. Pop songs tend to be repetitive and easily memorable.

One tactic I’ve used to work with song lyrics is scrambling the words from an entire album and then applying erasure techniques to this new text to create a poem. (My chapbook Fire In the Sky came from this process.) But I didn’t want to repeat that. I have this fear of being thought of as a one-trick poet. I’m always looking for a new path to take within my own writing practices.

So I stayed up late, angry that I couldn’t sleep, of course, trying in the dark to think of a way to do something new with the words of a band I’ve been enamored with since MTV actually played music videos. And for some reason I thought writing crowns of sonnets was a good idea. I hate myself a little.

I set up some rules for myself. I always have rules, maybe because I’m competitive (even with myself) and because I’m neurotic. Constraint has a way of opening creative windows while also forcing accountability. The more I bring this to my writing, the better the drafts that result. For my Foo sonnets, these were my rules:

1. I would write a crown(let) of three sonnets for each Foo Fighters album.

2. This would include the Saint Cecilia EP but no collections/compilations (like Greatest Hits) or live albums.

3. The double album In Your Honor would be split into two albums, because honestly they pretty much are and should have been and I think Dave Grohl even said so but I didn’t Google it to verify let’s just go with this.

4. For each crown I could only use words that were on the corresponding album. So “Feel This Real Forever,” which consists of three linked sonnets from the Foo Fighters album The Colour And The Shape, can only use words that appear on that album.

5. I could repeat words as many times as necessary. For example, if I wanted to use the word “ceiling” three times, but it only appeared on the album once, that was okay.

6. I wouldn’t have to use meter, but I did have to use end rhyme.

7. The end rhyme would be slant rhyme. Like really, obsessively strict slant rhyme.

8. In a crown, the sonnets are linked by line 14 of the preceding poem and line one of the next—the line repeats. Some folks who write sonnets might change a word or two, or change verb tenses. But my rule was to only change punctuation in these linked lines.

9. I would write the third sonnet in each crown first. (This was less of a rule and more of a really good tip from Cathleen Allyn Conway)

10. I would rite three linked Foo sonnets every day for 10 days.

This last rule showed up at the end of day one. Because I was feeling overzealous and obsessive. But it worked:

To prepare, I compiled the lyrics of each album into a Word doc. I removed line breaks and all punctuation except for hyphens and apostrophes, creating a paragraph out of each song. I then ran the doc for each album through the Cut-Up Machine at the Language Is A Virus website, creating a scrambled version of the lyrics. I saved these versions as separate docs creating two docs for the lyrics of each album.

Every day I started by printing out the two docs corresponding with an album. I read through these pages and circled words and phrases I liked or thought would be useful. The scrambled lyrics gave me Dave Grohl’s language out of its original context and the original version let me pick choice phrases that I could use to call back to Foo Fighters songs. As the days went on, I also started making lists of concrete nouns from each album, since songwriting tends to use more abstract language. I needed words that could anchor my poems.

And then I revised. I revised a lot. My first drafts were all hand-written (and occasionally illegible, ugh) and as I was typing up these drafts I revised. I cross-checked the language in my poems with the source text(s). My poems got better. They even got good.

I’m pleased to say that my efforts paid off. I wrote ten mini-crowns of sonnets. I actually really love them and many have been sent off into the slushpile ether.

And I was angry while I wrote. I figured if I could stay angry I could stave off depression. I could put that anger into these poems every day. I knew I could keep myself from feeling dark even when I was writing dark topics by using my anger fuel my creative work.

But what I didn’t expect was finding an absolute joy in this grueling routine. In the weeks since finishing the first drafts, I’ve missed writing these sonnets. I’ve missed the language. I’ve missed the process. I’ve missed the neurotic obsession. My rules—my constraints—continue to set me free in more ways than one.

And while I’m writing some erasures for the month of April, I’m already planning my next manic, fast-drafted project. I have an idea. Some rules. A notebook I’ve selected from my stash. A text from myself at 3 a.m. a week or so ago that just says “research golden shovels.”

I’m looking forward to chasing another poetry high all summer and I am excited to see where my new rules—and my new joy—take me. I’m doing another thing I’ve never done before. I’m going to write tough things and I’m going to have tough rules, but I’m going to have fun with it. And goddamn, I’m going to write a shit ton of poems.

E. Kristin Anderson is a poet, Starbucks connoisseur, and glitter enthusiast living in Austin, Texas. A Connecticut College graduate with a B.A. in classics, Kristin has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture (Anomalous Press), and Hysteria: Writing the female body (Sable Books, forthcoming). Her writing has been published worldwide in magazines and anthologies and she is the author of eight chapbooks of poetry including A Guide for the Practical Abductee (Red Bird Chapbooks), Pray Pray Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), We’re Doing Witchcraft (Hermeneutic Chaos Press), and 17 seventeen XVII (Grey Book Press). Kristin is an assistant poetry editor at The Boiler and a slush reader at Sugared Water. Once upon a time she worked the night shift at The New Yorker. She blogs at EKristinAnderson.com and tweets at @ek_anderson.