#food grain tax opposition

[townpostin]

Jamshedpur Traders to Protest Bazaar Samiti Fee with Torch March

SCCI and Vyapar Mandal organize demonstration against proposed food grain tax Jamshedpur’s business community unites to oppose the Jharkhand government’s plan to impose a Bazaar Samiti fee on food grains. JAMSHEDPUR – The Singhbhum Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SCCI) and Vyapar Mandal will lead a torch procession on September 1 to protest the proposed Bazaar Samiti fee on food grains. The…

[askpredetor]

A lot of people have this very hipster mentality of cinema and the theater, and others have the complete opposite. Some say to save cinema is to double the price of mainstream blockbusters and halve the price of independent films so the unwashed masses get taxed for slop and the enlightend get rewarded for going against the grain.

Others say just have theaters rented out to play sports games and concert footage and let people text, smoke, and talk during a Mavericks game or a 2003 Beyonce Concert

I'm smarter than both those sides combined, I say just clean the theater and halve the price of popcorn and soda. People will watch everything if the medium bucket of popcorn is no longer the price of a fast food combo

[swldx]

BBC 0422 19 Jul 2023

12095Khz 0357 19 JUL 2023 - BBC (UNITED KINGDOM) in ENGLISH from TALATA VOLONONDRY. SINPO = 55545. English, dead carrier s/on @0357z then ID@0359z pips and Newsroom preview. @0401z World News anchored by David Harper. The leader of Thailand's election-winning Move Forward Party was braced for what could be his final shot at becoming prime minister on Wednesday, as a parliament that denied him last week convened for its second vote on the premiership. Donald Trump has said he expects to be arrested by a federal inquiry into the US Capitol riot and efforts to challenge the 2020 election results. The ex-president said in a social media post he had been informed by special counsel Jack Smith on Sunday night that he was a target of their investigation. Mr Trump posted he had been told to report to a grand jury, "which almost always means an Arrest and Indictment". The special counsel has not commented on Mr Trump's statements. Honduras' government will lift a curfew imposed last month in two major industrial cities to counter violence, following a sharp drop in homicides in the region. WTO asks countries to lift restrictions on food exports to stabilize food prices and inflation worldwide in the wake of the Ukraine war. Ukrainian air defence systems were engaged in the early hours of Wednesday in repelling a Russian air attack on the southern port of Odesa for a second consecutive night. Russia struck Ukrainian ports on Tuesday, a day after pulling out of a U.N.-backed deal for safe Black Sea grain exports, a decision that raised concern primarily in Africa and Asia of rising food prices and hunger. An Israeli air strike targeting the vicinity of Syria’s Damascus left two Syrian soldiers injured and “caused some material damage”. Kenya is braced for the latest in a series of opposition protests against the rising cost of living and tax hikes, which have turned violent, with at least 24 people killed in recent months. A kitchen shrine adorned with serpents, a bakery, human skeletons, exquisite frescos, and yes, a picture of something that looks very much like pizza. These are among the new finds being turned up at the Pompeii Archaeological Park. @0406z "The Newsroom" begins. 250ft unterminated BoG antenna pointed E/W w/MFJ-1020C active antenna (used as a preamplifier/preselector), Etón e1XM. 250kW, beamAz 315°, bearing 63°. Received at Plymouth, United States, 15359KM from transmitter at Talata Volonondry. Local time: 2257.

[argumate]

"the interesting thing about living in a protectorate of the American empire is that 20% of our imports come from China and 30% of our exports go to China" -- And yet on this very blog you have rightfully criticized them, rightfully noted that all their belt and road shit is a complete fucking scam and the US is generally a much better faith actor on trade in general, everything to do with the internet, etc. [1/2]

I'm not defending any of the bad shit we do, but if your choice not to completely divest is acceptable and registering a complaint is all it takes to get off the hook morally for benefitting from the horrors, having a cut-off point for empathy for other people damaged by the whole thing is revealed as completely self-serving and, more to the point, really more about not changing things than the opposite. [2/2]

it’s not clearly what would constitute completely divesting from civilisation, besides suicide obviously, nor is it particularly clear who benefits from various activities and how.

before the invasion of Iraq, various entities in Australia were actually covertly breaking sanctions to trade oil for food:

The AWB oil-for-wheat scandal (also known just as the AWB scandal) refers to the payment of kickbacks to the regime of Saddam Hussein in contravention of the United Nations Oil-for-Food Humanitarian Program. AWB Limited is a major grain marketing organisation based in Australia. For much of the 20th and early 21st century, it was an Australian Government entity operating a single desk regime over Australian wheat, meaning it alone could export Australian wheat, which it paid a single price for. In the mid-2000s, it was found to have been, through middlemen, paying kickbacks to the regime of Saddam Hussein, in exchange for lucrative wheat contracts. This was in direct contradiction of United Nations Sanctions, and of Australian law.

now I don’t have any personal exposure to wheat farms, oil importers, or military contractors, so trying to figure out exactly whether I was benefiting from the atrocities of Saddam or the atrocities of George Bush or both or neither seems highly non-obvious.

it’s not even clear if the US as a whole benefits from US actions in the Middle East or if this just represents a transfer of wealth from American tax payers to various contractors, with great suffering thrown in as an uncosted externality.

similarly are the growing tensions between the US and China likely to actually help anyone in practice or just increase the risk of a costly and ultimately ineffectual war, I certainly can’t answer that, nor is it obvious what action I should take even if I could.

I certainly don’t unquestioningly stan the Commonwealth of Australia as a force for good in the world, it’s an organisation that has committed atrocities like any other and needs to be carefully watched for as long as it continues to exist so that it can be resisted where necessary.

[historical-babes]

Louis XVI of France (1754-1793).

King of France.

.

He was the last king of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. He was referred to as citizen Louis Capet during the four months just before he was guillotined. In 1765, at the death of his father, Louis, son and heir apparent of Louis XV, Louis-Auguste became the new dauphin of France. Upon his grandfather's death on 10 May 1774, he assumed the title "king of France and Navarre", which he used until 4 September 1791, when he received the title of "king of the French" until the monarchy was abolished on 21 September 1792.

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The first part of his reign was marked by attempts to reform the French government in accordance with Enlightenment ideas. These included efforts to abolish serfdom, remove the taille (land tax) and the corvée (labour tax), and increase tolerance toward non-Catholics as well as the abolition of the death penalty for deserters. The French nobility reacted to the proposed reforms with hostility, and successfully opposed their implementation. Louis implemented deregulation of the grain market, advocated by his economic liberal minister Turgot, but it resulted in an increase in bread prices. In periods of bad harvests, it would lead to food scarcity which would prompt the masses to revolt. From 1776, Louis XVI actively supported the North American colonists, who were seeking their independence from Great Britain, which was realised in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. The ensuing debt and financial crisis contributed to the unpopularity of the Ancien Régime. This led to the convening of the Estates-General of 1789. Discontent among the members of France's middle and lower classes resulted in strengthened opposition to the French aristocracy and to the absolute monarchy, of which Louis and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, were viewed as representatives. Increasing tensions and violence were marked by events such as the storming of the Bastille, during which riots in Paris forced Louis to definitively recognize the legislative authority of the National Assembly.

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Louis's indecisiveness and conservatism led some elements of the people of France to view him as a symbol of the perceived tyranny of the Ancien Régime, and his popularity deteriorated progressively. His disastrous flight to Varennes in June 1791, four months before the constitutional monarchy was declared, seemed to justify the rumors that the king tied his hopes of political salvation to the prospects of foreign intervention. The credibility of the king was deeply undermined, and the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic became an ever-increasing possibility.

.

In a context of civil and international war, Louis XVI was suspended and arrested at the time of the Insurrection of 10 August 1792; one month later, the absolute monarchy was abolished; the First French Republic was proclaimed on 21 September 1792. He was tried by the National Convention (self-instituted as a tribunal for the occasion), found guilty of high treason, and executed by guillotine on 21 January 1793, as a desacralized French citizen under the name of "Citizen Louis Capet," in reference to Hugh Capet, the founder of the Capetian dynasty – which the revolutionaries interpreted as Louis' surname. Louis XVI was the only King of France ever to be executed, and his death brought an end to more than a thousand years of continuous French monarchy. Both of his sons died in childhood, before the Bourbon Restoration; his only child to reach adulthood, Marie Therese, was given over to the Austrians in exchange for French prisoners of war, eventually dying childless in 1851.

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[Submission]

[bubmyg]

wonder - jjk

pairing: jeongguk x reader 

genre/warnings: pool boy/waiter/kind-of-baker/first-aid-extraordinaire/aspiring singer!jeongguk(ft. cherry!guk), writer/journalist!reader, the CHEESIEST fluff, tiny amounts of angst, a bad attempt at original poetry, there is a tiny blood mention

word count: 14,906

summary: romance novels lie about finding some deep epiphany in the ocean because you find your inspiration in some chlorine tainted red locks or where jeongguk isn’t smooth with a pool net. 

a/n: this is. the longest fic i’ve ever written. also the longest i’ve ever worked on a fic (...a month ajfdks) and im really proud of it :-( i hope u like it :-( 

There’s a certain breaking point for an advice columnist, one that isn’t supposed to come three years into the job and over a handwritten letter from a nine year old who has just had her dream of becoming a vet shattered by this sudden discovery that she, in fact, passes out when she sees any type of blood. Or if that breaking point comes, the draft of the response isn’t supposed to make it past an unsaved document, (Dreams are a scam, anyway. Learn that.) scrapped and used as emotional support to formulate the real answer.

There’s a nine year old little girl who rushes to the paper for a week after sending her letter, hoping to find some sort of solace in the advice column she finds fascinating, generally filled with advice on things she doesn’t have the capacity to understand: cheating husbands, the capitalist nature of the makeup industry, why “business casual” isn’t a reward for women, and taxes. She’s memorized her opening line enough to have her heart racing into her throat when she catches sight of it on its usual page, her letter transcribed and italicized just above the tiny portrait of the columnist and the bold font that would be her response.

Her mother finds her sobbing on her bed fifteen minutes after she called for her to come to dinner and consoles her enough to acknowledge that being a Disney princess is just as good of an aspiration as a vet, not before writing a strongly worded letter addressed to the editor of the paper and canceling the family’s subscription.

There’s a different document you should have scrapped completely, the sixty-seventh page of your never ending novel, never ending in the sense that it would never end because you were going to give up on everything with the exception of the column for the next day: an obscure sex toy shop escapade that isn’t fit for the nine year old and her canceled subscription in the first place.

You’d been glaring at the grainy lines across your monitor, ones that cut through the middle of the words on the sixty-sixth page, when Hoseok’s figure glided past the glass wall of your office to enter without knocking.

He cleared his throat and you turned slowly from the monitor, as if your gradual spiral cascading to a head had brought an end to your cordiality as well. There was a paper in his hand, the day prior’s edition, ink thick on the outside where a picture of a local elementary school’s service project was displayed. He opened it silently, turning to a page, your page, outlined heavily in red ink pen.

The gold links of Hoseok’s watch reflected off your monitor as the paper smacked and slid its way across your desk, forcing you to wince for two separate reasons.

“I’m sorry—”

Hoseok withdrew his latter hand from the pocket of his black slack and your fingers itched to close out of your novel but his gaze was steady on the blinking cursor next to a piece of grammar you’d fiddled with six separate times.

“Any progress?” You blinked at him and he jerked his head in the direction of your desktop, black fringe parting against his eyelashes so his dark eyes dropped a deeper shade of black.

There was a raw spot ready for you on the inside of your cheek and the taste of stale metallic flooded your tongue. Your legs unfurled from where they’d been folded up underneath you in your desk chair, gaze sweeping to the wilting ficus underneath your desk, “Not exactly…”

Papers fluttered together and you caught sight of the dogeared letter from the little girl as Hoseok brushed a bare spot on the corner of your desk to take a seat. There was a smiling cartoon character patterned to the surface of his short-sleeved button up and it’s smiling muzzle appeared to mirror that flit of an upturn on the edge of Hoseok’s dimpled lips. The subtle cock of his chin was anything but of praise, sympathy more so bleeding out the strict in his dark irises as he sighed.

“I understand this job and this column are not your first love,” He mirrored the snarky response that swallowed on the back of your tongue, “Hell, this probably isn’t even your third or fourth love.”

“But I do expect you to uphold a certain level of professionalism in your column. I’ve never had an issue with you in the past. In fact, I nearly stopped looking over your submissions before sending things to print,” Hoseok leaned forward, elbow on his thigh, chin on curled, ring clad knuckles, “However, as of recent…”

“It won’t happen again, Hoseok. I swear, I was just—”

You quieted when his fingers curled outward from underneath his chin. “...this was not the first column as of recent that hasn’t exactly been up to par.”

Quieter, barely a breath, you nodded, “I’m sorry.”

Hoseok’s index finger straightened, leaning from his lips to press into the side of your monitor, tapping his nail against the screen, “I know how much this means to you. I know how little progress comes when inspiration comes. I know that inspiration doesn’t just strike when we ask it to. I get it, I really do.”

“...and I think some time away from here, from this place, from your column, would do you wonders.”

There was something defensive in your next inquiry, “What are you saying?”

“I’m giving you the summer off—” His finger wagged in your direction when you choked, “—no I’m making you take the summer off.”

“The whole—”

“Two months. Away from here, as in, I’m sending you to the coast for two months. Beach house, all to yourself, all-expense paid. Except for your food, I know you like—”

You squinted at him, “What?”

“Namjoon,” Hoseok provided and you tensed at the name of his friend, a high-powered executive at a publishing company you’d failed three times over to score an internship at, “He really understands the plight you’re going through. It’s his house.”

“There has to be a catch.”

“Yes, I’m giving Jimin your column while you’re gone.”

You grit your teeth at the mention of Hoseok’s blonde headed assistant and Hoseok chuckled at the reaction he desired, “I’m kidding. I mean, I am giving him your paper space. But, Namjoon said, providing that you make some sort of sizable progress on your manuscript, he’ll review it.”

“What?”

“You’re my friend. He’s my friend,” He plucked your turtle shaped paper weight into his palm, tracing it with the same index finger, “I want the best for you and I want my employee’s to be working at their utmost capacity. Namjoon can never have too many clients—” He made eye contact with you when he set the turtle down, “—and he probably owes me some sort of favor.”

Your gaze wandered out the window, eyeing a taxi as it sped away from the curb and forced its way into the flow of traffic. “All because I told a nine year old that Disney princesses’ aren’t real, huh?”

“No,” Hoseok’s hand covered one of yours, patting gently, “Because you’re better than this version of you. And I miss her, frankly. Old you used to bring me coffee in the mornings, so—”

“That’s when I was in Park Jimin’s position.”

“Jealous?”

“No,” Your jaw clenched but the smile on your lips was tiny and genuine regardless, “Thank you, Hobi.”

He hummed, pushing himself up off your desk to trail around toward the door, “Put your novel away, you have two months at the beach to work on that. Submit tomorrow’s column and then get your ass out of here. You have a flight to pack for.”

You weren’t sure if it were the wet tropical air that clung to your hair follicles or the grains of sand already wedged underneath the platform of your sandal but stepping off the plane gave you at least the vague sense that your inspiration was back. You itched for the keys on your laptop, letters worn and granules of salt from potato chips lodged in between, the space bar with two glossed circles from the unconscious tap of the side of your thumbs.

But the device was lodged in your backpack which was lodged between your shoulder blades as you tried to balance the lopsided baggage while maneuvering the cheap wheels of your suitcase over cobblestone sidewalks.

The keypad granted you entry when you’d barely pressed down on the last number of the combination you were given and your suitcase thanked you when sand rippled stepping stones became smooth, white tile. You nudged the luggage aside, dropping your backpack from your shoulders in the process of the long exhale you released from tense muscles, sand splaying messily over sleek flooring as you peeled your sandals from your ankles.

The house was open concept, white tile outlined in golden, sand like consistency, flooring that disappeared from the entryway to the wide room in the middle and down a short hallway that pointed into a wide, sliding glass door. Stainless steel appliances encased by black cabinets and white marble countertops, blue accent pieces and a fruit bowl filled with plastic treats completed the kitchen while compact leather furniture in the same hues boxed in a towering entertainment center on the opposite end of the room.

Your bare feet welcomed the shag grey rug that resided under the living room furniture, carrying you toward the various DVDs peeking out of the glass case underneath the TV. Nature documents sandwiched a singular copy of The Notebook, the cover worn and tattered underneath plastic from being parted so many times.

He’ll like her then and your fingertips twitched at your thighs in search of your laptop keys.

You turned a collection of faux grapes in your palms, pressing into the waxy material, eyes squinted for the typed letter lodged underneath the wire basket.

Welcome! I trust that you’ll find your accommodations satisfactory for a few months, yes? I’m eagerly awaiting your progress, Hoseok speaks very highly of you and your skills. Happy writing!

Underneath was a bulleted list of contact numbers and a FAQOTH (Frequently Asked Questions of the House), trash days, the number of the nearest pizza delivery, the code to the shed outside that contained noodles and an inflatable flamingo for the pool. It was skimming that provided you with that information and your brain short circuited on the mention of a pool, abandoning memorization in favor of your bare feet scuffing across the warmed concrete of the pool deck.

If the pesky sand rubbing raw at the arches of your feet or the palm trees you’d spotted out the windows of the plane weren’t enough to immerse you in the mindset, the clear blue of chlorine tainted water twitched at your knuckles just a fraction more, especially as engulfed by a privacy fence and vining vegetation cut neatly through the rungs of thick white.

Your stomach argued for lunch from one of the pizza places Namjoon had suggested and your heaping luggage argued for organizing the white wicker drawers in your bedroom but your gut said your laptop and your swimsuit. You were pressed onto a candy-striped towel in a lounge chair with the sun trickling at the sweat on your hairline before any other option could out weight, your clothes half strewn in the entryway of the house where you’d dug for the spandex material but forgotten as you furiously hacked away at editing your outline.

You bolded the newest addition to your outline inside your outline, the one that held all the tropes you wished to tackle in the sensical nonsensical manner that was a novel centered around the beauty of clichés. If other authors avoided clichés at all cost, the adverse relationship of shoving any and all that you could correlate between the confines of two plastic ends and a spine could produce a similar effect, pique the interest if marketed as the cliché of all clichés, work against and for itself between worlds of bubblegum high school romance and stale mint flavored coworkers, strangers, and enemies to lovers.

 Besides, eliminating stereotypes within clichés counted for something in itself. A commentary on something much larger, at least, you liked to think it was.

SEND THEM TO A BEACH HOUSE appeared directly beneath THE SPAGHETTI SCENE FROM LADY AND THE TRAMP BUT WITH EXCESS CHEESE FROM A PIECE OF PIZZA and the giddiness from typing it out had you overloading the software with how quickly you switched documents to your outline outline, swiping your index finger until the setting appeared and you deleted it in one long, blue highlight.

You thought back to the young adult romance you’d read in high school that had taken place in a beachside town, then to the very same romantic thriller you adored as an adult, to the whimsical short story you’d written in an undergraduate, elective creative writing class, to the first time you’d dug your toes into slightly damp sand and let the soothe of the waves lap at your ankles and the fall of your eyelids to be as dark as the never ending water disappearing over the horizon.

Nothing is more cliché than a beachside town, you thought and spoke the words all the same, shoulders hunching over your keyboard as you clacked the same sentence across the screen and quickly deleted it to amend more specifically. It was the most you’d typed, switched tabs for research, and had the curled feeling of anticipation for what would flow from your fingers in the last year and you briefly wondered if Namjoon had pumped something into the seashell shaped air fresheners stuck in every outlet in the house.

Your trusty search engine provided little response for “beachside towns with little to no tourism” and you instead found yourself typing in the name of the city you’d directed your cab to from the airport, a homage to the sudden rush of inspiration. More details flowed than necessary but you allowed them in the haze of humidity and sun, the name and country and zip code following out next to the bolded location bullet point until your cursor dropped down to the third line and you cut yourself on the words Sunny Drive, where the speed limit signs end in threes?

You cracked your knuckles first, then your toes, then rolled your ankle to pop it, too, crooked fingers still sat on the middle row of the keyboard, asdf-jkl;, tapping in tune with the hum that slipped through your sealed lips.

The high top of a golf cart cruised over the links of the white fence encasing you in your writing utopia, the whir dying as the vehicle rounded the corner. Your fingers were back in action, deleting the modest, white four door sedan assigned to your main character in favor of a high-powered golf cart that you’d research later if realistically existed.

Somewhere in the distance was the call of a bird, traveling over the thrash of the waves onto the shore just in reach beyond the tops of houses suspended on frames around the boardwalk. It was the call of a sea gull or something of the same variety, but you considered giving your main character a parrot and added an entire new section of your outline for the very plot piece.

Something bubbled in the depth of the pool stretched at the end of your pointed ankles, something that had curled into the filter and elicited a burst of air. In your head, you extended the pool by significance on either side and gave your protagonist the trait of an accomplished swimmer in high school.

Nothing more cliché that dropping some characters into a seaside town, one with a parrot, a tricked-out golf cart, and an affinity for swimming rather than surfing like her love interest, antagonistic counterpart and his four door sedan with a dent in the side and caked sand on the rims.

Three documents over was your actual manuscript, one you marked with various highlights to change major plot points later. A major rehaul of location but worth it for the electricity snagging and pushing your joints to click across the keys. Your brain left a footnote to revamp the scene you’d left your characters at, previously at a crossroads of figuring out the vibe in their acquaintance, stuck in a grocery store with the love interest clutching a bouquet of flowers and squinting at your protagonist.

It was quickly changed to a late night scene at a beach, the bouquet of flowers instead a ghost crab and the line of dialog a do you want to hold him? rather than the, awkward albeit, I could buy these for you? To give to your mom, of course—

And then the artificial blue of the water behind you seemed to engulf your laptop screen, draining it into a lower quality of pixels and blurred lines that categorized your work computer, the giant stone turtle hidden behind a bush of thick vegetation shrinking into your paper weight, the line of documents open across your screen erasing into your next column that, for some reason, included every curse word you could imagine in angry red font.

A tiny emoticon reminiscent of the talking paperclip from early Microsoft word processing appeared in the corner, but in the shape of Park Jimin.

In short, you were stuck, the fire of inspiration eager to boil in the pit of your stomach evaporating like the footprint on the pool peck after you’d dipped a singular foot in. You’d transported back to your office in the uncomfortable desk chair stolen from the insurance office a story down with Park Jimin breathing down your neck for your position by bringing Hoseok coffee every morning but in a slightly better quality than you had, because it was handmade with love in the longue, with a novel that was no closer to being finished than it had been when you’d fell in love with the concept and got paid to outline the entire thing not a week into your position at the newspaper (and in between running Hoseok coffee and trying to hide your work in the limited privacy of your cubicle).

A massive control + Z was in order and the fingers on one hand stretched to do just that on the first of three documents, latter cuticles shoved in between your teeth to nibble miserably on. You’d erased any mention of a beachside town and ripped away the sticky note on the inside of your conscious that suggested touching a ghost crab for romance when something rough and cold dripped against the outside of your thigh.

Confusion caused you to place your laptop to the concrete below your chair and terror caused the startled gasp to bubble out of your throat at the sheepish looking figure stood knee deep on the pool stairs.

“Uh, hello,” The figure had obnoxious red hair to match the obnoxious yellow shirt hanging off his shoulders, a similar hue that colored the apples of his cheeks, shading embarrassment over sunburn and traveling to the peek of his teeth and the twinkle in gentle brown eyes that much resembled that of a deer pinned by some oncoming headlights. “I’m...here to clean the pool.”

It was a pool net that had hit you, misjudged from the sopping pile in the mulch of leaves and bugs and neon colored specks of unidentified objects. Your eyes trailed upward from the damp pleats of rope at your side to the holder of the pole, one who hadn’t tried to jerk the net away from you but instead kept in place, as if he didn’t move a muscle maybe you’d disappear.

“I clean the pool twice a week?” He tried again but you were too focused on the rosy shade of his lips matching the moussed fringe that curled into his eyelashes. “It should have been on the note Namjoon left—”

“It probably is,” You dismissed and he finally pulled the net away from your side, the wide sweeping circle he took to plop it back into the pool not succeeding without dripping some onto the top of your head. Unconsciously eager to amend the endearing pout that graced the stranger’s lips as he stirred the net into the center of the water, you added, “I just got in this morning. I haven’t had time to read everything yet.”

“Oh. Oh,” The man straightened from where he’d been crouched trying to snag a red thread at the far end of the pool, the ends of blue pool shorts darker than the rest and trickling against toned thighs, “Well, I’m Jeongguk. The neighborhood pool guy. And groundskeeper. And...whatever else you need me to be, I guess.”

You quirked an eyebrow and Jeongguk faltered, “I mean, like, I can fix shit. If you need me to. Like, if the cable goes out. But don’t ask me about the Wifi. No clue how to improve that.”

“Do any of us?”

He laughed and there was a peek of a dimple at the corner of his lips, turning away from you, “Fair point.”

You watched as he navigated the net with a finesse that suggested he didn’t just smack your thigh with it, depositing the red string in a sad heap near the filter. The calculated wander of your gaze drew your mouth to dry, following the jump of his calf muscles as he stepped from the pool, dragging the net with him over his shoulder.

“Seriously though,” Jeongguk’s voice snapped you out of your trance and you wet your lips and longed for your chapstick lodged somewhere in the depths of your backpack. He stood by a plastic looking brown shed, the net out of his hands, arms instead folded to his chest. “If you need anything, just call the front desk. The number is pasted on the fridge.”

“Noted, thanks.”

“My pleasure—” He paused halfway through the sliding glass door, fingers poised in an awkward pointing motion, “—what was your name again?”

You uttered it and Jeongguk winked, fingers shaking as his latter foot joined him inside. “Well, then I’ll see you later.”

“Perfect,” You breathed to yourself and you realized after the roar of his blue maintenance truck pulling from your drive that your collection of tattered bras and panties were scattered in the only entrance to the house.

Romance novels lied and movies an even bigger scam about wearing sandals for long periods of time without developing stupidly coarse blisters on the surface of the faux leather straps. You were heaving and limping and confused by the time you found the main office at the far end of the neighborhood.

In retrospect, it was hard to miss, an obnoxious aqua shade of paneling, outlined in a thick white trim led to by an equally bright staircase. Bikes accented in the same white but a clearer shade of blue lined the racks outside, complete with wicker baskets on the front and shiny metal bells that glinted just right to make you shield your eyes and trip up a single stair in your ascend. Inside the barn like doors came a refreshing burst of air conditioning, eliminating the humidity from outside and immediately calming some of the sweat curling into the hair at the nape of your neck.

A man sat behind a glass top counter in the middle of the room, legs delicately crossed on the stool he perched to, sunglasses nudged in the darkest part of dyed blonde roots, thumbing through a tourist style magazine that advertised May, the current month, as it’s date of publication. When the doors rattled shut behind you, he looked up, sunglasses bouncing to the bridge of his nose as he let out a tiny, startled noise.

“Hello!” He greeted after a moment, broad shoulders setting as you approached the counter. The magazine was flipped shut and slid closer to you, eyebrows wiggling at you beyond the frames of his fallen glasses, “Can I interested you in an entire article on the shrimp business in town?”

You giggled then, gently nudging the magazine back to him. The gold on his nametag fastened to the pocket of a blue surf shop t-shirt read Seokjin.

“No, not today.”

Seokjin balled the gloss into a roll and with a shrug, pitched it over his shoulder. “You know what, me either,” He winked, folding his hands on the counter and leaning toward you, plump lips curled back to let out an endearing wheeze of a laugh, “What can I do for you today?”

“Do you rent the bikes outside?”

“I’ll rent you two of them,” He laughed again at the expression on your face, turning to fish a clipboard off the tiny table behind him. “Kidding. I’ll rent you three.”

“I love it, but I think I only need one for right now.”

“If I weren’t on shift, I’d accompany you,” Seokjin scribbled something on the clipboard, “What house number are you in?”

You recited the number to him and he nodded with his tongue between his back molars. The clipboard was returned to the table in exchange for a set of tiny keys, ones he held out to you by the dangle of their miniature, metal hook. “These work on the first bike on the rack,” He smiled again, all full lips and an endearing red tinge to the tips of his ears, “Bring them back to me to check the bike back in or I may have to hunt you down.”

Your eyes widened and he cackled again, slapping a palm down on the glass countertop, “Kidding. But there is a fine if it’s not returned in twenty-four hours so—”

“Noted. I’ll have it back,” You pressed the keys into your palm and offered a halfhearted wave, “Thank you!”

“Always! Happy riding!”

The keys were deposited safely into the pocket of your shorts after you’d managed to wiggle the bicycle away from the rack, clacking against your phone screen as you clambered aboard the leather seat and pushed off in the direction you’d came.

You pedaled first in search of the house, finding it easier on the retrace and mapping it to memory as you dared a new trail, the one that looped and met a dead end when asphalt curled into white sand. The house whirred by again and then the main office, the air cooler in a breeze and with an easier travel than walking with a dozen blisters. You cycled slowly, taking in the unruly wind of cobblestone sidewalks and curiously planted palm trees near the planned planted flowers and each house in their own entirety in comparison to your own and the license plates of each car in each driveway as they advertised various regions and places and worlds aside from the one you were living in.

The blue maintenance truck elicited bile in the back of your throat from the incident earlier in the week as it sat parked on the street corner where sprinklers poked out of the turf and sprayed onto the green and yellow logo pasted to the side. The cab was empty but the yard it was parked in front of wasn’t, the knee height gate surrounding the shrubbery open with Jeongguk’s feet planted just on the other side of it.

You whipped your gaze from the slice of hedge trimmers through an exotic looking tree, instead looping your bike onto the opposite sidewalk and in the opposite direction. To no avail, the cul de sac throwing you back around like an out of control speed skater and suddenly the distance in front of you was filled only with the image of Jeongguk’s bare shoulders.

The bike coasted underneath you, leather relaxing its strain on your blisters as you concentration instead fell to the defined ridges between his shoulder blades, ones that rippled under a thin sheen of sweat each time he drew the trimmers open and shut, fluttering confetti like green to the grass below. The gardening tool fell as you watched, one arm staying above his head as he wiped a glove covered hand across his forehead, pasting more of the faded red fringe to the sweat already glistening there than clearing it. In the same moment did he pivot, trimmers dangling at his thigh, but this time you weren’t focused on the short black clinging desperately to his lean hips or the bunched white shirt sticking out from the waistband, rather the defined lines of his trimmed stomach starting underneath his ribs and disappearing underneath the elastic.

Jeongguk calling your name wasn’t part of the mirage and your rounded mouth jerked up just in time to notice the rapidly approaching edge of the curb.

Your dry mouth didn’t need water when it instead got the sprinkled of gravel, your bike tire colliding with the blocked concrete below and throwing you off to the side. A pain registered as a skid down your elbow but nothing quite matched the shamed embarrassment that flushed at your cheeks as a distant shit, hey! echoed in your ears and gravel crunched under approaching footsteps.

“Hey, woah, are you okay?—” You felt like you were underwater, like the ocean had suddenly decided it could eat the human race and was choosing you as its first victim, “—shit, you’re bleeding.”

A sting to your arm drew you above water and fingers that weren’t your own wiggled in front of your blurry vision, coating in a glob of dark red. The dots in your vision worsened when there was a pressure around your arm, Jeongguk’s t-shirt yanked from his shorts to act as a makeshift bandage and you couldn’t even appreciate the feeling of his hands touching you when you felt like you could vomit all over them any second.

“Hey, hey, babe can you hear me? Don’t pass out on me, it’s just a little scrape. C’mon, hey, I have some water in my truck, give me a second—”

The grass was a welcome pillow to the throb in your head, clearing the specks of black and white in your vision just enough for you to welcome the overhead blue curling around the landscape. You focused your attention on a cloud, one shaped like a disfigured dolphin, until it slipped in front of the sun, the rays spilling out in thick shards from between the transparent water vapor chilling the new layer of sweat that had slipped over your skin in your near faint.

You shuddered as more of the dots in your vision transferred to a seeming chill in your veins, goosebumps crawling across your arms and leaving a dry, cotton taste in your cheeks. Scrambling footsteps in the gravel returned as quickly as they had retreated and a gentle hand slipped behind your shoulders, aiding you in sitting up enough to bring your lips to a cool splash of water.

“I’ve been telling Seokjin to replace the brakes on these for months,” Jeongguk passed the water bottle into your still twitching fingertips, instead taking a seat next to you in the grass.

You were shaky in taking another gulp of the lukewarm water, letting it slide thickly down your throat. Various retorts snagged in the back of your throat and you suppressed them like the urge to glance over at him. Instead, a soft hum came out, one emitted through another cheek full of water.

“Well, when you’re ready, I’ll drive you back to the house and take the bike back—”

“I’m fine,” You croaked but you punctuated the sentiment by gathering your feet underneath you. A dull pain throbbed in your forearm and you swayed slightly in your crouched position, but you managed to stand with no more than a few stars decorating the back of your eyelids.

Jeongguk stuttered behind you, scrambling to his feet as you hunched over the fallen bike, dragging it to an upright position by one of the protruding handles. He slipped a warm hand to the small of your back, stalling you. “You’re not going to try to ride back, are you?”

“Yes?”

“You nearly fainted just now. Do you really think that’s...the best idea?”

Your knee caught on the seat in your first attempt to straddle the bike but you were successful the second time, standing with shaky palms clenched on the handles. “Not really. But it’s not very far…”

You thought you’d shaken him, the bike wobbling as you pushed off, getting two tire rolls away before his figure was jogging up beside you, placing an insistent hand on the bars. “At least let me walk back with you,” Jeongguk insisted, red fringe not obscuring his wide-eyed concern.

You begrudgingly ignored the veins in his forearm, slowing the speed of your pedaling to let him guide you through the desolate roads of the quiet neighborhood. It was a quick but silent trip, Jeongguk turning to balance the bike with two hands as you clambered off on shaky legs. He’d barely pivoted from depositing it back into its empty space on the rack when you’d pushed the tiny set of keys against the center of chest, too engrossed in a range of mortification.

“Here,” You bit out, “Thanks again.”

You took off in a rumpled mess of gravel, sunburn, and a bloody t-shirt as Jeongguk called after you some variation of be careful! that almost sounded like he was laughing.

The blood caked off his t-shirt on the third wash (when you managed to understand the complex mess of dials lining the top of the machine) and you hung it on a wire hanger on the tiny awning that extended outward from the house onto the concrete. He’d have to duck underneath it to do his job as you hid faithfully in your bedroom and pretended to nap for the duration of his visit.

There was a distinct clattering outside as the morning hours drew into the afternoon and you buried your head underneath the puffy duvet, taking comfort in the flash of colors across your phone screen even if you were mute to the video you’d played. But then the clutter outside transferred to the slide of the patio door and the video disappeared as your phone fell face down against your waist and you froze.

Jeongguk was calling your name, fluctuating in volume as he moved about the main part of the house. You winced each time the scuff of his bare feet moved closer, relaxed when it was farther away, and sighed when he tried, “I know you’re in here. Seokjin didn’t see you leave today. Or yesterday. Or the day before.”

You swallowed your pride and the unattractive scab growing on the flat of your forearm as you stalked out of your room. You found him mostly clothed this time, hands braced on the lip of the bar in the center of the kitchen with his phone pressed toward his nose in one hand.

“What, have you been watching me?”

There was a fond smile that crept to Jeongguk’s lips as he turned to look at you, “Making sure you didn’t bleed out, actually, but if you want to look at it that way.”

You paused in the hallway, feet as wide as your shoulders and arms folded tight to your chest. Only then did you realize you still had flannel pajama shorts and a flimsy white shirt on. “Well. Here I am. With only minor injuries. So uh…”

There was a glass plate in the flat of his palm before you could blink, a pyramid of chocolate chip cookies wrapped with plastic presented before you. “I, uh, made you some cookies,” He blinked, tossing his head toward the refrigerator. The red in his hair had faded to a harsh pink, “and there’s fresh lemonade in the fridge.”

“Your t-shirt is hanging outside,” You blurted in response, “free of blood.”

Jeongguk’s nose wrinkled, turning to deposit the cookies to the countertop again, “Didn’t want it back. I have fifty of the same thing. But thank you…”

You stared at the back of his head, where dark brown roots had begun to weave through the sharp red. After a moment, you blinked, “...so you can bake?”

He shrugged without looking at you, peeling the plastic away from the plate to pluck a cookie into his palm. He glanced over his shoulder, endearing smile dimpled into his cheeks and you melted like the bits of chocolate that brushed against his digits when he stretched the treat out to you, “Eh. Try one?”

Jeongguk’s gaze followed you as you shuffled around the kitchen, sliding out one of the bar stools with the crook of your foot to slip onto the round leather. You reached over the countertop, snatching a napkin from a pile near the sink to spread out in front of you, lips pressing into a geometric shape in your cheeks.

“C’mon, hand it over.”

He bypassed your wriggling fingers to place the cookie down on your napkin, watching you with a bated breath and round eyes. Soft irises followed the path of the piece you broke off the cookie to where you nudged it into your mouth by the curve of your thumb. The cookie crumbled across your tongue, melting in a mess of sugar and chocolate that gurgled a pleasured moan from your throat as you dived in for two, four more nibbles on the soft corners.

An amused expression wrinkled at his cocked eyebrows and the small sliver of his teeth when your eyelids fluttered open from devouring half the treat, “Good?”

“You can bake,” You affirmed, breaking off another bite sized corner. “Maybe I should wreck bikes more often.”

“No,” Jeongguk assured, replacing the cookie with a fresh one before turning to your fridge to yank out the pitcher of lemonade, “You definitely should not.”

His stature went fishing about the kitchen area, yanking open cabinet after cabinet until he found something suitable, glass pieces smudged from years of use. He pulled down two, placing them in front of the pitcher.

“You know, your food selection here is pretty sad,” He handed over a full glass, watching as you took a languid gulp.

“I don’t exactly know where the grocery store is,” You argued of the boxes of leftover pizza stacked inside your fridge and the singular bag of pretzels you’d smuggled onto the airplane. “Nor do I have a car, and biking is certainly out of the question—”

Jeongguk ignored you, opening and closing drawers until he found the packet of paper Namjoon had left for you, the FAQOTH. His thumb lodged between the pages, squinting at the ink as his voice muffled around the rim of his own glass.

His tongue swiped at the lemonade clinging to his upper lip, sighing, “You really didn’t read this, did you? There’s, like, seven cab services to choose from. And at least six of them know where the Walmart is.”

You dismissed him with a wave of your hand, snatching the packet of paper from his grasp to flatten it over the napkin you’d been snacking from. “All Namjoon has listed are pizza places…” You trailed off, “I need restaurant recommendations. Throw some at me.”

“That’s a pretty broad question. I have a lot.”

“You’ll have to show me a few before I leave.”

You stared at each other in a passing silence that heightened your mortification like bile on the crux of your throat, especially when Jeongguk cocked an eyebrow, the slightest of smirks slanting his lips as his chin unhinged, falling to his chest as he fished aside for another napkin.

“Maybe…” He trailed off, snatching a pen from the same drawer the FAQOTH had came from. “But for now—” He scribbled some more on the surface pebbled in design, scratching out a name and an address before presenting the drooping napkin to you, “—try this place. I think the cab drivers can find it...”

The Dusty Dolphin bordered the line between the natural white sands of the beach and the main strip of highway that cascaded down the coastline. It was as if sitting on the border in territories, the inside seating of the restaurant on soft grasses sticking through sand like soil with an asphalt parking lot lined in chipped neon parking spaces just a walking distance away, while the outside seating was perched on the beach, a patio raised on wooden platforms with brightly colored umbrellas stuck through the center of wooden tables.

Your fingers paled your knuckles with how tightly you clenched your fists, flip flops slapping against the wooden surface as you climbed up a rickety staircase to tell an uninterested looking hostess that it would be just you.

“Outside?” It wasn’t really a question of yes or no, more of a confirmation of what she was expecting you to say as she hopped down from her stool and began to collect silverware and a glossy menu.

Your sure was lost under your breath as she took your curt nod as the answer, weaving through the close knit tables in the indoor seating to lead you through a single set of double doors and to an empty table on the far corner. Again, her, “Is this okay?” was a confirmation, not an affirmation, and your nod had her saying your server will be right with you when she’d already slipped back inside.

The sun peaked out from behind the lapping waves on the horizon, the blackness engulfing the farthest waves a taste of the sun’s sleep for a few hours, leaving the world with a brilliant mesh of pastel hues, colored together like oil crayons as brushes of wispy clouds rushed by to the melody of the water rushing to the shore. A breeze rolled with the motion of the water and you tugged your thin cardigan closer to your torso, not helped with the fans bolted to the overhead framing that continued to rotate softly, a cooldown from their midafternoon duties where they whirred fatefully.

“Hey, told you the cab driver could find this place.”

Jeongguk stood in front of you with the dopiest of grins on his lips, a tiny and audible giggle stumbling out from the shocked expression that met your features. He was adorned in all black, tight black jeans, a black belt cinching a black t-shirt into his waist, a black apron snug just a beat above the belt buckle. His bright locks were styled, parted away from his forehead in a calculated fashion that made one swoop a tad bigger than the latter side. Pens and straws and a tiny notepad were tucked into the pouches of the apron and he held a notepad of a similar fashion up, pen clicking rapidly as he continued to giggle at you.

“You work here?” You blinked, and then added with flat palms slapping against the front of your menu, “Is there anything you don’t do?”

“Can’t quite train the dolphins at the wildlife reserve yet, but we’re getting there,” His nose wrinkled in another laugh, pen clicking out finally as he rested it against the paper, “What can I get you to drink?”

“Uh. Water, I guess.”

“Boring,” Jeongguk scribbled shorthand to the pad, “Are you going to get something a bit more exciting than chicken strips for your meal?”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to be heckling the paying customer.”

“Seriously,” He eyed you again, “Do you know what you want?”

You opened the menu for the first time, the array of seafood and pastas and salads and various other dishes overwhelming you with him hunching over you, shuffling to read over your shoulders.

“What do you recommend?”

“Well, we’re pretty known for seafood—” You shot him a look, “—obviously. But like, all the shrimp is pretty good—”

“Because of the shrimp business in town?”

Jeongguk laughed, “Seokjin?”

“A little bit.”

He hummed, chin hovering dangerously close to your shoulder before he straightened, shuffling between the railing around the porch area. “I’ll bring you a couple things,” He decided, mostly to himself and absently over his shoulder,

A couple things meant a platter of shrimp, cooked, seasoned, piled, and ripped in different variations, piled high like the pyramid of cookies you’d nearly devoured after he’d left your house. His manager complained twice upon finding him sitting with you, judging your expression as you sucked some butter contraption off the ridges of a steamed shrimp and teasing you of the flakes of garlic clinging to the corner of your mouth. He returned to refill your water when you’d only taken a few sips from the candy striped straw and ignored you three times when you asked for the bill as the sun completely disappeared beyond the water, leaving the sea to one giant stretch you could not see but could hear the threat of.

“Here, I guess,” Jeongguk settled the black fold down on your table, leaving with a wink that illuminated in the artificial porch lights hanging from the center of the still turning fans. It was enough lighting to read that he’d paid for your bill, scrawling a giant smiley face underneath the amount.

You sighed, prepared to reprimand him as you carefully folded the receipt to slide into your pocket but two colored notes underneath caught your attention. The pink one read wait on me, I’ll drive you home. You placed it aside with a check to your phone, finding it five minutes from closing time of the restaurant as a majority of the other patrons who had long fled the premises.

The second note was yellow, the handwriting a bit more loopy, calculated in a sense.

A mirage is the peace the night time sea suggests; a reality is the beauty your soul creates.

Jeongguk was free of the apron when he returned, shirt untucked, and a large blue jacket shrugged across his shoulders. The same giddy smile from before remained plastered to his features as he dug in his pocket, pulling out a set of keys that he tossed and caught in the same palm.

“Ready to go?”

You folded the sticky note carefully, slipping it with the collection of bills in your back pocket.

“Yeah, let’s go.”

He left notes while you were asleep and he had another schedule to get to, choosing your pool as the first to clean and assess and correct the chemical balance of, leaving the bright blue paper with tacky glue stripped on the top to the patio door.

You caught it when you shrugged outside with a piece of toast in hand and your laptop folded under your arm, crumbs decorating your knuckles as you slipped the paper off the sizable smudge on the glass to bring it to your nose.

Think of dream, sleep of you.

He left notes on the hedge just outside your door on his way to the neighbors to fix a faulty outlet in the upstairs bedroom for a family who’d just arrived and had decided to cram three children with twelve electronic devices between them into that very room.

It was bright pink and sealed to the petal of a flower you debated picking, a petal that dislodged anyway when you plucked the note instead, decorating the stone walkway with a single question of soft red hues.

Bloom in my heart like the question of my soul.

He left notes on the inside of your refrigerator, right on top of a family sized bottle of orange juice he’d watched you haul through the front gates of the neighborhood while Seokjin assumed he was paying attention to his instructions for the disposal of some lawn chairs at the community pool near the beach.

You found it after he left in a flurry of more cookies, the smell of chlorine, and an off handed comment about you needing more variety in your life than water and orange juice, a yellow note that rivaled the unnatural coloring of the juice when you’d purchased a brand name rather than the more expensive, family brand.

Orange juice sucks, that much I do know.

You scattered them across the screen of your open laptop like an investigator piecing together the details of a crime while your neglected novel watched on, the cursor mocking you from beyond a note that said procrastinating my destiny with a useless metal fence. Color coding failed when Jeongguk switched from pinks, blues, and yellows to purples, oranges, and greens. His handwriting didn’t falter, suggest a trend with a certain harder press of his pen. The medium in which he wrote varied, lead or red pen or what appeared to be a blue colored pencil. Some told a story, only to be ruined with orange juice or elbow scabs or half eaten shrimp.

Your laptop screen was coated in a thin layer of film from placing and plucking the notes into various orders, one that hazed over your novel as you began to stack the notes into a neat pile in your cupped palm. It mirrored the midday haze that had curled across the neighborhood, the sun eliciting the mirage of steam curling off the pool water that seemed to hinder your conscious unable to understand the growing tree of poetry in your grasp.

The contents of the last paragraph, even without a layer of tacky glue and humidity stained air, made little sense, only one of five you’d written in three weeks. It was thick and expositional, a writing exercise within the draft, a rambling discussion of your surroundings when you’d decided to have your characters visit a beach rather than force their stories into some sand and sun.

Your outline answered your rhetorical question.

Why are they going to the beach? TBD.

You deleted the fifth paragraph and shut your laptop. Four paragraphs in three weeks.

Soft fluttering of the notes between your fingertips kept the distracted state of your conscious occupied long enough to seek out an unnatural sound of nature. It was a scurrying from around the side of the house, scattering through dry pine needles and gravel poured between the concrete stepping stones. The cloud of your thoughts cleared enough to panic in confusion, leaving the notes underneath a corner of your laptop as you crept into your flip flops.

The wire gate was left open, swinging gently against the side of the house. Clear footsteps rut deep into the coarse brown needles, smudging into the mud below still damp from the morning rain shower.

Your first rational thought of it being a squirrel erased as you reached for the gate, pulling and latching it. Someone was walking a dog across the street, a tiny white poodle with a ridiculous haircut and a cat bell on its collar. A childlike scream traveled upward from the beach. The breeze clattered against the leaves of a towering tree planted entirely too close to the house.

The same gentle breeze fluttered a strip of pink against the side of the house.

“Dammit, Jeongguk,” You cursed, needles lodging between the rubber of your flip flops and your bare feet as you moved off the stepping stone path. It was pasted high, too, barely in reaching of your pinching fingertips as you leaned into the house and stretched as high on the balls of your feet as you could go.

Your back slumped against the house as you glared at your prize for thin scratches and a strain in your shoulders. A number. A phone number.

With a shitty smiley face, a curve and two dots, beneath it.

You cursed through another layer of pine needles, deserting your flip flops on the far end of the pool deck as you hopped across seething hot concrete to retrieve your phone from underneath your towel. Pointed thumbs jabbed in the number to a new text thread, equally as prominent in clicking out a message.

What the hell are you trying to tell me with these notes, Jeongguk?

For thirty-seven agonizing seconds, you thought your only answer was the smiling emoticon with tiny red hearts dotted around the surface. And then three little dots appeared in the bottom left corner.

Everything. Meet me at the beach tonight?

You followed the sound of music, passing only a family with two tiny girls, headlamps strapped to their foreheads and plastic sand castle buckets clutched in their fingers as they chatted eagerly about what they’d seen underneath their feet, and a colony of the very crabs they’d been trying to capture. Your flip flops followed the beat of the guitar melody, pattering against the flex of your thigh where you clutched them in loose fingers at your hip, bare feet sliding through the cool sand, occasionally catching on snags of sea shells and scurrying sea creatures.

The sounds grew louder, dimming the thrash of night time waves, and you found him, seated not far down the coast line on a ratty looking, red lawn chair.

Jeongguk glanced up from furrowed eyebrows when you cleared his throat, hunched over a guitar balanced neatly on short clad thighs. Confusion erased into elation as he grinned, tossing his head toward the empty lawn chair next to him, blue and with less frayed edges.

“Hey! Have a seat. I brought beer in the cooler behind you. And water. I can go get you anything—”

You ducked for the red plastic container, drawing out a dripping water bottle and cracking the lid, “It’s okay. Thank you.”

He visibly relaxed, the lingering stare on your lips wrapping around the bottle diverting back to his work on the instrument in his lap, fiddling with some of the tuners at the top. You watched as he worked, thumb coming out to strum at the bottom few strings before he sat back with a satisfied hum.

And then Jeongguk began to sing. Softly at first, a testing glance in your direction as soft pink lips seemed hesitant in parting. When intrigue lit your features, body visibly tensing, his mouth curled into a smile, voice a higher volume but a soft octave nonetheless, gentle and soothing like a retreating wave that lipped gently across the shells it was leaving behind. His gaze faltered from yours to hit a note, a scrunch to his nose, a vein down the length of his neck, a passion that you longed for as his voice fishtailed into an easy run. It was an unfamiliar tune to you, one that ended in a handful of endearing head bops and cheesy hums from Jeongguk as he strummed once, hard, down the strings of his guitar.

The smile on his lips wobbled, trying to contain his teeth but still dimpling in his cheeks as he blinked at you. He lost the battle with his smile when he spoke, testing “Good?”, with a slight giggle.

“The notes,” You said dumbly, “They’re your lyrics?”

“Some of them…” He sat the guitar in the sand with a shy hand wrapped around the back of his neck, “Some are just, I don’t know, poetry.”

“So you sing.”

“I sing,” Jeongguk nodded, “I like to think I’m a better singer than pool cleaner. Or cookie baker.”

You followed his gaze from your eyes to his clasped hands on his knees. “Have you tried to pursue anything in it?”

“No point,” His gaze moved onward from his hands to the ocean, squinting and closing, “Just a hobby.”

“For now—”

“For always,” He was staring at you again, curt in his sharp correction. After a moment, a tiny smile slanted his lips, “It’s okay, really. I enjoy doing it in my free time.”

You tilted your head, “Why are you sharing this with me?”

Jeongguk was standing above you, hand outstretched, shy smile flushing his cheeks even in the darkness. “Walk with me.”

He took the initiative the thread your fingers together, leading you down to the edge of where the water reached. The water still warm from the heat of the season lapped around your ankles as you trudged down the coast, hand in hand, silence welcome to the soundtrack of the ocean. After a sizable distance, Jeongguk sighed, footsteps stalling to yank your unsuspecting figure to a stop.

“I’m showing you because lately, they’re all about you.”

You blinked at him, hands still clasped but pulled at an unnatural distance between your statures. “Jeongguk, what—”

“Look, I’m extremely lame and not as good with actual words as I am with the notes I left you but…” He stepped closer, dropping your intertwined hands to swing between your bodies, “I like you. Basically.”

“Basically?”

A disgruntled whine left his lips and his gaze trailed over your shoulder, upward toward the sky, “I know you’re only here for another month and I know I barely know you but. I don’t know. I like you. And I felt weird envisioning a future where I didn’t at least try.”

Your skin warmed through the thin flannel draped across your sun irritated skin. Another step closer, this one initiated by you, followed by a soft squeeze and tug on his palm. “Like you said, I’m only here for another month,” Soft eyes darkened into the stars dancing around you wandered back down to your gaze, hopeful even as you sighed, “I’m supposed to be writing, anyway. That’s the entire point of my trip and I’ve barely got anything done…”

“I won’t be a distraction.”

“You already are.”

Another shy smile graced Jeongguk’s features, mumbling, “Sorry.”

“But a good distraction…” One more step and there was but a fingertips length distance between your torsos, your thumb running along his knuckles, “You’re a good distraction.”

“So what you’re saying is…”

You held up your free hand, pinky presented. “I’m willing to try, Jeongguk but—” You punctuated the word before he could hook the digit in yours, “—no obligations. Not really, anyway.”

“Do the obligations include or exclude kissing?” He braved leaning closer to you, even as the rosy hue on his cheeks spread, “Pleasesayinclude, pleasesayinclude, pleasesay—”

You tugged down on his hand, loose fist with your pinky presented falling against his shoulder as you connected your lips. He hummed happily into the seam of your lips, arm snaking around your waist to eliminate the distance between your torsos. “One month,” You punctuated between a breath of air, one he ignored with another languid kiss into your mouth.

“So I can’t tell Taehyung you’re my girlfriend?”

“Who’s Taehyung?”

“My roommate,” Jeongguk linked your pinkies while you were distracted, kissing your jaw, “I’ll introduce you to him.”

“Jeongguk,” You squeezed his hand and pinky in tandem, “One month.”

“Stop, you’re making your not-really-your-boyfriend sad.”

Kim Taehyung was all surfer, the stereotypical bleached blonde hair with dark peeking out of the roots, baggy black shorts with the white strings untied, a thin white undershirt hugging his lean figure underneath a blue shirt with some intricate design of flames and waves and a surfboard ironed on the front. His bare feet slapped through the corridor, grumbling something to Jeongguk’s greeting call, hair tossed back with a thick white headband around the middle of his forehead that pronounced his harsh eyebrows, ones that furrowed to inspect you.

“Hi!” He was loud, like an over excited golden retriever, especially when he beamed to tease his roommate, “So you’re the beautiful lady Gukkie here courted by flashing his stellar abs and less than comparable thighs.”

You gawked, cheeks heating because well, kind of, but the hand on the small of your back fist into the material of your shirt, pushing you forward and past his broad figure.

“Don’t you have a wave to almost drown in?”

“C’mon, I was just kidding, love!” Taehyung’s footsteps were heavy behind you, following your figures through a narrow hallway, “No part of Jeon is impressive enough to get you. Did he bribe you? I’ll pay the ransom.”

You giggled as Jeongguk paused around you, sucking in a breath through his teeth that materialized into a whispered, “If you ignore him, he goes away. Eventually.”

Your nose wrinkled, turning to look at the red-faced man pressed against your back, “But he’s funny.”

You’d paused in front of a doorway, one Jeongguk pushed open and glared pointedly at you. “Don’t encourage him. Go.”

Jeongguk’s room was wide, a contrast to the narrow hallway lined in creaking hardwood and paneled walls. It was open concept, not much furniture aside from a few dressers and the bed. Blacks, whites, and greys told the story with color sprinkled in from accented belongings, like a collection of keychains hanging off a billboard in the corner, the cork material of the wall hanging filed with various photographs pinned up by neon colored tacks. A string of lights hung above his headboard, polaroids dangling from the wires, similar ones pasted in a haphazard pattern on the same wall.

“You like photography?”

He watched you step to his corkboard, delicately sliding your fingers underneath a photograph so as not to touch the ink on the front. It was a picture he’d taken of Taehyung at a surfing competition, purposefully edited to look straight from a vintage yearbook.

“A little. Filming too....”

You nodded, letting the photograph flutter back against its board. Pivoting, slow steps carried you toward his slumped figure standing rigid in the center of his room, sliding your palms over his shoulders when you got close enough.

“All of these talents and you can’t dye your hair by yourself?”

Jeongguk’s fingers fell into the fringe hanging over his eyes, now blonde with hints of pink clinging to the ends of certain strands. A pout materialized but he didn’t whine, just leaning closer to you with tendrils of hair still secured between a hand behind his head.

“Just because it’s your first visit doesn’t mean I won’t subject you to Taehyung’s three hour lecture of proper surfboard waxing techniques.”

“Stop threatening me with a good time and lead me to the hair dye.”

His bathroom was as small as the hallway and you found yourself seated on the edge of the vanity with Jeongguk crushed between your legs. He didn’t seem to mind, fingers twitching from their place beside you to creep up to your thighs as you squinted at his head, plastic covered fingers globing harsh red through his hair.

“What’s your natural hair color?”

“Brown.”

You tapped at his roots, taking a glob with the crook of your fingers. “Why don’t you leave it at that?”

“Because red is cool.”

“Who told you that?—” You pulled your hands into your lap, careful to hold the stain away, “—Your girlfriend?”

“Don’t know,” Jeongguk leaned close enough to smear red on your forehead with his bangs if they weren’t pasted to his forehead, “Is my hair color cool?”

A playful look of disgust wrinkled at your nose, “Only half of your hair is dyed right now.”

He glanced behind you in the mirror, eyeing the glob of dye on one half of his head to the straight blonde on the latter. “So?” He blinked back to you, “Is it cool?”

“I don’t know,” You began to peel the gloves off, “Wash it out and we’ll see.”

You sat cross legged in the center of Jeongguk’s bed when he returned, half of his hair back to the vibrant red it had been when he nearly impaled you with a pool net, half the blonde it had been trending toward when he asked you to entertain his affections for a month more. He didn’t give you an option of a yes or no, flopping at the foot of the bed to press his cheek against your ankles, arms stretched out across your thighs.

“Hey,” He said after a moment, muffled against your jeans.

You tested the waters of placing a hand against his scalp and when he cuddled into your affection, you softly ran your nails through his hair. “Hey, what?”

“I let you read my things—” Jeongguk shifted to place his chin on your naval, blinking owlishly up at you, “—my things about you. When do I get to read part of your novel?”

“Hmm, when it’s finished and published and available in bookstores.”

“Is that soon?”

You shot him a look but he didn’t seem to be kidding. “No. Probably not. Especially since I’ve made virtually no progress.”

“Well,” He pecked your belly button over your shirt, snuggling back against you again, “I’d love to read an advanced screening version.”

You’d deleted the four paragraphs you’d completed in three weeks. Zero paragraphs in five weeks.

“We’ll see…”

You printed your outline in three separate copies, each one with their own unique set of markups of various color pens and pencils and highlighters, colors born out of your tiny sparks on inspiration that you tried to hold onto like a the end of a rope, one that would pull you to the surface for clarity, creativity, anything. But each time the trill of your red pen reached the end of the page, transferring over to your fingers on the keyboard, the half an ounce of rope had slipped through your fingertips, leaving you to tread underwater.

Those stapled pages were spread across a table on the patio area of The Dusty Dolphin, half sandwiched between your laptop that was attached to an extension cord. Jeongguk had hijacked both the Wifi password and an extra long cable, seating you in the far corner of the deck area and keeping you stocked with fresh water and samples of mozzarella sticks.

It was the third time you’d marked through and rewrote a certain bullet point, the result a smear of dying highlighter in neon yellow that you could barely read. You capped the highlighter and the open pen rolled to the center of your keyboard, turning your attention instead to the goosebumps that had appeared across your bare forearms and Jeongguk’s figure as he jogged out onto the patio deck.

“That my hoodie?” He questioned as he approached, your head halfway through the black fabric you’d had tied around your waist for the duration of the day.

“Could be Taehyung’s. I stole it from your laundry room.”

Jeongguk placed the new glass of ice water down, avoiding your papers and electronics to wrap a hand in the collar of the hoodie to tug your mouth to his.

“Nope,” He teased with a nip to your bottom lip in a whirling departure, “Mine.”

“Wait!”

He turned, nearly colliding with a high chair protruding out into the walkway.

“Come back, waiter.”

The pad of paper was drawn from his apron, just to appease the look the child’s mother shot him as he moved to stand next to you again. “Yes, paying customer?”

“Can you bring me real food, please?”

He began scribbling something before you could talk, mirroring your sentiment the same time you uttered it.

“The shrimp pasta?”

A bashful smile sunk your chin into your shoulders and you nodded. “Yes, please.”

“Course,” Another chaste peck on your lips that turned into two, then lingered on the third, only for heavy footsteps and a rough voice to have him jumping away.

“Jeongguk…” A figure was leaning out of the doorway dressed in an ironed white button up and black slacks, the tiny gold nameplate advertising manager first reading Yoongi. “Stop kissing customers, please.”

This time a horrified gasp from the mother in question, one that caused Yoongi’s eyes to widen as he moved for the table, shooting you a comforting wink as he began to explain the concept of a joke while Jeongguk disappeared back into the depths of the restaurant.

You managed to hack out two paragraphs while Jeongguk put your order in with a handful of dialog sprinkled within. His kiss was to the top of your head when he slipped the plate in front of you, careful to avoid your twitching fingers over the keys as he hummed.

“Any progress?”

Your response wasn’t a total lie. “A little bit…”

Two paragraphs and useless dialog tagged with edit later in six weeks.

You’d managed to catch a handful of the rope promising to pull you ashore, one you clung desperately to while your fingers, coiled equally as tight, wore the letters on your keyboard to nothing, backspace barely a factor as you left in typos and grammar issues and a myriad of useless punctuation. The lines from where your laptop sat in relation to the cover your swimsuit bottoms provided was of little concern, just as your hair tied messily on the nape of your neck and the lack of towel underneath the bare parts of your stature not covered by the swimsuit you’d stumbled into in route to reach the rope.

The paper outlines sat somewhere inside but you didn’t need them anyway, the digital copy enough to mark off pieces from as your word count skyrocketed, pages clicking over and over the hump you’d previously been stuck on, the rope dragging your belly first over but getting you there nonetheless. You typed until your mouth begged for the ice water you’d left inside and one of the two cookies of Jeongguk’s left, but you powered through into another page, giddy with the possibility but more focused on the emotion somewhere between determination and greed.

You heard the gate open but ignored it, you heard a call of your name but ignored it, and you felt the splash of water hit your ankles and glared at it.

“Hey!” Jeongguk resurfaced on the side of the pool. He’d fixed his hair, vibrant and red against where he brushed it out of his eyes. “Come in for a swim?”

You pursed your lips, determined to ignore him as your fingers started slow on the keys again. When you arrived at your previous speed, you huffed, “You aren’t supposed to clean today.”

He dunked his head under, resurfacing in a flurry of bubbles, “Does it look like I’m cleaning?”

“Jeongguk. I’m busy today.”

“You’re only here for another week.”

“Exactly!”

He sighed, forearms folding onto the concrete as he leaned forward, watching you, “Whatever you have is great. Better than great.”

“You wouldn’t know.”

“I have a vague idea because you won’t let me read anything.”

You were glaring at him again, the playful expression previously on his features hardened into something you couldn’t quite understand, one that softened only marginally as the seconds passed.

Jeongguk uttered your name, a gentle request, “Take a break.”

Your laptop sat open on the bare lawn chair, battery zapped the longer the heat bore down on it but the pointed stalk of your footsteps across the pool area had shoved it aside. The water was cold upon first touch but the reactions of your body didn’t show it, carrying you down the staircase until you were submerged, body crouching so that your chin skimmed the surface of the water until you were treading directly in front of Jeongguk.

“I’m in the water,” You hissed, “Is this what you wanted?”

He didn’t have it in him to giggle, a sad smile instead not quite reaching the dimples in his cheeks.

“No. I want you to believe in yourself.”

The push of your mouth against Jeongguk’s was wet, tasting of the chlorine that splattered around you when you stood to grapple for purchase on his shoulders. Strong arms encased your waist, accepting you anyway as one liquid staining your lips was replaced with something warm and tinged in salt, dripping in unwarranted streams from the corners of your eyes.

You whimpered when your back was pressed to the side of the pool, legs coming to wrap around his waist while your fingernails scraped at his back. “I’m sorry,” You gasped, his lips mouthing at your neck while he held you.

“Don’t be,” He reprimanded you with teeth on your collarbone, arms sliding higher on your waist to press you flush to his chest, “I’ve got you.”

Another miserable apology fell from your lips and your chin was jerked upward by a soft palm cupping your cheek, latter hand pressing into the concrete behind you. “I said, I’ve got you, baby girl,” Jeongguk reiterated, forehead pressed to yours. Something sad rippled in his starry irises, something that dug the dagger deeper into the hammering organ in your chest, “What do you need me to do?”

“Just, I—”

Words failed but the bury of your face into his neck, securing your ankles around his back and holding to him like he’d disappear any second, didn’t.

Jeongguk’s arms threaded around your stature again, nosing into your damp hair with a shaky sigh. “Okay. Okay, I’ve got you. Shh, it’s okay, it’ll be okay…”

Fourteen pages in seven weeks.

The weight of his palm in yours had never quite reached home, a foreign weight laced through your fingers from the hesitancy echoing a mantra in the forefront of your conscious, eerie and daunting and to the tune of your rapidly beating heart.

No obligations. A distraction. A good distraction. No obligations. Broken laptop charger. Not enough complete. No obligations. Too much dialog. Too little progress. No obligations.

Fourteen pages. Seven weeks. No obligations.

You squeezed your fingers together just to watch the joints retract under your skin, the moonlight a ghost over your knuckles. Again and it was inevitable to catch Jeongguk’s attention, his hand flexing underneath yours, smooth and gentle and waiting, accepting of the home your lost heart would need.

If you’d just let yourself knock on the door. No obligations.

“Hey.” He’d stopped walking next to you, the sand cold on your toes, the plastic straps of your sandals rubbing a blister on the soft crease between your fingers on your free hand. “Hey, can we…”

“Look,” You overlapped him, sandals falling from your grasp when you pointed instead. A small group of crabs ruffled through the sand in front of you, bumping through languidly, over and under each other. Jeongguk’s eyebrows nearly met at the wrinkled bridge of his nose, the corner of his mouth slightly downturned when you glanced at him. Softly, you nodded, “Crabs.”

He let go of your hand, crouching. A cupped palm scooped through the sand, effectively excavating one of the crabs. It shook the sand from around itself, scurrying eagerly about the surface of Jeongguk’s hand as he straightened, stretching the creature out to you.

“Do you want to hold him?”

Thoughts of your novel and the overwhelming overhauls it’d endured in your eight weeks, the first a modest to a beachfront neighborhood, from a grocery store to a beach, from a bouquet of flowers the boy had been clutching onto for months while you worked on the details around him to a tiny crab who lasted long enough for you to hate the idea.

The tiniest of smiles made it to your lips, “Is there anything you can’t do, Jeon Jeongguk?”

He crouched again, releasing the crab in a flurry of sand dusted from his fingertips before returning to you. Curled fists made it into the pockets of his shorts, foot nudging into the ground below him as he shrugged. Wide eyes lifted from their spot at the tips of his toes to yours, the same sad smile lacing his features, “I can’t figure you out, apparently.”

“Can we...can we talk?”

He nodded, slowly at first and then all at once. A hand stretched in your direction again, fingers wiggling, the smile on his features a step closer to genuine. “C’mon, let’s go sit down.”

You followed Jeongguk up the beach, finding a space just in front of where the long grasses began, fluttering gently in the night time wind so much so that their soft ambiance almost outweighed the ripple of the ocean from farther up on the shore. Your hand retracted from his, sandwiched between your thighs but your shoulders still touched, sitting side by side as the moonlight crawled up the waves to be deposited onto the coast.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” You said after a moment. Features scrunched to the breeze, eyes shutting as you sighed, “I really don’t know what I’m doing.”

He hummed, “Do any of us?”

“You seem to,” Your cheek pressed to your shoulder, offering a smile when he glanced at you, “Mister gorgeous pool boy who can sing, play guitar, write poetry, bake, and catch ghost crabs without blinking.”

Jeongguk hummed once more, a lower sound this time, nose pointed toward the breeze. “If you think my ambitions in life stopped at tourist neighborhood groundskeeper and a waiter at a place named The Dusty Dolphin, I must have done a really shitty job at letting you get to know me over these couple of months.”

“I know that,” You nudged him, “but how are you content with your passions just staying passions? How can you not want more?”

“Let me ask you a question,” He nudged you back, chin meeting his upper arm to peer at you under vibrant bangs, “Why do you write?”

“Because I want to have a published novel.”

Jeongguk quirked an eyebrow, “Why do you want to have something published?”

“Because I’ve put years of work into the idea. I’ve drained my soul to invest it in this project.”

“Do you love it?”

You blinked, “My novel?”

“Your novel, your column, the newspaper, writing,” Jeongguk shrugged, “Any of it.”

“I did…”

“Did?”

“I’ve always been in love with the craft of writing—” Softly, you amended, “—my writing. My creations. And I’ve had slumps, I’ve endured writer’s block. I’ve gone past deadlines and I’ve scrapped entire plots, ideas, paragraphs, sentences. But never this bad. Not to the point where I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Why I even started writing the piece in the first place, what the end goal. What it was even supposed to be about, let alone anything about it.”

Jeongguk nodded, nose pointing toward the breeze again, cheek lulling to his arm, “Why did you come here, of all places?”

“I was sent here. Work leave.”

“What’d you do?”

“Told a nine year old that, not only are Disney princesses not real, but not a viable career option.”

He chuckled next to you, legs stretching out in front of him. “Harsh.”

“What about you?” You nudged him again, “Why do you write?”

“Because I love music and words are the language of music,” Jeongguk’s finger dug into the sand, absently drawing geometric shapes before brushing them away with the heel of his palm, “Even instrumental pieces can be described in words. Whimsical, haunting, pretty. That kind of thing.”

“I didn’t have to ask you if you loved it…” It was a rhetorical sentiment, trailed off as you stared at the nudge of his fingernail into a crooked rectangle.

“Can you do me a favor, when you go back home?”

“Please don’t tell me not to forget you. We live in the twenty-first century. I expect a picture of Seokjin with his shrimp magazine once a week.”

He was smiling when his hand slipped to your cheek, turning your gaze to his. “I’m serious,” His eyes flicked between yours, dizzying you in a mess of stars that never seemed to blur with the speed of his insistent gaze. “Scrap your entire novel. Start over.”

“What? Do you understand—”

Jeongguk’s lips felt like home. You hadn’t placed your guard around those. “I don’t understand. You won’t let me read it,” His forehead pressed to yours, “but just try it.”

“But Namjoon—”

Another kiss, gentle, a brush of your mouths together, just enough to swallow your insecurities. “The new one will be just as great. Better. More than enough to send to Namjoon.”

“How do you know?”

His thumb brushed against the apple of your cheek, eyes following the movement, “Would you allow him to read your current draft in its entirety? Not just what you’ve gotten finished while here.”

You hesitated long enough for Jeongguk to kiss you again, lingering enough to properly swallow what you were going to say. No, absolutely not.

“Might as well try—” His cheeks dimpled and it was the first genuine smile you’d allowed yourself in days, “—right?”

“Can you do me a favor?” You asked after several seconds of indulging in each other’s affections, lips swollen and brushing against his mouth.

“I won’t send you shirtless pictures every morning, no—” He shifted enough to shed himself of the pink checkered flannel on his shoulders, wrapping it to your shoulders to pull you against his side, “Taehyung already thinks I’m vain.”

You smacked Jeongguk’s shoulder and he giggled, leaning forward just enough to brush the tips of your noses together. Once. Twice. Four times.

“No,” You tilted to squish your noses together, locking his gaze to yours, “Try to pursue something with music. I don’t care if it’s DJing at that shitty club Taehyung was trying to get us to go to last week. Or maybe busking on the weekends. You can set up in front of the pond as you enter the neighborhood.”

“I don’t…”

“Try it,” You punctuated it with a hard kiss to his lips, “What can it hurt?”

You’d shifted to lay between his legs, cheek on his chest, kisses shifted to his chest over his shirt, his sprinkled to your forehead, cheeks, nose. He hummed into the ministrations, nosing over your hairline.

“Theoretically, if I were to become a famous musician, would you come to my first gig? It’ll never happen, but you’re a writer. Speaking in hypotheticals...”

You settled your chin between the hard planes of his chest, “Depends. Will you buy my novel?”

“Three copies. I’ll come to three separate book signings to get personalized notes from you.”

You giggled and Jeongguk couldn’t help but kiss your nose. Twice. “Then yes. I’ll come to your first gig. Maybe two of them, if you pay for my plane ticket.”

He seemed satisfied with the answer even as an insecurity seemed to linger on the tip of his tongue, one that festered when he glanced over your head to the ocean, still as dark and thrashing as before. “You really won’t forget about me, will you? Because truthfully, I don’t think I’ll ever forget about you.”

“You’re stuck with me, unfortunately. Give me your email and we can be penpals. You can remind me not to crush the dreams of elementary students while I’m at work…”

“...but no, Jeongguk,” You squeezed his waist, pressing your lips to the center of his chest, “I won’t forget you.”

“I’ll still send you my lyrics. They’ll probably be about you for a while, anyway.”

“I’ll let you read snippets of my novel, once I restart. Actually let you read something I’m proud of.”

“I’ll send you a picture of the first dollar I get from busking. It’ll probably be from Seokjin, but it’ll count.”

“I’ll miss you. And your cookies.”

“Miss implies forgetting,” His index finger lifted to prod at your pouted bottom lip, “We aren’t forgetting.”

Another sad smile, a different type of sad, one of the up most cliche smile because it happened, adorned your features as you raised a pinky finger. Slightly crooked, open, without your guard, “Pinky promise?”

Jeongguk’s lips distracted you from the feeling of home that came with the link of your pinky’s, squeezing onto your digit. “Pinky promise.”

Zero progress in eight weeks.

Park Jimin was standing in front of your desk with a copy of your novel in hand, a nervous smile pasted on his plump lips, feet shifting awkwardly beneath him as he waited on you to finish typing. He’d told you to keep working and who were you to deny him of that request.

“What can I do for you?” It wasn’t anything work related. You’d already passed the advice column and your office down to him in exchange for a feature column and a better office with a better computer monitor. He wasn’t getting that too.

The book hit your desk and he scurried to amend the flurry of papers that kicked up around it, speaking as he shuffled through the documents. “My girlfriend, she, uh, loves your novel and I was wondering if you could, uh, sign it for me? Maybe? It’d make her day, year probably, and—”

“Yeah, Jimin,” You reached for the book, dismissing his efforts to clean your desk with a flick of your wrist and a smile, a genuine one, “Of course I can sign it. What’s her name?”

The waxy cover contained the result of your efforts, the painstaking nights you’d stayed up sobbing over your manuscript, the early symptoms of carpal tunnel from hacking at your backspace too much, your familiarity with deleting and recovering entire documents. But most importantly, the return of your passion, your love, your fears the ultimate roadblock to the end of your novel and the beginning of a new, the one currently hidden behind a couple emails and your column for the following week.

The beauty of dual screens.

“Thank you so much,” The blonde gushed, clutching the novel against his chest when you were done scrawling on the cover with a ballpoint pen, “She’ll be so excited. Thank you!”

Your phone was prepared to text Hoseok, did you pay Jimin to do that?, when you noticed another notification, red and glaring at you from your messages application. It was a familiar contact name, a message written in a font generated by something, a three step process he must have taken to type, copy, and paste it. Even through the silly font did your heart swell.

They say lest we forget, but why forget when I can be there with you, if you’ll let me.

You kicked away from your desk, propping your foot onto the seat of your chair, phone onto your knee.

Alright, Guk, what’s the significance of this one?

There was several seconds of typing, deleting, typing again, silence, more typing. Finally, a message. A single emoticon, the side eyes, the ones that knew something with a slightly upturned mouth. You were halfway through another inquiry, an okay, what the hell does that emoji mean, Jeon? when you received a picture.

His hair was brown now. Dark and fluffy and disheveled across his forehead where a single pink note was pasted to his skin. The ink was dark, prominent, like he’d sat and scraped at it for hours.

I’LL SEE YOU SOON.

You called him.

“Jeongguk, what the fuck are you talking about—”

“I got an audition.”

You paused and he continued with a shaky breath, “I got an audition. In your town. For music. Singing.”

“...so what you’re saying is you’re going to become a big superstar and I’m going to have to pay my own way to your first concert—”

“Baby,” Jeongguk whined, “I haven’t got the spot yet.”

“Yeah, but you will.”

There was another pause, some rustling in the background and then he hummed, “I’m going to sing a song about you. For the audition.”

Your cheeks heated and you rolled toward the window, blankly staring at the towering building next to the office. “Yeah? What’s it called?”

“Wonder.”

“Yeah I wonder what you’ve titled the song about me, if it’s not my name—”

“The song is called Wonder…”

There was a pause and he was singing again, just as soft as you remembered, the same lyrics he’d serenaded you with on the beach holding a different weight now, both literally without the organic strum of a guitar and figuratively to what the polished poetry did to your healed heart, open and ready.

You murmured into his soft, teasing hums, hugging a knee to your chest, “That song, huh?”

“I told you already. I can’t seem to write anything that’s not about you,” You could hear Jeongguk’s smile, “That didn’t change in the months since you went home.”

Your cheeks heated all the way to the back of your neck, filtering to the shy roll of your shoulders as you hunched over your knee, squeezing it tighter, and you reveled in that he couldn’t see you to quip, “You know what has changed though? Your jokes. I think they’ve gotten dumber.”

There was still a smile in his voice, even as he threatened, “Alright, listen here you little—"

“Watch it or I’ll sue for you using ‘me’ without my consent.”

“You based an entire character in a bestselling novel after me. It’s only fair.”

You spluttered, “I did not—”

“And for the record? Washboard abs is a lame description of my godly physique. Even I know that and I’m but a mere lyricist.”

“I’m going to kick your ass when you get here.”

“...so you’ll want to see me?”

“Of course,” Your voice softened and you watched a bird climb altitude before fluttering to the windowsill, “I have to sign your three copies of my novel.”

Jeongguk laughed, sweet in your ears.

“I can’t wait…”

[southeastasianists]

Surrounded by low-hanging clouds, mud and chickens in a village deep in the northern hills, a young woman tells me, “We are not Thai and we try not to be Thai. Sometimes I find myself talking to my family in Thai and I think, ‘No, try to be Lisu’”. Katima is an activist and member of one of Thailand’s myriad ethnic minorities. The Lisu people are spread across Thailand’s northern hills, deep into north-eastern Burma and southern China. They are a stateless people with language, culture, religion and practices that are completely distinct from any of the national states that envelope them.

In The Art of Not Being Governed, anthropologist James C. Scott makes the case that the Lisu (and many of the other ethnic minorities found in upland southeast Asia) are culturally and materially anti-state. Their fluidic language, culture, lack of alphabet and semi-nomadic living practices developed as a response to escape the reach of the states that would have had them as productive subjects who store grain, deliver taxes and provide soldiers. The Lisu and other similar groups were free of these obligations and were able to live under their own community governance. Scott argues that they have tried—consciously or not—to make themselves an unconquerable population.

Down the road sits the local government office. Built around 20 years ago, it marked the first formal governing presence in the lives of the local people. “When I was a kid, we used to have no hospitals, no schools, no government,” Katima tells me. Today the office is coated in flags and murals dedicated to the monarchy and nation-state. Those who work in the office are not locals, but Thai people brought in to govern the Lisu population. The same is true of the teachers in the local government schools: Thai civil servants assigned to teach the national curriculum. There has also been a concerted effort to build Buddhist temples in these more remote areas, which serve to supplement and eventually replace the animist spiritual beliefs held and practised by the local people.

This extension of the state is a clear and direct plan originating from 20th-century policies of ‘Thaification’ formulated by the central government. Beginning in 1933, dictator Plaek Phibunsongkhram oversaw a massive nationalist overhaul of the state’s relationship towards ethnic minorities. Notable policies included harshly enforcing the Thai language in the education system, reinforcing the relationship between the monarchy and population, and issuing the 12 Core Values—a kind of nationalist guide to ideal ‘Thai’ behaviour, ways of living and etiquette.

A negotiation

Even today, some Thai officials are scared to go into Lisu villages. There are stories of government officials being detained by angry villagers over land rights conflicts. “It’s definitely happened before,” a resident tells me. “The Lisu people came out with knives and bats and the Thai officials had to negotiate for their release.”

Another young Lisu woman, who wanted to go unnamed, describes government involvement in Lisu life as a negotiation. “We accept some of the things the government offers us, like schools, hospitals, temples. But we are still Lisu … The defiance is at home and in the community, where we will continue to do our customs and live our own way of life. We won’t really assimilate”. Most local people don’t feel the government has any influence over them.

In the north of the country, one of the state’s most effective arms is without a doubt the Royal Project, which was inaugurated in the late 60s as a means to replace opium crops grown in the hills by ethnic minorities with fruits and vegetables. The agricultural products produced for the Project are sold to a state-operated company which distributes them throughout the kingdom, leaving the locals dependent on the state for their material wellbeing.

In the early days, the Project was funded and supported by the United Nations. Besides crop replacement, an added and intentional benefit was the absorption of minorities into the activities of the Thai state, with the aim of keeping them from being drawn into the drug trade or from joining the communist insurgencies which were flaring up across Southeast Asia at the time.

Today Royal Project stations, which can be found throughout the hills, technically serve the purpose of agricultural research and development. They also act as laybys for domestic Thai tourists from urban areas—embassies of a kind to help central Thai people feel acquainted with the faraway hills. The outposts are a continuous source of soft power for the central government to ingratiate officials with the local population and absorb their activities into the nation-state.

Anti-state fight/flight

The same anti-state culture is exhibited by the Maniq people in the deep south of the country. The Maniq are nomadic hunter-gatherers who live in the heavily forested national parks near the Thai-Malay border. Like the Lisu, they have their own language, culture and no alphabet. But unlike the Lisu, the Maniq refuse to even negotiate, rejecting literally all aspects of modernity in favour of a far more traditional existence. Even today they live without electricity, permanent housing or any of the trappings of modern life. They find food from hunting with slingshots and poison-tipped blow darts, or by foraging in the forest.

Maniq groups typically consist of around 30 individuals. They live nomadically and communally with no concept of private property and without hierarchy. Their total population, confined solely to these hills, is estimated at only around 200.

Historically, the Maniq people have suffered tremendously at the hands of outsiders. There are two key words in Maniq language, which one quickly learns when spending time with them: ‘Maniq’ (‘us’) and ‘Hamiq’ (‘them’). “You are either of the forest or of the town. Maniq or Hamiq,” Speaker Kai tells me. (The role of Speaker in Maniq society is literally that of a communicator—a speaker for the group. As there is no hierarchy in the community, the Speaker is by no means a leader. Rather they listen to the many voices of the group and communicate the consensus with outsiders.)

The key to the Maniq’s survival so far has been their flight reflex. They’ve spent thousands of years literally running away from settled society, and are well known for being extremely wary of outsiders. But today that nomadic lifestyle, particularly as it concerns conceptions of private property, inevitably results in constant clashes with the Thai legal system. Their lack of formal identification runs parallel to Thailand’s great state bureaucracy. Meanwhile their seclusion and isolation leaves them ripe for exploitation from illegal loggers and poachers. Plantations and farmlands have also been squeezing the Maniq’s living area for centuries, shrinking it at an astronomical rate.

James C. Scott made the case that the geographic conditions of Southeast Asia historically made state building no easy task. Evidence of this historical lack of state reach is still clear in the lowlands of Thailand, where almost every region—even the provinces immediately outside of Bangkok—have a distinct dialect or even language. For example, many rural people in provinces such as Surin (450 kilometres from Bangkok in the flatlands of eastern Thailand) speak upwards of four languages: Khmer, Lao, Surin and the most recent addition, Thai. The people of Surin also have religious practices and cultural points of reference which are not found in mainstream Thai culture.

Such communities live as proof of a Thailand before it was ‘Thaified’—a place rich in diversity and bound by communal strength in local identities. But these communities are rapidly fading under the ever-growing reach of a state able to replace local identities with a national one. Yet opposition still exists in different guises, particularly in the hills, from the Lisu in the North to the Maniq of the South.

Speaker Kai pointedly says of the Thai government, “They want us to settle down, grow food, go to their schools, be like them. We can’t live like that”. The Thai state has made efforts to control the Maniq including issuing ID cards, which quickly disappear. A forced resettlement project, where they were made to live in permanent housing on a kind of reservation in Phattalung province, was apparently seen as an act of charity by the state. The experiment didn’t last long as the Maniq ran away and escaped back into nomadic jungle life. “We don’t want charity or help. I just want my kids to grow up like I did. I want them to be Maniq, to live as Maniq,”  Speaker Kai tells me. “We just want some land to live off of and to be left alone”.

This is pure anti-state ideology: a refusal to take part in any kind of settled civilisation with powers that supersede their own control. Still, above the Maniq’s temporary forest shacks fly two flags: one Thai national flag and one Thai royal flag. They were erected by the Maniq as a show of good faith to the local Thai plantation owners and national park rangers who have been harassing them for decades. Pessimism about their future is inevitable as the veins of settlers stretch ever deeper over the hills and into the forest. Speaker Kai’s message to the outside world rings out: “We want to be left alone”.

[eldritchsurveys]

909.

5k Survey XXXIII

1701. How will tomorrow be like today? >> It’ll probably be exactly like today. 1702. How would you react if a stranger pinched your bottom? >> Violently. 1703. When was the last time you went on a date? >> --- 1704. Have you ever ridden a horse? >> Nope. 1706. What is almost over? >> Hmm... I’d say summer, but I mean, there’s a full month and a half to go.

1707. What should you be doing that you are putting off? >> Nothing. 1708. How much would you have to change physically before you would no longer be yourself anymore? >> I’d still be myself regardless of how much I changed. I fail to understand what else I could possibly become. (A change does not mean that I cease being “myself”, it just means “I” have undergone a change...) 1709. How much would you have to change mentally before you would no longer be yourself anymore? >> See above. 1710. Would you rather be famous or notorious? >> Neither, please. I’d rather just be left alone. 1711. Would you rather have a necklace that’s dripping with diamonds or a blueberry farm? >> What would I do with either of these things? 1712. Could you take first place in a beauty contest? >> No. Nor would I care to participate in one. 1713. Who is the biggest hypocrite you know and why? >> --- 1714. Would you consider yourself to be more opinionated or bitchy? >> These aren’t opposite concepts, so this is confusing. Anyway, I don’t consider either of these to be appropriate descriptors. 1715. How long is it until your next day off? >> --- 1716. What sound is annoying you right now? >> I’m not currently being annoyed by any sound. Which, I’ll admit, is pretty remarkable. 1717. Imagine you’re taking a vacation with 4 people. Who are they? >> I can’t imagine voluntarily going on vacation with four other people. 1718. The five of you travel by plane. Suddenly your plane crashes down over snowy mountains. The pilot and the air crew and all the other passengers die. The only way for you to survive is for one of you to get eaten by the others. Who will it be? >> --- 1719. Anorexia and obesity are two life threatening eating related disorders. Why is it that when it is discovered that someone is an anorexic they are rushed to the hospital, but when someone is obese they are not rushed to the hospital? >> Usually when an anorexic person is rushed to the hospital, it’s because something life-threatening has happened in relation to their malnutrition (organ failure, for example). I’d gather that obese people are also rushed to the hospital, if something life-threatening has happened in relation to their obesity (...organ failure, for example). 1720. Who is your favorite smurf? >> --- 1721. Why do you do things that you know are bad for you? >> Because I want to. 1722. How important is testing to education? >> I know nothing about this. All I know is that as a person who often performed poorly on tests, it did nothing for my education except make me think I was bad at everything. 1723. What food group do you eat the most of (bread and pasta, meats and eggs and fish, fruits and vegetables, milk and cheese, sugar and butter)? >> I’m not sure. Probably grains, although I’d like it to be vegetables. 1724. Who is the most adorable person you know? >> --- 1725. If you had to spend a half hour locked in a dark closet with someone from school or work that you don’t normally hang out with who would you want it to be? >> --- 1726. How often do you masturbate in a week? >> Inworld shenanigans can happen anywhere from zero to three times in a week. 1727. In the USA people work a full third of the year for the government, due to taxes. How do you feel about this? >> --- 1728. Should people be allowed to use cell phones in their cars? >> Sure, if they use them lawfully and mindfully. As in, hands-free when driving. I feel like using your phone while at a stoplight or stuck in traffic or whatever is different. Personally, I think if I drove, I wouldn’t use my phone at all unless it was to set up a GPS route and then stick it in a holder on the dashboard. 1729. Have you ever been in the room while a human baby was born? >> No. 1730. Have you ever been in the room while an animal baby was born? >> Probably. 1731. Did you see the video The Miracle of Life in school? >> I don’t recall. 1732. How do you feel about having a baby? >> I am 100% opposed to it. 1733. Have you ever had a tooth pulled? >> Yeah. 1734. Who are you waiting for an email/call/note/visit from? >> --- 1735. What are you counting the days until? >> --- 1736. What is the greatest temptation for you? >> I’m not sure. 1737. How do you resist it? >> --- 1738. Who is your knight in shining armor? >> --- 1739. If you were walking and someone behind you yelled “HEY YOU!” would you turn around? >> Yeah, reflexively. I would fucking hope someone’s not shouting at me like that, though. 1740. Do loud noises make you tense? >> Quite. 1741. Has anyone ever told you that your epidermis was showing? >> Ha, no. 1742. Would you rather work or stay home with the baby? >> --- 1743. Would you rather have people agree with you all the time or tell you the honest truth? >> I definitely do not trust or value people who agree with me all the time. In fact, I start to get suspicious when someone agrees with me too much, even if it’s just logical (like, we have a lot of values in common or whatever). I just hate fawning behaviour, period. 1744. Will you/have you gone to your high school reunion? >> No. 1745. What do you think of your yearbook picture? >> I haven’t seen any of my yearbook pictures in over 10 years. My father has all that stuff and therefore I doubt I’m ever going to see it again.  1746. Are you more of a hunter or a gatherer? >> Neither??? I shop at the fucking store, lmao. (Unless this is a cheeky way of asking if I’m omnivorous or veggie/vegan, heh...) 1747. If you ever were to visit Hershey Park, the theme park based on the chocolate candy, would you enjoy going to the spa where you can be treated to a whipped cocoa bath, a milk and honey bath, or simply a chocolate fondue skin wrap? >> I would not visit Hershey Park, period. I don’t even like chocolate candy. This all sounds disgusting to me. 1748. If someone asks you to read a poem they wrote, will you really take your time to try and understand what they wrote and tell them what you think or just read it quickly and tell them that its really good? >> I would read it and react however I react (noncommittal if I didn’t care for it, happily if I did). Asking me to read a poem if you’re looking for strictly positive reactions is a real crap shoot because I don’t like most poems I read. 1749. Do you feel that if a coincidence occurs it means something? >> Sometimes. Delusions of reference is definitely my thing. 1750. Were you beautiful as a child? >> What kind of question is this?

[onewhoturns]

Fireworks (3/4)

This is... the fluffiest. xD Hello and welcome to Jonas and Alex are dorks with each other. If you want to start from the beginning: Part 1, Part 2. Feel free to hit up my AO3 if you’re interested.

Fandom: Oxenfree Pairing: Alex/Jonas Chapter: 3/4 Characters: Alex, Jonas, Michael, Ren, (later) Nona, Clarissa Word count: 2568 Rating: T for language Summary: The one saving grace of that first kiss (apart from, well, it wasn’t a bad kiss) – the one thing she could point to as making the kiss sort of okay, morally – was that it was in a timeline where they were just friends. Well… okay, maybe the kiss might have changed that. A little? Or maybe it didn’t get a chance to, much, cause Alex was too busy shutting herself away and having a teensy tiny crisis over kissing her sometimes-stepbrother. And then, naturally, as always seemed to happen July 8th, it would be May 1st all over again. or: the First, the Fourth, the Fireworks.

-

If anyone had told her that approximately 14 months after whatever the hell happened on Edwards Island she’d - they’d all - be heading back to that cursed place, Alex wouldn’t have believed them. And as she watches her friends faces, as Michael hands the drive thru bag to Clarissa, and the fast food is doled out among them, she thinks that maybe there’s some fear under their smiles.

“Not to put too fine a point on it,” Clarissa is doing that thing where she wants to be a bitch but is just a hair past the line of ‘too nice’ to do it. She’s always so much nicer in the later half of the loops. When she exists. “But… is there any particular reason we’ve jammed five people in this car when Jonas is stuck driving alone?”

Michael hums a noise that is suspicious for its innocence, and Alex feels like everyone’s eyes turn to her. Michael is stopped at the turn out of the parking lot, shooting her a look over his shoulder that says well it had to happen sooner or later. And he’s right.

Alex sighs melodramatically. “Yeah okay fine, I’ll go be Jonas’s navigator.” She pops the door open and steps out, pulling her backpack from where it was wedged under the seat.

“Great! Finally getting my fries all to myself!” Ren seems overjoyed, and Alex’s eyes narrow at his mischievous grin, wondering just how much he knows. Jonas and Ren always get along a lot better in the timelines when Michael’s back. But well enough for him to mention the— um…? “Alex, if you don’t get moving you’ll be holding up traffic and we’ll get stopped and our glorious plans will never come to fruition.”

“...Not necessarily a bad thing…” she mutters, but closes the door and lets them drive off as Jonas’s truck pulls forward.

It’s a hand-me-down, well worn, and by now she’s familiar with it— how much the handle sticks, how she’s really gotta yank the passenger side door, the right spot to step on the running board to swing herself up into the front seat.

He looks surprised to see her, though he obviously knew she was getting in since he was the one who stopped for her. “Hey.”

“Hey.” She avoids his eyes, settling her pack between her feet as he pulls out of the lot, and digging in her paper bag for— “Yesss.” The box is popped and that perfect high sodium nugget is in her mouth immediately.

“Still think it’s weird you don’t use sauces. Not that I’m complaining--I mean, I’d rather not have ketchup smell soaking into the upholstery, but still.”

“Why on Earth would I mar the perfection of a well-fried nugget?” She gives him a pitying look, but he’s grinning, and she’s grinning, and everything is back to normal. And when he looks back to the road, she feels a little tug in her gut that could be anxiety but feels a lot less awful.

“You know that stuff is just fleshy bits all held together with meat glue-”

“Shushushushush!” Alex waves a finger at him. “Do not. Ruin this for me.”

He’s smirking, and it’s cute. Dammit, he’s cute. Since when is he cute?

“...Just for that, I’m taking a fry tax.”

“What?!” For all his shock and horror he can’t hide his smile and she’s already digging in his to-go bag. “If anything, I deserve a tax of your disgusting dry nuggets, for driving.”

“Jonas, seriously? A burger? How exactly did you plan on eating this while driving?”

He shrugs, “I dunno. Wait til we get there? I mean, it’s July, it’ll keep warm-ish.”

He’s kind of right, but it’s also kind of gross. Plus the sun will be down in the next hour and it’s already cooling down outside. “Hoo, bud, that is a str-etch.”

“Hey, give me a break, okay? I haven’t driven to the ferry before, how was I supposed to know it’s far enough that we’ll need provisions for the drive?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe Google?”

“Okay you know what? You’re the fry wench now. For that, you are the fry wench.”

She snorts, rolling her eyes. “Riiiight.”

“Nope, it’s a thing now. Fry me. Wench.”

There’s a vicious grin on her lips, spotting her secret weapon nestled in the cup holder. “Owo, what’s this?”

“Did you seriously just—” Jonas’s words stop as she lifts the cup. “Alex…” It’s a warning, but not one she plans to heed. Her fingers pop off the lid. “Don’t you dare.”

“Oh: I dare.” Her smirk is straight up evil as she brings the fry to the milkshake’s edge. “I am the dare-iest.” She snorts and repeats, “I am the dairy -est.”

“First you ruin my threaten to ruin my milkshake and now you’re punning about it?” He shakes his head disappointedly.

“The only fry sauce for me.”

Jonas lets out an audible hiss, wincing as she dunks the fry. “You’re a monster.”

“You’re a cretin with an unrefined palate,” she shoots back, exaggeratedly humming her enjoyment as she chows down on french fry and chocolate milkshake.

“Dry nuggets and soggy fries,” he tuts his tongue in disapproval.

“One day you will taste the majesty that I taste and you will be enlightened and choirs of angels will sing you to flavor heaven.”

He’s skeptical, but amused as he shoots her a look out the corner of his eye. “...Okay.” He catches the raise of her eyebrow and laughs. “Screw it, right? Why not now? Fry me, humble fry wench. Gimme that soggy fry.”

There’s a look of triumph, of complete and utter self-satisfaction, as Alex picks out the perfect fry for the job.

And then eats that one, and picks out another.

“Why don’t you just buy your own fr-” He stops cause she’s about to poke him in the chin with a milkshake-covered fry, so he just shoots her a side-eyed glance and eats it. She’s chomping down on her own (perfectly seasoned, no-sauce-needed) nuggets as she watches his brow furrow, watching the road before them - Michael’s tail lights - with a look of utter concentration.

“Hm?” She bats her eyelashes, about 90% sure she’s won this debate.

Jonas’s lips twist and she thinks he’s chewing his cheek before he finally speaks. “...It’s… okay.”

“Ha! It’s delicious, you lying liar.”

His tongue swipes out for just a second to catch the last grains of salt on his lip, and he’s giving her that begrudging amused look, and she suddenly remembers that kissing isn’t bad and-- oof-- where did that even come from?

“It’s… what’s the opposite of sub?”

She knows what he means, though the context is lacking. “Super?”

“It’s super-par? That doesn’t sound right.”

Finishing off her nuggets and licking her fingers clean, Alex preens; “Just super will do. Super duper, even,” and ignores his snorted response.

“...How much longer is this drive, anyway?”

“Like… thirty minutes?”

For the first time since she entered the car, there’s a moment of silence.

“Um…”

She’s suddenly holding her breath. There’s just a teeensy bit of terror that he’s gonna ask her some Big Loaded Question about their kiss. But when he finally brings himself to say something, it’s a lot more relevant.

“So. The island.”

Crap. She’d almost forgotten about that for a second. “Yeah… Why did Ren pick it?”

Jonas lets out a heavy breath. “Pretty sure it’s some BS about closure.”

Alex is definitely too comfortable with him, cause the bitter laugh is nervously bubbling from her throat before she thinks to stop it. “Pretty sure there’s no closure in a loop. Or-- well, like, I mean it’s a closed loop, but-- but it’s already happened? Or… something?” Ugh. So much for living in the moment. She makes a weak attempt to wipe the soles of her mostly clean beat-up high tops on the car’s rubber mats before pulling her legs onto the seat, criss-cross applesauce, just like elementary school. His annoyance at feet on the upholstery is minimal. This truck has seen much worse than a few pebbles and a bit of dirt.

“Well, yeah, but…” His fingers are drumming on the steering wheel. “...I mean, maybe he’s right. It was a year ago. It’s over.”

His free hand digs through the bag for his food, and unthinkingly grabs the spilled fry pieces and dips them in the uncapped shake before popping them in his mouth. There’s definitely an urge to point it out and crow about it, but Alex is no longer in the mood. It’s not over. It’s never over. Instead, since he seems intent on doing it, she unwraps the burger for him and holds her tongue from warning him how ridiculously stupid it is to try to eat a burger while driving. And when he reaches for it he has that same soft look on his face, and he maybe takes a little too long to take it from her hand, and she feels a tiny bit noodle-y as blood rushes to her cheeks.

The effect is lessened a bit as he inevitably drops shredded lettuce on his shirt, and there’s a cynical edge to her poorly hidden affectionate smirk. Of course she’d figure this out now. Too late. Too early. Too much of a wrench in the cycle of island-island-island. He’s… bent the spokes of her tire, or... something. Whatever it is, it’s just gonna make it harder to deal with the leaving.

She sighs, feeling like her lungs are being pressed of all their air. It’s not the first time she’s backhandedly grateful that she won’t remember it all at once. A twisted kind of blessing and curse all at once. She remembers too late to stop it, but still has to remember. It usually just ends up confusing. Or depressing.

Or both.

If she were looking at him she might see the way he glances over at her, the way he keeps glancing back and forth between her and the road, mildly irritated by the food in his hand, looking at her hand instead, before he finally settles on just finishing his burger as soon as possible. But she’s not, so all she sees is him taking massive bites.

She raises an eyebrow. “You good there, bucko? Don’t forget to breathe.”

He shoots her a vaguely irritated look, but his mouth is too full for a comeback. Which, okay, maybe that does lighten her mood just a bit. Alex does not stop stealing fries. She, of course, rationalizes this with the fact that they’re already getting cold, and cold fries are of no use to anyone. The only sign that he spots her continuous filching is the occasional side-eye she gets. But she just turns straight ahead, watches the back window of Michael’s sedan.

That’s one of the things she loves about Jonas’s car, no matter how… well-loved it is; it’s a solid foot or more taller than all the smaller cars on the road. And yes, that means it’s a pain in the ass to climb into, but once she’s in she’s so tall! She likes tall. Jonas is tall. She likes Jonas.

...Oh no, not this again.

He opened that whole can of worms and now… they’re just… flailing around on the asphalt of her heart, or… whatever worms do. The metaphor in her head is very promptly heading just about nowhere. The point is: she likes him. She really really likes him. But there’s A Lot happening-- the fact that she like likes anyone, for one, when she’s more used to friend crushes in the ‘you seem so cool I want to hang out with you’ way and not in the ‘okay yeah, actually, this kissing thing, not too bad, please hold me’ way.

She chews her lips, pulling her knees to her chest and making a noise like a hurnnngh cause she is very A Lot right now and -- hhh.

“We don’t have to go, you know.” Jonas is done with his food, with minimal spillage, and is watching her closely in quick glances.

“Hm? No, no, that’s-- it’s fine. It’s just an island.”

She hasn’t been back since that night. Maybe she should’ve. Maybe she could’ve learned something. Maybe-- and it was a slim-to-none chance, but maybe -- there was a clue there to ending this hopeless cycle.

“If it helps, I’m like 99.9% sure no one wants to fuck with any radios.”

Her smile is grateful but weak, cause now she’s not so sure that that’s it. Maybe they do need a radio. Maybe it’s time she gave the Sunken a piece of her mind, instead of running away and hiding and trying to live her life one 14-month dose at a time.

“And, y’know… um…” Jonas’s words are becoming more uncertain, more mumbled as he continues. “I’ll… be there, I guess. With you. If that even-- I mean, if that makes a difference.”

She’s not expecting the sudden jab of pain in her chest. Because-- well, it does and it doesn’t. For Alex, Jonas was always the one on the island. He was the one who believed her when no one else did, who stuck by her and occasionally scared the shit out of her, and sat by her side when she went God knows where with the ghosts in her head. But… that isn’t how it happened here. In this timeline.

Her breath is held for a half second before she puts her head against her knees and sighs. It can’t hurt. Whatever pain she’s due for, she’s due for it no matter what. So she flops her arm out, onto the cupholders, narrowly avoiding toppling the milkshake and instead just crunching down the now-empty to-go bag. She’s not looking at him. Not even when she flexes her fingers out, expectantly. But she can guess at his expression, when his fingers twine with hers. Soft.

She shifts her head sideways to glance at him when he turns her hand over, and feels her face going flush when he pulls the back of her hand to his lips. He’s watching the road, but he’s-- alright, it’s cheesy to say he’s glowing, but… well. His ears are pinker than the light of the setting sun and she suspects he’s trying to play it cool, but his lips are twitching.

“You are such a sucker.” Not that she isn’t blushing, too. But she can at least attempt to hide her face in the shadow of her knees.

“Shut up. I’m a romantic.”

She’s smiling at him, rolling her eyes. “Oh really. Since when?”

“I’ll have you know, it’s genetic.”

And okay so maybe it’s also a little contagious, cause he’s shooting her a look, and the sun is just at that really annoying height where it’s blasting orange light into everyone’s eyes, but it’s kinda beautiful. He’s kinda beautiful. And he’s very nearly grinning, and Michael’s words pop into her head-- “...he’s been in love with you for… like, ever?”

She doesn’t argue. Doesn’t even make an attempt at a comeback, especially since she knows it’s true. She just lets whatever’s doing little loop de lous in her stomach keep doing its thing, and she holds his hand and-- yeah, maybe it’s a little sweaty, but it’s July so what could she expect really. She just holds his hand. And they’ll figure the rest out later.

[officerjennie]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Naruto Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Senju Tobirama/Uchiha Madara Summary:

Hiraeth - A homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.

For @copyninken because reasons.

Click the link or continue below the line to read. Ko-Fi link in blog header :)

It had started as little more than a waking dream, settled into his mind in the brief moments before he had fully awakened. Laughter in ruby eyes, a scrunched up nose, white tufts a mess as they ticked his cheek. Soft lips pressing against his own with a content sigh, smooth pale skin under his calloused palms, and nothing but peace and quiet hanging in the morning lit room around them.

Once the sleep vision left him, his futon empty save for himself and the pillow he always displaced in his sleep, all he could do was blearily blink at the spot he had been certain someone was laying in. Only after his mind caught up with itself did he feel the tug of revulsion at his gut, and he tossed the covers aside to stumble his way down the hall to the kitchen, determined to pump himself so full of coffee he would never sleep another wink again.

For once, not even his dark roast could comfort him, nor could it erase the small flicker in his chest. He was left staring at his counter-top, searching for answers in the wood grain as the sparrows busied themselves building a nest in the rafters of his back porch.

The Senju brat had been nothing more than a thorn in his side since the treaty had been signed, a constant nuisance determined to cause him issue at every turn. The only sanctuary he’d had left from that sneer and sharp tone since the village had formed had been his home, and now even that had been violated by unwelcomed visions.

Instinct said it was a plot against him. Sage only knew what that bastard could really do, what secret jutsu or poisons he crafted, locked up in that lab of his. The Senju was quick enough for sleight of hand trickery, and it would only take a moment of distraction to slip something into his food. Just to be sure it wouldn’t happen again, Madara spent the little quiet time he had left that morning preparing a bento. His own cooking didn’t compare to what Hashirama forced on him every lunch, but preparing it himself guaranteed no contaminants beyond the food particles he couldn’t be bothered to scrub off his counters.

For a while, his problem was solved. By the time a month had come and gone, he’d forgotten his strange half-dream, mind busy and body exhausted from throwing himself into making his childhood dream and sound and lasting reality. Pondering a fleeting and ultimately meaningless moment was a waste of energy when peace itself was so hard to grasp, every ally gained a victory but a touch and taxing battle still.

Some evenings he longed for the song and dance of his early adulthood. Forms and meetings and long candle-lit nights in the tower left less blood on his hands but always left him bone-weary in turn, as if his soul knew not how to handle this new leaf he’d turned.

At least he did not suffer alone. The oaf might have slipped into this new life with ease, but there were a few whose eyes told tales of sleepless nights. His own night wanderings had gone unnoticed by the village over which he held vigil, though there were times he felt a second set of eyes watching along with him. He never said a word to the form hidden in the trees, never caught that ruby gaze. Only settled himself further into the crook of his oak, letting the cool air drape over him, the moon shinning over the buildings he couldn’t quite believe were real.

It was his habitual nature that brought the memory back to him. He’d groused on about the sparrow’s nest when Izuna would sit still enough to listen, but he’d left the birds to do as they pleased in the end to no one’s surprise, least of all his own. Sneaking to the kitchen window of a morning to watch them had become routine, counting the days til the air would fill with both the bitter-rich scent of his morning brew and the shrill cries of the hungry chicks growing inside the eggs he’d spotted the week before.

The morning came and his heart warmed with it, sparrow chicks turning to hawklings in his mind’s eye, how his own used to respond to his cooing. How that warm memory morphed into his forgotten dream, he did not know, but it was no longer down fluff his fingertips tingled at the memory of, no longer the ghosts of his hawks that caused the melancholy settling over him.

How he could miss a moment that never was baffled him, and he left without finishing his second cup of coffee, hoping to drown himself in the paperwork waiting for him in his office. But for once all that awaited him was menial tasks, never enough to occupy his thoughts, mind ever drifting to the man he could hear down the hall chewing their esteemed hokage out for misplacing some document or another.

It was long passed when the sparrows had left the nest that Madara allowed himself to wander back to his oak, not trusting his own traitorous mind after its recent betrayals. He still said nothing when his silent companion joined his watch, still sat in awe and disbelief at the expanding streets that stretched further below with each passing day.

Exactly when their night watches together became another routine, Madara could not tell. But soon sitting alone overlooking his village put him on edge, the air stale at times when only he stayed up in the dark. Thankfully he wasn’t left often to ponder the whys of the matter, since not even his supposed good sense could keep the Senju from ruining any hope of a healthy sleep schedule, so often he’d slip into the treeline to study the village beneath them.

By the time winter made Konoha its home, even the hostile edge to their professional dealings had cooled. For every heated argument over laws and regulations there was a handful of meetings without incident between the two. In place of the jeering that had marked their relationship there was mutual disinterest, an unstated understanding to let the other be and go about their day with as little provocation as possible.

Winter left them early, spring coming and going before Madara had a chance to enjoy the pleasantly cool weather. His sparrows nested late, their eggs only having just been laid when the heat of July hit them.

He found the dream haunted him more and more as the days warmed, no longer left in the farthest reaches of his mind but just in its periphery. And that wasn’t all that haunted him while the stars were at their peek, shinning in through his open window as the night breeze fluttered the loose papers on his night table. Something niggled at him, a thought just out of reach, his body restless as if on the cusp of understanding.

His answer came as quiet as the nights they’d so often spent in each other’s company. Lunch in Konoha’s newly formed shopping district still felt like a luxury, and Madara hardly ever indulged out of his own pocket. Eating with his overtly generous friend had its perks at least, even if the price was dealing with the tension that sparked the air between their brothers.

With Izuna’s job at the academy on the opposite side of town they split ways shortly after they ate, the other three content enough to meander back to the tower, Madara bringing up the rear. He was treated with a rare sight, watching the two Senju act like true siblings. The growing responsibilities weighed on them all so heavily that even Hashirama often slipped into his own bastardized version of professionalism when out and about, but their lunch out had been enough to relax his shoulders and set him about roughhousing in the bustling streets, doing his best to catch Tobirama off-guard and topple him over.

One misstep, and Hashirama tripped, limbs flailing as he tried and failed to catch himself. Their fearsome leader landed face first in the middle of the street, several of his citizens having to cover their mouths to not be caught snickering at his tomfoolery.

He expected Tobirama to lecture the idiot. His spiels on proper etiquette were so common place they seemed second nature, structured so well Madara was certain he’d practiced in the past to perfect them. And Hashirama was his favorite target, after all, not a day passing without at least one of his several speeches echoing down the halls of the tower from his older brother’s office.

Instead, he laughed. Nothing boisterous like his sibling, no obnoxious snorting or shrill giggles. Just a wrinkle of his nose, the edges of his eyes crinkling, staring down at his wailing brother. A hint of a smile, no noise beyond a soft exhale as he helped Hashirama up from the ground.

All Madara could do was stare at the way the wind tousled his hair, face soft, nose scrunched up just like in the moment that never was. And when his heart ached at the sight he knew he was doomed.

“Coming, Uchiha?” The words were tossed over his shoulder, ruby eyes alight with humor. Madara nodded dumbly in response, but it still took a few more moments to get his legs to listen.

He didn’t go back to his oak that night, dazed at the revelation squirming in his stomach. Only stared up at the ceiling until the sun peeked in, the sounds of the morning spilling in through his open window, his sparrow’s chicks hatched at last and chirping from their nest.

It seemed they weren’t the only uninvited guests worming their way into his heart after all.

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Michael Hudson: Global Warming and U.S. National Security Diplomacy

Digital Elixir Michael Hudson: Global Warming and U.S. National Security Diplomacy

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is “and forgive them their debts”: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year.

Global Warming and U.S. National Security Diplomacy

Control of oil has long been a key aim of U.S. foreign policy. The Paris climate agreements and any other Green programs to reduce the pace of global warming are viewed as threatening the aim of dominating world energy markets by keeping economies dependent on oil under U.S. control. Also blocking U.S. willingness to help stem global warming is the oil industry’s economic and hence political power. Its product is not only energy but also global warming, along with plastic pollution.

This fatal combination of the national security state’s mentality and oil industry lobbying threatens to destroy the planet’s climate. The prospect of raising temperatures and sea levels along the coasts while inland regions suffer drought is viewed simply as collateral damage to the geopolitics of oil. The State Department is reported to have driven out individuals warning about global warming’s negative impact.1

The only attempts to restrict oil imports are the new Cold War trade sanctions to isolate Russia, Iran and Venezuela. The aim is to increase foreign dependence on U.S., British and French oil, giving American strategists the power to make other countries “freeze in the dark” if they follow a path diverging from U.S. diplomatic aims.

It was the drive to control the world’s oil trade – and to keep it dollarized – that led the United States to overthrow the Iranian government in 1953, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to invade Iraq in 2013, and most recently for Donald Trump to isolate Iran while backing Saudi Arabia and its Wahabi foreign legion in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Sixty years earlier, in 1953, the CIA and Britain joined to overthrow Iran’s elected President Mohammad Mosaddegh to prevent him from nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. A similar strategy explains U.S. attempts at regime change in Venezuela and Russia.

While seeking to make other countries dependent on U.S.-controlled oil, America itself has long aimed at energy self-sufficiency for itself. In the 1970s the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) developed the environmentally disastrous plan to promote North American energy independence by tapping Canada’s Athabasca tar sands. About ten gallons of water are needed to make each gallon of synthetic crude oil. This water is treated as a free good, not factored into the cost of extracting syncrude. (I was the lead Hudson Institute economist evaluating ERDA’s plans, and was removed from the study when I protested that this might cause downstream water problems.) A byproduct of American energy self-sufficiency may be to make water scarcer and more expensive, especially as fracking pollutes local water resources while diverting an immense flow of fresh water as part of the extraction-and-pollution symbiosis.

The short-sightedness of America’s aggressive oil diplomacy is causing opposition in Europe as it buckles under unprecedented summer heat waves, just as U.S. cities are being devastated by drought, forest fires, floods and other extreme weather. Yet this has not dented the basic thrust of U.S. foreign policy to control oil.

Oil in the U.S. balance of payments

Control of oil has long been a major contributor to the U.S. trade and payments, and hence of the dollar’s ability to sustain the huge outflow of overseas military spending. In 1965 I conducted a study for the Chase Manhattan Bank and found that in balance-of-payments terms, every dollar of oil industry investment outflow is recovered in just 18 months. That is because hardly any of the reported import value of oil was paid to foreigners.

To the extent that the United States must import foreign oil, such trade has been limited to U.S. oil majors (on “national security” grounds), mainly from their own foreign branches. Only a small proportion of the price was paid in foreign currency. U.S. companies bought crude oil from their foreign branches at very low prices, and allocated all the price markup to their shipping affiliates in Panama or Liberia, along with shipping and freight costs, dividends and interest, managerial charges and charges for capital investment, depreciation and depletion. Most of what is counted as U.S. foreign investment in oil takes the form of machinery exports, U.S. materials and management, and so did not actually represent a dollar inflow. The effect has been to obtain oil imports at minimal balance-of-payments cost.

Since 1974, Saudi Arabia and neighboring Arab countries have been told that they can charge as high a price as they want for their oil. After all, the higher the price they charge, the higher the profits will be for domestic U.S. oil producers. The “conditionality” is that they must recycle their export earnings into the U.S. financial market. They have to keep their foreign reserves and most personal financial wealth in U.S. Treasury securities, stocks and bonds. A global move away from oil would impair this circular flow of oil-production gains into U.S. financial markets supporting domestic stock prices.

Solar energy technology and other alternatives to oil will not contribute nearly as much to the balance of payments as oil. Not only will environmentally friendly alternatives be outside the ability of U.S. diplomats to control or cut off energy supplies to other countries, but China is taking a leadership position in solar energy technology.

A major factor bolstering the oil industry’s economic power has been its tax-avoiding “flags of convenience” located in offshore banking centers. U.S. oil companies have long registered taken their profits from production, refining and distributing in Panama and Liberia. Over fifty years ago the treasurer of Standard Oil of New Jersey walked me through how the oil industry pretended to make all its profits in the tax havens that had no income tax – paying a low price to oil-producing countries, and charging a high price to downstream refiners and marketers.

One implication of this is that there is little political chance of any cleanup of tax avoidance via offshore banking centers, by Western investors and indeed the world’s criminal class and corrupt politicians, given the fact that oil and mining are the major beneficiaries. Weakening the lobbying power to prevent closing the tax loopholes that permit the fictitious cost-accounting of tax-avoidance centers would weakening the oil industry’s economic power.

U.S. foreign policy is based on making other countries dependent on U.S. oil

U.S. diplomatic strategy is to make other countries dependent on vital materials that U.S. diplomats can use as an economic lever. An early example were the food sanctions imposed in the 1950s to spur resistance to Mao’s revolution in China. Canada broke the grain embargo.

If other countries produce their energy by solar power, wind power or nuclear power, they will be independent of U.S. oil diplomacy and its threats to cut off their energy supplies, grinding their economies to a halt if they don’t endorse U.S. neoliberal economic policies. This explains why the Trump Administration withdrew from the Paris climate agreement to slow global warming.

U.S. Cold War 2.0 policy is aimed at isolating Russia

U.S. energy self-sufficiency finds its counterpart in the demand that Europe become dependent entirely on American “Freedom Gas,” at a much higher price than is available from Russia’s Gazprom and reject the Nordstream 2 pipeline, preventing it from obtaining lower-priced rival gas from Russia.2 The Trump administration argues that to avoid dependency on Russia, Europe should buy its oil and gas at much higher prices from the United States – about 30% higher, in addition to the expense of building LNG ports to transport liquified natural gas by ocean tanker instead of by Russian pipeline. “We’re protecting Germany from Russia and Russia is getting billions and billions of dollars in money from Germany,” Trump complained to reporters at the White House during a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda.3

On July 31, 2019 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 20 to 2 to back the “Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Act” sponsored by right-wing Republican Ted Cruz and Blue Dog New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen. Companies in Switzerland and Italy were first to be censored.

Global warming and GDP accounting

Warmer air temperature means a higher rate of evaporation, and hence more rain, tornados and flooding, as we are seeing this year. A related result will be drought as glaciers melt and no longer feed the major rivers on which dams have been built to generate electric power. The seeming irony is that these effects of global warming and extreme weather have become bulwarks of the rise in U.S. GDP. The cleanup costs of air and water pollution, the expense of rebuilding flooded or damaged homes, crop destruction, the increased cost of air conditioning, of coping with the spread of injurious insects northward and the rise in medical and health costs may actually account for all its growth since 2008.

Neoliberals celebrated the End of History after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, promising an era of new growth as “the market” became the world’s planner. They did not spell out that much of this growth would take the form of coping with the short-termism of the oil industry and other rent extractors living in the present and taking their money and running.

What factors should a Green Policy emphasize?

As Mark Twain quipped, “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” In today’s political world, doing something about global warming means taking on a set of goliaths that go beyond the oil and gas industry. It is one thing to say that global warming, climate change and the resulting extreme weather are existential threats to present-day civilization and economies. It is another to spell out the preconditions for solving the problem in the sphere of economic and tax reform, military and U.S. national security policy.

A Green program cannot succeed without confronting the National Security state’s mentality aiming at U.S. oil supremacy. U.S. national security has become a war threatening the security of the entire globe. Threatening to freeze countries in the dark if they do not follow U.S. policy and isolate Iran and Russia, the United States is burning itself up along with the rest of the planet.

Stopping global warming requires a tax policy to close down the special privileges promoting oil industry profits including the use of “flags of convenience” in offshore banking centers as a means of tax avoidance. A Green program logically would include a natural-resource rent tax (as classical economists advocated throughout the 19th century), and charges for what economists call “external economies,” that is social costs that are “externalities” to corporate balance sheet. Companies should become liable to reimburse society for such costs.

Imposing a tax on oil usage would raise the price of gasoline, but would not deter consumption much in the short run because car drivers and public utilities already are locked in to oil-using capital investments. A more effective response would be to reduce the profitability of oil by closing the tax-avoidance loopholes and “flags of convenience” that the industry’s lobbyists have created. “Oil industry accounting” leaves “Hollywood accounting” and Donald-Trump style real-estate accounting in the dust.

The public relations problem with this solution is that this practice of pretending to “earn” all one’s income in small island enclaves with no income tax has become so widespread that it has created an enormous vested interest now including the leading IT giants, industry and real estate. Depriving tax accountants of recourse to such tax-avoidance centers also threatens America’s National Security state by challenging its perceived national interest in attracting the world’s criminal capital to these enclaves as a bulwark of the U.S. balance of payments. The world’s wealthiest corporations and tax evaders are aligned against an economic policy that would most help reduce the carbon footprint by moving beyond oil and gas.

To implement a successful Green policy program, it thus is necessary to move beyond the environmental problem to take on a broad and wealthy array of vested interests. They will cite free-market ideology as justification for taking their money in the short run, without care for the weather disaster they are causing. That makes the task much more daunting, and also may limit the ideological appeal of a real Green program.

In countries such as Iceland and Germany, neoliberal Green Parties tend to be centrist and conservative when it comes to supporting banks and the financial sector, and endorse a market-based bonanza of carbon trading rights to be bought and sold by Wall Street speculators. The problem is that such “market-based” solutions must fail, because markets are short-term and do not take account “externalities.” Are Greens willing to criticize this “market philosophy” and its tunnel vision? Without such a challenge, Green parties will appeal largely to “feel good” voters who want to register their politically correct concern without doing much to actually solve the underlying problem.

We indeed seem to be entering the End Time. It is turning out to be the antithesis of the neoliberal End of History that was being celebrated in 1991 as free market victory after the Soviet Union collapsed. It is a crisis of Western civilization, not its apex.

Michael Hudson: Global Warming and U.S. National Security Diplomacy

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It's found in foods such as green vegetables, nuts and eggs. Like vitamin C, it also plays a role in repairing sun damaged skin. If you didn't have vitamin K in your system, then every scratch or cut would bleed continually. I just graduated and feel this 100%. It's hard not to feel angry or robbed of my college experience. My family is from Louisiana so they had this very social, sorority centric experience filled with fun, parties and laughs. Foods that Help Your Muscles GrowIf you want your muscles to grow, its important that you eat a balanced diet with plenty of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and 평창출장안마 protein. It is also important that you have variety in your diet. Don't be one of those bodybuilders that says that they eat 12 oz. Resuming his descent along the left bank of the Popo Agie, Captain Bonneville soon reached the plains; where he found several large streams entering from the west. Among these was Wind River, which gives its name to the mountains among which it takes its rise. This is one of the most important streams of the Crow country. It not a vanity thing. I don think I alone in noticing almost every one of these reflections I encounter during my day and making some sort of judgment about them usually negative. I think people (women in particular) are trained this way, to notice our reflections. You might find another similar camp later on which doesn have anything of that sort to help you out, so you have to come up with alternatives. Or execute 평창출장안마 your combat perfectly to beat them old school style. The possibilities are often endless and it all up to you. At the head of the social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he was only the more trammelled by its regulations, its principles, and even its prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his order inevitably hemmed him in. As a man who had once sinned, but who kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the fretting of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer within the line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.. I found SCA and Curology, then found this sub through my search for a sunscreen that doesn make me look like I forgot the date of Halloween. The concept of many layering different products and not expecting one product to do one thing was a breakthrough for my skin! Instead of trying to conduct a scorched earth policy on my face to deal with acne, drenching it in moisture has made such a huge difference. Now I just breakout from products that don agree with my skin instead of constantly breaking out.. TIM SCOTT: Those folks living in a single parent household, head of household, could see their taxes cut in half. And the folks living in a dual household of $117,000 see their taxes going down. The real question is, when we define the middle class around $250,000 or $300,000, which is in the top 5% of income in the country, you do have some times where 80% of the taxpayers see their taxes go down. It also bothers me that she claimed to be a minority, even though I don't think it helped her get any jobs. It's just so ridiculous. I'm from the Midwest where it seems like every white person claims to be some fraction Cherokee. The flaming opposition in their front grew with their advance until it seemed that all for ward ways were barred by the thin leaping tongues, and off to the right an ominous demon stration could sometimes be dimly discerned. The smoke lately generated was in confusing clouds that made it difficult for the regiment to proceed with intelligence. As he passed through each curling mass the youth wondered what would confront him on the farther side.

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Embattled Virginia governor: ‘I’m not going anywhere’ (AP) Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam considered resigning amid a scandal that he once wore blackface, but the pediatric neurologist said Sunday that he’s “not going anywhere” because the state “needs someone that can heal” it.

Gun-seizure laws grow in popularity since Parkland shooting (AP) In the year since the deadly mass shooting at a Florida high school, more and more states have passed laws making it easier to take guns away from people who may be suicidal or bent on violence against others, and courts are issuing an unprecedented number of seizure orders.

Pope Denounces ‘Scourge’ of Human Trafficking and Slavery (Reuters) Pope Francis urged governments on Sunday to take decisive action against the $150 billion-a-year human trafficking business and the plight of millions of modern-day slaves.

Doctors Demand Humanitarian Aid Be Allowed Into Venezuela (AP) Venezuelan doctors protested Sunday at the entrance to a bridge blocked by their nation’s military to demand that humanitarian aid be allowed to enter, as opposition leader Juan Guaido acknowledged the conflict over the food and medical supplies could lead to clashes.

UK’s May Rejects Pivot Towards Brexit Customs Union Compromise (Reuters) British Prime Minister Theresa May has rejected the idea of targeting a customs union with the European Union, pouring cold water on hopes from some that she could shift her Brexit policy to win over the opposition Labour Party.

Orban Offers Financial Incentives to Boost Hungary’s Birth Rate (Reuters) Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced new tax and loan benefits for families on Sunday as part of his government’s efforts to increase the birth rate while holding a hard line against immigration.

‘It’s Like Indira’s Come Back’: Sister of Indian Opposition Chief Makes Debut (Reuters) Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the popular sister of the head of India’s main opposition Congress party, made her political debut on Monday with a roadshow drawing thousands in the most populous state months before a general election due by May.

Chanting ‘Death to America’, Iranians Mark 40 Years Since Shah’s Fall (Reuters) Hundreds of thousands of Iranians held nation-wide rallies on Monday to mark the 40th anniversary of the fall of the Shah and the triumph of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Shi’ite cleric who led an Islamic Revolution that rattles the West to this day.

Top Pentagon Official in Afghanistan Amid Push for Peace (AP) The Pentagon’s top official made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan on Monday to meet with U.S. commanders and Afghan leaders amid a push for peace with the Taliban.

China Angered as U.S. Navy Ships Enter South China Sea (Reuters) China’s foreign ministry expressed anger on Monday after two U.S. warships sailed near islands claimed by China in the disputed South China Sea.

South Korea, US sign cost-sharing deal for American troops (AP) South Korea and the United States struck a new deal Sunday that increases Seoul’s contribution for the cost of the American military presence on its soil, overcoming previous failed negotiations that caused worries about their decades-long alliance.

Thai Election Panel Disqualifies Princess Ubolratana as PM Candidate (Reuters) Thailand’s Election Commission on Monday disqualified the sister of the king from running for prime minister on Monday, ending a stunning, short-lived candidacy for a populist party after King Maha Vajiralongkorn called the bid “inappropriate”.

Indonesia Police Apologise for Using Snake in Papua Interrogation (Reuters) Indonesian police have apologised and pledged disciplinary action after officers draped a live snake around the neck of a suspect to persuade him to confess during an interrogation session in the easternmost area of Papua.

Australian Government Set for Crushing Election Defeat: Poll (Reuters) Australia’s conservative government is facing a huge electoral defeat as it heads into the final sitting of parliament ahead of a national election expected in May, a widely watched poll found on Monday.

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3,000 Evacuated From New Zealand Fire Can Return Home (AP) About 3,000 people who fled as a wildfire threatened a New Zealand town were allowed to return home Monday as firefighting conditions improved.

U.N. Says Grain Stores in Yemen’s Hodeidah ‘at Risk of Rotting’ (Reuters) The U.N. special envoy to Yemen on Monday said the urgency of accessing grain stores trapped in a frontline position in the port city of Hodeidah was increasing as the food was “at risk of rotting”.

Algeria’s President Bouteflika to Seek Fifth Term: State News Agency (Reuters) Algeria’s President Abdelaziz Bouteflika said on Sunday he would seek a fifth term in a presidential election set for April 18, the state news agency APS reported on Sunday, putting an end to months of uncertainty caused by his poor health.

[historical-revolution]

French Revolution Master post

The French revolution was a very important event in modern European history. This post will give a brief understanding of what caused this revolution, key events,historical figures involved and the aftermath.

The Basics: The French revolution was not one major event but a series of radical Political, Social and Economic changes. Scattered across twelve unstable years from 1787 to 1799. That would change how France and Europe saw the aristocracy and equality forever.

Historical Figures of note: 

The Royals/ Second Estate

King Louis XVI

King Louis XVI was born  23 August 1754, Palace of Versailles, Versailles, Yvelines, France. He was the grandson of King  Louis XV who left France in severe debt after defeats in the Seven years war. Louis XVI married the 15 year old Austrian archduchess  Marie Antoinette in 1770 at the age of 16. He was a loyal husband and monarch. He was actually quite intelligent and progressive.  Actively trying to get out of debt even suggesting taxation to the  aristocracy. Unfortunately he was easily persuaded and indecisive. This contributed to his downfall. He was Guillotined 17th of January 1793

Queen Consort  Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette was born   2 November 1755

Hofburg Palace, Vienna, Austria. 

Marie Antoinette was the beautiful Archduchess of Austria. Louis XV arranged the marriage between her and the Dauphin (Future Louis XVI) in a bid to unite and bring peace between the two enemy nations. This made her vastly unpopular with the French people and Nobility alike. She became the figurehead of all that was wrong with the aristocracy. The fact that it took 11 years for her to produce a male heir weighed heavily on her image and popularity for years to come. She was Guillotined 16th October 1793. Only one of her three surviving children lived to see the other side of the Revolution.

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis De Lafayette

Lafayette was a key figure in both the American revolution and the French Revolution. He was however of the French nobility and stood behind king Louis. On   29 December 1786, King Louis XVI called an Assembly of Notables, in response to France's fiscal crisis. The king appointed Lafayette to the body, which convened on 22 February 1787. Lafayette decreed that there should be a truly national assembly representing everybody. Including the third estate/ Commoners.  However he was ignored by the king. And later as leader of the national guard tried to save the king and his family while supporting a constitutional monarchy. He was exiled and take prisoner by the Austrians.

The third Estate/ The radicals

Maximilian Robespierre  

Born 6 May 1758 Arras, Artois, France. Robespierre is famous for being the Leader of the jacobin political party and member of the Committee of Public Safety. He is a principal figure of the French Revolution and the reign of terror. An intelligent self made man earning an enviable education on merit alone. He was heavily influenced by the writers of the enlightenment such as Voltaire and Rousseau. Near the end of his life he suffered a period of illness and started having a nervous breakdown that led to a series of self-destructive actions finally leading to a conspiracy that made him into a villain. He was Guillotined

Camille Desmoulins

  Lucie-Simplice-Camille-Benoist Desmoulins born 2 march 1760, Guise, France. Was one of the most influential figures of the french revolution. He was a accomplished journalist and pamphleteer. Despite his stammer he was a effective orator. Calling for Parisians to take up arms  ( 12,July1789) This lead to storming of Bastille on July 14. Not soon after he published the pamphlet  La France Libre (“Free France”) which lay charges against the disintegrating  ancien régime. He fell far however and was ordered by Robespierre to be guillotined on 24 March 1794 because he began to disagree with the Committee's use of political terror and anti religious ideals.

Causes of the Revolution:

Finacial: King Louis’s Grandfather Louis XV left France in severe debt because of the loss of the seven years war. Then King Louis XVI decided to fund the American Revolution as a dig at the British. This unfortunately backfired when America didn’t keep the promises they made and France sunk into further debt. Causing higher taxation and reduced privlage on the already struggling Third Estate. Louis XVI consulted quite a few Financial advisors all were a failure. He even tried to tax the Second Estate (Nobility) but a lot of them were his family and reluctant to give up their life of excess at Versailles.

Social: The rise of the Bourgeoisie (Middle class) out of the Third Estate (the commoners) had evolved to have it’s own agenda to reach political equality with the Clergy ( First Estate) and Nobility (Second Estate)

Political: The French political system was broken up into three Estates The First Estate ( The Clergy) The Second Estate( The Nobility) and the Third Estate (the Common people). The Third Estate made up the majority of french population and was often overlooked and underrepresented by the other higher estates. This was grossly unfair and the combination of food shortages and the preachings of the Enlightened middle class such as Robespierre. the people decided to revolt and form their own National Assembly separate from the King.

Cultural: The Age of Enlightenment brought radical new ideas of philosophy and democracy. This promoted the idea of having a government based on reason and equality. Rather than the traditions and autocratic rule of the monarchy and the Catholic Church. The writing of the Devine rights of man and the citizen drafted by Lafayette greatly reflects this.

Economic: The deregulation of agriculture and the grain market supported by Liberal Economists. As well as a harsh harvest. Lead to a vast increase in the price of bread a staple of the French diet. The French people as a result were starving and they blamed the well fed Nobility. So they revolted

Some Key Events:

Meeting of the Estates General: King Louis XVI reluctantly called the estates general in May 1789. This was Louis’s last desperate attempt to solve the financial crisis. The First and Second Estate could always out vote the third. Knowing this Robespierre lead the Third Estate representatives to form their own National Assembly after being locked out of the Estates Generals. They then formed in a near by indoor tennis court. And pledged the famous Tennis Court Oath, vowing to remain there until a new constitution had been written.

The Fall of Bastille: 14th of July 1789. A mob of angry, starved french people marched on the medieval fortress of Bastille. It was considered a symbol of Louis XVI’s reign and everything the Second Estate represented. The commander of the Bastille, Marquis de Launay and his troops resisted. but they eventually surrendered. After learning about the events of Bastille, King Louis XVI withdrew the royal troops from the French capital and recalled finance minister Jacques Necker whom he dismissed just three days earlier. However, he could no longer reverse the Revolution, while the National Assembly became the French government.

March on Versailles: In October, a large crowd of protesters, mostly women, marched from Paris to the Palace of Versailles, convinced that the royal family and nobility there lived in luxury, oblivious to the hardships of the French people. They broke into the quarters of Queen Marie Antoinette who as an Austrian was particularly despised. The crowd demanded bread and wanted to bring the King and his family back to Paris to “live among the people”. Louis conceded to their demands and agreed to go to Paris with the mob, believing it would only be a temporary inconvenience.

Flight from Varennes: the National Assembly decided to impose limits to the King’s authority. The King would have veto power but the National Assembly could overrule his veto. These restrictions appalled Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. They also felt like prisoners in their Tuileries Palace in Paris. They decided to leave France and seek refuge in Austria, hoping to eventually be reinstated on the throne as absolute monarchs. Before leaving, Louis wrote a manifesto denouncing the Revolution. On June 20, 1791, the royal family quietly left Paris. They managed to get within a few miles of the border before being recognized in the town of Varennes and forced to go back. Marquis De Lafayette was denounced a monarchist and exiled to Austria. And with him The King had lost his National Gaurd.

Declaration of the Republic and the Trial of King Louis and Marie Antoinette: Following the arrests of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette for treason, the Legislative Assembly disbanded and replaced itself with a new political body named the National Convention. Their first order of business was to declare France a republic. And it was 21 September, 1792. Louis was guilty. The next was the trail of Louis. The vote on the death penalty was in favour. On January 21, 1793, Louis was driven through the streets of Paris to a guillotine and decapitated. Marie Antoinette had a short trial next. She was accused of numerous crimes, many of them baseless degrading rumors. On October 16, she too was found guilty and guillotined the same day.

The Reign of Terror: The new National Convention was dominated by the Committee of Public Safety. One man in particular, Maximilien Robespierre came to dominate the Committee and established himself as the leader of the so-called Reign of Terror. From September 1793 to July 1794, an estimated 16,000 people were guillotined. Some were moderates not dedicated enough to the revolution. others were too radical. A lot were innocents falsely accused of treason. However strong opposition to Robespierre formed within the Committee. The execution of popular Committee member George-Jacques Danton and Robespierre proclaiming himself as the leader of a new religion of the Supreme Being caused much resentment. On July 27, 1794, Robespierre was arrested. He was guillotined the following day.

Conclusion:

The effects of the French Revolution are still felt today. France tried a few times to restore the monarchy over the years since and failed largely due to the legacy of the revolution. The ideals of the French Revolution largely influenced the events of the Russian Revolution in 1917-1918. However the root causes and aftermath of the revolution is still being debated by historians today.

Read/ watch up on this subject:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28675412

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/169812

https://youtu.be/5pXxoyk5wOo

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/318232

https://youtu.be/dY5jzdkG320

[divulgacion-alternativa]

Ben Ful Links | August 16/2021:

Source: benjaminfulford.net

The publication does not contain links.

The March 11, 2011 Attack on Fukushima and Its Aftermath

After the Fukushima mass murder event of March 11, 2011 (3.11) the Rothschilds sent a representative to explain why Fukushima was attacked.  He said they planned to move their Asian headquarters from Tokyo, Japan to North Korea.  To accomplish this they intended to move 40 million Japanese from Greater Tokyo to North Korea.  They even showed me a map of their planned industrial zone there.

Prime Minister Kan Naoto, who was in power at the time of the attack, told a packed press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan that he had been encouraged to evacuate Tokyo in the aftermath of the attack.  Not a single corporate media outlet reported this.

The other thing that happened was that immediately after 3.11, Israeli crime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Prime Minister Kan and told him that if Japan did not hand over its entire $7 trillion or so in foreign currency, then electro-magnetic weapons would be used to cause Mt.  Fuji to erupt.

However, at this point, something unexpected happened.  Hundreds of earthquakes hit the Atlantic Island of La Palma immediately after 311.  There was a very real danger that it would collapse into the ocean and cause a 100-meter tsunami to hit the U.S. Eastern and European Southern coasts.  The earthquakes stopped only after the U.S. military contacted the White Dragon Society and promised that no further attacks would be allowed against Japan.

Nonetheless, the Khazarian Mafia headquartered in Switzerland succeeded in re-imposing a slave Prime Minister on Japan.  Abe Shinzo was put in place via a fraudulent election.  Following this, he was invited to be a keynote speaker at the gathering of Western oligarchs in Davos, Switzerland.

At Davos, Abe told the international community that China was like Germany before WW1.  What he was referring to was a plan by George Bush Sr. to have the G7, Russia, and Japan all gang up and attack China.  The plan was to divide China into five or six separate countries to prevent it from ever again being a threat to Khazarian Mafia power.

Abe set up an openly fascist government and proceeded to carry out a massive, secret military build-up to participate in Bush’s planned invasion of China.  A huge amount of military equipment was secretly stockpiled in the Kumamoto region of Japan that is nearest to China.  At the same time, Abe set up a biological warfare facility disguised as a veterinary school.

However, the planned invasion of China was called off because both Russia and the Pentagon refused to go along.  The Pentagon has done war game after war game simulating an attack on China and the end result is always the same.  The war turns nuclear, 90% of humanity dies and the northern hemisphere of the planet becomes uninhabitable.

In 2016, a series of mysterious earthquakes, each centered exactly on a Japanese military base, destroyed this equipment.  The earthquake seismographs all indicated they were artificial earthquakes.  Abe was also secretly poisoned and told that if he did not go along with China he would not be able to receive the antidote, Asian secret society sources say.

At the same time, the White Dragon Society reached out to the global warming faction of the Western elite.  If you recall, the year 2000 U.S. presidential election was a contest between the global warming faction under Al Gore and the Nazi fourth Reich faction under George Bush Sr.

The global warming faction, centered around Queen Elizabeth, believed that the environment could be saved by putting a tax on carbon and using the money to pay third-world countries to preserve their forests.  The Nazi faction wanted to kill 90% of the global population.

This writer has a tape recording of an invitation to join this faction.  They said that in order to preserve the environment it was necessary to eliminate the “useless eaters.”  These were people like subsistence farmers who could feed their families but did not work at factories making things.  They said that war did not kill enough people so that they would use starvation and disease to accomplish this goal.

This is why the Bush Jr. administration set up biological weapons factories all over the world.  They released SARS, Bird Flu, Ebola, Mers, etc. in their attempt to kill people off.  At the same time, they subsidized farmers in developed countries to use their grains to produce “biofuel,” instead of food.

However, the plans failed because none of their bio-weapons were able to kill the intended billions of people.  The attempt to starve people to death was also stopped after insiders blew the whistle and explained that biofuel subsidies were causing starvation crises in 33 countries.  This put an end to those subsidies.

A letter was sent via diplomatic pouch from the UK embassy in Tokyo to Queen Elizabeth asking for her blessing for a campaign similar in scale to World War III but this time the enemy would be “poverty, environmental destruction and everything else that plagues this beautiful but fragile planet we all share.”

Following this, a series of countries, England, Germany, France, Canada, Switzerland, Italy, etc. decided to join the China Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.  The multi-trillion-dollar Chinese Belt and Road Initiative followed this.  The money was spent building highways, ports, schools, railways, hospitals, bridges, and other such infrastructure around the world.

Japan and the United States were the only major countries that held back from this initiative.  They called it a Chinese debt trap.  However, it clearly put the Bush Nazi faction on the defensive.

The other thing that happened in 2016 was that the Gnostic Illuminati decided to form a temporary alliance with the British commonwealth to prevent Hillary Clinton (Rockefeller) from becoming president of the United States.  A meeting was held in Antarctica on the November 8th, 2016 election day that was attended by Skull and Bones John Kerry and many other members of the secret Western elite.

We have interviewed two people who were present at that meeting.  They say a decision was made to flip the election so that designated loser Donald Trump would be elected president with the very votes intended for Clinton.  This was accomplished after a firefight between Special Forces at the underground base near Denver Airport took over the election stealing computers on behalf of the Trump forces.

It is interesting to note how in the 2016 election things seemed to be going Clinton’s way and then they suddenly flipped and went Trump’s way.  The opposite happened when the Nazi forces regrouped around Rockefeller proxy Joe Biden in 2020 and flipped a real Trump victory into a fraudulent Biden victory.  We will get back to that later.

In any case, Trump became president of a bankrupt nation and there really was very little he could do about it.  The $23 trillion raised for Barack Obama was running out.  Trump tried many things, including tariffs to try to turn the situation around.  Remember he also said things like China would buy $200 billion worth of goods every year, He also tried unsuccessfully to take over the World’s largest oil reserves in Venezuela and offered to “buy Greenland.”

However, a nation with a GDP of about $20 trillion and over $200 trillion in debt and unfunded liabilities really has no choice but to go bankrupt.  The U.S. corporate government has external payment deadlines every September 30th and January 31st.

In September of 2019, the U.S. was able to avoid bankruptcy only by stealing Japan’s national pension fund.  In January of 2020, they failed to make their payments.  They were given a two-week grace period lasting until February 16th, 2020 but were unable to make their payments.

That is when all hell broke loose as we all know.  The owners of the U.S. corporation lashed out with a massive 5G electromagnetic attack on Wuhan China.  Remember, mass deaths began in Wuhan only after 10,000 5G transmission towers were activated, subjecting the population to deadly low-level electromagnetic attacks.

The official story that it was a “coronavirus” is provable nonsense.  That is because if it was a biological attack then the pandemic should have spread first to the suburbs of Wuhan and then to other parts of China.  Instead, it was restricted exactly to the 5G zones inside Wuhan proper.

After this, the spread of Covid-19 around the world coincided exactly with maps of where 5G networks had been activated.  To understand 5G think of the defrost mode of your microwave.  That operates at around 200 watts, while 5G is equivalent to about 30 watts.  However, if it is transmitted 24 hours a day, it starts producing symptoms that resemble lung disease.

Japan warned the world about this danger after they subjected 5,000 passengers aboard the cruise ship Diamon Princess to 5G and started getting multiple deaths.  After this, all 5G was stopped worldwide.

So the Khazarian Mafia was forced to resort to plan B.  They went ahead with medical martial law and started renaming influenza, the common cold, pneumonia and tuberculosis, and all sorts of other deaths as being from “Covid-19.”  At the same time, they used their access to fiat money printing presses to pay huge sums of money to doctors to diagnose Covid-19.  Since Western doctors operate under a military regime, they were told to go along with the pandemic story or lose their licenses.

The Khazarian Mafia also used their corporate media to spread pandemic fear porn 24/7.  Also, since the KM failed to kill their planned billions of people with 5G radiation, and since all their bio-weapons had proved ineffective, they next resorted to vaccines.

What has now happened is that the secret government of the West has been exposed by this campaign.  The world’s military, police, and intelligence agencies began a counter-attack.

Next week we will report on the status of that counterattack and also on plans for running the planet after the Khazarian Mafia have been ousted from power.

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[homesteadalternatives]

While hemp is a popular topic today, this isn’t the first time the plant has been involved in our culture. It turns out that hemp has a well-documented history in the US.

Records show that that hemp was first introduced to North America in Jamestown around 1611. American farmers grew the crop for a multitude of purposes, including rope, paper, and lantern oil.

Fast forward to the 1700s, to a blossoming nation with an agriculturally-driven economy. While most farmers preferred to grow tobacco, hemp was such a staple crop that its cultivation in many of the colonies was legally mandated by England.

Turning Tides on Hemp and Cannabis

Although hemp played a prominent role in the nation’s early years, attitudes toward the crop shifted in the 1900s. The rising availability of cheaper foreign sources of hemp fiber, particularly from Russia, after World War I led to hemp falling out of favor with many farmers, especially in Kentucky, a state that at one time was responsible for 75% of the nation’s hemp fiber production.

Moreover, the federal government’s increased efforts against drugs led to The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which placed heavy taxes on the sale of cannabis. Arrests for possession and dealing followed shortly after, with convictions for violating the Tax Act. In part, the act contributed to declining hemp cultivation.

Hemp experienced a slight resurgence during World War II, when the US Government recognized hemp was needed to support the war and briefly lifted enforcement of the Marihuana Tax Act. The Department of Agriculture during the time even actively promoted hemp and encouraged farmers throughout the Midwest and Southwest to grow hemp.

After the war, however, hemp returned to its illegal status and farmers again grew discouraged as cheaper synthetic fiber became widely available.

Shortly after, combined with conflicts with other big business, like tobacco, and anti-marijuana political movements, the entire cannabis family, including hemp, fell to opposition campaigns and propaganda.

These campaigns concluded with the passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which classified THC (a compound found in hemp and cannabis) as a Schedule I substance, making all cannabis and hemp cultivation federally illegal.

It would be some 30 years before hemp would again enter the mainstream in a positive light.

The U.S. Farm Bill Shines A Light On Hemp

In 2004, the US started allowing businesses to import dietary hemp products. In 2007, there was a glimmer of positivity when two farmers were granted licenses to grow industrial hemp by the state of North Dakota, though those licenses were ultimately rejected at the federal level, “because the state hadn’t satisfied the agency’s [DEA’s] security and logistical requirements.”

Building on these developments, changes started across the nation with the 2014 Farm Bill, which paved the way for state pilot programs, such as Kentucky’s, which allowed farms and processors to start growing, processing, and creating local hemp products.

Kentucky was one of the early adopters — pair that with our ideal soil and climate, and you see Kentucky is now a national leader in growing and creating hemp products.

In 2018, there were even more positive changes – hemp was deemed federally legal, no longer under the purview of the DEA, and able to be cultivated as a commodity and transported without fear of federal interference.

These changes, brought forth by the 2018 Farm Bill, took the previous Farm Bill’s pro-hemp stance a notch higher.

The 2018 bill encourages the building of hemp businesses; the increased certainty is expected to lead to more investment for hemp farming on a much larger scale than prior pilot programs allowed and, as long as hemp is produced in accordance with the bill, its sale is now much less restricted than before.

Although the new Farm Bill shows improvements over its predecessor, there will be some lag time before farmers begin to experience clear benefits. Each state will have to walk through regulatory doors before obtaining USDA approval, and there is uncertainty about how hemp derivatives, such as CBD, will be regulated by the FDA.

Kentucky Aims to be the Epicenter of Hemp

Kentucky is leading the charge on these new hemp standards, having already developed what Commissioner of Agriculture Ryan Quarles calls, “…a regulatory framework that perfectly aligns with the requirements spelled out in the Farm Bill.”

1,035 hemp applications have been approved in Kentucky for 2019, and it looks as though Kentucky is poised to be the epicenter of hemp production in America.

These Kentucky applicants have also been approved to grow 42,086 acres worth of hemp in 2019, compared to only 6,700 acres grown in 2018.

We’re proud to say our farm, Mt. Folly Farm, has already been conditionally approved to continue growing USDA Certified Organic Hemp, which is used to make our Homestead Alternatives CBD. Mt. Folly also raises hemp grain for Laura’s Hemp Chocolates.

Hemp Reclaims Prominence on the Back of CBD

Hemp isn’t the only thing growing exponentially — its primary derivative, CBD, is also experiencing a boom. The volume and variety of CBD products has risen quickly over the past five years, with tinctures, oils, lotions, capsules, and topical creams now on the market.

It’s a renaissance, of sorts, in which hemp’s nostalgic past is meeting its more scientific future.

What’s Coming Next for Hemp?

The rapid growth means that today’s hemp market is inconsistently regulated, and many companies are misrepresenting the product they’re selling.

At Laura’s Mercantile and Homestead Alternatives, we’ve implemented stringent third-party lab testing procedures to ensure our hemp and CBD products are high quality and reliable.

We also place an emphasis on being transparent with our processes, carefully monitoring our partners who extract our full-spectrum CBD, and owning the hemp from seed or cutting to final product.

Most importantly, we keep our products as close to the plant as possible, understanding the natural way of raising crops is best for our bodies.

Our hemp is raised on ground that’s been handled organically for three years, which means the soil is more fertile and we use no herbicides, pesticides, or other chemicals. In food, this production leads to more nutritious foods, and particularly in the case of hemp, it allows the plant’s terpenes to better resist insects and prosper.

Looking forward, the hemp and CBD industries are set to continue rapidly growing, with uncertainty about the potential size of the markets. Brightfield Group projects the market for hemp to be $22 billion by 2022, and the Hemp Business Journal estimates the market for CBD in particular will reach $2.1 billion by 2021.

We hopeful that hemp and its derivatives will continue to see expanded economic support, particularly at the state level, providing exceptional opportunities for farmers. We’re excited to continue being part of hemp’s long history!