#fort lauderdale home show

[obscurechris]

fuck you numb - chris sturniolo

bsf chris sturniolo x bsf fem reader

in which chris surprises his best friend after waiting for him to come back from his trip, and their phone call gets her sexually frustrated

cw: smut, phone sex, soft dom chris, praise, unprotected sex, overstimulation, creampie

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two hours until he gets off the plane, two hours too long. after sending a risky mirror pic in the bathroom before boarding the plane, i had not been able to get him out of my mind. it’s been too long without feeling his gentle touch on my body, or his rough marks on my skin, and i’m impatient. i hate when he leaves me sexually frustrated, knowing i can’t do anything until he comes home in who knows how long. i can’t make myself feel good the way he can, and that’s what makes my blood boil. i pick up my phone and press on his contact, the phone only ringing twice before he answers.

“hey, baby. what’s up?” his gruff voice comes through, making my heart skip a beat.

“where are you? were you just sleeping?” my voice comes off a bit heavy, still feeling an ache in my core from his teasing earlier.

“stuck in an airport in fort lauderdale, plane’s delayed. i fell asleep on matt’s shoulder,” he lightly chuckles.

“are you fucking kidding? i have to wait longer like this, without you here to fix the problem?” my voice slightly raises.

“what are you saying?” his voice remains groggy and calm.

“don’t act like you don’t know. don’t act like you didn’t text me the hottest picture of you to fuck with me. you know how much of a tease you are. you know that type of shit has me clenching my thighs craving you every time. you have a problem to fix.”

“is that so?” his voice is drenched in amusement.

“it’s not funny, chris.”

“oh yeah?” his chuckle lets me know he’s not done teasing me. “you miss me, huh? you miss the way my hands squeeze your ass? the way my fingers trace your skin?”

i think back to the photo, the way his hand gripped his phone, and the other wrapped around his hard dick in the wide open. a knot begins to form at my stomach, twisting a weird aching feeling through it.

“chris-”

“yeah, you like that? you like how i kiss your neck and leave marks for everyone to see? how my thumb rubs your clit while i pound into you?”

i choke up on his words, my breathing stuttering for a second, and i can tell he heard by the sound of him exhaling a laugh through his nose.

“can’t forget about how i fuck your throat so good you want more? how i stretch you out so good you can’t have more?”

i clench my thighs together and my head tilts back. i can’t help but bite my lip at the thoughts running through my head.

“stop- please…” i breathily beg, heat beginning to radiate from between my legs.

“i can’t wait to come home and show you how much i’ve been missing you, how much i’ve missed the way you feel.”

“fuck, i can’t wait any longer. when are you gonna be here? i need you inside of me right now, it literally hurts waiting for you,” i practically whine and he mumbles a subtle curse beneath his breath.

“you don’t have to wait.”

“what do you mean?”

“turn around.”

i get down from the kitchen counter and do as i’m told in confusion, the sight of the boy in front of me making my knees weak. i run into his open arms and immediately go in for a kiss, to which he deepens without wasting any time. he starts walking me backwards toward my room, him tugging my shirt in signal to discard it. our clothes are then scattered across the floor as we’re left completely naked, still making it to my room door. he slides his hands down my ass, and i take that as an order to jump. he holds me by the bottom of my thighs and carries me to the foot of my bed, where he hugs his arms around me tight, letting my legs wrap around his hips while he sets me down against the mattress.

he hovers over me and i bite my lip to try to hold back a smile, but fail resulting in my finger wrapping around his chain to pull his lips closer to mine to hide my blushed cheeks. once our lips touch, he sucks onto my lip and doesn’t think twice about letting go. his hand reaches down to his erect length and positions it to my wet entrance, the sudden feeling on my opening giving me goosebumps. he brushes his tip back and forth over my clit, spreading my juices before pushing his hips forward slowly, letting his tip inch in. the slickness of my pussy allows his dick to easily slide in, and the feeling of it completely filling me up causes throaty groans to emanate through the thick air.

chris pulls his face back as he stands tall, the warmth of his lips leaving but the wetness remaining, and i can only focus on the pressure of his dick stretching my walls. his hands find a grip on my hips, lifting them slightly to have better leverage as he begins his soft thrusts. the lines of his stomach show once his body moves back and forth, along with the veins in his arms creating a shadow as they form. his slow thrusts gradually speed up, his dick hurting with the amount of time he's been waiting, the amount of teasing i have done. i feel him shiver, though it isn't visible.

"you're so tight, you feel so good," his raspy voice sounds out.

i bite my lip while he dips his head down, placing kisses on the valley of my chest. my hands nestle in his hair and comb through the thick, dark strands. he trails his way up my chest, kissing along my collarbone and shoulder. i ache for more and roll my hips in slight circles to get him going. his hands run down my arms, pinning my hands down onto the bed as he intertwines our fingers together and thrusts sharply. his hands squeeze mine as the speed of his thrusts quicken exponentially.

my insides are aching badly, his tip hitting the right spots and making me crave more. i almost feel numb with the feeling of his tip stimulating my g-spot, my insides feeling hot from the friction. his hands go back to my hips, his thumbs digging into each point of my pelvis as he lets his head fall back and a deep moan come through. he lifts one of my legs up and over his shoulder, driving his dick impossibly deeper. i feel him against my cervix, the bend of the hard muscle sending shockwaves through my body as the pleasure intensifies.

"fuckkk," chris drags out his exclamations, groaning at the sensation i’m allowing him to feel. “so wet for me.”

i look down at the scene with my jaw hung open, watching how his dick, shiny with all of my juices, pushes and pulls in and out of my pussy, being suctioned in the more he thrusts. his fingertips sink deeper into my thighs as his pace becomes quicker and more rough, his hips beginning to slam into my skin. i can note each and every vein of his dick against the walls of my sensitive pussy—my legs curling closer—to which he then spreads my thighs further apart and drills into my leaking entrance like a motor.

the loud claps of chris's body colliding with mine fill the room and his hair and chain dangle, moving back and forth with his rough motions. my moans crowd his eardrums, his eyes squeezing shut at the sound. sweat starts to form all over his body, droplets threatening to fall. the tips of his bangs stick to his forehead and his eye bags are darkened.

"oh my god, i'm bouta cum," he breathlessly reminds me, his face twisted.

his breathing is heavy and his movements become choppy, his pounding faltering with his rising orgasm. his face remains pleasured, his eyebrows knitted together with his eyes closed, and his jaw hung ajar. the sexual fulfillment he's been receiving causes him to look as though he is in pain, and my stomach forms a pit at the sight, ready to burst at any given moment. chris's dick begins to throb, feeling hot and causing me to clench around him.

“such a good girl, taking me so well. keep it up baby, i know you’re almost there.” his face is close to mine, his breath fanning out against my chin as he almost whispers.

with those words, a feeling of pure euphoria washes through me and i claw at his slick back, my dull nails digging into his hot skin. my jaw widens slightly to respond, but no words come out as i’m incapable of even making a sound. my hips involuntarily flick up as i ride out my high, my legs propping up to help with my movements. his hands hook back around my upper thighs, pulling me closer with each pounding thrust.

his head falls forward, burying into the crook of my neck and leaving messy, open-mouthed kisses against my sensitive skin. i moan and let my head sink further into the pillow. with a few more clenches and my overstimulated pussy ready to give out, his dick jerks and a rushed moan exits his lips. his face comes back up close to mine and a hand finds its way around my throat, where it grips lightly. i let out a high pitched moan at his action, my teeth digging into my bottom lip.

“atta girl,” he smirks before his eyes squeeze shut one more time.

his fingertips dig into my skin as he leans his forehead against mine, his load shooting in warm spurts and his hips harshly thrust a few more times, fucking his cum deeper into me. he becomes still as his high crashes and pulls his thick cock out slowly, us both hissing at the sensation. i’m left feeling empty without the pressure of his dick on my walls and his cum flowing out of my entrance.

a subtle smirk creeps upon his fucked out expression, his eyes heavy and attractive while his tongue pokes at the inside of his cheek. our breathing is rapid, my jaw hung ajar as i try to catch my breath. i look at him through my eyelashes, his expression so insanely hot in the moment. his thumb dips down to my opening, pushing some of his fluid back into my hole. with the way his hair is sticking out in each and every direction, sweat dripping down his face, the rings around his eyes dark and his lips plump and swollen, all i can think of is the unimaginable things i want to do to him in return.

[coco-loco-nut]

imgonnagetyouback

pairing: logan sargeant x reader

summary: you aren’t sure if you want to destroy his car or take him home with you

a/n: most of this was written late at night and not proofread. love y’all, thanks for answering the poll, that was fun. might do it again

requests open masterlist series masterlist

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You enter your usual Miami haunt with your friends, one mission in mind. Your lilac skirt fits your like a glove, showing off your legs and curves. It was Logan’s favorite.

Logan was an asshole, he knows it, ever since he broke up with you last year. He’s been keeping tabs on your socials recently, knowing this is where you go when you are in Miami instead of Fort Lauderdale. He brought Oscar with him as moral support, they stand at the bar, laughing over some bubbly drink.

Your eyes scan the club as you walk in, slightly pausing when you recognize the blonde guy staring at you from the bar, you can tell when someone wants you. Instead, you train your eyes on some guy on the dance floor, sending him a flirty smile and joining him for a dance or two, giving Logan a chance to pull himself together before going in. He can’t help but tell Oscar how good you look. The trap has been sprung. You are going to get Logan back. Whether romantically or by revenge, you weren’t sure.

You walk over to the bar, pretending to have not noticed the pair, standing one seat over.

“Tequila shot,” you order and Logan takes his chance.

“Add two more and put it on my tab,” Logan tells the bartender, Oscar gags a little, but doesn’t protest. You give Logan a look he can’t decipher, but you slide into the seat beside them.

“Thanks,” you say, the awkward small talk between the three of you filling the time as you wait for the shots. Logan salts his wrist for his shot. You grab his wrist, lick it, and throw back the shot. Oscar barely suppresses his laugh as you turn to go back to the dance floor. Logan quickly throws back the shot and follows you. Your friends find Oscar and chat, the group curious to see how this pans out.

“Y/n,” Logan catches your wrist, you act like you don’t care about him, but you can see the whispers in his eyes searching if you still love him. It breaks your cold heart a little. “Don’t be mad, please. I never wanted to hurt you,” he says, trying to win you back.

“I’m like your fucking car. You steered me into the fucking ditch then ran off,” you say after a second, turning back towards the crowd, he just pulls you closer.

“I’m so sorry. I hate myself for that,” he admits, you ignore him, dancing to the beat, not pushing him away but not encouraging him to dance with you either. Just when things are feeling too comfortable, you walk away in the direction of the bathrooms. Logan follows.

“Will you give me a chance?” he asks, the music quiet in the background. ‘God, he’s so fucking fine’ you think to yourself. The lighting doing everything right, the shadows enhance his jawline but his eyes shine bright.

“I haven’t decided yet,” your eyes revealing more than you intended. He can see the hurt and love in them. You aren’t sure if you want to curse him out or bring him home.

“What can I do,” he grabs your hands.

“I don’t know. I’m between being your wife or smashing your car,” you say, steeling yourself. Logan is thinking twice, unsure if he was ever yours or was never not yours. Logan pulls your closer, kissing you. Your body automatically responds to him. letting him pull you close.

“You’re mine,” you whisper, the temptation to both flip him off or pull him into the bathroom strong. He follows you back to the dance floor, you can feel the tension and chemistry coming back, electricity humming in the way you dance together. It’s like pressing a reset button, becoming something new. Oscar and your friends left a while ago, knowing the two of you were determined to leave here together from the start.

You tell the cab the address of your Miami apartment. Every moment that passes sees the hurt and past fade to gray.

“Pick your poison, I’m poison either way,” you had told Logan earlier, he chose you anyway, the both of you wanting to play with the broken pieces of your former relationship.

He pushes you against the wall, kissing you passionately.

“Before we do this, where do you stand? If we go ahead, there is no turning back,” Logan stops, needing to know that you belong to him again, you already know he belongs to you.

“I hate you but I love you just the same. I’m gonna get you back,” you tug on his shirt, pulling him back to you, a feral need for him growing.

It wasn’t a surprise to Logan’s friends when you showed up to the Miami paddock later that week.

What was a surprise was the ring around your finger, one that matches the one around Logan’s.

“What the hell?” Oscar asks, a smile on his face.

“I’m not going to let her go again,” Logan looks down at you with a smile.

“I chose to love him till the end, luckily for Sauber,” you joke, referencing the team who decided to take a chance on Logan and help him develop.

“I’m happy for you two,” Oscar says, happy to see his best friend happy. Everyone but your parents were happy for you, the parents were just mad you got married without them there.

“I am too, but I will take it out on his car if he hurts me again,” you tell Oscar, joking but not joking. Logan just holds you closer. You both told each other about your plans to get each back, it caused a lot of laughter.

“That’s my wife,” he grins proudly. Oscar shakes his head at his friends.

“You did what!” Alex runs over to the two of you. “Where was my invite? Oh, glad to have you back Y/n, Lily missed you,” Alex says, as the two of you just laugh.

instagram

y/nsargeant what if i told you i’m a mastermind, and now your mine ❤️

logansargeant it was all by design ❤️

oscarpiastri not letting the two of you go back to a club, Y/n will end up pregnant or something

y/friend1 you both took getting each other back a little too seriously. this is why i love you

user1 hold up, since when were mom and dad back together??

user2 AND MARRIED??

y/friend2 you really went to the club heartbroken and left ready to get married😭 ilysm

alexalbon they are so unserious 😭

sauberf1 when did this happen? LOGAN??? we’re not mad. pick up your phone

charlesleclerc ^^^

carlossainz55 ^^^

landonorris ^^^

georgerussell iconic

y/nsargeant thanks pookie ����

[sissylittlefeather]

One Shot Masterlist

I decided to gather all of the one shots into a list together with descriptions, so you know what you're getting into before you read it!

What a Lovely Way to Burn

Two words: Angry Elvis. You're at a party together and he catches you talking to another man. Needless to say, he's less than pleased.

Warnings: 18+ minors DNI! There's some dirty smut here, kissing, fingering, oral (both receiving), p in v sex, unprotected sex, lots of cussing, Elvis and reader yelling at each other a lot, him grabbing reader's arm and being a teensy bit violent (if you squint), reader calls Elvis "daddy" in a sexual context at one point...

You're the Boss

You show up in Elvis's room after a show and show him who's boss. The mirror belt plays a starring role.

Warnings: this is absolutely 18+ only, MDNI!!! Cussing, fingering, oral (f & m receiving), p in v sex, unprotected sex (with a stranger), swallowing, teasing, and the reader being pretty dominant. I hope that's everything.

Devil in Disguise

In honor of Halloween, a spooky story featuring army Elvis and you, a vampire who's looking to feed on a young, vital man. But, you need a little help from a friend to really get what you're looking for.

Warnings: 18+ SMUT MDNI!!!! Kissing, cussing, fingering, oral sex (f receiving), a little girl on girl action, threesome (MFF), p in v sex, unprotected sex, creampie, also vampire bites and blood drinking

Power of My Love

You and Elvis are out for a drive when you are overcome with desire. There's only one way to get what you want, and Elvis isn't complaining.

Warnings: 18+ MDNI SMUT, kissing, cussing, oral sex (m receiving), public sex (road head), fingering, teasing, dangerous driving, etc.

Hot for Teacher

An AU where you and Elvis teach together at a local high school. You have a crush on each other and everything is fine until you chaperone a student trip to Fort Lauderdale together.

Warnings: 18+ minors DNI!, kissing, cussing, fingering, oral sex (f receiving), p in v sex, unprotected sex, ejaculation, also some baby talk during sex kinda?

I Can Help

Your husband, Elvis, has been rehearsing late into the night for his upcoming Vegas show. One night he comes home early and finds you in the process of missing him.

Warnings: 18+ minors DNI, this is pure smut, kissing, cussing, fingering, masturbation (f), p in v penetrative sex, unprotected sex, creampie

Make Me Know It

It's 1960 and your boyfriend, Elvis, is just home from the army. However, you know he's been a bad boy in Germany, so you intend to make him sorry for messing around.

Warnings: 18+ minors DNI, kissing, cussing, teasing, reader being a little dom, foot action, masturbation (both m&f), references to oral sex, p in v penetrative sex, unprotected sex, creampie, and I think that's all

A Little Less Conversation

This isn't your first time acting, but it is your first time acting with Elvis Presley. He takes you aside to calm you down and is surprised to find it has the opposite effect on him.

Warnings: 18+ minors DNI, kissing, cussing, fingering, oral sex (f receiving), p in v penetrative sex, unprotected sex, ejaculation

Baby, Let's Play House

You're stuck in a bad marriage, but your sweet neighbor, Elvis, has no intentions of letting you suffer alone. What starts as an innocent yard work arrangement turns to much more when your husband takes things too far.

Warnings: 18+ minors DNI, kissing, cussing, fingering, p in v penetrative sex, unprotected sex, creampie, infidelity, domestic violence (happens "off screen", Elvis is not violent), mentions of infertility

Viva Las Vegas

You've grown up as part of the mafia in Las Vegas. Elvis is relatively new to the game, but he doesn't hesitate to dive in deep when he falls in love with you, the daughter of his biggest rival.

Warnings: SO MUCH SMUT AND VIOLENCE 18+ NO MINORS, kissing, cussing, fingering, oral sex (both receiving), p in v sex, unprotected sex, swallowing, ejaculation, creampie, ALSO GUN VIOLENCE

[dailyanarchistposts]

Chapter Three. Conversion

Thus there is such a thing as human absorption. It appears in all the forms of conversion wherever the superior power of one person is consciously or unconsciously misused to influence profoundly and draw into his spell another individual or a whole community. Here one soul operates directly upon another soul. The weak have been overcome by the strong, the resistance of the weak has broken down under the influence of another person. He has been overpowered…. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together[57]

Dr. D. James Kennedy, tanned and dapper in a dark brown suit with a white handkerchief in his breast pocket and meticulously combed silver hair, stands to the side of the podium and shares with us the most important tool in winning converts to Christ: becoming a friend. The seminar I am attending is being held in a hall of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church complex at Coral Ridge, Florida. Three spindly, white spires, all topped with crosses, tower above the cut-rate shopping centers and convenience stores stretched along North Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale. The five-day seminar is designed to train us to teach Evangelism Explosion. The program was begun by Kennedy in 1967 and is designed to train evangelists in the tactics and methods used to save souls for Christ.

“I would always go in first, introduce myself, Jim Kennedy,” he begins. “I’m checking the lay of the land, and I will look around the living room and see if there’s something there that I can comment about. Frequently, there will be a large picture somewhere and where did they put it, this picture? Why would they put it over the fireplace? Significant.”

“In Fort Lauderdale you don’t find too many fireplaces,” he adds, smiling, “but there’s some kind of central focus. Maybe…golf trophies…I’m over here looking at these golf trophies…painting…I say, ‘Beautiful painting. Did you paint that?’ The first rule about looking at trophies: don’t touch them…‘Did you win all those trophies?’ So we have a little conversation about golf, but I know enough about golf to have this conversation. Now what have I done? I’m making a friend.

“Compliment them on whatever you can,” Kennedy says. “Discuss what they do. You’re going to find out what are their hobbies, maybe right there in the living room. Then you’re going to ask them about what they do, where they’re from, how long they’ve been there…something to discuss with them…In doing this, you have made a friend.”

We sit with our green marbled Evangelism Explosion workbooks open to the chapter titled “Making Friends.” We are being taught how to get prospective converts to open up and feel at ease. The manual suggests asking questions such as: “Tell me something about yourself.”[58] We are instructed to listen attentively, since “people usually are most interested in what they themselves have to say.”[59] Evangelists should “look the prospect in the eye, move your head up and down, echo what he says by repeating his words and voice inflection. Be sensitive to his felt needs and respond appropriately. Remember and use his name often in the conversation.” And, it adds, “Pay a sincere compliment.”[60]

Kennedy warns us not to carry a large Bible, but to keep a small one hidden in our pockets: “Don’t show your gun until you’re ready to shoot it.”

Metaphors of war and sex saturate the lectures and the readings. Kennedy says that the primary task of Christians is to recruit “soldiers in the army of Jesus Christ who are absent without official leave (AWOL).”[61] He speaks of himself and other pastors as generals or admirals and of evangelists as soldiers. And he warns that it is Satan who convinces believers not to take part in the battle.

What is [Satan’s] idea? It is this: that wars are very dangerous, complicated operations, and ordinary persons could get hurt needlessly; therefore, they should go home and let the generals and admirals fight wars…in the church this, in essence, is exactly what Satan has done![62]

Sexual metaphors are also sprinkled into the bellicosity of the conversion message. A “functionally mature, responsible, reproducing Christian”[63] should be producing others like himself. Christians who receive the gospel for themselves but do not convert others “are like immoral seducers.” “The seducer,”[64] Kennedy writes, “is satisfied merely to exploit and then tell of his exploits rather than entering into a meaningful marriage commitment.” Kennedy recalls the difficulties he had one night during which he was unable to “consummate the witness”[65] with a new disciple’s wife.

Conversion is a form of sexual warfare, a form of seduction and finally a form of physical conquest.

You must “seek to identify with your prospect. If that person would talk about the fact that they were lonely and you had a lonely experience, man, you want to tie into that, you jump onto that…get all over that with your testimony…because they’re going to identify with you,” Kennedy says.

The tactics of conversion come with layers of deception, including, we soon learn, false friendships and cooked testimonies, the promise that the evangelists are giving the “free gift” of eternal life and that what they preach is the inerrant word of God and cannot be questioned. Conversion is supposed to banish the deepest dreads, fears and anxieties of human existence, including the fear of death. This is the central message we are told to impart to potential believers. But along with this message comes a disorienting mixture of love and fear, of promises of a warm embrace by a kind and gentle God that yearns to direct and guide the life of the convert toward success, wealth and happiness, and also of an angry, wrathful God who must punish nonbelievers, those who are not saved, tossing them into outer darkness and eternal suffering. The message swings the faces of this Janus-like God back and forth, one terrifying and one loving, in dizzying confusion. The emotions of love and fear pulsate through the message. God will love and protect those who come to Him. God will torment and reject those who do not come to Him. It becomes a bewildering mantra.

Conversion, at first blush, is euphoric. It is about new friends, loving and accepting friends; about the final conquering of human anxieties, fears and addictions; about attainment of wealth, power, success and happiness through God. For those who have known despair, it feels like a new life, a new beginning. The new church friends call them, invite them to dinner, have time to listen to their troubles and answer their questions. Kennedy tells us that we must keep in touch in the days after conversion. He encourages us to keep detailed files on those we proselytize. We must be sure new converts are never left standing alone at church. We must care when no one else seems to care. The new converts are assigned a “discipler” or prayer partner, a new friend who is wiser than they are in the ways of the Lord and able to instruct them in their new life.

The intense interest by a group of three or four evangelists in a potential convert, the flattery and feigned affection, the rapt attention to those being recruited and the flurry of “sincere” compliments are forms of “love-bombing,” the same technique employed by cults, such as the Unification Church or Moonies, to attract prospects. It was a well-developed tactic of the Russian and Chinese communist parties, which share many of the communal and repressive characteristics of the Christian Right. This intense showering of affection on an individual, as psychiatrist Margaret Thaler Singer described in her 1996 book Cults in Our Midst, is often very effective:

As soon as any interest is shown by the recruits, they may be love-bombed by the recruiter or other cult members. This process of feigning friendship and interest in the recruit was initially associated with one of the early youth cults, but soon it was taken up by a number of groups as part of their program for luring people in. Love-bombing is a coordinated effort, usually under the direction of leadership, that involves long-term members flooding recruits and newer members with flattery, verbal seduction, affectionate but usually nonsexual touching, and lots of attention to their every remark. Love-bombing—or the offer of instant companionship—is a deceptive ploy accounting for many successful recruitment drives.[66]

The new convert is drawn gradually into a host of church activities by his or her new friends, leaving little time for outside socializing. But the warmth and embrace soon brings new rules. When you violate the rules you sin, you flirt with rebellion, with becoming a “backslider,” someone who was converted but has fallen and is once again on the wrong side of God. And as the new converts are increasingly invested in the church community, as they cut ties with their old community, it is harder to dismiss the demands of the “discipler” and church leaders. “Backsliding” is a sin. Doubt is a sin. Questioning is a sin. The only proper relationship is submission to those above you, the abandonment of critical thought and the mouthing of religious jargon that is morally charged and instantly identifies believers as part of the same, hermetic community. The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton describes this heavily loaded language, the words and phrases that allow believers to speak in code, as “thought-terminating clichés.”[67] “Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior” or “The wages of sin are death” are used, in this instance, to end all discussion.

Rules are incorporated slowly and deliberately into the convert’s belief system. These include obedience to church leaders; the teaching of an exclusive, spiritual elitism that demonizes all other ways of being and believing; and a persecution complex that keeps followers mobilized and distrustful of outsiders. The rules create a system of total submission to church doctrine. They discourage independent thought and action. And the result is the destruction of old communities and old friendships. Believers are soon enclosed in the church community. They are taught to value personal experience over reason, and to reject reason. For those who defy the system, who walk away, there is a collective banishment. The exit process is humiliating, and those who leave are condemned as “backsliders” no longer favored by God.

There is a gradual establishment of new standards for every aspect of life. Those who choose spouses must choose Christian spouses. Families and friends are divided into groups of “saved” and “unsaved.” The movement, while it purports to be about families, is the great divider of families, friends and communities. It competes with the family for loyalty. It seeks to place itself above the family, either drawing all family members into its embrace or pushing aside those who resist conversion. There are frequent prayers during the seminar for relatives who are unsaved, who remain beyond the control of the movement. Many of these prayers, including one by a grandmother in my prayer group for her unsaved grandchildren, are emotional, and it is not unusual to see saved Christians weeping over the possible damnation of those they love.

This control, while destructive to personal initiative and independence, does keep believers from wandering back into the messy situations they fled. The new ideology gives the believers a cause, a sense of purpose, meaning, feelings of superiority, and a way to justify and sanctify their hatreds. For many, the rewards of cleaning up their lives, repairing their damaged self-esteem, and joining an elite and blessed group are worth the cost of submission. They know how to define and identify themselves. They do not have to make moral choices. They are made for them. They submerge their individual personas into the single persona of the Christian crowd. Their hope lies not in the real world, but in this new world of miracles. For many, the conformity, the flight away from themselves, the dismissal of facts and logic for magic, the destruction (even with its latent totalitarianism) of personal autonomy amount to a welcome and joyous relief. The flight into the arms of the Christian Right, into blind acceptance of a holy cause, compensates for converts’ despair and lack of faith in themselves. And the more corrupted and soiled they feel, the more profound the despair, the more militant they become, shouting, organizing and agitating to create a pure and sanctified Christian nation, believing that this purity will offset their own shame and guilt. Many yearn to be deceived and directed. It makes life easier to bear.

The most susceptible people, we are told in the seminar, are those in crisis: people in the midst of a divorce; those who have lost a job or are grieving for the death of a close friend or relative; those suffering addictions they cannot control, illness, or the trauma of emotional or physical abuse. We are encouraged to target the vulnerable. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James wrote that those who experienced dramatic conversions might have been born with a “melancholy disposition,” a chronically “divided” mind—or else, he suspected, they had drunk “too deep of the cup of bitterness.”[68] It is easier to bring about a conversion when the person being proselytized is in crisis. Indeed, the goal of the conversion is to generate a sense of crisis by stressing that all who are unsaved are lost and in desperate need of help.

When he speaks, Kennedy exudes the oily charm of a traveling salesman. He is meticulous about his appearance: never a hair out of place, his face tanned to a leathery brown and his suits finely cut. He talks in a low, sonorous voice, one he uses every Sunday when, decked out in his robe and academic hood, he stands behind his massive mahogany pulpit at the start of the service and announces, “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it,” at which point the thunderous organ erupts in pulsations that rock the church. He is a rigid fundamentalist, determined to defend and prove the truths of the Bible through what he sees as intellectual, rational and scientific argument. His sermons can often be pedantic, filled with windy discussions about what he says are historical or scientific facts that illustrate the inerrant truth of the Bible. He is one of America’s most public and vocal dominionists.

Kennedy was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago by a glassware-salesman father, rarely at home, and an abusive, alcoholic mother. It was not a happy childhood. Kennedy moved with his parents to Jacksonville, Florida, while he was in high school and by his own admission spent most of his time surfing and water-skiing. In his early 20s, he taught the fox-trot at an Arthur Murray Dance School in Tampa. He met his wife, Anne, there in 1952. But the official literature reads, “It all began on a Sunday morning in 1953, when he [Kennedy] was startled awake by a preacher’s stern question on his clock radio: ‘Suppose you were to die today and stand before God, and He were to ask you, “What right do you have to enter into My heaven?”—What would you say?’”[69]

Kennedy explains he was unsure of his answer. He says he went to a bookstore and bought The Greatest Story Ever Told, the 1949 novel by Fulton Oursler that chronicles the life of Christ. Kennedy had little experience with religion. He did not attend church regularly. The book, he says, opened his eyes to God, and he enrolled in seminary. He, unlike some of his charismatic or evangelical counterparts, did real academic work. He studied at Columbia Theological Seminary and the Chicago Graduate School of Theology, and received a PhD from New York University.

He began modestly with a small church, affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America, which split with the mainline Presbyterian Church over what the schismatic sect branded its liberal theology. It had fewer than 100 members. But Fort Lauderdale proved to be fertile ground for the young preacher, with families moving in droves into sprawling new developments. The population influx helped swell his congregation, although the church literature portrays its growth as the result of successful proselytizing. He slowly built a massive multimedia empire. Kennedy’s weekly broadcasts of The Coral Ridge Hour can be seen on more than 600 television stations and four cable networks and heard on the Armed Forces Network. It is the third most widely syndicated Christian program in the nation, reaching more than 3.5 million people. His radio show, Truths That Transform, is on more than 744 stations, six days a week.[70] He runs a lobbying group in Washington called the Center for Reclaiming America, as well as the Center for Christian Statesmanship, which evangelizes those who work in Congress. He hosts monthly luncheons, for members of Congress and their staffs, which feature conservative speakers. Kennedy believes that “the Christian view of morality and life is the one that should prevail in America.”[71] He is fond of quoting John Jay, the Chief Justice of the first U.S. Supreme Court, who said that “God in His providence has given to us a Christian nation, and it behooves us as Christians to prefer and select Christians to rule over us.” Kennedy argues that this “was the Christian perspective of most of the founders in the beginning of this country.”[72]

“Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost,” Kennedy has said. “As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors—in short, over every aspect and institution of human society.”[73]

Kennedy is opposed to abortion, homosexuality and the study of evolution. He rails against the values of the Enlightenment. He says that theories of evolution were the basis for Nazism, communism and fascism and that “these are the views of men that have resulted in millions and millions of people dying.”[74]

He once told a reporter he’d never had a gay friend, adding, “I believe one was working at the dance studio [where he worked in his 20s], but I couldn’t tell for sure. They are very good at blending in.”[75] Still, despite having no personal interaction with gay people (he says only ex-gays are members at his church), Kennedy formed Worthy Creations Ministry, a branch of Exodus International, in 1998. Worthy Creations preaches that homosexuality is a sickness that can be healed.[76]

The cultural decline in America is the result, he says, of straying from Christian values. In The Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail: The Attack on Christianity and What You Need to Know to Combat It, a book Kennedy wrote in 1996, he writes that although the United States was once a “Christian nation,” that is no longer the case because today “the hostile barrage from atheists, agnostics and other secular humanists has begun to take a serious toll on that heritage. In recent years, they have built up their forces and even increased their assault upon all our Christian institutions, and they have been enormously successful in taking over the ‘public square.’ Public education, the media, the government, the courts, and even the church in many places, now belong to them.”[77]

The goal is not simply conversion but also eventual recruitment into a political movement to create a Christian nation. But this process is riddled with lies and deception. In the seminar, evangelists are told to pretend at first that they are taking a survey of religious belief to get people to talk and that proselytizers should hide their Bibles so their targets do not know they are being proselytized, and should ignore “No Soliciting” signs, since what they are giving people is “a free gift.”

Kennedy begins to talk about the godless character of liberal churches. He dismisses the members of these churches as “nominal Christians.” Referring to a potential convert whom he calls Scott, Kennedy tells us that since Scott had previously attended Grace Baptist Church, the word “grace” being a popular term within the Christian Right, he was probably a real Christian.

“Suppose we’ve got a lot of liberal churches in this area, and if you just named a church in this area that you go to, probably 90 to 10, I could tell whether or not you’re a Christian,” he says. “And how could I do that? Simply because these liberal churches don’t preach the Gospel. I can tell you a big liberal church in this area where you can stand outside the church, Sunday morning after service, and say, ‘Excuse me, sir, I’m lost, I wonder if you can tell me how to get to heaven.’ And I would venture to say that 98 percent could not tell you, and that’s because the pastor is a liberal and he doesn’t believe in heaven. He doesn’t believe in salvation; he probably doesn’t believe in sin. Certainly doesn’t believe in hell.

“There are millions of people in this country who attend church regularly,” Kennedy tells us, “trying to live a good life and follow God’s teachings, and yet somehow—now underline this next phrase—the church has failed to communicate to them how they can know for sure that they have eternal life and they’re going to heaven.”

At the Evangelism Explosion workshop we must write and rewrite our personal testimonies and practice delivering them in front of our assigned prayer partners, who critique them according to the manual. The testimony is an illustration to the nonbeliever that the converted are absolutely certain of eternal life and have been freed from all human anxieties. The testimony, we are told by the instructor, must state explicitly that the fear of death has been banished forever. We must describe moments in our lives when death appeared certain and we felt at peace and certain of eternal life. The testimony has to stress and repeat this total certitude of our belief in eternal life and freedom from fear. We turn our testimonies in for correction by the instructors to make sure our essays have not deviated from the two approved outlines of conversion, and we rewrite them when they come back with “errors” marked in red.

Freedom from fear, especially the fear of death, is what is being sold. It is a lie, as everyone who works to write and rewrite their testimonies has to know on some level. But few people would have the firmness of mind to admit this in front of other believers. Such an admission would be interpreted as a lack of faith. Yet creation of this internal conflict is also part of the process, for it fosters a dread of being found out, a morbid guilt that we are not as good or as Christian as those around us. The process, from its inception, is not only dishonest but cruel. The dissonance between individual sensibility and the group does not go away with conversion or blind obedience or submission. Belief systems that preach a utopian and unachievable ideal drive this angst underground, forcing the convert to measure him- or herself against an impossible ideal. This system ensures continuous feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt, guilt and self-loathing. That many converts feel deep remorse for past actions, for mistakes and cruelties, for the despair that has gripped their lives, only makes them more insecure.

The proper form for a conversion testimony is detailed for us in the Evangelism Explosion workbook:

Stage 1: What I was before. “Select one life concept such as loneliness, strife, guilt, fear of death, emptiness, rejection, insecurity, depression. Then include it (only one life concept per testimony) in an opening statement, saying, ‘Before I received eternal life, my life was filled with a paralyzing fear of death.’ Next, move from the general statement to a specific illustration out of your own life experiences. Give concrete details to make your illustration come alive.”[78]

Stage 2: How I received eternal life. “At this point, you may want to say something like, ‘Not many months later, a friend shared with me the most wonderful news I’d ever heard—that God had provided eternal life for me and what the conditions were to receive that life. As a result, many things changed in my life.’”[79]

Stage 3: What eternal life has meant to me. “At this point, you may want to share the life concept in reverse. If you selected fear of death as your life concept, you will now want to speak of courage in the face of death. If you chose the concept of guilt, you may now want to speak of forgiveness. The reverse of depression is hope; of emptiness, purpose; of rebellion, obedience, etc. Then you will want to illustrate the reverse life concept with another illustration from your experience. For instance, you may want to say, ‘The fear of death is now gone, and in its place is courage when facing death situations or thoughts about death.’”[80]

“As you prepare your testimony,” Kennedy says, “realize that you are fashioning an evangelical tool, so that you will be a more proficient witness.”

There are two possible types of conversion experiences, the class is told: a childhood conversion and an adult conversion. Those who have experienced childhood conversions are told by the instructors not to state in the testimony that they were converted as a child. It will hurt their credibility with adults.

A childhood conversion testimony starts with the sentence “I’m glad I have eternal life because it’s given me the certainty of knowing where I’m going when I die. And because of this, I have no fear of death.”

The instructor gives us an example of an effective childhood conversion testimony:

“‘Not long ago we were driving north on Interstate 57 during an ice storm that put a sheet of glazed ice on the highway…. We were easily easing along at 25 miles per hour, looking for a place to get off the highway to find shelter for the night, and as we were driving we came alongside a semitrailer truck.’ They’re painting a picture here. ‘The wind was blowing very hard, and the trailer truck became like a sailboat, catching the wind.’ Got this picture? ‘Whoa. The truck was gradually being pushed across the center line, and steadily toward the car. There was nowhere to go. We couldn’t go to the right because we’d run into the truck; we couldn’t go to the left because we would eventually end up in a ditch with the truck on top of us. And as we waited to see the outcome, our tragic injury seemed certain. My whole life came before me, and yet God gave me complete peace in my heart, knowing that even in light of this almost certain tragedy, I knew for certain that if I were to die, I’d go to heaven. What a joy and a difference that made as I faced that danger. And it’s the same today. I know that if I were to die right now, I’d go to be with God in heaven.’

“See?” the instructor goes on. “He captured your attention with a story, and that’s what we’re wanting you to build into your story, because all of you have that. I teach my trainers that they should be able to write a testimony like that. As they’re listening in the introduction, the Lord will capture them with something in their own story with which they can build a testimony.”

The adult conversion testimony, however, is different, although it too focuses on overcoming the fear of death. A stocky instructor recounts it for us:

“‘Before I received eternal life, I had a fear of death and dying.’ Same concept: the thought of death terrified me. ‘I had no idea what lay beyond death’s door for me. When I was in college I was living in a small home alone. One night, a terrible storm arose with wind gusts over 50 miles per hour. Kind of like Wilma down here; she was packing some heavy winds. The wind was so strong that the rain was pouring horizontally across the ground, our little mobile home was rocking on its concrete block foundation, and a bolt of lightning struck a tall oak tree right next to me. I was frightened, and I set up near to the sofa, fearful that I was going to die. Not many months later, a friend shared with me something very wonderful, and I received eternal life. Many things changed in my life. And now that I have eternal life, the fear of death and dying is gone. Not long after I received eternal life, we were driving north on Interstate 57 during an ice storm that put a sheet of glazed ice on the highway.’…Same illustration, only in the life of a person who’s accepted Christ, you know? And what happened before and then what happened after. ‘As we waited to see the outcome, death or tragic injury seemed certain, and my whole life came before me.’”

The class has their workbooks open to the chapter “Sharing Your Testimony.”

“Now here’s not how to give a testimony,” an instructor says. “‘I received blessing when I became a Christian! I received deliverance through the Sinners’ Prayer! I was unsaved and needed to be saved! My conversion happened when I put my faith in Jesus Christ, my savior, who died for the sins of those who trust Him. Praise the Lord! Hallelujah! Amen! I received salvation when I believed the Gospel and was washed in the blood of the Lamb, and I was born again when the Holy Spirit spoke to me at the altar of God. I lost all my friends and I lost my job, but God has looked after me ever since, and praise His name! The trials and tests are unbearable, and I just hope I can hold out until the end, and then maybe I’ll be able to go to heaven!’

“You know,” he says, “really, all of those things are true. All of those things are true of what happens in our lives. ‘The blood of the Lamb,’ that’s a great, great phrase. ‘The Gospel,’ ‘washed in the blood of the Lamb,’ ‘born again when the Holy Spirit spoke to me at the altar of God.’ What’s wrong with those statements? Way too churchy. Now you think how lost people think, and they don’t think that way. They don’t understand that. That is a jargon, and they just don’t have any clue…. We use phrases like that and toss them back and forth, and a lost person thinks we’ve dropped off another planet. So what we want you to do, we want you to go into your prayer groups and we want you to talk them through your story.”

The class of 60 evangelism students, many of them pastors, breaks up into preassigned prayer groups to practice their personal testimonies again.

We are told to always emphasize the positive and to find common interests, experiences, or viewpoints that will allow “your prospect,” as the potential converts are called in our manual, to identify with us. We are told to pepper our talk with uplifting thoughts, such as the comfort we have of going to bed every night and knowing that if we do not wake in the morning we will be in paradise with God. We are instructed to paint detailed pictures of terrible personal tragedies that have been solved by God. As an example, the manual quotes a parent saying that they had “a Christian son killed in Vietnam” but they are at peace with the loss because the parent knows that, since the son was a Christian, he has eternal life, and the parent will be reunited with him in heaven. Our testimonies and conversions must be sprinkled with words like “love,” “peace,” “faithfulness,” “hope,” “purpose,” and “obedience.” But the core of the message, the point we must impart to the potential convert, is that conversion has obliterated our fear of death, not only for ourselves, but the fear we have of losing those we love. This is what is being sold. And we, as the salespeople, are meant to stand as proof that humankind’s deepest fear, the fear of nonbeing, the fear of death, can be banished from life.

Two women from the church walk up in front of the group to role-play the conversion process. One sits in one of two green leather chairs on a raised platform. The other stands and pretends to knock on an imaginary door. The woman in the chair gets up to greet her visitor and welcomes her inside. They sit. The evangelist exchanges a few banalities about how nice the house looks and compliments her hostess on her taste in home furnishings. She “makes a friend.” She then gives her personal testimony. After the testimony, in quick succession, she asks the two questions that have to be asked early of every potential convert. The class has been cautioned that “when two people are present, begin by asking the person who seems least likely to have the correct answer.” The goal is to elicit incorrect answers, answers that allow the evangelist to push home the message that time is running out, sin is accumulating. The gift of eternal life waits to be taken, but without salvation everyone is damned to eternal punishment.

“‘Have you come to the place in your spiritual life where you know for certain that if you were to die today you would go to heaven, or is that something you would say you’re still working on?’” the evangelist says, repeating verbatim the first question.

“I would say I am still working on it,” the other woman answers.

The evangelist launches into the second question.

“Suppose you were to die today and stand before God and He were to say to you, ‘Why should I let you into My heaven?’ What would you say?”

Her mock recruit fumbles, talks about having lived a good life.

The evangelist repeats the answer, because, as the instructor has told the group, “this will help preclude the prospect saying at the end of the Gospel presentation, ‘I’ve always believed in Jesus Christ and trusted Him alone for salvation.’”

This is an important moment, we are told, because the conversion process depends on potential converts saying they are not sure they will be granted eternal life and they have not placed their total trust and faith in Jesus Christ for salvation.

“When you answered that first question, I thought I had some good news for you,” the evangelist says, lifting the sentence verbatim from the manual. “But after hearing your answer to this second question, I know that I have the greatest news you have ever heard.”

The workbook, lying open in front of the onlookers, instructs the evangelist to say this sentence with “great enthusiasm,” since, the workbook adds, this “precludes a hostile reaction.”[81]

Heaven, the potential convert is told after the questions are asked, is “unearned, undeserved, and unmerited. It’s free.” But it can come only through a commitment to Jesus Christ.

And then the discussion in the conversion process turns to sin. The evangelists are told to disabuse converts of the notion that sin is limited to robbery, murder, adultery or other specific acts. We are informed that sin “is anything that doesn’t please God or is a transgression of His law.”[82] Sin, the convert is to be told, is “the fatal malignancy which infects the soul of the entire human race.”[83] The convert is to be told that there is no escape from sin and that even the most righteous commit innumerable sinful acts.

This definition of sin is a subtle and pernicious twist to the traditional Christian concept of sin. As defined by Paul in his letters, sin is a state of being, a split between our conscious will and our real will, between us and something strange and alien within us. Sin is not, as Kennedy claims, a scorecard of rights and wrongs. For Paul, as well as many theologians such as Paul Tillich, there is no action, no matter how moral and good, which is totally pure or moral, totally free from sin. Sin is, rather, a way of describing our estrangement from others and ourselves, from what Tillich calls “the ground of our being.”[84] It is estrangement from the origin and aim of life. When we carry out acts that further this estrangement, when we violate our relationships with others and with ourselves, we sin. But Kennedy paints sin as something quantifiable, as if there were a digital counter that recorded one sin after another and stored the information in some heavenly bank account.

An instructor turns to a church member and illustrates how to speak about sin to a potential convert:

“Suppose I could get to the point where only ten times a day or five times, or let’s say three times a day, maybe one attitude [of] sin—jealousy or anger or bigotry—maybe one thing…slips from my mouth that’s hateful,” he says. “And maybe I miss doing something that I know I should do, like help my neighbor when they’re having a special need. What do you suppose would happen if I got that good? Man, I’d practically be a walking angel! But do you realize that at the end of the year I [would] have a thousand violations against God’s law? And if I live to be, well I’m 59 right now, so I’d have 59,000 violations against God’s law. What would happen if I died right now, or not died right now but stood before a judge right now with 59,000 traffic violations? Think what would happen. He’d say, ‘This is a habitual offender; let’s get him off the road.’ And he’d basically take my license and I wouldn’t be able to drive. Well, imagine standing before the judge of the universe with 60 or 70 thousand violations against God’s law. And that’s at the very best, that’s at the very best! But what we’re really trying to say with this is, you know, not only does a little add up to a lot, but our sin problem is serious. And then you can move right in.”

At that point the pairs form again to practice delivering the message about sin.

After the practice session, the instructor asks: “Why do we put the three-sins-a-day illustration in there?” Several people call out answers.

“A little bit of sin turns into a lot of sin,” he says. “All right. It’s that multiplication again.”

The point the evangelists are instructed to make is that eternal life cannot be achieved through good deeds or even a good life. It is impossible to earn your way into heaven. We must accept that we have sinned, will always commit sins, and ask to be born again so Jesus will take our sins upon Him. Once this is done we can learn to live a new way, a way that, while not totally free of sin, allows us to live a life approved by God, a life in which, with the help of the church, we learn to reject sinful acts. The believer can learn to condemn and avoid sinful acts—acts defined for him or her by church leaders as anything that doesn’t please God or is a transgression of His law. The leaders determine these acts, rousing the believer against what they label as sins, such as abortion or homosexuality. The emphasis, once the conversion is made, is on acts, acts that please or displease God. The believer can delineate these acts only with the aid of church leaders. There is a calculated destruction of individual conscience. All must submit to the will of those godly men who define the communal good. Sin, in short, is anything the leaders do not like.

“Because He is a just judge, He must punish our sins; His law declares that our sins must be punished and that He ‘will by no means clear the guilty.’ There is no doubt about this!” the instructor tells us.

The potential convert is to be told, finally, that Jesus came to earth and died “to pay the penalty for our sins and to purchase a place in heaven for us” and that “to receive eternal life you must transfer your trust from yourself to Jesus Christ alone for eternal life.”[85] The convert is asked whether he or she is willing “to turn from what you have been doing that is not pleasing to Him and follow Him as He reveals His will to you in His Word.”

The evangelist and convert bow their heads and pray, with the convert repeating each line after the evangelist.

“Lord Jesus, I want You to come in and take over my life right now. I am a sinner. I have been trusting in myself and my own good works. But now I place my trust in You. I accept You as my own personal Savior. I believe You died for me. I receive You as Lord and Master of my life. Help me to turn from my sins and to follow You. I accept the free gift of eternal life. I am not worthy of it, but I thank You for it. Amen.”

When this prayer is over the believers are told, “Welcome to the family of God.” They are told to read a chapter a day in the Gospel of John and that they will be visited again in a week to talk about the Bible. They are encouraged to pray because God “promised to hear and answer our prayers.” They are told to find “a good Bible-believing church and become a part of it.” They are told to join a Christian fellowship group. And they are told to witness to their families. With this, the process of deconstructing an individual and building a submissive follower is begun.

The goal is more than building the church; it is building a Christian America. Kennedy talks often about the recruitment of legions of new believers to the political as well as the religious arena. He claims to have brought in millions through Evangelism Explosion.

Kennedy insists that America was founded as a “Christian nation.” The denial of the Christian roots of the nation, he says, is a “great deception [that] has been used to destroy much of the religious freedom and liberty this country has enjoyed since its inception.”[86] And Kennedy’s crusade is well funded and well organized. He is backed with grants, often for millions of dollars, from conservative trusts such as the Orville D. and Ruth A. Merillat Foundation and the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, which has over the years given nearly $6 million to his church organizations.[87] The drive to bring in new souls is also an open drive to broaden the political base of the movement and impose a theocracy.

The prayer partners are told to separate into clusters. Those in the room take turns practicing their testimonies in front of their group of three or four, with the other members critiquing the performance. The final version of each participant’s written testimony is to be turned in the next day. My prayer group has three other people, including one of the few African Americans, a thoughtful man who grew up in the church and was converted as a child; a middle-aged man who overcame drug and alcohol abuse as an adult through his conversion; and a grandmother, who said that as a child she had a morbid fear of death that was overcome only when she was saved and assured of eternal life. I pair off with the grandmother, who is chatty and friendly. We read our testimonies, trying to get them exactly right.

A woman from the church tells us how to share the Gospel with a person who suffers from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. She heads teams that go into 24-hour nursing homes and assisted-living facilities.

“These precious people are basically confined to these types of facilities,” she says. “Now they say by the year 2025, there will be two seniors for every teenager on the face of this earth. And with multiplication and with people living longer, in the United States they say pretty soon there will be about 50 million people that are alive [who] will end up spending their final years in some type of facility. So this is an untapped resource.

“They’re always there,” she tells the group. “And so we get to go back and we get to see Miss Mary, week after week after week, and share with her.

“The other thing that we’re dealing with is different forms of dementia,” she adds. “The most common form is Alzheimer’s. So for most of us—and I mean, I forget things easily—we have to go back and repeat ourselves. But that’s OK. Maybe the first week we’ll just get through an introduction and maybe share our testimony, maybe the two questions. The next week we’ll go back, we’ll pick up with Miss Mary, maybe we’ll have to refresh her memory.

“One thing that we get a lot with the elderly,” she says, “they are so works-oriented because of the culture in which they were raised and having gone through the Depression. So we really have to talk about eternal life as a free gift. That has to be emphasized over and over and over.”

Disruptions, reluctance to accept the message, open hostility and interruptions during the evangelization process are always blamed on Satan, part of what is described to us as “spiritual warfare.”

“The devil is so obvious,” an instructor says. “I mean, he’s so easy to figure out.”

The instructor recounts the story of a house visit. The evangelists were sitting in the living room of a woman who asked the team to convert her unsaved husband. At the moment the evangelists were about to get him to accept Christ, the phone rang.

“It was an old-fashioned message machine where you could hear the person,” the instructor says. Through the loudspeaker on the machine, the group heard a child call out, “Daddy, Daddy, I know you’re in there.”

The group sat and listened to the plea of the child. Finally the father said, “‘Excuse me,’ and he walked over and just clicked it back off,” the instructor tells us. “He came back over, and my trainees at the time were just praying so hard, great drops of blood…that that guy could receive Christ. We got ahead of the distractions.”

[oldguardleatherdog]

For Father's Day:

"The One Decent Thing I Ever Did"

This is a monograph from 2015, previously posted here some time ago, a tale of my maternal grandmother, a below-zero winter night, the New York City subway West Side express during post-9/11, that mentions my father only in passing... and it's about my father.

THE ONE DECENT THING I EVER DID.

I.

A long time ago, during a time of struggle, I did one decent thing:

I'd just gotten on the subway in Midtown Manhattan on a brutal winter night, the No. 2 uptown express, when a couple with a small child boarded the car I was riding.

They were having a very loud conversation with their child (about four years old, I think) who was crying or somehow behaving in a way that was "bad". The mother took the belt from her jeans and raised her arm to strike her child with it.

Don’t ask me why I did this, but I rose from my seat, grabbed the mother’s arm mid-swing, and said, “As long as I am on this train, you will not hit that child with that belt.” She and the child’s father were stunned into silence for a moment as I made my way back to my seat.

Immediately after I sat down, the mother and father began leveling all kinds of vitriol my way, calling me every name in the book, including all the variations of “faggot” in use at the time. I just sat there, smiled wide, laughed loud, and shined ‘em on:

“You can call me ‘faggot.’ You can call me anything you like. Because every minute you focus on me, you are not beating that child with that belt.”

The crowded train car fell silent.

II.

Yuletide, 1982. I was in the service in Germany and took leave to see my grandmother in Florida. My grandfather had passed away the previous March, and something told me to seize the chance to see Grandma while she was still with us. I was only 20, born late in life to my parents, and never got to know my grandparents in the way my older brothers did.

We were in my Grandma's airy, air-conditioned Fort Lauderdale kitchen having coffee one morning when the rest of the family had gone out for breakfast. “Would you like a little pick-me-up in your cup, dear?” I laughed. “No thanks, Gramma, it's a little early for me.” The joys of Florida.

I'd had a rough upbringing by any measure - my father was first-gen shanty Irish born in the early 1920's with a mean spirit and a violent edge, mother not Irish but still violent - but at age 20 I hadn't yet realized just how rough it had been.

“You know,” I said to Grandma, “Harold and Evelyn did the best they could. I mean, I turned out all right, right?”

Grandma leaned back in her chair, took a nice drag off one of her unfiltered Camels, and said in her declarative New England way the words that always meant Listen up, you're about to hear gospel truth:

“Well, I'll tell ya, Joe.” I was all ears.

She took another hit off of her cigarette. “I held my tongue. More than once, I held my tongue.

“But one day, your mother and father were in the front yard with your grandfather and me, and I walked up to your father and said, “Harold, I just want to tell you something. It takes a real man to beat a child with a belt.”

...Wow.

I only wish she hadn’t held her tongue!

I sipped my coffee, looked for palmetto bugs on the lanai. “Grandma,” I said, “I'm all right.”

She looked away, and I saw the colors of the rainbow in the prism of her pendant.

III.

What was I doing on the 2 train heading uptown in the bitter blistering freezing cold New York winter?

Heading “home” – that is, to one of the many rundown firetrap SRO hotels paid by the City of New York to house homeless people with HIV. The City's AIDS regulations set the policy: if you showed up at the HIV center at 30th and 8th before 7 PM on a given day, New York City was obliged to find you housing for the same night and for the next 30 days in a row at the very least.

Strange - in those days, New York would house you but not feed you, and San Francisco would feed you but not house you. Come to think of it, that's the way it is these days.

My dank, filthy, crawling with roaches and vermin crack-house "shelter" was way uptown, near 96th and Broadway. (I had always dreamed about making it to Broadway, ha ha.)

96th Street and Broadway stop was next. The train car was still silent as the parents sat sullenly and the child - Jesus, he can't be older than 3 or 4 years old, I thought - was staring at me, no expression on his little face, but eyes wide as saucers.

The train screeched to a stop. I got up and headed to the door, passing the couple with the small child and the loose belt. They were silent and did not regard me as I passed; the child, I think, might have glanced at me, but I’m not sure. I knew that after I got off the train, or after they got off the train, that poor kid was probably going to get beaten. Severely.

Out the door and onto the bone-chilling platform at 96th Street. A young woman who had witnessed the mother wield that belt came up to me and said, “I’m so glad you did that, I wanted to say something, but I was too…” Her voice trailed off as the pained look on her face finished her thought.

“I understand,” I said to her as our eyes met in that New York way of speaking the unspeakable, then made my way up the stairs into the below-zero winter breezes of the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

What the hell, I thought as I made my way out of the station, I had nothing to lose. Those were dark times, desperate days. I'm no angel. But just once, on that long-ago Number 2 train, I was granted the grace to do one decent thing.

Animal J. Smith San Francisco, California July 22, 2015 and June 18, 2023 v2.0

My maternal grandparents, Ed and Ethel (Schirmer) Olson, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, c. 1980

[beardedmrbean]

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — A woman who pleaded guilty to dressing as a clown and in 1990 murdering the wife of a man she later married was released from prison Saturday, ending a case that has been strange even by Florida standards.

Sheila Keen-Warren, 61, was released 18 months after she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for the shooting of Marlene Warren, Florida Department of Corrections records show. The plea deal came shortly before her trial would have started.

Keen-Warren, who has maintained her innocence even after her plea, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. But she had been in custody for seven years since her arrest in 2017, and Florida's law in 1990 allowed significant credit for good behavior. It had been expected she would be released in about two years.

“Sheila Keen-Warren will always be an admitted convicted murderer and will wear that stain for every day for the rest of her life," Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg said in a statement Saturday.

Greg Rosenfeld, Keen-Warren's attorney, has said she only took the plea deal because she would be released in less than two years and had been facing a life sentence if convicted at trial.

“We are absolutely thrilled that Ms. Keen-Warren has been released from prison and is returning to her family. As we’ve stated from the beginning, she did not commit this crime," he said Saturday in a text message.

Marlene Warren’s son, Joseph Ahrens, and his friends were at home when they said a person dressed as a clown rang the door bell. He said that when his mom answered, the clown handed her some balloons. After she responded, “How nice,” the clown pulled a gun and shot her in the face before fleeing.

Palm Beach County sheriff's investigators had long suspected Keen-Warren in the slaying, but she wasn't arrested until 27 years later when they said improved DNA testing tied her to evidence found in the getaway car. Rosenfeld has called that evidence weak.

At the time of the shooting, Keen-Warren was an employee of Marlene Warren’s husband, Michael, at his used car lot. Since 2002, she has been his wife — they eventually moved to Abingdon, Virginia, where they ran a restaurant just across the Tennessee border.

Witnesses told investigators in 1990 that the then-Sheila Keen and Michael Warren were having an affair, though both denied it.

Over the years, detectives said, costume shop employees identified Sheila Warren as the woman who had bought a clown suit a few days before the killing.

And one of the two balloons — a silver one that read, “You’re the Greatest” — was sold at only one store, a Publix supermarket near Keen-Warren's home. Employees told detectives a woman who looked like Keen-Warren had bought the balloons an hour before the shooting.

The presumed getaway car was found abandoned with orange, hair-like fibers inside. The white Chrysler convertible had been reported stolen from Michael Warren’s car lot a month before the shooting. Keen-Warren and her then-husband repossessed cars for him.

Relatives told The Palm Beach Post in 2000 that Marlene Warren, who was 40 when she died, suspected her husband was having an affair and wanted to leave him. But the car lot and other properties were in her name, and she feared what might happen if she did.

She allegedly told her mother, “If anything happens to me, Mike done it.” He has never been charged and has denied involvement.

But Rosenfeld said last year that the state’s case was falling apart. One DNA sample somehow showed both male and female genes, he said, and the other could have come from one out of every 20 women.

And even if that hair did come from Keen-Warren, it could have been deposited before the car was reported stolen. He said Marlene Warren's son and another witness also told detectives that the car deputies found wasn’t the killer’s, though investigators insisted it was.

Aronberg last year conceded that there were holes in the case, saying they were caused by the three decades it took to get it to trial, including the death of key witnesses.

Michael Warren was convicted in 1994 of grand theft, racketeering and odometer tampering. He served almost four years in prison — a punishment his then-attorneys said was disproportionately long because of suspicions he was involved in his wife’s death.

He did not respond to a phone message left for him Saturday.

[hbbethany]

As mentioned earlier we just got back from our first ever Disney cruise. This is going to be a long post about the cruise and also the travel as a trans woman so feel free to skip it if you don't want to read a long post. I'll even put a "read more" break because I'm nice like that and don't want to fill people's dashboards with really long text posts ☺️

The cruise was from Fort Lauderdale in Florida so first was the flight there. The flights were actually okay. I was mostly boy moding to make travel easier (or as boy mode as I can with titties). We had a layover in JFK and I was very happy to discover that JFK has quite a lot of "All Gender" toilets ☺️

I was mis-gendered a lot but it's understandable, I was boy moding. A few people did get it right though which makes me feel like I have a very androgenous vibe at the moment.

After the travel day though I spent every day of the cruise in full makeup and dresses. I was correctly gendered for the whole cruise by both crew members and other guests. I had no problem using women's toilets on the ship. It was all round an amazing experience.

The downside is I was dead named for entire cruise but I just went with it because the cruise was booked in my legal name and every time I scanned my room key it showed my name but I know some girls that have the same name as my dead name so I went with it and didn't let it bother me.

We also had an awkward encounter with one of the photographers that had assumed me and my wife were sisters.

The flight home was a little more awkward. Coming out of Florida I had to have a full pat down by security because the scanners were showing something in my pockets and my crotch which was awkward but unfortunately a side effect of travelling while trans. I just gritted my teeth and got it over with.

Overall a great trip other than the flight home.

[jamieroxxartist]

(🎬 Click the Pic to Watch the Video)

Jamie Roxx & Dani Glunt | Pop Roxx Radio ( https://www.PopRoxxRadio.com ), Ep #1425

Pop Art Painter Jamie #Roxx ( https://www.JamieRoxx.us ) welcomes Danielle Glunt (Dani, Jamie's Wife) to the Show!

(Click to go there) ● WEB: https://spectralmoon.com ● IG: https://www.instagram.com/thespectralmoon ● IG: https://www.instagram.com/proptroopers

Jamie and Dani have been together since 2010. They were married in 2020 (one week before the world shut down from the COVID-19 pandemic.)

Dani is Jamie's artistic muse for his painting. An artist herself, she specializes in Sculpture and Ceramics, sharing a home-based art studio with Jamie. Rounding out their little family is their dog, Studio Dog Mei Ling, cats, Babycat and Raven, and also Ursula Dani's Albino Ball Python.

Dani her business partner Travis also owns a web-based business Spectral Moon. Dani, says “We are a small metaphysical shop that specializes in handmade bracelets and ceramic charging plates, as well as creating a safe space for all." And they are. They not only deal in beautiful Crystals, Metaphysical items, and specialty jewelry and Ceramics. Education in these to the public in general is a big pillar of their business, with lectures, in-person meet and greets etc.

#DanielleGlunt #SpectralMoon #TheSpectralMoon, #Painting #PopArt #Vampire #CrystalMagic #EnergyAmplification #CrystalMagic #HealingStones #ShopFavorite #CrystalHealing #MetaphysicalShop #EnergyCrystals #SpiritualJourney #CrystalMagic #HealingStones #CrystalEnergy #OnlineMetaphysics #HolisticLiving #GemstoneLove

#Unscripted, #"Artist to Artist", #Conversation, #"Digital Radio", #Podcast, #Interview, #"Pop Roxx Radio", #"Talk Show", #"Chat Show", #"Pop Art" # "Jamie Roxx", #Roxx, #JamieRoxx, #"South Florida", #"Deerfield Beach", #Miami, #"Fort Lauderdale", #"Boca Raton"

[billy-royalton]

if i fucking may be insufferable for a moment, i'm gonna cry about music under here.

dgd were the band that got me into post hardcore as a genre. i was 13, whatever i say is royal ocean had just come out, and i went to see them open for drop dead gorgeous (with no adult supervision which is wild to think about how my dad just trusted me and my friend to go to a hardcore show at that age by ourselves) at a club in fort lauderdale. and it absolutely shaped my entire personality from that point on.

i experienced my first pit at that show and fell in love. i came home with bruises and covered in sweat and just loved how i felt pressed up against the stage and being thrown around like that. there's just something so religious about the pit. it's fucking cathartic to scream and jump and push and to do it in a crowd of people. and we're all there for each other: someone falls, you help them up, someone needs a breather, you let them through. we're all just running and jumping and bumping into each other to let it all out and feel something. it's really a beautiful thing.

the whole scene just became such a big part of my life after that. i spent most of high school going to every single phc/hc/pop-punk show i could get tickets for. i met my best fucking friend through our love of the same bands. he and i would go to a show at that same club multiple times a month -- often on school nights. i would show up to school the next day absolutely exhausted with no voice and everyone in class would go "oh daisy went to a show last night." even now as an adult, i'm constantly counting down the days until my next show.

so many of those songs are about wanting to be seen for who you are, acceptance and hope, rising above challenges, and like, okay, not to get too depressing but that's the shit i needed as a teenager and it's still the shit i need as an adult. it's really just nice to hear someone singing about their own life and be able to have it fucking resonate with you deep in your heart.

seeing dgd next month 17 years and 10 albums later is so fucking surreal to me. like i've been to so many shows since then but that show remains a standout for how it just shaped me as a person. and look i listen to so much music and love so many genres and artists (400 vinyls i can assure you they are not all post hardcore or pop-punk) but these were the first bands that i found completely on my own, they're part of me, i feel like these songs and albums belong to me just as much as they belong to the artists. just in a different way.

so yeah. got it all out i'll go back to crying about silly karate stuff now.

[smp-archive]

Scott Mitchell: Manson's Broken Family

Scott for Guitar World, August 1997. Archived article courtesy of Daisy Berkowitz on angelfire.com.

Until now, He's been known as Daisy Berkowitz, former guitarist for Marilyn Manson. Now, prepare yourself for Scott Mitchell, solo artist with an axe to grind —in more ways than one.

Since being forced out of Manson at the end of the recording of Antichrist Superstar, Mitchell has been writing songs, amassing a 30-song catalogue of varied styles. Working with singer Tyreah Jaymes, the 28-year-old guitarist is shopping songs under the moniker Three Ton Gate. He's also been jamming with an outfit called R.O.D., to keep his live chops up.

"I felt a lot of creative freedom being out of the band," says Mitchell from his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. "Some of the songs have a psychedelic vibe to them —they seem kind of abstract and crazy, but there's a common thread running through them. I hate to compare what I'm doing now to Manson, but my new material is stark and exotic, and there's even a few acoustic, mellow sounds. There's a sense of humor, like there was in the old days of Marilyn Manson —before Marilyn and Twiggy started taking things too seriously. One of the songs is about people bugging me about the band and about what I'm doing now."

Another is about the ever-controversial Marilyn. But, Mitchell says, "That one won't be on the demo."

Mitchell, who wrote a dozen songs for Antichrist Superstar and saw all but one rejected by Marilyn, says he still feels "gypped" by the experience. But, he adds, he has no regrets:

"People are really eager to hear my new stuff, and I consider being in Marilyn Manson a good stepping stone. I did a lot of things I'd never done before. I can blame particular people, but I don't need to."

Instead, Mitchell says he's "been thinking about writing a book" about his experiences. What might the opening anecdote to such a book be?

"There was one after-show party in New York, when we were on tour with Nine Inch Nails, where we went to a very private, exclusive club. The people that were there, the underage girls, the way money was being thrown around —it was dark, but not in a good sense." —TOM GOGOLA

[jules-has-notes]

2017 VoicePlay spring travels — all over the map

VoicePlay were some busy bunnies in early 2017, and they continued to get by with some help from their friends, particularly their three substitute singers for live shows.

.

The guys started their spring with a mini-tour through Georgia. They picked up J.None and traversed the state to play four shows in five days.

Some auditions go more smoothly than others, but they're always amusing.

.

Howdy, fellas

When their pals Home Free came to town, the guys couldn't resist seeing them do their thing.

.

Then they grabbed Erik Winger and hit the road again for a whirwind weekend. First they hopped over to Texas for a student workshop and a concert in Lake Jackson. (While they were there, Winger also earned cool points with some fans' kids via backstage shenanigans.)

Next they flew up to Pennsylvania to headline a local high school a cappella festival. Then they headed down to Washington, DC for a private event.

.

Workin' day and night

After they got home, Layne, Tony, and sound guy Paul Kaleka spent most of the next week working on PattyCake's next project, "Michaeleficent", at a couple different locations in the area.

Geoff and Kathy spent some time making final preparations for the impending arrival of their little one, and VoicePlay brought in his paternity leave replacement — Bryant Vance, member of Vocalosity and Rockapella, and then-fiancé of their frequent collaborator Hannah Juliano — to get him up to speed.

Meanwhile, J.None was a busy bee. He recorded some vocals for a friend's EP; squeezed in a quick cruise gig with one of his other regular groups at the time, Paradigm Party Band; volunteered at an annual event to uplift unhoused people; and then met up with Paradigm again for an electrifying night at the Hard Rock Cafe.

Once J was available again, VoicePlay scooped him up for a private event at Disney World.

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A post shared by J.None 🧈🎶 🎙📝🎬🎹🎸📽🤣 (@itsjnone)

clips of "A Whole New World", "I Want It That Way", & "Hound Dog"

.

Here comes a son

And then it was time to meet the newest, tiniest member of the Castellucci family (a couple weeks sooner than expected).

Geoff's announcement on Twitter // the Steins' first visit // wrangling the baby and the fur baby

Kathy posted a video on Instagram for William's seventh birthday that includes footage of them in the hospital before and after his birth. The kid's become quite a little bundle of energy, as Geoff predicted.

.

Bright lights, several cities

Bryant started his subbing duties the next week with a corporate gig in Fort Lauderdale. A couple days later, the guys pulled Geoff out of the house for one day to film their next video with J.None.

The week after that, they gathered up Winger and met Bryant in Washington, DC for a private event at the Library of Congress.

Back at home, J.None and his friend Daniel provided a live serenade for another friend's marriage proposal. (She said yes.)

Some of the gang followed Bryant home to NYC, and had a bit of an aca-reunion with Hannah and former 4:2:Five tenor Danny Alan. The Edge Effect's Instagram account joked that they were forming a supergroup called the RockaLocity PlayEffect. (They do have all the vocal parts covered…)

.

From the seas to the plains

In the middle of May, the guys set sail for the Bahamas on the Disney Dream once more, again with both Winger and Bryant. (Some high seas hijinks ensued when Erik fell asleep in the wrong cabin.)

During their week at home in between trips, Eli and Ashley bought a new house.

Then VoicePlay finished the month by hitting the road again with J.None and Geoff back in the mix for a show in Toledo, Ohio.

Toledo, OH show — photos by Mary D. Fox

.

Functioning privately

June was a bit quieter, allowing the guys to do some work at home in preparation for future projects. Layne, Cyndi, and the girls even recorded a family music video of "Dear Theodosia" from Hamilton for Doris's first birthday.

VoicePlay did have a couple of private events booked for the middle of the month, though. The first was at a marina in Vancouver.

The second was at the top of a hotel in Miami Beach.

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sound check of "Don't Stop Me Now"

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A post shared by VoicePlay (@thevoiceplay)

backstage shenanigans (No, I don't know why Earl is saying "fish".)

.

Ships in the morning

They closed out the season with one more trip on the Dream, where they crossed paths with their pals The Edge Effect.

[wilted-yellow-flowers]

two and a half weeks before Easter I had to fly to Taipei from Lower Matecumbe through Key West and San Francisco for family reasons. because of a key lime pie, some very aggressive desire to not impose, and a sword shaped key chain, along with a whole bunch of other mistakes, I didn't get to the airport far enough ahead of time and missed my flight. I then had to be driven from Key West to Fort Lauderdale, spend the night in tht brightest and noisiest airport on the face of the fucking planet,

slept face down on my backpack on some chairs and woke up with the zipper pressed into my face.

I flew to San Francisco from Fort Lauderdale and wandered into a Sunglasses Hut, thinking,

"I wear my sunglasses all the time now, living in the Keys. I haven't had much money because of my shit, absolutely garbage job that doesn't pay me, plus missing this flight cost me a lot, and it's kind of expensive to have to fly to Taipei, better just try on."

I walk in and don't like any of the ones the saleswoman is giving me to try on. I want mirrored aviators. Ray-Bans. she clearly disagrees with the ones I want but reminds me that the second pair is $60 off with their current promotion. I tell her,

"hey thanks for showing me around I'm just going to order these online by myself"

and she hands me an ipad. "you want custom ones right?"

I don't see a way out and I think I've actually forgotten I was trying to escape? or probably I forgot I was trying to escape in order to save money. I remembered I wanted to leave and it seemed like the fastest way to get to leave the store was to just buy some sunglasses?

I don't remember why but she said some kind of customization wasn't available on the frames I chose but! the second pair is $60 off! so I could get a SECOND pair with a different frame but that customization it would be perfect. I remember tapping through the customization screen. I remember there was a couple in there looking at Gucci sunglasses with the other attendant. I remember waving my phone over the credit card reader? and almost leaving without my receipt.

I walk all the way to the curb and was ordering a Lyft home when I get a phone call? from the sunglasses hut. dazed, I pick up,

"hello?"

"hey this is Brenda from Sunglasses hut, ummm you live in San Francisco right, maybe I could ship your luggage to you?"

"oh, no, I'm still at the airport. I'm just outside, let me head towards the security gate so you can hand it to me"

"what?"

"you can just bring my suitcase to me, I'm still at the airport"

"oh okay good, you didn't leave because you knew you left your luggage right?"

"uh actually no, I didn't know at all"

"what the heck. you. you didn't know?

okay where are you? oh I see you I'll bring it out"

I'm like standing on the other side of the glass waving at her store and the security guy already glared at me once and barked, "hey no reentry"

she brought out my luggage and was so confused why I wasn't panicking or super grateful or anything. mostly I was tired as hell. at this point it had been well over 24 hours since I had left my bed in Lower Matecumbe.

I wandered around the underground parking garage for a little while, with my suitcase. frustrated that I couldn't find the designated share ride pickup area. turns out I went down instead of up at one point and ended up at the right place but four floors down.

The driver tries to make small talk with me and I decline. I tell my discord friends I may have accidentally spent $435 on two pairs of sunglasses that will arrive in my house in the Bay Area when I am still in Taipei.

the lyft takes over an hour to get to my house from the airport, I don't live in San Fransisco. I spend one nice day at home and then I take another Lyft back to the airport, and after a 12 hour flight, I have to deal with my family in Taiwan.

I don't want to talk about that part much. it was pretty harrowing. it was Good to see family I haven't seen in a really really long time. I was going to go back in 2021 but there was a travel restriction for Americans because we were handling the pandemic so badly.

I wasn't there for good reasons, really. but it was good to get a chance to say hi. I leave my electric toothbrush at the resort we stayed at. I call them and my aunt gives them her phone number and address so that she can mail it to California when they find it.

after 9 days it is a 10 hour flight home, and then one night sleeping at home, (I retrieve my sunglasses from the porch) and then a 4 hour flight to Houston. My flight to Key West gets delayed. I buy Starbucks for breakfast. its an hour late. the Starbucks at the airport is full of teenagers. there must be a field trip. they are out of oat milk and I settle for almond. 2 and a half hour flight to Key West. my friend finds me and then it's a 1 hour drive to the camp where my they work. I can cook and eat dinner, and another hour drive from there to where I work and sleep.

the guy who can drive me to where we work is still working so I hang around waiting for him to finish working and then he drives me back and on the way back, I realize that oh fuck the full moon isn't on Easter. it's tonight! I'm tired as hell but I've got to do it, I've got the wine and the candle and a lighter. I've never been to that beach at night but I can do it today.

[daggerzine]

Descendents, Circle Jerks, and Adolescents on 3/30/24 at Revolution Live in Ft Lauderdale, FL.

The big punk rock legacy tour came through Fort Lauderdale, and I couldn’t miss it (and thank you very much to the man who shall not be named for putting me on the guest list, I really appreciate it).

I hadn’t been to Revolution Live before, but it’s a big, sprawling venue that has an indoor stage and a bigger outdoor stage where the show was tonight. It is sort of half indoors and half outdoors, and it's tiered as well. And yes, the place was packed to the gills!

These days the Adolescents are vocalist Tony and four other guys… Kidding......The four other guys have been in the band for quite some time (guitarist Dan Root has been in the band since 2010, drummer Mike Cambra since 2013, rhythm guitarist Ian Taylor since 2014, and bassist Brad Logan since 2018), and they sounded great. They played a nice mix of old and new cuts. They also played plenty of songs from the blue album and a few other scattered hits here and there. Again they sounded excellent (and the set ending "Kids of the Black Hole" was icing on the cake)!

I had seen the Circle Jerks a couple of years ago when they came through Denver along with 7 Seconds and Negative Approach. It’s basically the same lineup with Keith Morris, Greg Hetson, and Xander Schloss along with Joey Castillo on drums. Like the Adolescents, they played most of their classic first record, Group Sex, and several other must-hear tunes ("Stars and Stripes," "Trapped," "Junk Mail," etc). Keith is always cracking jokes in between songs, but also telling stories about old LA bands that really deserve respect (ie: The Last, The Weirdos, The Crowd, etc). At 28 songs in their set, they really gave the audience their money's worth.

Finally, as the clock struck 10 PM, the Descendents came out. I can’t remember the last time I saw them, but it was sometime within the last decade  They were really on fire on this particular evening. The whole band sounded great! Milo‘s vocals sounded as great n' gravelly as always while the rest of the band: Stephen on guitar, Karl on bass, and the man himself, Bill Stevenson, on drums, all hammered it home from start to finish. They played a righteous mix from all of their records  ("Hope," "Silly Girl," "Coolidge," "Rotting Out," "Clean Sheets," etc). For the 4-song encore, they even brought out "Good Good Things," "Jean Is Dead," "Grudge," and "Get the Time." Again, a superb set! I made it home in one piece and this old man was in bed by midnight! Huzzah!

PS- sorry for the crap photos

[etherialises]

── ( rachel zegler, gender apathetic, she/they. ) ＊ ︰ alicia grace jimenez. chiron often praises their ardent temperament, but mr. d’s always going on about how they can be pretty venomous. that comes as no surprise, knowing that they’ve been at camp now for fifteen years and they turned twenty-three this year.

BASICS.

FULL NAME  alicia grace jimenez NICKNAME(S)  ali, al AGE  twenty three DATE OF BIRTH  february 21 PLACE OF BIRTH  fort lauderdale, fl CURRENT LOCATION  long island, ny ETHNICITY  white latine GENDER  gender apathetic PRONOUNS  she / they ORIENTATION  bisexual & biromantic RELIGION catholic EDUCATION LEVEL  high school, ged LIVING ARRANGEMENTS  cabin 10 FINANCIAL STATUS  lower middle class SPEAKING VOICE AND ACCENT  south floridian, “long vowels” SPOKEN LANGUAGES english, spanish, greek

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE.

FACECLAIM  rachel zegler HAIR COLOR AND STYLE  dark brown, usually long COMPLEXION  cool, mid-toned tan EYE COLOR  dark warm brown EYESIGHT  poor, typically seen with glasses on her head HEIGHT 5'2 BODY AND BUILD  petite, lithe, delicate TATTOOS none PIERCINGS  ears, singular CLOTHING STYLE  ecclectic, primarily feminine, flow-y and loose cuts, lots of skirts DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS  large mouth SIGNATURE SCENT  suntan oil and various, cheap body sprays

PERSONALITY.

LABEL  the chameleon POSITIVE TRAITS  passionate, lively, friendly, adaptable, curious NEGATIVE TRAITS  vitriolic, spiteful, irresolute, irritable, unsteady TROPES manic pixie dream girl, the broken bird, cute and psycho, damsel errant, beauty brains and brawn, the ophelia TOUCHSTONES molly gunn (uptown girls), holly golightly (breakfast at tiffany's), sally bowles (cabaret), juliet hulme (heavenly creatures), penny lane (almost famous), jenna rink (13go30), daisy buchanan (the great gatsby), cordelia chase (btvs)

BEFORE CAMP.

triggers parental death

mateo jimenez meets aphrodite much like he would have met any other woman — in the crowd, at one of his rock shows in a little divebar. he doesn't think much of it at the time. beautiful women are a perk of his job, as it happens. a false name, a pseudonym of hers, and he's never the wiser for their brief love affair. a child, much less one that he didn't ask for, was never part of the plan. a gift, she calls it, though he's less certain of that. when he recounts the story to his daughter a few years later, her eyes wide and bright, he'll tell her it was because he had so much love to give and her mother knew that he needed them. and a loving father he is, while he can be. he gives up his music, he starts working in real jobs, moving them to where the work is, turning their travel into games so alicia, named for his mother, will never suspect it was because they have to. demigods are distinctive, and she is no different. he does what he can to protect her while he's there, though that does not last as long as either of them would have liked. she's only six when he passes, an accident, she's told, when the gentleman who informed her is asking where her mother is, the answer one she doesn't have. her mother's not there, her mother's never been there for her. no extended family that she knows, only seven with no answers. their answers will change everytime she's asked, but she knows to travel on her own now, using some of the same tactics her father did to evade danger — both human and monster. she gets used to relying on only themself for safety, occasionally taking up with others, but rarely sticking with them for as long as it would take for them know her, see her do her little rituals of protection every night, pray to a mother they're certain has never listened or cared. she gets by through asking for things, an explanation that earns her confused glances from others without homes, something they haven't had luck with. she doesn't know her persuasion is magical, only that it works. it isn't long, however, before some of these friends are not quite so normal, either. she knows they aren't like her, not exactly, but they seem to know more than her. one of them tells her there's somewhere she can go, where she wouldn't have to keep on the move as much anymore, where her mother's other children are. indignation strikes her more than desire, that her mother has other children and has not brought them to the same place after all this time, but the desire to have a family again wins out.

CAMP.

after her satyr friend explains everything about the gods, she isn't sure what to think, whether to believe them. she chooses to, for the sake of meeting siblings she may have, but there's a suspicion in her at the concept of gods outside of the god that her father raised her with. it's hard to disagree once she reaches camp, though, and sees the magic for herself. she spends the bulk of her time there — mostly training, which she liked, but also learning, which she liked less. she doesn't feel the same need to keep moving, feels safety finally for the first time since her father passed. aided by having friends with similar abilities, who understand what she means when she says she can just do something, or that the words on a page swim around for them the way alphabet soup does in the pot. it makes it easy to feel at ease there, to sink into comfort they haven't had before, and they rarely leave as a result, becoming a long term resident and one of the friendlier faces for new campers. her upbringing doesn't get brought up much, certainly not by alicia themself, and any mention of parents usually gets a swift subject change. their trust in her siblings and other demigods does not extend to the gods, to the mother who neglects. despite her comfort at camp, the distance she creates by letting few people in is a safety measure. fifteen years, longer than she had been on her own or with her father, and she does not want to risk not living up to the image they have had of her for so long. so she shapes herself to what she thinks people want to see, an image of perfection as they see fit, with little to no room for error. she wants to be everything to everyone, craves approval like it's water. she just wants to be enough.

tldr pathological people pleaser with abandonment issues, a different person to everyone

[callmebrycelee]

9-1-1: LONE STAR REACTION

This reaction is for the season 4, ninth episode "Road Kill" which originally aired March 21, 2023. The episode was written by Carly Soteras and Wolfe Coleman and directed by Brenna Malloy. Spoilers ahead!

***LAST TIME ON 9-1-1: LONE STAR***

TK and Carlos enlist Mrs. Reyes to help rein in wedding planning-obsessed Owen, but their plan backfires when Andrea's inner-bridezilla is revealed. Meanwhile, Marjan aids a young couple she encounters in New Mexico, but becomes suspicious when the girlfriend slips her a message asking for help. TK and Carlos end up removing both their parents from their wedding planning duties and Marjan helps the young woman get away from her abusive boyfriend. 

Now that we're all caught up, let's talk about episode nine - ROAD KILL. In our opening scene, a young girl named Mouse (Samsara Leela Yett) is involved in an accident with her best friend Joey Dawson (Ivan Sinitsin) and his parents, Jim and Susan (Greg Cohan and Jessie Cohen) when the dad becomes distracted and drives into the oncoming lane.

Title card!

Over at the 126, Captain Strand gets a Facetime call from Marjan. She lets him know she's sold the bike he gave her and got $200 more than what she paid for it. Marjan tells Owen and the others she's ready to come and of course they're all excited to hear this. She asks them not to make a big deal of her coming back to the 126 and Owen promises her they won't. She tells them she's currently in Tucumcari, New Mexico and she will leave for Austin first thing the following morning after she gets some rest at a hotel. Owen asks her to come straight to his house once she's arrived back in Austin because he says he wants to get a headstart on paperwork. Marjan sees through this and realizes her 126 family is planning a party for her return. Marjan is fine with the idea but asks that there not be any yacht rock. Marjan ends the call and we see her with Kylie (Brooke Sorenson), the young woman she rescued from her abusive boyfriend in the last episode. We learn that Kylie has purchased a bus ticket to Fort Lauderdale and Marjan gives her an envelope full of money so she can get a fresh start. Marjan says, "I blew up your old life. The least I can do is help you start a new one."

Kylie is overwhelmed by the gesture, especially when she learns that Marjan sold her bike. Marjan assures her she will rent a car to get home. The two of them arrive at the bus and Kylie begins to have second thoughts. She begins to reflect on the good times she and her boyfriend had but thankfully Marjan is there to remind her that those fond memories she has of their relationship aren't real. She then tells her that by now Grant has posted bail and there's no better time than the present for her to get away. Kylie tells her she's scared of doing this alone and Marjan tells her she's really brave for doing so. Marjan reminds her that her sister Sahar will be nearby in Miami should she ever need help. Marjan is such a good person! Kylie thanks her and hugs her before getting on the bus. Marjan tells her to enjoy her life because she deserves it. As the bus pulls away from the station, the camera pans out to show that Grant (Cameron Cowperthwaite) is watching.

Over at the captain's house, the 126 and Carlos are busy preparing for Marjan's return. Owen is fussing over canapes and LED balloons. It seems like he's channeling all of the energy he would be spending planning TK and Carlos' wedding into Marjan's welcome back party. 

Somewhere in New Mexico, we see Marjan in a rental car en route to Austin, Texas. She notices an RV following really close and she realizes it's Grant. She attempts to have Siri dial 9-1-1 but the call keeps getting disconnected due to low reception in the area she's in. The RV rams into the rental which causes Marjan to drift into the oncoming lane. We see a glimpse of a red car before she drives off the road. The car flips and winds up in a ditch. Thankfully Marjan is still alive. When she comes to, her face is bleeding and Mouse is in the passenger seat. Marjan asks her what's happened and Mouse tells her there was an accident and she drove off the road. Marjan tells the girl she does that sometimes and this is when I remembered something very similar happening in last season's snowpocalypse episodes. Poor Marjan! Perhaps she should just stay off of highways. Marjan assesses her injuries and believes she has a couple of broken ribs and a concussion. She asks where Mouse came from and the girl tells her she was in the accident, too. Marjan remembers the red car she saw before she drove off the road and Mouse tells her that her friend and his parents are still stuck in the car. She asks Marjan to help them and Marjan says she will call for help. Unfortunately her phone is all busted up so she gets out of the rental car and asks Mouse to show her where the car she was in is located.

Meanwhile, Grant regains consciousness in the RV and he is pretty banged up as well. He finds a gun and some bullets and gets out of the RV. While leading Marjan to the car, Mouse introduces herself. Marjan does the same and the two discover they have something in common which is playing the same position in soccer. The two arrive at the car and find it flipped over. Marjan tells Mouse to sit down while she goes to check on Joey and his parents. Unfortunately there are no survivors except for Mouse. Mouse asks if they're dead and Marjan tells her she's sorry. Mouse blames herself for distracting Mr. Dawson but Marjan assumes responsibility. Knowing the outcome of this episode, I find it interesting that both Mouse and Marjan blame themselves. Marjan tells Mouse they need to go to the top of the road and find help but Mouse wants to say goodbye to her friend first. Marjan doesn't think this is a good idea and suggests she say goodbye to him in her head. Mouse asks how to do this.

Marjan says, "Close your eyes. Think of a time when you were truly happy together. Do you have a memory like that?"

Mouse recalls the time when Joey made a goal and he was so happy and he hugged her. Marjan tells her that if she holds onto that memory then Joey will always be that happy. The two then start off towards the main road.

Back in Texas, Owen's canapes are going bad and he wonders where Marjan is since she hasn't arrived yet. Mateo calls her phone but it goes straight to voicemail. Nancy suggests that maybe Marjan doesn't have service but Mateo says that if she's on the interstate she should have service. Marjan not answering her phone and being late to her welcome back party is a red flag because according to Mateo, Marjan never turns off her phone and she's never late to anything. TK asks if they should start calling hospitals. Judd tells him he has a better idea. He calls Grace who is on duty at the dispatch center. Judd tells Grace that Marjan should've arrived two hours ago and her phone is going straight to voicemail. Owen asks if Grace can try to get a location on her phone. Grace attempts to track her GPS but doesn't see her. Carlos asks her if she can tell them when the last time Marjan used her phone. Grace tells him that an hour and a half ago two calls, both under three seconds, were made to 9-1-1. Owen asks Grace to check for accidents in the area where the calls came from and Grace tells him she doesn't see anything. Paul figures out that Marjan can't be too far out from Austin based on when she left and when the calls to 9-1-1 were made. Owen enlists Judd and Paul to come with him to look for Marjan and Carlos says he's going to get in touch with the police to send someone to that area. 

Marjan and Mouse make it back to the top of the road. A pickup approaches them and Marjan flags it down. An older man named Rick (Matt Gottlieb) gets out of the truck and let me just say, this guy was acting sketchy as hell, especially when he started talking about duct tape. One thing I noticed in this scene, especially during my second viewing of the episode, is that the man only acknowledges Marjan. He does not acknowledge Mouse. The old man tells them the nearest hospital is over 40 miles away. He goes into the bed of his pickup truck and hands Marjan a bottle of water. He then tells her he will dial 9-1-1. Unfortunately he doesn't get a chance to make the call because Grant shoots him. Grant starts shooting at Marjan but she and Mouse run away. The two of them retreat to what looks like a large sewage pipe and Marjan announces she is shot.

Back at Owen's house, TK and Carlos are busy making phone calls while Mateo combs Marjan's social media accounts. Carlos tells them that the rangers haven't found anything and TK reports that no Jane Does matching Marjan's description have been admitted to any hospitals in the area, Nancy suggests they start calling tow truck companies in case Marjan is stranded on the road. Mateo tells everyone he has a bad feeling. He says they never should've let her leave in the first place. TK and Carlos being great big brothers ask him to hold it together. Grace calls Carlos' phone and tells him that she ran a search on her name in the system and it came up on a recently filed paperwork. She tells them the report was made by a woman named Kylie claiming aggravated. Marjan was a material witness to the assault which is why her name is listed on the report. Grace tells him that Kylie's boyfriend was released from custody the same day and he failed to show up for his arraignment. Not to get all soap-boxy but this is yet another reminder of how flawed our legal system is. Grant should've never left police custody in the first place but I digress. Mateo finds Kyle's instagram account.

While Grant moves Rick's body, he yells out to Marjan who can hear her from where she and Mouse are hiding. Marjan tells Mouse she needs to get away but the little girl refuses to leave her. Mouse commands her to get up otherwise they're both dead. At the top of the road, a cop car pulls up behind the pickup and an officer (Dan Southworth) gets out to talk to Grant. This scene bothers me so much because there are a few instances where the officer seems suspicious of Grant's behavior and let me just say, Grant is not doing a good job of pretending everything is good. The officer is both clueless and useless and drives away. Makes me wonder if things would've turned out differently if Grant was a person of color. Just saying. 

Marjan and Mouse find the RV and head inside. Mouse helps Marjan pack her gunshot wound in hopes of slowing down the bleeding. Marjan then finds Chekov's flare gun and grabs it. Marjan starts to drift in and out of consciousness while Grant goes looking for her. Marjan and Mouse manage to get out of the RV before Grant arrives but not before Marjan draws a sign in blood to alert anyone who comes looking for her. This game of cat and mouse definitely had me on the edge of my seat. 

Back at Owen's house, Carlos relays the information he got from Grace to Owen, Judd, and Paul. Mateo gets a DM from Kylie saying she is on a bus to Fort Lauderdale so the others know that she is not with Marjan. Owen tells Mateo to get her on the phone. Kylie receives a call from Carlos and he tells her he's a friend of Marjan Marwani. Owen tells her that Marjan is missing and he and the others have not heard from her since yesterday. Kylie says she hopes Grant hasn't done something to her. She tells Owen that Marjan put her on a bus to get her away from him. Kylie lets Owen know that the RV she and Grant were driving belongs to Grant's father and that it has lojack. Owen tells Carlos to fill Grace in so she can locate the RV. Kylie says that Marjan is a hero. Owen agrees with her.

Marjan comes to after passing out and once again she begs Mouse to leave her. She tells her that she's lost too much blood and she's not going to make it. Mouse, once again, refuses to leave her. She tells her to take her hand and get up. Marjan summons all of her strength and the two head into another sewage pipe but this one is blocked off by a gate on one side preventing them from exiting through it. 

Grace directs Owen to the location of where Grant's RV should be but he doesn't see anything. Grace tells him he should be right on top of it. Owen sees the pickup truck that Rick was driving and he, Paul, and Judd get out to look for signs of Marjan. Judd finds Rick's body on the ground. Owen says he will call it in and they need to split up to look for Marjan.

Grant finds Marjan and Mouse and prepares to shoot them. He stops when they hear Owen, Paul, and Judd calling for her. Grant figures that since Marjan is in rough shape, he doesn't have to waste a bullet on her. Instead, he goes to finish her off with his bare hands. As he advances towards her, Marjan takes out the flare gun she found in the RV and shoots him in the neck. I honestly didn't know flare guns could be used as weapons but it looks like it did quite a bit of damage to Grant. His neck is on fire. Yikes! He starts to choke on his own blood and it looks like Grant is dead. Marjan passes out right as the fire the flare gun started really starts to burn. Thankfully, Owen finds her in the nick of time. Marjan tells him to take Mouse first and Owen looks confused. Yet another sign of the twist that is about to be revealed. Mouse tells Marjan she will be okay and Owen picks Marjan and takes her back to his truck.

Tommy makes her appearance in this episode when she delivers some cronuts to the hospital waiting room where everyone's gathered. I've never had a cronut before but they sound delicious. One thing I love about this show is that when one of our first responders is down, the rest of them rally to show support. I love that. Of course TK and Carlos are the ones who go for the cronuts. Tommy asks how Marjan is doing and Grace tells her she is good and stable. Aside from sustaining a bullet to her abdomen, she also has two broken ribs, a concussion and some smoke inhalation. Goodness! There's a funny moment where Tommy talks about Izzy's three and a half-hour dance recital and Judd jokes that he hopes that Charley stays away from extracurricular activities.

Owen and Paul arrive with coffee right as Marjan's doctor, Dr. Cortes (Armand Vasquez) comes out to let them all know that Marjan's surgery was a success. Mateo asks if they are allowed to see her and Dr. Cortes says yes but only two at a time. Owen and Paul volunteer to see her first and when they arrive in her room she is happy to see them. Marjan is pretty groggy and she's on a LOT of painkillers. Marjan thanks Owen for saving her but he tells her she saved herself. Owen asks about Grant and Paul tells her he got what he deserved so I guess that means he's dead? Or in jail? I wish we got a more concrete answer. Owen does confirm the fate of Rick, the guy who tried to help Marjan. Poor guy didn't deserve that at all. Marjan then asks about the other car - the station wagon with the family inside. Owen tells her there wasn't another vehicle. Marjan is confused by this information. Owen asks if "Mouse" means anything to her and she says yes right as a nurse brings her flowers. When Paul asks her who the flowers are from, we get a flashback. 

Waleed and Nasreen (Nicky Boulos and Vera Hairabedian) arrive at the hospital and rush to their daughter's room. Mouse is distraught about Joey and his parents. Marjan tells them she felt so alone but her mother reminds her that with Allah she is never alone. Her father tells her that he and her mother love her very much and her mother refers to her as their "sweet, little mouse". Plot twist!!! Mouse is actually Marjan! More on that later! 

Back in the present, Marjan reads the card that came with the flowers and see that they're from her parents. End of episode.

What a great episode and what a great payoff to the Marjan leaves the 126 plot. I'm so happy we have Marjan back and I'm equally ecstatic we got a bit of her backstory. A few seasons ago we learned she was arranged to be married to her childhood friend but that's about all we knew about her other than her Firefox persona and her roller derby playing. I'm also glad we got to see Natacha Karam show off her acting chops. Not only is she one of the most stunning people I have ever seen on-screen, she can do action, comedy, and drama. I hope we continue to learn more about her because even though this can feel like the Owen Strand and Tarlos show at times, Marjan Marwani is particularly beloved by the fandom.

Let's talk about the episode's twist. I figured it out in the first scene but there were moments where I thought Mouse was really there. Upon second viewing of the episode, I noticed the car that the Mr. Dawson nearly collides with is not the rental car that Marjan was driving. However, in the scene where Marjan is hit by Grant's RV, she is already starting to lose consciousness when she sees a red vehicle approaching her. Another thing I noticed watching the episode again is that none of the characters Marjan encounters after the accident acknowledge Mouse's existence. When I knew for sure that Mouse was a figment of Marjan's imagination is when Owen finds her and she asks him to take Mouse first. Owen gives her the look Hen Wilson gave him when he was hallucinating Tim Rosewater back in season two. 

What I found particularly interesting is that when Mouse blames herself for Mr. Dawson crashing the station wagon, Marjan interjects and says it's her fault. I think this is a sign that even years later, Marjan still blames herself for the accident that killed her best friend and his parents. I also thought that Marjan's ability to survive and take care of herself after the accident until help came speaks to that old adage that you can't help others until you first learn to help yourself. Marjan's origin story isn't one of triumph. It's actually one of loss. However, Marjan was able to keep her wits about her and her inability to save her best friend became the thing that motivated her to want to save others and Marjan has saved a LOT of people. 

Well, we've gotten a lot of screen time with Marjan Marwani these last few episodes, so I wonder which of our characters will get focused on next. We still have quite a few episodes left in season 4. Give me some Judd and Grace, please, because they've really taken a backseat this season. Also, give me some more Paul and Asha and also give me some Mateo and some Nancy. Then I'll officially be happy. Oh, and one more thing - please bring Billy Tyson back because I miss that ornery asshole so much! Maybe I'll end up getting what I want. Until next time ...

[beardedmrbean]

Three men are facing multiple charges after authorities said they kidnapped a man at gunpoint before waterboarding him and threatening to kill him even after realizing they'd meant to kidnap his coworker, who they tried to lure out of a strip club.

Brothers Jeffry Arista, 32, and Jonathan Arista, 29, and Raymond Gomez are facing charges including kidnapping, conspiracy to kidnap, aggravated assault and battery, records showed.

The bizarre incident unfolded Friday morning when the victim was leaving his Fort Lauderdale home and was approached by one of the kidnappers, who was armed and wearing police attire with a ballistic vest and gold badge on his belt, an arrest affidavit said.

The kidnapper forced the victim into a white Dodge Charger with a police light driven by a second kidnapper, the affidavit said.

The victim was forced to wear a head covering as the kidnappers drove to an Airbnb in Plantation, tossing the victim's phone out of the car along the way, authorities said.

Once they arrived at the Plantation home, they were met by a third kidnappper, who removed his mask and started to question the victim and asked him to identify himself, "implying they had kidnapped the wrong individual," the affidavit said.

The kidnappers confirmed they'd taken the wrong man when they took out his wallet and saw his ID, the affidavit said.

Even after realizing they had the wrong person, the kidnappers forced the man into a bathroom, covered his face with four or five black masks and started waterboarding him by pouring buckets of water on him, the affidavit said.

The affidavit said the victim "thought he was going to drown."

They also threatened to kill him while pointing guns, Tasers and an electric drill at him, authorities said.

The kidnappers learned the intended target and the victim's coworker was at the Booby Trap gentlemen's club in Pompano Beach, so they took the victim there in a Porsche, authorities said.

Once there, the kidnappers ordered the victim to go inside and lure out the intended target, but once inside the victim called law enforcement, the affidavit said.

All three suspects were taken into custody, authorities said.

According to the affidavit, Gomez told investigators that he and the Arista brothers were involved in the kidnapping and that they were being directed by another unknown man, who wanted the intended target kidnapped over a monetary debt.

During one of the suspects' appearance in bond court, a defense attorney discussed the bizarre accusations in the case.

"I gotta tell you judge, in the history of kidnappings, this would be the first time someone gets kidnapped then taken to a strip club, I've never heard of that before," he said.

"I was about to say, I think there's a long list of husbands who have claimed exactly that in the past," the judge responded. "We've all been taken against our will."

If convicted, each defendant faces a maximum sentence of life in prison, authorities said.

U.S. Attorney Markenzy Lapointe for the Southern District of Florida and Special Agent in Charge Jeffrey B. Veltri of the FBI, Miami Field Office, announced the pending criminal complaint charges.

FBI Miami investigated the case, with assistance from the Broward Sheriff’s Office and Fort Lauderdale Police Department.