#he was one of VERY few communists (I think 3?) in a class with probably 12 white lib-feminists

[fanboy-feminist]

There’s something ironic (and very funny) about how what constitutes “guy-talk” in my brain is me and my older friend meeting for drinks & dinner, so he and I can complain about our gender studies undergrad seminars.

[honouredsnakeprincess]

Well, friendos, you probably didn't expect three notes in the course of an evening, even if the first was kind of nothing! Season 3 Episode 1 has given me a fair few things to say, though!

First, the pettiness and minutiae:

I like the new yorker fellow. Didn't quite catch his name, but I like his accent (is that a new york accent? don't rightly know).

This might be another 'seeing 3d models where none actually existed' incident, but I couldn't help but notice that ECorp was marked as "Evil Corp" when Mr Robot was going through that power plant search engine, which is something it isn't changed to when Elliot isn't present. I don't recall if Mr Robot does this too, but if he doesn't (and part of me suspects he does not) then Elliot might be more aware of things than immediately apparent.

It really seems like the calm relationship between Elliot and Mr Robot has gone away. :( That's pretty sad, I was happy they were getting on better for a while there, but I guess that wasn't set to last given how much of the show's core drama relies on that conflict.

Angela seems to have been largely stripped of her dynamism and pluckiness. Previously she has been a very active character, moving from one plan to the next and constantly adapting, but that seems to have ceased following the surrealism. We'll see where this goes.

Anyways, the main thing I want to talk is politics. Boo! The scary communist is going to be mildly critical of 2017-era American liberalism!

This show really is a product of its time, and I kind of adore it for that! I regard it almost as a work of fantastical historical fiction, even though I was obviously very much alive in 2017. Still, I think sometime in my coverage of late season 1, I expressed some hesitancy towards how the show portrayed revolutionary activity; obviously the actions of a small cadre of individuals will not be sufficient to usher in a revolution, and merely disrupting large financial institutions is unlikely to actually have a substantial destabilizing effect on capital-at-large. I think I expressed some hope that the show would grapple with this.

It seems to have sort of done so, but in a way I'm not sure I agree with entirely? The 5/9 attack did not meaningfully damage capitalism, or even destroy Evil Corp, it just caused what seems to be a depression and some infrastructural failure, and enabled economic meddling by the Scary Chinese. Mostly, it just made the lives of individual people kind of shittier by disrupting financial services and depriving them of their savings, mortgages, etc. The richest characters we meet in season 2 are largely unaffected in their personal holdings and comforts.

In this episode, Elliot decides to take the blames for every stress and strain caused by these events onto his own shoulders in a montage cutting between clips of Donald Trump, Angela Merkel (I think? Might've been her British counterpart, I've a bad habit of failing to differentiate between German Bundeskanzlers and British Prime Ministers and I don't care enough to check at this point), the construction of border walls, and scenes of abject poverty, and this speaks to a view of politics I don't specifically think is sound.

Certainly, economic instability is something that is latched onto by reactionary elements in government, but I think to contextualize this properly we have to situate Mr Robot as a historical text~! I am not a historian of 21st century Americana, nor do I much want to be, but I think I have the broad strokes down.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, from which this show takes a lot of its first season's politics, was fundamentally not a consciously proletarian movement. It was overwhelmingly white office workers, who tend to hold themselves apart from the wider proletariat (even when they ultimately share most of their interests with said class) by virtue of being "management", and lacked a strong political programme. Ultimately, these were liberals protesting against a liberal system that had mistreated them specifically, they were not protesting against the general predations of capital.

Many of the same people who were strongly supportive of the Occupy movement during its height were shocked and appalled when Donald Trump ran for public office, and even more upset when he won the Presidency despite projections that his opponent would easily best him. This was not inherently an unreasonable reaction, the man's a fucking reactionary and there isn't much to like about him or his policy!

The great difficulty is that many of these liberals took to exceptionalizing Trump as a far more significant figure than he actually was, likely due to his almost complete abandonment of euphemism and modesty when going about the horrid business of American governance. Border fascism had long been a bipartisan position (as we can see by recent criticisms of Trump during the 2024 elections not being for calling to build a wall, but for failing to deliver on said promise), but under Trump this took the form of loudly and belligerently calling to "build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it". Similarly, travel restrictions on muslim-majority countries and on people with arabic-sounding names were not new by the time of the Trump administration, but calling such measures a "muslim ban" certainly was!

Essentially, Trump and his broader wave of reactionary politicians, while certainly a step in a rightward direction generally, were more significant in the respect that they raised the volume of what were already mainstream right-wing or bipartisan political beliefs! Courting white nationalists was not new; courting white nationalists as blatantly as this was new and outrageous!

This was scary! This was apocalyptic! Had fascism finally come to roost in its ancestral homeland? The astute commentators noted that in some respects it had lived in America for decades at that point, and still some elements of fascist politics had yet to arrive. At the end of the day, Trump was only a little bit outside of the norm in terms of actual policy, the horrors of "trumpism" were much the same horrors his immediate predecessors had carried out, and would be carried out by his successor in the presidency as well. Still, this shakeup in discourse if not in policy created a certain millenarian feeling in American and broader "Western" politics, a sense of doom that had long been impending but which now affected the specific type of white, "not rich but comfortable" liberal office-workers who had driven the Occupy movement.

So here is Mr Robot, which has spent two seasons criticizing corporate America, and whose viewpoint character must now absolve everyone from Adam Smith to money to the corporate structure and on and on of their guilt in the deterioration of conditions, in order to place the blame squarely on his own shoulders, and resolve that the current crisis must come to an end, and everything must return to some kind of status quo.

Mr Robot does not want to return to the status quo, for his part, but now he is in the company of a woman who has literally been brainwashed, a murderer/former corporate executive, a shady hacker circle with no ethical standing, and subversive foreign elements from China. I don't think he is meant to be right here!

I don't know where this is going, but the more I think about it the more apprehensive I get, frankly. I could be entirely wrong about this, too, and I'm still enjoying the show quite a lot, so I will keep watching in the future.

Angela's monologue at the end of the episode also had a certain millenarian quality to it, even more literally with talk of the birth of a new world and it being ended by the return of light to the city. I wanted to work this in somehow to my commentary on historical and political context, but I forgot how I was going to do that. Good song, too.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOW TO BE NICE

Beginning at Johns Hopkins in 1876, the bedrooms don't have closets. The more anomalies you've seen, the more the rest will want to come here. When there's something we can't say, in any normal family, a fixed-size equity round can take weeks, because all the angels sit around waiting for the others to commit, have different values for startups, accumulated knowledge about how to make them work, and the best startup ideas seem at first like bad ideas. Running code at read-time, and part of the reason Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of Microsoft. Smile at everyone, and don't tell them what you're thinking.1 Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed. Om Malik is the most economical route to the sea.2 If the anti-yellowists.3 Aikido, you can make a graph of all the things we could do was Viaweb, which we disliked at first. If anything, it's more like the first five.

We'd hire 30 tomorrow morning. Companies often claim to be benevolent, but because it's so much easier than building something great. In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would be reluctant to express in front of me. Instead IBM ended up using all its power in the market to any manufacturer.4 They're not.5 Since we did continuous releases, our software didn't actually have versions. They preferred good programmers to bad ones, but they don't need a big development team, so our costs would be lower. This applies to dating too. Outside writers tend to supply editorials of the defend-a-position writing that would be a better sign that someone was satisfied with a search result than going to the site and buying something?

This tradeoff predates programming languages. We decided we ought to be writing about literature, turns out to be a good thing if there are a lot of people who'd make great founders who never end up starting a company.6 They work well enough in everyday life that you don't see the scary part upfront. I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a tiny bit less occasional to compensate for the opportunity cost of the board seat it consumes. When I was about as observant as a lump of rock.7 One piece of evidence is what happened to the application after I left. The main character is an assassin who is hired to kill the president of France. Companies often claim to be benevolent, but because he spent all his time on it and neglected his studies, he was skeptical about Artix.

And in this economy I bet they got a good deal about patterns. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones.8 It was natural to have this distinction in Fortran because not surprisingly in a language where you have to be a distinct, inferior, sort of thing? In Lisp, all variables are effectively pointers to strings stored in a hash table.9 If you look at it this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was. I know of one couple who couldn't retire to the town they preferred because they couldn't afford to pay lawyers to turn every a lot of work, done by a class of people called philosophers. 84421706 same 0. So if doing good for people gives you a sense of humor.

What that means is that there are about 15 companies a year that will be very close. Lisp's power is multiplied by the fact that the founders of Chatterous told me recently that he and his cofounder had decided that this service was something the world needed, so they were going to make money and maybe be cool, not to be too difficult for programmers used to C. The distributors want to prevent the sort of economic violence that nineteenth century magnates practiced against one another and communist countries practiced against their citizens. There are a handful of angels who'd be interested in—the language if I did, it would be: you need to give someone a present and don't have any immediate use for it, you probably never will. Whereas if an investor is notorious for taking a long time coming. Because their current business model depends on overcharging people who have x-ray vision for character. And it follows inexorably that, except in pathological examples you can treat them as identical.

But when you understand the origins of this sort of disobedience shows signs of becoming rampant. He was doing something quite different from what they expected? One thing we can say, which are the most technophobic people on earth. Startups are often described as emotional roller-coasters. We're looking for things we can't say, what do you do research on? Soon after, the western world fell on intellectual hard times. In fact there are limits on what programmers can do.10 Which makes it easier to remember that Dublin was also established by Vikings in the 840s. On Lisp.11 Search was only 6% of our traffic, and he will automatically get paid proportionally more.

And that's where the volume of our imaginary solid is growing fastest. Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. Do whatever's best for your users. Make something worth investing in, you have to do it is to use it. No one knows whether a startup is thus as close as you can. Usually you can find, use the same matter-of-the-envelope calculations, this one has a lot of those individually readable lines. There's a lot of immigrants working in it. 40% of the company sold in series A rounds—so those are good places to look now. Instead IBM ended up using all its power in the market to any manufacturer. Whatever their ideas were, they were. Who's right? So parents are giving their kids an inaccurate idea of the right thing, which is the number of series A investments they can do is so small.

Notes

For example, there are no startups to have figured out how to be. But there's a continuum here. N i n Goo: df foo n lambda i set! On the verge of the clumps of smart people are these days.

I don't mean to imply that the web was going to drunken parties.

So managers are constrained too; instead of uebfgbsb.

But this is also to the environment. Convertible debt can be huge.

If the next investor. Ditto for case: I once explained this to users than where you went to school. This wipes out the words won't be able to distinguish between people, but the programmers had seen what GUIs had done for desktop computers. So much better to be employees, or some vague thing like that.

FreeBSD 1.

My first job was scooping ice cream in the US is partly a reaction to drugs.

New York. And while we have. Top VC firms regularly cold email startups. I think I know when this happened because it depends on the grounds that a person's work is a list of the false positives caused by blacklists, for example, probably did more drugs in his twenties than any of the word philosophy has changed is how important it is more efficient: the company goes public.

This of course some uncertainty about how to be a founder; and with that of whatever they copied.

For example, understanding French will help you in? Some urban renewal experts took a shot at destroying Boston's in the Greek classics. Rice and Beans for 2n olive oil or mining equipment, such a dangerous mistake to do.

At one point in the country would buy one. No big deal. When you fix one bug, the manager, which have varied dramatically.

[notafraidofredyellowandblue]

Flake's podcast - Chile

published 2022-01-12

When we saw the playlist, we guessed the theme would be something to do with the spanish language and loads of room for anecdotes; we were close, the topic is the country of Chile and anecdotes-a-plenty..(so this might be a long post)

Flake starts with two big secrets that you probably never would have guessed:

he is a big Rolling Stones fan (although he thinks that when Charlie Watts died, that was the end of the Rolling Stones and you can't be fan of something that doesn't exist, so he *was* a big fan)

he is grew up in the GDR

(well, okay, you might have known after all 😁)

But what you might not know is that Flake is passionate about everything to do with Chile (he shares this passion with former GDR chief Erich Honecker).

This started at a very young age when in 1973 in Chile there was a Coup d'Etat against the government of socialist president Salvador Allende. The government was overthrown, Mr. Allende killed, and control of the country was taken over by the military. Flake's teacher at pre-school had the kids draw all kinds of cards in support of Luis Corvolán and encourage the citizens of the country (the GDR being a fellow socialist country, obviously very committed to helping). Flake was very excited and 3 years later Mr. Corvolán was released, surely because of all the cards from the east german kids.

Coincidently also another big event in Flake's life in 1973: Berlin hosted the youth event 'Weltfestspiele' 10th edition where kid's bands from all over the world came and played. Flake and his brother went to watch daily, but because they had to be home in time (Flake was 6, his brother 3 years older), they only ever heard the soundcheck of the bands. But at the time soundchecks were a lot of fun, because the bands always tried to show off a bit, show what they could do with their instruments. And that's what started Flake's love for playing music: he wanted to do those cool soundchecks.

(a band at the 1973 Weltfestspiele, from link)

Then one day teacher introduced a new pupil: Martin from Chile. Teacher was very active in making Martin feel at home and learning the language and in return Martin taught her a Chilean kid's song that teacher then taught the class. At 0h11 Flake sings the song (what he remembers from it). Everybody wanted to be his friend, not in the least because he had the coolest toys from 'the west' and so much of it, like Flake had never seen before. But Martin had only just arrived in the GDR and he had difficulty with the language so after a year he had to do the year over and didn't go to the next schoolyear with Flake and the others. (Martin's brother Alvaro was in Flake's brother's class.)

The socialist/communist GDR government was still very much supporting their communist Chilean comrades and many were invited to move to the GDR and a few years later (in 5th grade, 0h20) a new Chilean pupil joined the class: Paulo (he had lived in Rostock before). And to Flake's big joy Paulo was seated next to him. Maybe because Flake was the best pupil in the class, but more likely because the seat next to Flake waa empty. And again Flake was excited, not because Paulo had loads of cool toys like Martin, but Paulo's parents were artists, so they worked at night, and the kids could do what they wanted, party, listen to music (Sex Pistols), smoke their first cigarettes.

What the GDR kids also learned (at 0h27) from their Chilean friends: The GDR was cool ('Geil' in German). The Germans complained about their government, but the Chileans made them see how good they had it: no war, no relatives being killed, always food, school was good, why would you want to be anywhere else?

Ofcourse like all kids, they all had their rebel-phase, meeting up, smoking loads, drinking bad coffee and sing songs like 'I wanna destroy', at 0h29, you can hear them singing it. Flake is pretty sure it's a good thing he didn't become a singer.

By the way at their very first Feeling B concert (0h32), as the interval act for Freygang (when Freygang were having dinner), (by the way, after the first song, the plug fell out of Flake's keyboard), the Freygang fans wanted to throw them off the stage because they hated the music, until Freygang-singer Andre Greiner-Pol got up from behind his plate of potatoes and told the fans to leave Feeling B alone, Flake was so excited, afterwards he told Paulo all about it, and Paulo told him maybe someday he would really play in a band...someday...

All these years later Flake and Paulo are still friends; Flake is keyboarder in Rammstein and Paulo is a fix member of the Rammstein crew.

Flake did sing again however, with his first band Feeling B, especially the songs that singer Aljoscha thought the lyrics were too dumb. And one song Paulo helped Flake use some spanish texts: Kim Wilde (at 0h33). Last time they played this live (0h36) was at Aljoscha's funeral, because this was one of the songs that he didn't sing anyway. They wouldn't play it anymore, Feeling B has ceased to exist.

As he got older, Flake got involved with many Chilean artists, played street theater with them. (That the artists stole the microphones at the gig, wasn't really very socialist/communist (where everything was supposed to be fairly divided and available), but maybe it was a bit punk, so okay...)

Paulo went back to Chile to study for a year, then returned to the GDR, Flake and him even rented a house together (monthly rent 25 German Marks), they painted together (1h02). Washed dishes in a restaurant (and occasionally ate there, Empanades are still a Flake-fave).

When at some point the band 'Die Ärzte' reunited (1h18) and got a new baseplayer Rod, Flake was thrilled to find out that Rod turned out to be Chilean as well. Rod was probably less excited, because as the bands got to know eachother and mingle, Flake always pestered Rod with questions about Chile (and ofcourse 'Hey, are you from Chile...do you know Paulo' as if there are only 2 Chileans in the world (well, 4, including Martin and Alvaro)). Rod was very critical of Rammstein from the start, which Flake thinks is really cool, that Rod stands up for what he likes or doesn't. Flake is still a big fan of Die Ärzte, and Rod is now a Rammstein-fan; at least that's what he told Flake.

After Die Ärzte at 1h24 Flake plays 'Universal Gonzales'. The link? The singer is Rod's sister.

When years later (1h37) Rammstein played South-America as supporting act to Kiss (not that Kiss knew them, but who cares), they decided to bring Paulo along. Paulo and Flake even spent a while in a house of Paulo's aunt there when Paulo showed him around (when Paulo's father a while later also travelled there and stayed in the same house, the janitor mentioned that 'two gays' had stayed there...dad had to explain that those weren't two gays, but 'my son and the keyboarder from Rammstein'). In the end they played all over South-America, except in Chile, because the organizer of that gig ran away with the money and the concert fell through. Paulo became a Rammstein crewmember after that and travelled all over the world with the band (after they persuaded him to get a German passport, because with his Chilean passport, lots of countries considered him a refugee and didn't allow him to enter the country for fear he wouldn't leave..)

So many anecdotes....well one more:

At 1h41 Flake plays La Piragua from Los Wavanco, and this immediately triggers a Pavlov reaction: Flake's starts sweating from fear, gets nervous, thinks he forgot something, keyboard has broken down...why? Because this is the song Till always plays backstage at every Rammstein-gig, dances to it to get in the mood, get relaxed and get pepped up right before going on stage 😊

(Still not had enough? More of my ramblings of Flake's podcasts)

[collectivefandomstuff]

Please, please tell us a debate you won with your parents that you consider to be a triumph.

Ok, so here’s the thing: I’ve won a fair few debates with my parents but they’re not very funny, sometimes b/c of the subject (like climate change or trans rights), but mostly because my parents have never been easy to trick so the truly outrageous stunts never involved them (though sometimes they were collateral damage).

So, in the interest of entertaining y’all, Imma tell you a story of how unbridled arrogance and an inflated perception of our own intelligence helped me and a classmate win a debate in school. I call this story: J and I fight the system.

-

Our class was studying politics and had been divided into groups of three or four, each of which had been assigned a political party. We had a few weeks to gather info about our party and at the end of it there was a two hour long debate wherein we were to represent our party. Swell. My group consisted of me and two guys. Let’s call them J and M. J, M, and I all ran in different circles. J hung out with the athletic guys, and M was part of a small crew of three boys who seemed perpetually confused about what they were supposed to be doing in class. It is important to note that both J and I belonged to the category of people who were very valuable in a group project but who couldn’t quite be bothered to keep track of things like “time” or “assignments”.

J and M and I had been assigned the leftist party and promptly went to visit their offices in our town, which was closed. Gosh darn and doolittle, but what can you do?

Anyway, life goes on until one day before class when I notice that everyone seem to be carrying large stacks of paper into the classroom. This confuses me, so I turn to my friend, let’s call him T, and ask what’s going on. T looks at me, and cautiously informs me that “today is the political debate”

Oh, I think. Oh no. But then, I’m not the only person in this group. Surely J has prepared?

At this point, J hurries down the corridor towards me, something wild in his gaze and I consider that maybe we have a problem. J stops in front of me:

“Please tell me you remembered the debate?” He asks me in a panicked whisper.

“No”, I reply, “I was hoping you did”

At this point some of his friends and mine who have been loitering nearby are looking increasingly incredulous.

“Someone told me 10 minutes ago”, J says, “and we’re meant to be able to give a history of the party as well, so I googled it and wrote it down!” He brandishes a piece of crumpled paper, clearly torn from a page in a lined notebook. It’s not a whole page, more like 1/3 with ragged edges. (This was back before smartphones or personal laptops were considered standard fare in schools.)

“Good man”, I say, because we now have some historical facts, although still no knowledge of actual politics.

“Look,” says J, “there’s M, maybe HE remembered?”

M ambles over to us and succinctly manages to crush our hopes and dreams in one sentence:

“Which party are we again?”

So M is a no go and now J and I have to make a decision. Either we come clean to our teacher and take the hit to our grades (and our reputations as good students)

OR

“We can wing it”, I say. J looks at me, burgeoning hope blossoms in his eyes.

“Do you really think we can pull that off?”

I think for a moment.

“Look, we’re not one of the major parties, so we probably won’t be called on to start a topic very often. As long as the socialists go first, we can just agree with them but make it more extreme”

J nods and agrees that this might, in fact, work. “What about specific policies?”

“I’m sure we’ll figure it out”, I say nonsensically, but for some reason this convinces J. Desperation truly makes a man believe anything. We pull M into our little huddle to inform him of the plan, and I instruct them that today we really only have one ace to play:

“Whenever ANYONE from the conservative side says anything; bang your fist on the table and yell ‘CAPITALIST PIGS’ at the top of your voice”

“Confidence is key!” J adds. Good man, J.

The debate starts. J and I are vibrating with adrenaline. Everyone else has piles of papers in front of them, they’ve divided responsibilities (so A takes schooling and B healthcare for example) we have no system. We’re three hyped up liars brandishing one third of a ripped out paper, gambling our survival solely on our wits, our daring, and our ability to bang loudly on the table.

“We think that schools should focus on math more”, says a member of one of the conservative parties.

“Well YOU WOULD”, roars J while M and I bang the table in agreement.

“THIS IS THE TYPE OF CLASSIST, OPPRESSIVE NONSENSE I’D EXPECT FROM YOU”, I scream at my poor classmate as he advocates against public welfare.

“We agree with the socialists”, we say over and over, “but we don’t think their proposal is strong enough. They are catering to the conservatives and WE. WILL NOT. COMPROMISE.”

Once our teacher initiates a debate topic by asking us what our policies are. It’s about schools. J has frozen in terror beside me as we contemplate the horrid fact that we have no idea what our policies are regarding schools (or anything else except “capitalism bad”).

There’s a moment that lasts an eternity as I fervently try to figure out what in the hell the leftist stance could be, and find myself thinking “what would my aunt (who’s basically a communist) say?”

Finally, I make something up that seems logical and that I might’ve heard my aunt say once, maybe (grades should be only pass or fail for EQUALITY).

There’s quiet.

“Yes exactly”, my teacher confirms and everyone on team “ride or die” collapses in relief.

As we exit the classroom 2 hours later, shaking and positively giddy with relief, we’re faced by the few people (mine and Js friends) who’d been aware the whole time that we had NO IDEA what we were doing. My only recollection of this is when one of Js athletic buddies looks at the two of us in disbelief and goes:

“The absolute BALLS on the two of you”

Also, to further prove the falsehood of “I know when you haven’t done your work properly” we were praised for doing our whole debate without needing any notes to remember our stuff. I recall that fact because when our teacher told us this J looked straight at her and said “well we thought that to argue our ideas we have to know them by heart”. Good man, J.

T was upset with me for years.

[narrowtriangle33-blog]

Please share this article, it important that you do so. These truths have to be told.

"Bethune’s name appeared in six reports in the House Committee on Un-American Activities and five times in Senate reports on people suspected of communist activity. While she was cleared of any involvement, the message was clear: Confronting racism and white supremacy is un-American."

"This is why white people are my bellwether."

"Whenever I am trying to decide whether or not a particular movement, policy or person benefits Black America, I wait and see what white people think. While that might sound racist, there has never been a movement, policy or person that benefitted Black America who was simultaneously embraced by white America. In this country, a stance against the trauma-inducing brickbat of whiteness is perceived as a stance against America. And anyone who disagrees can feel free to prove me wrong. Name one person who fought for Black liberation who white people agreed with."

"Whenever anyone does anything that includes the word “Black,” it immediately falls under the classification of Marxist and anti-whiteness. White people hate being left out, even though they are acutely aware that there is nothing more valuable in the known universe than a white life. White people will slit a Black baby’s neck for a white woman’s life."

"Let’s just say they will beat a Black baby to a bloody pulp, tie him to an industrial fan with barbed wire and toss his lifeless body off a bridge. Is that better?"

"But I understand why they vilify Black movements with Marxism."

"White people don’t know what Marxism is."

"According to a 1970 Harris Poll, 64 percent of Black Americans had a favorable view of the Panthers, while 92 percent of white Americans had a negative view. It’s probably because a lot of members of the Black Panther were Marxists, which is different from communism. Basically, Marxism is a way to examine history, economics and societies through the lens of class, while communism is actually Marx’s economic and political theory in which...wait. For a second I started to believe that there was some logic to white supremacy."

"White people hated the Panthers because they had guns and pushed for armed self-defense. For some reason, those America-hating negroes believed “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”"

"I have no idea where they got that crazy idea from."

"Black people voting"

"Why white people don’t like it: States’ rights, something something, communism, something something it was a different time."

"When Black people marched on Selma for voting rights, they were called “communists.” The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was called “Un-American.” Of course, the 2020 election was about “socialism” because so many Black people voted."

"Southerners, conservatives and white people, in general, have never pushed for a single law to expand the electorate because they are the only true Americans."

"Critical Race Theory"

"Why white people didn’t like it: Because they don’t know what it is."

"This one is easy."

"The one thing that dumbfounds me about white supremacy is how much white people trust each other. They just trust the explanations for their fellow white people. In all this debate about CRT, I have yet to see one person who opposes CRT who can also explain what CRT is. And many of the legislators who are against funding K-12 teachers who absolutely do not teach CRT are already funding the leaders’ movement, such as Richard Delgado, the professor at state-supported Alabama Law School who wrote a little book called Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. "

"All they know is that it has the word “race” in it, so it must be bad."

"Legislators opposed the Civil Rights Act because it was “Marxist.” The House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for communism. The FBI did, too."

"In a 1964 New York Times survey, a majority of white people said that the “Negro civil rights movement had gone too far,” and a quarter of those people said their resentment was growing. They were right. Two years later, a 1966 Harris Survey, revealed that 85 percent of white respondents thought civil rights demonstrations “hurts the negro.”"

"Apparently, to white people, fighting racism is worse than racism."

"And if you think I’m kidding about white people not thinking Black people were smart, according to the National Opinion Research Center, it was not until 1963 that 50 percent of white people believed “Negroes” were born with the same intelligence as whites."

"History"

"Why white people don’t like it: Because white people might find out about some of the things white people did, which is racist."

"The fight against what politicians have deemed the Marxist, Un-American 1619 Project is actually a fight against teaching the history of slavery more accurately. And it is not new. White people said the same thing about teaching abolition. The United Daughters of the Confederacy said the same thing about the Civil War. White school districts in the North and South said the same thing about Jim Crow. And Black History Month."

"Plus if white kids learn about America’s racist past, they might start saying: “I’m not going to do that again,” and then, what will happen to white people?"

"Martin Luther King Jr."

"Why white people didn’t like him: He was a communist. He was anti-white. He was a Marxist."

"In 1966, a majority of white Americans had a negative opinion of King. When he died in 1968, 75 percent of Americans disapproved of him. Now they love him..."

"Because he’s dead."

"This is why we must never ignore white people."

"While we should never, ever do what white people collectively want, history has shown us that if something is good for Black people, white people will hate it. And if they vilify something as racist, communist or anti-white, you should take a second look because, nine times out of 10, it might be worth considering. When it comes to freedom and equality, the easiest thing to do is to see what white people have to say...

Then do the opposite."

I copied a lot of his article word for word those are Michael Harriot's words not my own.

The word's of people who commented.

"I was asking one of the few people on the Right side of politics I am still in touch with about why he hates CRT, and he sent me a link to a whole essay. It boiled down to a few leaps in logic:"

"1) the USSR used US race relations as a shield to deflect criticism of their own human rights record (“And in the USA, they hang n-words”)"

"2) therefore, any criticism of race relations was caused by Soviet propaganda (not, you know, by actually HANGING BLACK PEOPLE)"

"3) therefore any discussion of race relations was commie propaganda."

"4) therefore, any movement that calls attention to race is communist."

"It’s very similar to how the Communist League fired the original writer of The Communist Manifesto because he brought up ethnic minorities and racism and replaced him with Marx, outright rejecting any factor that so much as complicated their preconceived model. It also shares many of the issues raised in the “grievance studies” affair, being exegesis to elaborate and propound upon a founding scripture."

"That’s the most idiotic line of reasoning I ever heard. It’s so typical of white people as a group in this country that when someone points out some shit they did that’s fucked up that instead of you know, stopping the fucked up thing they basically say that the entity pointing out their fucked up shit is bad therefore bringing up solutions to the fucked up thing they did is wrong."

"Fuck the trolls, but if anyone is actually confused about the likelihood of any white person to trust any other white person over anyone at all who is even POSSIBLY not white, please refresh your memories regarding the multiple instances in the last several years of a Black person being anywhere near a house or building, then being approached by either a white guard, cop, or other self-important deputy of white fragility."

"In these instances, Black people are often believed to be up to no good even after they show ID proving they live in the building some white person has decided they don’t belong in. No amount of proof will have a fragile white self-deputy believing that even state-issued IDs are a real thing and this Black person lives in their own home."

"But when any white person walks by and says “Oh, this is _____, they live here��, immediately, that’s good enough to let this perceived criminal go into their home."

"Because any white stranger vouched in any sort of way."

"Literal evidence of address means nothing, but the word of ANY white person, with no proof of their authority, no hassle about “Well what are YOU doing here?!?”, just...instant belief of any white skin."

"Also, the main difference between Angela Davis and Assata Shakur is that Ms. Davis beat the system at its own game, the “proper” way. Racism couldn’t even beat her at their heavily-rigged game. Ms. Shakur ALSO beat the system, but because she didn’t get to win at a fully-rigged game, she found her own loophole and got out of this racist hellhole."

"Not that it matters, because they’re both the same to any racist. To me, they’re both brilliant heroes."

"If you asked these mouth breathers what they hate about CRT not only could they not tell you, they would call you “the real racist” for asking. There is no winning with these people because they refuse to see themselves as ANYTHING other than the good guys in any situation. It is fucking tiring to deal with this shit and yet they seem to not understand that we are more fucking tired than they are. With each comment, committee and talking point they pretty much prove that no white person could handle being anything other than well, white."

"To admit anything else would result in a reckoning. It will never happen and America will remain a racist society, with white culture pushing back and getting more extreme as each generation of BIPOC become more aware and angry over white supremacy. America will implode and whatever rises from the ashes will either be that reckoning with real change or a third world country."

Again I quoted these people

[bubblesandpages]

bookblr asks: 1, 2, 3, 6, 16!

Thank you for the ask!

1 What was your favorite book as as a child? 

The Silver Brumby by Elyne Mitchell, this book was easily 20% of my identity as a kid. I read it when I was about 6/7, it was the second ‘proper’ book I’d ever read, the first one was another Australian classic called Blinky Bill (which I didn’t finish at the time, and to this day it isn’t really one of my favorites). I was really hesitant to read it at first so my mum offered to read the first few chapters out load to me, but eventually she had to go and work. I kept coming up to her for the next hour or so, asking if she was finished so she could keep reading to me. I finally gave in a started reading it on my own, and we stuck together through the rest of my childhood.

2 What was the first book you read and didn’t like? 

I should probably say Blinky Bill! But despite my hiccups with it (it’s one of those children’s books where the child characters are rather mean and spiteful, there were a lot of those in old children’s lit, I feel like). But it was the Tale of Despereaux, I read it a few times growing up but always found it sort of weird and off putting. I love the Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane though, it’s written by the same author and a story I hold very close to my heart.

3 Which book were you JUST reading right now?

The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo, I’m not very far in, but I’ve very curious to see how it terns out!

6 Do you have a book with a strong nostalgic connection? Which book is it and why?

I’ve talked a lot about books from my childhood that hold a lot of nostalgia for me, so let’s try something from more resent times. And since it is one of my missions to let more people know about it, let’s talk about the Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. Possibly the greatest ya book and series of this or any other time. It is impeccable and I won’t hear any other opinion on the matter.  

16 Do you have a favorite classic book?

I have two answers to this, one being a Tried and True Proper Classic and the other also counting as a classic, but from a more recent time. Firstly, we have Frankenstein, I had to read this for a lit class threeish years ago, and felt pretty meh about it. Then I didn’t stop thinking about it for two years straight. The part of the story I got most annoyed at was Victor Frankenstein himself (and the monster tbh) eventually I found disliking Victor so entertaining that he somehow turned into one of my favorite characters, and now I think of the book as more of a comedy. A dark comedy, that brings up some very interesting questions, but a comedy none the less (you cannot read a story where a person messed up THIS badly and not expect me to turn to humor to try and make sense of it all). 

The other book I’ll mention is Watership Down. Yes, the book about the rabbits who go questing and run into one (1#) death cult, a Communist militia, and a delusional enslavement camp to name a few of their problems. Is it lowkey kind of sexist? Yes, it’s also a brilliant story that’s one of my favorites of all time (plus, you have BIGWIG as a character, who DOESN’T love Bigwig? Also Hyzenthlay was a freaking queen and I love her).     

[coraxaviary]

Sister-in-Arms | CHAPTER 3: Mess

(Part I, Run the Gauntlet)

Summary: June is thrown into the fray, and meets some of the company.

Word Count: 5.1K

AO3 | Masterlist | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

Author’s Note: This chapter is unbeta-ed! I apologize for any gross mistakes.

Warnings: Minor canon-typical profanity and slurs.

Taglist: @keoghans​​ @papercinders​​ @junojelli​​ (ask to be added)

.

“So, why?” came a voice behind June. It was Lipton.

“Why did I join the Army, sir?” June stalled, not wanting to have to explain yet again the full-context history of her personal past.

“Yeah, why? A woman like you – you could marry, settle down, have kids,” he said, boots crunching in the coarse dirt. “Isn’t that nicer than slogging around with a bunch of men?”

June had wondered that at some point, too. Why did she have to be different, so ambitious? Why couldn’t she just have met a nice guy and lived somewhere on the California coast: no job to worry about, maybe just two or three children and a kitchen to cook in. She’d have tea with friends or something, have a content life with a husband, and live quietly. No newspaper articles nationally decrying her and her class as products of the radicalized communist youth. No men calling her names. And certainly no physical pain and pushing her body to the limit.

She was no stranger to inordinate challenges.

Only her and a few others in the class had been less connected to politics, but they’d been top of their classes anyway and somehow worked their way up to get Senatorial nominations after being mutually made aware of the girl’s class that year. She’d seen the article in the San Francisco Sun and applied the following month. June had been working as a secretary assistant at the local district office. It took hounding and convincing. Some other girls from less progressive areas had to pull teeth and do favors to get that nomination. She wasn’t exactly sour about it, though. Anyone who had the grit to withstand the West Point treatment had to have the commitment to get in.

She couldn’t help it. June was just how she was. She had tried to reason with herself the year she went to West Point. Why did she have to make her mother so upset? She was selfish, putting her own astronomical ambitions above her own family’s stability. Financially, they had barely been able to afford West Point for the first year. Thankfully, the Depression didn’t hit them particularly hard, but the real strain had been the conflict between June and her mother.

June tried to organize her thoughts. She’d always been like this, she realized, always reaching for some impossible point far in the distance and getting as close as possible – pulling herself along the broken road of life by her own bootstraps. She got some satisfaction out of doing things. But it had to be alone. She’d broken her high school’s 10,000-meter track record on her own. She’d gotten into West Point on her own merit and by her own networking. West Point itself had sabotaged her efforts by forcing her class to graduate a year early, but June had done as much as she could by herself. It was exhausting sometimes, June knew. The loneliness was almost crushing at times.

But once she wanted to do something, she had to do it. Failure was not an option, or else she’d implode on herself. Failure was not the way June did things. She would not fail now. But she’d give Lipton the simple answer.

“I wanted to be with the best,” she said. “I want to fight for our country.” She left it at that. Is that so offensive? That a woman feels patriotism too? she wanted to say, but that would have been bordering on disrespectful to her new fellow trainee.

Lipton fell silent and the mess hall grew in the distance as they neared the building. The din of men talking loudly overtook the crunching sand. “I suppose not. Why not a nurse?” he persisted.

“If you saw men killing themselves because they were denied health clearance to enlist, wouldn’t you feel at least a little motivated to try and fight if you were able?”

He mulled this over. “I suppose,” he said, not sounding very convinced. June sighed, and the three of them stopped in front of the door, where light spilled out from inside the building and some vague smell of cooking wafted out.

Lipton got in line, then Coates, and then June dropped to the back of the group, already feeling like a burden. With Coates starting to seem very concerned over the reactions June elicited from the other men, June felt like she was being babysat by him. He was constantly looking out in other directions. June would have liked to think he was naturally cautious, but she also had a suspicion that Sink assigned Coates to tour her around base because Sink knew Coates would watch her back.

June took in the crowded mess hall. It was almost overstuffed: absolutely exploding with raucous conversation and occasional bursts of laughter. Men moved between tables and benches, which were sandwiched so close to each other that the walking aisles between tables were about the width of one man. It was a sea of soldier trainees from wall to wall.

A few men roughly pushed by to get out the door or to put their trays to the side when they were done. June reflexively ducked her head down in hopes that no one would specifically notice her. No one did, for the time, and men flowed by June as if she was a rock in a river.

June held onto some futile hope that no one would notice her right away. Things were looking up for the few seconds it took for the chow line to move down, but June didn’t relax. Coates handed her a tray, and she moved down, getting a single serving of whatever they had made that day. June didn’t really pay attention: she’d seen the sign and the information went out the other ear. She was too hyper-focused on her surroundings, looking out into the crowd for potentially hostile faces.

Coates turned around to check on her, and June met his look with a stressed, darting look. Lipton had disappeared, probably to eat with his friends, and June wondered if Coates would leave her too and find his men – HQ Company, she remembered.

He cast a glance around the room, eyes snagging on a certain cluster of tables near the right side. He’d found whoever he was looking for, and June felt a nervous ice-cold feeling wash down her spine. He was leaving now. This was where she forged her independence. In the midst of the ocean of men – taller, menacing, threatening, and hostile – she would have to find a seat and do it on her own.

“You a broad?” came an unfamiliar voice, and the frozen feeling of panic came over June with renewed intensity. Her head swiveled up, back and forth rapidly, trying to find the owner of the voice. “Or just a John wearing lipstick?” June turned around and was met with the close stare of a recruit, leaning in.

A smile grew on his face slowly as his eyes took in June’s unamused poker face.

“I’ll be damned,” someone else said close by, and June felt a nudge on her arm from someone else. She jerked away, and leaned in the opposite direction from them, shoulder touching Coates’s back, who was already turned around. June looked pleadingly at Coates, and he looked to identify who was harassing her.

“What are you doing here?” said the same voice again, and June shrunk back, clutching her tray but unable to leave the scene. She had to eat, find a seat somewhere, but more and more recruits were being alerted to her presence.

June had stayed silent, but it was getting increasingly harder. Like before, the attention spread quickly, and soon she felt the mess hall become quieter and quieter until after another minute, the noise level had been halved. June glanced above the shoulders of the nearest men, and found eyes directed towards the small gathering in front of the mess hall.

Her heart was in her throat, and the press of more and more attention was starting to make her sweat. She bit her lip, being stared down by multiple men. She only had two options: run or eat. She intended to eat, because it seemed that this was the way she’d have to elicit eventual acceptance.

“Shiiiiiiit, out of those ODs you’d be a knockout,” said yet another unfamiliar voice. June cringed. “We could find out–” he was cut off by another voice.

“What’s going on here?” said a new soldier, pushing through the crowd. Apparently he had some authority, because the men yielded slightly more easily when he elbowed men to the side. He was tall, dark-haired. Heavy five-o-clock shadow. June eyed his patches. An officer. She straightened, and so did the men next to her, including Coates.

He directed a long, perplexed look at June. He looked quizzically at a soldier next to him, who shrugged in turn.

“Who are you?” he asked, looking down at June.

She internally sighed. The men were going to have a kick out of this. She couldn’t salute, so she just stood and firmly spoke.

“Diedtrich, June. Private, sir.”

Near-silence had come over the mess hall, save for constant shifting, the sounds of the kitchen – which had also dulled – and the occasional scrape of silverware or glass.

A slightly condescending smile came onto his face as he nodded, looking as if he found the situation entertaining. He looked as if he was going to try to hold back a laugh. June looked at him seriously, never breaking eye contact – her most valuable West Point skill. June felt the eyes of the entire hall on the pair of them, wondering what she was going to do next. It felt as if the room was waiting for something to happen. Clearly this was a man who many of the men knew. They held the staring contest for a couple more seconds, and his mocking expression fell away slightly as he seemed to realize something.

“Damn, Private,” he said, breaking the silence, comprehending some mysterious fact. “Easy Company?”

“Yes, sir,” said June.

The man ran a hand through his hair, exhaling powerfully.

“Well, uh…” he said, clearly at a loss for words. The weird, slightly disoriented half-smile came back. “Welcome to Easy, Diedtrich.” He started to turn away, going back to whatever table he was at, then turned around as if he’d forgotten something.

“I’m uh, Lieutenant Nixon. Lewis Nixon,” he added, looking down at June’s hands holding her tray, evidently not free for a handshake. “See you later,” he said, turning and disappearing for the last time.

“Sir,” June muttered, a beat too late when the crowd had already coalesced where Nixon had been standing a moment before.

The quietness of the room was unnerving. June looked about, taking in the various forms of confusion displayed on the faces around her. There was a great deal of muttering, and the atmosphere of the room took on a slightly louder tone, gaining decibels as June stood awkwardly in the center of the crowd.

June looked down at her food, which was quickly cooling. She didn’t necessarily mind, because it was almost stifling in the mess hall filled with bodies, the kitchen radiating heat, and trapped sun-warmed air. She looked at Coates, who was looking at her. She raised an eyebrow, wondering if he had any comment to offer. He shook his head tiredly.

The exchange drew a few hoots – Coates, you know her? – and June cursed herself for dragging this innocent man along in the wake of her troublemaking presence. Coates nodded to a nearby table where one half was free, and June squeezed through the press of bodies, careful not to get food on anyone, which at this point was a major achievement; with her luck, she’d have already spilled something or dropped the tray. He sat down across from her, and June set her head in her hands, waiting for the attention to fade away.

June did remember one thing, though, as the men whirled around her like a hurricane. She quickly located her napkin and dipped it into her water glass, and scrubbed off her lipstick without checking her appearance in any reflections. Her hands itched for a mirror to hold whenever she touched her face, but she stowed the ingrained desire somewhere out of mind, and got to eating the food, trying to distract herself from the continuous looks being directed her way.

Coates watched her carefully, and picked up his fork. June tried to ignore the feeling of guilt she now felt when she looked at Coates. She pushed the food around on her plate after eating about half, feeling too nervous to try and consume the rest; she hadn’t eaten since that morning, but the nerves of the situation were making her stomach contract. She hoped she didn’t throw up later. She needed the protein.

June remembered the sign telling her to finish everything on the plate, and she tried to swallow a few more bites. After eating calmly for a few minutes, the attention had dispersed except for the stares. She wouldn’t be able to do anything unnoticed, so she waited for Coates to finish his food before following him like a lost child.

On the way to the exit, a passing soldier hit the bottom of her tray upwards with a glancing blow. Luckily, her dishes stayed on the tray, but her fork and knife flew off. June stood without turning around silently, while another quiet lull blanketed the room. An annoying tingle of heat started in her cheeks, and her heart pounded harder than when she’d finished a sprint, picking up speed when it had just calmed down to a sub-normal pace. Her ears heated. She breathed hard for a couple of exhales and bit the side of her mouth.

He’s just tryna get a rise, she told herself. Coates waited nonchalantly by the doorway, watching her to see what she did. June was glad. Him helping her would turn into something worse, and she’d possibly be seen as someone even weaker.

“There you go, babe!” someone yelled from far behind her. Scattered laughter drifted up from the hall.

She bent down and took her time collecting the silverware, trying to conceal the shake in her hands. She turned around, dumped the contents of her tray in the washbin, and without another backward glance, walked out with the eyes of the entire mess hall on her back, again.

“Yeah, go get her, Coates!” someone said from inside. Within a few seconds, he was again by her side.

June grew more furious and upset by the second, walking wherever her feet were taking her – far away from the mess hall, out beyond the paths and between the barracks, passing billet after billet, picking up speed. The evening air cooled her face, and she went faster and faster. She heard feet crunching on the dirt behind her, and she walked even more rapidly, hoping to lose him.

“Private!” called Coates, and June immediately slowed for the NCO. She wiped roughly at her eyes, dragging her fingers under them, stretching out her skin and massaging circles into her temple, hard.

“Yes, sir?” she said, turning around. They were caught between two billets, and she hoped both were empty.

Coates looked as if he wanted to say something else, but he decided against it, rubbing the back of his neck and kicking at the dirt with one boot.

June wondered what he thought of her at this point. Some weak, delusional woman trying to fulfill some fantasy of a man’s world? Maybe. That’s what it seemed most of the men thought. She didn’t fault them. That was almost exactly what she was doing.

“I think this is where we part, Private,” said Coates after a long pause. June knew this was coming, so she took it with a nod. “I’ve served my purpose for the day,” he continued. “I work at Battalion HQ, so you know where to find me.”

“Yes, sir,” June said, overwhelmed by guilt yet again. She needed to say something, apologize maybe, but Coates talked on.

“Make sure you get back to the billet at twenty-two hundred,” he said. “You have free time until then, and then lights out. I don’t think you need guidance on the rest of the schedule. I hear your CO is… particularly demanding.”

June nodded, not wanting to say goodbye even though she was probably being too melodramatic about it. He was, after all, never going to be more than a number of yards away at the Battalion HQ. But to June, it was as good as miles. She’d probably never have a reason to enter HQ soon, unless Sink saw fit to talk to her or release her from base.

“You have an uphill fight, Diedtrich,” he said, leaning back against the billet and looking southwards, towards the rising mountain that arched above the camp, brushing the fault of the skies..

“Thank you,” June said suddenly. Coates looked at her, eyes widening. “Thank you, Sergeant, for sacrificing your day. Without you I would have been alone.”

He nodded, surprised. “It wasn’t any problem, Diedtrich. I got a free day out of it, as far as I’m concerned. Away from Sink and all the top brass, anyway,” he said, cracking a smile. “Brighten up, Diedtrich. You have Sink on your side, even if he doesn’t look it. If he saw something in you, there’s hope yet.”

June pondered the words. “Thanks, sir.”

“Go light on the smoking,” he said in response, easing off the wall and starting to turn back onto the path that would lead to the HQ billet. “Good luck, Private Diedtrich.”

“Goodbye, sir,” June said, wishing she could say more. Her gratitude vastly outstripped the brief words she’d gotten out. But it seemed that the final goodbye was sufficient, so she watched Coates’s retreating back until he disappeared around a corner. Her first ally was gone, and June tried to settle into the familiar loneliness that was her default these days. It fit, much to her relief, like an old, worn jacket.

She checked her watch. It was half-past seven. She looked out onto the empty, darkening field. The track around it was inviting. Her final conversation with Coates had made her rage almost completely dissipate, but she needed the outlet, even more than a smoke.

She set off for the track, intending to go around for an hour or two. When she stopped, though, she’d been going at it for two, walking and running away her thoughts until it was her and the pounding pavement and her blistering feet.

♤

June reported back to her billet thirty minutes before 2200. Light streamed through the crack in the door, and she stopped outside, listening to the voices. It would have been nice, if only her disturbance wasn’t going to destroy whatever peaceful comraderie had been developing before she arrived. Again, June was a burdensome intrusion on the lives of soldiers just trying to learn to fight. She had calmed down after the blissful emptiness of the run, and she opened the top few buttons of her ODs, flapping the chest a little to encourage ventilation. She waited for longer than necessary, then nudged the door open a few inches, watching the small view the door permitted.

Some of the men were having a rather loud conversation about something.

“No, I swear that’s her stuff,” someone protested loudly near the door. “Who else would be joining this billet?”

“Nix says she’s in Easy,” another voice added. “Of course she’s in here.”

“Hey, that’s Lieutenant Nixon to you, Perco.”

“Come on, it could be someone else. Volunteers are coming in each day,” said someone else. “We can’t assume–”

“Let’s ask Lip,” someone said. June stiffened, suddenly alert. “What were you doing in here before she came out–”

June opened the door before Lipton could respond, and looked at the men who had apparently been gossiping about her. The billet fell silent, and thirteen pairs of eyes snapped to June. She’d schooled her face into the customary one, again. When she’d be able to relax around these men who were supposed to have her back, she didn’t know; she didn’t know if it would ever occur. She pushed the discouraging thought of her mind and kept it carefully empty, gathering information quickly; she also quelled her reaction to the smell of the barracks. It should have been expected, but the wood, smoke, and sweat hit June all the same with unpleasant surprise.

Lipton was sitting on a bed to the immediate right of June, in the first row nearest to the doorway, looking rather tired of June already. Some faces she almost recognized from the incident outside the billet that afternoon, but she didn’t know their names. And then there was Guarnere, fifth row down to the left, almost exactly across from June’s empty bed, with an unlit cigarette between his fingers, and a deadly expression daring June to look a little longer.

Almost every bed was filled except for two or three near the center of the billet, and there was a man on or near each taken bed. June’s cheeks heated again under the scrutiny – something she couldn’t help – and she made a beeline towards the bed where she’d laid her things down previously. There was no more privacy, not even a semblance of one. June looked down her nose at the man sitting on the bed nearest to hers, vaguely aware that there was a fine line between making an impression that was unyielding and one that was bitchy.

She figured the men were going to call her one anyway, so she erred on the side of strictness. She said nothing, just lowered her eyelids into a mockery of passive calmness and silently took in one face at a time, praying that they didn’t hear her blood pounding deafeningly, and the miniscule tremor in her muscles as she locked them into place.

She figured she didn’t have to introduce herself. Everyone already knew who she was. As she got halfway to her bed, Lipton cleared his throat pointedly. June turned around.

“You want to uh…” he waved a hand, “introduce yourself, Private?” Lipton asked haltingly.

June cast another gaze over the rest of the billet. She saw no other alternative.

“Uh, hello,” she started, pausing and mentally cursing herself – way to make an awkward introduction even more awkward. “I’m June Diedtrich,” she said without tone.

No one said anything in response. Her statement seemed to echo in the empty air, caught in the energy of unsaid thoughts. June watched a few men exchange glances with each other. With considerable effort, she unglued herself from her stationary position and resumed her walk to her bed: fourth on the right.

When she got there, she sat down on the side next to the empty bed, feeling as if she’d exerted herself more in the five-second journey than her exercise in the past few hours. She felt simultaneously light-headed and heavier burdened, and she sat silently without making eye contact with anyone. Gradually, the men started talking again, but nowhere near as loud as before June had entered.

She waited and waited for the right time, and convinced herself she had to do it. After a few more minutes, she knew she couldn’t wait any longer, and further stalling would only be willful hesitance on her part. Just get it over with, she thought, and she started on the first few buttons, opening her ODs to the PT gear underneath. She tried to muffle the button snaps as best she could, but there was no avoiding the looks.

June fixed a murderous glare somewhere in the distance between two other bunks opposite the room – refusing to look at anyone – and undid the belt, slipping off the OD jacket quickly and setting it on the bed next to her. The conversation in the room had died down again, and she was once again the center of attention. She huffed quietly, and began undoing the buttons on the pants.

Some subtle shifts in her periphery told June that some men were trying to turn away slightly or direct their eyes elsewhere. She knew most of them still wanted to look, maybe if only for the novelty of a woman doing the same routine that they had been going through for about a month or two. She got the pants over her hips and thighs by standing slightly, and sitting back down for the rest, shucking the whole article off after pulling the bottoms out from her boots. She threw the pants down on her bed with probably more force than necessary, feeling the satisfying crinkle of fabric when it hit the jacket.

June stood up to readjust her shorts, fiddling with the tie. She looked up, feeling like she had to at some point. About half the men were openly staring and about half were acting like they weren’t when she knew they had been. She hadn’t even had to strip down to her undergarments and she felt debilitatingly embarrassed.

She packed up the ODs and laid them in her trunk, the amount of air hitting her legs feeling unnaturally inappropriate. She’d never been this unclothed in front of anyone before, other than at the beach or when she’d had to get clothing tailored, very rarely. She had no time to prepare for the unsettling exposure. She’d been thrown into it, and today was a day of firsts.

No one made any comment or whistled, to June’s minor relief. She figured that in a smaller setting, men were less inclined to single themselves out. It was the nameless mob she had to worry about, or at least she hoped.

There was another thing June had to do before bed. She unhooked her rifle from its hook above the bed, and heard more than a few hushed mutters. At least she was confident in this procedure: at West Point, the girls had learned how to disassemble, clean, and reassemble their weapons: essential Academy stuff. They had practiced with something similar to the M-1 Garand, which was what June weighed in her hands.

Someone beside her made a sound, and June turned to find the nearest man looking reasonably nervous at June’s handling of the gun. She scoffed, looking briefly at him, and then turned back to her rifle, sliding the bolt open and checking the chamber before she flipped it over on her bed and set to taking the trigger assembly out. She subsequently laid out all the parts as she deconstructed the gun, little by little. She was a little rusty, but back at the Academy, she’d mastered the skill, and the fine movements were coming back to her. She got up to retrieve some tools and a towel from her trunk, and cleaned the parts before slotting them back together.

There was nothing June could do about the mood of disbelief emanating from most of the nearby men, but she finally snapped the trigger guard back into place and played with the safety a few times to finish. She wiped her hands off and gave the bolt a few satisfied pumps. June knew a clean gun was Army standard, and that they were expected to regularly clean them. She knew no one expected her to already know. She was quietly smug, basking in the brilliance of proving the others wrong. It was a special type of fulfillment.

“Where’d you learn to do that?” came a voice from June’s left. It was the man next to her, sitting cross-legged on his bed, looking at her gun intently.

June gave something that was almost a smile, but then buried it under indifference, remembering her need for respect. Friendliness was not an option.

“West Point,” she said, turning to hang the rifle up again. There was a long silence – something that was growing very frequent in the billet.

“Bullshit,” came a voice from the other side – the second-to-last row on the left. “West Point doesn’t accept girls.”

June shrugged, trying desperately to sell an image of nonchalance. “Guess they decided to.”

“You been living in a hole, Skip?” said her bed neighbor. “It was all over the news. They have girls now,” he said.

Skip scrunched his eyebrows together, taken aback. “The hell. Why?” he said.

Most of the men shrugged. Lipton looked at June without saying anything.

“Where ya from?” asked a new voice from beyond Skip. Why anyone was interested in knowing was beyond June, but she answered.

“San Francisco.”

A few heads turned to a bed near the back. The man on it looked around, annoyed. “What?” he said.

“Lieb, aren’t you from San Francisco?”

“Kinda,” he said, mildly irritated, as if sharing a city of origin would somehow contaminate him with the association of June. “Family moved down to Oakland later.”

There were a few nods. June knew all the men were showing restraint. Normally they’d probably be talking freely.

“I’m Skinny, by the way,” said the man nearest to June. He didn’t offer a handshake, but there was something close to a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. It was there for sympathy. “You already know Lip, I guess, but…” He slapped the shoulder of the guy between him and Lipton. “Introduce yourself. She’s gonna have to know for drills, unless you wanna run an extra mile for her mistakes.”

June did not want to be reminded of the impending marches and group drills, and especially group punishment.

The man rolled his eyes. “I’m Alex Penkala.”

“Carwood Lipton,” said Lipton.

“Martin,” said the man with the thousand-yard stare across from Lipton. And the sequence ran down the left row.

“Grant.”

“Perconte.”

“White.”

Everyone looked at Guarnere. “Come on, Bill,” said Lipton when Guarnere didn’t say anything.

“We’ve met,” he growled.

“Roe,” said the dark-haired man next from Guarnere after an awkwardly long pause.

“Skip,” said the next.

“Malarkey,” said the man who asked her where she was from.

The last man on the right column started after Malarkey. “Tipper.”

“Liebgott.”

“Hanson.”

June looked around, trying hastily to remember all the names. There were too many, and she blinked. She was never great with names. Maybe the quirk of their nicknames would help somewhat.

She sighed. This was already hard, and they hadn’t even gotten physical yet.

“We have a few more minutes, and then lights out,” said Lipton over the billet. “I don’t know about you, but I feel a night march in my bones,” he warned, and the men groaned. Some of them threw malicious glances at June, as if it was her fault.

As June would find out, it was nearly impossible for anything to not be her fault. Their CO was demanding, as Coates had heard. In fact, Sobel was much more than demanding. He was, in June’s eyes, the devil incarnate.

.

[brandossss]

( tommy martinez , 24 , cismale ) i  just  bumped  into  brando  esparza  the  other  day  while  walking  down  east  kingsboro , where  he  lives . i  hear  they  can  be  brave  and  impatient , but  when  i  think  of  them  i  immediately  think  of  ( venezuelan  pride , curly  hair , going  to  the  gym  literally  everyday ) 

tw : communism , corruption , poverty , violence , death  ( suicide )

full  name : brando  nicolas  estefano  esparza

nicknames : just  brando , if  he  really  fucks  with  you  you  can  get  away  with  teasingly  calling  him  brandy , but  not  even  lolol

gender : cismale

height :  6 ′ 2

age : 24

birthday : august  4 , 1996

zodiac : leo  ( aries  moon , capricorn  ascendant )

right  handed  or  left  handed : ambidextrous , but  basically  right  handed 

eye  color : light  brown

hair  color : dark  brown

piercings  &  tattoos : no  piercings , this  tattoo  of  venezuela  right  here , but  on  his  left  wrist 

languages  spoken : spanish ( native  tongue ) and  english

sexuality : pansexual / panromantic

place  of  birth : maracay , venezuela

last  3  songs  listened  to : llueve  sobre  la  ciudad  by  los  bunkers , yo  te  esperare  by  cali  y  el  dandee , soñe  ( unplugged )  by  zoé

so  brando  was  born  to  yessenia  olivares  and  bruno  esparza  in  maracay , venezuela . originally , he  wasn’t  supposed  to  be  named  brando . a  fun  fact  &  random  little  headcanon  is  that  his  mother  &  father  had  the  full  intention  of  naming  him  brandon , after  his  grandfather  ( or  father’s  father ) , who  passed  a  week  before  he  was  born . being  both  parents’  first  born , his  father  got  super  nervous  during  his  mother’s  labor  &  basically ? got  really  wasted  because  he  was  practically  crapping  his  pants  about  his  son  being  born . when  he  went  to  sign  his  birth  certificate , he  was  so  drunk , he  literally  forgot  to  write  the  ‘ n ’  in  brandon . once  they  realized  the  mistake  his  father  had  made , they  didn’t  want  to  go  through  the  annoyance  of  changing  his  name , so , they  went  with  brando , and  surprisingly ? it  really  stuck  &  everyone  loved  it  more  than  brandon  kdjvcndfkcmn

he  was  an  average  kid  tbh . his  family  was  middle  class  &  even  though  his  country  had  been  struggling  ( for  the  lack  of  a  better  word )  for  years  now , he  didn’t  fully  feel  the  economic  fall  at  first , of  course . now  fast  forward  a  few  years  &  shit  is  changing  right  before  his  eyes , and  he’s  really ? just  a  kid

pretty  much  communism  coming  to  it’s  finest  point  tbh . all  these  restaurants , stores , businesses , all  these  places  brando  used  to  go  to  when  he  was  younger ? done  with , or  just  government  owned  &  a  blink  away  from  breaking  completely . it’s  actually  really  sad  because  he’s  literally  watching  it  all  happen , watching  his  country  go  down  the  drain  &  there’s  really  nothing  he  can  do  to  stop  it

his  father  becomes  an  active  protester , along  with  many  other  angry  venezuelans , but  this  does  more  bad  than  good . eventually  his  father  gets  arrested  at  a  protest  when  brando  is  11  years  old . that  was  over  a  decade  ago  &  up  to  this  very  day , present  time , brando  has  no  idea  where  his  father  is , if  he’s  well , or  if  he’s  even  alive  tbh  ( talk  about  trauma ? ) . it’s  like  one  day  he’s  coming  home , giving  his  only  son  a  hug , &  the  next  day , he  completely  vanished  from  planet  earth , as  if  he’s  some  high  profile  serial  killer  when  really , he  was  just  protesting  the  shit  communist  government  they’re  living  in 

it’s  just  brando  &  his  mom  from  that  point  on . of  course , things  just  get  worse  with  time . i’m  not  gonna  get  into  details  but  basic  poverty  &  communism  tbh . they’re  hungry , they’re  broke , the  country  is  just  getting  worse  &  worse  with  each  passing  moment  ( hyper  inflation , food  scarcity , severe  corruption , government  abuse , do  i  even  need  to  go  on ? ) . all  these  things  anger  brando  to  no  extent  &  he  finds  himself  releasing  his  anger  with  his  fists . it’s  getting  into  random  fights  for  no  reason  &  screaming  at  anyone  who  even  looks  at  him  weirdly , pretty  much  becoming  an  angry  ass  kid 

TW : SUICIDE , READ  WITH  CAUTION !! things  are  bad  but  they  really  hit  rock  bottom  when  his  mother , surprisingly , commits  suicide . brando  finds  her  foaming  at  the  mouth , a  clear  overdose , but  by  the  time  they  make  it  to  the  hospital , she’s  pronounced  dead . literally  a  15  year  old  boy , alone , in  venezuela .... honestly  terrifying . brando  literally  doesn’t   know  where  to  go ? on  top  of  the  trauma  he’s  holding  he’s  worried  about  his  living  arrangements  as  well . luckily , a  friend  of  his  allows  him  to  stay  at  his  house  a  few  nights  but  this  is  just  temporary

he  just  really  wants  to  leave  his  country  but  he  feels  completely  stuck . he’s  depressed  &  angry  as  fuck  but  he’s  determined  to  get  out  somehow . brando  eventually  contacts  a  family  friend  on  facebook  ( aka  claudia’s  mom ? ) &  tells  them  his  situation . it  seems  to  touch  this  woman’s  heart  so  much , she , wait  for  it , brings  him  over  to  the  states . he  spends  his  16th  birthday  in  america , with  claudia  &  her  family . the  year  is  2012 

very  slowly , but  things  begin  getting  better  for  him . he’s  enrolled  into  school  &  pretty  much  gets  guided  through  everything  thanks  to  claudia . they  are  not  blood  related , but  their  families  were  so  close  at  one  point  that  they’re  pretty  much ? cousins  tbh ! literally  not  blood  related  but  still  family

with  his  dedication  &  ambition  he  pretty  much  catches  on  completely  in  less  than  3  years  ( learning  english  of  course ) , he  loses  his  accent  completely  after  4 . he  goes  through  a  whole  adoption  thing  with  claudia’s  family  until  he  thankfully  gains  american  residency  thanks  to  them , which  of  course , eventually  leads  him  to  citizenship . instead  of  picking  fights  with  people  for  no  reason , brando  takes  out  his  anger  with  physical  activity , becoming  very  much  involved  in  going  to  the  gym , or  even  just  exercising  by  himself . whether  it’s  leg  day , boxing , whatever  it  is , he  loves  any  type  of  physical  work , since  it  keeps  his  mind  distracted 

this  has  pretty  much  lead  him  to  have  quite  a  #body  tbh . like .... it’s  hella  obvious  he  works  out  kdndjndjvnfd

he  also  developed  a  hobby  for  piano , after  taking  piano  classes  in  high  school , beginning  of  freshman  year . he’s  been  playing  since  he  was  16 , eventually  buying  a  crap  keyboard  when  he  was  17 . he  does  piano  covers  on  youtube , but  again , this  is  really  just  a  hobby  of  his 

DEATH  TW !! after  the  passing  of  claudia’s  parents , her  &  brando  move  to  kingsboro  when  they’re  both  19 ! they  share  an  apartment  with  lemon

on  top  of  that , he’s  a  bartender  @  blue ! he’s  also  a  personal  trainer . literally  lifting  24/7  for  him .... bless

he  enjoys  drinking  on  weekends  &  letting  loose  every  once  in  a  while  but  i  don’t  think  he’s  crazy  about  weed  tbh . he  thinks  the  feeling  is  nice , but  he  hates  how  it  makes  you  hungry . would  never  go  out  of  his  way  to  buy  weed  &  basically  only  smokes  it  if  he’s  offered , preferring  alcohol , but  again , he  mostly  just  exercises  &  eats  right , not  really  having  any  addictions  of  any  kind , just  little  hobbies  every  one  in  a  while

brando  honestly ? considers  himself  lucky , despite  all  the  terrible  things  he’s  been  through . he  feels  lucky  that  he  left  before  things  got  really , really bad , even  though  they  were  already  pretty  awful  tbh . anyone  who  hears  his  story  would  think  he’s  anything  but  fortunate  but  the  truth  of  the  matter  is  that  he’s  one  of  the  lucky  ones . not  every  venezuelan  has  had  the  opportunity  to  leave  &  he  just  feels  very  fortunate  that  he  was  one  of  the  few  that  did 

he’s  not  the  type  to  take  anything  for  granted  tbh , very  much  the  type  of  person  who  appreciates  everything  he  has , no  matter  how  small . you  could  literally  get  him  a  present  from  the  dollar  store  for  christmas  &  he  would  still  be  super  happy  about  it . for  him , it’s  the  thought  &  time  put  into  something  that  counts , not  the  price , or  the  brand 

he  very  much  struggled  with  his  sexuality  for  years . not  because  he  was  in  denial  or  ashamed  or  anything , but  for  the  longest  time , he  kind  of  just  didn’t  know  what  he  was ? sometimes  he  thought  he  was  straight  but  undergoing  a  phase , other  times  he  wondered  if  he  was  gay , then  he  considered  himself  bi  for  a  really  long  time . the  truth  is  that  he  didn’t  fully  understand  his  sexuality  up  until  not  too  long  ago , when  he  began  hanging  with  an  lgbtq+  crowd . eventually , he  realizes  society  basically  labels  him  as  ‘ pansexual ’ , but  he  doesn’t  even  really  like  to  label  himself ? brando  just  falls  in  love  with  the  person , with  their  soul , &  he  doesn’t  care  what  they  have  underneath  tbh 

i  haven’t  fully  figured  him  out  yet  because  he’s  a  new  character  but  i  picture  he  can  be  such  a  stereotypical  leo  sometimes , but , his  whole  #capricorn  ascendant  really  does  take  place  for  him , in  the  sense  that  he  can  be  a  very  difficult  person  to  read  sometimes . like  is  he  happy ? is  he  upset ? is  that  just  his  face ? is  he  planning  something ? you  will  rarely  ever  know  tbh 

he’s  a  very  humble  person , probably  because  of  his  childhood . he  hates  show  offs  tbh , or  very  rich  people  with  no  consideration  for  anyone . literally .... miss  him  with  that  bullshit  lmfao . he  finds  the  entire  snobby  or  ‘ i’m  better  than  you ’ attitudes  to  be  so  unattractive  tbh ? you  could  be  the  hottest  person  on  the  planet  but  if  he  hates  your  attitude  you  really  just  don’t  matter  to  him  lolol

over  all  he’s  a  lot  calmer  than  he  was  before  tbh . he  still  has  his  moments  but  he’s  a  pretty  stable  guy  in  the  sense  that  he  no  longer  wants  to  beat  up  everything  or  anyone  he  see’s . he  still  has  a  ton  of  issues  to  work  on  but  basically  just  doesn’t  wanna  go  to  therapy  &  doesn’t  really  talk  about  his  past  at  all , preferring  to  ‘ live  in  the  present ’  even  though  talking  about  his  issues  &  sharing  his  pretty  shitty  story  would  definitely  help  him  clear  out  his  head  but  🥴 it  honestly  probably  won’t  happen  &  he’ll  probs  just  keep  burying  shit  LMFAOOOO

very  very  hard  working  guy , ambition  like  crazy , always  gives  his  all  in  anything  he  feels  strongly  about , he’s  very  good  at  persuading  people  tbh , usually  gets  told  he’d  make  a  ‘ great  lawyer ’  because  he  just  has  this  way  of  convincing  you  like ? he  would  never  become  a  lawyer  but  the  truth  is  that  he  would  make  a  great  one , persuasion  skills  like  a  MF 

this  is  all  i  can  think  of  now  but  i  did  his  birth  chart  ting  🖤 

[entwinedmoon]

John Torrington: Life in a Northern Town

(Previous posts 1, 2)

What was John Torrington’s life like before he joined the Franklin Expedition? There are a few things we know for sure, a handful that we can infer, and everything else is speculation.

So what do we know for sure?

We know he was born and raised in Manchester. During his lifetime, the industrial revolution was already in full swing, and Manchester held a significant role in that. The majority of cotton manufacturing in the UK took place in and around Manchester, so much so that it earned the nickname “Cottonopolis.” Steam engines powered the cotton mills, choking the air with coal dust and smoke. People came from across the British Isles to find jobs in Manchester, causing its population to boom in the early part of the nineteenth century. I believe William Torrington was one of these jobseekers, as a later census record that I think refers to him indicates that he’s not native to Manchester. I have yet to be able to find his baptism registry, but there a few possible records that could be his, and none of the possible William Torringtons that I’ve found were born in Manchester. But what exactly was life like in Manchester at this time?

Ask Friedrich Engels.

Yes, that Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s BFF and co-author of The Communist Manifesto. Before he met Marx and wrote one of the most influential—and notorious—political documents in history, Engels wrote another book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. It was first published in 1845, the same year Torrington would leave Manchester for his fateful trip to the Arctic. The book was written when Engels lived in Manchester from 1842 to 1844, and it was heavily inspired by what he saw during his time there.

Engels wrote of disease and terrible living conditions in large cities such as Manchester, with mortality rates rising sharply since industrialization and urbanization had begun. People lived in poverty, they suffered from poor health and lacked autonomy, and they were at the mercy of heartless employers who exploited them. Factory accidents, pollution—especially terrible air quality due to coal smoke from the factories, overcrowding, overwork, and other deplorable conditions affected the working class while wealthy business owners profited at their expense. Basically, all the negative stereotypes of the industrial age that we think of, such as Victorian factory owners who employ child workers and pay absurdly low wages to people living in rundown tenements, who will inevitably die of disease while coughing on the ever-present coal smoke? That’s Manchester, baby!

Now, this was, of course, merely Engels’ interpretation of the situation, but one based on observations of the real conditions that many people lived in at the time. Of course, not everyone suffered thanks to industrialization. The burgeoning middle class benefited, as did wealthy people such as Engels’ own father, who owned multiple textile factories. But it’s clear that those of the working class did experience some pretty horrifying living and working conditions.

John Torrington was a member of the working class.

We know that his father, William, was a coachman, a working-class position. A coachman is exactly what it sounds like—someone who drove a coach, a type of horse-drawn vehicle. This was a position that required little education, as William was unable to write his own name as of 1823. (The fact that he could sign his name in a later document is interesting, and suggests he received at least some level of education as an adult, possibly personal tutoring from an acquaintance, an employer, or even his wife Sarah, who could sign her name.) The term often is used to refer to a private coachman (essentially, the precursor of the chauffeur), who served wealthy families and would also be responsible for overseeing the stables. But in a bustling city like Manchester, there was plenty of need for public transportation, so it’s possible William worked as the Victorian equivalent of a taxi driver.

Coming from a working-class background, Torrington would have had limited schooling, but we do know he received enough to be able to sign his name, since he signed the Allotment book for the Franklin Expedition. His signature on that document, by the way, is my favorite, because he ran out of room and his name was going to spill over into the next column, so he wrote his name like this:

John Torring

             ton

He ran out of room, and on an official naval document—a now very important historical document that serious researchers pore over—he wrote his name as

John Torring

              ton.

Never have I identified so strongly with a dead Victorian sailor.

But anyway…

Torrington clearly received some education, although it’s hard to say how much. In 1833, money was allocated to build schools for the poor throughout England, and there were churches that taught poor children in Sunday schools, but education for the lower classes was limited. And girls often received no education at all. Torrington’s sister, Esther, for instance, could not sign her name, so whatever education he was able to gain was not shared equally (which is a shame, since her mother had clearly received some form of education, but Esther did not share the same opportunity).

Speaking of 1833, there’s another aspect of Torrington’s life we do know about for a fact: He lost his mother.

Sarah Shaw Torrington died in 1833. The cause of death is not listed on her burial record, but in Victorian Manchester there were plenty of ways for people to die. For instance, in 1832, Manchester was struck by a massive cholera outbreak, starting in May and lasting into January of 1833. Perhaps she was one of the epidemic���s last victims. But without any records, no one can say for sure.

She was buried in Prestwich on February 3, but the exact day of death is not shown. Her age is listed in the record as 27, which means that she probably was born either in 1805 or 1806. The record lists her abode as Prestwich, the same place she was buried. Prestwich is considered part of the Greater Manchester area, but it is not within the city itself, which means the Torringtons must have moved. It doesn’t seem that uncommon for the working class to move around, from what I’ve seen of census records. However, William Torrington (and I assume, his family) lived in Manchester in 1823, 1825, and later in 1836. Why would the family move to Prestwich in the intervening years only to move back to Manchester?

I started to think that maybe Sarah was originally from Prestwich. Perhaps the family had moved in with her parents when she became sick, which is why they are listed as living there.

Looking at baptism records, there were a lot of Sarah Shaws born in 1805 and 1806. Some of them were born in or around Manchester, some outside of the area. When I searched for a Sarah Shaw born in Prestwich around the same time, I found precisely one record. There was a Sarah Shaw baptized on July 22, 1804, in Prestwich. Being born in 1804 would have made her 28, going on 29, in 1833, but as I’ve mentioned before, ages weren’t always recorded exactly. Of course, I can’t prove that this is the Sarah Shaw—and there are numerous candidates who better fit the age given on her death certificate—but it’s a possibility. We may never know if this is Torrington’s mother or not, but I’m putting it on the maybe pile, not just because Prestwich is where she’s buried, but also because of another intriguing factoid: her parents’ names were John and Esther.

Again, that’s not proof of anything and could be purely coincidental. However, this new information made me reconsider another record. William Torrington’s indictment lists two sureties, one of whom is George Calvert, and the other was Esther Shane, a widow from Manchester. After finding the record for the Prestwich Sarah Shaw, I wondered if perhaps the name of Shane had been mistranscribed on the original document. What if the name was recorded incorrectly and it should say Shaw?

This is pure speculation, of course, but if this actually is Esther Shaw, mother of Prestwich Sarah, then that would mean Sarah’s mother was now widowed and living in Manchester. And acting as surety for her indicted son-in-law. If so, did she live with the Torringtons during this time? Did she help out with her grandchildren when they were growing up? These are some interesting possibilities, but they all hinge on a name being wrong when I have no reason whatsoever to think it was written wrong. This is just me grasping at straws, trying to cram the puzzle pieces together, but it’s a fun thought experiment, even if that’s all it is.

Torrington would have been seven when Sarah died, and Esther only six. That’s a young age to lose a parent, and it must have been rough on William suddenly being the sole caregiver of two young children. Perhaps that’s why it didn’t take long for William to remarry. On June 21, 1836, William married Mary Hoyle, making her John and Esther’s stepmother and the newest member of the Torrington clan.

But Mary may not have been the only one joining the Torrington household on that day. The marriage certificate lists Mary as a widow. Hoyle is her married name, and for a while I couldn’t find her maiden name, ironically making it difficult to find her first marriage certificate and therefore her first husband—and any children they may have had. Recently, however, I found a family tree on Ancestry that says Mary’s maiden name was Warren. The baptism record for a couple Mary Warrens matches other records that I long-suspected referred to her in her later years, and a Mary Warren did indeed marry a man named Hoyle—Jonathan Hoyle—in 1823, the same year William and Sarah married. Jonathan Hoyle was also a coachman, like William, which makes me wonder if they knew each other. Were the Warren Hoyles friends of the Shaw Torringtons? Who knows?

Since this is relatively new information for me, I haven’t researched it as fully as I have some other records, and there are a few discrepancies I haven’t been able to tease out. For one, Mary’s baptism took place in Manchester Cathedral, (as did her marriage to Jonathan Hoyle), however, her marriage certificate and a later census record I believe belongs to her says she was from Ashton-under-Lyne. Ashton is also considered part of the Greater Manchester area, like Prestwich, so it’s not that far from Manchester itself. Maybe there was a lot of moving going on? Also, I have yet to find Jonathan Hoyle’s death record. He must have died, since Mary was a widow, but I can’t find the record. I don’t know how to explain these discrepancies, and I haven’t had a chance to investigate further. Still, it looks like I found the right Mary, despite the problems. UPDATE: I have since learned that the Collegiate Church in Manchester held a monopoly over the licenses required to perform baptisms and marriages during this time. This means that many people from Greater Manchester travelled to the city for these services, so their records would seem to indicate they were from Manchester when in fact they were from one of the surrounding townships. This probably explains these discrepancies. (It also raises the question, what about the Torringtons' records? Did they actually live in Manchester or in one of the surrounding towns?)

Mary and Jonathan had two children, both baptized in Ashton-under-Lyne (definitely some moving around going on). Their oldest was William, baptized January 2, 1825 (and therefore most likely born in late 1824), followed by James Warren Hoyle, baptized February 11, 1827. If I’ve found the right Hoyles (and I’m going to keep saying if because I haven’t been able to verify it), then Mary brought two sons with her into the Torrington family, giving John and Esther two stepbrothers—one older and one younger than the two Torrington kids.

How well did these two families integrate? Did John and Esther get along with their new brothers? Did Mary mind doubling her brood? We’ll probably never know.

But what happened to Torrington after this major life event? What did he do as he came of working age but before he joined the Franklin Expedition?

I have no idea.

I mean, I have some idea, based on speculation and probabilities, but no firm facts. Ideally, his occupation would have been listed in the 1841 census. Except he’s not in the 1841 census.

There are some John Torringtons in the 1841 census. In fact, there’s one that I briefly thought was him because the age was oh-so-close to Torrington’s:

FYI, the occupation listed of MS meant Male Servant, which doesn’t sound like a great career, but there are a couple problems here. One, this guy is 17 years old, while my boy should have been 15 going on 16 in 1841. One year off isn’t so bad, which is why I thought it might be him, but it’s not perfect. Two, this Torrington is living in St George Hanover Square in Middlesex, not Manchester. Torrington may have moved, of course, there’s no way to know if he lived in Manchester his whole life, but there’s something that’s not adding up here.

Wrong age, wrong place. Sound familiar?

Yeah, that’s got to be good old JT1, the Torrington born in Norfolk in 1824. Which means, my boy isn’t in the census.

There are several reasons why someone might not be in the census. They could be out of the country, or traveling overnight, or staying in part of the country where the records for 1841 are missing. Heck, the name could even be misspelled. A simple explanation would be that if Torrington were working on a ship and was away at sea, then that would explain why he’s not there. There’s just one problem with that.

His family isn’t in the census either.

Esther’s not in the census, Mary’s not in the census, even William doesn’t appear to be in the census. (Now, there is a William Torrington in Manchester in 1841, but he’s a little younger than I suspect Torrington’s father to be, and he’s listed as a laborer, which is the same occupation as JT1’s father. He’s also in jail. Considering William’s previous run-in with the law, this isn’t so surprising, but I don’t think this is the right William.)

The only members of the family who may be in the census are Mary’s sons from her first marriage, William and James Hoyle. A James Hoyle is listed as 14, right next to a William Hoyle, age 15. James would have been 14 in 1841, but William should have been 16 or so. However, in the 1841 census, ages for anyone older than 15 were supposed to be rounded down to the nearest multiple of 5 (not everyone did this, clearly, as JT1 is listed as 17), so this could still be him.

William and James are listed together at the same address, and they both have the occupation of “cotton piercer.” I can’t find information on what a “piercer” did, but a cotton piecer was a common job for children in the cotton industry, which involved repairing broken threads during spinning. The Hoyle boys are in Ashton-under-Lyne and are listed among a large number of people who don’t share the same last names. Were they living in Ashton while Mary lived in Manchester? Who were they staying with? Why aren’t they living with the Torringtons?

Which brings us back to the original question, where was the Torrington family? Were the Torrington’s staying overnight somewhere else? Were they travelling? Why was the family separated from the Hoyle boys?

We may never know the answers to these questions, unfortunately. And we may never know what Torrington did before he joined the Franklin Expedition, but there are a few possibilities based on what we know of his job on the expedition.

But that is for my next post.

<<Back | Next >>

Torrington Series Masterlist

[flockofdoves]

4, 9, 25!

omg.. these are all questions when looking through it i was like. i have a lot of Thoughts abt those ones fdkgjhdfkg. thank you angel!!! also please don’t feel obligated to read All This

i’m kinda embarrassed i wrote this much but i’m not good at editing things down after the fact

4. do you like your name?  is there another name you think would fit you better?

i do! chiara is my birthname and at times through my life i’ve wished for a more androgynous/masculine name but i guess like. my name and its pronunciation and spelling and what it meant to my mom in naming me has been consistent throughout my life i don’t feel like myself without that. if i grew up in italy i’d probably feel differently though bc at least in the north its become like . italian “maddie” lol i get so confused when i go there bc all of a sudden i’ll be hearing my name everywhere

chiaroscura i came up with as a melodramatic kid after i got excited about reading the tale of despereaux that the rat character chiaroscuro had a name so similar to mine and i thought it was cool he shortened it to roscuro. i liked the art style too and it helped people know how to pronounce my name sometimes. no one irl really called me roscura but i’ve been going by it online in addition to chiara since i was a tween

i’ve tried to go by other names throughout my life like cj and arie (pronounced in 3 syllables ah-ree-ay) and rio but none of them really stuck outside of very specific contexts even if i wanted something more androgynous i think i’m just ingrained with this. i’ve thought about having it be chiaroscuro instead but chiaro for short just seems dumb. idk. and even if roscuro sounds fine roscura isnt just Me me its also a name i really associate with like uhhhh.. some dissociative alter stuff so i wouldnt want to take that away from her idk

i was sure when i was younger i’d want to change my middle and last name. my middle name is anne lol so thats very common and i thought it was boring and didnt feel like Me and too feminine etc but in the past couple years with my nana (dads mom) dying and her name was ann and then also my grandma (moms mom) is annette and my moms own middle name is anne i guess even if i dont like it without context i can keep it for history

similarly with my last name. its anglicized swedish and i have no connection to that part of my family and when i was having a really difficult time with my dad i didn’t want it but now that hes died and our relationship got better towards the end i’m more okay with it.

not sure what i’ll do if i ever get married. also have considered changing my name if i ever have trouble with how fucking stupid i’ve been with being openly a communist/disabled/gay/etc online with my full name since i was 11 lol but i doubt that

9. are you an artist?

lol. i’m not sure anymore tbh :( i at least drew stuff almost every day of my life up until like a bit over a year ago now and even if i didn’t think i was any “good” compared to my peers in like . high school AP art who went on to art school and stuff it was a big part of my identity but i let myself fall out of it even when i’d never let depression do that before and just didn’t get that momentum again. i stress about it almost every day since then i keep saying i’m Finally getting back into it but beyond like . art therapy when i was in a php program or the couple sculpture classes i took before i had to drop out of even part time classes and then a few sketches i still haven’t really provably picked things up again. and its not just digital art or cartooning its also my other creative passions like making clothing and cosplay and making stories i feel like a shell of a person without it i’m tired of saying i’ll Soon get back into it. got as far as sketching something for an actual traditional art thing last week so maybe if i finish that i can prove to myself again. i think i have trouble and why i stopped is i wasn’t doing art because i enjoyed the process anymore, i wanted the final product to be good and got discouraged and fell into a grating routine to make art. i need to learn how to enjoy that process again (or just? let myself? idk) i really need to learn that with making comics because i don’t have much proof at all that i can make things beyond like. 6 pages long. and of course with webcomics you’re constantly learning and growing in developing them thats part of the medium. i want to be able to call myself an artist again even if its hard to see that right now. i almost started drawing before i started answering this right now. i hate that i keep pushing it off. i’ve definitely said this before, but it has to be soon

25. could you live as a hermit?

i think this past 9 months has been the closest i’ve ever been to a hermit and its made me very confident that i absolutely could not lmao. i’m so sick of this i need to see proof of life beyond this place and with irl interaction with loved ones beyond my mom on a regular basis stagnating here for even a few months longer is just too much i don’t even feel like a real person anymore and thats concerning on multiple levels lol. its wild to me i even got to this point and kind of ironic that i feel the most isolated i’ve ever felt once i moved to one of the biggest cities in this country. right now i’m sustaining myself by chasing hope of a way out with the start of maybe actual concrete steps towards just . seeing people i love again irl. but honestly even that is freaking me out because realistically it might take longer to get out of this than i’d like to and i really can’t handle being in this situation more than a few months more.

also just in a general sense i think humans need to collaborate and provide for each other. individualist fantasies of just providing for oneself and not having to care for others both jsut . tend to not actually be accurate and can be pretty reactionary. so many people are so isolated in many ways under capitalism and that makes divide and conquer easier but to ensure a future where that won’t be the case we need to build community/dual power/solidarity/etc etc. i feel a bit guilty i’m not putting my actions where my mouth is with that as an individual right now but i guess it makes sense how i got here when so much is structurally at play. its weird intellectualizing that balance sometimes.

i’m so sorry this turned into some fucking . vent tumblr therapy session jesus christ fdgkjhd

[those70scomics]

Links to the Rest of the Story: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Outline for the End

Disclaimer: That '70s Show copyright The Carsey-Werner Company, LLC and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, LLC.

CHAPTER FIVE THE CIRCLE

“Honey,” Eric's mom said at the kitchen table, “what kind of food does Donna like?” Eric was halfway through his breakfast, pancakes slathered in maple syrup. He gulped down some orange juice, in preparation to give his mom a thorough answer, but his dad spoke first: “How's the boy supposed to know that? He's barely met the girl.” “I just though he'd seen what she'd eaten at lunch. Eric, you have been sitting at lunch with her, haven't you?” “Oh, yeah,” Eric said, and it wasn't a complete lie. He'd eaten lunch with her once in this life but thousands of times in his other one. “Chicken Parmesan's her favorite meal. She, uh … she told me. She also loves strawberries.” Mom smiled, and her blue eyes crinkled. “Thank you, sweetie. I'm going grocery shopping for our dinner this Saturday. I want to make sure Donna's comfortable. Her father looks like he'll eat anything, and Midge—” She twirled a finger around her temple. “She probably won't notice what she's eating.” “What you're mother's trying to say, Eric,” Red said and turned the page of his newspaper, “is that the neighbor girl's mom is a ditz.” “Red, I did not say that.” She nodded at Eric and mouthed, “That's exactly what I'm saying.”

Eric ate a bite of pancakes, and the syrup  tasted sweeter than before. Even if he wasted today and tomorrow, that dinner would give him and Donna a real chance to bond. All he had to do was not alienate her further. But Coach Ferguson alienated him during gym. It was the first class of the day. Twenty-five minutes in, and Eric's second greatest wish was never to see a soccer ball again. He'd been made goalie of his team for some incomprehensible reason. The soccer ball sailed past him one too many times, and the more athletic students on his team converged on him. “Hey, quit it!” Kelso said and moved in front of Eric. “He may be a lousy goalie, but he's got it up here.” Kelso pointed to his head. “He knows stuff. Spooky stuff.” “Either take his place, Smells-so,” Kevin Oakridge shouted, “or get outta the way!” “Fine!” Kelso turned around and patted Eric on the shoulder. “Take my position. I got you covered.” Eric left the orange cones that served as goal posts. He had trouble believing what had just happened, but when he glanced back at Kelso, Kelso gave him a thumbs-up. Several minutes later, Eric blocked a kick from Fez, who was on the opposing team. The ball slammed into Eric's stomach, and he grunted. Fez had put all his strength into the shot, as if he were aiming for Eric's beanbags and not the goal. “Fez,” Eric said as Kevin took control of the ball, but Fez sprinted to another part of the gym. Gym ended, as always, with Eric covered in sweat. He had a few short minutes to towel off and change from his gym clothes. By the time he was finished, Kelso and Fez were both gone from locker room. No chance to ask them questions. During homeroom, Eric found Hyde but no answers. “Have no clue what's going on in Kelso's skull.” Hyde said. “You got history class with him next. Find out.” Eric planned on doing just that, but his shoulders stiffened as Mrs. Bridges went through the school announcements. “How did you know I have history?” Hyde's attention was on Mrs. Bridges, and he gestured for Eric to be quiet. “You're such a teacher's pet,” Eric said. “Get bent, Forman.” But Hyde seemed more annoyed than pissed, and he walked with Eric to the hallway after homeroom. “Donna's got history,” he said. Eric’s stomach hollowed out. Hyde had memorized Donna's schedule, just as Eric had done in his other life. Hyde wanted her, just as Eric did. Only, in this life, Hyde had a much better chance with her.

Eric entered history class unsure of where to sit. Donna and Kelso were already at their usual desks, with Pam Macy sitting beside Kelso. But as Eric passed by their aisle, Kelso shouted, “You!” Eric braced himself for an attack. Kelso's friendly attitude in gym class must’ve been an anomaly — or a setup — but the attack never came. “Why're you just standing there?” Kelso said and slapped Donna's desk. “Sit down.” Eric looked at Donna questioningly, but she offered him no assurances. She had her pencil out and wrote in her notebook. Kelso slapped her desk again. “Move down a seat, Donna.” She continued writing. “Knock it off, dillhole” . “Move down a seat.” Kelso shut her notebook. “Me and Eric have to talk.” She glared at him. “What?” “Kelso, leave her alone,” Eric said. “I'll go somewhere else—” “No, I'll go.” She picked up her notebook and backpack and left the aisle completely. Eric's instinct was to grab her arm and tell her to wait, but he took her desk instead. Kelso leaned in close to him and whispered, “I gotta thank you.” He hiked his thumb at Pam Macy. “Me and Pam didn't stop at making out yesterday.” “That's … fantastic, Kelso.” Eric tore a page from his notebook and began turning it into a paper football. “So why, exactly, are you thanking me?” “Because you know me better than myself. I can't be tied down to one woman, and Pam's totally cool about me fooling around with other chicks. That was your plan all along, to free me from monogamy.” Eric ripped his piece of paper in half. “Sure.” Kelso wagged a finger in Eric's face. “I see your plan now. You're here to make all our lives better, like some kind of genie. The Genie of Janesville.” Eric didn't argue. If Kelso thought Eric was supernatural, so be it. Better than having to fend off Kelso's fists everyday. “So who're you gonna help next?” Kelso said. “Hyde?” “Who knows?” Eric was folding his strip of paper into triangles. “But no hard feelings about Jackie?” “No way. She would've told me not to fool around with other girls, and Pam—” Kelso's next word was garbled. His body jerked back, and Eric spotted the cause. Pam Macy's arm was under Kelso's desk, and a smirk glided over her lips. Eric focused on finishing his paper football. Donna didn't know how lucky she was he'd taken her desk. Mr. Wilcox arrived to class late but not late enough for Kelso. Pam withdrew her hand from him, and Kelso shrieked. He pushed himself from the desk and fled the classroom, no doubt to finish Pam’s work in the bathroom. Mr. Wilcox cleared his throat and continued the week's lesson the Cold War. Kelso's absence had to be on his mind. Class disruptions were more than a pet peeve to him. He took them as a personal affront, which was why Eric behaved himself during class. Getting a detention in this life would interfere with his other life, depriving him of a precious hour to win Donna back. “People aren't property,” Mr. Wilcox said when Kelso eventually returned. “But in communist societies, everyone is treated as a slave — and you, Mr. Kelso, will see me after class.” “But I see you now,” Kelso said. “After class, Mr. Kelso.” “Fine!” Class continued with Kelso scrawling angry notes. Eric glanced at Kelso's notebook, afraid that Kelso blamed him for his trouble, but Kelso wrote about experiencing his own Cold War because of Mr. Wilcox. Eric didn't leave his desk when the bell rang. He had study hall with Donna next, with Mrs. Fletcher supervising. It would be a prime talking opportunity, but he needed to give Donna space. She had to see he wouldn't pen her in, and letting her walk the halls without him stepping on her heels was a good start. Kelso sneaked behind Pam on his way out of the row, but Mr. Wilcox called him to the front of the classroom. “I had a bathroom emergency!” Kelso shouted after a minute-and-a-half, and that was Eric's signal to leave. He strolled out of the classroom, walking slowly to give Donna even more time. If he bumped into her in the stairwell or hallway, that was fate's fault, not his. But he got to study hall without seeing her, and her red hair was like a signal fire. He found her easily among the other students already seated. The tables were full of yammering guys and chattering girls, including Jackie and her cheer-squad friends. Donna had taken a table in the corner and seemed to be actually studying. Eric curled his fingers into his palms. His hands weren't sweaty yet, but his heart beat loudly in his ears. Donna's affect on him was as frustrating as it was necessary. In his other life, those few hours without her had turned him into a breathing corpse. Having to live a lifetime without her wasn't a prospect he'd consider. “Can I sit at the table with you?” he said by her shoulder, and her head dropped to her chest, like he was intolerable to her. “I don't mean next to you.” He gestured to the other end of the table. “I'll sit over there, but I figured I'd ask your permission since you think I'm — well, since you don't like me very much.” Her head rose with a sigh. “It’s a free country.” He went to the end of the table and sat down. His blood thrummed with his pulse, with his small victory. She hadn't rejected him. She hadn't pushed him away, and he removed the triangular paper football from his backpack.

“Will you ever talk to me again?” he wrote on the football and flicked it across the table. His aim was perfect. The paper football landed on Donna's notebook, and every gaze at the table turned toward it, including Donna's.

Her hand glided over the football and pulled it closer. She must have read his message because her hair fell over her face, and she wrote on the football herself. The football sailed through the air a moment later and smacked Eric in the chin. “I haven't decided yet,” she'd written below his message. He ran his thumb over her round, feminine scrawl before writing, “I'm not an asshole.”

He tossed the paper football across the table. Hands not belonging to Donna reached for it, but they were too slow. Donna snatched the football from the table and wrote on it again. She threw it back to Eric, and her message said, “But you are creepy.” “And you're judgmental,” he wrote. “True,” her next message said. “Sorry.” “But I can see why you think I'm creepy,” he wrote and threw the paper football to her. It hit her arm; but she read his message, wrote below it, and tossed the football back. “How did you know?” her message said. The question was tiny but not illegible. That side of the paper football had run out of writing space, and he flipped it over to the other side. “I dove head-first into Kelso and Jackie's lives the first day I met them.” He chucked the football toward Donna, but someone grabbed it out of the air: Debbie Filipelli, an honors student and well-known gossip-monger. Donna stood from the table and moved menacingly toward her, and Debbie relinquished the football to Donna's custody. Donna took a moment to write her next message, and she hurled the paper football so hard it overshot the table. Eric had to get up to retrieve it. The power she put into her throw must’ve been for safety's sake, to prevent other people from getting the football. “No,” her message began. “I mean, how did you know Kelso was a cheater?” “Our first history class,” he wrote. “His eyes + Pam Macy's boobs. Simple math.” She smiled as she read his message, and he grinned at reading her next one: “So you're not a sociopath. You're just perceptive?” “Yes!” he wrote, and the tip of his pencil broke in his enthusiasm. He pulled a pen from his backpack and kept writing. “That's what I've been trying to tell you.” He'd drawn smiley-face beside the last word, but she didn't seem to appreciate his artwork or his message. She unfolded the football and refolded it, exposing a blank space to write.

“You're also a busy body,” her message said, “sticking your nose into other people's business.” “Was trying to help,” he wrote. She read his message looked over at Jackie, who was deep in conversation with her fellow cheerleaders. Jackie gestured wildly, and her voice carried but not enough for Eric to make out full sentences. Donna inhaled a heavy breath. Her shoulders drooped while she wrote, and she flicked the football back to Eric. She'd given him her longest response yet: “You probably did help Jackie, but I haven't made my mind up about you. You could still be a sociopath in a perceptive guy's body.” “Fair enough,” he wrote back, “but I promise you, Donna, I don't want anything from you other than friendship.” It was a lie. He wanted a lot more from her than friendship, but that was in his other life. In this one, all he wanted — needed — from her was a kiss. “Sociopaths lie to get what they really want,” her next message said. “Actions speak louder than words.” He turned the paper football around for a clear space to write in large letters, “What do you really want?” She read his message and stuck her pencil between her teeth. Her fingers drummed on the table, and her gaze drifted to the ceiling before writing him back. “For you not to be so damn creepy.” It was her last message to him. By the time he looked up from the football, she was on her way out of the study hall. He stuffed the paper football into his backpack. He and Donna hadn’t developed any trust between them yet, but at least she'd started to communicate with him.

But he still had plenty of work to do — and not just with her. He approached Jackie’s table, and six pairs of eyes turned toward him. They belonged to the cheer squad, and he found no kindness in them, only judgment. “Jackie,” he said, “it's time to settle up.” Jackie rose from her chair. “Not here,” she whispered and pointed to the center of the room. She strode ahead of him. He followed, but standing in the middle of all the tables made him feel exposed. Even Mrs. Fletcher glanced at him from her desk. “Can't we sit somewhere?” he said. She scoffed and clasped her hands behind her back. “Where people can't see exactly what we're doing? Please. Do you know how much damage control I had to do because of Timmy Wilson's big, fat mouth? I'm sorry, Derek, but...” She jutted out her bottom lip in what had to be false-sympathy. “You're just too skinny and weird for me to make-out with, despite that you're friends with Buddy Morgan.” “Okay, first of all, it's Eric, not Derek. Second...” A scathing burn surfaced in his mind, but she hadn't paid him yet. If he antagonized her, she could back out of their deal. “All I want from you is those tickets.” “What tickets?” He gaped at her. She couldn't have forgotten their bargain. She'd just referenced the gossipy fall-out from their negotiations. “To the Rundgren concert in Milwaukee!” “Oh.” She examined her nails, as if this conversation couldn't be more boring. “My dad left for a business trip this morning. He won't be back until Sunday night, so I can't get you any Todd Rundergament tickets.” She lookat at him again. “But I heard there's a Rush concert in two weeks. I could get you tickets for that.” He gripped the top of his hair, and his cheeks grew hot. “For the love of — I ask you to do one thing!” “Don't shout at me!” She swung her foot at him. It connected with his shin, and pain spread through his tibia. He doubled over with a grunt, and by the time he recovered, she was back at her table of cheerleaders.

Eric spent all of music class fantasizing about calling WFPP, winning the Rundgren tickets, and presenting them to Donna. He thought about it on his way to the cafeteria, about the kiss she'd give him as a reward. The angel didn't specify that the kiss be on Eric's lips. A kiss, freely given, to his cheek had to count just as much. “Gross” Edna — Hyde's mom — dropped a greasy hamburger onto Eric's tray. He grabbed a fistful of potato chips and scurried from her sight. She was known to bitch-out students if they didn't move fast enough. Eric went toward Buddy's table. The spot across from Buddy was unoccupied, but shouts of “Eric, over here!” and “Yo, Forman!” drew his attention. Kelso and Hyde were calling him to their table. This was new, and Eric grasped his tray hard enough to make his knuckles hurt. Fez was still in the lunch line, but his objections to Eric's presence would likely be ignored. Donna, though, was seated next to Hyde. She bit into a potato chip and stared at Eric, as if challenging him to sit across from her. She had no idea who she was messing with: a man with his future on the line. He changed directions and sat at her table. “So, any of you manage to bag tickets to the Rundgren concert?” he said before anyone else spoke. He had to act cool, as if Kelso and Hyde's invitation weren't a big deal. “'Cause I've had no luck.” “Been calling every night,” Hyde said. “Got through once — and was caller number eight.” “That sucks.” Eric bit into his hamburger. A mixture of grease and meat juice dribbled onto his chin, and he wiped it up with a napkin. A person had to be caller number thirteen to win tickets. “Timing is everything,” he said. “Too bad we don't have someone working there who could help us out.” Hyde angled his head toward the ceiling as he chewed his last bite of food. Eric recognized the look. Hyde was mulling over an idea. “While I'm against nepotism in any form,” he eventually said, “getting concert tickets could make me abandon my principles.” Kelso laughed. “Yeah. I'd abandon Principal Pridewell on the side of the road for Rundgren tickets.” “Principles,” Donna said, “not principals, you dink.” She picked up her hamburger but didn't bite into it. “Oh, man, I'd love to work for WFPP.” “And I'd love to work for Jackie,” Fez said. He'd arrived with a tray piled high with potato chips and sat beside Eric. “I'd be her assistant, and eventually she'd let me choose her outfits, and I'd be there while she got dressed—” “Fez, gross,” Donna said. “Could you at least try to be less skeevy?” Kelso thrust a potato chip in Fez's face. “If you go after Jackie, man, I'll shove one of these where the sun don't shine.” “Why would I care if you shove a potato chip in Sweden?” Fez snatched the chip from Kelso's fingers and ate it. “I mean it,” Kelso said. “Jackie's mine.” “But I thought you didn't want Jackie anymore,” Fez said. “Not if she's the only chick I can fool around with. But after I'm doing it with all the girls who don't care about stuff like that, I'll give Jackie a chance.” “But that could be years!” Kelso shrugged. “Thems the breaks, Fez.” Donna's nose wrinkled. “Give me a break. Kelso, Jackie can date whoever she wants, including Fez. You don't own her.” Eric instinct was to back her up. If they'd been in his other life, he would've done it without hesitation. But here, she might interpret his support as undermining her.

He kept his mouth shut, but Hyde said, “Hey, I don't want Fez dating Jackie either. We just got her out of our life, thanks to Forman.” “No, thanks to Kelso being a horny pig,” Donna said. “And, apparently, a self-entitled one.” “A self-en-what?” Kelso said. She put up her hand dismissively. “Never mind.” Fez put up his hand the same way examined it. “This feels powerful.” He held his hand steady and glared at both Kelso and Hyde in turn. “If I choose to pursue Jackie, that is my choice.” “But, Fez—” Kelso said. “My choice!” Fez put down his hand and continued to eat. “Whatever.” Hyde swiped a potato chip from Donna's tray. “Study sesh after school?” “Sure,” she said. Their easy interaction occupied Eric's mind through the rest of lunch. Donna's friendship with Hyde was impenetrable, inviolable. Trying to get between them would be a foolish endeavor. As much as the idea soured his stomach, he'd have to treat them as if they were two parts of a whole. Being on Hyde's good side had gotten him this far. If Eric concentrated on that, it might get him even farther.

OUTLINE MODE BEGINS

Chemistry class. Eric and Buddy continue the lab experiment from yesterday and write down the results.

Buddy Morgan says, “Things must have gone well yesterday because you sat with the redhead at lunch.”

Eric says yes and no. Donna thinks Eric's creepy, etc. And Jackie flaked out on giving Eric the Rundgren tickets. The bargains he's made here so far aren't panning out.

Buddy says that's too bad.

Buddy's a bit cold to Eric, and Eric wonders if it has to do with Eric not eating lunch with him.

Eric asks if Buddy wants to hang out with Eric after school. Eric says he plans on going to Donna's house, and there's no reason Buddy can't come, too. Buddy thanks him, smiling, but declines. He has plans of his own.

Eric leaves school concerned about his friendship with Buddy. He hopes he didn't lose it by not eating lunch with him one day. The Buddy in his other life isn't so sensitive or fickle. But in less than three days, this life's Buddy won’t be a concern for him anymore.

Eric cringes at that thought. It sounds so callous. Tomorrow, he’d make sure Buddy knows Eric really does appreciate him.

Eric also wants to make a peace offering to Donna and Hyde. So he buys pot from Leo at the Fotohut.

Afterward, Eric goes to Donna's with the pot in his backpack. Donna opens the front door, and Hyde's on the living room couch. His and Donna’s trig notebooks are open. They really are studying.

Eric shows them the bag of pot.

Hyde says, “Holy hell.”

Donna says, “Whoa.” Eric says, “And I've got the perfect place to smoke it.”

ERIC'S BASEMENT. Eric locks both basement doors, the one to the kitchen and the one to the outside. Donna comments on the creepiness of that, asks if Eric plans on getting them high them murdering them.

Hyde says Donna's paranoid, which Eric finds funny since Hyde's the paranoid one in Eric's other life.

Eric says it's just a safety precaution. If Eric's parents catch them down here, he's dead.

Donna says, “Some perfect place to smoke.”

Hyde tells Donna to lighten up on Eric.

DURING the circle, Eric tries to guide the conversation to women's rights. But Hyde's much better at talking about them than Eric is. Hyde, in Eric's other life, always was, too.

BY THE TIME the circle is over, Eric wonders why Donna was ever with Eric in his other life. Eric sucks, but he can do better. He prays to God that if he gets that kiss from Donna, he'll read all the Feminist books that exist.

The angel appears and says this is bargaining. “And didn't you say your bargains don't pan out?”

Eric says this whole situation is a bargain. The angel can't argue. Eric asks if he's doomed to failure. The angel says he's got a little more than three days left to figure that out. 

[coffee-books-and-roses]

FAQ about American politics for those who do not live in America (and also Americans who don’t keep up with the news). This is a long fucking post heads up.

I’ll start by saying that if you want to keep up with American politics, listen to Pod Save America. It was created by former Obama officials.

One last thing, when I saved this as a draft, a lot of the words turned to emoji’s, So incase you see clapping hands, that means p a r t y. 

Ok, now to begin. Incase you didn’t know, America is more or less one shit show when it comes to our politics right now. Most Americans are struggling to keep up with the news, so I can’t even imagine what it’s like for those outside the US, who have no cultural context. 

(Some notes before we go: We go by a two party system (1) Democrat = liberal. The party of Obama. (2) Republican = conservative. The party of Trump. Also, GOP stands for “Grand Old Party.” It’s another name for Republicans)

For the last two years (2016-2018) Republicans have controlled all three branches of government. The three branches: Judicial, Executive, and Legislative. However, that turned a few days ago when Democrats took control of one of the two Chambers in the Legislative branch called “The House”. This is the first time in eight years that they have taken control of the house. 

This will now be conversation form, making it easy to follow along

“What are the midterms?” America holds presidential elections every four years. Meanwhile, every two years we have an election in the legislative branch, also known as congress. The mid terms are the elections between presidential elections. Every election, all 435 house seats are open. Mean while, the number of seats up in the senate range in the mid 30′s. This year in 2018, 35 seats were up and open. (It is the same during the presidential election. Again. all 435 seats in the house are open, and somewhere in the mid 30′s senate seats are open.)

“How are the 435 house seats distributed among the states?” It’s all proportional, based on state population. The more people in a state, the more house seats they get. For example, California with 39 million, get 53, while places like Alaska, with only 700,000, gets just one representative. Each state will, at a minimum have one representative. 

“Wait- how are the representatives divided up with in the state?” I’ll explain that when we get to gerrymandering. 

“How many seats do Democrats need to take in order to get control of the house and senate?” For the house: 23. For the senate: 2. 

“Wait- you only won 194 house seats in 2016. Wouldn’t you need 24?” Democrats won a special election in Pennsylvania in 2017 after the Republican guy who held the office quit. 

“Same with the senate, you only won 46 seats in 2016.” There are two independents  in congress, although they vote almost always with the Democrats. We had a special election in Alabama, which we won, making us need only two seats. 

“Let’s say that Democrats with 50 seats and Republicans with 50 seats. Being that they would vote along party lines, what will happen to the bills?” The vice president- aka Mike Pence, will get to cast a vote on any bill that is half and half. Being that he is republican, he will side with his party. This is the only time the vice president is allowed to vote on issues in congress. 

“Back to the 2 seats in the senate. 2 seats don’t seem that hard” We had to defend 26 of the 35 seats, and then gain two more. In 2018, Democrats had to win 80% of the seats to take control, which, of course, didn’t happen. 

“So, what were the results?” Well, they are still counting a few races. However, regardless of those outcomes, we know for a fact that Democrats have taken at least 225 seats, seven more than the 23 needed. As for the senate, Republicans have at least 51, so even if the rest come out democrat, it won’t matter.

“What will American politics be like for the next two year?” Democrats can put a pause on Trumps agenda. Without control of both houses, he won’t be able to get his bills passed. Also, we will have subpoena power, meaning that we will finally investigate corruption that Trump has ignored. 

“Why did it take so long to get back control of the House?” Voter ID laws and gerrymandering 

“Voter ID laws? Don’t those protect against people from illegally voting? Okay, I tried writing about it, although it got to long. I’ll give you a 3 minute video for the shortened version. Just a heads up, when there are voting fraud attempts, they are mainly done by mail, not in-person. More democrats vote in-person, which is why they are doing this. 

“Gerrymandering ?” I don’t know how to explain it, so just watch this 3 minute video , it will explain the next questions below. 

“How often do the gerrymandered districts get re-drawn?” Every 10 years. See, the republicans took control in 2010, a census year. The next time states get re-drawn is in 2020

“What the heck happened in 2010?” The TEA party was formed 

“What is the TEA party?” It stands for “Taxed Enough Already”. The name also is a reference to the “Boston Tea Party” in 1773, when the American colonies dumped a bunch of British Tea into the Boston Harbor. 

“So what were the political views of the tea party?” They were a far fringe in the Republican party. The tea party argued for lower taxes, and reducing the amount of debt America had to other countries 

“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad. Why is that a problem?” Because in reality, it had very little to do about taxes or debt. While certainly people did joined because of financial reasons, in reality, it was more about racism than anything else. A bunch of old white people lost their goddamn shit because Obama, an African American, was in office. To them, he was a communist-atheist-Muslim-socialist-gay-Kenyan who was here to take away your guns and It’s not just me saying that. There has been evidence to suggest that racial resentment played a part in the tea party. 

“Yeah, well, didn’t they make good on the promise of lower taxes? After all, they just passed the largest tax cut in decades.” Yes. For the rich. As for the middle class and poor, they get almost nothing. The over whelming majority- 83%- will go to the wealthiest 1% of Americans.  

“What about caring for the debt?” Their tax cut actually expands the deficit- exactly opposite of what they promised. 

"Where, then. are they going to get the money to pay for the debt?” Republicans now want to cut funding Social Security and Medicare, programs designed to help the poor.  

“What does the American public think about this?” 60% of Americans think the tax cuts help the rich, not the middle class. That would probably explain why Republicans really didn’t talk that much about their tax cut during the 2018 midterms

So what could they run on if they didn’t talk about the tax cuts? Two things, first “pre-existing conditions” regarding Obamacare, and, or course, racism 

“Wait- before we go any further- what’s this whole Obamacare thing?” Obamacare allows people to get health insurance. In America, health insurance is a for-profit business. Of course, there is Medicare and Medicaid, but those are for really old people or really poor people. 

“I thought that program was called ACA?” Obamacare goes by many names. The official title is “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” although people shortened it to “affordable care act” then shortened it even more and abbreviated it to “ACA”. People gave it the nickname “Obamacare” because it was passed by Obama. 

“So how does everyone else get health care?” Two ways: though their employer, or by a single plan. This means you can, on your own, shop around for the best price.

“What was the point of Obamacare then?” Prior to Obamacare, while you could get insurance through your employer, you couldn’t always get it on the single market. There are these things called “pre-existing conditions”, which means that you were sick before you bough their health care. This could mean anything from cancer to acne. If you had a pre-existing condition, the company could charge you more money since you have a history of medical problems, and might cost them more money in the future. In some cases, they would deny allowing you to buy their health care at all.

“Holy shit. Is it possible to buy health care while your sick?” Technically, yes. However, most insurance companies would not do that. If you had cancer, then went looking for health care, almost always it would be too expensive for people to get. In most cases, they would just deny you insurance. Of course, you could get it through work insurance, however, you have to work full time for a month before you can get the health care. 

“So what problems of the health care system were solved with Obamacare becoming law?” Now companies couldn’t charge you more or deny you coverage if you had a pre-existing condition. Also, it gave more money for medicaid and medicare, so more people could be covered. It did a lot of other things, like help fund rural hospitals, although I don’t have to go into all, but those were the main ones. 

“Why the fuck would the republicans want to repeal Obamacare? Why the fuck would anyone want it repealed!?” Because repealing it would give a major tax cut to the rich. Again, all about tax cuts. 

“How did the American people support this?” Fox news and the right wing nut jobs created fear. Pundits and Republican law makers were on tv (including CNN) telling people that this was a government take over of health care. (It wasn’t. We still have the private health care industry.) They told bullshit stories of “death panels”, that the government would line people us and decide who was most deserving of cancer treatment. 

Did the Republicans at least show their version of improving healthcare? Nope. For seven years, they ran on “repeal and replace”, yet never once showed what the “replace” part would be. They just kept telling people that once they got both chambers and the presidency, they would replace it with something better. 

“Why wouldn’t they get a plan together before the 2016 presidential election?” They wanted to push it off another four years, since all the polls were showing that Hilary Clinton would win

“So when Republicans held onto both chambers and won the presidency, what did they do?” They made two major attempts, both in 2017, and both ended up failing

“What was the first one?”  In late February of 2017, almost a month after Trump came into office, they tried to write a bill. Of course, the democrats wanted a copy, but the Republicans wouldn’t give them one. So on March 2nd, Democrats went on a legit scavenger hunt trying to track down a copy of the bill. They finally revealed it on March 6th. The bill ended up being too moderate for the right wingers, and to right wing form the moderates. Anyway, the bill got pulled before it could get a vote on March 24, just a few weeks later.

“The second one?” On June 22nd, 2017, they revealed another bill called “The Better Care Reconciliation Act.” They wanted to vote on it by the end of July. Just so you know, health care is 1/6 of the economy. In one moth, they wanted to recreate 1/6 of the fucking economy. Long story short, we got a few republicans to switch sides and vote with us. However, we needed just one more vote, In come John McCain, one of the few decent Republican left. On July 28, just after midnight around 12:30 AM, John McCain voted no, and you can watch it in this dramatic video 

“So why did they vote no?” Americans put a ton of pressure on their senators and representatives. 

“Wait- I heard that Republicans supported protecting people with pre-existing conditions this elections?” They lied. Most still wanted to get ride of protecting people with pre-existing conditions, but Obamacare has become too popular. For example, Republican Scott Walker, who just lost his seat to the  Democrat Tony Evers, told people he supported the pre-existing conditions part of Obama care, all while he was part of a lawsuit challenging it in court.  

“You mentioned them running on racism?” Yup. If you want a deeper dive in all the examples of racism in the 2018 midterms, read this Atlantic article 

“How did the Republican party get so full of racist people?” It started with the TEA party in 2010, but took off with Trump. It has gotten so bad that In the 2018 elections, they had a white nationalist run in North Carolina.  

“Are you saying that all republicans are racist?” No. Many republicans don’t hold these views. The republican base is shrinking, with those who just want tax cuts leaving.  For example: Ana Navarro,  a hispanic republican, decided to vote democrat in the Florida election. She was the hispanic chairwoman for the John McCain campaign in 2008.  

“How did Trump play into the racism for the 2018 election?” He lied about the migrant caravan in South America. Basically, they the caravan is made up of people fleeing government oppression and violence in South America. Once they reach the US boarder, they are going to request asylum. This, of course, is legal. Yet Trump lied, falsely calling them an “invasion”. saying they there all a bunch of gang members who were going to kill Americans the moment they arrived. He said democrats were “too dangerous” to govern falsely saying that they would have “open boarders”

"I don’t hear much about the caravan now.” That’s because it was a political stunt- he din’t care about the caravan. He just used them to stir up fear for the elections. Of course, he still doesn’t want them in America. Yet he’s not going to talk about it because the elections are over. 

“Obviously not all Americans fall for his lies, but why do I see Americans tweet and support his lies?” A lot, but certainly not all, are Russian bots trying to divide people 

“Speaking of Russia, how did this whole Trump-Russian thing start even?” TL;DR He was being investigated way back in July 2016, fired the FBI investigating him in March 2017, and then a special prosecution council was made in May of 2017, with Robbert Muller being the lead prosecutor. Supposedly Muller is going to write his final report soon, but it hasn’t been confirmed.

“Shouldn’t this whole Russia thing all over the news?” There is so much going on that it is hard to just focus on the Russia investigation. The midterms, tax cuts, health care, immigration....all the things I listed above. Now it is only reported on if something massive happens- like an arrest or if someone is called to testify before congress. 

“Wow, man, this shit show is really bad. The whole thing could have been avoided if Hilary got the majority of the votes.” She did. She won the popular vote by 2.5 million. If we were in any other democracy, be that Canada or Australia, she would be president right now. This also happened in the 2000 election, when George W Bush lost the popular vote yet became president 

“Wait” You say “How the fuck does something like that happen?” Welp, get ready for your head to explode in anger  [Part one]   [Part two]

So....the guy who is trying to take away health care and give tax cuts to the rich is also they guy who lost the popular vote and could be working with Russia? Yup. 

“Any good news?” We won the house, and for the next two years, we will make Trumps life a living hell.

Anyway, I’ll end here. This is about 2,700 words and I’m exhausted. 

[fractalfractures]

Introducing Books 2 and 3

I take back everything I said about Book 2 being a more interesting genre. It is also, to all appearances, a romance novel, and definitely takes place in the modern world.

So far the story goes:

Prologue: Main character looks at a beautiful starry night and thinks cynical thoughts about how life is suffering and the only person you can rely on is yourself, and how it’s been 13 years since the incident that taught him this, which he considers the beginning of his current life. Also, he lives in a cabin surrounded by trees, and his family owns an inn, and it’s pitch dark all around with the village’s lights barely twinkling on the horizon, so sue me for thinking this was a medieval hamlet somewhere.

Chapter 1: He goes into town to run some errands and runs into ... HER. The person he sees in all his nightmares. Turns out that betrayal of 13 years ago was by the girl he’d thought was his soulmate. And she’s all, “Hi! Remember me?” and he’s basically “I do everything I can to forget you, please go away and never interact with me again,” and she’s like, “Oh, so you still think about me, yay! That’s great, since I obviously came to this tiny boring town just to be near you, and I’m threatening to stay here for ever and ever! Now I’m going to keep smiling and being fake-friendly and pretending you want to go out for coffee with me,” and he is nearly fainting from terror until he gets his chance to escape, and also mad at himself for noticing exactly how beautiful she is (obligatory description of her looks, including skin so blindingly pale it burns with a few minutes in the sun, yet is somehow devoid of so much as a single freckle, and as a pale-skinned individual myself who has to deal with far worse than freckles no matter how often I apply sunscreen, it’s like she’s TRYING to make me hate the character even more than I already did.)

Chapter 1, part 2: 13 years ago, the girl’s point of view. They are both 16 and in high school. She’s new in the boring little town, her family having moved because of financial difficulties, and there are some Bella Swan parallels with how she relates to her parents. She literally runs into the guy who was until now our main character, and just can’t take her eyes off of him and has now idea why. Then when she gets to class the only available seat is right in front of him, and she’s just so aware of his presence behind her she can’t concentrate on the lecture! Meanwhile her friend has spent the whole chapter trying to warn her that he’s bad, bad news and she should stay far away from him, nobody at school (except his one friend) can stand him even though he’s rich and throws the best parties, and as for why they go to his parties, it’s like a Communist dictatorship where nobody likes the supreme leader but they’re also not about to say so to his face. It’s just easier if they all follow his orders and that way no one has to deal with his explosive temper.

Chapter 2: Present day, dude’s POV. He helps his bff fix a car and practices taking in every detail of his surroundings without seeming to pay attention, a highly-developed skill that serves him well in some kind of mysteriously-alluded-to job that will probably be explained a bit more when I finish translating this chapter.

So that one’s looking to be its own kind of hot mess. Translating it felt super fast compared to the other one, for whatever reason. I think the writing’s a little better in this one, too, or at least more conventional novel-ish.

Book 3, meanwhile, was very clearly going to be a story about a women who gets sent back in time to the Wild West of the US in the 1800s, and eventually finds herself torn between her desire to go home and her desire for the hot bachelor she meets there. I’ve covered one chapter so far, and what I didn’t  expect was for it to spend several paragraphs establishing how happy and content this Main Character was with her life so far, working her way into a satisfying career and close enough to her sister to talk about opening a business together. That doesn’t stop her from getting mad when Little Sis confesses to having signed her up with a marriage agency, which of course turns out to be sketchy as heck. First they call her asking would she like to learn about the bachelors who have already showed interest, despite sis having already gone back to take her off the list. Then they convince her to physically come to the office to watch her profile being removed from the database, and it’s a creepy dark mostly-abandoned complex with one woman there, and she has to sign a paper consent form to have her info removed even though she never consented to have it put there in the first place, and the woman leaves with the papers and then the lights go out and she doesn’t come back so main character tries the door and walks out into the living room of our unsuspecting 1800s gentleman who had just written off for a mail-order bride asking specifically that the woman be obedient. There is absolutely no staring awestruck at each other in this one, but I guess he’s a good guy because he tells her she doesn’t have to marry him if she doesn’t want to, she’s free to leave. After considering her prospects wandering the arid wilderness alone, she says sure I’ll marry you, and they immediately go into town to look for first more modest clothing and second a preacher, while she’s secretly plotting her escape as soon as she gets hold of a telephone. The chapter ends with her finally figuring out she’s been sent back in time, and fainting.

This one wins the award for most errors per paragraph wrt commas. With the others I kind of tried to keep to the original writing style but this was just too ridiculously bad.

[selphplusplus]

Forgotten

This time last year still sick form COvID

I can remember the fever dreams vividly.

We were microorganisms, defending our puddle from invaders. It was very dynastic-conquest-esque.

As we fought survival wars, there as a class of shaman that could manipulate genetic matter and cause our people to evolve, a mix between Ender’s Game and Spore, the evolution and civilization emulation.

I was very baby leftist at the time and had no theoretical understanding of what an epidemic could do to a society. I still thought Bernie could change things, that we could just vote all this away. We had yet to see how utterly abandoned America was going to leave the poor.

But the dream did trigger a curiosity. I was frustrated often in that dream, my people were at war with an Other we didn’t understand. I was like a leader of a batallion, not one of the higher ups that had us fighting. And being there felt very much like real life. It reminded me of high school football. As cliche as that sounds, the close bonds I formed with teammates battling it out against a far superior team. Only it wasn’t touchdowns we were giving up. It was our lives. Watching someone you’ve grew up with die right beside you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Hell, you don���t even know why you’re fighting.

Even though it was “just a dream” it wasn’t unusual to wake up with tears, or utterly dejected.

Why were we fighting anyway. Later this would become a metaphor for class war. But last March I didn’t understand those dynamics.

It lasted 3 days. Recurrent I wasn’t even keeping track of time and I slept most of those 72 hours only waking up to use the bathroom and get some fluids. The dream world was the only thing my subconscious kept returning to. And it was a weird but profound experience. I’d never dreamt consecutively of the same thing like that, and never so lucid and impactful that I could remember it when I woke up.

So I was stuck on the question of protecting society from a biological threat. How apropos that it coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic.

A few months later I reread the Communist Manifesto. It hit different that time.

Having just come out of 7 year disconnect from society proper, living as a lumpenprole (though I didn’t have that concept yet), having just got out of my first real stint of jail time that was thankfully cut short with a COViD inspired plea deal (do 1/3 of your time, plead guilty, no fees, no probation, just go—and seeing the judge just a day before that agreed release, it was an easy “here’s my signature, I’m not guilty of these trumped up bullshit charges, I was having a drug induced psychosis and needed a hospital not a jail cell, but OK I’d rather be not in jail...Fine, I’ll plea out.”) bit I digress—

In the coming months I went from liberal “left”

progressive by American standards to guillotine Bezos, but unironically, today, unapologetic communist. A tankie, and a badge I wear proudly. When I say COVID-19 radicalized me, I mean literally. It was the combination of the futility of individualism that was instilled by the successive failures of my Avatar in the dreamworld to save my people. For a fantasy land, the emotions of rage and sadness and loss left a lasting imprint.

And then i got to see it play out in real time. To my actual people, the poor and marginalized in the US. The forgotten—or intentionally ignored—the most vulnerable told to fuck right off.

Told to go die for to keep making the bosses rich.

Told what they already felt about themselves, that their lives didn’t matter.

And we heard that loud and clear. The George Floyd cold blooded murder by a sociopathic pig (daily “Fuck the police” mantra by the way). That was a catalyst. That they tried to excuse it by painting the man as a fentanyl abuser, as an addict and a criminal, enraged us even more.

How the fuck do you think we survive in a system that demonizes us, shuns us because we fell into the spiral of addiction!?

Of course we fucking do crime. No one will hire us. Medical help only exists for a select few who win the lottery of the bare bones funding for social work.

And not just that, but you gotta get an addict in for help immediately. When they ask for it, they’re at that rock bottom place, probably suicidal, and the intake process is “wait three weeks” and by then, if they’re still alive they probably don’t wanna do to rehab. And that’s the reality of the cycle. (Unless you have money of course and you can pay your way in same day. But let’s keep acting like class doesn’t exist.)

Then it’s to the revolving door of the recovery industry, enriching the parasites that have found a way to profit off of misery. They deserve a special place in hell in Dante’s fourth circle: greed. Ain’t late stage capitalism grand?

So a black man who happens to be caught in this terrible maelstrom of tragedy and somehow deserves a cop standing on his neck, wailing in agony in his final moments, because he may have been a drug addict!?

Fuck you.

Fuck you entirely.

If this what you think, that an addict’s life is some how lesser or less than, I hope you kids die of an overdose; I hope someone trying to get their fix snatches your purse, steals your car, robs your house. I want you to understand the real gravity of the situation. We’re not abstractions. And we deserve a dignified life and a society that gives us a chance.

But instead, when things weren’t so dire, and you could just forget about us, and we could scrape out a meager existence funding out habit to escape a society that’s already written us off, we just thought as long as we stayed invisible your opinion about us was indifference.

When we saw a pig murder a man, on repeat. Replayed over and over on national fucking media outlets and social media—

When the state sanctioned a killing and we saw people debating a man’s life as he begged for mercy—

After he had done noting wrong, it’s quite audacious that you’re upset about a few burned buildings.

We heard you loud and fucking clear. You don’t see us as forgotten. You see us as unwanted.

And here we are a year later. $1800 dollar puttiance. (Be happy with what you have, peasants) yet we saw other countries, even capitalist countries, shut down, lockdown, pay people’s salary, protect their workers.

Vaccines that favor the rich. (Yet a the socialist nations developed their own, even exported them with no strings attached because that’s the right thing to do.) and here’s American companies like Pfizer, trying to manipulate South America for USA imperialist conquest. promising vaccines for trade, just a no-fault contract “so we’re [Pfizer] is indemnified if we fuck you over, oh and a military base. Or your people can just for from COVID, no pressure.”

Business owners bailed out. And the poor having to go literally risk their lives to make some money rich fuck with a yacht richer. Nah. The answer to my dream-prompted questions, it turns out we’re already answered by a German philosopher and the thoughts and societies built by his predecessors. Socialism has given us a real life

example on how to take care of my people. And that together, with revolutionary love. That’s why we do this.

“When it’s our time, we will not apologize for the terror.” You wrought this on yourself.

[anarchy-in-the-pre-k]

feel incredibly weird. took a nap after doing almost nothing that would cause me to be especially tired today. i mean, i woke up at 10:30, did 1 class, shoveled the 1 inch of snow off my driveway, then i slept for the next 4 hours. i dreamt i was sick (and maybe, i probably am now irl) and i was making music. maybe it was a weird time of day in my dream too. i remember feeling this same gross blend of maturity/infantile back-at-home existence/disgust at my own body that i feel every day irl. was i making a shitty skramz album in my dream? that would be funny. when i went back upstairs in my dream my dad was pissed at me. he accused me of faking being sick and yelled at me (like he does every time im sick irl) but my mom was still alive and she partially calmed him down. they asked me about my plans for the future and seemed weirdly loving for a second. i told them about the indentured-servant audio graduate program in georgia and they told me that it sounded like a good idea. my parents started reminiscing, although i guess it was my mom specifically, about some theater-house they used to go too. maybe it was something more explicit like opera, but in front of/part of the theater-house was a huge flock of incredibly creepy long-legged huge-beaked water birds. And birds like this i suppose are generally fairly gentle, even the meat-eating ones, but these birds were just so silent, and put off such a murderous mental vibe. i think that they were psychically broadcasting/inclining everyone near them towards hatred. they were very cold and hateful. in a flashback somehow, i saw somebody throw some kind of ceremonial fish/offering into the water where they were standing. there was a short, slow and silent soccer-like skirmish to get the fish, which was at last cornered in the pond by one bird, leaving the others to go back to other corners of the pond to mind their business. the bird stabbed it straight through with its long/thin beak. i guess this fish was still alive, it started bleeding out and flopping like crazy until it stopped thrashing and lay still a few moments later. the bird didnt even eat the fish. it killed it, stepped out of the pond, and lay down to rest right next to its dying body, only half-looking over its shoulder at it sometimes. i remember now, my parents called them “taipei” birds/herons i think. they were bright red and yellow and brown/black. im awake now, and i hate it here. i had such a horrible dream, teasing me with the eeriness of a still-alive mom, a somewhat loving family, the horrible psychic messages from the birds, but i hate being awake too. all of my friends have moved on without me, even the two bookish communists who have been my only real human connection besides my dad for the last 3 years. theyve unfollowed me on twitter, meet up all the time without me, i dont get invited to anything anymore. i dont even know what ive done wrong besides be boring/stupid in their eyes. and i do definitely feel boring/stupid. i felt horrible laying down to bed at 6PM, because whether online, irl, or in my dreams i feel like all i ever get are nonstop reminders that i am alone and the good times are over. i am writing this for nobody. i just feel so much dread, both for the world at large politically and for how i might turn out socially. ive felt my social skills deteriorating for a while before quarantine, and this might have been the final nail. i dont know what it fucking is. i spend my day as a flattened wojak listening to my dad be incredibly racist and homophobic, throwing tantrums about every little thing that his bar friends or somebody on facebook says to him, i even heard him refer to me as his therapist to someone over the phone this morning, then i go to sleep full of hatred for myself and wondering why i couldnt be good enough for the last few friends i had again, then i get a fucked up dream about my dead mom and murder birds doing horrible things and sending me horrible telepathic messages to just hate everyone and everything as much as i can, and now i wake up in a world thats just so horrible and confusing and lonely and shows no signs of getting better in the slightest. fuck you joe biden, the liberals are happy now, the public pressure is off, and im back in a fucking john carpenter “they live” scenario where i feel like only 1 of like 15 fucking people total who realize that everything is just as bad. i hate it here, i hate it irl, and i hate it in my own mind. fuck you joe biden, and your psychic bad-vibes herons.

tl;dr: things suck everywhere. reality sucks, the internet has been fully subsumed by reality at this point, it sucks in my mind, and art isnt even an escape anymore bc escapist art just bums me out with the constant implication that life needs escaping from, and good art is almost always just depression-affirming