#head empty except for 70s daniel

[twyllodrus]

You see, you were nimble-minded, even back then. I was a moron.

[winchesterbrotherstan]

Supernatural- Provenance (1.19)

b.. a. by.

Pairing: Olive Winchester (OC)

Summary: While working a case, a girl catches Sam’s eye, Dean and Olive butt heads, and Olive goes into attack mode.

Warnings: cursing, screaming, creepy little ghost, slit throats, olive is a monster, the usual

Word Count: 8163

I yawned, dropping my head onto the table of the bar. Dean was flirting with a pretty girl while Sam and I were elbow-deep in research. Sam made a face at Dean before gesturing to him. Dean only held up a hand, laughing at something the girl whispered to him.

“Dean!” I called, annoyed.

He rolled his eyes before coming back to us, dropping a beer in front of Sam.

“Alright, I think we’ve got something.” Sam sighed.

Dean glanced back over his shoulder. “Yeah, me too. I think we need to take a little shore leave, just a little bit.” He grinned. “What do you think, huh? I’m so in the door with this one.”

I rolled my eyes, biting back a snarky comment. Sam sighed.

“So what are we today, Dean? I mean, are we rock stars, are we army rangers?”

Dean’s grin grew, and I rolled my eyes again.

“Reality TV scouts, looking for people with special skills. I mean, hey, it’s not that far off, right?” He leaned toward Sam. “By the way, she’s got a friend. Possibly hook you up. Whatcha think?”

Sam sighed. “No thanks, Dean. I can get my own dates.”

“Yeah, you can but you don’t.” Dean made a face.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Sam shot back.

“Hey! Dean’s just being a jackass. Don’t pay him any attention.”

Dean tried to protest, but Sam rolled his eyes. “Mark and Ann Telesca of New Paltz, New York were both found dead in their own home, a few days ago. Throats were slit. No prints, no murder weapons, all…”

Dean was distracted, staring back at the girl at the bar. I kicked him under the table and he turned back to me with lips curled, angry.

“Dean! Pay attention.”

“No prints, no murder weapons, all the doors and windows locked from the inside.”

Dean took a sip from his beer with a shrug. “Could just be a garden variety murder. You know, not our department.”

“Dad says different.” I spat, flicking through his journal.

“What do you mean?”

Sam pointed to the map on the page. “Dad noted three murders in the same area of upstate New York. First one here in 1912, second one here in 1945, third in 1970.”

“Same MO as the Telescas. Throats slit, doors locked from the inside. So much time happened between the two that nobody checked for a pattern.”

“Except Dad.” Sam sighed. “He kept his eyes peeled for another one.”

“And now we got one.” Dean pouted. “Alright, I’m with ya. It’s worth checking out. Can’t we pick this up first thing though?”

I sighed, and Sam shrugged.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Good.” Dean patted Sam’s arm and circled the table to me. “Love you, kid. Even when you’re being a brat.”

I scoffed back at him, and he pulled me into a hug. “I love you.”

“Fuck off.” I spat, pushing him away.

He rolled his eyes and flipped me off as he walked back to the bar. Sam bumped his elbow into my side.

“What’s the deal, bug?”

I sighed and leaned against him with a huff. “Just not in the mood for his shit.”

“The flirting? Aw, bug, are you jealous that you don’t have all of Dean’s attention?”

I rolled my eyes again. “No, you big idiot. I’m just sick of him being a horny fucker all the time. It’s really annoying.”

Sam only snickered.

                                                          ***

I snuggled further into Dean’s side, kicking my shoes off. He was asleep, slumped in the passenger seat with a pair of sunglasses on. He went out last night with two girls and came back to the motel beyond drunk. He had thrown up countless times. I stayed up with him, rubbing his back and wiping the sweat off his forehead. Taking care of a grown man was frustratingly difficult when you only had one arm.

Sam walked around the car, knocking on the hood. I looked at him through slitted eyes. He put a finger up to his mouth before leaning in through the window and slamming the horn. I let out a squeak, and Dean jumped up, spooked. Sam got into the driver’s seat, cackling. Jinx howled, and Sam turned around to pat her head.

“Man, that is so not cool.” Dean grumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“God fuck, Sams.” I hissed.

“I just swept the Telescas with EMF. It’s clean. And last night, while you were… well, out…”

I pushed my head further into Dean’s chest. “We checked the history of the house. Nothing strange about the family.”

“Alright, so if it’s not the people and it’s not the house, then maybe it’s the contents. Cursed object or something.” Dean mumbled.

“What?” Sam asked, leaning in.

“No, bubba, house is clean.” I groaned, sitting up.

“Yeah I know, Sam said that.”

“No, I mean it’s empty. No furniture. Nothing.” Sam shook his head.

I blinked, suddenly awake. “What?”

“Where’s all their stuff?” Dean squinted.

                                                         ***

I wiggled my nose, trying to move my glasses back into place as I followed Sam around, hand in his. I squeezed, a signal to wait for Dean as he picked a piece of finger food off a tray. Sam squeezed my hand back. Jinx was asleep in the Impala, and I was hoping it would stay that way. The last thing we needed was somebody with a stick up their ass calling animal control on her. We were out of place. 

This fancy auction house, with women in fancy flowing dresses and men in tuxedos. I kept myself behind Sam. We were in our scratchy canvas jackets, dirty flannels, ripped jeans and scuffed boots. Dean grumbled as he caught up.

“Consignment auctions, estate sales. Looks like a garage sale for WASPs if you ask me.” He plucked more food off another tray.

A man in a tuxedo popped up behind us, and we spun around. Sam pulled me closer to him as we forced matching polite smiles.

“Can I help you gentlemen?”

Dean eyed him and cleared his throat. “I’d like some champagne please.” He spoke in a posh accent.

Sam’s jaw clenched, and I dug my arm into Dean’s side, ignoring the throb that radiated from my bones. “He’s not a waiter.”

Dean cocked an eyebrow, and Sam held his hand out. “I’m Sam Connors.”

The man blinked at him, not taking Sam’s hand. I popped out from behind him and squared my shoulders.

“I’m Olive Connors, and this is our brother Dean.” I nodded to Dean.

“We’re art dealers, with Connors Limited.”

“You are… art dealers.” The man repeated, eyeing us.

I sighed, and Sam squeezed my hand again.

It’s okay, just stay calm.

“That’s right.”

“I’m Daniel Blake, this is my auction house. Now, this is a private showing, and I don’t remember seeing you on the guest list.” The man cleared his throat, the look of disgust clear on his face.

“We’re there, Chuckles. You just need to take another look.” Dean snapped as he swiped a glass off a passing tray. “Oh, finally.” He sniffed the glass, raised his eyebrows, and walked off.

“Cheers.” Sam forced a smile as I yanked on his arm, trying to follow Dean.

“What is wrong with you?” Sam snarled at Dean.

“Hey.” I tugged his arm. “Relax. He’s just being a prick again.”

The three of us fell silent as we stared at an old painting of a family. Our heads tilted the same way, identical looks on our faces.

“A fine example of American Primitive, wouldn’t you say?”

The three of us turned up to see a very pretty girl about Sam’s age coming down the spiral stairs. Her dress was black and sleek, hugging her body. She gave off classy vibes, and I was immediately entranced. I blinked as her back turned to us. Dean slapped Sam on the back, and Sam ignored him.

“Well, I’d say it’s more Grant Wood than Grandma Moses. But you knew that, you just wanted to see if I did.” Sam smiled.

“Guilty.” She smiled back. “And clumsy. I apologize. I’m Sarah Blake.” She held her hand out to him.

He took it, and my heart softened at the twinkle in his eyes. “I’m Sam. This is my little sister Olive, and our…” He sighed as Dean continued to stuff his face with food.

“This is our brother, Dean.” I grinned.

Sarah chuckled. “Dean. Can we get you some more mini-quiche?”

Dean shook his head, in the middle of chewing. I giggled.

“He’s okay, thank you.”

Sarah smiled widely as she turned back to Sam. “So, can I help you with something?”

“Yeah, actually. What can you tell us about the Telesca estate?”

Sarah grimaced. “The whole thing’s pretty grisly if you ask me, selling your things so soon. But Dad’s right, sensationalism brings out the crowds. Even the rich ones.”

“Is it possible to see the provenances?” Sam asked.

Dean and I eyed each other, confused.

What the fuck does that word mean?

“I’m afraid there isn’t any chance of that.” Blake came back up behind us.

“Why not?” I asked, shuffling around to be in front of Dean.

“You’re not on the guest list. And I think it’s time to leave.”

“Well we don’t have to be told twice.” Dean spoke poshly again.

“Apparently you do.” Blake took a step toward us.

I backed up, running into Dean’s front. Sam reached for my hand.

“Okay. It’s all right. We don’t want any trouble. We’ll go.”

Dean rolled his eyes and walked off. Sam and Sarah stared at each other until I grabbed Sam’s hand and pulled him along to follow Dean. I glanced over my shoulder to see Sarah staring right at Sam’s ass. I shivered, uncomfortable.

                                                         ***

“Grant Wood?” Dean spoke to Sam as they walked behind me.

“Yeah, Sams.” I called over my shoulder. “The hell was all that?”

“Grandma Moses?”

“Art history course.” Sam smiled. “It’s good for meeting girls.”

Dean shook his head as I unlocked the motel door. Jinx ran in, wagging her tail.

“It’s like I don’t even know you.”

We shuffled into the room and blinked. Retro 70s disco fantasy room. The Do Not Disturb sign was a silver outline of John Travolta. Jinx watched us as we took the scene in, all heads tilted.

“Huh.”

I shrugged and tossed my bag at the feet of the bed furthest from the door. Sam and Dean did the same, still staring at the room.

“Sams, what was… providence?” I stumbled over the word.

“Provenance.” Sam sounded it out. “It’s a certificate of origin, like a biography. Ya know, we can use them to check the history of the pieces, see if any of them have a freaky past.”

I frowned. “Huh.”

“Well, we’re not getting anything out of Chuckles, but Sarah…” Dean made finger guns at Sam.

I giggled, and Sam smirked at Dean. “Yeah, maybe you can get her to write it all down on a cocktail napkin.”

Dean laughed, and I shook my head.

“No no no, pick-ups are Dean’s thing.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t Dean’s ass she was checking out.” I dropped onto the bed.

Sam narrowed his eyes at me, and Dean grinned. Jinx jumped onto the bed and barked in Sam’s direction.

“In other words, you two want me to use her to get information.” Sam sighed.

I shrugged. “Sometimes you gotta take one for the team.”

Dean grinned wider. “Call her, Sam.”

                                                         ***

I put my glasses on as I left the bathroom and turned the lights off. Dean was sitting on our bed, sharpening his knife. Sam was criss-cross on his own bed, rustling through papers.

“Hey, Sams!” I grinned. “How’d it go?”

He had gone out to drinks with Sarah while Dean and I stayed at the motel, showering and fixing weapons.

“She just handed the providences over to him.” Dean grinned.

“Provenances.” I corrected.

“Provenances?”

“Yeah.” I nodded, turning to Sam. “Okay, so?”

“We went back to her place, I got a copy of the papers-”

“And?” Dean wiggled his eyebrows.

“And nothing. That’s it. I left, told her I had to get home to my little sister.”

I giggled, and Dean made a face.

“You didn’t have to con her, or do any… special favors or anything like that?”

“Dean.” I chastised, trying to keep the smile off my face. “Get your mind out of the gutter!”

Dean laughed as Sam rolled his eyes. I dropped on the bed, next to Dean.

“You know, when this whole thing’s over, we could… stick around for a little bit.” He offered.

“Why?” Sam furrowed his eyebrows.

“So you can take her out again.” I shrugged. “Duh.”

“It’s obvious you’re into her, even I can see that.”

“I think I’ve got something here.” Sam ignored us, holding a paper up.

I switched over to sit next to Sam, taking the paper from his hand. “What am I looking at here?”

“Portrait of Isaiah Merchant’s family, painted in 1910.” Dean read off the paper.

“Wasn’t the first murder in 1912?” I tilted my head.

Sam nodded. “First purchased in 1912, Peter Simms. He was murdered in 1912. Same thing in 1945, oh, and 1970.”

“Then stored, until it was donated to a charity auction last month. Where the Telescas bought it.” Dean read from Dad’s journal.

“So, what do you think? Haunted? Cursed?”

Dean dropped the paper and grabbed his knife. “Either way, it’s toast.”

I grinned. “I’ll get the gloves.”

                                                         ***

Dean lept halfway up the metal gate, easily climbing the rest. He sprinted into the fog, then called back to us.

“Come on!”

Sam dropped onto a knee, helping me get a step up onto the gate. I climbed it faster than he did, anxious to be back on solid ground. I balanced on the top, knuckles white. Although I had gotten used to being down an arm, scaling fences became a lot more difficult. I had to rely mostly on the weight of my body against the fence and the soles of my boots. I took a breath before getting a grip and climbing down the other side. Dean helped me once I was halfway, and Sam jumped off, hitting the ground and rolling back to his feet.

“Stay with Dean.” Sam whispered as he went for the security alarm.

He fidgeted with the wires, and I watched with a smile on my face as he worked.

“Alright, go ahead.” He turned back to Dean.

Dean picked the lock with ease, pushing the door open. I led the way, flashlight low as we looked around. Dean tapped my arm and pointed up the stairs. I grabbed Sam and followed as he sprinted up the same spiral staircase from earlier. Dean went to put his flashlight in his mouth but I took it, handing him a switchblade.

He flicked it open and cut the painting from the frame. Sam helped him roll it up, and I pulled a hair tie off my wrist with my teeth and wrapped it around the painting. Dean tucked it under his arm and patted my shoulder.

Let’s go.

                                                         ***

“Ugly ass thing.” Dean spat as he struck a match. “If you ask me, we’re doing the art world a favor.”

Sam sighed, aiming the flashlight. “Dean, just hurry up.”

Dean dropped the match without a word, and the painting began to curl at the edges. We stood in a huddle, watching it burn.

“Alright. We can head back to the motel, take the night and then pack up and hit the road.” Dean wrapped his arms around himself.

I nodded, smacking at a mosquito. “Let’s go.”

                                                         ***

“Bug?” Sam’s voice was a whisper.

“What’s up, Sams?” I mumbled.

I was wrapped in Dean’s arms, buried under three different blankets.

“Can we share a bed tonight?”

I grunted as I shuffled out of Dean’s grip and rolled onto the floor. Sam sat up and pulled the blankets back.

“Thank you.” He whispered.

I nodded as I curled up in his bed, snuggling into his side. He threw the blankets back over us and sighed.

“You okay?”

He nodded, resting his chin on the top of my head. “I’m just not feeling great.”

“Upset?”

He nodded again, wrapping his arms tight around me. “Yeah.”

I sighed. “I’m sorry, Sams.”

“It’s okay. I’ve got you guys.”

I snorted and pushed my head into his neck. “We’ll find you a girl, Sams. Don’t worry.”

                                                         ***

“We’ve got a problem!” Dean rushed out from the bathroom.

“What happened?” I asked, clipping Jinx’s collar on.

“I can’t find my wallet.”

Sam didn’t look up from his duffel bag. “How is that our problem?”

“Cause I think I dropped it in the warehouse last night.”

Sam’s eyes went wide and his head snapped up. I stumbled backward, dropping onto the bed and struggling to breath.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No.” Dean shook his head.

“Dean! That’s got your prints all over it, your ID!” I ran a hand through my hair.

“Well, my fake ID, but yeah.” Dean nodded.

“We’ve gotta find it before somebody else does. Come on.”

                                                         ***

“How do you lose your wallet, Dean?” Sam hissed.

I rubbed the back of my neck as we rushed around the auction house, eyes scanning every possible surface. Dean threw his hands up and kept looking. I groaned, ready to duck and check under tables.

“Hey guys!”

We turned around to see Sarah with a huge smile on her face. We all smiled back, trying to act cool and collected.

“Sarah! Hey!” Sam’s smile came naturally.

“What are you doing here?” She asked, glancing at Dean and I, who were still looking around.

“Ah, we uh… we’re leaving town, and you know, thought we’d come to say goodbye.” Sam stumbled.

“What are you talking about, Sam? We’re sticking around for at least another day or two.” Dean grinned as he tugged me along.

Sam looked at us, confused. Dean fished his wallet out of his pocket and smiled at Sam. “Oh, Sam. By the way, I’m gonna go ahead and give you that twenty dollars I owe you.” He turned to Sarah with a smile. “I always forget, you know.”

Sam only blinked, and Dean held the cash out with a grin. “There you go.”

Sam snatched it, glaring at Dean.

“Well, I’ll leave you two crazy kids along, I gotta-”

“We should go check on the dog!” I grinned, patting Sam on the back. “See ya!”

I grabbed Dean by the hand and tugged him to follow as we scrambled away, toward the parking lot.

“Are you insane?” I asked, eyes wide.

“He likes her.”

“I know he does, De, but you almost gave us both heart attacks.” I hissed.

“Oh my God!” Sam shouted.

I whipped around, hearing my teeth crackle inside my head. Dean grabbed my wrist and yanked me back his way, shaking his head.

Relax.

“Yeah, and now you’re just going to sell it again?” I heard Sam again.

I blinked, swallowing the blood in my mouth. Dean let out a breath, and Sam hurried into view, grabbing us both by the wrists and tugged us along.

“We’ve gotta go, now.”

He dragged us to the Impala, dodging our questions. Dean slid into the driver’s seat, and Sam shoved me to sit in the middle of the front bench. Jinx yapped as Sam slammed the door shut.

“Sams, what happened?” I asked.

“The painting.” Sam hissed.

“What?” Dean made a face.

“The painting is back.”

I shook my head. “Sammy, that’s not funny.”

Sam glared. “I’m not playing. I saw it.”

Dean let out a breath. “What the hell?”

“I don’t understand, Dean. We burned the damn thing!”

“Yeah, I got that, Captain Obvious!” Dean spat.

“Hey! Both of you relax. We just need to figure out another way to get rid of the thing. Ideas?”

“Okay, alright.” Sam sighed. “Well, um, in almost all the lore about haunted painting, it’s always the painting’s subject that haunts ‘em.”

“Yeah.” Dean nodded. “So we just need to figure out everything there is to know about that creepy-ass family in the creepy-ass painting. What were their names again?”

                                                         ***

“You said the Isaiah Merchant family, right?” The proprietor asked.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

Dean circled the table, a huge smile on his face as he flipped through an old book full of pictures of guns.

The proprietor put down a large book of newspapers clipping down on the table. “I dug up every scrap of local history I could find. So you kids are crime buffs?”

“Kinda.” Dean shrugged. “Yeah. Why do you ask?”

“Well…” He held up a newspaper article, pointing to a side article.

Father Slaughters Family, Kills Himself.

“Yes.” Dean piped up. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“The whole family was killed?” I asked, eyebrows furrowed.

“It seems that Isaiah, he slits his kids’ throats, then his wife, and then himself. He was a barber by trade. Used a straight razor.”

I shivered. Dad was a bit crazy, that was true, but there was no way he’d ever kill us.

“Why’d he do it?” Sam asked as he wrapped an arm around my shoulders.

“Let’s look… uh,” He skimmed the page, “People who knew him describe Isaiah as having a stern and harsh temperament. Controlled his family with an iron fist. Wife, uh, two sons, adopted daughter… there were whispers that the wife was going to take the children and leave.” He made a face. “Which of course, you know, in that day and age… so, um, instead, the old man… well, he gave them all a shave.” The man dragged a finger across his throat and made gagging noises.

He kept his eyes on Dean as he laughed, and Dean laughed back, maintaining eye contact. He was flirting. I blinked, holding back a smile. Sam gave Dean a bitchface, and Dean immediately stopped, clearing his throat.

“Does it say what happened to the bodies?” I asked, rubbing Dean’s arm.

“I’m sorry?” The proprietor blinked, looking at me.

“What happened to the bodies?” Dean repeated.

“Just that they were all cremated.” The man shrugged.

I sighed, and Sam groaned. “Is that all?”

“Yeah.” He glanced at Dean, then back to Sam. “Actually, I found a picture of the family. It’s right here… somewhere.” He flicked through the book. “Right, here it is!” He pulled out a paper and showed us.

It was a picture of the painting. I sighed, and Sam asked him for a copy. The guy nodded before turning around and disappearing into the back room.

“Hey.” I smacked Sam’s arm. “Be nice.”

“What?” He squinted.

Dean was looking through the book of guns again, his demeanor sad. His shoulders were dropped and a sad look was on his face.

“Why’d you give him a bitch face?” I whispered.

“Because he was laughing at a dead family.”

I rolled my eyes. “You idiot. He was flirting.”

“With … a guy?”

I rolled my eyes again. “What, I can be bi, but Dean can’t be?”

Sam shook his head. “Olive, that’s not what I’m saying. I just… I’ve never seen him be forward about it.”

I snorted. “That’s cause you haven’t seen him without Dad in a while.”

Sam blinked. “Yeah. I guess you’re right.”

The guy came back with a copy of the picture and handed it to us with a small smile. “Here you go.”

I smiled back as Sam took it. Dean smiled at the guy as we left the store.

“Come on.” I held my hand out.

Dean took it with a soft smile and held the car door open for me.

                                                         ***

“What the hell?” I squinted, bringing the copy of the photo closer to my face.

“What?” Dean looked over his shoulder as he stood in front of the sink, washing the coffee mugs from earlier.

“The pictures are different.” I rolled from my stomach onto my back and sat up.

Dean snorted. Sam reached out across the beds and took the paper. Jinx whined, popping her head up as Sam stopped petting her.

“Holy shit. Olive’s right.”

Dean shook his head. “No way.”

“I’m telling you, De.”

“The painting at the auction house, the dad is looking down. This copy, the dad’s looking out. The painting changed, Dean.” Sam squinted at the picture.

“Alright, so you think that Daddy dearest is trapped in the painting and is handing out Columbian neckties like he did with his family?” Dean turned the tap off.

“Well, yeah, it seems like it.” Sam sighed.

“But if his bones are already dusted, how are we gonna stop him?” I asked.

“Well, if Isaiah’s position changed, then maybe some other things in the painting changed too. Ya know, it could give us some clues.”

“What, like a Da Vinci Code deal?” Sam began to pet Jinx again.

“Uh…” Dean stammered, staring at Sam with a blank look. “I don’t… know, uh…”

“He’s still waiting on the movie for that one.” I giggled.

“Anyway, we gotta get back in and see that painting.” Dean threw himself on the bed and crossed his arms behind his head.

I dropped onto my side and snuggled up to him, curling up and placing my cheek on his chest. He wrapped one arm around me and kissed the top of my head.

“This is a good thing.” I mumbled.

“Yeah, cause Sam gets more time to crush on his girlfriend.”

“Dude.” Sam rolled his eyes. “Enough, already.”

“What?” Dean asked.

“What do you mean, what? Ever since we’ve gotten here, you two have been trying to pimp me out to Sarah. Just back off, alright?” Sam snapped.

“What, you don’t like her?”

Sam rolled his eyes and dropped onto his back, annoyed.

“Alright. You like her, she obviously likes you. You’re both consenting adults…” Dean trailed off.

“What’s the point?” Sam raised his voice. “We’ll just leave. We always leave!”

“He’s not talking about marriage, Sams.”

“You know, I don’t get it.” Sam turned to us. “What do you two care if I hook up?”

Dean sighed, calm as he talked. “Cause then maybe you wouldn’t be so cranky all the time.”

Sam glared, let out a huff, and looked back up to the ceiling.

I bumped my head into Dean’s chin and sat up with a sigh. “Sammy, we’re serious. This isn’t just about hooking up, okay? I mean, we… we think that Sarah could be good for you.”

Sam scratched his head, staying silent. Jinx whined, sensing the tension. I shot Dean a look.

Say something.

“And…” Dean spoke as he sat up, voice soft. “I don’t mean any disrespect, but… I’m sure this about Jessica. Right? Now, we don’t know what it’s like to lose somebody like that, but…”

“Sams, I know you miss her.” I whispered. “But she would want you to be happy.”

Sam said nothing as he listened, tears in his eyes. Dean sighed.

“God forbid have fun once in a while. Wouldn’t she?”

Sam gave a soft laugh. “Yeah, I know she would.” He sighed. “Yeah, you two are right. Part of this is about Jessica. But not the main part.”

“What’s it about?” Dean asked.

Sam said nothing, and Dean huffed.

“Okay.” I laid back down, and Dean followed.

He wrapped his arm around me again and yawned. I closed my eyes as Sam flicked his phone open and cleared his throat.

“Sarah, hey.” Sam spoke, awkwardly. “It’s Sam.”

A pause, and I cracked my eyes open.

“Hey, hi.”

Another pause.

“Good. Good, yeah, um… what about you?”

I watched as he paced around the room.

“Yeah, good, good, really good.”

Dean huffed. “Smooth.”

I thumped my head against Dean’s chest. “Be nice.”

“So, uh, listen… my siblings and I were uh… thinking that maybe we’d like to come back in and look at the painting again, I…”

Dean shook his head again, then turned to me with a smile.

“I think maybe we are interested in buying it.”

My nose wrinkled up.

“Buy it and be haunted? No thanks.” I whispered.

“What!” Sam snapped, and I pushed myself up, eyebrows furrowed.

“Who’d you sell it to?”

I rolled over Dean and got to my feet, digging through the duffel bag. Jinx jumped off the bed and ran toward me, sniffing the bag.

“Hey, no.” I pushed her nose away. “Don’t do that.”

“Sarah, I need an address right now.”

                                                         ***

Dean slammed the brake and put the car in park. He moved slower than Sam, and I scrambled out past him.

“Sam, what’s happening?” Sarah asked as she jumped out of the car in the driveway.

“I told you, you shouldn’t have come.” He ran past her, bolting up the porch steps.

“Hello? Anyone home?” I asked as I pounded on the door.

Dean tried kicking at it, but it didn’t budge.

“You said Evelyn might be in danger. What sort of danger?”

“I can’t knock this sucker down. I’ve gotta pick it.” He groaned.

I sprinted back to the car and dug through the backseat. Jinx tried to lick my face, and I pushed her away again.

“Stop it.” I mumbled as I fished out the pick case.

“Here.” I shoved the case into Dean’s hands and joined Sam at the windows, which were covered in security bars.

“What are you guys, burglars?”

“I wish it was that simple.” I scoffed, hitting the window.

“Look, you really should wait in the car. It’s for your own good.” Sam tried to get her out of the way.

I rushed to Dean’s side as he got the door open.

“The hell I will. Evelyn’s a friend.” Sarah ran in after us.

“Evelyn?” Sam called.

“Evelyn.” I inched into the lounge.

She was sitting on a couch, half turned away from us. The painting moved, the dad’s position changing again. Sarah reached for Evelyn, and Sam tried to get her to stop. Evelyn’s head tipped back, and her slashed throat was exposed. Sarah let out a scream, jumping back into Sam’s arms. He led her out of the room.

                                                         ***

There was a knock on the door, and I shifted. Sam opened the door, and Sarah stormed in past him.

“Hey. You alright?”

“No, actually.” She crossed her arms over his chest. “I just lied to the cops and told them I went to Evelyn’s, alone, and that I found her like that.”

Sam let out a huff. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me.” She growled.

I sat up and yawned. Jinx was on her back next to me, kicking in her sleep.

“I’m about to call them back right now if you don’t tell me what the hell’s going on. Who’s killing these people?”

Sam glanced at Dean, who shrugged.

“What.”

“What?” Sarah looked at me.

“Not who. It’s a what. A what is killing these people.”

She looked at me like I was insane.

“Sarah, you saw that painting move.” Sam spoke softly.

She shook her head, becoming agitated. “No! No, I was… I was seeing things. It’s impossible.”

Dean snorted. “Well, welcome to our world.”

“Sarah. I know this sounds crazy, but…” Sam stumbled.

“We think the painting is haunted.”

She shook her head at me again. “No. You’re joking.”

The three of us sighed, faces dead-panned as she looked at each of us.

“You’re not joking.” She wiped fresh tears out of her eyes. “God, the guys I go out with.”

“Sarah, just think about it.” Sam tried to reason with her, and she took a step back.

“Look. Evelyn, the Telesca’s. They both had the painting, and there were others before that too. Wherever that butt-ugly painting goes, people die.” I shrugged.

“We’re just trying to stop it. And that’s the truth.” Sam sighed.

“Then I guess you’d better show me. I’m coming with you.” She pulled her purse over her shoulder.

“What? No! Sarah, no, you should just go home. This stuff can get dangerous, and I… I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Sarah snorted. “I’m sorry, how old’s your sister?”

I rolled my eyes as I moved to sit next to Dean at the table. “I’m fifteen.”

“Look, you guys are probably crazy. But if you’re right about this?” She sighed. “Me and my Dad sold that painting that might’ve got these people killed. Look, I’m not saying I’m not scared, because I am scared as hell, but… I’m not gonna run and hide either.” She took two long strides to the door and turned back to us, arms crossed over her chest. “So. Are we going or what?” She walked out.

“Sam?” Dean got his attention.

Sam looked up at us, eyes wide.

“Marry that girl.”

                                                         ***

“Uh, isn’t this a crime scene?” Sarah asked, looking around as Dean picked the lock.

“You’ve already lied to the cops once.” I shrugged. “What’s another infraction?”

Dean pushed the door open and stepped inside. I followed, and Sam and Sarah came in last, looking nervous.

“Aren’t you worried that it’s… gonna kill us?” She asked as Sam lifted it off the wall.

“Nah, it seems to do its thing at night. I think we’re okay in the daylight.”

I pulled the picture out of my back pocket and unfolded it, trying to flatten it out over my thigh. I compared it to the picture and my lips curled up.

“Yeesh. Sams, check it out. The razor. Closed in this, open in that.” I pointed to the razor blade in Isaiah’s hand.

“What are you guys looking for?” Sarah asked.

“If the spirit’s changing aspects of the painting then it’s doing so for a reason.” Dean explained.

“Hey, hey, hey. Look at this.” Sam pointed at something. “The painting in the painting.”

I huffed and looked around. Dean picked up a glass ashtray and held it up to the painting. I squinted.

“What is it?”

“Merchant.” He read.

                                                         ***

Jinx pulled hard on her leash, and Sam pulled back. She sniffed one headstone before jumping around to another.

“This is the third boneyard we’ve checked.” Dean groaned. “I think this ghost is jerking us around.”

“So this is what you guys do for a living?” Sarah asked.

“Not exactly.” Sam shrugged. “We don’t get paid.”

“Well, Mazel tov.” She sighed.

“Hey.” I hit Dean’s arm as I spotted the mausoleum. “Over there.”

I hurried over, leaving the others to catch up. I tugged on the lock, but it was solid. Dean moved me aside and slammed a knife handle into it, breaking it open. He stepped in first, and I followed. There was a bunch of name plates, and four urns in small glass boxes. I flinched as I noticed the dolls set up next to each urn.

“Okay. That right there? The creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.” Sarah shuffled.

“It was a… tradition at the time. Whenever a child died, sometimes they’d preserve the kid’s favorite toy in a glass case, put it next to the headstone or crypt.”

Jinx began to bark. A breeze blew in, and I shuddered as the cobwebs fluttered around us. Dean wrapped an arm around me.

“Notice anything strange here?”

Sarah giggled. “Uh, where do I start?”

Sam laughed, and I rolled my eyes at him.

“No, that’s not what he means. Look at the urns.”

“Yeah.” Sam noticed. “Only four.”

“Mom and three kids.”

“Father dearest isn’t here.” I sighed.

“So where is he?”

                                                         ***

I yawned, then giggled as Jinx did the same. Sarah and Sam were sitting on a short wall next to the office buildings. I was sitting on the ground next to them.

“So what exactly is your brother doing in there?”

“Searching county death certificates trying to find out what happened to Isaiah’s body.” Sam fiddled with his fingers.

“How’d he even get in the door?” She chuckled.

“Lying and subterfuge mostly.”

I snorted. “Dean’s really charming, actually. Especially when he wants to be. He can get himself wherever he needs to be.”

She nodded, turning back to Sam.

“You have a, uh… you have a right… no, uh, you know what…” Sam smiled at her. “Do you mind if I get it?”

“No.” She smiled.

He brushed it off and held it out on his finger. “Okay. Got it. Make a wish.”

Sarah laughed and then blew it away.

“Sam, can I ask you something?”

“Yeah, sure.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. “I’m gonna… take Jinx for a walk.” I rushed to my feet and pulled Jinx along.

We circled the block. Jinx wanted to sniff everything, but there was nobody around, and being alone freaked me out. I hadn’t been alone for more than a few hours, come to think of it. I grew up stuck to Sam and Dean. When Dean started going on hunts, Sam stayed with me. When Sam moved away, Dad and Dean would go on hunts, and I would stay with Bobby or Pastor Jim.

I circled back around to the front of the building, where Sam was in the middle of a heart-felt sentence, and Dean was standing with his hands in his pockets.

“Are we interrupting something?” Dean asked.

“No.”

“Not at all.”

Sam and Sarah spoke at the same time.

“Huh.”

“Oookay.” I let out a breath and shuffled back to Dean.

He bumped my arm as Sam asked what he had found out.

“Paydirt.”

“Oh, do share.” I grinned up at him.

“Apparently the surviving relatives of the Merchant family were so ashamed of Isaiah that they didn’t want him interred with the rest of the family. So, they handed him over to the county. County gave him a pauper’s funeral. Economy style.” Dean clicked his tongue. “He wasn’t created. He was buried in a pine box.”

“So there are bones to burn.”

“There are bones to burn.” Dean nodded.

“Please tell me you know where.”

                                                         ***

I flung dirt over my shoulder with a huff. It was hot, and I was sweaty and gross. I could’ve sat out on digging, Dean and Sam understood that doing that with a single arm was difficult, but I didn’t want to engage in small talk with Sarah. Dean took a second, and Sam crawled out of the grave, standing next to Sarah.

“You guys seem to be uncomfortably comfortable with this.” She noted.

“Well, uh, this isn’t exactly the first grave we’ve dug.” He chuckled. “Still think I’m a catch?”

She laughed, and Dean tapped his shovel against something hard.

“Think we’ve got something.”

“Wanna crack it open?” I asked Dean.

“Nah. Jump.” He tossed his shovel up to Sam.

I did the same, and Dean held his hands out to me, holding onto my forearm and elbow. I giggled as he smiled.

“Ready?”

“Are they… laughing?”

“She grew up in this life. We all did.” Sam sighed. “Olive tends to find joy in the very little things.

“Alright, come on.” Dean gave my arm a squeeze.

I anchored my feet down before hopping. The heels of my boots cracked through the wood. Dean gripped me by the middle and held me back up. Sam reached down and helped me out. I shook the dirt off my boots as Dean got himself back on solid ground.

I rustled through the bag and yanked out the rock salt. Sam poured the kerosene all over the coffin, and I dumped the container of salt in. Dean struck a match and watched it burn for a second.

“You’ve been a real pain in the ass, Isaiah.”

“Good riddance, bitch.” I grinned as Dean tossed the match down.

The coffin went up in flames.

                                                         ***

“Keep the motor running.” Sam instructed as we rolled up.

“I thought the painting was harmless now.” Sarah tilted her head as Sam got out of the car.

“Better safe than sorry. We’re gonna bury the sucker.” Sam shut the door.

“I’m going with you.”

“You sure?” Sam was taken aback.

“Hey! Hey, hey!” Dean called Sam. “Olive and I will stay here.”

“Go make your move!” I grinned, punching his arm.

Sam rolled his eyes.

“Sam! We’re serious!”

Sam flipped us off behind his back at he and Sarah jogged up the stairs. Dean flicked the station and turned the radio up. I giggled as a love song blared. Sam turned around and glared. Dean shrugged, and Sam pulled a finger across his throat. Dean sighed and turned the radio off. I threw my head back against the seat as Sam and Sarah disappeared inside the house. Dean sighed.

“He’s never gonna get laid.”

I rolled my eyes. “We can’t force him to go on a date if he doesn’t want to.”

Dean opened his mouth to respond, but a child’s loud laughter cut him off. We sat up straight to see the front door slam shut. We turned to each other for a second, and then busted out of the car, bolting up to the door. Dean pushed at the door, and I shoved it with my shoulder. Something on the other side, hopefully Sam, was trying to pull it open.

“Dean! Olive! Is that you?”

“Sams!”

“Sammy, you alright?”

Sam didn’t answer, but Dean’s phone rang. He flicked it open and put it on speaker.

“Tell me you slammed the front door.” He shoved the phone into my hand and began to work on the lock.

“No, it wasn’t me. I think it was the little girl.”

“Girl?” Dean echoed. “What girl?”

“Oh fuck, the girl in the painting!”

“Yeah! She’s not in it anymore. I think it might’ve been her all along.”

“Wasn’t the dad looking down at her?” Dean glanced at me. “Maybe he was trying to warn us.”

“Hey hey hey! Let’s recap later. Just get us out of here.” Sam pleaded.

“Well I’m trying to pick the lock, but the door won’t budge.”

“Well then knock it down.”

“Okay, Sams, let us just grab the battering ram.” I spat.

“Guys, the damn thing is coming.”

“You’re just gonna have to hold it off until we figure something out. Get salt and iron.” Dean instructed.

I slammed my shoulder against the door, and nothing happened. I shook my head as I took a breath. Dean paid no attention, again trying to take the door down. My teeth shifted inside my mouth, my jaw splintered, and blood came down in streams.

“Uh, guys, gimme a sec, don’t go anywhere.”

Dean walked around the porch, looking for a way in. There was a shout over the phone, and I clenched my fists, head spinning.

“Sammy, you okay?”

“Yeah, for now.”

“How are we gonna waste her?” I whispered.

“I don’t know. She was already cremated, there’s nothing left to burn.”

“Then how’s she still around?” Dean hit the door again.

“There must be something else.”

I opened my eyes and let out a breath. I could feel fangs in my mouth, digging into my bottom lip.

“Guys! Sarah said the doll might have the kid’s real hair. Human remains, same as bones.”

“The Mausoleum!”

“Dean, you’ve gotta go.” I shut the phone and shoved it into his hand.

He blinked, stumbling backward. I breathed heavily.

“What-”

“I’m in control right now. Go burn the doll.”

“What are you gonna do?”

I ran my tongue over my teeth and squared my shoulders. “Get in there and get Sammy safe.”

“Olive, you can’t-”

“I can take a ghost better than Sam can right now.” I huffed. “Dean. Go.”

He stared at me for a second before turning and dashing back to the car. The engine roared, and he peeled out of there in record time. I struggled with the sling before managing to fling it off onto the ground.

“Hang on, Sams. I’m coming.”

I sprinted down the porch and to the windows. I had to jump to get a good grip on the security bars. I slipped my legs in through them, anchoring my feet on the glass. I kicked as hard as I could, and the glass shattered. The alarm began to go off, and I flinched. It was worse than it would’ve been normally.

I tucked my legs back under my body and tugged at the bars with my full weight and strength. They broke at the connections, and I slammed my shoulder into them. They fell into the house, and I scrambled as I hit the floor, skimming across a layer of broken glass.

“Sammy!” I called.

“Sam!” Sarah shrieked from another room.

I followed the noise. A wardrobe was pinning Sam to the ground, and the little bitch of a ghost was staring Sarah down, razor in hand. Sam strained under the wood, trying to get it off. The girl raised her hand, and Sarah was thrown up into the air like a rag doll.

“Hey, kid!” I spat.

The ghost’s head turned to me unnaturally fast, and a rage filled her dead eyes. Sarah took the opportunity to scramble to Sam, helping him push the wardrobe off. The girl ran at me, blade up high.

“Olive!”

I took a swing at her, feeling metal slice against my forearm. Sam knocked me to the ground, away from the ghost. She stumbled backwards, burning up. Her figure reappeared in the painting. I hissed as Sam’s hand clamped down on my skin. His phone rang, and Sarah fished it out of his pocket for him.

“Sam, you good? Did Olive-”

“Right here, De.” I snarled, teeth bared as I tried to squirm away.

Sam grabbed me and held me down in his lap and yanked his flannel off, tying the sleeve around my arm. I blinked, coughing on my blood as my teeth began to go back to normal, bones cracking.

Sarah stared, and Sam sighed as he leaned his head back against the wall. I pushed off of the ground and onto my feet, heading right for the painting.

“Olive?”

I took it down and flicked out a switchblade. I spat the rest of the blood in my mouth onto the little girl’s face, then drove the blade right into her face.

“Rot in hell.”

                                                         ***

“This was archived in the county records.” Dean smacked my head with a paper.

“What is it?” I asked, snatching the papers away as he stood next to me.

Sarah and Sam turned their attention from the painting, which was being crated up, to us.

“The Merchant’s adopted daughter, Melanie. Know why she was up for adoption?”

I flicked the papers open and read off the paper with a snort. “Her real family was murdered in their sleep.”

“Think she killed them?” Sarah asked.

I shrugged, and Dean nodded.

“Who would suspect a sweet little girl? She kills Isaiah and his family. Old man takes the blame.”

“You’re right, his spirit must’ve been trying to warn people ever since.”

“Where’s this one go?” A worker asked as he patted the crate.

“Take it out back and burn it.” Sarah didn’t skip a beat.

We blinked at her, taken aback.

“I’m serious, guys. Thanks.” She nodded at them and they shrugged at each other before lifting the crate and stumbling away.

“So why’d the girl do it?” Sarah turned back to us and crossed her arms over her chest.

“Killing others? Killing herself?” Sam tilted his head and shrugged. “Some people are just born tortured. So when they die, their spirits are just as dark.”

“Maybe.” Dean huffed. “I don’t really care. It’s over, our time to move on.”

“Oh…” Sarah’s shoulders fell. “I guess this means you’re leaving.”

Dean and I glanced between Sarah and Sam. Sam blinked at us, then cleared his throat. Realization dawned on me as I grabbed Dean by the hand and smiled.

“See you around, Sarah!”

“Oh. Yeah, we’ll go wait in the car. Bye, Sarah.” Dean grinned, wrapping an arm over my shoulder and leading us out of the door.

She said nothing, and Dean rolled his eyes. I snorted.

“Not like I got sliced and almost dislocated my shoulder, but it’s fine.”

“And I’m the one that burned the doll, destroyed the spirit, but don’t thank me or anything.” Dean grumbled under his breath.

I shook my head. “Some guys just get all the glory, don’t they?”

Dean laughed as we leaned against the car. I stifled a yawn as Sarah let Sam out of the house, closing the door behind him. I sighed as Sam stood on the porch, hands in his pockets.

“Alright, come on.” Dean pushed me into the car. “Guess he didn’t wanna make his move.”

“Wait, wait.” I smacked his hand away and watched.

Sam knocked on Sarah’s door. She opened it, and he stepped in and kissed her. I smiled and slid into the car. Dean grinned.

“That’s my boy.”

“Go Sams.” I giggled as they continued to kiss in the doorway. “Think he’ll ask to stay?” I leaned against Dean’s shoulder.

He shook his head. “No. He won’t.”

Previous Ep: Something Wicked (1.18)

Next Ep: Dead Man’s Blood (1.20)

[eyesaremosaics]

4, 11, 15, 27

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

Not really. I’ve always thought Megan was a little boring and ordinary. It means “soft and gentle” which to me—sounds like a detergent. I always wished I had a more exotic name like Andromeda.

11. describe your ideal day

Hmm... wake up in the arms of the love of my life, make a healthy breakfast together and eat it out on a beautiful veranda overlooking a beautiful cityscape or green horizon. Listening to music, talking and laughing over mimosas and coffee. Doing yoga together. Then meeting up with a huge group of friends for a celebratory lunch of some kind. Going shopping afterwards, and then to the theatre to watch something spectacular in New York or London. Going out to a swanky place for dinner, and attending a glamorous party that goes all night afterwards. I like my life to be full of beautiful things and good hearted people.

Alternatively: I would love to wake up on the road, heading to Disneyland with the person of my dreams. Singing songs out the window, driving down the long stretch of highway. Stay at the grand California hotel (which I’ve always wanted to stay at), and leisurely go around the parks, taking breaks to swim at the hotel or have cocktails in the piano lounge. Sitting around the tiki bar, shopping in downtown Disney, having dinner at the blue bayou... on our way back staying at the Madonna inn, in the blue suite I’ve always wanted to stay in. Hanging by the pool... going in for a spa treatment in the morning. Then going out horseback riding through the hills in the afternoon.

Basically I just need to be rich lol pretty much, I just want to find my person, and travel the world with them in style. Acting on stage and in films, living in a modest bit nice apartment or home, having guests over for dinner parties... I love to host. Wish I had a space and the resources to do so.

15. five most influential books over your lifetime.

“Brave new world”—Aldous Huxley

A dystopian world that revolves around science and efficiency. In this society, emotions and individuality are conditioned out of children at a young age, and there are no lasting relationships because “every one belongs to every one else”. As a devout monogamist, the main character reflected my deep feelings of horror at losing ones individuality in this changing world, and also losing the sense of intimacy and connection that makes human relationships so special. His disgust at the casualness of sexual relationship, and interchangeability of ones loyalty is exactly how I felt. Like the last unicorn.

“Ishmael”-Daniel Quinn

Ishmael is a 1992 philosophical novel by Daniel Quinn. The novel examines the hidden cultural biases driving modern civilization and explores themes of ethics, sustainability, and global catastrophe. This book changed my life, and made so much sense to me.

“Frankenstein”—Mary Shelley

This book is so beautifully written, and of powerfully affected me as a teenager. This pervasive feeling of isolation and abandonment by those who were supposed to guide and protect you. Feeling outcast and condemned by society. The themes of feverish obsession and madness, met with the harsh cruelty of life. Death and loss... it’s a beautiful book. And a warning that when humans try to play god—disaster strikes. It’s a story of revenge, of longing. I related most to the monster, and wept many times reading of his experience.

“Interview with the vampire”—Anne Rice

Anne Rice influences my style of writing immensely. There is a lyrical, and descriptive quality to her writing that is so sensual. Really evocative but also layered with meaning. This book was a metaphor for her child who died of leukemia. The vampirism represented the blood disease, and Claudia a child who could not die. The book was her response to her grief. An empty echo at the ghastly nature of eternity, what exactly it would mean to live in hell on earth. Watching everyone and everything die around you. The fragility of life is what makes it beautiful by contrast when one is immortal. Yes of course I related most to Louis lol. But also to Claudia. Trapped for eternity in the body of a child. Forever helpless, but so vindictive and bitter in heart. What lies ahead for those who follow that spirit. The tragedy of letting your anger control you.

“The great Gatsby”—F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald is a major influence on me, his birthday is the day after mine, and his romantic idealism has always resonated with me. This novel in particular showcases the hypocrisy of pretense. How it’s what inside that counts and shows your true character. Basically everyone in the novel is a piece of garbage, except for Gatsby and Nick (though they end up participating in bad things as well, they are essentially good at their core). The scene at the end... when no one comes to his funeral.. just breaks my heart. This man who wanted so much to be loved, who wanted so much for people to like him... ended up all alone at the end of it all. This book highlights the cruelty and frivolity of the upper class, how people with privilege don’t recognize they have it, and so smash up other human beings as though they were merely toys that can be replaced. I remember crying and crying at the end of this book. Also, I related to holding someone in my heart so deeply. That they were all of life to me....and to have them throw me over for someone else. Ugh. Poor Gatsby. I just really related to him.

——-

27. do you feel like your outside appearance is a fair representation of the “real you”?

I think so... I wish my features were less crooked, and that I was less gangly and awkward, but I try very hard to take care of myself and my body. Especially my skin. I moisturize everyday, using multiple products. My purple contacts are a reflection of wanting to be unique, unlike anyone else. Also purple is a very spiritual color, enhances my mystique to others (or so I’m told). My aesthetic is witchy 1930s-40s. Occasionally 90s grunge or 70s secretary. I like classy simple clothing, very influenced by Audrey Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, Greta Garbo, Gene Tierney, and Katherine Hepburn’s style. Also a little bit of Tim Burton thrown in there, Wednesday Adams, Lydia Deets. Winona Ryder has been my hero since I was little. Also Dita Von Teese since I was about 14. They gave all lent influence to my style and presentation.

[ohsnapitzlovehacker]

Lean On Me - Aubrey x MC

Author’s note: This one was inspired by the prompt “Your eyes are red...were you crying?” and damn, it almost ruined my fluffy brand lol. Other people’s thoughts are in parenthesis. 

Summary: Aubrey knows just the thing to cheer Abby up.

Word count: 1733

Tagging: @mskinkyafro

*These characters belong to the Choices game from Pixelberry, not me!

(It’s like a tornado hit!)

“Where are you going in such a hurry?” Tony smirked, watching the way Abby quickly cleared off her desk and packed up her things for the weekend.

(Thank God Abby got to Aubrey before Marissa. )

“Someone’s got a date, huh?” June passed a knowing look to Tony, in time for Abby to look up and catch it. “Yeah, with my dad,” Abby rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t stop the grin growing on her face. “Remember that radio phone contest I entered on my break a few weeks ago?” Abby pulled a mirror out of her drawer to fix her bangs before tossing in back and closing it shut. June waved goodbye as Tony continued his conversation with Abby. “The one you had June cover for you while you hid in the bathroom? I think I recall.” Abby gave a more exaggerated eye roll this time, electing a chuckle from her friend. She pulled her brown, leather tote across her shoulder, searching the bag for her phone. “Well, I won two tickets for Frankie Jones & the Kid!”

(.......?)

Tony gave her a blank look as Abby pulled out her phone to send a quick text to her father. “It’s this group from the late 70s my parent’s loved. He’s been working so hard lately, I thought he might need a break,” Abby dropped her phone back into the bag, nearly bouncing with excitement.

(You’ve been working pretty hard yourself. How does she have so much energy?)

“Ahh, cool. I guess have fun then?” Tony gave her a nod as Abby hugged herself, hardly able to contain herself.

“Oh don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of fun!” She gave him a quick wave and was out of the station before she was any later picking up her dad. First, it was a quick stop to her apartment to change clothes, check on the animals and take Biscuit for a short walk before heading to his house. “I’m here!” Abby called as she unlocked and pushed open the front door. She was met with silence. Abby knew her father was home; his pickup truck sat in the driveway. “Hello? Dad...ready to go?” The silence gave way to a voice in her head that wasn’t hers.

(Ah, she’s here. Think Daniel, think!)

Abby felt her heart stop at her father’s thoughts. She crept closer, words failing her.

(Can’t pretend I’m sick. I’ve got an early day tomor...wish she hadn’t bought those tickets)

“Dad?” Abby called, though she sounded like she was speaking in a vacuum. There was shuffling, then her father appeared looking weathered and exhausted.

(...can’t deal with a concert now…)

Abby swallowed back the emotion in her throat and was proud her voice didn’t shake. “Hey! So about the tickets? Turns out the concert was the thirteenth, not the twenty-third!” Abby laughed, throwing her hands up as if she couldn’t believe she’d goofed up the dates. “Oh…” her dad spoke, and Abby could feel his relief as if it were her own. Except it rang hollow. “That’s okay Abby-girl. I’m sure you’ve got better things to do on a Friday night than hang out with your old man,” he smiled, and Abby wasn’t sure how well she returned it. “Yeah...I’ll just go over and check on Jamie. He’s home around this time,” Abby felt her face ache from the fake smile she tried to maintain.

(...hang out another day. Yeah. Thought those tickets…best not to question it…)

“Tell Jamie I say hello,” her father wrapped her in a hug, his thoughts rolling around in her head. An old, familiar ache in her chest threatened to make itself known, and Abby rushed out to her car, slamming the door behind her. The last person she wanted to see right now was Jamie, and she put the car in drive, taking the quickest route back to her apartment. Pulling into an empty parking spot, Abby reached over and pulled a concert ticket from her wristlet, studying the funky cursive script of Frankie Jones & the Kid against the black background and purple and white QR code. Abby wasn’t sure what she’d done wrong. Sometimes when she stayed over, she heard her dad’s old records play from the other room. Talking about her mother was still hard for the two of them, but Abby figured there wouldn’t have to be talking with music involved. She just wanted things to be the way they were before with her dad. She missed her mom, but she missed her dad even more.

Abby sobbed into her hands, in full view of anyone within a ten-foot radius to spot her in the car. Her pity party was broken up by the soft chirp of her phone, and Abby reached into her glove compartment for the spare napkins she kept. Blowing her nose, she glanced down at the phone.

Filming an episode of Script Doctor. It’s your *favorite* movie!

Abby’s small laughed turned into a hiccup as she read the message. It wasn’t a concert, but maybe Aubrey would welcome her company.

have room for a special guest??

Aubrey’s response was instantaneous.

Always!

Abby doubled tapped the message to give it a heart, and cranked up her car again, determined to put the beginning of her evening behind her. She hadn’t get dressed up for nothing. Before long, Abby had pulled up in front of Aubrey’s place, parking right next to his car. Abby glanced in her rearview mirror, flinching instinctively once she caught sight of her face. Her mascara held perfectly, but there were smudges in her makeup where her hands had contact with her face. Maybe Aubrey wouldn’t show her on camera? Abby touched up what she could, and taking a deep breath, she exited the car and walked the short path to the door.

“Hey, it’s good to see you,” Aubrey smiled when he opened the door to see Abby standing before him.

(....again. See you again, ugh. Be cool, dude!)

He stood back so she could come in, and Abby watched his smile dim as he took in her subdued expression, despite how equally happy she was to see him. She took a seat on the couch, eyeing camera equipment, microphone, and laptop on the couch. “Your eyes are red...were you crying?” Aubrey’s voice was hesitant but gentle, and Abby shut her eyes tight to hold back the onslaught of tears. It was a futile attempt, and speaking was an equally bad decision. “I…” Abby’s voice cracked, and instantly Aubrey’s arms were around her, pulling her close to his chest.

(I can’t stand to see her cry…)

Aubrey rocked her back and forth, his motions soothing even as the pain sharpened. Abby hadn’t cried quite this hard since her mother died. What she wouldn’t give to have her right now. Aubrey pressed a light kiss on the top of Abby’s head, and the storm clouds parted just a little for her. He held her until her sobs subsided and her shoulders no longer shook. They sat in silence, and even Aubrey’s thoughts were quiet. Abby let out a giggle as she pulled away from Aubrey, dabbing at her eyes. She took one look at Aubrey’s tear-stained shirt and laughed harder. “I don’t think either of us is camera ready,” Abby joked. Aubrey followed her gaze and shook his head smiling, but worry lined the edges of his kind face. He reached over and took one of her hands in his.

(I’ve never seen her so sad)

Abby traced lazy circles on his hand with the pad of her thumb, unable to address anything but their joined hands. “It’s stupid, really. My dad and I were supposed to go see Frankie Jones & the Kid but something came up.”

(...not stupid...cares so much)

Aubrey’s thoughts were a hum, barely comprehensible to Abby. She chanced a look up, and Aubrey was watching her as if weighing his next words. “I can film tomorrow. We can watch a movie instead.” Abby frowned, guilt eating away at her. “No, now I feel bad,” she argued, but Aubrey seemed to have his mind made up. He brought a hand up to her cheek, tucking a stray hair behind her ear.

(...gonna put a smile back on her face. A real one.)

“It’s no trouble at all. What are you in the mood for? Comedy? Action-flick? A classic?” Aubrey moved his equipment to make more room on the couch and crouched down in front of his shelf of DVDs. Abby decided to play along, even though a movie was the last thing she wanted. “Something with dragons?” Abby shrugged, and Aubrey plucked a movie from the very bottom shelf. She watched as he changed the setting on the TV with the remote and turned placed the DVD in the player.

(I know just the thing.)

“Be right back,” Aubrey winked and gave her the remote before he disappeared down the hallway. Just as she hit the title menu button, Aubrey appeared with a blanket in tow and a giant Hershey bar. Abby let him drape the blanket over her, pointing a questioning finger towards the chocolate. “What’s that for?” Aubrey smiled as he ripped open the wrapper and broke off a piece before handing the rest of the bar back to her. “Movie snacks. I don’t have any popcorn though.” Abby broke off a piece of chocolate but paused when she felt Aubrey’s soft gaze on her. She knew she looked less than put together, but through Aubrey’s mind, she seemed to glow. Slowly she leaned in, Aubrey meeting her halfway until their lips touched. He tasted of chocolate and something else much sweeter. Abby wasn’t sure which one of them had accidentally pressed play. When they finally pulled away from each other, the beginning action scene had taken place.

“More chocolate?” Abby asked Aubrey as she reached inside the plastic wrapping again. She broke off a piece and fed it to him, feeling the full force of his heated gaze. Aubrey looked away suddenly, munching on the chocolate and very interested at the animated dragon who laughed at his charred buddy.

(I don’t want her to think I’m taking advantage of her…)

Abby leaned her head against his chest, pulling the blanket tighter around her body. It was nice to have someone else to lean on for a while.

[vincess-princess]

Am I a Monster?

hi everyone i’m not dead and even still writing! this was written as a request for @prettyboysixx1974 and spent some time in my drafts (two months uh-oh) before i finally got down to finishing it. sorry camryn, i promised it’ll be smut here, but it turned out that it would be extremely out of character, so i decided to not include it. i hope you’ll still enjoy it though :) ah, and meet my new amazing, lovely beta-reader @polska-tankietka !

Fandom: Guns N’ Roses Author: @arnold-layne Rating: Teen Relationships: Izzy Stradlin\Axl Rose Word Count: 2475 Tags: sex worker\client au, minor violence, unholy thoughts

A meeting with a pretty red-headed hooker makes Izzy ask himself a very important question.

“How much?”

“Depends on the type,” the redhead closed his eyes and blew out a puff of smoke. Izzy couldn’t help but look at him, curling his thin, delicate lips around a cigarette. He’s never seen such a pretty hooker. “Oral, handjob, blowjob, classic?”

“All at once.”

The redhead’s eyes widened in surprise, but only for a second. “That will cost you a pretty penny.”

“So nice of you to care about my finances,” Izzy grinned, making a direct eye contact with the guy until he gave in, blinked confusedly and looked away. “No need to worry, I could afford ten hookers like you, if I wanted to.”

“I gotta check that you won’t screw me,” snapped the redhead in return, “and you don’t look rich. Show me the money.”

“Appearances can be deceiving. And you haven’t told me the price yet,” Izzy reminded.

“20$ for oral and handjob, 30$ for a blowjob and 70$ for a classic. 120$ total. You pay half up front,” the guy said it so quickly, that he either was incredibly good at counting or created all these numbers right away especially for Izzy.

“Don’t you think you value yourself too much, boy?” Izzy said only for the sake of saying something, already reaching for his wallet. “You are going to lose all your clients with a price list like this. Here is your half,” Izzy passed him two dirty dollar bills, which the guy instantly hid in his jacket.

“So nice of you to care about my income. Show me the other half,” the redhead demanded, relaxing a little only after Izzy showed him another two dollar bills. “Alright. Are you gonna rent a room or do you have an apartment? There’s a nice hotel down the road…”

“No, we are going to my place,” Izzy interrupted, reaching for the redhead’s shoulder to guide him towards his car, but he shrank back, not allowing to touch him. The hooker got a grip on himself the very next moment, but it was too late.

“Hey, what the fuck? I wasn’t gonna hit you or something!” Izzy frowned at the redhead. God knows he had never treated his whores badly, but if this one was going to avoid even a harmless contact, like a fucking virgin, he wouldn’t be fun at all. “You’re a newbie, aren’t you? That’s why I haven’t seen you here before?”

“No,” he shook his head. “I used to work in another part of the city.”

“Why did you move then?”

“The police,” he said dryly, this time allowing Izzy to take his arm, and followed him to the car in silence. This boy was a tough nut to crack, and Izzy wouldn’t even bother with him, preferring to find a more compliant hooker, if the guy wasn’t so incredibly, astonishingly beautiful. He should be standing on  stage, not on street corners. Izzy found himself thinking with some kind of compassion, but quickly shrugged these thoughts off – the guy chose it himself, after all.

“What’s your name, by the way?” he asked while starting the car. The guy cast him a strange look, but answered, although reluctantly:

“Axl. Without ‘e’.”

“Nice to meet you, Axl without ‘e’,” Izzy said carefully, watching Axl’s facial expression. He expected a negative reaction, but, to his surprise, Axl smiled.

“Still better than ‘Axel’.”

“It doesn’t sound like a real name,” apparently, Izzy hit too close to home, because Axl pursed his lips in irritation.

“Now it does. Yours?”

“Izzy.”

“Did your parents want a girl?”

“No.” Izzy slammed on the accelerator and, accompanied by screeching of the tires and Axl’s almost as high-pitched shriek, he drove onto the road.

***

“Ten hookers?” Axl said skeptically, having walked through the door after Izzy. “It was them who had made such a mess here?”

“Yeah, exactly,” Izzy said, putting his arm around Axl’s waist and guiding him to the room. “If you have a problem with it, you can clean up here yourself.”

“Another 100$ dollars - and I’m at your service,” Axl replied playfully. He seemed to finally relax, but Izzy could still feel the tension in his body as they walked across the room, side to side, and sat down on the couch.

“Alright,” he grinned and pretended to reach for his wallet.

“What the… oh shit, you almost got me there,” Axl laughed shortly, and Izzy realized he was enjoying this sound more than he should’ve. “I wish I could do the same.”

“What ‘the same’?”

“To say absolute bullshit with such a serious face.”

“Bullshit?” Izzy frowned. Axl immediately tensed up and tried to move away, but Izzy didn’t let him go, grabbing his arm and dragging him closer. Axl raised another arm, intending to push him away, but Izzy caught his wrist and pinned it to the couch.

“Let me go!” Axl freaked out, and tried to kick Izzy and wriggle out of his arms. It was a pure miracle that Izzy managed to keep a hold of him. But Axl was almost as strong as him, and it was only a matter of time before he would manage to break out. “Let me go, fucker!”

“Shut-” Izzy actually let go of his arm - and slapped him in the face with such strength that Axl almost fell off the couch. He stopped screaming and hid his face behind his arms in a quick, protective movement.

“-up,” Izzy finished calmly. Axl was breathing rapidly behind his improvised protection. Izzy couldn’t see his facial expression, only eyes shining from under his fingers, watching carefully his every move. Izzy wasn’t going to hit him again, but this alarmed reaction irritated him too much. Did he really look like such a violent monster in this hooker’s eyes?

“Stop this,” he ordered, trying to keep his voice emotionless. “If you behave, I’m not gonna hit you again.”

Axl hesitated for a moment but finally lowered his arms. “Y’all always talk like that.”

“Like what?”

“Stop making a fuss, I ain’t gonna do you anything bad,” Axl imitated mockingly. “Guess what happens next? Something bad.”

Anger rose in Izzy’s chest, its warm wave sweeping through his head, slowly driving him to losing his temper. “Haven’t you ever thought, that if you learned how to talk with clients, you wouldn’t have so many problems? It’s no doubt they beat you up. Nobody likes being talked to like that. It’s not sexy.”

“Oh yeah, poor guys, who don’t get a boner fast enough,” Axl carefully touched his cheek, that was slowly turning bright red. “Do you have the same problem?”

“What? No!” Izzy felt an almost uncontrollable urge to slap him one more time. He was growing more and more tired of this pointless conversation.

“Su-ure,” muttered Axl and recoiled in advance, expecting one more punch as a punishment, but Izzy made a great effort not to do it, instead he got up and headed towards the kitchen.

When he came back with a bottle in hand, Axl narrowed his eyes and asked with suspicion.

“Are you gonna get drunk?”

“We’re gonna get drunk,” Izzy corrected him. “You’re obviously no good when sober, so maybe a good drink will make you friendlier.”

He expected Axl to refuse indignantly, but after a second of thinking, he nodded. “Okay.”

He took the bottle and, without even reading the label, opened it and took a long gulp. “Night train,” he stated. “You said you can afford ten hookers at once, and you drink Night train?”

“No. You drink Night train.” Izzy came back to the kitchen and returned with another bottle. “I drink Jack Daniels.”

Axl opened his mouth, looked at the bottle Izzy was holding, then at his own one – and closed it without saying a word. The first sip Izzy took from his bottle tasted like a victory.

To the “a lil’ bit tipsy” stage and a half-empty bottle, Axl got in a matter of minutes, having chugged it in four or five big gulps. It seemed to have a good effect; Axl’s shoulders weren’t so tense under Izzy’s touch anymore.

“Why don’t you drink?” Axl asked suspiciously, looking at Izzy’s almost full bottle. “If you don’t wanna, give it to me!” he reached out to grab the bottle, but Izzy quickly raised it in the air. Axl didn’t insist on having it and switched to his shitty drink again. “Then drink,” he demanded. “I don’t want you to be sober while I’m drunk. You - clients - are always like that.”

“Okay, okay.” Izzy pretended to take a sip. “Everything for your pleasure, baby.”

“We haven’t got to that stage of our relationship yet.” Axl smiled slyly.

“Aren’t we going to skip it? I mean, we met an hour ago, and already are drinking together.” Mentioning that, with hookers the last stage was usually the first one felt like a bad idea. Moody one-night stands that expected anything else except a bottle of wine and a good sex usually drove Izzy mad. But with this one, he was ready to wait for a little longer.

“Yeah, probably,” Axl agreed, his smile fading away. “We could as well move to the final stage right now,” he said in such a tone that Izzy understood immediately doing this would be no good.

“Calm down, sweetheart, I’m not in a rush. Take your time.”

“Baby, sweetheart… who do you think you are to call me like this?” Axl muttered, but his facial expression softened. When he turned to his bottle again, Izzy poured out some of his Jack into a vase near the sofa. Flowers in it had been dead for a long time anyway.

Axl held his almost empty bottle to his face, looked at Izzy through the remaining liquid and giggled. Izzy rolled his eyes, but couldn’t help smiling as well. Drunk Axl was definitely more pleasant than the sober one. What kind of hooker even goes to work sober? Izzy had never seen a single one of them sober before, and he had seen a lot.

He glanced at inner sides of Axl’s arms. Blinked in amazement and outright stared.

There were no needle traces. At all.

He could as well snort shit, Izzy reassured himself. Or smoke. The guy seemed to be relatively new in business. Maybe he just didn’t get to heavy drugs yet… no, for sure, he didn’t. It was all still ahead of him.

Axl sighed with unexpected sadness and put his head on Izzy’s shoulder. Izzy froze in his place, feeling a strange, warm wave going through his whole body. That was only the arousal and nothing else, he tried to convince himself. It couldn’t be anything else.

“You alright?” Izzy asked, his voice strangely hoarse.

“Yeah.” Axl’s hair fell on his face, but he didn’t try to brush it back. From the corner of his eye, behind these loose, red strands, Izzy could see Axl’s green eyes. Greener than any he had ever seen before, and he knew Axl looked right at him with these unnaturally green eyes. ”Night train’s kicking in. You’re not that bad of a guy, y’know,” he changed the subject so unexpectedly that, at first, Izzy didn’t believe his ears.

“That’s Night train speaking, isn’t it?”

“Dunno.” Axl frowned. “Maybe. Maybe not. I’m in two minds about you.”

Izzy held the bottle up to his face, made a huge sip and hugged him. Axl raised his eyebrow but didn’t pull away. It meant that Izzy was doing everything right – so far.

Maybe he finally found the right tactic.

“Wanna some Jack?”

“Wh- Seriously?!” Axl jumped a little. “What was that fucking ‘you’re-drinking-night-train-I’m-drinking-Jack’ show?!” His eyes were sparkling with indignation.

“Well, I needed to show you who calls the shots,” Izzy was somehow absolutely sure that this was the right thing to say. He already realized that Axl didn’t like dishonesty. “But since you need it more than I do…” he offered Axl the bottle. Axl glared at him for a few more seconds, but then sighed and accepted it, the corners of his lips lowered with disappointment.

“You’re right.” He took a big sip – too big, he must have realized after he choked on the liquid and spit almost everything on his black tank top with ‘Twisted Sister’ logo. “Shit… well, it’s already black.”

Izzy tried his best not to laugh but didn’t make it. Now it was Axl’s turn to roll his eyes.

They sat in silence for a while, Axl quietly eliminating the remaining whiskey, and Izzy watching him secretly. The speed with which Axl was getting drunk alarmed him. At this rate, it wouldn’t take him long to drink to the point of passing out, and Izzy didn’t want that.

“Slow down,” he said, gently taking away the bottle from Axl’s weak fingers. “If you pass out, we’ll have to postpone it till morning.”

“Don’t lie to me,” muttered Axl, following the bottle with his eyes but not trying to reach it. “You’ll only be happier if I pass out. Won’t have to follow the rules.”

Izzy felt like he’d been punched in the gut. Anger again rose in his chest.

All evening – all fucking evening - he tried to follow these goddamn rules. And for what? To be accused of enjoying fucking unconscious bodies by the same hooker he’d been courting all that time, who he’d been trying to make as comfortable as possible, suppressing his own desires?

Axl shifted, moved his head away from Izzy’s shoulder and curled up on the couch near him.

Izzy could feel his already half-hard cock in his pants, being like that for so long that evening it almost started to hurt.  He waited all that time. From the moment he saw the beautiful hooker on a street corner, a hooker with soft red hair, delicate face, thin wrists and a cigarette between his fingers, a hooker with no typical boredom in his eyes and weariness on his face, a hooker that seemed alive and thus so much differed from all the others he had ever seen. Now this hooker – no, not like that. Now Axl was here, in his flat, on his couch, half-passed out from all the alcohol Izzy poured into him, completely at his mercy.

Fuck it, something snapped inside of Izzy, and he leaned over to Axl and covered his lips with his own, pushing his tongue inside his mouth. Under the pressure Axl parted his lips and let Izzy in, but his tongue seemed cold and lifeless. His eyes were empty. Jack Daniels had done its job well.

Even through the drunken blush on Axl’s cheeks Izzy saw the reddening trace of his own hand.

“Shit,” Izzy stopped the kiss and buried his face in Axl’s neck, desperation twirling inside of him.

He couldn’t do it to him. He just couldn’t.

[hotelsweet]

you might kill me with desire - chapter 4

it’s me! back with the fic I apparently only update when I damn well feel like it! 

ao3 link 

***

As a detective, Amy’s made habit of reminding herself that she can never know anything for sure.

Today, standing to the side of Major Crimes’ biggest press junket yet, she has changed her mind. There is one thing of which she has never been more certain.

Keith Pembroke is an asshole.

As a self-respecting woman with at least half a shred of common sense, she’s always suspected it- but standing here, now, watching him take credit for her decision to reorder Oliver Clare’s autopsy, it’s decidedly clear.

Though it’s far from the reason she works where she does, Amy will happily admit that she enjoys receiving credit for her work. Being humble is one thing, obviously, but where it’s due, there’s nothing wrong with accepting praise for your hard work. Of course, she’s been told she’s a teacher’s pet- she can be smug, proud, and hugely competitive. But this is just insanely unfair.

She watches Pembroke, sat next to the commissioner. A seemingly endless tide of camera flashes blind the air, a room full of eager eyes, and he’s lapping it up- he’s not even smirking, putting on his Serious Face, and somehow this infuriates Amy even more. He’s doing everything he can to make himself convincing, like it was him who figured out Oliver might have been murdered, when he’s actually a total asshat who’s done virtually nothing this entire case-

“Hey.”

Jake, stood next to her, smiles lowly down at her. “You’ve got crazy eyes again,” he says under his breath.

Amy stays quiet- it’s unlikely that anyone would see them talking and question it, but she’s not sure she can even bring herself to risk it.

They must have opened the floor to questions, because suddenly the room is filled with the noise of eager voices competing to make themselves heard.

“I’m fine,” she says calmly to Jake, smiling politely, while she has the chance.

She’s not fine. She’s angry, confused, and determined to find out who hurt Oliver Clare. If it’s not torture enough having to stand here and watch the Vulture take credit for her work, it’s taking too long, and she desperately wants to be working.

It’s not like she’s really in the mood to have Jake comforting her, either- since she saw that text on his phone last night, she can’t help but feel a little wound up. She knows it’s petty, especially if she’s not going to ask him about it or give him a chance to explain, but they’re finally in a kind-of good place and she doesn’t want to ruin it by bringing something unnecessary up. Anyway, it could be nothing. It is nothing. If he wanted to see someone else, he’d see someone else.

There is, of course, the possibility that he’s seeing someone at the same time as their relationship-slash-not-relationship is happening. Amy can’t bring herself to believe it, but men she’s known have done worse.

All of a sudden, everything hits her. Jake, the case, the look on Pembroke’s face- her jaw aches slightly and before she knows it she feels sick to her stomach.

“I can’t be here,” Amy whispers quickly.

“What?!” Jake hisses back, but she’s already silently making her way out of the room.

Thankfully, it’s not too hard to be quiet. If the sudden tide of voices is anything to go by, they’re taking questions. She’ll be unnoticed.

The near-empty hall she finds herself in is far cooler, and she immediately finds herself more relaxed as a result. There’s a little residual dizziness, but nothing she can’t handle- she sinks into a seat off to the side and rubs her temples in a futile attempt to slow it all down.

There’s movement from the other side of the hall, which must mean things are coming to a close. Amy wipes the small sheen of sweat from her forehead and takes a deep breath. Her head is pounding, every negative emotion possible is boiling over, and she’s just about ready to punch somebody in the throat.

“Keep going, Amy.”

There’s no real belief in the words she’s speaking to herself, but hearing it is enough to get her back on her feet and moving towards the exit. Through the doors, and into the parking lot, and into her car, and back to the office. She wonders if she should wait for Jake, then decides against it. If she’s going to work she needs to be focused, and she can’t have him in her front seat and spend the entire time wondering if that text on his phone was from a girl, or worse yet, somebody who actually mattered to him.

No. Instead of waiting for Jake, she keeps repeating the same words over and over in her head.

Keep going, Amy.

***

“Thanks for meeting me. This should be pretty… brief.”

“No worries. I just want to help.”

The young, handsome man sat in front of Jake seems oddly comfortable. Naturally confident. Surprisingly at ease, given that his boss- and his boss’s son- have just been murdered.

“We appreciate it. This shouldn’t take too long- we’re just looking over everyone we’ve already spoken to,” Jake explains, in his super-manly-and-professional-detective voice. Secretly, this voice is one of his favourite parts of his job.

“No problem. Ask away.”

Daniel Clarke may just be the most charismatic man Jake’s ever met. He’s sat opposite a cop in an interview room, and he seems as appropriately at ease as a reasonable man could be in this situation. Of course, there’s an anguished seriousness behind those impossibly blue eyes, but he’s friendly, self-assured, and instantly likable. Makes sense- he seems exactly the kind of person someone as busy and powerful as Kristoff would want to hire.

“You said last time we spoke to you that you were almost constantly in the house, working with Kristoff.”

Daniel nods, completely focused on Jake.

“What was that like, being in his home so often, rather than an office?”

“I mean,” Daniel begins, pausing to think for a moment. “I was between the house and the offices. 70/30, really. It wasn’t too intense. But when it was just Kristoff and I in the house, things definitely felt… quiet.”

“Were you ever brought into family matters?”

“Never,” Daniel replies quickly. “I drove Angelica to therapy once or twice, but that’s it. It wasn’t the closest family environment, if y’know what I mean.”

“Angelica was in therapy?”

“Is,” Daniel corrects him. “I probably shouldn’t even be saying anything.”

“Why?”

Daniel sighs, an uncomfortable look on his face, as if realising he’s dug himself a hole.

“It’s pretty hush-hush. Emilia doesn’t want it getting out. Angelica’s had some problems with alcohol and drugs over the last couple years.”

“Didn’t she graduate high school early?”

“I’d imagine that’s thanks to the Adderall.”

“I see,” Jake replies solemnly, slightly discomfited by Daniel’s smooth reply. Angelica’s just a kid, with god knows what kind of pressures going on in her life. “From what you’re telling me, you sound like a pretty integral part of this life.”

“Eh,” Daniel brushes this off, “Kristoff was a self-made millionaire. I was just a pair of helping hands.”

Jake smiles politely at his modesty.

“Did Oliver have much involvement in the company?”

Daniel grimaces.

“Kristoff and his son weren’t on the best of terms. When Oliver was at MIT, Kristoff offered him work in the… online presence of the company, if you will, since he was studying computer science. He turned it down.”

Jake nods, but finds it hard not to feel a little frustrated. He’s hearing the same thing over and over, from everyone he interviews- Kristoff and Oliver had little to no relationship, both were closed-off moody men, et cetera, et cetera. There’s a missing link in something, or someone, that’s supposed to be coming after this family.

“Is there anyone you can think of that’d want to hurt the Clare family?”

“You’ve asked me that before.” Daniel smiles wryly.

“Better safe than sorry, I guess.”

“Well, there’s plenty,” Daniel half-laughs, “but none that’d want to kill them. Business is cut-throat, but Kristoff was virtually untouchable.”

“Or so it seemed.”

“Exactly.”

“If you don’t mind,” Jake continues cautiously, “could you take me back to the night Kristoff was killed? You said you were called back to the estate in the evening. Was there anything unusual about that?”

“Oh. Sure,” Daniel agrees, clearing his throat. “I was on a date, as you know, and I got a text from Kristoff asking me to come back to the estate urgently. I have no idea what it was for. Not that it mattered in the end, obviously.”

Except it did, Jake thinks- Kristoff might have known he was going to be hurt.

“Honestly, I didn’t think much of it. I don’t get much time off, and when I do it’s not exactly unusual to be called back in. I was essentially Kristoff’s bitch,” he half-laughs.

“Huh.” Jake flicks back and forth through the file Amy’s given him on Daniel. It’s only a couple of pages- his details, original alibi, that kind of stuff. But there’s no record of a text. “Would you be able to show me the text from Kristoff?”

Fleetingly, Daniel looks a little panicked.

“Uh, yeah-”

“Don’t worry, it’s just so we have a full collection of evidence. We need everything possible to make sure whoever did this is punished. We’ll take it on the way out.”

“Sure,” he agrees.

“Great. That’s all we really need from you today.”

“Sure.” Daniel repeats himself.

Once the interview’s been tied up and the screenshots have been collected as evidence, there’s very little for Jake to do except head back up to the office. Truthfully, Amy’s taken over the bulk of the work, barely uttering a word unless it’s to do with the case- he had to convince her to let him take the interview with Daniel just so he had something to do.

He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t worried about her.

The worst part is, he suspects it has something to do with him; since the night he received that text from the woman he met at the bar, she’s been… off. Not angry. Not cold. Just not quite Amy. If he thought she was intense about work before, he’s certainly coming to change his mind now. He wants to sit her down and tell her it was nothing, but he can barely get a word in edgeways if she’s talking to him at all.

When he reaches the office she’s leaning on one of her hands, hunched over a pile of papers so wide they’re almost falling off her desk. For the life of him he can’t even figure out what she’s looking at- but he daren’t disturb her. She doesn’t look up when he sits down at his desk, opposite her.

“I didn’t have much luck with Daniel,” he confesses, after at least a full minute of silence since he’s entered the room.

“Damn.” Amy glances up quickly to offer this one-word response, shooting him a brief, pitying look.

“Did get something new, though. I don’t know how helpful it really is.”

“What?” She doesn’t look up.

“Angelica’s in therapy.”

“Oh, I knew that. I thought I sent it to you last night.”

“No. What’ve you got there?” Jake asks after a pause lasting exactly the amount of time he feels makes it clear she’s not looking to further the conversation herself.

“Family records,” she replies absently.

“We’ve looked over those a hundred times,” he says reluctantly, conscious that this is neither helpful nor positive.

“I’m aware. I was hoping the hundred-and-first time would bring up something we haven’t seen yet.”

This time she doesn’t look at him when she says it, and now he’s sure she’s pissed off with him. He can’t be in the office while it’s like this, he decides, pulling on his jacket.

“I’m gonna get some coffee, maybe some lunch. Want anything?”

Staying away, for now, seems the best option; knowing the way their relationship is swinging back and forth right now, the icy reception could very easily be hot sex within the next twelve hours. Regardless, that vague sense of unease, of guilt, remains. They need to talk, he thinks, observing her as she twiddles a pen over her lower lip in concentration- but not right now.

“I’m good, thanks.”

He nods, instead of forcing a reply, and heads for the door.

But a loud, distinct iPhone’s ping! stops him in his tracks- for a moment, he thinks he might have left his phone on his desk, seeing as his is the only one that ever has the ringer switched on. But the noise has come from the corner, where Amy’s phone is charging on top of a filing cabinet. He’s not sure what makes him reach for it- perhaps the inviting look of curiosity that’s peeled her gaze away from her work and towards the phone.

“Who is it? Only VIP contacts have a ringtone,” Amy explains curiously, a touch of concern in her voice.

Jake can’t reply. His eyes have already found the screen, and he’s not sure he can look away. He can’t bring himself to mentally process the block of a message, only catching real buzzwords like miss you and touch and fuck and come back and what we had. Perhaps he’d be able to read this message if it weren’t for the name above it.

“Jake? Who is it?”

“It’s Teddy.” He’s almost embarrassed at how obviously thick his voice sounds when he says this. He couldn’t be more obviously affected.

“What?!” Amy springs up out of her chair and towards him, but she needn’t bother; Jake’s already holding out her phone towards her.

“So, when did that start again?” Jake forces these words through a laugh. It threatens to choke him.

“It didn’t.” She replies indignantly, staring wide-eyed at her lockscreen. “God, this is intense.”

“He really misses you.”

“Or he’s just horny. That’s a little embarrassing,” Amy grimaces, stepping past Jake as she clicks her phone shut and plugs the charger back in.

Jake can’t quite believe how easily she’s brushing over this. Amy’s about as likely to send a message that overtly sexual as she is to skip laundry day- so he’s a little surprised, to say the least, that receiving one hasn’t completely disgusted her. On the other hand is the fact that they’ve slept together several times now, not to mention the underlying romantic weirdness still lingering between them. Some part of him, however, small, feels owed an explanation.

“What’re you gonna say back?” He asks bluntly, maybe a little too late, since Amy’s already settled back into her reading.

“I…” She looks at him strangely. “I don’t know. I honestly wasn’t planning on texting back at all.”

“We both know you’re too polite to not text back.” Jake forces a smile. “C’mon, what’re you going to say?”

Amy smiles back, but it seems slightly pained- her eyes narrow and her lips part into an uncomfortable position, like she’s trying to read him on the spot.

“Jake, why do you care?”

There’s something sad in her eyes. He wonders if that’s because she pities him, or because she already regrets asking that question.

“Are you-” Jake has to steady himself for a moment, feeling that anger at their situation rise again. Every time they reach a solution they hit another wall, and it’s driving him insane. “Are you kidding me, Amy?”

She just raises her eyebrows at him, staring up at him with dark, sad eyes.

“We both have feelings for eachother. We’ve been sleeping together on and off for weeks, staying in eachother’s apartments, and I like you, Amy- obviously a message like that is gonna make me feel like crap.”

She doesn’t reply this time, just watching him. Her expression becomes more concentrated, upset transforming into red cheeks and angry eyes and ever so slightly glistening eyes.

“I mean, you just said yourself he’s a VIP contact, or whatever,” Jake continues, unable to stop the words falling out of his mouth. He can hear himself being bitter, petty, maybe even straight-up childish, but it’s been days of virtually no communication and he can feel it all spilling out in one go. “Why? Have you been talking to him?”

Amy sighs. Her eyes find another point in the room and seem to stay there for a second, before she’s back on her feet again moving over to her phone.

“First of all, Jake-” she says calmly, taking her phone down from where it’s charging- “he’s a VIP contact because he used to be my boyfriend. I guess I never turned it off. It’s the first message he’s sent in months, as you can see,” she says, holding up the screen displaying their conversation to Jake’s face, “and secondly, I think it’s pretty rich that you’re this mad.”

Instantly, the penny drops-

“You did see that text!” Jake almost laughs, incredulous. “I knew it.”

“You knew?!” Amy laughs exasperatedly. “Oh my god-”

“- I knew it. You’ve been acting weird all week!”

“I’ve been busy.”

“No, you’ve been bitter. I wish you’d have said something-”

“If you knew, you should have said something to me!” Her eyes burn into him. “I had just slept with you, I didn’t want to mess things up by bringing up something that was probably nothing.”

“That-” Jake finds himself replying too quickly, and slows himself down. “That… makes sense. I didn’t want to bring it up because it’s nothing, so… y’know…”

“If I hadn’t seen it then you’d be bringing it up for no reason at all. Right,” Amy agrees, an understanding exasperation clouding over her expression. “What was the text even about, anyway?”

“She’s this girl I met in a bar a few weeks ago. We talked, she invited me to sit with her friends, nothing happened.”

“Except for the taking her number part?”

“Yeah,” Jake admits. “I wasn’t in a great place, it was a couple days after we agreed not to sleep together again. I didn’t want to do anything with her. She knew that, I guess, but asked for my number. I never even got hers.”

“It’s okay, you don’t have to explain. We’re adults,” Amy responds, mostly unconvincingly.

There’s a moment of quiet as they look at each other.

“I’m sorry for not talking to you,” Amy’s voice is quiet. “It’s difficult, sometimes… we’re both so exhausted and stressed that we can’t really date right now, but I do care about you.”

“I care about you too,” Jake says softly. “Sorry for being such a baby.”

Amy smiles, a little amused.

“It’s okay.”

“I was just jealous. I shouldn’t have acted like that.”

“… jealous?”

Amy’s got a kind of smirk on her lips. She draws her hand to her mouth, like she’s trying to stop herself.

“What? Are you laughing?” Jake smiles as he watches her.

“No! I just,” she sighs, leaning against her desk. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

Jake laughs.

“Amy, I’ve been jealous of everyone you’ve dated for a solid year and a half.”

She beams.

“Shut up.”

“I’m serious.”

For a moment they just smile at eachother, and Jake feels awake for the first time all week.

“For the record,” she adds- “I was mentally planning what I’d do if I ever met her. Y’know, if you two were dating.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Mm. It mostly included alcohol and a lot of side-eye.”

“Huh. Amy Santiago likes me enough that she’d be deliberately impolite to somebody.”

She shrugs, smiling, watching him as he makes his excuses about getting their lunch from that place they both love down the street. Jake will admit it’s tiring: they’re between not talking at all, flirting, and having sex in a matter of a week. But having her look at him like that makes him feel like he’s in the room with his first crush all over again. When it’s good, it’s so good.

He couldn’t get over her in a thousand years.

***

Amy shivers a little in the cold of the night. She’s stood outside her apartment complex holding a cardboard box filled to the brim with an assortment of total junk. It needs to go. Call this spring-cleaning.  

Unfortunately, Teddy is late.

Her eyes search the roads around her building, looking for his car. Nerves bubble within her. The relationship’s long dead, but after that text today she’s slightly worried about the kind of conversation he might try and start while he’s here. In her head she rehearses the lines she’s constructed to make this situation go by as swiftly as possible- it’s what’s best for both of us, please don’t contact me again, and the real kicker: I’m seeing someone else.

The words sound as strange in her mouth as they do in her head. Whatever it is that’s going on between her and Jake, it’s far from easy to define. As far as Amy can tell, they’re hanging in the balance somewhere between friends and lovers, and the mess of the case is limiting the communication they’re able to share. On top of that, they’re both perpetually tired, stressed, angry, and, apparently, still dealing with other people.

They’re not boyfriend and girlfriend. At the rate things are going, Amy can’t help but wonder if they’ll even make it that far- if the work becomes any more strenuous there’s a very real chance they’ll end up killing each other. Objectively, she knows they were stupid for hooking up in the first place. If they’d have waited until everything had blown over, maybe instead of all the complicated emotions currently on their side, it’d still just be a case of moderate sexual tension and teasing. There wouldn’t be entire days or weeks going by where she didn’t feel like they were friends anymore.

If they want to move forward they need to be ready as soon as it comes. And this, standing out here in the dark waiting for Teddy to come by and collect the very last of his things, is part of it. She wants to be prepared for him.

Eventually, the car she’s been waiting for comes around the corner and stops in front of her building.

Amy comes down the steps and moves towards the vehicle, which is when he opens his door. His face is steely, almost angry, the pained face of a man holding back his feelings. Some part of her senses that she’s about to hear about these feelings. In detail.

“Oh, no, it’s okay-” she stammers, in a futile attempt to stop him from leaving the car. “You don’t have to get out. I can just put these in the back.”

“We need to talk,” he says quickly. “Please.”

“Teddy.” She holds out the box, in some part just to create a necessary distance between them. “We’ve been broken up for four months. I think everything that needs to be said has been said. I’m sorry.”

“I can’t let you walk away.” He shakes his head as he says this. There’s real desperation in his eyes, Amy thinks, feeling a little guilty. “I’ve been thinking about you every single day.”

“Teddy-”

“Do you know what you mean to me, Amy?”

“I have an idea,” she mutters weakly. She’s used to this flair for the dramatic.

“You’re my future. I can’t picture my life without you in it. I’ll do whatever it takes to change, I’ll make it better than it was before-”

“You weren’t the problem, Teddy.” She breathes. “I mean… you weren’t not the problem, but I had my own issues to work through. I still do. And I’m super busy, I’m on the Clare case-”

“Which I’m so proud of, Ames-”

“- and I have feelings for somebody else.”

This stops him in his tracks.

“Who?”

“That’s not important-”

“- Amy, if this is actually goodbye…”

“It was goodbye four and a half months ago. This is me giving you your stuff back.” She looks down at the box in her hands. “Which you still haven’t taken out of my hands, by the way.”

“I have to kiss you one last time.”

Before she’s really got a chance to do anything, he’s pressing his lips against hers. Her eyes are wide open, and her first instinct is to push him off her. Unfortunately, her hands are a little full.

“Mm!” She objects against his mouth.

He pulls away, a sullen look on his face.

“You know where to find me,” he says sulkily, taking the box from her and pushing it into the passenger seat of his car.

“Sure.”

Part of her feels bad for being blunt. The other part feels like a chapter has been legitimately closed, and room’s been made for Jake. That part feels a hell of a lot better than the other one.

She stands and watches as his car pulls away from her building, her eyes following it until he’s out of sight.

The absence is a wonderful thing, if not just relaxing.

Right until she sees Jake standing across the street, looking at her with the most pain in his eyes she’s ever seen.

Maybe the exhaustion makes her feel worse, but she could swear things are coming crumbling down. Her stomach churns the second she sees him, plastic bag in hand- oh god, he brought takeout- and pure confusion in his eyes. She’s running across the street, not looking twice for traffic. She needs to explain-

“Jake-”

His name is leaving her lips over and over, because he’s walking away-

“It’s not what it looks like-” He’s not stopping. “Jake!”

He stops and turns to her. His face is eerily… blank. He just seems tired, she thinks, and she doesn’t blame him. It’s a misunderstanding, and she can fix it-

“I’m tired. I need to go home.”

“Are you gonna let me explain?” She can’t help it. She’s angry. It’s one catastrophe after another right now, and after the last ten minutes, she could really use just one of the men in her life listening to her.

“Amy… I don’t think you’re a liar.” He looks at her funnily, like he can’t find the right thing to say.

She tries to find the words to reply, but she can’t. What’s she supposed to say to that?

“So?” Is all she manages.

“I can’t deal with this. One second you’re not talking to me, the next we’re sleeping together…the next your ex-boyfriend is kissing you outside your apartment.”

“That’s not fair. I was giving him his stuff back.”

“You were right. About timing. This entire… attempt, at whatever our relationship is, has been a mess. I miss my friend. I love you, Amy” he says, like it’s nothing, and Amy’s heart drops- “but I miss things being simple.”

No matter who’s wrong or right, in any of this, the worst thing which Amy has to admit to herself is that she misses him too. Everything made sense, and now it’s in tatters. Every time they come close to fixing it, things only become worse. Her heart is swollen, a painful beating in the middle of her chest. He looks so sad, and it’s her fault.

“I miss it too.” Her voice is hoarse; talking hurts the lump in her throat, which is what makes her realise she might be about to cry.

“I want this,” he continues, his voice low, “but I want it in the right way.”

“Me too.”

And to think only minutes ago she was forcing herself not to mock Teddy for being overdramatic.

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

***

The next day is hell.

There’s word around the office that things aren’t moving quick enough, and the case is being considered for the FBI instead.

Amy can’t let it happen. She’s come too far, had too much credit stolen for her work, had almost her entire relationship with Jake destroyed. She needs a lead and she needs one now.

Of course, being able to find something without wildly damaging mental strain coming first would be far too easy, so when 7pm comes and they’ve made no progress other than reinvestigating Julian, Emilia, Angelica, and Oliver for the millionth time, as well as double-checking Daniel and Greta, Amy feels like she could just about sink into the ground.

“Alright, ding-dongs.”

Yes. She’s ready now. If the ground would like to open up, now would be the perfect time.

“Keith,” Jake responds monotonously. Pembroke grimaces at the use of his first name. Amy enjoys it for approximately .1 second.

“You’ll have heard about the FBI coming in to scoop up our case.”

“It’s happening?!” Amy can hear how panicked she sounds. She doesn’t care.

“Not yet. We’ve got until Sunday.”

“For what?” Jake asks. “Are we talkin’ Solve The Entire Case, or just some evidence, or what?”

“This may sound unfamiliar to the two of you, since you’re capable of finding one about once a month, but we need a lead,” Pembroke widens his eyes, clearly irritated. “This is getting embarrassing.”

“I’d say it’d be great if we had your help, but that’s obviously a lie.”

“Pleasure as always,” he replies, ignoring Jake’s comment, and like that he’s gone.

“I wonder what he does during the day.” Amy says sadly once he’s gone. “He’s getting paid to be a jackass.”

“So was I, until I got put on this case,” Jake jokes resentfully.

Amy smiles weakly. The night before still lingers in the air. Over and over and over in her head she hears him telling her he loves her, but it doesn’t matter. Neither of them seem quite sure where they stand.

“Do you want to work tonight?” She offers, although she’d enjoy virtually anything except this. It’s a peace offering.

“I’m actually grabbing a drink with Boyle.”

“That sounds nice.”

“You’re welcome to join, if you want-”

“No, no,” Amy insists. “I’m okay. I think I’m gonna stay here for a little while.”

“Are you sure? You’ve barely slept.”

There is no plausible explanation as to how he might know this. And yet he’s completely right. Must mean the bags under her eyes are more telling of the hours she spent awake after their exchange last night than she thought.

“Now I’ve got a deadline there’s no way I’ll be able to relax at home.”

Jake nods knowingly as slings his bag over his shoulder.

“Makes sense. I’ll see you in the morning.”

In her quiet, dim corner of the office, she watches him leave. Eventually, the sound of his steps disappears and she’s left only with the soft whirring of the heater in the corner of the room. Alone.

Keep going, Amy.          

***

“I’m sorry, buddy. Sounds like you’re going through a lot. I just wish you’d have told me sooner"”

Charles looks at his best friend earnestly, patting him on the back, causing a small prang of guilt in Jake’s system. He wishes he’d told him sooner, too.

“I’ve missed you, bud.”

“It’s not the same at the precinct. Those two empty desks are heartbreaking. Now I really understand how Marius felt when he sang Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.”

“The awful, heart-breaking story of all his friends dying at the barricade wasn’t explanatory enough?” Jake asks. Charles shrugs.

“I still can’t believe you never told me you and Amy hooked up!” Charles grins. Jake gives him a pointed look. “I know, I know. Your relationship has become chaos as a result. But still! It’s the romance I’ve always dreamt of.”

“And you can’t tell anyone.”

“Not even Genevieve?”

That reply was too quick.

“You’ve already texted her about it under the table, haven’t you?”

“We share everything, Jake! My excitement is her excitement, quite literally-”

“Yes! Yes, you can tell Genevieve anything you want, as long as you stop talking right now.”

“Fine.”

"How're the others?"

Charles stops to think.

"Gina's exactly the same. Word has it she met someone, but obviously she won't tell us who."

"Sounds just like her."

"Rosa body-tackled a perp the other day, right in the middle of the precinct. I filmed it for you."

"Oh, man, you did?!" Jake feels a surge of love for his best friend. "Show me!"

"Sure! Oh," Charles opens his phone, dismayed. "I filmed it with the front-facing camera."

Sure enough, the video he brings up is a solid forty seconds of pure shock filtering in and out of his face. Jake's convinced it may be better than any other video he's ever seen.

For the first time this evening, there’s a pause in their conversation.

“I told Amy I loved her last night.”

The words sound strange out loud, real. Now he's told Charles, last night's incident exists outside of the bubble that is the case. The bubble where it's only he and Amy that exist.

Charles’s face lights up with glee.

“WHAT?!”

“I didn’t even… I didn’t mean it like that, y’know?”

“No, I don’t know. Continue. Explain,” Charles stares at him, continuing to sip at the straw of his diet coke like a teenage girl being fed the hottest gossip she’s ever heard.

The fact of it is that he’s scared. He always loves too quickly and too hard and, if he’s being honest with himself, he’s been doomed for since the day he met her. He’s surprised he lasted this long before letting the words spill- it’s just a shame they’re not actually in a relationship, or even really sure of what they are at all. Great timing, Jake.

“I try not to say it, usually, when I’m in a relationship.” He sighs. “I realised pretty quickly that I was normally saying it too soon.”

“Adorable. You’re the king of love itself,” Charles gushes, pressing a hand against his chest. Jake shoots him a stern look. “Sorry. Continue.”

“With Amy it is romantic, but it’s more like… I care about her like family. I have… loving feelings for her. It’s not the same as being in love with her.”

“Sure.” Charles rolls his eyes.

Jake glances at his phone, tipsy and finding his own words are confusing him. It’s almost midnight.

“I bet Amy’s still in the office.”

“She stayed behind?”

“Yeah. She’s putting herself under crazy pressure.”

He wonders if she’s achieved anything. If the office is as painfully quiet as he imagines it to be. If, god forbid, she’s fallen asleep at her desk.

“Hey, I’ve only had one drink. I’ll drive you back to the office.”

“What?” Jake looks at Charles oddly. “Why would you do that?”

“Because all you’ve talked about all evening is Amy, and you just casually told me that she’s alone at work late at night, then wistfully gazed off into space for a solid ten seconds.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to. C’mon.”

And like that, Charles is leading him outside and into the car, and he’s on his way back. The journey, under the lights of the city, makes Jake realise just how tired he is. They’re a while from home- they’ll have to come all the way from the offices back to Brooklyn. Poor Amy’s not even had a break.

The offices are eerie. Half the lights are off, and the entire place is silent.

When he enters their office, he’s actually relatively relieved to see Amy passed out at her desk. Something about the office is telling him he would have found it even creepier if she was able to work in an environment like this.

“Ames?” He knocks gently on the door, standing in its frame. He doesn’t want to alarm her.

She stirs for a moment, her breathing becoming momentarily stronger, out of pace.

“Ames, wake up.”

After a moment she lifts her head, slowly at first.

“What time is it?” You can hear the exhaustion in her voice, now reduced to a croak.

“Gone midnight. C’mon, we’ll get a cab.”

“I’ll just sleep here,” Amy murmurs, but he knows she doesn’t really mean it. She might be obsessive over her work, but she hates not having a fresh pantsuit in the morning, and he knows for a fact she’s used the spare clothes she’s been keeping here. “I’ve made progress.”

“Nope. C’mon. You can tell me all about it on the way back. Or even sleep.” He’s closer now, shaking gently at her arm.

She lifts her head, looking up at him with dark, slightly reddened eyes, half-asleep. She looks beautiful, even with the small patch of hair she’s been leaning on which is now an upwards-facing scruff of bed hair. Desk hair, if you will.

“Fine. Better be a comfy-ass cab.”

He laughs lowly at this, only too aware of how ready she is to pass out.  It’d be irresponsible to send her home by herself- not because she couldn’t handle herself, not in any scenario, Jake thinks- but purely because she deserves a nap.

Luckily, it doesn’t take too long to get a taxi. Admittedly, at first, the driver seems a little wary of what Jake can only assume from an outsider’s perspective appears to be a vulnerable woman passed out in the arms of a man trying to take her home.

The drive back to hers feels like a decade. Jake doesn’t mind. He savours each second, especially when she passes out on his shoulder. The radio is playing softly in the front of the car, some late-night dance station. She’s warm against him, and occasionally the scent of her hair floats upwards. He can’t get over how beautiful she looks, and so he spends the journey memorizing each detail of her face. Freckles, eyelashes, eyebrows, the cupid’s bow of her lips.

He’s beyond exhaustion. After last night’s exchange he obviously couldn’t sleep, and the worst part is that he knows it’s his fault. If he’d just been understanding maybe they could have talked it through again. But, frankly, he doesn’t regret saying the things he did. He cares about her, maybe more than anything, but while the last two months have been exciting, scary, and new, they’ve also been some of the most stressful he’s ever known. He wants her, but not with the way things are right now. She deserves better than him in this state.

She hums against his chest, and, for some reason, this is the moment at which he realises he's never, ever, felt like this about somebody. She amazes him, in every possible way, but on top of all of this, she frightens him. Amy is everything he could possibly want or need and he doesn't have the room to mess a single thing up. Maybe he already has.

Miraculously, Jake succeeds in staying awake until they reach her apartment. He can’t help but feel a little guilty as he wakes her, talking softly to her until she stirs again.

Amy doesn’t let go of him as they walk up the steps into her building, or even when they’re in the elevator on the way up. She’s not clinging, not by any means- rather, he keeps an arm over her shoulder, and, gently, she holds up her hand so she can hold his. It’s intimate, obviously, and all Jake can think of is helping her into bed and climbing in next to her, falling asleep beside her. But there’s an understanding between them, and he knows it as well as she does. If he kisses her now, he makes everything awkward and weird again for a couple of days.

Maybe this is the perfect balance, he thinks. Just being able to hold each other, let the other know they’re there. No talking. No sex. No complications. Just caring for each other when it matters the most. Maybe.

“Stay here. The blanket’s already on the couch,” she says firmly once they’re inside. He knows there’s no point in arguing, especially since it’s nearing 2 in the morning, and more practically speaking he lives a solid 15 minutes away and right now he feels like he could pass out on the spot. “I’ll get you a pillow,” she adds, wandering off towards her bedroom.

After a minute she reappears in the living area with one of her pillows, throwing it onto the couch.

“Night, Jake.”

She stands in front of him for a second, smiling tiredly, but then, out of nowhere, he finds himself being pulled into a hug. Her arms are thrown around his neck, and for a moment she’s just breathing into him. Jake takes this as permission to do the same, pulling her in, closing his eyes against the top of her head as the fatigue threatens to take him to sleep a few minutes too early. He could swear she fits into him, against him, perfectly. She's made to be there. Hours of work haven't affected the softness of her skin, or the gentle waft of her perfume, and for a moment he wishes he could fall asleep here, in her arms.

The words she says next, muffled against his chest, are little more than a whisper; if he’d been even breathing a little louder he might have missed them. Missed her. But it’s certain, and even when she pulls away and ambles slowly away to her bedroom, it echoes throughout the room. Throughout the city. The most spectacular four words Jake’s ever heard.

“I love you too.”

[hotelconcierge]

The Tower

hey man there’s a hole in my head where information goes

I. 

1 And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.

2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

3 And they said one to another: 'Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.' And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.

4 And they said: 'Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, with its top in heaven, and let us make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'

5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

6 And the LORD said: 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.

7 Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.'

8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city.

9 Therefore was the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11:1–9)

In Sunday School or Illustrated Classics, we are taught that God punished humanity for hubris, for daring to disobey Mesopotamian zoning laws. That’s not what it says here.

Biblical man didn’t build a tower to sneak into Heaven’s happy hour without ID. He wanted to “make a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” The tower was symbolic, decorative, a community service project. It was supposed to bring people together.

And accordingly, the LORD doesn’t care about the tower, doesn’t even mention it by name. The tower is merely a tip-off that something is awry. When God descends to Earth, His complaint is,

'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.’

The Judeo-Christian capital G—o—d, robed, bearded, opinionated, deadlifts, thematically male, is the avatar of civilization, just check the year. Even so, His omnipotence is not uncontested. He knows this. You should see what He did to the guys with the golden calf. God said, “Let there will be light,” and there was light. But just as Nyx preceded Zeus, that means the darkness was already there. And the house always wins at the second law of thermodynamics.

“Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do.” God didn’t punish Homo sapiens sapiens for hubris, he launched a pre-emptive strike. “Now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.” Far be it from me to psychoanalyze God. But if I’m reading the tone correctly, He did this because He was scared.

II. 

But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life and life only.

—Bob Dylan

Everyone deserves to figure out the meaning of life at least once or twice. We’re talking late teens and early twenties, when work is too easy and finding better work too hard. Turning the post-acid feeling of cosmic oneness into a fridge-note to-do list is harder than expected, but whatever man, MWF pass/no pass. Start from the basics. Matter is math, mind is matter. Determinism except for the quantum stuff. Time is a flat circle, space is a mobius strip, morality is aesthetics and aesthetics is quantifiable. Big Bang and billiard balls of 1s and 0s colliding and uncolliding on loop. “Though existence has no inherent meaning,” you tell your ex over chamomile, “in the end, all we have is each other.” Reply: something about how all behavior is an expression of the ancestral Art that is shared by our collective unconscious. “Um, yeah,” annoyed, “I thought that was obvious.”

Ah, surprise surprise, turns out your inch and footnoted masterpiece was predicted by the Greek philosopher Fuchylus in 380 B.C.E. Like, you could have right-clicked that guy’s papyrus for synonyms. Not to mention the next twenty-three hundred years of middlebrow philosophy you somehow missed. Why did you think your reductionism was original? Even your doodles are boring. Wolfram plays coy. The rock band turns to sediment. Making a fool of yourself drunk won’t get a rise from fate and sobriety gives a hangover too. Atoms don’t touch they just brush electrons; the sky magnifies the sun onto the anthills of man. Spilled soda on the counter and cashed bowls on the kitchen table; it’s the witching hour, and some guy in an Neff beanie is asking if you have any Xanax. And the meaning of life strikes again, that sacred cosmic oneness, how strange it is to be anything at all—but just for a second. And with the wisdom of a philosopher, you reply, “Dude, I need to sleep.”

That’s when the open-mic audience would start finger-snapping and I would do a handle pull from whatever was available, probably Seagram’s. Look, we’ve all been there. And to the best of our abilities, I hope we’ve all moved on.

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown. (Beyond Good & Evil)

But I also hope that you’ve kept some sympathy for homebrew creation myths. Even though one inevitably stumbles upon some version of “existence is suffering, might as well floss,” the challenge of applying vocab words to reality sometimes reveals patterns that would not otherwise be obvious.

So consider yourself warned: the unfortunately academic ideas hereafter will not take the controls you so desperately proffer, and they will not grant you an answer that does not exist. I still believe they are important.

The question is thus: why don’t we choose to be happy?

For those who doubt humanity’s anti-joy stance, look no further than the sci-fi concept of Wireheading. If in the year 20XX the Hegemony announces a Guaranteed Happiness Machine, would you use it? There’s no catch. You sign in triplicate, there’s low-volume Sinatra playing from an overhead speaker, a lab tech hooks up electrodes to your forehead, terms and conditions, agree, YES, ON. And then you feel good. As good as it is possible to feel. The machine makes heroin look like a sharpie high. The feeling it gives you isn’t mere hedonistic pleasure, it is limitless understanding, loving and being loved, progress and growth—whichever nouns or adjectives you prefer, the sum feeling is happiness. The machine never stops working and it never induces a tolerance. You can stop anytime, although no one ever does, they live in rapture while undergrads making $12.50 an hour tend to their fluids. Ninety years later, they die.

I have no doubt that some readers would hit the ON button so hard they’d break a metacarpal. Not unreasonable, if you are depressed or a hippie circa 1967. I can’t question your axioms, I’ll drop a few nickels when I pass by on Telegraph Ave. Those of you who reject suicide by Hallmark, I agree, but please note that instead of happiness, equanimity, transcendence, or any other internal state postulated as the ‘meaning of life,’ you are prioritizing something that is not a feeling at all.

A second thought experiment re: that something. Suppose that your behoodied Silicon Valley boss offers you an all-expenses-paid vacation to virtual reality paradise. This is more than a chemical high: an analysis of your preteen forum posts nudges the universe into whatever genre fiction your unconscious craves most. The VR offers you the chance to live out your dreams. Alas, for copyright reasons, any memories of the vacation will be wiped upon your return, any skills you acquired will be unlearned, and any metadata of your adventures will be destroyed. You’ll remember inhaling the sedative, then you’ll wake up with lumbar back pain to show that time has passed.

I’m more tempted by dreamland than the empty calories of wireheading, but even so I recognize that both choices are fundamentally the same: an ecstasy that leaves no trace vs. bland but tangible reality. The decision is almost binary. If you would spend a year in the Matrix, why not twenty? Why not the rest of your life?

These concerns are not theoretical.

In the study, Kahneman and colleagues looked at the pain participants felt by asking them to put their hands in ice-cold water twice (one trial for each hand). In one trial, the water was at 14C (59F) for 60 seconds. In the other trial the water was 14C for 60 seconds, but then rose slightly and gradually to about 15C by the end of an additional 30-second period.

Both trials were equally painful for the first sixty seconds, as indicated by a dial participants had to adjust to show how they were feeling. On average, participants’ discomfort started out at the low end of the pain scale and steadily increased. When people experienced an additional thirty seconds of slightly less cold water, discomfort ratings tended to level off or drop.

Next, the experimenters asked participants which kind of trial they would choose to repeat if they had to. You’ve guessed the answer: nearly 70% of participants chose to repeat the 90-second trial, even though it involved 30 extra seconds of pain. Participants also said that the longer trial was less painful overall, less cold, and easier to cope with. Some even reported that it took less time. (Summary by this website, source Thinking Fast and Slow)

Ur-Rationalist Daniel Kahneman distinguishes between the experiencing self, which reacts to the bartender’s “you’ve had enough” with pain fiber shocks of disbelief, and the remembering self, which, subject to biases such as duration neglect and the peak-end rule, leaves the two star Yelp review. The cold water experiment is a brilliant demonstration of how, as in the wirehead and dreamland examples above, our remembering and experiencing selves often disagree. This should be intuitive: consider the TV series ruined by the finale, the regret that follows junk food bliss, or the bad date that turns into a comedic memory.

Except Kahneman doesn’t take his idea far enough. Consider the motivations of a suicide bomber. The experiencing self knows nothing save immediate pleasure and pain. It has no interest in martyrdom. It will only pull the trigger to end some greater agony, such as during sickness, when some elemental part of you literally does “want to die.” The remembering self is what chooses to endure the flu, since it knows from its internalized stories that all pain eventually subsides; failure of this mechanism is the cognitive basis for depression. At times, the remembering self will even coax the experiencing self into discomfort, e.g. work, in exchange for a future reward, e.g. dough. But the case of a kamikaze, the remembering self is willing to die not for its own postponed pleasure, but so that some other remembering self can look back on its behalf.

Ask any teenage boy, would you prefer an miserable life—and I mean no “life satisfaction,” no “dopaminergic reinforcement,” nothing but anhedonia and abject suffering—with a great legacy, or a happy but unremarkable stay? All he’ll have to do is point to his Nirvana t-shirt. In his own faux-hawked way, he’s continuing the sacrificial tradition of his ancestors: warriors, prophets, and parents. Any given hamartia may cut your QALYs in half, but plenty of Greeks would’ve taken an arrow to the heel in exchange for a Homeric cameo. This is why utilitarianism is for nerds. I get the need for a heuristic, fine, but the remembering self doesn’t want quality of life, it wants quality of death, and it is impossible to factor that into your calculations because nothing ends, Adrian, nothing ever ends. Your story continues postmortem on the Ship of Theseus down the River Styx, vulnerable to necrophiliacs and redeemable by eulogy. The remembering self is not bound by pleasure, it is not bound by time, it is not even bound by self.

If someone hits your hippocampus with a rock and proceeds to wipe every trace of your existence from humanity’s collective memory, then you aren’t you anymore, pick a new name and maybe stop messing with the CIA; but anything short of that and the remembering self rises up like The Thing. In every interaction worth memory, some fraction of your breath-by-breath biography is pasted into the the recipient’s memory and thus into their remembering self. The size of this interpolation varies, as does the fidelity of translation. Cashier gets a caricature, lovers get a short story, and you get an anonymous manifesto called ‘The Tower.’ Burroughs: 

The word has not been recognised as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host. (The Electronic Revolution)

Of course, it’s not just words. It’s everything.

The idea of “cultural evolution” is as old as Darwin, the idea of transmissible cultural information bits—“memes”—at least as old as Dawkins [1]. For the idea of human consciousness as a collection of memes, Keith Henson coined the term “memeoid,” although he defined the term as “victims who have been taken over by a meme to the extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential.” Pleading guilty to the goofy vocab, I contend that we are all such victims. Schizophrenics are absolutely correct to be worried about the insertion and theft of one’s thoughts. Memory is a collection of memes. The so-called remembering self scores our attempts to secure the interests of such memes, the experiencing self totals the millivolts of pain and pleasure, and the algorithm to which we ascribe free will chooses between them.

But by this point I hope that I have demonstrated the limitations of Kahneman’s terminology. So, in older and perhaps better words: superego, id, ego. Q.E.D.

III.

One is a sterile number. When there is only one there can be no love, no yearning, no union. Two are required to forge a relationship. Without the other, the self has no meaning. (Myth = Mithya)

Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind. (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius)

The first dichotomy, per Freud, divides ego-instincts from object-instincts. Ego-instincts bubble up from within. Our necessities, the autonomic-prompted lower rungs on Maslow’s hierarchy, are such: hunger, fatigue, defecation, micturition, respiration, crude sexual desire. Newborns, lacking cerebellar motor plans, with vision only capable of parsing light and motion, respond solely to ego-instincts, treating the entire world as an extension of their ill-defined bodies. We are born narcissists.

Object-instincts, together composing the infamous libido, develop as we learn the range of our power and begin to direct it outwards. Freud marks draws his second dichotomy as the yin and yang of libido: Eros, the love instinct, and Thanatos, the death instinct. I have written elsewhere about this dichotomy. Whether our interactions with the outside world can be reduced to two fundamental modes is debatable, but while other categorizations are possible, I find this one to be a useful approximation.

In my view, Eros—true love, sure, but also the sacred moments of connection between strangers in a mosh pit—is best approximated as belonging. Not cognitive empathy, affective; not the conscious decompiling of another’s code, just the instinctual feeling of namaste, “the light in me sees the light in you.” Eros can mirror neuron a puppy or a mood-concordant landscape; even the Buddhist desire to renounce desire falls within her domain. Eros asks for nothing save acceptance. Acceptance is belonging and belonging is pleasurable. Only when we see ourselves reflected by the universe can we believe that it is part of us.

With Thanatos, Freud describes an extreme. Our other primordial desire is not for death per se, but for control—Ananke. Self-destruction is the ultimate form of such power—the pleasure of failure is that you know how to do it—but sudoku falls on the same path. Ananke hates nothing but entropy. Ananke rewards us for turning atoms into tools and tools into appendages, so much the better if those atoms comprise other humans, viz. the high of domination. But Ananke cares not if we are weak, so long as we are choosing to be weak, viz. the high of submission. Ananke demands action. Ananke compels us to learn, to make the universe predictable, to gain control over time, what next happens, and space, what happens next. Only when the universe is predictable can we believe that it is part of us.

"The ego is the libido’s original home," says Freud. Other human beings are no more than anthropomorphized objects and anthropomorphization is no more than self-reflection in a funhouse mirror. We are born narcissists and it is narcissism to which our instincts pull.

Exposition and truisms, nothing more distasteful, I apologize for inflicting them on you. What I’m trying to prove is that the battle between id and superego is cooked from the start. All of the above goddesses are bound within the id. The id is what we want, by definition. The superego has to sneak and skulk around this fact. Its power—our sacred power as conscious beings—is that we can choose how to go about wanting.

How do we make that choice? At first, Pavlov. Suckling is a spinal cord reflex, calories are tasty, welcome to the rat race, kid. Ananke drives development: contracting the sarcomeres of babbling or crawling is intrinsically pleasurable because it is a new form of control. Once we piece together the object permanence scam, operant conditioning takes over as lead programmer. Convincing dozens of children to sit quietly and crank out long division is possible only with a mass conspiracy of reward and punishment for strange, bureaucratic tasks, see also golf, San Francisco, writing longform on Tumblr. These inculcated memes compete for the real estate of your mind, e.g. a meme A that reads, “Do not allow meme B entry.” (Although the message might sneak past the immune system as a mutated meme B2.) Memes also cooperate—“Do not forget meme C, no matter what”—and this process of anchoring new memes to existing residents (per terminology, creating a “memeplex”) is the mechanism behind semantic memory. As always, the map becomes the territory. Certain memes sate the id and are reinforced into habit, new memes follow through behavioral association and in turn dangle the carrot and wield the stick. The final algorithm of one’s existence must to some extent serve Eros and Ananke in each moment (you have to “want” in order to act), but it may or may not work towards their long-term procurement, or the sum of their derivatives, happiness. However, pleasure or not, the remembering self will use the superego’s algorithm when assigning meaning to memory: “Did I do what I really wanted?”

But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man...will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate LORD over all the other impulses. (Beyond Good & Evil)

The remembering self doesn’t care what MacGuffin you pick. Five-act memories are the natural consequence of movement toward a goal—static friction, activation energy, climax, relaxation, rest, there’s no other way to so much as cross the street. Stasis is the enemy, action begins with the disruption of routine. Minimum wage jobs are worse because of their pointlessness more than because of their indignity, work harder/better/faster/stronger and no one cares, screw up and you’re replaced without a missed beat. No direction, no story; the days blur together until arthritis leaves you crippled. Stoned summers don’t get you off the hook, duration neglect compresses both good and bad sensations. No matter how pleasant, when nothing is happening, the superego starves. There’s a reason couples fight on vacation.

The secret to a cozy deathbed is to pick a single memeplex and grind towards its goals alone, a Nietzschean Will to Power over Schopenhauer’s Will. Being a dilettante is simply too easy: flat lines don’t form memories. Reinventing yourself between brunches feels good—the illusion of control—until you’ve dreamt the same dreams too many times and they no longer get you high. A little navel-gazing, mind-wracking, and soul-searching is necessary, but adolescence is supposed to come with an expiration date, and adulthood marks the switch from explore to exploit. The menthol-smoking relativists in acid-wash jeans are correct: the meaning of life is arbitrary, constructed, cultural, fake. But the path to a meaningful life is universal.

Happiness and meaning—sometimes they overlap, sometimes you must choose. I don’t have the answer, there is no answer, all I can do is warn you about the trap by which you obtain neither. Even if you’re sign-me-up-for-the-Orgasmatron all in with Team Experiencing Self, the id is too myopic to be any good at long-term hedonism. The unchecked id would have left us cavemen, samizdat & chill wouldn’t even be on the table. Conversely, even if you’re polishing trophies for Team Remembering Self, the default superego is an incoherent mess, infected with millions of selfish, MALIGNANTLY USELESS memes that have no interest in your happiness, care not for the coherence of your autobiography, and will drive you to madness rather than let you winnow them away.

The key word is default. We all have some degree of protection, either through physical isolation or memetic immunity, “Mom says not to trust strangers who say they have candy.” But most of us fall short of contact precautions. And in that case, we are ruled by probability—by Moloch, by Nyx, by Nature, the only force that God fears. Why else would He confuse mankind’s language? Why would He demand obedience to 613 commandments? Circumcision? What was Judaism, with rabbinical prohibition against interfaith marriage or proselytization, except God’s attempt to create a religion that would not spread? It failed, as it always does. Autotune and Manifest Destiny. The house always wins at the second law of thermodynamics.

With free flow of information, how can any belief system hold? All belief systems rest on axioms, if you grant equal footing to a contradictory axiom, the belief system collapses. I suppose I’m that guy claiming that atheists invent a God—not an interventionist God, nor a fuzzy deism, but a set of unprovable principles that determine right and wrong and to which one must atone. Don’t give me that humanism bullshit. When someone slaps your hypothetical girlfriend’s ass in the proverbial club, what does humanism say you should do? At least toxic masculinity has an answer. Humanism is a motte and bailey, a set of milquetoast ideals which provide no guidance in day to day life and so leave you passive (“Hey, man—first principles!”) or, more likely, vulnerable to whatever crypto-ideology is most virulent. If you do not have a code of conduct, one will be provided for you.

With free flow of information—a suppressed memetic immune system, a hypothetical Tower of Babel—it is statistically inevitable that every meme will attain its most infectious form. There are countless ways to make an idea more or less palatable, but the first step is always the same, a single amino acid substitution, a lingering desire affixed to every thoughtlet: “SPREAD THIS MEME.” With free flow of information, this will be the only value that remains—every other axiom will be cancelled out by its opposite, but the codon “don’t spread this meme” will, definitionally, not spread.

A pathogen that is too restrained will lose out in competition to a more aggressive strain that diverts more host resources to its own reproduction. However, the host, being the parasite's resource and habitat in a way, suffers from this higher virulence. This might induce faster host death, and act against the parasite's fitness by reducing probability to encounter another host (killing the host too fast to allow for transmission).

But as long as transmission continues despite the virulence, virulent pathogens will have the advantage. So, for example, virulence often increases within families, where transmission from one host to the next is likely, no matter how sick the host. Similarly, in crowded conditions such as refugee camps, virulence tends to increase over time since new hosts cannot escape the likelihood of infection. (“Optimal virulence,” Wikipedia)

At least natural selection is a package deal: half your genes per haploid donation. Even the most selfish of genes is bound to help its chromosome buddies reproduce. Not so with our minds. Speech can excise one meme at a time. That meme has no obligation to help any of your other memes spread. Indeed, insofar as your other memes occupy time and energy, they are its enemies. The result: an overpowering desire to be understood, all I want in life’s a little bit of love to take the pain away, unquenchable, because the memes that want to be understood are contradictory and changing from moment to moment: you have failed to define a you, so you are a vessel [2]. 

At least the force of natural selection acts along one axis. Here, you are torn apart.

IV.

Art is form struggling to wake from the nightmare of nature. (Sexual Personae)

“Culture is not about esthetics” by Gwern Branwen is worth reading even though I oppose its conclusion with a vehemence others reserve for colonoscopies and Ayn Rand. I can’t do justice to 125 footnotes of background research with a bullet-point paragraph, but the argument goes:

We subsidize the creation of art, both directly (museum fees, camgirl wishlists) and indirectly (universities, copyright law).

There is already far more art than could possibly be consumed in a lifetime.

Old art is better than new art—because of the selection bias of time, if nothing else.

People would be happier if they consumed only the best art.

We should not encourage the production of new art; indeed, if it truly is harmful, we should ban it. (Gwern gives nonfiction a pass.)

If you’re not in the right mindset, this may seem completely insane, which it is, but you have to respect a guy who goes for the null hypothesis hat trick. Intellectual honesty is best achieved by contrarianism against every belief encountered, including contrarianism. We arrive at verisimilitude by ping-ponging between falsehoods, praise be unto Gwern for serving as one of the paddles.

The first objection to an art ban: what qualifies as “better?” Let’s assume that all art can be boiled down to a single rating between 0 and 10. Perhaps even then an 8 may be situationally better than a 10; perhaps for some people Eminem’s rhymes resonate more than George Chaucer’s. Do niche and novel issues benefit from niche and novel perspectives?

Gwern says no. “Fiction can be unfairly persuasive, bypassing our rational faculties.” “Time consumption is zero-sum between fiction & nonfiction.” “As a society, is it good to have our discussions and views about incredibly important matters like space exploration hijacked by fiction?”

Either fiction is effective as propaganda and setting societal agendas, or it isn’t. If the latter, then the loss is nil; if the former, then fiction is dangerous!

Gwern seems to think that if we banned Guardians of the Galaxy the relevant audience would switch to Douglas Hofstadter. The assumption here is that nonfiction exists, distinct from and more truthful than fiction. I don’t buy it. Whenever a human is involved it’s fiction, and if policy decisions came from Excel spreadsheets that data still would have been collected by a mortal of limited peripheral vision. Please recall that extremely fucked up scientific racism tomes of yesteryear such as “Crania Americana” and "Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race" were nonfiction bestsellers. A glance at the news site of your choice will show that we have achieved only a marginal improvement in veracity. If you ban sensationalist fiction, odds are that the proles will get their info from sensationalist nonfiction, and if you think our discussions and views are hijacked now, just wait.

But the greater oddity here is that, when pondering the possible benefits of fiction, Gwern chooses to talk about...space. This reeks of too much Modafinil. Gwern gives two lines of courtesy toward the majority of modern fiction:

Now, what good deeds could only new works produce? Certainly it’s not edifying & educating our youth; it is not as if the pedagogy of Euclidean geometry has changed much over the last millennia, nor is 20th century fiction known for teaching moral lessons.

What the hell? I don’t know what 20th century fiction Gwern has been reading. Even Go, Dog. Go! had a moral.

That’s right. Love in the Time of Cholera, natch. Fiction needs motion which requires a MacGuffin which generates a value system around it. Fiction dispenses a moral lesson even when it’s not trying, and before you come at me with “the only moral question is whether you voted for Trump and how many bednets are you sending to Africa!!!!” allow me to point out that fiction is strongest when it deals with microethics, not “is war bad y/n.” (“A triumph of honesty...a shocking exploration of modern values.”— The New York Times.) We face a hundred small dilemmas every time we get close enough to breathe another person’s exhaled nitrogen and NOTHING BUT ART CAN ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS. We can gin and rummy about how conserved moral questions are over time—I’m sympathetic to Gwern’s object-level claims, the classics are underutilized, subsidies are bad—but even if the disease is ancient, you have to speak a living language if you want to recognize the symptoms.

All of this supports the first objection: that new art provides a nontrivial benefit to the observer. But I’m going for a bigger claim: it doesn’t have to.

Gwern states the following:

The humanities have made notoriously little use of science’s techniques, worldview, or results...Conceptually, I see no problem with a nation of sober hard-headed engineers and scientists doing quite as well without the novelists.

This seems like Gwern’s idea of a utopia. So let us suppose this art-banned nation of engineers exists—every man, woman, and child, speech-therapied and carbuncular, saluting a flag of the golden spiral—and indeed, is so successful that a post-scarcity economy is achieved and everyone retires to leisure. Now, enlighten me: what would these people do all day?

They could read Dostoyevsky. Maybe Notes from the Underground, if they’ve retained a sense of irony. They couldn’t write analyses of Dostoevsky, however—that would be new art. There wouldn’t be much in the way of comedy, but why would that be needed when one can recite from the classic jest and prankbooks of yore? As for tragedy, at the funeral of a loved one, choose from any of the more than sufficient eulogies already written. No new fashion but khakis are always in season. No new recipes but who doesn’t like Mealsquares. They could fuck. They could play tic-tac-toe. They could plug into the Orgasmatron—and this, I suspect, is the endgame of Gwern’s utilitarian fantasy hell, inspired by a glance at Maslow’s Hierarchy and, “Well, that part seems unnecessary.” I know it’s gauche to claim that your opponent’s philosophy would lead to the extinction of the human race, but he not busy being born is busy dying. “People would be happier consuming only the best art.” A rat in a cage will mash its nucleus accumbens until it starves to death. Are you a rat?

Gwern never defines what is art, perhaps because a broad conception would render his argument absurd, so I’ll help, apologies in advance for clichés. Art is compressed communication. The better the compression, with regards to both perceived fidelity and amount of information contained, the more artful the art. Limitation—poetic meter, scene-cut-scene, verse-chorus-verse—is the essence of every form because removing redundancies and noise, unnecessary memes, is how one creates a map. Satire is effective when via exaggeration or noun-swapping absurdism it calls attention to the underlying pattern. A twelve minute ambient or noise track may lack musical structure but conveys a precise-yet-generalizable mood to the listener; a random field recording feels less artful because it does not. A Pollock canvas may be composed through randomness and chaos, but the choice to use randomness and chaos...and so on. Life itself is walls between fluid. Beauty is objective, because we all interpret beauty by this criterion, and subjective, because experience dictates the extent to which we can unpack a given compression [3].

Art is not necessary for a meaningful life: if you contort your superego enough you can find meaning in rolling a boulder uphill. But given the Tower of Babel, the Will known to teenage pirates as “information wants to be free,” most human beings are compelled to spread memes above all else. And if your goal is such, then you must choose between compression and manic, babbling psychosis. The sharing inherent in romance and child-rearing is still the most efficient method of spreading one’s memes, but a conversation and a concerto are different in degree, not kind. Good fortune spoils if you cannot share it, yet when the pink slip arrives your instinct is to forgo the yellow pages to work on your novel. The old and homeless tell bawdy jokes and cirrhotic anecdotes, anything to anyone who will listen, street preferred to asylum, that anoxic last ditch expulsion of gametes trying to leave behind something of meaning. We live an world of aspiring communicators if not aspiring artists, everyone but the children who do not yet know they will die. Art is the way by which man purifies his soul from chaos, it his revenge against Nature, he decides which memes of consciousness to spread and he takes the rest to the grave. Or she.

“Best art?” There is no best art, only more and less true. Art exists for its own sake, it may heal, torture, corrupt, enlighten, restrain, or indulge, but this is incidental; all it wants is to be understood.

V.

I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in a circus sideshow, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me. (Invisible Man)

I’ll pull the political band-aid—I think “ease of having one’s art understood” is a defensible conception of “privilege.”

Don’t @ me, bro. I’m not trying to score internet groupies, here, I just want to torch this hydra of semantics once and for all. Per Wikipedia:

Privilege is a social theory that special rights or advantages are available only to a particular person or group of people. The term is commonly used in the context of social inequality, particularly in regard to age, disability, ethnic or racial category, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion and/or social class. Two common examples may include having access to a higher education and housing. Privilege can also be emotional or psychological, regarding comfort and personal self-confidence, or having a sense of belonging or worth in society.

This is one of the better definitions, and it is still so vacuous that when I plugged it into Google Translate my computer crashed. No one disputes that “some groups have advantages relative to other groups,” even proud racists admit this. The argument concerns who has which advantages and the relevant score multipliers. Case in point: the above definition includes "self-confidence” and "worth in society.” So who has more privilege, a cis-white-hetero billionaire with full-checklist depression or an unemployed transgender black woman who, despite this, is basically content? Either the billionaire has less privilege, in which case “privilege” is a Harrison Bergeron happiness tax, or the suicidal person has more privilege, in which case, how much does “privilege” matter, really. I know, not supposed to be a linear scale, but in a country of unhappy people this is the question that always comes up: “I am so alone and so miserable, you’re dancing on tables at the gay club, sympathy bottled or on tap, and I’m supposed to prostrate myself to atone for my 'privilege?’”

The academic leftist notion of privilege fails—is infuriatingly counterproductive—because it rests its weight on the experiencing self. Kahneman (in)famously found that, in the U.S., income’s effect on "positive affect” saturates after $75,000 per annum; race and sex impact happiness less than one might think; I’ve met Upper East Side kids less fulfilled by their iPads than Sub-Saharan kids without running water were with “catch the rock.” I am not saying such differences are insignificant. They are significant. But the vicissitudes of chemistry and fate (sickness, isolation, loss, defunct serotonin receptors) are the most important predictors of day to day happiness, which correlate but refuse to be limited by demographics. Saved wealth buffers against tragedy but suffering finds a way. Hedonic treadmill is the buzzword: as monoxide salesman Thomas Ligotti puts it, “We do not have the power to make our lives monumentally better, only monumentally worse.”

The remembering self tells a different story. Kahneman’s 75k study found that while happiness levels off, “life evaluation” does not satiate with income; other studies support a stronger link between income and “life satisfaction” than income and happiness. Of course these surveys are semantically loaded enough to put a postmodernist into anaphylaxis. The satisfaction question is usually phrased: “How satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” This is not a good measure of the remembering self. For our purposes the question ought to be: “Looking back, how satisfied are you with how your life has played out?”

Now even the most melancholic billionaire is gonna start singing My Way. The suicide note of George Eastman, founder of Kodak: “To my friends, my work is done – Why wait?” Poverty does not allow for such closure. Like a forgotten drive to work, we are amnestic to routine, and memories of “eat, menial labor, sleep” blur together in the rearview mirror. The important-yet-oft-forgotten obverse is that, independent of happiness, wealth buys freedom from routine. Chores—with increasing tax bracket, dry-cleaning, maid, gardener, and nanny. Work—the cheapest jobs get replaced by machines, nurses deal with the predictable consequences of urination and defecation, PAs treat a narrow range of colds and sore throats, doctors can research, lecture, politicize; at the top of the food chain, some CEOs fly to new city each day. Even leisure—a night at the opera is no more fun than pizza and brewskis, but the former is novel, for a time, and the latter soon fades from memory.

Just as freedom from routine can be spent on new experiences it can be spent on new ways to express them. Most purchases this side of a bodega are autobiographical product placement, from name-brand Tylenol to the SkyMall catalogs of the 1%. Ever since Gutenberg invented copy/paste, however, it’s been cheaper to ditch symbolism and go straight for the symbols. We describe upper-class people as “cultured” because...they know a lot of culture. Class is language, education over wealth, no one would invite a Duck Dynasty heir to the new Soho vegan place but you can tell instantly if a homeless guy went to college. What counts is breadth not depth, knowing the right way to convey your opinions—“underrated,” “progressive,” “guilty pleasure,” “ironic, I think”—not the specifics of taste. The bourgeoise use The New Yorker as a word a week calendar, or Slate if they can’t read. In a post-guillotine world, mainstream culture is the new counter-counterculture, and since dressing oneself in the morning is a middle finger to the haters, it should be no surprise how many childfree consumers are working on novels or at least unwatchable concert videos. We are all celebrities now. Map becomes territory, and as anyone who has kept a journal knows, soon you witness the present as you plan to record it, seeking out events good or bad that are likely to yield something worth recording. As the old try and fail to teach the young, life comes at you past.

Pause, value check. Leaving aside the moral question of whether it’s okay to Eat Pray Love while lonesome atheists starve, is Cash 4 Novelty, as a personal value system, a) the disgusting slop of narcissist-capitalism, or b) the boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon heart? Answer: yes. Let’s review. Option 1, reject the demands of the remembering self altogether, “memes are viruses and should be purged.” But this takes you to some weird places: if you’re a glass half-full kinda guy, wirehead extinction; if you’re a pessimist, vas deferens snip-snip and/or mass suicide. Option 2, the remembering self is good but the Tower of Babel is pathological, we should make like Sisyphus and find meaning outside self-expression. Whether or not this is a noble sentiment, it is an inevitable flop. The Tower of Babel is a logical consequence of memetic selection: to prevent a version of "spread this meme” from taking over, one would have to ban any and all communication between human beings. Seems impractical.

And so we face reality. Pleasure is necessary, so necessary, all the more necessary as one grows older—but not sufficient. We plan our lives around being understood. If wealth grants freedom from routine, increasing the ability to define oneself and the language to express this, then it bestows a privilege independent of its effect on happiness.

This has political implications, namely, that money is good [4]. If a country’s per capita GDP rises threefold over ten years, that is a positive even if the happiness surveys don’t budge. A trade policy that bumps the purchasing power of the bottom quintile by 5% and the Bilderberg Group by 500%—increasing both societal wealth and inequality—is in vacuo a good idea. Absolute amount of money, not relative, buys freedom. Economics is not a zero sum game. (There may be better ways to distribute the dough, sure. Different argument.) Switching political stances in the batter’s box, the reactionary claim that American women were happier before they had orgasms or jobs is untrue. But even if it was, the indisputable increase in the ability for women to self-define and self-express is likely worth the cost. See also: every other pitch for traditional values and neonatal pneumonia.

It is perhaps not generally realized that a refrigerator can be a revolutionary symbol—to a people who have no refrigerators. A motor car owned by a worker in one country can be a symbol of revolt to a people deprived of even the necessities of life... [Hollywood] helped to build up the sense of deprivation of man's birthright, and that sense of deprivation has played a large part in the national revolutions of postwar Asia. (The Medium is the Massage)

Which brings us back to privilege. Belonging to the dominant race and sex of a culture grants the same in memoriam advantage as class, but by a different mechanism. Poverty and lack of education prevents one from speaking the language of culture. Differences of race, gender, and orientation prevent others from listening.

Without getting too bogged down in vocab, the canonical term is “stereotype.” Stereotypes are necessary to function. If art is compressed communication, a stereotype, in the broadest sense, is a pattern of extrapolation. We are constantly making small stereotyped judgments. A raised eyebrow and pause after the end of the sentence may signify “He’s skeptical,” “He’s joking,” “He’s mad,” or, “He’s mad because I ran over the Japanese Prime Minister,” depending on context. Conversation would be unfeasible without these snap judgments, with social confusion verging on autism.

Contrary to the pop-ethical consensus, discrimination is not caused by having too many stereotypes but too few. If you wake to find a lithe man dressed in all black standing over your bed and holding a katana, it may be quite reasonable to infer that he is a hired ninja and that you are in grave danger. If, however, you assume this about every East Asian man that you encounter, you lack nuance of stereotypes. If you want to insert a more topical example, go ahead, it should be obvious however that misunderstanding can result in racist outcomes even without conscious ill-will. Example: stories about disparities in use of Emergency Room analgesia make the headlines about once a year. My observation has been that there are certain culturally accepted ways to express pain, some verbal (saying “I have a high pain tolerance” suggests the opposite) and some nonverbal (wrong ratio of gritted teeth to screaming). When ordering the Dilaudid, physicians unconsciously underestimate the pain of patients who didn’t dot the i’s and cross the t’s of their agony, or, less charitably, unconsciously realize that an undocumented migrant is less likely to write a complaint letter than the hawk-like Shakespeare professor who has given two stars to every book club novel for the past 45 years.

Small comfort for the guy with a broken femur, I agree. But this matters hugely for any campaign against -isms. The above bias would not necessarily be picked up by the, ah, "replication-challenged” Harvard Implicit Bias Test, because if a person of the race in question was wearing an argyle sweater and reading Middlesex the mistreatment would not have occurred. The collegiate notion that some folks are Racist and some have been Saved betrays a preschool understanding of human beings. Most racists are really culturists, or “I don’t hate them, unless they X,” and all racism starts this way, a single heartfelt (although not necessarily true) observation that is falsely extrapolated. I am not defending this, just pointing it out that you do it too and that to some extent it is inevitable. Race and gender are social constructs, but the cultural norms that correlate with race and gender—and goth, prep, jock, etc—are real. Avenue Q theory: until we evolve a hive mind or learn to speak pheromone, every interaction will be mediated by a model of the other. There will always be a stereotype. The unsurprising path forward is to talk to the stereotyped individual, acquiring new detail which is added to the map as it asymptotically approaches the territory. “Be aware of your biases” is excellent advice, but framing this as “don’t be racist, join or die” fails—is infuriatingly counterproductive—because it doesn’t create a new stereotype to work with, an alternate explanation for the genuinely felt observation.

Denying one’s stereotypes altogether is impossible, although you can’t say the woke garbage wytch industry isn’t committed to the attempt. Nevertheless, if you, well-intentioned young person who gets anxiety with phone calls, are trying very hard not to fit someone’s behavior to a stereotype, thinking “don’t stereotype don’t stereotype” over and over throughout the perilous encounter—then too bad, kid, because a) you need to start lifting or something, b) you have a fixed view of how to treat someone based on demographics, which is c) uncomfortable for all concerned, and d) a stereotype. The social justice term for such benign stereotyping is “microaggression,” but when it concerns the opposite sex, it is more precisely dubbed “objectification.”

The Reddit demographic seems to have a mental block about this concept, so allow me to Joe Rogan you some experience: it is perfectly acceptable to think that buxom blonde women are hot. However, if you convey to your waitress that you are attracted to her solely because she is a Hot Blonde, you are saying that all of her other personality traits are irrelevant, i.e. her choices don’t matter, e.g. you get maced. (See also: “What should I wear tonight?” “Honey, no one cares,” and then the fight.) What’s confusing is that sometimes it is okay to like someone just for being comely and flaxen-haired—even the same waitress at the club that night. But notice the difference: at the club, the waitress is trying to convey “Hot Blonde.” You’re not boxing her in, you’re correctly identifying and complimenting her outfit. See also: catcalling vs. dirty talk.

Microaggressions are no different. Someone asking to touch a black woman’s hair may lack malice but nevertheless reminds the woman that in the eyes of others she cannot escape her race. Even explicitly positive stereotypes are harmful—gays are fashionable, Jews are smart; 1970s rockstars lamenting dehumanizing fame—and I hope you can see that they are harmful not against the experiencing self, for at some level attention is always enjoyable, but against the remembering self, which demands to be understood.

What’s less obvious is that the mere existence of a stereotype is harmful. If you have never been hated, as in people-wish-you-were-dead hated, then you may not understand this, but—hatred is painful even if you never encounter those doing the hating. There’s an element of paranoia, sure, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about this very old very fundamental feeling of being misconstrued, of one’s memes being stymied somewhere out in the ether, of one’s legacy going down wrong, a feeling closely related to shame and to which the response is, invariably, rage.

This particular flavor of suffering spares the privileged: historically, straight white males. They had the money so they got the education so they defined class so they controlled the language so they spread the most stories, any of which can serve as template for “white dude.” This says nothing about acuity of suffering, only that such suffering can be communicated more easily and with more nuance. “I’m not Elliott Smith depressed today—it’s more of a Bright Eyes feel. Know what I mean, officer?” “No lies, just love, sir. You have a nice day.” Gross misunderstandings are rare. Oh, you can try—Bushwick art majors tweeting “white people be thinkin physical intimacy be spicy food”—but it rings hollow, because everyone knows at least one horrible “free hugs” guy and his equally horrible friend with a fetish for sriracha. Or at least knows the type. In contrast, white people get their info about minorities from cuckold porn, or worse—sketch comedy.

If we care about the remembering self and we care about other human beings then forging new stereotypes is crucial. This puts me in agreement with mainstream liberalism—although I hope my conservative readers can see that this comes from a genuine desire for fairness rather than brownie-point trend-hopping or sublimated self-loathing—that minority representation is important. Something worth fighting for.

Except there’s a catch: the current push for “diversity” isn’t going to work. 

Like so many policies with charitable intentions but terrible incentives, executed by so many people with no understanding of Goodhart’s law, the current push for multiculturalism will spin the wheels of progress while accomplishing very little. It will create a new hatred for every one that it solves. And those in power will laugh all the way to the vault.

VI.

Real, total war has become information war…the cold war is the real war front—a surround—involving everybody—all the time—everywhere. Whenever hot wars are necessary these days, we conduct them in the backyards of the world with the old technologies…It is no longer convenient, or suitable, to use the latest technologies for fighting our wars, because the latest technologies have rendered war meaningless. (The Medium is the Massage)

If globalization is the defining phenomenon of the modern age, then immigration—physical and cultural, the latter determining who gets to be understood—is the defining political conflict. Let’s take a break from theory and see what the LA Times is doing to bridge the gap,“How Houston has become the most diverse place in America”:

The boys sprint in white and yellow uniforms down the green turf, grunting and sweating as the coach shouts from the sidelines. “Búscalo, búscalo,” he yells in Spanish, urging the players to sprint for the ball.

“Umusitari!” comes a voice on the sidelines — run down the line — from Biganiro Espoir, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Margaret Long Wisdom High School soccer team hails from Central America, Mexico, Africa and points between. Its bench hums with Spanish, Kinyarwanda, Swahili and often English. But its real unifying language — soccer, played hard — is universal.

Okay, first of all, no American gives two shits about soccer in between World Cups. Entry number 80, Stuff White People Like: “The Idea of Soccer.” ("Many white people will tell you that they are very into soccer. But be careful, it’s a trap.”) Nor is it a coincidence that the photographed uniforms lack red and blue. I’m just saying, kind of provincial that they didn’t call it football.

“It’s really surprising to see a place like this in the South, where you consider it to be racist and xenophobic,” said Michael Negussie, a Wisdom High School senior from Ethiopia. “Stereotypes of Texas don’t apply here.”

Note that it’s taken for granted that “you” consider the South to be racist and xenophobic—and indeed, the stereotype only doesn’t apply because:

...demographic experts say the Houston metro area, home to the third-largest population of undocumented immigrants in the country — behind New York and Los Angeles — is a roadmap to what U.S. cities will look like in the coming decades as whites learn to live as minorities in the American heartland.

What that means is a whole new dynamic, in which minorities are no longer seen as outsiders. “Suddenly these are 100% American kids, and they’re falling in love with each other, making multiracial babies,” Klineberg said.

A “psychology of inevitability” begins to set in around immigration, he said — it’s happening, and it might not be a bad thing.

“Maybe it’s going to position Houston…for success in building the connections to the global marketplace. Maybe I can make money off of this.... And then we begin to say, how do we make this work?”

This article is bad. It’s bad for conservatives, it’s bad for immigrants, and it’s bad for anyone caught in the crossfire called America. No matter our superficial differences, I hope by the end of this essay we can agree on one thing: if the revolution ever comes, the LA Times should be a first round draft pick to be burned to the ground.

Theory of mind, please: how does this article look to conservatives? When I said that since white people control the language they have an advantage in communication, I didn’t mean, like, Republicans. It’s no big mystery that sleeveless undershirts can only get off to NASCAR and daydreams of slavery. Count off the archetypes: hypocrite evangelical priest. Serial killer. Grandiloquent but inept oil baron/plantation owner. Mentally addled inbred bucktooth. The only nuance is whether those hicks are gonna die off from diabesity or heroin, am I right?

This didn’t happen overnight. At some point there was a modicum of mutual respect, or so I’m told. But ingroups gonna outgroup, and slowly—faster after the insult of George W. Bush—the y’all class became a stereotype, got stereotyped so thoroughly that they weren’t interesting to talk about, which left them no way to contest the verdict. So now the LA Times can take your opinion as a given, and the poor, suffering factory workers are only brought up when some Coachella communist wants to say “they’ve been fooled by the 1%” and call for “solidarity.”

No. It would be unfair to say that you have blinders on when far as I can tell you have gouged out your eyes altogether. Talk to any, any, any Trump supporter, and you get:

There was a working-class, white bar I spent two days in and that’s where it really struck me: This man [Trump] is really resonating. This message is really taking hold and really hitting people. What sociologists and others have long talked about when you go to a poor, working-class black neighborhood is that there is this code of honor, this demand for respect. That same thing was taking place in the white bar I was seeing. And Trump was fulfilling that respect. It was all about respect, regaining respect. (The Atlantic)

Respect. Being understood as an imperfect human being struggling for his or her values, “even if I don’t agree, I can see where you’re coming from.” It’s so simple and yet no one wants to do it, because once you concede that other value systems are valid you start to question your own. Better to pretend at being Robin Hood, 90% tax on Martin Shkreli and basic income for all. And maybe that’s a great idea, but it doesn’t solve the problem: You could give every Appalachian 2 mil and they’d still vote for Brexit and Le Pen. They don’t want your money, they’ll take whatever government handouts are offered but they’d rather go nuclear than beg. Class matters, but this problem is cultural, not economic. “Look, I’m [gay/Muslim/an immigrant/from Portland]. You’re asking me to ‘respect’ people who would deny my existence.” I empathize, you don’t have to respect them, but you unless you think bigotry is Mendelian you should at least look a little deeper:

“...is a roadmap to what U.S. cities will look like in the coming decades as whites learn to live as minorities in the American heartland.”

The LA Times is speaking excitedly of how a group that has already been forced out of the social discourse will soon lose their voice completely. They’re thrilled by the up-and-coming Yelp $$ restaurants and the possibility of “making some money off this” in the “global marketplace.” They’re saying that once the right sort of people move in it might turn out to be a really nice neighborhood. The direct consequence of this brand of pro-immigration sentiment is hatred of immigrants. Oh, I’m sure there was some animosity to start with—that’s why the media had to build a Doomsday Device, to make sure the situation didn’t get out of control. 

Cheesy example, bear with me: “The Gay Agenda.” Treated as a joke, and does indeed sound like a fantastic glam rock band, but when rural conservatives denounce it they mean “the advocacy of cultural acceptance and normalization of non-heterosexual orientations and relationships.” And here’s the thing: they are right to worry about this—just as they are right to worry about immigration—not because David Bowie will corrupt the youth but because of the LA Times. Once acceptance becomes orthodoxy even private dissent becomes grounds for ostracization. No matter your other convictions you become a stereotype that society will single-issue-vote off the island, just ask Brendan Eich. Of course I support gay marriage; my point is that if one’s views before were “well, it is kind of weird,” then being told “soon there will be enough of us that we won’t have to deal with people like you at all”—that makes homophobia logical. And at least you can change your opinion of gay marriage. It’s much harder to change being white and low-class.

It would be correct to blame the LA Times and their ilk for the rise of Donald Trump. But that would let them off too easy. This problem began long ago and it extends far beyond a political issue or presidency. If you’re working class and want to get a promotion then odds are you will have to impress a bureaucrat, be it a manager or a Dean of Admissions. You will fail unless you share their values or convince them that you do—these values are the biggest obstacle to your advancement. So when some vacant skull in a dinner jacket tells you that the working class “votes on social issues” and “against their economic interests,” splash some pinot on his ascot and inform him that they are one and the same.

No one is born hateful, stranger anxiety doesn’t even start til six months. But culture war is history being written by the winners, first draft. Conservatives are offered the choice of fighting the ever-changing tides of social values or toiling away in obscurity while journalists pretend to like soccer. People want to be understood. And they will rage all sorts of ways against the dying of the light.

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are others left over to receive their aggressiveness...When once the Apostle Paul has posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence. (Civilization and Its Discontents)

Please understand: I don’t think that the red tribe is in any way morally superior to blue, see above and also history. But in our society there is a meaningful asymmetry between them. The upper-middle class—mostly urban, mostly blue—claims by far the largest share of America’s income, more than the middle class and far more than the 1%. This, despite their protests to the contrary, gives them disproportionate control over the news and entertainment industry, which in cyberpunk America is tantamount to controlling the culture. 

So even though individual subgroups may feel under-represented—perhaps the mainstream media is “liberal” and likes Katy Perry while certain free-thinkers are “leftist” and like Kate Bush—they are by and large clueless as to the feeling of freak-show isolation that comes from existing outside their norms altogether, norms which are ubiquitous every time you turn on a screen. They are, one might say, “blind” to their “privilege,” blind to the fine print disclaimer of their culture, “Swipe left if you voted for Trump.”

I didn’t vote for Trump. And my personal experience of refugees and illegal immigrants—via medical and psychiatric asylum cases—has been overwhelmingly positive. But policy decisions shouldn’t be settled by anecdotes. There is a moral imperative to help those in need—and conservatives should recognize this—while at the same time friction is inevitable when two cultures exist side by side—and liberals should recognize this. One would hope for a reasoned discussion of how to balance the two. But that won’t happen as long as those whose are insulated from the consequences of policy—need I point out that Los Angeles is not located in Houston?—use multiculturalism as a weapon to enforce class.

And what’s so infuriatingly tragic is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Do migrant farmworkers have more in common with Sarah Silverman or a rural mother of four? Polls show that 9 out of 10 Syrian refugees think John Oliver is worse than the war. One of my Muslim colleagues wears a Dallas Cowboys hijab and plays Fire Emblem in the break room—why doesn’t the LA Times do a story about her? How come when “multiracial babies” get mentioned the context is always sexy brown man and not sexy brown woman? Do liberals think that only Broad City characters have the capacity to consent? Some right-wingers buy into the predatory immigrant mythos wholesale, and they’re idiots, but many more are concerned not because they think most immigrants are drug dealers, rapists, etc, but because if they were, the castrato left would post three monkey emojis and say that the reports of such incidents are proof that Islamophobia is alive and well. It would be so easy to validate the concerns, to say #notallmigrants, sure, but to say just as loudly that misdeeds are misdeeds and will be punished as such. I’m no skinny-armed libertarian saying “if only we didn’t talk about race, no one would be racist!” I’m saying that the specific way the media talks about race and culture, creating an incoherent set of rules regarding “appropriation” and etiquette, proudly crying out that this is the end of those boring, selfish white people, has made the situation much, much worse. If the left wanted to prevent assimilation, there would be no more effective way.

That’s the point.

VII.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” — Sun Tzu

Suppose you’re a benevolent Disney executive (maybe an oxymoron) who wants to increase minority representation in movies. How are you going to do it?

Well, your first instinct is to throw a fistful of Franklins into the writer’s room and scream “write me some of them brown people!” But here’s the problem: all your writers are white.

So now the decision tree forks. You can tell them to write “how they imagine” a person of color would talk and act, taking food choices, cultural dialects, and quinceañera celebrations into account. Or you can tell them to write an a-racial dude and use the paint bucket tool in Maya.

And that’s not really a decision at all. Not only could asking white boys to Tarantino another race lead to potential uh-ohs, having your characters speak anything but the dominant language/culture would limit your audience (definitionally, else it wouldn’t be the dominant language).

So you tell the writers to write an a-racial character, but since the cis-white-hetero patriarchy created the dominant language, the default assumptions of how people act—that means white. Which gets you a blockbuster superhero movie and a million Tumblr webcomics. Nice!

Except you’ve only sort of increased representation: there are minority characters, but in every way besides melanin they’re lighter than Luke Skywalker. There’s something to be said for that (for children in particular, since kids are kids wherever you go) but it’s not going to help the 18 year old black girl whose tastes, mannerisms, and values have been shaped by the pressures of being black in America, if nothing else.

Ergo, you decide to hire some minority writers to write your minority characters. Applications rush in. How are you going to decide who makes the cut?

“You know, the usual. Interview. Letters of recommendation. College transcript—”

This is part of a larger, systemic problem with the way power has shifted not from Group A to Group B, but from ground up to top down, and top down works in a very specific way: it concedes the trappings of power while it retains the actual power. (The Last Psychiatrist)

This is how the system protects itself against change. At every step of the social hierarchy, what is required for a person of color or a woman to succeed is determined by the values of the ruling class. I think that’s “white patriarchal supremacy,” but don’t quote me. Of course, the same principle applies to e.g. homosexuals and Jews; thankfully those traits are easier to hide.

Here’s your analogy: when you glance over at the in-flight movie flickering in front of the passed-out behemoth blocking your path to the bathroom, it is instantly apparent whether he’s watching a good movie like Face/Off or terrible Oscar bait. What gives the latter away? The meticulous set design? The histrionic orchestra? The slow pacing? The lingering close-ups of faces? The heavily scripted funny-because-it’s-sad-and-true? Oscar bait films are theatrical, a word which is supposed to mean “keeps reminding you that you’re in the audience,” but actually means “keeps reminding you that you are the audience.” The actors are side characters, background dancers. The hero is the camera. It’s the one with the character growth, guilt and redemption, it’s the one for whom the score sings. Which means the hero is...

It’s better than nothing. Better than segregation, better than open and unpunished murder in the street. It’s progress. But as Baudrillard said, that The Matrix was the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix itself would produce, I suspect that the most art about inequality is precisely the art that inequality sanctions.

And that’s bad. There’s a case to be made for affirmative action, but you know who gets the scholarship? Whoever can best conform to the in-demand stereotype. Middle of the road for the med school application. Tone it down if you want to get into Wharton. But maybe play it up a little for the grant proposal—go ahead, be a queer Chicano nationalist, send some mean tweets, academics eat that shit up. Of course they’re the only ones that will: the rest of society will stereotype you as “another” queer Chicano nationalist academic and never listen closely again. Even if you’re Manny Pacquiao you better not step from the party line. About half of African-Americans oppose gay marriage—you ever see that op-ed in the Times? Of course not, no one wants to hear that, they want Dear White People, an extremely controversial show about how important it is to pay Ivy League tuition. This is the scam behind every campus free speech debate: Freddie DeBoer and Ezra Klein draw pistols at dawn, but no matter who wins it is further cemented that Twitter, Vox, and college are where the correct opinions of class are determined. I often hear arguments about [insert school] not having [insert support group], which might be a real concern except that no one seems to care that outside of college it’s either AA or the bar. Harvard Inc. was America’s first corporation, FYI. Better make sure your toddlers are practicing their Latin.

You want some sick irony? Everyone knows that class is somehow hereditary, that a rich kid will get a better job than a poor kid even if the former has a rap sheet for selling ecstasy to One Directioners. But if you know or have had sex with any of the sons/daughters of the bourgeoisie you will have observed that no one is more critical of such nepotism. These “gifted” but “troubled” people will bumble through their whole lives, getting second through tenth chances, mysteriously finding that anything involving an authority figure goes their way, as they ruthlessly condemn capitalist injustice, never realizing that criticizing privilege is...the language of privilege. And wouldn’t you know it, the promotional video for the latest Run The Jewels album features none other than the cast of Portlandia, helping such youth bridge the gap between the predictable children they’ve been and the predictable adults they are going to be.

This isn’t a new trend, although it is trending. Think about it this way. The service industry is any job where the customer is always right, e.g. writer, therapist, barber, sales. This has always been a proxy for class, since only the aristocracy had the time and knowledge to make listicles for the King. (“The Ten Most Protestant Criminals In Bastille Prison—You Won’t Believe Number Three!”) On the other hand, if you have a manufacturing job—anything that involves doing rather than talking—no one cares whether you have problematic faves.

Enter the industrial revolution, as featured in Office Space (1999): mind over matter, words over matter, manufacturing jobs get replaced by machines. Unemployment + labor saving machinery = a lot more people have the time and ability to read Wealth of Nations. No more kings, no more monopoly rights, now theoretically anyone can code Ye Flappying Birde and please the market. So if you’re an aristocrat and being literate was like, your whole thing, how are you gonna keep partying like it’s 1899? You need a job that lets you tell other people what is okay to read/write and consume/produce—a job that keeps you one step ahead and thus relevant. And so the meta-service industry: mass media, academia, and government work. Fast-forward, and note that the remaining manufacturing jobs now involve a) operating machines or b) designing machines. And gosh darn does the newspaper hate those alt-right nerds and those Silicon Valley tech bros.

So the conspiracy comes full circle. The meta-service industry promotes a version of “multiculturalism” that is hostile to everyone outside their class but doesn’t affect them, LA ain’t in Houston and Manhattanites would never step in a neighborhood without HBO. This pushes the suckers of the working class into xenophobia, and those they mark as alien have to abandon the idea of making things and assimilate through the only other path offered: the meta-service institutions. Now you have a glut of wannabe thinkpiece writers. Supply and demand, university prices go up, labor costs goes down, and everyone buys the assigned woke products and logs onto Twitter to bemoan capitalism. Well, you may not love capitalism, but capitalism loves you.

In a global market, the main criterion for a service industry gig is your ability to speak inoffensive in four languages, which winds up being a proxy for class. Fine, no surprise, pop music sucks. But the incentive of the meta-service industry—I’m not saying it’s all they do, but it is the incentive—is to create new ways to be offensive (n.b: not offended), new required extracurriculars, new rules of etiquette making it harder to advance the class hierarchy without paying up. Some would call this racketeering. Those would be uncharitable people. But consider effort the school system spends on teaching the approved answers to ‘why’ questions, as opposed to ‘how’ questions like ‘how to balance a checkbook’ and ‘how to feed oneself,’ with the assumption that if you reach the upper class you’ll be able to pay someone to do those practical skills for you— and if you don’t, hey, there’s always food stamps. Think carefully about whether this mode of education is likely to make society more meritocratic or less.

The issue is not that youth of color see academic success as limited to whites. It is that they typically see white teachers as enforcers of rules that are unrelated to the actual teaching and learning process. (For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y'all Too)

Bonus: if you say that you’re trying to help the disadvantaged, then when your policies make the situation worse—well, that’s all the more reason to redouble your efforts.

What’s the solution? There’s only one and it is so radical that I hesitate to even suggest it: stop being a pleb. You. Stop treating words as a substitute for action. Stop paying time and money into institutions that loan a symbol of mastery in lieu of actual depth. Stop looking for such symbols in others. Stop judging policies by the veneer of good intention rather than the details of consequence. Stop looking past people, because this is all the same, isn’t it? Working from a map, a stereotype, a symbol, instead fighting for the complex truth? None of this horror requires malice or even stupidity. All it requires is taking the easy way out.

Or don’t change. Keep hitting the like button, the algorithm guarantees it’ll be something you like. But there’s a price to pay. And it won’t hurt right away. It’s a price paid in memory, not sensation. That’s why it’s so terrible. It won’t sink in until it’s too late, when you look back and wonder,

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? (Invisible Man)

VIII.

“The ingenuity and adaptability of Homo sapiens has led to its becoming the most influential species on Earth; it is currently deemed of least concern on the Red List of endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.” (“Homo sapiens,” Wikipedia)

Accelerationist philosopher Nick Land is very smart and very edgy and can sometimes finish a full sentence without asking the reader to recognize this. This eagerness makes him very empathizable and lovable, and he does get the problem, even if his solutions are, you guessed it, calamitously, catastrophically, direly, and dreadfully wrong.

Since this is the epilogue, i.e. not the place to defang every noumenon, I’ll skip to the punchline: Nick Land thinks we’re nearing the end of the world. Or at least the end of a world where debates occur via blog post rather than bone cudgel. Per his condensed manifesto, “The Dark Enlightenment”:

Civilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from diminishing time-preference (or declining concern for the present in comparison to the future). Democracy, which both in theory and evident historical fact accentuates time-preference to the point of convulsive feeding-frenzy, is thus as close to a precise negation of civilization as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to).

No, man. Tell us how you really feel.

As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment, are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a ‘reality television’ political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the other team, so it’s best to eat it all now.

Land titles the next subsection “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards zombie apocalypse” and provides stats for the possible governments (“Communist Tyranny,” “Authoritarian Capitalism,” “Social Democracy”) that occur in sequence before “Zombie Apocalypse.” Okay, sick campaign setting. But why is this all inevitable?

Militant secularism is itself a modernized variant of the Abrahamic meta-meme, on its Anglo-Protestant, radical democratic taxonomic branch, whose specific tradition is anti-traditionalism.

Land is describing the Tower of Babel. I wouldn’t name its essence as “anti-traditionalism,” but the meme “spread this meme no matter what” has a similar destructive effect. Land’s solution, depending on the essay, is either an omnipotent AI ruler or biotech augmentation of high IQ individuals into elite übermenschen. Which, who knows, maybe that is how the Rapture will go down. I’m not here to make fun of anybody’s religion.

But in the short term, Land is wrong. This isn’t the end. The fall of Babel wasn’t a warning of what might happen. It’s something that happens all the time.

Since the death of God there’s been a vacancy, now everyone wants evolution to answer “why.” If anything seems unjust, it’s because evolution cares only about memetic fitness. Moloch, who elects foolish politicians! Moloch, who crowdfunds terrible podcasts! Moloch, who makes it so girls only like tall guys who drink Natty Light!

The catch is that evolution doesn’t care about memetic fitness. That’s a meaningless statement; evolution IS memetic fitness. And what determines memetic fitness is: whatever we decide.

Competition is ugly, no denying that. But blaming Moloch for fidget spinners is unfair to that poor Carthaginian spirit: people just want fidget spinners. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be fidget spinners. It’s possible that folks don’t know what’s good for ‘em, sure, and you can elect some small deity to enforce your taste as law, but you haven’t killed Moloch, you’ve just shifted the arena in which people compete. Now all the bullies are under 5′7″ and pontificating about how partying is for nerds. Or how much they love Stalin.

Evolution is always bound by a value system. History has a progression, but it’s not an arc, it’s a spiral. God strikes down the tower, the “democratic virus” burns through society, we move towards a single language, the masses cry now nothing will be withholden from them, and God strikes down the tower once more. This is predestined by the very fact that each human being is unique. When you impose one language, one value system, when you hold someone back from that desperate desire to be understood—don’t expect that person’s God to forgive you.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.

Land and his followers are wrong twice over. Wrong because they are fooled by the word “multiculturalism” and thus advocate for the pretend solutions of social exit, “assortative mating of the elite” or a “white ethno-state,” when it was cultural inbreeding of a white aristocracy that created the monoculture, multiculturalism in name only, that they so despise. It wasn’t Moloch, it wasn’t Nature, it was regulatory capture and top-down imposition of values. Those who feel persecuted for thoughtcrime are those who should be pushing hardest for diversity—real diversity, as opposed to a slick brochure of the indebted. Such diversity of ideas was what made America great, not that we haven’t punished people for race and sex and religion and a million other insane reasons that are not “bad behavior,” but even so America is the country of the stolen sample and the conspiracy theory, a nation of ingenuity and creation like no other, while the “white ethno-states” or “Scandinavian social democracies” you adore have created, I think, Avicii. Like wealth, class should not be treated as a zero sum game. There should not be a single ladder of correct beliefs. Having more ideas, even bad ideas, allows more ways to self-actualize and has worth in of itself.

It’s true that no group can perfectly match the values of its constituents. But the reactionaries are wrong again because their ideal nation would look no different. There is always a language gap between human beings, and fidelity is sacrificed to bridge that gap. Groups come together and cleave apart; it is the nature of individuation. Even if our society prohibited every value but the uncritical passage of information, soon we would be competing to pass information the most uncritically. Soon we would split into rival factions based on philosophy of uncritical passage. Man is a machine that extracts meaning. But communication of such meaning occurs in spite of groups, not because of them. Only when treated as an individual do we feel listened to. Existence is suffering, but once in a while someone else gets it. Might as well floss.

Still, don’t let me trick you into undue optimism. Though all value systems can generate meaning, though individuals will always fight to belong and then fight even harder to push away—that does not mean that all value systems are equal. Not long ago kids would argue over which console was better. Now teenagers whisper ‘cuckold’ and ‘nazi’ like it’s considered good manners. We are in the midst of a profound rearrangement of what traits are to be incentivized and rewarded, driven by some seven billion people each acting with what they believe to be the best of intentions. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?

[1a]. Memetics is not without controversy: in academia, it often stands accused of the heresy of dualism. The meme of “Christianity” cannot be sequenced in the way that DNA can, so how can one confidently say that it has “spread” from missionary to convert? Or that a gnostic sect is a “mutation”? Show me the nucleotides of thought, quoth the critics.

Two objections. First, we can’t isolate memes for mass spectrometry because consciousness isn’t a physical entity, it is a PATTERN of relation AMONG entities, an emergent property, meta-neuronal, not neuronal. The order of letters gives meaning independent from the letters themselves, ditto words, ditto sentences.

Second, it doesn’t matter. Is your neural firing pattern for “green” is the same as my neural firing pattern for “green”? Maybe or maybe not, perhaps your brain codes hues in RGB and mine uses hexadecimals. But it seems clear that some information is exchanged between us when we agree that grass is green. “Meme” is a proxy term for that unit of information. And if you accept this, then the burden of proof is on you to show why the mathematical algorithms of evolution—mutation, migration, and selection—the near-universal laws of information exchange—fail to apply here.

[1b]. If you take memetics seriously—and you should, Daniel Dennett’s in the New Yorker so it’s gonna be status quo in 10 years—then you should be skeptical of the gross extrapolation of IQ. Review: Is IQ a useful measurement of innate cognitive ability? Yes. Is IQ a summation of multiple somewhat-correlated skills into one number? Yes. Are some, if not all, of those skills trainable? Yes, with the greatest effects in early childhood. Are IQ tests sexist/racist? No, but they are trainable, training is culture-dependent, and culture cares a great deal about sex and race.

Ah, but here’s the trick. Let’s pretend that, like the SAT, IQ is an immutable and comprehensive measure of inborn intelligence. It would still describe hardware, not software. An out-of-date Compaq could still run new games if you allowed for a slow enough frame rate. Someone with an IQ of 80 could pass medical school given sufficient perseverance; there’s no single meme in the medical field (or quantum mechanics, etc) that is too big for the human brain, it just takes varying amounts of time to flip the pages. If you claim that IQ predicts various negative life outcomes, fine. If you claim that it’s an ability cap, you’re an idiot.

[2]. Note that the desire to love another (Eros) is actually more primitive than the desire to be loved (i.e. understood, Babel). If this seems counterintuitive, note that the Eros does not require recognition of the love object as a separate being. Babel does, and empathy takes effort. Last time you felt desperately alone, was the dominant emotion, “I hope one day someone loves me,” or “I hope one day someone accepts my love?” Pet your therapy dog and think about it.

[3]. Hence the template model (section II) of human beauty: men are attracted to wide hips because experience teaches that this trait is representative of the category “woman,” not because of an inborn preference for curves over lines. I suspect that inanimate beauty follows a similar mechanism: a view from distance is pleasing because if you zoom out far enough you can see a pattern in anything, symmetry is pleasing because... 

Paglia: “Every time we say nature is beautiful, we are saying a prayer, fingering our worry beads.”

[4]. Of course, it’s possible to blow one’s freedom from routine on a fresh set of rituals. Buying novelty is meaningful only until it stops feeling novel. It’s quite easy (and socially encouraged) to pull a Blue Jasmine and wake up just as unfulfilled with more credit card debt. Struggling with increasing strength against escalating challenge—“work”—is the only lasting source of meaning precisely because of this escalation: all other wells of novelty will run dry. But as previously alluded, landing this type of job requires personal wealth (e.g. time and money to apply to grad school) and societal infrastructure (e.g. institutions to hire you). Exhortations to “finish your Soylent, there are kids starving in Africa” are the worst sort of pointless sanctimony, but there’s a real lesson hidden inside “be grateful”: if you’re hearing it, you have the freedom to change.

[erikredwood-21]

Chapter I: You’re not like everyone else...

The final exam is simple enough, you can take it whenever you like, and you have to answer 100 questions, you can take it with a partner but each individual has to answer 100 questions, so if you take it with a partner you have to answer basically 200 questions. Simple enough right?

  Well here’s the catch, each and every test and question is different, none of them are the same and there is no exam even similar to others. All with different questions and from a different subject.

  Some were afraid of it, some weren’t, such as Erik. Erik is part of the Redwood family, both his parents are programmers and engineers in communication devices. He wasn’t afraid of the Academy as some of the people he knew, he looked at it as another place he had to go, and he was confident he was going to graduate, after all, his brother Alexander did, so he had a chance. You had to go to the Academy, it wasn’t something you could deny or not go, after all, it was the law.

  It was reglamentary to take a test a few days before going to the Academy, it was supposed to measure your knowledge so they can arrange the students in the proper class but everyone, as far as Erik knew, everyone had to go to the beginner’s class.

  It was 5 pm according to Erik’s wristwatch, the welcoming ceremony was at 6 pm so he already got all of his things ready to go, he was organized in his own way. His room looked kind of empty since he had to take the little he had such as books, clothing, and all of that with him. The Academy had sent him a brand new laptop, since he was going to need it for it a lot, it was black with a bright purple stripe that had small golden letters that wrote “Erik R.” In the cover.

  After taking a last look to his now empty room he went to the bathroom, he looked into the mirror over the sink and a guy with dark hair and light brown eyes looked back at him. This was going to be, probably the last time he was going to be there, at least until summer when he could come back for vacations if the Academy approved it.

  He took his things and walked down stairs to the living room, his dad was sitting in the dinner table doing something in his computer, Erik thought that maybe it was work, since most of the time he was working. He left his things near the entrance door and walked towards the living room, when he entered his dad looked at him over his reading glasses, like he was scanning him.

  ‘So, it begins, huh?’ his dad asked him, his voice was kind of rough, and low.

  ‘Yes… I guess’ said Erik while he walked passed him towards the main dinner table.

  The Redwoods didn’t live in a very big house, but in one that was perfectly the right size, it was old though, sometimes it crooked loudly, mostly in winter and other times it stayed fresh even though outside was hot as hell.

  Erik saw his mother sitting in one of the edges of the table, with a folder and a lot of other papers and documents around her. She had her red hair curled up in a bun above her head and a pair of reading glasses where just under it as if she was taking a small break from a very interesting story.

  ‘Hello sweetie, you have everything ready to go?’ she asked so motherly as always but without looking at him, probably because what she was reading was important information.

  ‘Yes mom, all of it is at the door…’ Erik answered as he took a seat at a side from his mother.

  ‘… I have to go right?’ Erik asked in a slightly sad tone.

  His mother looked at him and comb his hair with her hand. ‘Yes, you have to go, it’s for your own good.’

  ‘Yeah, I know that, but, I was the smartest kid at my school, isn’t that enough to just let me graduate?’ Erik asked, his tone denoted annoyance.

  ‘Well, if you had a good grade in the test you took a few weeks ago you won’t be there for long.’ his mother answered while she arranged the documents she had over the table. Erik was indeed the smartest kid in his school, but the Academy was a big deal for everyone, no exceptions.

  ‘Well, we need to go, you can’t be late on your first day of school ‘said his father from the living room.

  Erik took his things and got inside the car, the Academy wasn’t too far but it was a long walk from home. Erik looked out the window to the numerous houses, and other places he wasn’t going to see for the next semester. When they got to the Academy entrance a bunch of other families and students were already there. Most of them with a part of the Academy’s uniform, you didn’t have to wear all of it, but at least one piece of clothing from the uniform was required to all students to wear. Erik got out the car and put on the Academy’s cardigan it was very comfortable and he was used to wear sweaters and hoodies. He could see how a large line of students and parents was being made for the newcomers, so he went straight there. When his turn arrived, Erik gave his Academy ID, his luggage, and his mother the folder she was checking one last time before leaving, it had Erik’s birthday certificate, his notes from previous years and a lot of other important documents. The lady in the counter filed it and activated Erik’s ID for him to go through to the welcoming ceremony. He looked towards the entrance and turn around to face his parents.

  ‘I guess this is it, right?’ he asked looking at his ID.

  ‘Yes pal, this is it, from here you just got to go forward’ his dad told him.

  Erik hugged his parents ‘I hope I can see you in the summer’ he said while holding them.

  ‘Don’t worry moon pie, we’ll be fine you go and learn’ said his mom while Erik walked backwards slowly. Erik wanted to take a last glance at his parents, her mom with her shiny red hair and his dad with his reading glasses.

  Erik turned around and moved towards the entrance credit post. You had to slide your ID to get in, Erik did and a green light flashed, he got in and he just followed the bunch of students that walked in front of him.

  Erik noticed there were older students with what looked like a gaffet, they were herding the bunch of new students. The older students lead the group of newcomers to a courtyard, but there was a table where all the new students had to show their ID and they gave them a bag and some other school supplies.

  When Erik got to the table he could notice that the one who was taking the ID’s and giving away the school supplies was a girl, a very young girl, maybe a year or two older than him, but he was expecting an adult, he was 15 after all.

  ‘Welcome, ID please’ said the girl with a nice and cute voice. Erik gave her his ID and she just took note of his ID number and got him a bag like everyone else, but his was different, the other students got a normal backpack, but he got a side bag with a large strap to wear across his chest, it had the same pattern as his new laptop and also his surname engraved, “Redwood” in golden letters.

  The girl gave him that and a small envelope, Erik then noticed everyone else had a white one but his was of a bright purple.

  ‘Congratulations Erik’ she said while handing him the envelope.

  ‘Thanks, I guess’ Erik answered really weirded out.

  Everything was odd, he was getting all different than everyone else, but he had no time to think about it. He walked to the courtyard and stand between the students, relatively closed to the podium, there were what Erik assumed older students sited in a row, they got the same type of gaffette like the ones who lead them there.

  For a few moments the students kind of got arranged in lines along the courtyard, and Erik just crossed his arms and stayed where he was, he wanted to get this over with. After that a loud microphone noise could be heard. There was now a man in the podium, and he started speaking.

  ‘Welcome to the Academy, I am professor Daniels, unfortunately our honourable Principal Juniper couldn’t be here with us, but she hopes as much as all of us that you find this place as home. I hope that all of you know the rules by now, answer the final test correctly and you may go, although there is not much for you out there.’ That last part made Erik think a lot, if there wasn’t much out there, why everyone was so afraid of the Academy?

  ‘Now, everyone please, put your attention at the screen’ Beside him there was a big monitor and a lot of numbers started to pop out, there was two columns one that had “0-19” and another one with “20+”. ‘This is where we’ll know who is going to the beginners program or who will go to the Standard one.’ the numbers started to stop and in the “0-19” column there was a gigantic number, but in the “20+” column there was only a 2.

  ‘You’ve all been given an envelope, inside it you’ll find your grade from the test you took to enter here, please open them.‘ said the professor and he said something to one of the older students who was beside him.

  Erik took out his bright purple envelope and opened it, but he did it so desperately that he got a paper cut in the palm of his hand. Inside there was a small paper with a number in it “21/100”. Erik couldn’t believe it, he only got 21 questions correctly, but he was certain he was going to at least get 70 correctly, or at least that was what he estimated. He looked again at the screen and he saw the “20+” column, only a 2 was beside it, so he assumed he was one of the two who got over 20.

  He was perplexed, he had never got such a low grade before, he had a very unique ability to just answer all his exams correctly, but he had never got under a 90.

  ‘Hey, Redwood?’ Erik heard behind him, he turned around and saw a tall guy. ‘Yes, it’s me, Erik Redwood’ he answered quickly. ‘Come with me, the Principal wants to see you’ said the guy to him and he walked pass him. Erik followed him between the bunch of other students and out of the courtyard.

  ‘Sorry, my name is James, this is my third year here, pretty impressive what you managed to do, I still can’t get passed the 10th question.’ said James as he walked in front of Erik. James had been in the Academy for three years now, and he couldn’t answer more than 10 questions?! All of this was getting extremely weird, Erik couldn’t process it yet.

  ‘It’s impressive that this year we got two geniuses, since I’ve been here no student had ever got over 20, I remember the highest of my year was a girl with a 7.’ said James as he called the elevator. The main building was tall and full of windows, the elevator arrived and they got in. James pushed the 7th floor button and waited beside Erik.

  ‘I still can’t believe it, I mean, you should have killed yourself studying, and I thought that one guy that got a 20 10 years ago was crazy.’ James said as they arrived to the 7th floor, the elevator door opened and Erik could notice how everything was of the same colour scheme as his stuff. They walked for a while until they found the Principal’s office, James knocked on the door and it opened slightly.

  ‘I can’t go any further, it was an honour’ said James while he walked backwards before turning around and going towards the elevator.

  Erik, opened the door and entered the office, it was completely white, only a black desk with a black chair where on the other side of the room, Erik could notice like someone was sitting behind the desk.

  ‘Mr. Redwood? ‘ the Principal asked as he heard him enter.

  ‘Yes, it’s me, Erik Redwood ‘he said once again in the same tone he answered James in the courtyard.

  ‘I am very impressed with your grade, Mr. Redwood, I never thought someone could beat that number, I was the one who established it after all.’ the principal said while she turned around. She had black hair and bright blue eyes, she was wearing the entire Academy uniform and got a pair of pointy glasses on.

  ‘What you did was, unbelievable’ the Principal said and she stood up, she took out what looked like a cell phone and clicked something, then a bunch of holographic screens appeared in front of Erik, all of them denoted him, doing the exam, saying goodbye to his parents and even through the ceremony. ‘We kept a close sight of you Mr. Redwood, since the moment you got past the 20th question correctly we knew you were going to be a great student for the Academy, but we never thought you’ll make it all the way to the 21st question.’

  Erik just, couldn’t digest it, he only got 21 of 100 questions correct and he made a major achievement? The paper cut in her hand still sting but he tried to forget the pain and think about his current situation.

  ‘So, if I did something no one else was able to for the past 10 years…’ ‘Oh there is another, there was another who made it very far, a girl was able to answer the 20th question and was for about an hour or two famous, until you came along.’ answered the Principal while she sat back behind her desk.

  ‘I hope you’ll be able to graduate Mr. Redwood, I really do, after all, you wouldn’t be the first Redwood to do it. Inside your bag you’ll find a key and a new cell phone please use them to find and enter your dormitory, you’ll be in the main dormitories after all, you are not a beginner. You are dismissed.’ the Principal said as she turned around in her chair.

  Erik was still confused, but there was nothing else for him to do but to get to his dormitory, it was beginning to get dark anyways. He opened his bag and found, between other things, a thin and almost weightless transparent acrylic plaque. Not very large but of a dark grey. He analyses it but it was just a plaque, he found a small overture in the low part of it, small enough for a card of some sort to fit in. Erik took out his ID and slide it inside the acrylic plaque. It went right in, it fitted perfectly, after a few seconds the plaque went darker and the Academy symbol popped off the screen. Apparently that was the new “cell phone”, it finished loading and a dark screen showed three stripes with options. The first one said “Dormitories” then “Map” and finally “ID”. In the low right corner there was a power symbol which Erik assumed was to turn it off, and in the low left corner there was a quarter circle with four small points. Erik looked at the screen for a few seconds and a text box appeared over the screen.

                                                 //Hello,Erik…

                                             Would you like to

                                            initiate the tutorial

                                                   Protocol? //

                                         > Yes                 > No

  Erik touched the “Yes” option and the phone initiated the tutorial, it had a lot of functionalities, it was able to weigh object over it, it had a calculator, a translator with over 200+ languages, a holographic measuring tape to up to 10km, a GPS tracker and locator, scheduling board, internet navigation and the system to emulate any kind of app needed or installed.

  Without a doubt it was a brilliant piece of technology for a student, and it was very easy to be able to understand and use. Erik started the GPS tracker and set it to Dormitories, immediately the phone showed him the way. The Academy was, how to put it, one of a kind, it had a lot of green areas for the students to be able to study or hang out, the buildings were extremely technologically advanced and had the perfect environment to study or just hang out with people. Erik noticed that in the green areas there where some places with chairs or tall trees, perfect spots for a good read.

  Erik arrived at the dormitories building, it had a bunch of small plants and most of its walls were see through. Before being able to go upstairs to his room he had to go through the cafeteria, it was white and with a bunch of black chairs and tables. It was a pretty elegant and somehow it felt cosy, like a home, of course it wasn’t the same feeling as being home, but it had an incredible alikeness.

  Erik went through the large amount of tables and chairs towards the big stairs behind of it all. He got to the first small balcony of the place and someone caught his attention. In the centre table, a blonde haired girl with a ponytail was drinking tea slowly, she was wearing a light pink sweater with dark pink accents and a rose in her collarbone. She was peacefully sited with her legs crossed she looked almost as if she was royalty. The girl noticed Erik’s presence, she stood up and gave Erik a smile.

  The girl was, extremely beautiful, her hair was of a light and almost golden blonde colour, her eyes were of an icy blue, her lips thin and of a very lightly shade of pink, her chin was somehow pointy, her nose was exactly the right size for her face, and her collarbone was, well, simply attractive, it looked smooth and delicate.

  ‘You’re Erik, aren’t you? I am Helena, Helena Silvershine, a pleasure meeting you’ she said as she bowed a little bit. This was a sign of respect, you usually did it to greet someone much older than you or at an important meeting, it was etiquette.

  Erik bowed as well ‘Erik Redwood, a pleasure to meet you too’.

  A small smile was drawn in Helena’s face, but it was soon changed by an expression of concern.

  ‘Your hand, was it the envelope? Don’t worry, mine cut me too.’ She said taking Erik’s hand to look at it closer to see if he was more hurt.

  ‘It’s ok, don’t worry, it bled for a while, but now I am fine.’

  ‘You should take care of yourself, this could get infected, here let me take care of it’ Helena looked for something in her side bag, and she drew out of it a small dark cloth, and mended Erik’s wound. She tightened it up so it wouldn’t bleed again.

  ‘Thank you… Helena…’ said Erik, looking at her was somehow relaxing.

  Helena smiled at Erik, and their eyes met. They stared at each other for a few seconds.

  ‘Huh… you’re not like everyone else, you are different… in a good way.’ Helena said as she smiled softly.

  Erik’s first day at the Academy was a really strange one and full of questions, but meeting Helena made him feel something, something deep inside him, it wasn’t love, nor attraction, it was hope, hope that he could make it out of there, hope that maybe if he got out he could find his brother, hope that everything was going to be fine as long as they stick together. Erik smiled back at her, it has been a while since he smiled, even if it was for a small amount of time, he smiled, he truly smiled, not faking it and in a genuine matter. It felt good.

[paulbenedictblog]

%news%

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Cnn news 1st coronavirus case confirmed in Utah, NBA tells teams to prepare for empty arenas

Cnn news

More than 105,000 folks in on the least 100 countries have been contaminated with modern coronavirus amid an outbreak that has despatched countries and states scrambling to acknowledge.

No longer decrease than 3,559 have died, in step with Johns Hopkins College. Nearly the general cases and deaths have been in China, the build the virus turned into as soon as first detected in Wuhan in December sooner than spreading to each continent with the exception of Antarctica. The outbreak of the virus, known officially as COVID-19, has been declared global wisely being emergency by the World Effectively being Group.

South Korea, Italy and Iran have the glorious nationwide totals of confirmed cases in the encourage of China.

Tune into ABC News Dwell at noon ET every weekday for the most modern files, context and diagnosis on the unconventional coronavirus, with the plump ABC News team the build we can strive to acknowledge to your questions referring to the virus.

The form of People recognized with modern coronavirus is now on the least 424, in step with a case count by Johns Hopkins. No longer decrease than 19 folks have died in the U.S. in Washington sing, California and Florida, per ABC News' count.

Globally, more than 58,000 have completely recovered from the virus, in step with Johns Hopkins.

Today time's glorious tendencies:

Dying toll in US rises to 19

New York declares sing of emergency

Italy announces one-quarter of inhabitants to be quarantined

Quarantine hotel in China collapses

Utah, Hawaii, Kansas, Missouri, Virginia, District of Columbia confirm 1st cases

Pope cancels Sunday prayer gathering

Right here is how the problem is unfolded on Saturday. All times jap.

10: 48 p.m. Italy announces massive quarantine

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte supplied early Sunday local time that folk in Lombardy sing in northern Italy will be restricted of their poke by April 3.

The Lombardy sing, whose glorious metropolis is Milan, and 15 provinces (Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Reggio nell'Emilia, Rimini, Pesaro e Urbino, Alessandrio, Asti, Novara, Verbano-Cusio-Ossola, Vercelli, Padova, Treviso e Venezia) story for about one-quarter of the nation's inhabitants.

"For Lombardy and for the loads of northern provinces that I've listed there will be a ban for everyone to transfer out and in of these territories and likewise within the identical territory," Conte acknowledged in Italian, in step with The Associated Press. "Exceptions will be allowed dazzling for confirmed expert desires, distinctive cases and properly being components."

Italy has been the hardest hit nation by the illness delivery air of China. There have been 233 deaths, the most delivery air China, and 5,883 cases, third-most in the encourage of China and South Korea, in step with Johns Hopkins College.

8: 20 p.m. 1,000 elderly passengers on Worthy Princess

There are more than 1,000 passengers on the Worthy Princess cruise ship, positioned dazzling off the waft of San Francisco, who are over the age of 70, a source told ABC News.

That might perhaps presumably stamp nearly about one-third of the three,800 on board. These who are developed in age or have underlying clinical circumstances are particularly inclined to modern coronavirus.

Cruise line officials are also managing 1,100 separate prescriptions, in step with the source.

Twenty-one folks tested certain for the virus in runt early testing -- those that were regarded as as the most at-possibility -- with 19 of them crew members.

8: 16 p.m. Missouri records 1st case

Marking now 31 states to have a undeniable coronavirus case, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson held a press conference to articulate his sing's first contaminated particular particular person.

The 30th sing to have a case -- Virginia -- turned into as soon as supplied in a U.S. serviceman minutes earlier.

8: 01 p.m. 1st US serviceman checks certain stateside

An American service member has now tested certain for modern coronavirus in the U.S. for the principle time.

"A U.S. Marine assigned to Fortress Belvoir, VA tested certain this day for COVID-19 and is currently being treated at Fortress Belvoir Community Health center," the Pentagon acknowledged in a assertion. "The Marine no longer too long ago returned from in a international nation the build he turned into as soon as on official business."

Two American militia members beforehand tested certain for coronavirus, but both were serving in a international nation. An Military member tested certain in South Korea and a Navy sailor tested certain in Naples, Italy.

6: 24 p.m. 2 more 1st-time positives

Kansas and the District of Columbia both supplied their first cases of coronavirus on Saturday.

Both cases are counted as presumptive certain cases, performed with local testing, and might perhaps presumably presumably silent be despatched to the Centers for Disease Bewitch an eye on and Prevention for affirmation.

Circumstances have now been picture in 29 states and the nation's capital.

5: 37 p.m. CPAC attendee checks certain

The American Conservative Union team acknowledged in a assertion that one amongst its attendees on the Conservative Political Action Convention (CPAC) dazzling delivery air Washington, D.C., final week has tested certain for COVID-19.

President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were among the many discontinue officials who spoke at CPAC, but the ACU says the attendee "had no interplay with the President or the Vice President and never attended the events in the most vital hall."

The ACU acknowledged the Trump administration is "conscious referring to the problem."

That particular person is now in New Jersey, in step with the team.

5: 04 p.m. CDC, Pence change on take a look at kits

The Centers for Disease Bewitch an eye on and Prevention has shipped out ample checks for a minimal of 75,000 folks, in step with FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn.

Of the checks the CDC has shipped, public wisely being labs have been ready to envision more than 3,500 specimens from 1,583 patients, in step with Hahn.

An additional 1.1 million checks have been shipped to nonpublic wisely being labs. The manufacturer, IDT, is distributing them nationwide, but California and Washington, which have reported the glorious form of cases, bought the checks first.

Hahn famed that there have been "manufacturing considerations with the CDC take a look at" that "created complications for expanding decide up admission to for public wisely being laboratories" who would have in another case dilapidated the take a look at. These components have since been resolved, he acknowledged, and the CDC now has "a take a look at that the American folks can belief."

Vice President Mike Pence acknowledged after meeting with cruise ship officials that more than 1 million checks have been distributed and that "we'll be expanding decide up admission to to checks in the weeks forward to each American."

4: 25 p.m. Italian cruise ship rejected amid fears

Costa Fortuna, a luxury Italian cruise line, turned into as soon as blocked from Thailand and Malaysia amid modern coronavirus fears, in step with a assertion from the ship's operator.

The ship, which contains more than 2,000 passengers, none of whom have shown proof of COVID-19, chanced on itself on the injurious facet of modern suggestions both countries set into build hours sooner than its scheduled arrival.

Thailand grew to was the ship some distance from Phuket due to it turned into as soon as carrying 64 Italian passengers who left Italy decrease than two weeks ago, while officials in Malaysia are blocking off all cruise ships from docking in spite of who's on board.

The cruise ship is now headed for Singapore, the build a maritime and port authority official told ABC News it "might perhaps presumably presumably also silent be ready to dock."

"For the time being, there's no such thing as a executive policy which bars any cruise ship from docking at Singapore port," the official acknowledged.

4: 05 p.m. Constituent of Receive. Matt Gaetz, who mocked virus, among fatalities

Receive. Matt Gaetz, R-Fl., acknowledged he turned into as soon as "extremely saddened" to learn of the loss of life in a Santa Rosa County resident. The Floridian's loss of life had been beforehand reported and is fragment of the 19 fatalities, but right here is Gaetz's first time talking about it.

"Please continue to take most vital precautions to decrease your exposure to any illness, alongside with coronavirus," he acknowledged in a assertion.

Ultimate three days sooner than, Gaetz wore a gas veil on the House floor all the blueprint in which by a vote on emergency funds to acknowledge to modern coronavirus.

He also tweeted a photograph of himself in the gas veil, asserting, "Reviewing the coronavirus supplemental appropriation and making ready to scamper vote."

3: 21 p.m. Dying toll rises in US to 19

Two more folks have died in Washington sing, in step with local officials, putting the form of American fatalities at 19.

There have now been 16 deaths in Washington sing, with all but one in King County, in step with the sing's wisely being division.

A man in his 70s, who turned into as soon as a resident at Lifestyles Care Middle in Kirkland, and a girl in her 80s, also a Lifestyles Care Middle resident, were the 2 folks whose deaths were reported Saturday.

Different deaths in the U.S. have been in Florida, the build two folks died, and in California.

1: 45 p.m. Airport screening in Hawaii after sing's 1st case reported

Hawaii Gov. David Ige supplied his sing's first case of modern coronavirus.

The patient is quarantined at dwelling and "doing wisely," Ige added. The patient had traveled on a Worthy Princess cruise ship in early February and contracted the virus.

Screenings are now being conducted on the Daniel Okay. Inouye World Airport by federal authorities.

12: 59 p.m. Quarantine hotel in China collapses with dozens trapped interior

A hotel dilapidated as a clinical commentary center for folk that had contact with modern coronavirus patients collapsed in southeastern China, leaving around 70 folks trapped interior, Chinese language sing media reported.

Authorities officials in Quanzhou, the build the crumple took build, acknowledged in a assertion that 38 folks had been rescued from the Xinjia Resort as of 11 p.m. local time Saturday.

Rescue work turned into as soon as ongoing, with dozens of emergency and fire rescue vehicles, in step with executive officials.

It turned into as soon as now in the end obvious what brought on the crumple. An unidentified hotel employee told the Beijing Early life Day-to-day that the owner implemented "foundation-connected building" sooner than the peril, in step with the Associated Press, but no additional indispensable components were offered.

China, the build the virus turned into as soon as first detected in Wuhan, currently has more than 80,000 confirmed cases on the mainland.

12: 14 p.m. 76 cases in New York prompts sing of emergency

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a sing of emergency after the total form of confirmed cases rose to 76, with 32 modern cases reported in the final 24 hours.

There are now 57 cases in Westchester, 11 in New York City, four in Rockland County, two in Rockland County, and two in Saratoga County, in step with Cuomo. Westchester reported 23 modern cases and New York City reported seven.

The sing of emergency can lend a hand in hiring and buying, with Cuomo calling the problem "labor intensive. We desire the staffing."

He acknowledged that the problem in Westchester "is clearly a anguish for us." He supplied that each one nursing properties and senior citizen centers in the rapid New Rochelle dwelling would suspend delivery air company.

"Nursing properties are the most problematic," he acknowledged. Older adults might perhaps presumably presumably also endure heaps of the burden in the virus' unfold, in step with Imran Ali, a geriatric doctor working with the ABC News Clinical Unit.

Cuomo also criticized the Centers for Disease Bewitch an eye on and Prevention, asserting the agency is slowing all the pieces down and hamstringing states like New York.

The seven modern cases in New York City encompass two who were on a cruise ship and five that perceived to community unfold. One in all those patients is hospitalized at St. John’s Episcopal Health center in Some distance Rockaway.

The Saratoga County cases, in a 57-year-extinct pharmacist and a 52-year-extinct girl who had contact with a particular individual that tested certain for COVID-19 at a conference in Miami, are that dwelling's first to be reported.

9: 57 a.m. 1st U.S. service member in Europe checks certain

A U.S. Navy sailor stationed on the Naval Toughen Job Naples tested certain for modern coronavirus, marking the principle certain reason in the encourage of a U.S. service member in Europe, in step with a assertion from U.S. European Suppose Theater.

The service member is in isolation at their build and receiving sanatorium therapy in step with the Centers for Disease Bewitch an eye on and Prevention, the assertion learn. Someone who had shut contact with the patient has been notified and is in self-isolation at their build.

Their situation turned into as soon as no longer rapid obvious.

8: 50 a.m. 14 People below quarantine in Bethlehem hotel

The Palestinian wisely being ministry in Bethlehem confirmed that 14 American residents are being tested for modern coronavirus and have been quarantined in the Angles hotel in the metropolis of Bethlehem for now.

These American residents were trying to depart the metropolis the day before this day but were despatched encourage to Bethlehem by the Israeli military, in step with the Palestinian wisely being ministry. Folks are no longer permitted to depart or enter Bethlehem, as per a decision made by Israeli and Palestinian authorities after 17 cases of modern coronavirus were confirmed in the metropolis in the final 48 hours.

8: 43 a.m. Houston-dwelling church warns of imaginable exposure

A particular individual that tested certain for modern coronavirus attended the 5: 30 p.m. Ash Wednesday service on Feb. 26 on the St. Cecilia Catholic Church, in step with Harris County Public officials in Texas. The particular particular person bought ashes and had communion in the hand, but did no longer earn communion from the cup, officials acknowledged. The particular person sat in the final pew on the left facet of the church.

Officials are asking someone who sat in the final three rows on the left facet of the church all the blueprint in which by that service to contact Harris Couty Public officials at 713-439-6000.

In the intervening time, St. Cecilia has drained and sanitized the baptismal fonts and sanitized the church's pews, door handles and restrooms and might perhaps presumably presumably silent present hand sanitizers on the total church's entrances. Parishioners are being informed to raise dwelling in the event that they are feeling sick, in step with a assertion from the church.

7: 43 a.m. Pope cancels Sunday prayer gathering

The Holy Gaze press office acknowledged that Sunday prayers would no longer happen in the sq. as long-established, but from the window of the Library of the Apostolic Palace amid the unconventional coronavirus unfold.

The prayer will be streamed dwell by Vatican News and on monitors in St. Peter's Sq. "so as to permit the participation of the faithful," in step with the assertion, which turned into as soon as translated from Italian.

The Overall Viewers, held this upcoming Wednesday, will even be conducted in the identical manner.

These decisions are most vital in sing to steer clear of the possibility of diffusion of the COVID-19 as a result of the gathering all the blueprint in which by the protection controls for decide up admission to to the sq., as also requested by the Italian authorities," the assertion learn. "In compliance with the provisions of the Effectively being and Hygiene Directorate of the Vatican City Remark, the participation of the faithful company in the Loads in Santa Marta will be suspended till Sunday 15 March. The Holy Father will celebrate the Eucharist privately."

3: 46 a.m. Utah will get 1st confirmed case

The form of coronavirus cases and deaths persisted to originate better in the U.S. as officials in Utah reported late Friday evening that the sing had its first confirmed COVID-19 case.

Utah officials acknowledged they deem the sufferer turned into as soon as uncovered to the virus while on a contemporary Worthy Princess cruise.

A completely different Worthy Princess cruise ship is currently dazzling off the San Francisco waft with dozens of passengers quarantined onboard. As of Friday evening, 19 passengers on the ship are confirmed to have modern coronavirus and 46 folks have been tested, Vice President Mike Pence acknowledged at a press conference Friday.

Organizations across the U.S. have been grappling with the technique to contend with the unfold of the virus.

The NBA, in step with ESPN, despatched a memo to groups telling them to prepare to play in front of empty arenas in the shut to future.

The memo, got by ESPN and ABC New York affiliate WABC, acknowledged NBA groups were asked to originate a route of and identify actions required in the event they needed to play video games without followers in attendance and with easiest indispensable team on the field.

Following Friday evening's clutch over the Milwaukee Bucks, Los Angeles Lakers significant particular person LeBron James addressed the league’s memo to groups, warning he will now not play in an empty enviornment.

"I ain't playing. If I ain't bought the followers in the crowd, that's what I play for. I play for my teammates, I play for the followers,” James told newshounds in the locker room following the game. “That is what or no longer it is all about. If I picture as a lot as an enviornment, and there ain't no followers there? I ain't playing. So, they might perhaps presumably presumably discontinue what they ought to discontinue.”

The College of Southern California and Stanford College both moved all classes online in step with the Coronavirus outbreak.

Stanford supplied Friday that each one classes would be moved online for the final two weeks of the quarter and USC acknowledged it will probably presumably take a look at some distance flung classes for two days next week.

“Our college desires to be nimble and versatile in the event that now we need to originate any additional changes to the semester,” Charles F. Zukoski, USC Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, acknowledged in a assertion Friday. “We have about 7,000 lecture classes this spring. We need to envision our technical capabilities to originate certain instructional continuity in a web atmosphere might perhaps presumably presumably also silent there be a disruption.”

ABC News' Erin Schumaker, Morgan Winsor, Luis Martinez, Matt Gutman, Elizabeth McLaughlin, Phoebe Natanson, Karson Yiu, Rashid Haddou, Label Crudele, Matthew Fuhrman, Robert Zepeda, Ben Gittleson and Dragana Jovanovic contributed to this fable.

[ciathyzareposts]

The Years in Review: 1974-1978

I’ve given up on Daniel Lawrence’s DND, so it’s time to take a look back at the years leading up to 1978.  It’s been a long time getting here: I’ve been at this blog for about five years, and while I have covered about five years worth of games it feels like I’m making slow progress. Nevertheless, this is a good time to look back, take stock, and consider where the blog is heading in the future.

When looking back at this era and determining the highlights, it’s important to remember that there’s a huge technological gulf between the mainframes that the earliest games were developed on, and the home computers that games were being created on starting in 1978. Because of that I’m going to split them up by technology, as well as by genre.

THE MAINFRAME CRPGs It’s pretty safe to say that the bulk of the time I’ve spent on this blog has been taken up by mainframe CRPGs, particularly those on the PLATO system: DND and Moria took me a year each to complete.  By the standards of the time, these are staggeringly large games, complex in a way that home computers wouldn’t be able to match until the late 1980s at the earliest. Of all the surprising things I’ve learned during the course of this blog, I think the most surprising has been that the earliest CRPGs were far from primitive compared to things like Ultima and Wizardry. And yes, I’m aware that these games were developed over many years, but for the most part the ones that I played were fully formed by the late 1970s.

There are two distinct lines of influence in this era. First was the line of top down, iconographic games started with The Dungeon (aka pedit5), and continuing through The Game of Dungeons and Orthanc. The second was the line of first-person 3D games that started with Moria, and continued by Oubliette.  The top-down line continues on into 1980s with things like Telengard, but eventually it peters out. I suppose that Ultima could be considered as part of that line, but Richard Garriott has always said that he developed his games on his own, and any resemblances are purely superficial.  Similarly, Rogue has some similarities, but that game’s creators have also denied being influenced.  The third-person 3D line is far more influential, directly influencing the Wizardry series, which in turn influenced such varied games as Bard’s Tale, Dungeon Master, and pretty much the entire Japanese RPG industry through Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy.

It’s pretty obvious that all of these games were an attempt to recreate the seminal tabletop RPG, Dungeons & Dragons. As if the number of these games with the DND filename wasn’t proof enough, the mechanics are often drawn directly from that game.  But while the mechanics are drawn from D&D, the ability to craft an emergent narrative that’s inherent to that game was still beyond the technology of the 1970s. The PLATO CRPGs are all very much lacking when it comes to plot, setting, and characters, and it will be a very long time before any games can mimic any of D&D’s elements beyond exploration and combat.

I’m slightly torn when it comes to picking a Mainframe CRPG of 1974-1978. The Game of Dungeons v5.4, with a rating of 54, would be the obvious choice. It’s certainly the PLATO CRPG that I enjoyed playing the most, and by far the best of the top-down line. And yet, Moria and Oubliette are much more influential games. I can rule out Moria pretty safely, for being far too empty.  But Oubliette is a different story, with a sizable yet manageable dungeon that’s full of tricks and traps. Where Oubliette falls down is the lack of a modern community: it lives and dies on its multiplayer capabilities. If I were to go back and play in the 1970s, I’ve little doubt that Oubliette would be the game of the era. But from a modern perspective, The Game of Dungeons v5.4 is the superior game, and I have to reluctantly go with it.

Mainframe CRPG of 1974-1978: The Game of Dungeons v5.4 THE MAINFRAME ADVENTURE GAMES When it comes to adventure gaming in this era, there’s no escaping the influence of Colossal Cave Adventure. Every game that comes after it bears its influence in one form or another, to the point where “adventure” is the name of the whole genre.

There aren’t obvious lines of influence with adventure games as there are with CRPGs (although that could be my relative lack of knowledge when it comes to those two genres).  But there are many games here that feature the main elements of Colossal Cave Adventure: exploring an area, and earning points by collecting treasures. Acheton, Zork, and The Cottage all follow this format, as does the multiplayer MUD1. The main outliers to this format were Castle (which apparently predates Colossal Cave) and Aldebaran-III, both of which were created using the Wander programming language.  Aldebaran-III in particular is strong on setting and narrative, or at least it appears that way at the beginning. While the games that sprung out of Colossal Cave were the most influential in the short term, Aldebaran-III provides a glimpse into a future of adventure games more narratively sophisticated than simple treasure hunts.

It would be remiss of me not to mention MUD1 here, because it’s the progenitor of a whole line of multiplayer games, and is influential in ways that go far beyond my meager knowledge of MUDs. As with Oubliette, it would be a real contender if there was still a community playing it today. It’s still an enjoyable single-player experience, but obviously that’s not its greatest strength.

It’s quite a bit easier to pick the Mainframe Adventure Game of 1974-1978. While Colossal Cave Adventure is all-pervading in its influence, and Acheton is the largest and most challenging, there’s no denying the sheer quality of Zork. It has the highest score on the blog by a large margin (70), and holds up pretty well even today. A case could be made for it being the greatest adventure game of all time, and I wouldn’t argue too much with anyone who had that opinion.

Mainframe Adventure Game of 1974-1978: Zork THE HOME COMPUTER CRPGs With 1978, home computing finally became accessible with the advent of three computers: the TRS-80, the Apple II, and the Commodore PET. These machines were woefully under-powered compared to the mainframes I talked about above, and were quite incapable of recreating the types of games that could be found on PLATO. As such, there’s a certain disunity of theme and style in the games of 1978.

In fact, there are just five games to consider here. Beneath Apple Manor has a lot of Rogue-like elements, with its randomised top-down dungeons containing monsters represented with ASCII characters. Space is very much based on the tabletop RPG Traveller.  It has a claim on being the first sci-fi CRPG, but it plays much more like a collection of mini-games than a traditional RPG. The third game is Dungeon Campaign, a fun but somewhat slight attempt to emulate the party-based play that’s inherent to D&D. Devil’s Dungeon is potentially endless, but the version I played was bugged and broken. Finally, there’s Richard Garriott’s DND1, or at least the recreations of it that were made as part of a competition from a few years ago. It’s not really a home computer game, but in terms of gameplay and  complexity it belongs with these games.

Obviously we’re in the earliest days here, with the creators of these games still trying to figure out how to bring the tabletop RPG to home computers. There’s very little sign here of influence from the mainframe games; that won’t come for a while yet. It’s interesting to see these early efforts, and the gaming lineages that might have been, but ultimately, with the exception of DND1, these games would have little influence on the genre as a whole.

The Home CRPG of 1978 is pretty obvious. Space, Devil’s Dungeon and Dungeon Campaign hold little interest beyond an hour or so. DND1 is of great historical importance, but it’s very difficult to detect any of Ultima’s DNA in this primitive game. Instead, I have to give it to Beneath Apple Manor, which I enjoyed playing and could quite happily go back to right now.

Home CRPG of 1978: Beneath Apple Manor

THE HOME COMPUTER ADVENTURE GAMES The home computer market for adventure games was largely dominated by the work of two men. Or rather, one man and one boy: Scott Adams and Greg Hassett.

Before Infocom arrives on the scene, Scott Adams and his company Adventure International are the leaders in the adventure game field. In 1978, he produced two games: Adventureland and Pirate Adventure. The first is an obvious attempt to recreated the experience of Colossal Cave Adventure on a home computer, albeit in a highly truncated form. Pirate Adventure stretches a bit in terms of genre, but still presents a treasure hunt as the man focus (but what else do you want from a pirate game?). Both are solid, enjoyable games.

By contrast, Greg Hassett was a thirteen year old kid, who was prolific in his output (probably because all he had to worry about was teenage kid stuff). He released three games in 1978: Journey to the Centre of the Earth, King Tut’s Tomb, and The House of Seven Gables. These games were of varying quality, with House of Seven Gables obviously being the best. I have to give Hassett some credit for avoiding the fantasy genre that every else was seemingly obsessed with, but his games are somewhat lacking in polish. I mean, all the games of this era are lacking in polish, but Hassett’s efforts don’t measure up to those of Adams, at least at this point. Of the games that remain, Lords of Karma is the best, a polished effort that tries to provide some extra interest with a focus on doing good deeds. In reality it’s just another treasure hunt, but the idea was there. Treasure Hunt is an expansion of Hunt the Wumpus with some adventure game elements added in, and Quest might be the simplest adventure game I’ve ever played, with nothing more to do than choose cardinal directions to move in. I’m tossing up between Adventureland and Lords of Karma for Home Adventure Game of 1978. Karma blends in some CRPG elements, which is the sort of thing I like, but I think that Adventureland is a bit stronger as an adventure game.

Home Adventure Game of 1978: Adventureland. So that’s it for 1978, wrapped up, done, dusted and disposed of. I’m not sure where I’m going next.  I’ll probably create a page in the sidebar giving my schedule for the games of 1979, but I have to figure out what that schedule will be. I’ll probably start with either Akalabeth or Temple of Apshai, but I’m still undecided.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/the-years-in-review-1974-1978/

[how2to18]

IN Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Brian Boyd reports that Richard Wilbur, when his flight was delayed, arrived tired and hungry for a poetry reading at Cornell University. Standing on the stage about to read, he observed the author of Lolita seated by himself in the front row. Wilbur, who had already written in “Ceremony” of his preference for “wit and wakefulness,” told Boyd that he “passionately wished that I had eaten something, that I felt better, that my poems were better.” He needn’t have worried.

Like his mentor, model, and friend Robert Frost, Wilbur has been routinely misunderstood by admirers and detractors alike. To some among the former, he is safe and wholesome, like oatmeal. To his more emphatic critics, Wilbur commits heresy with every act of elegance, wit, and declaration of faith in the cosmic order. In this sense he was a well-mannered outsider, a fugitive from fashion. If Wilbur, who died October 14 at age 96, ever wrote a mediocre poem — one that is perfunctory, careless, egocentric, or empty — I couldn’t remember having read it. After his death, I resolved to read his Collected Poems 1943–2004 sequentially, cover to cover, wishing to reassess his accomplishment. After all, reading a writer attentively is the truest, most respectful act of criticism.

Collected Poems is arranged in reverse chronological order, beginning with new poems and winding backward to his first volume, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947), published when he was 25 and newly discharged from the Army. Two appendices attached to the back of the book, “Show Lyrics” and “Poems for Children and Others,” suggest Wilbur’s versatility. My goal was to avoid the chestnuts and pay attention to the poems less well remembered. Poems embalmed in anthologies too often blind us to unexpected duds and delights. Here, from among the new poems, is “Green,” one of many that indicate Wilbur was our poet laureate of trees without being, in the banal sense, a nature poet:

Tree-leaves which, till the growing season’s done, Change into wood the powers of the sun,

Take from that radiance only reds and blues. Green is a color that they cannot use,

And so their rustling myriads are seen To wear all summer an extraneous green,

A green with no apparent role, unless To be the symbol of a great largesse

Which has no end, though autumns may revoke That shade from yellowed ash and rusted oak.

A reader could almost gloss “Green” as a lecture on photosynthesis, from the Greek for “putting together with light” (which is not a bad way to describe Wilbur’s poetic practice). The fourth couplet expresses the poet’s persistent notion that creation is a gift, a bountiful gratuity for our enjoyment. Wilbur’s working assumptions in most of his poems are quietly, nondenominationally Christian. The world can be a cruel and dangerous place, but randomness is deceptive. Nature is arranged gracefully, like a good poem. The chlorophyll in leaves absorbs red and blue wavelengths of light but reflects the green. For the tree, green is gratuitous; for us, sheer beauty.

In the introduction to a posthumously published collection of her father’s poems, Penelope Fitzgerald writes: “Light verse is a product of civilization, for it is a sign of being civilized to be able to treat serious things gracefully.” Wilbur ranks high among recent poets of civility and civilization. The stridently earnest can be brutish in manners and morals, while the civilized are courteous and deferential. How are we to pigeonhole “To His Skeleton,” published in The Mind-Reader: New Poems (1976)? Is it light or heavy?

Why will you vex me with These bone-spurs in the ear, With X-rayed phlebolith And calculus? See here,

Noblest of armatures, The grin which bares my teeth Is mine as yet, not yours. Did you not stand beneath

This flesh, I could not stand, But would revert to slime Informous and unmanned; And I may come in time

To wish your peace my fate, Your sculpture my renown. Still, I have held you straight And mean to lay you down

Without too much disgrace When what can perish dies. For now then, keep your place And do not colonize.

The speaker is all surface, which is not a slur. His bones are internal scaffolding, concealed. Cartoonish emblem of death, the skeleton is the structure that enables life. Without our bones, we are “informous and unmanned,” like poems unmindful of meter and rhyme. The speaker admonishes his skeleton to bide his time. Call it graveyard humor with a metaphysical bent. Even a minor Wilbur effort such as “To His Skeleton” feels accomplished. As always, Wilbur is the wizard of rhyme, shoring up his poem and amusing us with music: “with”/“phlebolith,” “stand”/“unmanned.” In an essay he wrote 70 years ago, “The Bottles Become New, Too,” Wilbur says:

The presence of potential rhymes sets the imagination working with the same briskness and license with which a patient’s mind responds to the psychologist’s word-association tests. When a poet is fishing among rhymes, he may and must reject most of the spontaneous reconciliations (and all of the hackneyed ones) produced by trial combinations of rhyming words, and keep in mind the preconceived direction and object of his poem; but the suggestions of rhyme are so nimble and so many that it is an invaluable means to the discovery of poetic raw material which is, in the very best sense, far-fetched.

Note the order in which Wilbur describes composition: “fishing” for rhymes, sorting them, winnowing, rejecting most, all the while remembering the “direction and object” of the poem. A good rhyme isn’t the snap of a lock but a key to open the imagination. The ability to write first-rate poetry, like the gifts for mathematics and music (composition and performance), is a freakishly rare combination of rigor and openness. Few have been so lavishly gifted as Wilbur. Tin-eared critics will dismiss rhyme as handcuffs, something artificial to bind the imagination. On the contrary. When Wilbur likens rhyme to a psychologist’s parlor game, he’s not suggesting repressed memories and the unleashing of buried anguish and guilt. Music goes deeper than that. So melodic are some of Wilbur’s poems, so gracefully arranged, one might be tempted not merely to read his lines but intone them, as in these from “A Black Birch in Winter” (The Mind-Reader: New Poems, 1976): “Old trees are doomed to annual rebirth, / New wood, new life, new compass, greater girth.” Ella Fitzgerald would sing this bouncily, allegro moderato, with light stress on the nouns.

Wilbur once wrote that poems “should include every resource which can be made to work,” and in his best poems, no motion is wasted. They resemble happy athletes: the flab has been trimmed, the muscles are limber. They move with confidence and strength, and they make it look effortless. Consider one of his Frostian efforts, “Hamlen Brook” (New and Collected Poems, 1987):

Without broadcasting his erudition, Wilbur will often exploit etymological echoes in commonplace words. The stream’s “jet” is “lucid,” an adjective that customarily describes moments of intelligibility in an otherwise confused consciousness; Wilbur musters the original meaning — shining, luminous — in contrast to the “alder-darkened brink.” As he prepares to drink, he sees “[a] startled inchling trout / Of spotted near-transparency.” Its shadow on the stream bottom appears more solid than its translucent body. “[S]liding glass” suggests a specimen on a slide observed through a microscope, with the reflections of dragonflies, birches, and “deep cloudlets” on the surface of the water adding more layers of visual reality. I wonder if Wilbur had in mind an untitled poem by John Keats, written in 1816, known by its first line, “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,” which includes these lines:

[S]warms of minnows show their little heads, Staying their wavy bodies ’gainst the streams, To taste the luxury of sunny beams Temper’d with coolness. How they ever wrestle With their own sweet delight, and ever nestle Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand. If you but scantily hold out the hand, That very instant not one will remain; But turn your eye, and they are there again.

For both poets, creation is bottomless, more than we can hope to understand or even perceive. George Eliot in Daniel Deronda writes: “Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy — in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.” Wilbur adores “solid facts,” but he never deploys them as an end in themselves. His speaker does not drink but asks: “How shall I drink all this?” The final stanza is his answer. The joy-minded — in Wilbur’s case, the attentive and grateful — are “dumbstruck” by nature’s bounty, which slakes our thirst and leaves us thirsty for more. Keats’s rhyming couplets lend a finality to his poem. The minnows, the beams of sunlight, and the speaker’s hand are simply there and raise no questions. “Hamlen Brook” is trickier and more complex. The first and last lines of each stanza rhyme and are written in iambic trimeter. The second and third lines are in iambic tetrameter and iambic pentameter, respectively. The form mirrors the multiple visual layers without quite capturing them. There’s no bottom to this stream.

Wilbur’s other mode is a playfulness that respects readers regardless of their age. He published five volumes of poems for children (“and Others”). Wilbur loved writing limericks, riddles, and jokey verse that never descend into Edward Lear–like nonsense. Even his poems for kids feature a logical hinge in the middle, and they frequently skirt the mythical divide separating poetry and light verse. They exhibit the same regard for clarity and craft as his verse for adults. This poem is from More Opposites (1991), a volume dedicated to the poet’s granddaughter:

The opposite of kite, I’d say, Is yo-yo. On a breezy day You take your kite and let it rise Upon its string into the skies, And then you pull it down with ease (Unless it crashes in the trees). A yo-yo, though, drops down, and then You quickly bring it up again By pulling deftly on its string (If you can work the blasted thing).

Like poets, children revel in that species of logic we might call mock-logic. It differs from nonsense by possessing a superficially orderly appearance, like one of Groucho’s gags, but under the surface you’ll find nothing but ridiculousness. We might think of this as the opposite of Wilbur’s understanding of the world. Chaos, observed with a sufficiently discerning mind, discloses an unlikely and sometimes even beneficent order.

Wilbur founded no poetic school, though imitators abound. His mingling of good manners, masterful technique, and philosophical sophistication is rare and increasingly unfashionable. Wilbur wrote “For Dudley” (Walking to Sleep, 1969) after the death of his friend Dudley Fitts, the poet, teacher, and translator from the Greek. It begins:

Even when death has taken An exceptional man, It is common things which touch us, gathered In the house that proved a hostel.

The speaker is visiting the dead man’s house. On his desk he finds an incomplete sentence, “Not to be finished by us, who lack / His gaiety, his Greek.” The “quick sun” illuminates a chair previously in the dark. Wilbur, as ever, is mindful of light and its absence:

It is the light of which Achilles spoke, Himself a shadow then, recalling The splendor of mere being.

To honor the “exceptional” dead is a sacred trust. Their fate will soon be ours. Light is life. The waiting darkness is patient. Fitts was “brave and loved this world,” as did Wilbur. The poem turns to prayer and concludes:

Yet in the mind as in The shut closet Where his coats hang in black procession, There is a covert muster.

One is moved to turn to him, The exceptional man, Telling him all these things, and waiting For the deft, lucid answer.

At the sound of that voice’s deep Specific silence, The sun winks and fails in the window. Light perpetual keep him.

¤

Patrick Kurp is a writer living in Houston, and the author of the literary blog Anecdotal Evidence.

The post “The Exceptional Man”: Rereading Richard Wilbur appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[topmixtrends]

IN Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Brian Boyd reports that Richard Wilbur, when his flight was delayed, arrived tired and hungry for a poetry reading at Cornell University. Standing on the stage about to read, he observed the author of Lolita seated by himself in the front row. Wilbur, who had already written in “Ceremony” of his preference for “wit and wakefulness,” told Boyd that he “passionately wished that I had eaten something, that I felt better, that my poems were better.” He needn’t have worried.

Like his mentor, model, and friend Robert Frost, Wilbur has been routinely misunderstood by admirers and detractors alike. To some among the former, he is safe and wholesome, like oatmeal. To his more emphatic critics, Wilbur commits heresy with every act of elegance, wit, and declaration of faith in the cosmic order. In this sense he was a well-mannered outsider, a fugitive from fashion. If Wilbur, who died October 14 at age 96, ever wrote a mediocre poem — one that is perfunctory, careless, egocentric, or empty — I couldn’t remember having read it. After his death, I resolved to read his Collected Poems 1943–2004 sequentially, cover to cover, wishing to reassess his accomplishment. After all, reading a writer attentively is the truest, most respectful act of criticism.

Collected Poems is arranged in reverse chronological order, beginning with new poems and winding backward to his first volume, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947), published when he was 25 and newly discharged from the Army. Two appendices attached to the back of the book, “Show Lyrics” and “Poems for Children and Others,” suggest Wilbur’s versatility. My goal was to avoid the chestnuts and pay attention to the poems less well remembered. Poems embalmed in anthologies too often blind us to unexpected duds and delights. Here, from among the new poems, is “Green,” one of many that indicate Wilbur was our poet laureate of trees without being, in the banal sense, a nature poet:

Tree-leaves which, till the growing season’s done, Change into wood the powers of the sun,

Take from that radiance only reds and blues. Green is a color that they cannot use,

And so their rustling myriads are seen To wear all summer an extraneous green,

A green with no apparent role, unless To be the symbol of a great largesse

Which has no end, though autumns may revoke That shade from yellowed ash and rusted oak.

A reader could almost gloss “Green” as a lecture on photosynthesis, from the Greek for “putting together with light” (which is not a bad way to describe Wilbur’s poetic practice). The fourth couplet expresses the poet’s persistent notion that creation is a gift, a bountiful gratuity for our enjoyment. Wilbur’s working assumptions in most of his poems are quietly, nondenominationally Christian. The world can be a cruel and dangerous place, but randomness is deceptive. Nature is arranged gracefully, like a good poem. The chlorophyll in leaves absorbs red and blue wavelengths of light but reflects the green. For the tree, green is gratuitous; for us, sheer beauty.

In the introduction to a posthumously published collection of her father’s poems, Penelope Fitzgerald writes: “Light verse is a product of civilization, for it is a sign of being civilized to be able to treat serious things gracefully.” Wilbur ranks high among recent poets of civility and civilization. The stridently earnest can be brutish in manners and morals, while the civilized are courteous and deferential. How are we to pigeonhole “To His Skeleton,” published in The Mind-Reader: New Poems (1976)? Is it light or heavy?

Why will you vex me with These bone-spurs in the ear, With X-rayed phlebolith And calculus? See here,

Noblest of armatures, The grin which bares my teeth Is mine as yet, not yours. Did you not stand beneath

This flesh, I could not stand, But would revert to slime Informous and unmanned; And I may come in time

To wish your peace my fate, Your sculpture my renown. Still, I have held you straight And mean to lay you down

Without too much disgrace When what can perish dies. For now then, keep your place And do not colonize.

The speaker is all surface, which is not a slur. His bones are internal scaffolding, concealed. Cartoonish emblem of death, the skeleton is the structure that enables life. Without our bones, we are “informous and unmanned,” like poems unmindful of meter and rhyme. The speaker admonishes his skeleton to bide his time. Call it graveyard humor with a metaphysical bent. Even a minor Wilbur effort such as “To His Skeleton” feels accomplished. As always, Wilbur is the wizard of rhyme, shoring up his poem and amusing us with music: “with”/“phlebolith,” “stand”/“unmanned.” In an essay he wrote 70 years ago, “The Bottles Become New, Too,” Wilbur says:

The presence of potential rhymes sets the imagination working with the same briskness and license with which a patient’s mind responds to the psychologist’s word-association tests. When a poet is fishing among rhymes, he may and must reject most of the spontaneous reconciliations (and all of the hackneyed ones) produced by trial combinations of rhyming words, and keep in mind the preconceived direction and object of his poem; but the suggestions of rhyme are so nimble and so many that it is an invaluable means to the discovery of poetic raw material which is, in the very best sense, far-fetched.

Note the order in which Wilbur describes composition: “fishing” for rhymes, sorting them, winnowing, rejecting most, all the while remembering the “direction and object” of the poem. A good rhyme isn’t the snap of a lock but a key to open the imagination. The ability to write first-rate poetry, like the gifts for mathematics and music (composition and performance), is a freakishly rare combination of rigor and openness. Few have been so lavishly gifted as Wilbur. Tin-eared critics will dismiss rhyme as handcuffs, something artificial to bind the imagination. On the contrary. When Wilbur likens rhyme to a psychologist’s parlor game, he’s not suggesting repressed memories and the unleashing of buried anguish and guilt. Music goes deeper than that. So melodic are some of Wilbur’s poems, so gracefully arranged, one might be tempted not merely to read his lines but intone them, as in these from “A Black Birch in Winter” (The Mind-Reader: New Poems, 1976): “Old trees are doomed to annual rebirth, / New wood, new life, new compass, greater girth.�� Ella Fitzgerald would sing this bouncily, allegro moderato, with light stress on the nouns.

Wilbur once wrote that poems “should include every resource which can be made to work,” and in his best poems, no motion is wasted. They resemble happy athletes: the flab has been trimmed, the muscles are limber. They move with confidence and strength, and they make it look effortless. Consider one of his Frostian efforts, “Hamlen Brook” (New and Collected Poems, 1987):

Without broadcasting his erudition, Wilbur will often exploit etymological echoes in commonplace words. The stream’s “jet” is “lucid,” an adjective that customarily describes moments of intelligibility in an otherwise confused consciousness; Wilbur musters the original meaning — shining, luminous — in contrast to the “alder-darkened brink.” As he prepares to drink, he sees “[a] startled inchling trout / Of spotted near-transparency.” Its shadow on the stream bottom appears more solid than its translucent body. “[S]liding glass” suggests a specimen on a slide observed through a microscope, with the reflections of dragonflies, birches, and “deep cloudlets” on the surface of the water adding more layers of visual reality. I wonder if Wilbur had in mind an untitled poem by John Keats, written in 1816, known by its first line, “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,” which includes these lines:

[S]warms of minnows show their little heads, Staying their wavy bodies ’gainst the streams, To taste the luxury of sunny beams Temper’d with coolness. How they ever wrestle With their own sweet delight, and ever nestle Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand. If you but scantily hold out the hand, That very instant not one will remain; But turn your eye, and they are there again.

For both poets, creation is bottomless, more than we can hope to understand or even perceive. George Eliot in Daniel Deronda writes: “Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy — in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.” Wilbur adores “solid facts,” but he never deploys them as an end in themselves. His speaker does not drink but asks: “How shall I drink all this?” The final stanza is his answer. The joy-minded — in Wilbur’s case, the attentive and grateful — are “dumbstruck” by nature’s bounty, which slakes our thirst and leaves us thirsty for more. Keats’s rhyming couplets lend a finality to his poem. The minnows, the beams of sunlight, and the speaker’s hand are simply there and raise no questions. “Hamlen Brook” is trickier and more complex. The first and last lines of each stanza rhyme and are written in iambic trimeter. The second and third lines are in iambic tetrameter and iambic pentameter, respectively. The form mirrors the multiple visual layers without quite capturing them. There’s no bottom to this stream.

Wilbur’s other mode is a playfulness that respects readers regardless of their age. He published five volumes of poems for children (“and Others”). Wilbur loved writing limericks, riddles, and jokey verse that never descend into Edward Lear–like nonsense. Even his poems for kids feature a logical hinge in the middle, and they frequently skirt the mythical divide separating poetry and light verse. They exhibit the same regard for clarity and craft as his verse for adults. This poem is from More Opposites (1991), a volume dedicated to the poet’s granddaughter:

The opposite of kite, I’d say, Is yo-yo. On a breezy day You take your kite and let it rise Upon its string into the skies, And then you pull it down with ease (Unless it crashes in the trees). A yo-yo, though, drops down, and then You quickly bring it up again By pulling deftly on its string (If you can work the blasted thing).

Like poets, children revel in that species of logic we might call mock-logic. It differs from nonsense by possessing a superficially orderly appearance, like one of Groucho’s gags, but under the surface you’ll find nothing but ridiculousness. We might think of this as the opposite of Wilbur’s understanding of the world. Chaos, observed with a sufficiently discerning mind, discloses an unlikely and sometimes even beneficent order.

Wilbur founded no poetic school, though imitators abound. His mingling of good manners, masterful technique, and philosophical sophistication is rare and increasingly unfashionable. Wilbur wrote “For Dudley” (Walking to Sleep, 1969) after the death of his friend Dudley Fitts, the poet, teacher, and translator from the Greek. It begins:

Even when death has taken An exceptional man, It is common things which touch us, gathered In the house that proved a hostel.

The speaker is visiting the dead man’s house. On his desk he finds an incomplete sentence, “Not to be finished by us, who lack / His gaiety, his Greek.” The “quick sun” illuminates a chair previously in the dark. Wilbur, as ever, is mindful of light and its absence:

It is the light of which Achilles spoke, Himself a shadow then, recalling The splendor of mere being.

To honor the “exceptional” dead is a sacred trust. Their fate will soon be ours. Light is life. The waiting darkness is patient. Fitts was “brave and loved this world,” as did Wilbur. The poem turns to prayer and concludes:

Yet in the mind as in The shut closet Where his coats hang in black procession, There is a covert muster.

One is moved to turn to him, The exceptional man, Telling him all these things, and waiting For the deft, lucid answer.

At the sound of that voice’s deep Specific silence, The sun winks and fails in the window. Light perpetual keep him.

¤

Patrick Kurp is a writer living in Houston, and the author of the literary blog Anecdotal Evidence.

The post “The Exceptional Man”: Rereading Richard Wilbur appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[junker-town]

These Celtics are so damn fun after such a crushing start

After Gordon Hayward’s horrifying injury in the first game, this team has given fans a reason to hope.

On Monday night I found myself pacing back and forth in my apartment as I plowed through a box of not-that-good almond-flour crackers I’d fished out from the back of my cabinet. I was watching the Celtics play the Hawks, and seeing as I usually only stress-eat during close playoffs, I was approximately 70 games and five months ahead of my Sports Nerves schedule. The Game Anxiety usually only kicks in when there’s a title at stake.

This match-up wasn’t particularly important, but there was something more than just the 11th game of Boston’s season on the line.

For one, the Celtics were on a eight-game winning streak, and the Hawks were keeping them on their toes as they traded off the lead deep into the fourth quarter. There was also electricity, excitement, charm. Kyrie Irving was performing magic tricks on the court, dribbling between his legs, casually tossing rockets with one hand. Jayson Tatum was sinking threes. Jaylen Brown was rebounding.

It was so enjoyable to watch these guys jam. They were turning basketball into the graceful dance it becomes when players are so in step with each other that it looks like they’re moving to music only they can hear.

What I’m trying to say is: There was hope.

Bob DeChiara-USA TODAY Sports

I didn’t feel any of this hope on the NBA season’s opening night when I received a terrible text message from one of my editors. In fact, I felt the opposite of hope (is that dread? Defeat? Doom? Gloom?) as I read the blue bubble on my phone. “Don’t watch the Hayward footage.”

I was on my way back to the bar of my hotel after reporting a story all day. I’d been eager to settle onto one of the leather stools that was slightly cracked from the rotation of transient butts and watch the Celtics play the Cavaliers.

My hometown team’s season was thrilling to think about. I’d loved watching Gordon Hayward, Kyrie, and Tatum when they were in different cities or still in college. After enduring heartbreak when Danny Ainge traded the beloved Isaiah Thomas to Cleveland for Kyrie (even though I was excited to have my favorite flat-earth truther join the squad), I could hardly believe I’d get to see this group of guys play together, all wearing green.

Except that I wouldn’t. As soon as I read that text, I knew something awful had happened. But it was far worse than I imagined; as we all know now, Hayward fractured his tibia in perhaps the most gruesome way possible. (Or so I hear: I took my editor’s advice and still haven’t watched the footage). In mere seconds, the Celtics went from being a promising whole to missing their offseason prize of Hayward, a guy Isaiah helped recruit before he was ripped out of Boston.

I watched the rest of the totally shaken team hold their own and lose in a nail-biter as I ate my sad Ceasar salad. They kept the score close, but there was a cloud of horror hanging over the court for all four quarters. Boston then lost, predictably, the next night to the Bucks.

But then Kyrie put up 21 points and Al Horford had nine rebounds to beat the Sixers. In the next game, Brown scored 23 points and Kyrie had seven assists to beat the Knicks. The Celtics went on to wipe the Bucks’ special home floor with the Bucks themselves, then snag another W against the Heat. After that, they preceded to take down the Spurs, Kings, Thunder, and Magic.

In Hayward’s absence, team leaders have changed from game to game — it hasn’t always been Kyrie who scores the most points (though he often does) or gets the most assists. The top spots rotate between him, Brown, Horford, Marcus Smart. Terry Rozier, Aron Baynes, and Daniel Theis have all been doing work. Tatum has been impressive, already drawing comparisons to Paul Pierce on local broadcasts (take that with a grain of salt: it’s early, and Boston media has been known to, shall we say, get ahead of itself). A group of guys who haven’t played together much, including a very talented rookie, are finding a rhythm.

The point is that these guys are not only cookin’, they’re cookin’ with gas. Gas that seemed to be in short supply on that dark night in Cleveland a month ago.

And as I ate far too many weird, barbecue flavored crackers on Monday, I realized that the reason I was so invested, the reason an early season game against the Hawks had me wearing down my floorboards, was because I had let myself hope. And then the Celtics won, and my hope once again wasn’t dashed.

Do you know how fun that is? It’s so fun! It’s beyond fun! It’s the definition of fun! I found myself thinking in all-caps, “THESE GUYS COULD WIN IT ALL!!!”

Mark D. Smith-USA TODAY Sports

Optimism is a lovely thing. It’s also in short supply these days. I’m not used to having something outside of my control in the big wide world actually go the way I want it to when things seem bad. Even if it’s in the form of a sports team, I’m enjoying drinking from a glass that recently seemed less than half empty (shattered, even), only to find that it actually might be more than half full.

Who knows what will happen in the future. Players are humans, and humans, as Hayward’s injury so cruelly illustrated, are breakable. We learned before the Wednesday night game against the Lakers, for example, that Al Horford won’t play because he’s entered concussion protocol. Even if everyone stays healthy, there are some who think the Celts are outperforming. That this run is all a blip.

It could be. Momentum can come to a screeching halt in sports and in life as quickly as it builds. You can break your leg in the first six minutes of a game. Your pets heads can fall off.

But you know what? You can also watch your favorite team put on a beautiful show and win nine in a row. You can pray that this is a sign of what’s to come for the rest of the season. Sometimes it pans out, sometimes it doesn’t.

No matter what, feeling truly hopeful after you thought you’d entered a hopeless vacuum — even if it’s short-lived — is such a damn delight.

[pamphletstoinspire]

Faith Without Borders

My alarm clock rumbles at 4:30 a.m. It is just barely dark as the sun rises in the Sonoran Desert, about 60 miles south of Tucson, Arizona, and 12 miles north of the United States/Mexico border. The morning could not come soon enough after my night of fitful sleep on a slowly deflating camping pad. I did not use the sleeping bag again; the weather dropped to a stuffy 80 degrees overnight.

I roll out of bed and put on the same threadbare pants, praying that they will hold together for at least one more day and, I hope, the rest of my three-month summer commitment. I open my tent, turning my boots upside down and shaking them. Luckily, there are no scorpions in them this morning.

With my headlamp on, I do the morning chores: water in the large stockpot, water in the gallon pitcher, oatmeal in the pot, and coffee in the pitcher. I look in the kitchen tent for our broken lighter and flick it at the propane stove for several seconds. The heat from the flames is another unwelcome reminder that it is only going to get hotter today. Someone said that it will get up to 115 degrees this week. I tune my banjo and play as loudly as I can, walking around the camp.

Another 20 young volunteers roll out of their sleeping bags, tents, or the back of the truck where they have been sleeping. We all meet 20 minutes later at the plastic folding tables next to the kitchen tent. As volunteers with No Más Muertes (No More Deaths), a humanitarian-aid organization whose mission is to “end death and suffering in the desert,” we are the only group that has a medical camp right in the middle of the main migration corridor to the United States.

With bowls of oatmeal and large cups of coffee in hand, we begin again the conversation that we have been having all summer.

“When was the last time people went to Ruby East?”

“Three days ago.”

“How about Apache?”

“How much water did we bring there last time?”

“Twenty-five gallons, I think. And about eight cans of beans.”

“We saw a lot of footprints at Murphy’s Well last week.”

“What about Deadman’s Drop?”

“We only found slashed water bottles there.”

“Did you bring them up the trail, up that really steep hill? Border Patrol won’t climb that high; you could try putting the bottles up there.”

In this conversation I have yet another surreal moment, which seems to make up the majority of my summer. This group of 20 idealistic volunteers is responsible for trying to save the starving, dehydrated, and injured masses migrating north through the unforgiving Sonoran Desert.

Thirty minutes later, the day’s work is decided. Four groups will go out on “patrols” and “water runs.” Three people will stay back to monitor the patients in camp and to give the “Know Your Rights” talk. We also need to monitor patients’ blood pressures.

Doctors working with No More Deaths in Tucson are worried that the 50-year-old couple staying in camp may have ruined their kidneys’ ability to filter blood. Out here, you need to drink a gallon of water a day to keep your body working. They were both in the desert for three days without food or water.

We leave camp in large, scraped, bent, loud, old, and awesome four-wheel-drive trucks. Each is loaded down with tired volunteers, hiking packs, lunches, crates of beans, medical packs, and about 50 one-gallon jugs of water. For the next 90 minutes, we drive over dirt roads that I would feel uncomfortable walking over. We listen to an old cassette by John Prine. We pass one or two locals driving into town and about eight white-and-green Border Patrol “dogcatcher” trucks. Instead of a bed in the back, they have a low-ceilinged box, with bars for windows. We drive through yellow mountains, yellow not with sand but with blooming Mexican poppies.

Our GPS tells us we are in the right place. We all hop off the truck, load ourselves with as much water as we can carry, and then throw in cans of beans. We follow our GPS down a hill and into a ravine. My thighs are burning; my knees feel abnormally shaky underneath 8 gallons of water and my med pack. I am blinking twice as fast to keep the sweat out of my eyes, and I realize not five minutes later that my shirt is once again soaked in sweat.

We carefully enter a ravine, which makes me regret carrying 64 pounds of water. At the bottom of the ravine, I see the most beautiful sight I have seen all summer in this magnificent and deadly desert: 30 empty gallons of water and 25 empty cans of beans!

In the watertight bucket that once held packets of food and socks is a note scribbled on the back of a bus ticket to northern Mexico. It reads, “Thank you and God bless you very much.”

Reuniting with Families in the US

Scattered throughout this desert are the relics of the journey: valleys filled with empty water bottles, ravines littered with sweatshirts, fields strewn with backpacks. In the midst of this debris, in the midst of all this suffering, are islands of shrines. A small cluster of old candles surrounds the sun-tinted picture of Jesucristo y La Virgen, whose serene, saintly eyes follow you as you walk by.

Above a discarded black pair of jeans on a lowly mesquite tree hangs a wooden crucifix; its dying Christ blends in with the gnarled and thorny branches. Taking hope from the fact that their Savior, too, was lost in the desert and also migrated to a new and better home, most of those traveling find hope in their deep faith.

“Vaya con Dios” (“Go with God”) we write on the gallons of water we leave behind. We write this not to convert, but to affirm the attitude already held by those crossing.

The most conservative estimates show that at least 500 people a year die in this desert, on the US side of the fence. Since 1994, our country has been pushing people out of the cities, off the roads, and into the bleak, burning desert.

Over 20 years later, the reality of the border is changing. We are not closing our borders to drug smugglers, job stealers, or terrorists. We are closing them on those trying to go back to their lives in the United States.

According to a survey of those recently deported to Nogales, Mexico, the average person deported has lived in the United States for more than 14 years and has two to three children still living in the states (70 percent of those children are citizens). Of those interviewed, 70 percent said they would continue to cross the border until they make it back to their families.

The trip into the United States consists of a three-day hike (usually done at night and running) and about $3,000 paid to a coyote (human trafficker) who will leave you for dead if you lag behind or kidnap you if you are unable to pay.

If you are caught, Border Patrol will—91 percent of the time—either hit you; deny you food, water, and medical care; take your belongings; or mentally abuse you for the 48 hours you spend with them (cultureofcruelty.org). After this, some of those held will go to court and spend up to six months in the worst jails in the country. Even so, the human spirit survives. Still, people make the journey for their children, spouse, family, and almost never for their own sake.

One Couple’s Story

I first met the 50-year-old man and woman a couple of hours after they arrived in camp. Having been lost in the desert for three days without food or water, they had incurred significant kidney damage, and we were advised to monitor their vital signs every 15 minutes to make sure they did not go into shock. By the time it was my turn to monitor them, they were tired of being constantly prodded and squeezed by inexperienced EMTs. The woman avoided eye contact and nodded politely when I asked her if I could take her blood pressure. Unable to interact with my poor Spanish, they sat silently as I tried to count their breaths per minute.

An exceptional cook, she had a much stricter standard for cleanliness than most of my fellow volunteers. When another patient walked into camp, she made an excellent bedside nurse, though in need herself, giving water and attention to a man who had been lost for a week.

Her husband, a mechanic by trade, was shocked at the lack of maintenance we gave to our over-worn trucks. Through lots of patient pointing and hand gestures, we worked on the trucks together. He taught me how to replace a flat tire.

They had been living in Florida and have a 7-year-old daughter, who is a US citizen. After they were deported to Guatemala, their country of origin, they could not return to the United States legally for 15 years. Determined to be with their daughter, they wrote living wills for each other, talked to family about who could take care of their daughter if both of them died in the journey, and forged Mexican citizenship papers.

The journey from Guatemala to Mexico alone is as deadly as the trip into the United States. Because they knew that they probably would not make it on their first try, they were ready to keep trying again and again. We met them during their second attempt.

After a week eating her cooking and fixing cars with him, it was time for all three of us to head north. I needed to go back into Tucson to shower and take a break from the heat, and they had decided that if they stayed longer it would increase their likelihood of being captured by Border Patrol. We left camp at the same time, me driving the truck that he helped fix, and they on foot. While I drove through the hot, dark desert, they were apprehended and deported back to Nogales.

A Unique Perspective

One of the miraculous things about the desert is its ability to cut through all of our preconceived notions about “the immigration issue.” Theories about free trade, border militarization, and national security no longer seem relevant when you meet someone who has been lost without food, water, or shoes for a week. There is one truth given to us from the desert: we are killing our neighbors. We are killing our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Daniel Wilson holds a bachelor of science degree from Winona State University in Minnesota and works at the Catholic Worker house in that city and as a day laborer.