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creppersfunpalooza · 10 months ago

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Caught

CW/TW: drugs, mentions of addiction, vian. just generally vian, quick implications of dehumanization, lab stuff, mentions of corpses, self-experimentation

hi guys i actually wrote something. rare. shocking. limited edition…. (in the sense that i will probably delete it if i decide i hate it later)

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Silence is like a poorly fitting shoe. It’s uncomfortable at first, but you eventually grow into it. Dr. Venstal was used to working in silence. He was familiar with it. He’d even go as far as to say he usually preferred it. It let him concentrate. No frivolous distractions. Cadavers are very quiet. Amazing listeners, but generally speaking, they don’t have any words of their own.

But in that dimly lit office, the silence brought him no comfort. It hung in the air like cigarette smoke, coating over and sticking to everything it could. It didn’t help that his boss’s eyes were boring into his with an uncomfortable intensity. He couldn’t figure out what the man was thinking. Both that and the palpable tension in the air caused his throat to swell.

“Do you want to tell me what you were doing?” His boss was the first to speak, as was expected. His expression was completely neutral. An impartial judge waiting to determine his fate, no doubt. It didn’t reassure him.

“I…” The doctor started, but he swallowed down the words before they left his mouth. “I don’t know.” Feigning ignorance. It wouldn’t get him anywhere, he knew that, but it was the only thing he could think to do. At this moment, he was neither innocent nor guilty. He could still plead his case.

The man across the desk sighed and slid an ampule forward. The label was written neatly in Vian’s handwriting. The vial itself was partially empty, with only a few pearls of clear liquid sloshing around inside the glass. Vian bit down on his lip. He hoped the coppery taste would be enough to keep him grounded.

“Well, I just… Wanted to try something. I don’t exactly have people lining up to test these sorts of things.” He murmured, pressing against the couch. The wood frame creaked beneath him.

His boss rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Dr. Venstal, you know I trust you. I need you to do the same for me. I’m not firing you, and I doubt I will. Just tell me what you were thinking.” He sighed, gently placing the vial to the side.

“As you know, I have a hobby of developing medicines.” The doctor started, fiddling with his hands just out of view. “And, well, I can’t test those on anyone. I’m not authorized to do so.”

“And you thought your best option was using yourself?” Incredulousness hung heavy in his voice. “Do you realize how wrong that is? How much was at stake?” The rabbit’s judgment was clear. Painfully so. Of course Vian knew the consequences, he had a brain. It wasn’t as if he’d done it on a whim.

“I do, I’ve considered the risks. I just… Figured the results would outweigh the suffering. I see my mistake now. I shouldn’t have put myself in danger.” He replied with artificial sincerity. This situation was terrible, but not as bad as it could have been. He could salvage it. Best case scenario, he’d keep his job, get a small reprimanding, and maybe be monitored for a few days. Perhaps if he played his cards right, he could even gain a test subject from this whole ordeal. There were plenty of candidates, they just weren’t accessible to him.

His boss smiled. A good sign. “I’m glad to hear that, Dr. Venstal. I understand what you were trying to do, really I do. It’s very admirable, but we can’t have you risking yourself. You’re too important.” He spoke softly. There was something wrong about the way his tone changed. He’d been so professional just a moment prior. “But… We’re not done here.”

Vian wracked his brain. What else was there to speak of? He hadn’t left anything incriminating behind. Nothing that would be out of place, anyway. He’d hidden his tracks well. Paranoia crept into the edges of his brain, trickling into the little bends and folds of his mind.

“I searched your office. I found a concerning amount of opioids. Ones you’ve made, and ones that I can only assume you’ve also been… testing.” Oh. that. He hadn’t really expected him to notice. After all, it wasn’t really uncommon for someone in his field. Still, it didn’t look good for him. He didn’t have a proper way to respond.

In full honesty, he rarely tested anything addictive on himself. If he had to, he made sure to space it out. Instead, he turned to his patients for that. People who could be easily monitored as long as they stayed in the sanctuary. It had been harmless so far, only causing a few long-term drug dependencies. Nothing serious, just faults of the patient not being able to overcome the initial craving. He couldn’t exactly explain that to his boss though, not without being put away. He didn’t want to lie to him about drug addiction of all things, but what other choice did he have? Going to jail?

He steeled his nerves and responded.

“Well, yes, but I haven’t done anything like that for weeks. You can test my blood, if you need to.” He felt ashamed for admitting to an action he hadn’t even committed, but by the sympathetic expression on his boss’s face, he knew he’d made the right choice.

The man set his hands on the desk, adjusting the cuffs of his sleeves. “Thank you for being honest with me. This must be a very sensitive topic for you, but I hope you understand that I can’t just let this continue.” He took a deep breath before revealing his verdict. “I think it would help if you got some fresh air. Working yourself to death in that office isn’t doing you any favors. You’ll also need to retake your psychological evaluation, and I’ll be recommending you a therapist.” He spoke with a reformed sense of professionalism. Vian was a bit surprised by how mild all of this was. Was that really it?

“You’re dismissed, A7. I’m looking forward to seeing your improvement.”

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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“I never thought that in an American city in 2014 it would be illegal to stand still,” DeRay Mckesson writes in his new book, On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope. Mckesson, an activist, is referring to the “five-second rule” — created and enforced by some police officers in mid-August 2014, days after protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager.

The rule, which meant that no one could stay still in the streets for more than five seconds, was a tactic used to handle the massive group of protesters, and was later deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge.

Protesting in Ferguson marked the beginning of Mckesson’s public involvement in activism. Starting in August 2014, it was his “role to record and interpret as much as possible,” which translated into his position as a Twitter activist documenting what was happening on the ground in St. Louis for the rest of the world — he now has more than a million followers — and a spokesperson for Black Lives Matter.

The protests sparked Mckesson’s commitment to activism. As a result of his role, he has been teargassed, sued by law enforcement, and surveilled by private companies hired by city governments, he writes. A movie theater was even evacuated after Mckesson received a death threat.

While perhaps best known as an activist for Black Lives Matter, Mckesson has also been an educator and a mayoral candidate for the city of Baltimore in 2016 — he finished sixth — and he currently hosts a podcast for Pod Save America’s media offshoot Crooked Media. His book is part manifesto, part memoir, and part guide to activism.

I spoke to Mckesson about his views on how to improve policing and his advice for a new generation of activists, among other topics.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Hope Reese

You write about the “five-second rule” as an example of how “law in practice is never neutral, that it can change at the whim of those in power.” How did you observe the law changing?

DeRay Mckesson

Most people don’t even remember the “five-second rule,” but for those of us who were there, it was a defining part of what that experience was like. It showed me how fragile all of this is — that literally in the middle of the night, the police made up a new rule, they enforced it vigorously, and we had to go to court to get it overturned. [It was called “unconstitutional” by a federal judge] three months later. What I’ve lived, and what I saw with my own eyes, is that laws can be changed at the whim of anybody in power. And that was real.

But if they can redo the tax code on the back of NAFTA, my takeaway is that we can actually do this stuff really quickly too. Part of the imagination and part of our work is to say, we should ask for all of it at once. We can end mass-incarceration in my lifetime — this doesn’t have to be a 60-year solution. We can actually move this pretty quickly, because I’ve seen them move other things pretty quickly as well.

Hope Reese

Before heading to Ferguson, you wrote about seeing differing narratives of what was going on there on TV versus what you saw on Twitter — and you wanted to see for yourself what was happening. Can you describe what it looked like when you got there? Which account was more representative?

DeRay Mckesson

Twitter was definitely the representative account. The first night I was in St. Louis, I was out on the streets and got tear-gassed. That changed everything. I guess I didn’t know. I had never been in a situation like that where there were just so many police. So many protesters saying to the police, “No, we’re not going to let you act like this didn’t happen; we’re not going to let you forget about it.” And that changed everything for me.

Hope Reese

Can you talk more about Twitter, as someone who recorded the events via Twitter throughout the protests and after? What can Twitter do for activists? What are its limitations?

DeRay Mckesson

I’ve seen the best and worst of Twitter. A person who was never permanently banned from the platform was banned for trying to arrange to have me killed. I’ve seen the power of Twitter to create space for people where it didn’t exist before. So all of those things have been really important in the way I think about the platform.

I think a few things: One, as somebody who has a big platform, I’m not convinced we’re designed to get that much feedback. The second is that it does allow us to build communities just that much quicker in a way that was impossible before. And the third is that the online work doesn’t replace the offline work, but complements it.

Hope Reese

What about the flip side? That Twitter is a platform used for organizing for white supremacists and Nazis?

DeRay Mckesson

You know, some of it is that bad people are coming to the platform — it’s not like the platform is making everybody bad. I do think it creates a system for [groups like] white supremacists who didn’t know each other before. Platforms like this allow them to build a community, and I think that is bad.

Creators need to understand their responsibility to ensure that their platforms aren’t places where those communities thrive. It’s still early in understanding the power of social media to change the world. I think that Twitter is probably a little bit better at it than Facebook, but all the platforms have a lot of work to do.

Hope Reese

You’ve invested a lot of time investigating what is happening in police departments across the country, trying to create transparency. In the book, you write that “policing, as we know it, is the wrong response to the challenges of conflicts that we experience.” Can you describe why it’s wrong and how we can address it?

DeRay Mckesson

Police continue to kill a lot of people. You think 100 ago, doctors were draining the blood out of people and calling that “health care.” That didn’t work. That was a bad solution to real problems around illness.

These police departments, we put a lot of money into them, and they are solving very little, if any, crimes, and they are inflicting pain and damaging communities. It’s not controversial to say those things are true. You think about a police department like Baltimore where they’re the eighth-largest police department in the country and have a whole lot of money and not a whole lot of results.

So the question becomes: What would it look like to invest that money into prevention? All these crimes of poverty we can impact; poverty is not a thing that has to exist. If anything, we should be figuring out how to police the white men who are walking into Madden tournaments and shooting people. That’s not a crime of poverty. That is depravity, and I don’t know what we’re doing about that at a system level, but we sure are locking up people for marijuana at a record level. We arrest more people for weed than all violent crimes combined.

I wanna believe we can think about a response to safety that doesn’t say people need to be in cages and that doesn’t criminalize people for being poor.

Hope Reese

How can the police begin to address the issue? Training, hiring? Culture change?

DeRay Mckesson

When there just is no accountability baked in, it doesn’t matter how well you train people if they know that if they do something different, they won’t be held accountable. Which is why we sent off police unit contracts and use-of-force policies — those really are the biggest levers. If you change the underlying structures of accountability, all the other stuff actually becomes important. But without changing the structure, the other stuff is just a dressing on a window.

Hope Reese

You’ve been an activist for Black Lives Matter since its inception — and over the last five years, there’s been a renewed interest in activism from a younger generation, like the Parkland activists. What advice do you have for people who are getting started doing this work?

DeRay Mckesson

The greatest challenge is that sometimes the system change isn’t as quick as you want it to be — which doesn’t mean that it’s not on the horizon. So when the work is hard, do the work. That has been true for me. If there’s anything I see people struggling with the most, it’s knowing that you have the permission and power to imagine. That you should be thinking about what a new system of safety looks like that isn’t the police. You should be thinking about how we can rethink public education.

All of you have the power to do that. You can put these things out into the public conversation. So much in the way people think about social action is about fighting against all the bad stuff. But once all the bad stuff ends, we still gotta build the good stuff.

Hope Reese

What does Black Lives Matter look like under the Trump administration?

DeRay Mckesson

When the protest began that birthed a movement in 2014, what we focused on were on issues of accountability, injustice — and most importantly in that moment, it was about awareness. How do we make sure people are talking about an issue they’d rather not talk about? I think we forced it. But it was in the context of an administration that was at least willing to be pushed — even if they didn’t always agree.

This administration just doesn’t care. I think there’s a big change happening in all of activism right before and after Trump. I supported Hillary [Clinton] publicly, and there are people who said we were sellouts for doing that. There are people who said that the president doesn’t make an impact on anybody’s life. But that was a wrong analysis. The president actually has a huge impact in ways that people hadn’t even considered before, and I think people see that [now].

We’ve seen a shift to more people saying we have to be as organized on the inside as we are on the outside. That that has to be important. That we can’t just be fighting the people in seats of power; we actually have to be the people in the seats of power.

Hope Reese

What’s a current issue that you don’t think is getting enough attention?

DeRay Mckesson

I think a lot of issues lack attention. Think about the racial wealth gap — it’s getting more public coverage than it’s ever gotten. But the questions about what we do about it are still not very public. Like, what are the myths and fallacies of about how to attack the racial wealth gap? I wish we had more conversations about that.

I also don’t think that we talk enough about oral health, especially in low-income communities and rural communities. And how do we fix foster care across the country? There’s no cure for lead, so how do we think about not just Flint, but all the communities like Flint that people don’t know about?

There is a laundry list of issues I think about often that we’ve not yet figured out how to address.

Hope Reese is a journalist in Louisville, Kentucky. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, Playboy, Vox, and other publications. Find her on Twitter @hope_reese.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at [email protected].

Original Source -> DeRay Mckesson on Trump-era activism: “We can’t just be fighting the people in seats of power”

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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danithebookaholic-blog · 7 years ago

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A Book You Picked Solely Because of the Cover

The Fallen: The Fallen and Leviathan

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

This week’s suggestion on the Pinterest Reading Challenge is to pick a book solely based on its cover. So, I looked through my collection of books that I’ve gathered up through the years and thought to myself, “Hum… what looks good?”

With this week’s suggestion, I didn’t have the full pleasure of “judging a book based on its cover”—because I am trying to go through the hundreds of books that I already have—I’ve read all the synopses on their covers before. But I did make myself pick through a selection of books based on a few guidelines: the book couldn’t be a movie or TV show, it couldn’t be a classic that everyone knows the gist of the story line, and it couldn’t be one that I’ve been itching to get my hands on. I made myself look through the ones that I haven’t looked at for a while, the ones that were bought on a whim, written by someone I’ve never heard of before, or given to me from someone who reads genres that I’m not that into. This week I was going to make sure it was something different for me… Or so I thought.

Looking solely at the covers of the books I had collected—a couple fantasy, several YA and children’s chapter books (I don’t know why I gravitate to these so much!), a mystery, and a memoir—I kept coming back to the same one over and over. A black and white photograph of a lone figure with the title written in red. The lighting in the photograph had the lone figure highlighted in all the right places—the contours of his face and muscular arm—this alone will have you thinking to yourself that this must be some kind of romance novel, a spinoff of a harlequin perhaps and this will catch the females of the audience and make them want to pick it up. But romance novels are not my thing, so that is not what caught my attention. It was the dark angelic wing protruding from his back, and with a title of The Fallen, I couldn’t help myself but to pick it.

Some History:

The Fallen: The Fallen and Leviathan is a Young Adult read. It was originally published in 2003 and reprinted in 2010 with the new above picture on the cover. It is book one of five in The Fallen series, and it turns out it was also made into an ABC Family movie, Fallen, in 2006. (Oops! So much for those guidelines I made for myself!)

The Synopsis:

***SPOILER ALERT***

I wrote this review a little different than usual. I’m not sure why, other than this is how it came out, and I apologize that it 1) reads a bit like a school book report, and 2) does give away some of the ending.

Aaron Corbet is a child of the foster care system and has finally found a foster family who he regards as his mom, dad and his brother, Stevie. On his eighteenth birthday he can suddenly understand and speak languages of all kinds even though he’s had no education in them. On top of that, he comes across a “homeless” man who begins following Aaron, telling him about his troubled past and the future that is to come: Aaron is Nephilim—the son of a mortal and an angel—and he has been chosen to redeem the Fallen.

The angel Verchiel is the master of the Powers and a Messenger of God. His duty is to cleanse the earth of the filth that the Fallen have produced upon the earth: Nephilim. Using his human hounds and divine senses he tracks down Nephilim and purges them from the earth. The Nephilim he’s currently hunting is Aaron Corbet.

With the help of Zeke, the Grigori, Camael of the Fallen, and his best friend Gabriel, Aaron transforms into the Nephilim he is, and not a minute too late: Verchiel has finally found him and is ready to purge his filth from the earth. A battle ensues and Aaron turns out to be more powerful than Verchiel originally thought. Aaron injures Verchiel, who flees, taking Stevie with him. Now Aaron must not only fulfil the prophecy, but find his brother before Verchiel turns him into one of his human hounds.

Aaron and his posse begin a road trip in search of Stevie, with a powerful pull toward Blythe, Maine. Along the way they encounter a group of Orishas, another product the Fallen have created. However, the Orishas are ruled by Verchiel, who has bestowed the mission of killing Aaron upon them, but they don’t succeed. Only one Orishas remains, and before fleeing it gets a small revenge and bites Gabriel.

Arriving in Blythe, they find Gabriel a doctor to treat the infected Orishas bite, but the townsfolk here are a little strange: they look suspicious of everyone and act as if they’re being controlled. That is everyone but Dr. Katie McGovern, who later tells Aaron that she, too, is an outsider, new to town. She came to town because her ex-boyfriend, Dr. Kevin Wessell, had e-mailed her with a strange request that she visit, but when she got to town he was missing and hadn’t been in to see his patients for days.

Katie enlists the help of Aaron around the office until Kevin hopefully returns, but after finding several strangely mutated animals in Kevin’s freezer, she begins to think that Kevin may have dug up some dirt on the town that someone didn’t want him finding out. Katie and Aaron agree that they need to find out what’s going on around the town and try to find Kevin, but the mission is doomed from the beginning when Katie turns up missing herself. Aaron begins the mission alone, only to find himself in the lair of Leviathan, “that spark of uncertainty in the Creator’s thoughts as He forged the world—that brief moment of chaos—before Genesis.”

Leviathan, a great sea monster, entraps its victims by making their mind’s eye see whatever paradise it wishes to see, then swallows them whole and lives off the life force stored inside them. Aaron finds that both Camael and Gabriel are in Leviathan’s stomachs, and knows that in order to save them he must overcome his fear of letting the Nephilim power within him out and do the one thing the Archangel Gabriel could not: destroy Leviathan.

Aaron defeats Leviathan and frees all those within Leviathan’s stomachs including his friends and the Archangel Gabriel. Aaron then fulfills the prophecy and forgives the Fallen who are found within Leviathan’s many stomachs and sends them to their Heavenly home. But before The Archangel Gabriel ascends he gives Aaron another hint about the prophecy he is fulfilling and a wink of information about who his real father is.

The Fallen concludes with the townspeople of Blythe, Maine being released from their captor’s control, Katie and Kevin reunited, and Aaron with a lot of questions: Who is his real father? What does his father have to do with the prophecy? And where is Stevie?

The Review:

The Pros:

Of course, I liked The Fallen, it’s right up my alley (so much for breaking out of my habits and trying something new!) First, it’s a YA read, so you know I’m hooked there.

Second, it’s a present-day mythology just like the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan or The Mortal Instruments and Shadowhunter series by Cassandra Clare, both of which I’m a big fan of. To take a myth—and I use this word to group together the whole, so please you Christians out there don’t hate on me for using this word, I’m a Christian, too! —but to take a myth such as angels or Greek gods and to create a new story for them is awesome! You’re taking those classics that a lot of people don’t read any more because they find them boring or too difficult to understand and are making them readily available to today’s societies so that Genesis, Matthew, Luke, Homer and Sophocles are getting a new—and usually younger—generation to ignite and share their stories again.

Third, something that I found that set The Fallen apart from most YA books was the language. I, myself, don’t have the best vocabulary by any means (I should have listened to my mother and studied for those vocabulary tests!), but I have grown my knowledge and understanding over the years, and this book still had me looking up words in the dictionary (or rather dictionary.com, yay technology!) I like that about a book! I like that while I’m reading for pleasure I’m still learning things. I don’t think that everything should be dumbed down so everyone in the general population can understand it. I think you should always be learning something and improving on yourself, and if that means you must get a dictionary out to understand what’s happening in the storyline then that’s great! You learned something in the process; you made yourself better and had a better experience because of it!

The Cons:

Aaron Corbet is a little fake. He’s too good and not moody enough to be a teenage boy and a child of the foster system who has just found out that he’s this mythological creature. In the beginning, you’re told that he has a troubled past, that he was moved from foster home to foster home, but the person sitting in front of you is polite, never causes a stir, and when he does have an emotional outbreak of some kind its abbreviated and almost void of emotion. Almost like his outburst were an afterthought, like Thomas Sniegoski’s editor said, “Hey, don’t you think he would be a little upset that this is happening?” The lack of emotion he shows when someone he loves is hurt or killed is the biggest one for me. He doesn’t cry, he doesn’t get angry and yell, he just tells himself that he can’t believe that they are hurt or dead. I understand shellshock, but I think this is a bit more than just that. Aaron is not fleshed out enough to be a real person, but then again, I guess he really isn’t, after all he is Nephilim.

My other qualm with The Fallen is defeat is too easy. With each battle scene—if you can really call them that—the fight was ended really before it began. These are some big monsters he’s going up against, and yet I saw how the end of each battle was going to play out from the moment they started. There was no adrenaline rush of “is he going to make it?” in any of the battle scenes. From the beginning, you knew he was going to be just fine and good would prevail over evil once again.

The Wrap-Up:

Overall, I enjoyed The Fallen. I thought it was a great storyline with a good mystery: I want to know who Aaron’s father is myself! Who is this—as Camael puts it— “angel of formidable power to have sired one like [Aaron]?" ? And does he ever find Stevie? All the questions Aaron has at the end of the book are questions I have too, which is a sign of a good story. The author has you hooked to make you want to pick up that next book. Which I plan on doing just that!

From one wine-loving bookaholic to another, I hope I’ve helped you find your next fix. —Dani

Love this book? Check out The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare or one of her many other Shadowhunter series.

Pair it with: Lost Angel’s 2016 Mischief—Fruit-forward and jammy, with hints of cocoa.

Not all good wines are expensive, and this one is just that: good, easy on the wallet and fits with the trouble that Aaron gets himself into.

Start a conversation: What book have you chosen based solely on its cover and why? Was it worth the gamble?

Have a book you’d like to suggest or one you’d like me to review? Please feel free to leave your comments down below.

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