#it was five hundred seventy fucking dollars

[martinshep]

I bought a cooling vest lets fucking go hopefully now I won't die in the summer heat

[martyrbat]

just fully got done with jury duty ^_^

[yuwuta]

JUST KEEP LOVING ME THE WAY I LOVE YOU LOVING ME — SATORU GOJO

pairings. satoru gojo/reader

content, warnings. non-curse au, doctor au (reader), ceo au (satoru), no real content warnings, fluff, satoru is nothing but a romantic at heart

word count. 3k

notes. this exists in the post-completion au of a larger universe/incomplete fic of mine, that i will hopefully finish someday lololol but this is way easier to write than that so here you go 🥳

“There are four chairs worth a collective seventy-five hundred dollars in this office, so, pray, tell, why is your ass on my desk?” 

Satoru grins at your words, too distracted by taking in the sight of you to take into consideration the underlying threat. It’s been far too long, almost three whole days since he’s last seen you and, god, you look good. He knows if he said that you’d roll your eyes and insist that there’s nothing good-looking about your worn-in business attire and lab coat that was in desperate need of laundering, but it wouldn’t change his opinion: you always look good, and Satoru really fucking missed you. 

Which is why he doesn’t say the words, but makes sure to throw a deceivingly charming wink your way so that you get the message anyway. As expected, you still roll your eyes, but he doesn’t mind; you look good doing that, too.

“Seriously, Satoru, what are you doing here?” you question, closing the door behind you when you fully step into the room. You make pace towards your desk, attempting to get to the other side, but this is exactly why Satoru chose to lean against it instead of sitting on any one of your very expensive and comfortable chairs—because this way, he’s in the perfect position to intercept your path and pull you to fit neatly between his legs before you can even think about reaching your office chair and ignoring him. 

He pulls you by the loop of your lab coat, but his hands quickly find their way to your shoulders, unpeeling the white layer just enough so that your blouse is exposed to him, and he can slowly rub his palms against your arms and shoulders with just enough pressure to hopefully release some tension. You won’t let go of all of it, but that’s alright, because Satoru’s got other methods for taking care of you.

“Hi,” he calls, smiling gently down at you, “I missed you.” 

This close, Satoru can see the exhaustion clearly in your eyes. There’s more, too: frustration, guilt, worry—and it takes everything in him not to coo and pull you into his chest and do his best to shield you from the world forever. 

There’s a beat before you speak, a small sigh, that’s quickly painted over with a tired smile and a remorseful, “I missed you, too. I’m sorry for being so short, the interim chief has been getting on my last nerves, and—”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Satoru cuts in, leaning forward to press a reassuring kiss to your forehead. He likes that he can feel you relax under his touch. “I know you’re busy. I just missed you.” 

It’s not easy to share you with anything or anyone, but Satoru knows that even on the hardest days, you love your job, and that so many people need your brilliant mind. What he does mind is when people make your job harder than it needs to be, and he’s been getting an earful about this new interim chief from just about everybody—you, Kento, Yuuji, Ieiri, even some of your favorite scrub nurses have indulged him in the gossip about the newest common enemy—and he doesn’t appreciate that someone is putting extra stress on his baby. So, even if it is a makeshift massage in your office and distracting you from your paperwork, Satoru will do what he can to help you relieve tension. 

You reach your arms to wrap them around his shoulders, taking a half step closer to him, peering up at him. Satoru loves when your arms are around his neck like this; he can’t quite pinpoint why—maybe it’s the way you have to crane your neck to look up at him, the way you’re perfectly nestled under his view, the feeling of being wrapped in you. He does his best to close the loop of your intimacy, resting his hands on the small of your back and pulling you impossibly closer and pressing a kiss to your forehead. He likes that he can feel you relax into his touch.

“You’re sweet,” you smile, rubbing your thumb against the shorter hairs at the back of his head. Satoru feels himself melt into you, too. It’s been too long since you’ve been this close, three whole days too long. “Thank you.”

“Nothing to thank me for, baby,” he smiles, stealing a gentle kiss. Satoru loves this the most, loves the feeling of your lips on his—and it’s definitely been too long since he’s kissed you, so he makes sure to do it again, and once more after that for good measure. 

But it’s not enough. He’ll have to take you home, sit you on the couch so he can kiss you all night and make up for the lack of kisses and touches and youness he’s been deprived of these past few days. But first, he’ll have to pull you away from your work, and that’s not easy work. 

“Come home,” he muses, leaning his forehead against yours, “We can order in, and share your favorite bottle of wine, and watch a movie.” 

You lean up to kiss him briefly. “Every time we share a bottle of wine, we end up making out and not watching anything.” 

“Do we?” Satoru feigns innocence, “I never noticed. Doesn’t sound like a bad idea, though.”

“Satoru,” you whisper, quiet but firm, with a smile that lets him know you want to, but you can’t. It’s a tone that Satoru knows all too well, and isn’t particularly fond of. “I have charts to finish.” 

“Finish them tomorrow,” he steals another kiss, “Or pawn them off on Kento,” another kiss, “Or Yuuji. Residents always need more experience—isn’t that what you and Ieiri always say?” 

You let him kiss you again, and again, and again. Each time a little longer, a little warmer, a little less innocent than the last, growing from a little, to a lot, to all-consuming. Satoru hums when he feels your nails raking through his hair; an unfortunate move, as the sound pulls you back to reality and away from him in a decrescendo of kisses. 

“You’re really good at that,” you laugh, voice soft. 

“At kissing?” Satoru dips his head down to taste your laughter against his lips, “Thanks, I’ve had a lot of practice with a very pretty girl.” 

“No,” and you’re laughing again, louder this time, and Satoru counts every little giggle as a victory, “You’re good at... seducing me without saying you’re seducing me.”

“Oh, that?” he grins, tucking his pointer and index finger under your chin to meet you in a knowing kiss, “Yeah, that’s a talent of mine, too.”

You let him steal one more, and Satoru doesn’t take it for granted. “Come home,” he whispers against your lips before slotting them in yet another kiss, “I miss you.” 

And he can feel it when you finally break, sighing into the kiss, and melting into his touch completely. One more, he just needs one more kiss to seal the deal, and then—“Fine,” you concede, “But I get to choose where to get dinner from.” 

“Of course, sweets, whatever you want,” Satoru grins, pulling back to kiss your forehead again, “Now—shall we? If we order in the car, we can probably pick it up on our way home.”

He’s in the home stretch now, but he’s not completely free: if you catch a glimpse of your work, or someone comes in to find you, or your godforsaken pager beeps then all of his plans could come crumbling down before him. The key to transitioning from the “you’ve agreed to come home with him early stage”—if you can count 9:45pm, coming off of a 17-hour work day as early—to the “we are actually leaving this hospital and nobody can stop us phase” is swiftness. This time period is critical, and Satoru is ready for the sprint. 

He shimmies your lab coat all the way off of your body for you, checking for the weight of your pager in your right pocket, before hanging it on the back of your chair. He shoos you to grab your coat, and makes sure you don’t get within three feet of this side of your desk—taking your purse out of your locked drawer and closing an open file folder in the time it takes you to slip out of your heels and into your sneakers, and by the time you’re turning back around, Satoru is already there next to you, with your purse in one hand, and his other hovering on the light switch. 

He makes sure you’re out the door first, and flickers off the light with a satisfied grin. His baby was coming home early with him, and there is nothing else he’d rather do than spend time pampering you. 

You must truly be more tired than you know, because you make no protest when he slings an arm over your shoulder on your way out of the elevator. Usually, you chastise him for any PDA within hospital walls, but tonight you let it be, even leaning some of your body weight against his as you walk. Satoru’s not complaining at all, maybe he’ll try his luck and sneak a kiss on your cheek. 

He decides to go for it, leaning over for a kiss, when you suddenly pull away, turning and patting against your side. Confused, and disappointed, Satoru pouts, “We’ve really got to work on this fear of affection you’ve got going on, sweets. It’s the leading cause of makesatorupout-itis.” 

“We’ve been over this—you can’t just add “itis” to the end of your words to make them diagnostic,” you giggle, “I was looking for my keys.”

Satoru’s frown deepens. “You have the fancy reserved doctor parking space, they can’t tow you. So, we can take my car home.” 

“No, we cannot, because I do not trust you to wake up and drive me back tomorrow morning.” 

“Then I’ll get you a cab in the morning, or—even better, I’ll call Ichiji to pick you up.” 

“Ichiji is still in Paris,” you remind him. Satoru purses his lips. He did ask Ichiji to stay with Megumi. Damn it.

“I have other cars, you can drive one of them in the morning.” 

“And park it where?” 

“In your fancy reserved doctor parking—oh, okay I see the flaw there,” Satoru pulls back. You find amusement in his disappointment, but he doesn’t think there’s anything funny here. 

He shakes his head. He should have taken a cab from his office, but this is okay, a minor setback, nothing he can’t think around. “New plan: we take your car, and I’ll come by to get mine tomorrow. Easy peasy.” 

“Yours will be towed by then.” 

“That’s fine,” Satoru shrugs, “I can afford a tow fee.” 

“Satoru,” you call, reaching your free hand up to place your palm against his cheek, “We both drive home. It’ll be thirty minutes, tops. Forty if there’s traffic, but if you stop pouting and we leave now, we should be fine.” 

Satoru sighs. He knows that’s the most reasonable plan of action, but the simple truth is that he doesn’t want to be away from you right now, even to go the short distance home. He’s already spent the last few days without you, and even though this is calling it in early for you, he only gets maybe four hours awake with you before you’re off again. Thinking about that makes him miss you again already. Pathetic, maybe, but he doesn’t care.

“Oh, Dr. (_____), hey!” Yuuji’s voice is an easily distinguishable interruption to your petty argument, and Satoru’s sulking, “Perfect timing—I’m glad I caught you before you left. Is it okay if I ask you to sign something before you go?” 

You easily warm up to the younger boy and agree, fondly making conversation with Yuuji as he scrolls through some documents on his tablet. And just as you’ve finished scribbling your signature along the screen, Satoru has a bright idea. 

“Hey, Yuuji, you can drive right?” Satoru questions rhetorically, already reaching for his wallet and car keys, “Great! Here’s two grand, it’s all yours if you drive this car home tonight.” Satoru smiles widely, shoving his keys and some cash into the pocket of Yuuji’s white coat. 

“What—really? Awesome! But, why—” 

Satoru dismisses his disbelief with a wave of his hand. He steps a bit closer to Yuuji, just enough to lean into his ear and tuck a couple more bills into his pocket, “And between you and me, that’s an extra three grand if you finish up a couple of charts for my lady so she can sleep in tomorrow. Not a bad deal, right?” 

“Sure, no problem!” Yuuji salutes, “I’d do anything for Dr. Almost-Gojo. Plus, if I’m busy working for her, then I don’t have to babysit cells in a dish for Dr. Gakuganji.” 

“Atta boy,” Satoru ruffles his hair, “Catch you later, Yuuji, I’ve got a hot date to get to. And tell Nanamin I say hello!” 

You elbow Satoru shallowly, a silent warning to keep his voice down, and a verbal chastising of, “It’s Dr. Itadori and Dr. Nanamin to you.”

“More like Dr. Nanameanie,” Satoru laments, resuming the position of his arm around your shoulder, “I’ve left him six calls this week! He’s so cruel—he knows I have to leave next week and he’s depriving me of one on one time. I think I’m gonna have to sneak into his office at lunch tomorrow and confront him.”

Despite his crass words and dramatics, you laugh, and so, Satoru smiles. He finally gets that cheek kiss right as you two reach your car, bending down to plant one for you at the same time he steals your keys from your hand and banishes you to the passenger seat. He’s not much of a driver himself, despite his excess amount of cars, but you’re his baby and you deserve to be driven around no matter the case, but especially when you’ve spent all day taking care of other people. 

Plus, on days like this, if he’s real careful and smooth, you fall asleep in the car and he gets to carry you inside. He makes that his goal for the next thirty minutes, and he succeeds in twenty, confirmed by your soft snores just as he pulls into the curbside pick-up spot of your favorite restaurant. He retrieves the take-out as quietly as possible, before making the rest of the journey home, taking the time to glance over at you during red lights. 

Satoru loves the way you look when you’re asleep, loves to see you well-rested, but something even more dear to him than that is a fact that Nanami let slip in the aftermath of a dinner party he’d hosted about a year after you two had started dating: “She never sleeps outside of her bed, for as long as I’ve known her,” he muses, nodding to your sleeping figure on Satoru’s couch, “Not even in the on-call rooms during our 72 hour shifts. She must... she must really trust you, Satoru.” 

(He also recalls the awfully strong grip on his shoulder and subsequent shovel talk Kento gave him a moment later. Not that Satoru ever had anything but pure intentions with you, but the threat of breaking Kento’s best friend’s heart was more than enough to keep his commitments in check).

Satoru peers at you fondly in his arms, held bridal style with the takeout in the grip of a pinky finger, glancing up only to nod and thank his doorman for pushing the penthouse button for him. Satoru prides himself on many things, but the one thing he always holds in his highest regards is you: call him cocky, but he thinks he’s quite good at caring for you, that there’s nobody else fit to look after you the way that he can; and knowing that you feel safe in his arms is the highest honor he could achieve in this life.

He sets you carefully on the couch once he steps inside the apartment, and places the food on the coffee table. He debates whether or not he should wake you up now; he hates to, but he knows you need to eat, and, selfishly, he wants to cash in on those few hours he has with you to hear your voice. 

He’ll dish out the food first, and then wake you up to eat, he decides. He leans down to kiss the crown of your head, eyes flicking to your face, and pausing at your neck, where your engagement ring rests crookedly against your skin. You must have had an emergency surgery today, he thinks; your schedule for today was originally just to round on post-op patients and attend some meetings, but you knot the ring into your chain when you have to scrub into the operating room. 

Carefully, Satoru reaches to undo it from the chain, and slips it back onto your ring finger. It looks pretty against your skin when it’s around your neck, but personally, he thinks it looks best this way, the sparkle of the aquamarine against the halo of diamonds fits perfectly across the width of your finger, just the way he had it made to be.

Satoru bends down even further to kiss the back of your hand, before laying it to rest on your stomach. He might need to bribe Yuuji to take care of some more work for you, you two really should get a move on that wedding planning, and you’re going to need at least a week off to fly and visit his grandma’s pastry shop in Osaka for cake tasting.

He smiles at the thought. He doesn’t feel so bad about waking you up now—wedding talk seems like the perfect way to end the evening if you ask him; there would be no sweeter sound than hearing how you imagine the start of the rest of your lives to be. 

[gremlin-girly]

Flufftober 20

Alt 2: "I hate it." / "No, you don't."

Pairing: Ransom Drysdale x Reader

Tags/Warnings: FLUFF, swearing (it's Ran). established relationship,

Summary: Going to a charity gala, Ransom despises the tie you've gotten him. Word Count: 626 words

A/N: Sorry to all dog lovers (myself included) and no hate to Paul Smith for the inspiration of the dog tie (here). Also sorry it came after a lil Scratch the dog fic! - Love, Grem x

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"I hate it."

"No, you don't."

You sigh, biting back a smile as you straighten your boyfriend's new tie. He'd promised he'd wear whatever tie you got him, so long as it was designer. He'd said he didn't care what tie, so long as it was designer.

And, oh, it was designer alright.

One hundred and twenty pounds (or one hundred and fifty-five US dollars and seventy-eight cents) worth of fabric embroidered with multiple different breeds of dog.

Hugh Ransom Drysdale hated dogs.

"It's Paul Smith," You say coolly, smoothing the tie down. You can tell Ransom is seething by the rise and fall of his chest and you know damn well he's glaring daggers at you.

"It's fuck ugly is what it is," He hisses back at you, his own large hands inspecting the tie. You take a cautionary glance up to see him frowning at the tie and then glancing to the mirror with a worried expression.

"Ooh now don't say that," You coo mockingly and swiftly turn your back to him before he can catch your grin. You knew he'd hate it. That's why you'd bought it. He'd royally pissed you off two weeks ago when you were planning for the event in typical Ransom fashion; blowing you off and being a selfish prick as per usual. You loved your boyfriend - but sometimes he got on your damn nerves and this time, you weren't willing to let it go.

You picked up the small square box on the chair in front of you, handing it to Ransom with a smile.

"Here," You chirp, handing him the box. "I got this for you too."

Ransom balked as he opened the box, finding a matching pocket square for his tie.

"No..." He says quietly, looking up at you in disbelief. "Please don't make me wear this."

You bite back a laugh, trying your best to pout at him sweetly. "You promised, Ran."

Ransom's eyes scanned your sweet face. He had promised and there was no manipulation he could use to wriggle his way out of it. He checked his watch. The taxi would be here in five minutes. There was no time to change and you would be mad at him all night for breaking his promise. He'd have to suffer through it for you.

Oh, the things one does for love.

Ransom sighs, folding the pocket square into his suit jacket and giving a dejected look into the mirror as he gives himself one final once-over. Every time his eyes got drawn to the tie he wanted to rip it off.

You watch his internal turmoil proudly, folding your arms across your chest and admiring him. You inch slowly in the direction of the door.

"You look good," You reassure him.

"I always look good," He quips, adjusting the tie a third time. "I'll help you organise the gala next time. I'm... sorry I left it all to you."

You blink for a moment. Ransom never usually apologises. You narrow your eyes at him, now half sticking out of the door.

"You're not getting out of wearing it." You say cautiously.

"I'm not." Ransom huffs and rakes a hand through his hair. "Genuinely, I'm sorry."

The way he's looking at you confirms it and your smile softens your features. You're silently kicking your shoes off from behind the door and Ransom is starting to look at you quizzically.

"Thanks honey," You gush, excitement brewing in your chest as your bare feet touch the floor of the large house. "Promise you won't do it again?"

Ransom smiles and then nods. "Promise. I was an ass."

"You were." You agree and laugh at the frown he gives you. "But, do you mean it? About helping me next time?"

"I do." He places his hand over his heart and winces as if the tie hurt him. "Scout's honour."

"Good," You smirk. "You can help pick out an outfit and tie tomorrow... Because if you'd been paying attention, you'd know the Gala is next week."

Ransom's smile drops and you can only hear him yelling after you as you bound down the long hallway in your bare feet. Ransom Drysdale may be smart but you were always smarter. Always one step ahead of him; the only person he'd be less selfish for and all the more foolish. He couldn't help but grin, tugging the tie from around his neck as he chased after you and discarding it somewhere he couldn't care less about, thinking about how much he loved you and how he couldn't wait to get his hands on you and get his own back.

[adelaidedrubman]

wip weekend!

tagged today by @inafieldofdaisies to share a wip, thank you!! no pressure (seriously i know some of y’all just posted) tags to @henbased @unholymilf @florbelles @direwombat @socially-awkward-skeleton @shallow-gravy @derelictheretic @poetikat @roofgeese @schoute @deputyash @wrathfulrook @v0idbuggy @trench-rot @confidentandgood @corvosattano @afarcryfrommymain @sukoshimikan @voidika @strangefable @jackiesarch @harmonyowl @josephslittledeputy @g0dspeeed @purplehairsecretlair @blissfulalchemist @nightbloodbix @jacobsneed and anyone with things to share!

truly had one foot in the darkness and one in the hello kitty roller skate with writing lately, so here’s a taste of both. first, one of the (many) clunky expository bits of hl&s:

“The Admiral?” John repeated with a curious smile. “Might I ask who that is?”

Jessie’s eyes grew more dangerously alight yet. “You’re so funny, John!” She forced out laughter, eyes bulging wider than he thought possible with each sharp bark. “See how he managed to charm me so quick? He’s so fuckin’ funny.” She gave him a look that bore no hint of amusement. “Of course he fuckin’ knows who The Admiral is.”

“Of course.” Was he really catching flack from the woman who didn’t even know who the Ryes were — seemingly didn’t even know who his own family was, for that matter — for not being familiar with someone in the County?

What the hell kind of person could that level of recluse even get offended at him for not —

Oh.

Of course.

He did know.

“The Admiral is a fish,” he said, trying not to sound exasperated by the revelation.

“A fish,” Jessie laughed, slapping him on the back a little too hard. “I told you, he’s funny.”

“Well, not like anyone’s actually gonna catch him, anyways,” Adelaide sighed with a dismissive wave of her hand. “They never do. But everyone who pays the entry fee gets admission to the big ol’ Fish Fry we do after to cook up whatever they did manage to catch and get blackout drunk on party liquor.”

“I can do that at home without an entry fee,” Jessie scoffed.

“And this year, we’re co-hosting! Cook out’s gonna be over at the Ryes’ place, since they got everything set up nice from all the barbecues they hold any —”

“How much is the entry fee?” John asked.

Adelaide tilted her head to the side, pausing before she answered. She raked her eyes over him from head to toe and back up again, then allowed them to drift over his shoulder towards the boat parked in the slip behind him.

She crossed her arms over her chest, raising her chin before rattling off with ease, “Ninety bucks a person, one seventy-five for couples, three-fifty for a group of four.”

Oh, good. He was worried she would attempt to charge him something unreasonable.

He flashed her a smile; reached into his back pocket to slide two hundred dollar bills out pressed between his fingers. “Keep the change,” he hummed, holding the bills out in offering. “But do enter us as a couple.”

aaaand it wouldn’t be wip day without jessie being normcore and reasonable in wildfire:

“Hey, Jessie!” Another face materializing from the crowd — and what made them think they had the right to address her by first name? Just because they’d heard Tracey do it? Or else seen — “We were all wondering how you were gonna manage to top blowing up that statue, but you did it! I can’t wait to see how you’re gonna stick it to Faith next!”

“Gonna blow that shit up for real, this time,” Jestiny grunted with a nod as she turned on her heels to cross the length of the room, search the next set of drawers. “Can you stop gawking and help me fucking look?” she demanded, struggling to breath. She could feel the rot settle inside the wound of her arm, feel something diseased and corrupting and deadly crawling inside her that it was quickly approaching too late to flush out. “I need those fucking pills, fuck him if he took them back. How’d he even get in here? I —”

“Who’s he?”

“Deputy!” a bright and smiling face appeared beside her as she stood, fists clenched and scanning the medical supplies lining the shelves. “Is it true what folks have been saying about what you have planned next?”

“What —”

“Hey, maybe give her some space right —”

“Are you really heading back to the Valley to blow up that eyesore sign John Seed put up in the mountains there?” 

What? 

“We’ll all be sorry to lose you around here for a bit, but man does just picturing the look on John’s face make it —” 

Whatever sick, wretched thing had burrowed and coiled itself into the flesh of her wounded arm suddenly sprang to life, so that she found her hand gripping tight around the throat of the man speaking to throw him against the wall. 

“Jesus Christ, what the fuck are you —” 

“Where the fuck did you hear that?!” she demanded, hand tightening around his windpipe as her other shoved its heel against his forehead to knock his skull against the brick. “Who the fuck told you that?”

[duotheist]

pitter patter, the rain sounds, smells, and tastes the exact same way in chelsea manhattan as it does in philadelphia, as home, but the people here remind me of video game characters. i don't think it would be right to call them aliens, as they aren’t that foreign to me, but there is something about them that is so calculated, with every step in tune, an army of beautiful soldiers clad in gingham; tall and confident, in white and neutral linen pants even on the wettest, sloppiest kiss of a summer day. nine dollar “double dirty soy,” in hand, “scalding,” she barks at the barista, at someone like me, but her fingerprints and taste buds remain, so she rolls her eyes, throws a buck in the tip jar and walks away. subway transfers here are like sport, women in heels dashing across the platform like gazelles, fuck the 7 minutes until the next train comes. their drinks are getting cold and they have somewhere to be. beautiful apartments that cost more than my roommate and i bring in monthly (combined). forty seven dollar thai food take out and a thirty dollar red, off the bottom shelf of the specialty bottle shop down the block on a monday like it’s nothing — their white couches never see a drop, their glass always half full. dry clean only, one hundred and seventy five dollar blouses; beautiful, clandestine, pristine. i don’t think these people ever cry, or at least i can’t find a reason for them to.

[is-the-fire-real]

This is the irony of massively over-glutted markets.

When I was a tyke, there would be, on average, four films showing in theaters at any point in time. Four. Nowadays I go to the theater and there's sixteen films available... only not really. There's still just four. Because everybody only wants to see The New Disney Film, The New Comic Book Film, The New Fauxgressive Film, and The New Oscar Bait film.

If you go back to the theater, you don't go to one of those niche movies that's playing... you just go see Barbie again. Or Star Wars again. Or there's a new Star Wars to replace the old Star Wars already. Whatever.

You go onto your streaming platform of choice and there's hundreds, if not thousands of options... but you don't watch them. You watch Star Trek again. Or the new Star Trek. Or the other new Star Trek. Maybe you watch the new ATLA so you have something to complain about before you rewatch the old ATLA for the fiftieth time.

If you DO watch something new, it's because social media pressured you into doing it, and it's rarely really new. "Fine, fine, I'll watch House," you announce on Tumblr, the very site where thousands of posts brought up House to you, and now you're networked with thousands of people all chatting about House. Have you seen Columbo, you gotta watch Columbo, get an Amazon account and watch Columbo so you get all the memes. Don't gamble on a new show, your viewing time is precious and there's no memes for that anyhow.

As for video games, the main social pressure I see is that you must play games that look good on stream. Not games you're good at, or enjoy, or have been a fan of for years/decades. Games that look good when you stream. You gotta play Dark Souls because it's funny to the audience when you die hundreds of times. You gotta play Getting Over It because it's funny to the audience when you fall and start screaming and blow out the mic. Play ragebait games so you rage so you get more tips on stream. Play Hogwarts Legacy because the audience will be mad at YOU and that leads to more clicks more eyeballs more engagement.

What? You thought gaming was about your personal pleasure in the hobby? Fuck you. Drop another seventy dollars on a game you hate so the audience will watch you suffer. Why else would you play?

I totally agree with your points about how everything is being released to appeal to the widest audience possible. I think part of why producers do that is that audiences are becoming impossible to reach because there's literally too much out there. Audience behavior is changing. We expect more all the time, we expect everything to be The Best Thing Ever, we become angry when meaningfully challenged, we binge and simultaneously we never give anything outside our current binge preferences a chance.

And part of the irony I alluded to is that, functionally, with some media, we the audience aren't behaving differently than we did in the 1980s. We might as well only have four movies in the theaters and five channels on our analogue TVs and ten major books released per season and ten video games released per year, because that's about all any given human seems to be able to meaningfully process in a given year.

it's fucking me up how tv shows, movies, and even video games can't be "niche" content anymore

[submarinerwrites]

c.s. lewis, the four loves

★★★☆☆

in the four loves, lewis seeks to “describe and define” the nature of love as it relates principally to christ. the book is based off of a 1958 radio program, and it’s divided into (perhaps surprisingly) five chapters: non-human loves, affection, friendship, eros, and charity.

i recall reading the screwtape letters back in 2021, and finding that it reignited my sense of christ at a time when that sense had really been dulled. when i found the four loves at my local used bookstore a few months ago, i needed to buy it and therefore paid far too much (seven whole dollars how can they ask that for a one hundred and sixty page USED book) to have my own copy.

truthfully, i did not begin enjoying the book until the last two chapters. the first chapter, non-human loves, was perhaps to me the most distasteful, due to lewis’s approach to nature and patriotism. i disagreed with the notion that nature has nothing to teach us—mostly because my belief in dialectical materialism means that i DO think nature has a lot to teach us—and i disliked even more the idea that patriotism has much, if anything, to recommend it. enough said.

affection was mostly a boring chapter. one thing i will say is that lewis has a way of making even deeply uninteresting ideas sound incredibly compelling. there were some absolutely off-the-chain good lines in this chapter, but very little content imo.

chapter three on friendship was perhaps more interesting. a lot of what lewis says regarding friendships between men and women is very dated, even for the late 1950s, and i didn’t necessarily appreciate that. i enjoyed what he had to say about friendship as something that reveals the beauty of mankind.

i should note that the friendship chapter also has a several-pages-long diatribe on why male friendship isn’t secretly homosexual. which okay. but then immediately afterwards he compares friendship to the smoking club in the famously heterosexual herman melville’s famously heterosexual novel typee. like. dude. the homoerotic subtext was obvious in the nineteenth century why did you think that was an appropriate example to prove how NOT homosexual male friendship is.

actually that’s something else i want to talk about. the examples lewis uses to explain each type of love are probably seventy percent literary, rather than biblical. idk man i know you’re a professor of literature but when i pick up a theology book i’m looking for biblical interpretation and exegesis. many missed opportunities methinks. especially wrt to friendship, where he could have talked about saint peter and his betrayal of christ at an absolute MINIMUM.

okay that’s probably all my complaining out of the way. there were parts of this book that i adored beyond belief: parts that struck at the very core of me. honestly i think reading just the last two chapters is sufficient—i’d consider skipping the first half of the book.

in the opening of his chapter on eros, lewis discusses sex frankly and beautifully. i don’t really want to try to paraphrase it; he describes desire and the act of love with an incredible precision that i really enjoyed. he also talks about the need not to take sex so seriously, which is something i agree with intensely; he reminds us that lovemaking is deeply undignified, that laughter and levity have a place in the bedroom, and that our bodies are absurd and love to betray us.

and this quote: “pleasure, pushed to its extreme, shatters us like pain. the longing for a union which only the flesh can mediate while the flesh, our mutually excluding bodies, renders it forever unattainable, can have the grandeur of a metaphysical pursuit. amorousness as well as grief can being tears to the eyes.” like that bodied me. what the fuck clive.

also really enjoyed how he discussed the idea that sex has the element of ritual to it. to lewis, there’s this idea of playacting pagan roles of dominance and submission through sex, which he links to the idea that nudity is not a natural state. instead, nakedness is to him a kind of universal costume that destroys the individual identity, much like an actual, symbolic mask does. i liked this in connection with the idea that sex is a kind of destructive force.

lewis also describes marriage itself as a trial that can be failed. i loved the gravity which he attached to the act: he reminds us of the part of ephesians where fake-paul writes that christ-as-bridegroom gives his life for his wife, the church. that’s how profoundly he views marriage. the chrism comes in the sufferings, not the joys. he reminds us that we have to work to keep the promises of love even when that romantic love isn’t present. again, marriage as a trial which can be failed. catch me sobbing on the floor.

this leads us to the last chapter, charity, a chapter which made me want to walk straight into the ocean. he talks briefly about saint augustine’s confessions, a passage which i actually specifically remember reading as a sophomore in college lol. i remember thinking it was sad but not being able to fully express why. lewis does, perfectly. augustine reflects on losing a friend, and draws the conclusion that he ought not to love anything but god. lewis writes:

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin or your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell... Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness... We shall draw nearer God not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if he chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.

HOLY SHIT. when i tell you those paragraphs had me on the floor.

i honestly think that might be where i end this review. lewis also has a lot to say about grace that i enjoyed—specifically the idea that love happens essentially in spite of who we are, while grace, which does not depend on what any of us are, opens us to loving and being loved more completely—but none of it ripped me open the way that quote did.

i thoroughly enjoyed the final two chapters of the four loves, but i really could have done without the first parts. in some ways they felt like they’d been pasted in front of the last two chapters to add context, not necessarily because lewis thought they truly added meaning. the potency of those final chapters is really what redeemed the book in my eyes.

[soir-rouges-esprit]

xxxi.w: Coke, Blood & Handguns, we all stopped with our infighting … we all looked forward at the colorful flashing screen that was centered in the slot machine … the world started to go quiet around me … my vision darkened around me … until it was silent … and there was nothing but me … and the machine in a dark room … I was … I … … …. I hear … that low roar … that rumble … it builds and builds in my ears, as I feel my chest tightening and my breath becoming heavier … tunnel vision … my focus sharpened on one thing and one thing only … The screen … the number … the- … one, one, dot, five, two, eight, dot, three, seven, one. Eleven-million, five-hundred and twenty-eight-thousand, three-hundred and seventy-one dollars … I hi- … I hit the fucking jack pot … *breath* … *Breath* *Weez* … *BREATH* *WEEZ* *GASP *WEEZ* *GASP* *BREATH* *CLAP* … … … The world starts to come back to me … the sounds, the sights … slowly … clapping gets louder and louder and deafening. M & J are jumping and hollering all around me … a crowd had developed all around me … then everything came to me. “HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!!! HOLY FUCK IN THE SHIT SHIT IN THE FUCKING FUCK!!!!!” “RED!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK!?!?! YOU … YOU FUCKING UNBELIEVABLE FUCK WHAT THE HELL???” A bunch of hands slapped my back as the crowd cheered on … then a large man in a suit came to me and pressed a few buttons on the side of the machine … a ticket was printed out from one of the front slots of the machine, he grabbed it and asked “Are you the winner?” y-yea “Alright kid, well it’s your lucky day, come with me so we can get this ticket checked over for you … life is about to be very different for you from now on.” We get up … M and J follow … I’m … still in a trance, stumped in the situation and what was happening … it all must be a dream, it has to be, no way I hit the jackpot, Me!? Of all people on some stupid fucking slot machine? No way th- “Sir!” huh? “Sir … were gonna need you to sign here, and here … we’ll need to see your ID as well” ok … yeah ok. I signed where they told me … I handed over my ID. “Ok perfect, come with me” we walk through the back end of the casino, past a bunch of workers and the back desk, up an elevator and to a large room filled with desks and computers and people working at them … we walk through some big golden heavy doors into a main office … there is a man sitting at a desk on the phone, he showed us away at first but the lady that guided me up here kept walking, made her way around the desk, and tapped him on the shoulder and showed him my ticket … he took a once over … then quickly looked back out the window and continued the call. He turned grabbed the ticket, and gave it a whole punch from a hole puncher that he pulled from his desk … then got a red pin and wrote on it, handed it back to her, took a glance at me and said in a lack luster and somewhat dismissive way “Congrats kid” then he turned away and acted like nothing happened … she guided us back downstairs and to a large front desk area, where her and another employee went over the ticket and settled out a lot of paper work … then … she turned to me … handed me a bunch of paper, and a receipt … and said … “Congratulations Mr.Red, on behalf of the Bellagio we happily award you your winnings … we’ll contact you in a few days to discuss how our annuity plan will work and what you should expect … thank you sir!” … … … T-thank you … I took all the paperwork and my recipt and walked out to the front desk in a sort of haze … when M and J ran up to me, J jumping on me and giving me a large hug, forcing me to support the wright of his entire body and energetic nature, while M danced around me making little crab hands clamping and unclamping while circling me. “WOAH THERE!!! EVERYONE WATCH OUT WE GOT A BIG SHOT IN HERE” oh god please stop don’t say that … “WOOP WOOP!!! WOOP WOOP!!! WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO FIRST WITH YOUR WINNINGS??? I’d quit my job and move to the Maldives … live my life sipping wine and eating high-end food delivered to me by my three male servants.” ... [To Be Continued]

[idkwhattitlevsblognamemeans]

May 17th, 2024

I am pissed off that my fyp on tiktok and as well as on instagram a bit is slowly letting eating disorder content in. Or maybe its not outwardly eating disorder content but it trickles in and makes me think and be inspired about disordered eating.

Heres been my past little bit:

Sideplots:

Rhodes Scholarship

Circus School (full time away from the office)

Mo Keps

I've been coming to work (in the office) like baloney? every week and I'm convinced that nobody has noticed but also maybe they have and I am the idiot?

Artem invited me to a cottage with his friends this upcoming weekend. And I don't know how the fuck I should have played that. Whatever I"ve done though has been wrong and incorrect.

I don't like how I feel like I'm an idiot when I'm around him: he makes you think about him because he doesn't think about you at all. He is not emotionally available and look at what happened to Hadrian and look at what happened to me last time *emotional unavailability* was in the chat.

I want to go to circus school and work full time tee hee hee, I need to call the union and figure some stuff out.

If you are having an issue in the workplace and are not sure of how to proceed, please contact our labour relations team at labourrelations@acfo-acaf.com or call ACFO-ACAF’s office toll-free number 1-877-728-0695.

I'm reading the collective agreement for my job rn, here are some highlights:

An employee shall earn vacation leave credits at the following rate for each calendar month during which the employee receives pay for at least seventy-five (75) hours:

75 hours is 2 weeks. meaning I will get credit for june and july however if I didn't split them over months, I might not have

I get 9.375 hours of vacation time a month until my 5th year of service occurs

An employee is entitled to vacation leave with pay to the extent of the employee’s earned credits but an employee who has completed six (6) months of continuous service shall receive an advance of credits equivalent to the anticipated credits for the current vacation year.

Where in any vacation year all of the vacation leave credited to an employee has not been scheduled, the unused portion of the vacation leave up to a maximum of two hundred and sixty-two decimal five (262.5) hours credit shall be carried over into the following vacation year. All vacation leave credits in excess of two hundred and sixty-two decimal five (262.5) hours will be paid at the employee’s hourly rate of pay as calculated from the classification prescribed in the employee’s certificate of appointment of the employee’s substantive position on the last day of the vacation year.

30.09 When a medical certificate is requested by the Employer, the employee will be reimbursed for the cost of the certificate, to a maximum of thirty-five dollars ($35.00), upon provision of acceptable proof, for periods of absence of three (3) consecutive days or less.

36.03 Subject to clause 36.02 and operational requirements, an employee may be granted leave without pay for the care of immediate family in accordance with the following conditions:

an employee shall notify the Employer in writing as far in advance as possible but not less than four (4) weeks in advance of the commencement date of such leave, unless, because of urgent or unforeseeable circumstances, such notice cannot be given;

leave granted under this clause shall be for a minimum period of three (3) weeks;

the total leave granted under this article shall not exceed five (5) years during an employee’s total period of employment in the public service;

leave granted for a period of one (1) year or less shall be scheduled in a manner which ensures continued service delivery.

Article 38: leave without pay for personal needs

38.01 Leave without pay will be granted for personal needs in the following manner:

subject to operational requirements, leave without pay for a period of up to three (3) months will be granted to an employee for personal needs;

subject to operational requirements, leave without pay for more than three (3) months but not exceeding one (1) year will be granted to an employee for personal needs;

an employee is entitled to leave without pay for personal needs twice (2) under each of paragraphs (a) and (b) during the employee’s total period of employment in the public service. Leave can only be granted for a second (2nd) time under each of (a) and (b) of this clause ten (10) years after the first leave was granted. Leave without pay granted under this clause may not be used in combination with maternity or parental leave without the consent of the Employer.

It feels fake that I have a government job with benefits?

I applied for some free training just now,

I just looked in HRMS and I have 24.375 hours of sick leave (3.25 days of work) and 93.75 hours of vacation time (12.5 days). also a 7.5 hours from Wednesday May 8th that I worked. altogether thats

June 14th: work from home, travel to montreal with Gianna,

June 17 - 21 is 5 days (37.5)

June 24 is Jean Baptiste day

June 25 - 28 is 4 days (30 hours)

July 1 is a holiday

July 2 - July 5 - 4 days (30 hours)

all together that 97.5, less the 7.5 hours I already worked, for a total of 90 hours requested off.

Should I ask if I should use sick days?

Also isn't there leave each year that isn't carried over?

ok Matthieu just came to my office and asked if I could do some overtime work this weekend. I asked to be compensated in vacation days (1.5 times the hours) however I am wondering if I should have taken the cash... like $300? 64,221 / 251 (average amount of working days) = $255 a day * 1.5 = $382.5 for a day of overtime.

[iheartgracie]

foolish hearts funny claudia quotes

“We all know magenta is not pink, right?” She looks to me. “Right?”

“Abso-tootin-lutely!” I declare loudly, because I am a moron.”

“But Paige Breckner just took the cake in the breakup department. I want you to be better than you are. If I were Iris, I would’ve disintegrated on the spot.”

“We heard your phone,” Paige says.

“How do you know it wasn’t your phone?” I reply. Because. I am. A moron.”

“I didn’t know anyone was out here. I didn’t hear anything,” I say, even though it’s a lie compounded by another lie.

The silence is unbearable.

So I do what I do best, or what I do worst, I suppose—my greatest strength is also my greatest weakness. I break it.

“I had the faucet on,” I say. “Really loud. And I pee pretty loud. I’m surprised you guys didn’t hear me, it was like Niagara Falls in here. Just really … very loud in volume. A lot of … liquids … flowing in a … noisy fashion.”

“I don’t think that’s right,” I said to my manager Aaron on my first day. “Because Subway subs are twelve inches? So really it’s only seventy-five percent of a Subway sub?”

“They mean the six-inch,” he replied.

“So maybe they should say that?”

“It’s the worst. It is literally the worst. I’m a cog in the world’s dumbest corporate sandwich machine. But I needed a job. And Pinky’s was hiring. So here I am.”

“There was a lot of talk of this year being our year.”

“Who did all the other years belong to?”

“Right? I asked Madison that. She looked at me like I was crazy.”

“Too bad she can’t buy a sense of humor.”

“I’d sell her mine.”

“So many girls would be so happy for a chance to go to Prospect.”

“Then one of them should go for me,”

“Oh, this is Claudia,” Caris says.

“Third wheel extraordinaire,”

“Who still needs a partner?”

Time to accept my fate. I raise my hand.”

“I don’t hate anyone.”

“Not even Voldemort?”

“I mean, yes, obviously. But I don’t—”

“Are you hiding from somebody?”

I swallow. “Yes,” I say. “Death. That’s why you scared me. I thought it was the grim reaper sneaking up on me.”

“Well, you’ve got Oberon locked down.”

“Maybe you’ll be my queen,” he says, leaning in a little and wiggling his eyebrows.

“I mean, probably not. If there’s like … a nonspeaking role for a tree or something, that’ll probably be me.”

“What are you doing?” I finish off the creature.

“Sorry, Mark just got home.” I hear muffled conversation and then “He says hi.”

“Tell him I don’t say hi back. Tell him I respond with stony silence.”

“Gotta go. Have fun Shakespeare-ing.”

“I’ll try. Hey, if you’re mean to me, I’m gonna send Mark a list of names from this play. You could have a little baby Oberon or Hippolyta.”

“Oh geez. Don’t you dare.”

“Bet you wish you saved some of those vetoes.”

“Is that a problem?”

“I mean, yeah, it kind of goes against my usual thing.”

“What thing?”

“You know. Where I’m not really, like … active in that way.”

My mom gave me a look. “Sexually?”

“Agh! God! No! Socially. Socially active.”

“Do not take your eyes off the climber, the surprisingly stern college kid who trained us had said. Do not get distracted. Do not take your hands off the rope. Do not lose focus”

“Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars,”

“I hate everything about this.”

“Iris, you haven’t even climbed as high as you are tall.”

“Let me down. Now.”

“You could literally just step off the wall.”

“Hey, do you know Jacob Dolby?” he says like he’s going to introduce us, but there’s no Jacob Dolby in sight.

I shake my head.

“He’s having a party tomorrow night.”

“Good for him.”

“Do you want me to drop you off?”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I’m not a terrible person?”

She looks at me for a moment and then lowers her phone.

“Fine. You can drive me.”

“Really? Thank you. How gracious. What a privilege.”

“Do you need my address for the GPS?” she asks, following me to my car.

“Hate to break it to you, but 2004 Toyota Corollas don’t come standard with GPS. You’re gonna have to Google-Map that shit for me. Think you can manage?”

“I didn’t … fuck up on purpose.”

“Wait, so you were for real?” Iris just blinks at me. “You making faces in the dining hall before auditions. That was … you acting?”

“What can I say. We’re not all talented enough to be Magic Fairy Number Five.”

“Hey, I’m First Fairy. It’s a named character. I have lines.”

“Oh geez, let me get the Tony nominators on the phone.”

“Not everything I think is malicious.”

“What would a pie chart of your malicious to non-malicious thoughts look like? How big a piece of the pie is non-malicious?”

“What did you do today?”

“Sorry?”

“That has you so wiped.”

“Oh. You know. Saturday stuff.”

“What’s Saturday stuff? Typical Saturday for Claudia Wallace.”

“I ran a 5K,” I say.

“Really.” He says it like he might believe me, so I go on.

“Actually, I ran twelve 5Ks. Basically a 60K. And then I fought like seven bears. So. You know, I’m pretty beat.”

“Seven bears. All at once?”

“No, three and then four.”

“That’s impressive. I’ve only ever fought seven bears tournament-style.”

“I’m not saying it was easy. That’s … that’s why I’m so tired.”

“Claudia Wallace, you’re not even a little bit curious about my mixtape?”

“I’m like sixty-five percent sure you don’t have one.”

“It’s called Gideon Prewitt: Getting Improvement.”

“Agh, God, why?”

“Because it sounds cool.”

“Getting Improvement? What does that even mean?”

“It doesn’t have to mean anything, it just has to strike a chord with people.”

“I’m now eighty percent sure this mixtape doesn’t exist.”

“But I know you didn’t go to Morningbrook with us, I definitely would’ve remembered.”

“Maybe I had a face transplant.”

“Maybe you did. But I also feel like I would’ve remembered if someone in my class in middle school got a face transplant.”

“It was the summer between eighth and ninth grade. I kept a low profile afterward.”

“What did you look like before?”

“Better,” I say. “I had a rare condition. The doctors said I was too attractive. It was detrimental to my health and also society. So they gave me this face instead. For the greater good.”

“That was an SAT word.”

“I know. Do you want me to congratulate you for using it?”

“Is he really your favorite?”

“I don’t know. It might be some kind of subconscious conditioning, since his face is literally all over the room, and, you know, he just watched me pee and everything.”

“Not that I was pathologically afraid of crotches. I just … like to know a person before I measure from the crotch to the back of the heel where I want the pants to end.”

“I’m the funniest person I know,” he declares. “Except for you. You’re funnier than me.”

“That’s not saying much, because you’re not funny at all,”

“I don’t want to bond. I specifically want to not bond. What’s the opposite of bond?”

“Alienate?”

“I want to alienate.”

“Well, you’re pretty good at it.”

“Smooth job answering a question with a question by the way. Super ninja deflecting skills.”

“I’m a level fifty deflector,” I reply.

“Out of how many levels?”

“How many levels do you think?”

“Deflected!”

“Why would you bring Iris on a double date? Who does that?”

“This isn’t a double date.”

“Uh, yeah, it is.”

“You said it was a group thing! ‘Group thing’ does not mean ‘double date’!”

“Well, it was implied.”

“You should have said the words ‘double date’!”

“Are you ready to put the ‘fun’ in Fall Fun Fest?” he says as I slap his palm.

“I can at least put the ‘trip’ in ‘Triple F.’” A pause. “By being clumsy, I mean. Not by, like, sharing drugs with the group.” Three sets of eyes are on me, and I can’t stop myself from talking. “I don’t have any drugs. In case you were worried. Or, in case you were … expecting me to have drugs.…”

“If it makes you feel any better, you were right about her being scared. It kind of backfired though, because she seems, like, pathologically afraid of this whole situation.”

“Anyway, I left as fast as I could. It was Jackie Casella’s house. Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

“It’s in the French Palladian style. Way too ostentatious if you ask me.”

“I’ll keep that in mind when I design my chateau.”

“Is it weird,” Zoe asked once, “that she’s going to be a grandma but she’s also still your mom?”

“I think a lot of grandmas are also still moms?” I replied.”

“What if she loves the new grandbaby more than you?” Zoe said with a grin.

“Oh, she definitely will. I’ve accepted that.”

“Did you, like, read a book on gaming?” I say.

“I read the Internet. It told me all about it.”

“You read the entire Internet?”

“I hope everything’s okay,” Iris says quietly, pulling a piece of shredded lettuce out of her sandwich and frowning at it.

“There’s nothing wrong with that lettuce.”

“I meant with Paige.”

“I know, but you’re giving the lettuce a suspicious look.”

“I fucked up my first act as a mom,” she says. “I evicted him from my uterus ten weeks early.”

“That’ll teach him to pay his rent on time.”

“I really like TION. Like, I kind of love them.”

Zoe smiles. “I sort of got that impression.”

“Like, not even a little bit ironically. I genuinely love them. If one of them needed a kidney and I was a match, I would genuinely give them my kidney.”

[noivysneverland]

I dont normally post politics on here, but some of y'all leftists here are demonizing president Biden way too much. I get it, he wasn't my first choice in 2020 either but some of y'all seem to be insisting on another fascist presidency in november. One that will be fueled by hatred, spite, and outright fury against the very core of the USA.

I get that we're all fucking frustrated with what's happening in Palestine, goodness knows the zion-fascist machine that is running isreal may as well be the second coming of adolf fucking hitler with regards to the outright systematic genocide of the Palestinian people and the destruction of their homes. But I need to posit one itty bitty crucial little question that I think every single pro-Palestine american seems to be actively blocking from their heads is.

Do you really think it would be better under another a god forsaken gop administration, no less a far right one by the previous demon who is the current front runner for the party of modern fascism in this country? I think the answer to that question is easy to figure out. There's more at stake in the world than Palestine as well; what about Ukraine, which for the last two years has been holding out against another fascist invasion in the form of the putrid regime that has actively been working to undermine our own political system here at home in the USA. What do you think a return of the previous disaster in chief would enable the putrid regime to do not only to Ukraine, but to every single former soviet territory. he has just today (feb 10th, 2024) said that he would actively ask and encourage putrid to attack NATO allies and sit out our own military from intervening. While the russian military has been proven far, far less capable than putrid would like to admit, it has proven that it will throw as many people at a conflict as possible, regardless of the cost of the lives involved.

Biden's done some absolutely monumental things. The one I think about the most because I know a lot of friends who have had their lives and livelihoods changed for the better (for now) is what he's done with the price of Insulin. I'm sure ANYONE in this country with Diabetes (an estimated 27,000,000 people by the way) can tell you; putting into place a federal hard maximum on the price of life-saving Insulin and now the out of pocket price for Insulin is $35 per vial. This is down from a 2017 price of TWO-HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLARS ($275). That price we have now, along with so many other things are under a direct threat of being removed if the previous dictator is allowed to run our country again. Along side the ACA, Medicare, Medicaid, and so many other things on a federal level that many americans depend on.

LGBT+ rights, which have already been under attack far more aggressively than ever before in every single red-government state. What do you think will happen if the previous dictator is allowed to run our country again.

If that demon is allowed to enter office again, Project 2025; perhaps the scariest document I have ever read, will be implemented in as many ways as it can. If you haven't looked at the details of that, I really suggest that you do; you will be affected by it. I told myself back in October 2016 that there was absolutely no way that demon could become president. Today, many of you that I've seen on my feeds, not just here but on other social media pages, are going to directly contribute to that demons return to power through your own tinted lenses. What's happening in Palestine is out right genocidal. But some of the loudest voices here are screaming at biden because he can't stop a senate and house that are a majority of the red fascists from forcing their terms on funding Israel. And don't even get me started about the supreme court, which has three demon-appointed "justices" that will remain there for life-time terms.

We all thought that there was no way the demon could become president in 2016. Well, look at where we are now. Will you let it happen again this year, 2024?

[xtruss]

Why Maui Burned

Lahaina’s wildfire was the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century. Now the community is grappling with the botched response as it tries to rebuild.

— By Carolyn Kormann | October 30, 2023

The Lahaina fire reached temperatures more than a thousand degrees hotter than the temperature on Venus. Photographs by Bryan Anselm/Redux for The New Yorker

At 4 P.M. On August 8th, Shaun Saribay’s family begged him to get in their car and leave the town of Lahaina, on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The wind was howling, and large clouds of smoke were approaching from the dry hills above the neighborhood. But Saribay—a tattooist, a contractor, and a landlord, who goes by the nickname Buge—told his family that he was staying to guard their house, which had been in the family for generations. “This thing just gonna pass that way, downwind,” Saribay said. At 4:05 p.m., one of his daughters texted from the car, “Daddy please be safe.”

Within ten minutes, it became clear that the fire had not passed downwind. Instead, towering flames were galloping toward Saribay’s house. He got in his truck and drove to Front Street—Lahaina’s historic waterfront drag—and found gridlock traffic. Saribay, a stocky forty-two-year-old man with a tattoo covering the left side o f his face, texted his daughters. “Don’t worry. Dad’s coming,” he wrote. Then he lost cell service. At 4:41 p.m., he pulled into the one large open space he could find, a parking lot behind the Lahaina United Methodist Church, which had just started to burn.

Saribay had recently built a closet at the church, so he knew where all the water spigots were. He filled buckets and water bottles and scrambled to find neighbors’ garden hoses. With the help of three other men who had retreated to the lot, he soaked the church, again and again, fighting a three-story ball of fire with the equivalent of a water gun. At times, the men were stomping, even peeing, on sparking debris. Saribay recorded a video for his kids: “It’s bad. All around—crazy,” he said, panning the hellscape behind him. “Remember what Dad said, eh? I’ll come back.” Almost as if to reassure himself, he added, softly, “I know you guys safe.”

Shaun (Buge) Saribay, a tattooist and landlord, lost three houses, his tattoo parlor, and his boat in the fire. He has become a hero in the community, after he helped keep the neighborhood of Leiali‘i from burning down.

Saribay recorded videos throughout the night as he fought the fire. Despite his efforts, flames consumed the church. Well after midnight, the men tried to save a neighboring preschool, but that caught fire, too. When the sun rose and the wind began to ebb, Saribay got on an old bike and rode around town looking for other survivors. “I’m seeing fucking bodies every fucking way,” he recalled. “I’m pedalling through charcoal bodies and bodies that didn’t have one speck of burn—they just died from inhalation of black smoke. I felt like I was the only fucking human on earth.”

The Wildfire in Lahaina Was The Deadliest in the United States in more than a century. Ninety-nine people have been confirmed deceased, although for weeks the death toll was thought to be even higher, with police reporting that more than a hundred bodies had been recovered. In a town of nearly thirteen thousand people, at least seventy-two hundred were displaced. Twenty-two hundred structures were damaged or destroyed, and the estimated cost to rebuild is five and a half billion dollars. “I have been to most major disasters in the United States in the past decade. This is unprecedented,” Brad Kieserman, a senior official with the American Red Cross, said. “The speed of the fire, the level of fatality and physical destruction, the level of trauma to those who survived—it’s unspeakable.”

The destruction may have been unprecedented, but the fire itself was not. Public-safety officials, scientists, and activists had warned for years of the wildfire risks in Maui, owing to the growing population and the dryness of the island. “It was a ticking time bomb,” Willy Carter, a conservationist who studies native Hawaiian ecosystems, said. “The bomb went off.” Weeks before the disaster, conditions in parts of the state had been categorized as “severe drought,” and on August 4th the National Weather Service warned of hazardous fire conditions in the coming days. With a high-pressure system north of Hawaii and Hurricane Dora spinning hundreds of miles to the south, forecasters predicted that strong winds would be blowing, allowing flames to spread fast.

At 12:22 a.m. on August 8th, a brush fire ignited in Olinda, in the mountains of Central Maui, prompting evacuations. At 6:37 a.m., thirty-six miles away, another brush fire ignited, in a bone-dry field bordering Lahaina Intermediate School. Hard winds had toppled utility poles, and flying sparks from downed power lines likely started the blaze. (The official cause is still under investigation, according to the Maui Fire Department.) Nearby residents were ordered to evacuate within three minutes. By 10 a.m., the county announced, via Facebook, that the Lahaina fire was “100% contained,” but that a main road was closed.

Around 3 p.m., people noticed smoke clouding the sky near the school. With the wind gusting more than seventy miles per hour, the fire had flared up again in the same area. During the next hour, the fire hit “crossover”—a term used to describe a moment when the relative humidity drops below the temperature in Celsius. This allowed the blaze to tumble freely and grow exponentially faster, exceeding firefighters’ capabilities. All they could do was try to save lives.

It would be difficult to overstate the horror of these hours, the disorientation of the hazy twilight caused by toxic smoke, the searing wind and glowing ash, the stark terror of being surrounded by tall flames, the suffocation. At various times, Maui police, in coördination with the power company, closed most of the roads out of town, because of tangles of downed lines and branches, but also because of a fear that some of those roads would direct people into the fire. Evacuees were herded onto Front Street, where traffic was at a standstill. Some people abandoned their vehicles and hurled themselves into the ocean. The water’s surface itself seemed to be smoking, making it hard to breathe. One group held on to wreckage that had fallen in the water; others waded for hours, trying to dodge or douse the embers falling on their heads.

By 7 p.m., the docks and boats in the harbor were lit up as if in a coal-fired oven, the roar of the flames broken by a staccato of exploding propane tanks. In the ocean, the current was pulling weaker swimmers out to sea. Coast Guard boats were crisscrossing the water, barely able to see through the smoke. They ultimately rescued seventeen people from the water and forty from the shore, and recovered one body the next day.

During the fire, the county’s command-and-communication system fell apart. The county sent one emergency cell-phone evacuation alert at 4:16 p.m., after the fire was already moving through town, but the order was just for a single neighborhood. At 6:03 p.m., while the fire was incinerating Front Street, and while people were struggling in the sea, Maui County’s mayor, Richard Bissen, appeared on a local news broadcast, calmly sitting in his office on the other side of the island. “I’m happy to report that the road is open to and from Lahaina,” he said, seemingly unaware of the inferno under way. The county did not issue online evacuation orders for other parts of town until 9:45 p.m. The winds finally subsided at dawn.

Maui Was Formed By Two Shield Volcanoes about two million years ago, becoming the second-largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago, the most remote chain of inhabited islands on earth. Lahaina, which means “cruel sun,” sits on the leeward side of Maui, below the western mountains, Mauna Kahālāwai, which roughly translates to “house of water.” The highest peak is one of the wettest places in the world, historically receiving about three hundred and sixty-six inches of rain per year.

Hawaiians built their communities around the watershed. Their word for water, wai, has many meanings: blood, passion, life. Lahaina—even though it was relatively hot and dry—became, because of its water supply, a cornucopia, replete with irrigated breadfruit, banana, and sugarcane crops, terraced taro patches, and fishponds. In the early nineteenth century, Lahaina was the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The king lived in a coral-block palace on an island in the middle of a pond. Residents could paddle around town.

Alfredo Galinato, a seventy-nine-year-old Filipino immigrant, died in the fire. He once worked as a groundsman at the Westin and loved taking care of the hotel’s parrots.

Two of Galinato’s sons, James (left) and John (right), and his wife, Virginia.

During the American Civil War, the agricultural economy that sustained Southern farmers collapsed, and Hawaii became a primary source of sugar. But sugarcane is a thirsty crop. One ton of sugar requires a million gallons of water. To meet that demand, private companies producing sugar (and, later, pineapples) rerouted the flow from Maui’s watersheds, building concrete ditches, tunnels, pipes, flumes, siphons, and trestles across the island. European ranchers introduced non-native, drought-resistant African grasses—guinea, molasses, and buffel—for grazing livestock. In less than five decades, the island’s landscape and ecology were dramatically altered.

Agriculture declined in the late twentieth century, and plantation owners abandoned vast swaths of farmland, allowing the non-native grasses to proliferate. Instead of restoring the steep mountain streams, they left their diversions in place—in some cases, dumping water into dry gulches, or directly into the ocean—or used them to develop beachfront resorts, with lush gardens, swimming pools, and golf courses. By 1996, as Carol Wilcox writes in her chronicle “Sugar Water,” “competition for water had met the limits of the resource in Lahaina.” That same year, the newly formed West Maui Land Company started buying abandoned plantations (and their valuable irrigation systems) and creating new subdivisions.

Natural wildfire on Maui used to be rare. The high-elevation endemic forest acted like a sponge—capturing fog and rain, recharging aquifers, and releasing water downstream. But land development and the encroachment of invasive species are shrinking this ecosystem. “Towns are now, instead, surrounded by tinder-dry invasive grasses that just go up in an instant,” Carter told me.

In the past decade, Maui has faced periods of severe drought, exacerbated by climate change. Parts of the island got so dry during the past two years that the county limited residential water use. Hotels did not face restrictions. Fodor’s Travel included Maui on its 2023 “No List,” which warns against visiting regions that are suffering from environmental threats. And yet tourism in Maui remained steady.

Native-Hawaiian-sovereignty groups have long been fighting for stream restoration and more water control. According to the state constitution and a series of landmark court cases, Hawaii’s water must be held in a public trust for the people’s benefit, which includes the use of water for traditional and customary practices, such as taro farming. Private developers are required to follow streamflow standards, and must get approvals from the state’s Commission on Water Resource Management if they want to divert more water than their usual allotment.

On August 10th, as fires in Olinda continued to burn, the governor, Josh Green, suspended the water code. The same day, Glenn Tremble, a partner at the West Maui Land Company, wrote a letter to the water commission stating that on August 8th he had asked to divert stream water to the company’s reservoirs, south of Lahaina, to help put out the flames. A water commission deputy director named M. Kaleo Manuel delayed the diversion until that evening, explaining that Tremble first needed to check with a downstream taro farmer who relied on the stream to fight fire on his property.

Three children died in the Lahaina fire. Josue Garcia Vargas, pictured above, lost his brother, fourteen-year-old Keyiro Fuentes, who was at home, asleep with the family dog, when the blaze swept onto the street.

That stream is not connected to the county’s water network, which supplies Lahaina’s fire-hydrant system. Moreover, the day’s heavy winds meant that helicopters could not use those reservoirs to fill water bombs (known as Bambi Buckets)—they could not fly at all. Still, many were eager to blame the Native Hawaiian water deputy and, by extension, the water code. (A headline in the New York Post read, “Hawaii official concerned with ‘equity’ delayed releasing water for more than 5 hours as wildfires raged.”) Manuel was reassigned to another department.

Peter Martin, West Maui Land’s co-founder and C.E.O., told me that protecting water for Native Hawaiian cultural practices was “a crock of shit,” and that invasive grasses and “this stupid climate-change thing” had “nothing to do with the fire.” He felt unfairly demonized by activists: “They’re trying to paint this picture that I’m a colonialist.” The real problem, he said, was the water commission and its code, which was so overbearing that it prevented him from replacing dry grassland with irrigated, landscaped parcels, or even small hobby farms. Maui’s lands, he added, “weren’t being used as God intended.”

Sixteen Days After the Fire, Maui County, with help from the F.B.I., released a list of three hundred and eighty-eight missing people. This was a distillation of a larger list, with more than a thousand names, that had been assembled from potentially unreliable sources—online groups, anonymous calls—and contained redundancies and errors. (Many individuals had the strange experience of seeing the list and learning that the F.B.I. thought they were missing.) The estimated death toll had remained the same since August 21st, when the police announced that they had recovered a hundred and fifteen bodies.

Two blocks from Saribay’s house, Alfredo Galinato, a seventy-nine-year-old Filipino immigrant, had lived with his wife, Virginia, and their son James, who is mentally disabled. When the fire approached, Galinato told James to run to Safeway, where Virginia worked. Then Galinato climbed onto his roof with a hose to soak the house, just as he had done during previous fires. Virginia and James survived, but Galinato was now among the missing. His two other sons, Joshua and John, who were not in Lahaina on August 8th, went to the burn zone to look for their father. “Everything was burned to dust,” Joshua told me. After searching for seventy-two hours, they heard that authorities were collecting DNA samples from people with missing relatives, and they went to a community center to get their cheeks swabbed.

Following the fire, forensic anthropologists, dentists, pathologists, and fingerprint and X-ray technicians flew to Maui, to aid the overwhelmed coroner’s office. Urban search-and-rescue teams, deployed by fema, started working with cadaver dogs across the five and a half square miles that had burned.

The Lahaina fire reached temperatures more than a thousand degrees hotter than the temperature on Venus. Four thousand vehicles were caught in the flames, and almost none of them were left with tire rims. “There were rivers of melted aluminum down the streets,” Stephen Bjune, the spokesperson for fema’s Urban Search and Rescue Team, told me. But the fire also moved in mysterious ways. A truck on Front Street had been full of glass bottles for recycling, all of which melted. Five feet away, a single silver minivan was unmarred, as if it were still sitting in traffic.

It was so hot in the burn zone that the dogs could work only in quarter-hour shifts. About fifteen per cent of the discovered remains were intact enough to obtain fingerprints from—that is generally the quickest route to identification. In another thirteen per cent, forensic dentists were able to identify people from their teeth. In two per cent, medical hardware—such as a pacemaker—was used to make identifications. But, for about seventy per cent of the victims, the experts needed DNA. In the majority of those cases, there were still significant amounts of tissue. In a few cases—the most difficult ones—there were only ashes and small fragments of bone.

A resident picks up an air purifier from outside Archie Kalepa’s house, in Leiali‘i. Within forty-eight hours of the fire, the house had become one of Maui’s first community-organized emergency hubs.

The DNA analysis was conducted with the help of ande Rapid DNA, a biotech and public-safety company. ande manufactures a hundred-pound printer-size instrument that can generate a DNA profile, or “fingerprint,” in two hours. It can analyze five samples at a time—drops of blood, pinhead-size bits of liver, or fragments of bone. Richard Selden, the company’s founder and chief scientific officer, said that he and his team initially developed the instrument for the United States military’s counterterrorism operations in the Middle East, so it was designed to be portable and rugged.

The DNA fingerprints were compared with reference samples that families, like the Galinato brothers, had provided. The problem was that many family members were not submitting samples. Some authorities attributed this to a lack of trust between residents and the government, which went back more than a century, to colonization. Officials launched a publicity campaign emphasizing that the DNA samples would be used only by ande, and would not be used by the government for tracking people.

Alfredo Galinato was one of the first victims to be identified using the rapid-DNA machine. He had worked as a groundsman at the Westin, near Lahaina, for twenty-five years, and loved taking care of the hotel’s parrots. I met his family across the island, at the house of his son John’s fiancée, about a week after they received confirmation of his death. John, a carpenter, looked just like his father—with a gentle, open face and the strong, scrappy build of a former high-school state wrestling champion. He said that he felt blessed to have found out about his dad relatively quickly, compared with all those who were still searching.

Later, as I was driving back to Lahaina, John sent me a text, written as if his father were still alive. “Idk if I mentioned. My dad is a hard working man, dependable,” he wrote. “I can count on him.”

A Strange Scale of Tragedy had developed on Maui. Those who hadn’t lost loved ones might still have lost everything they owned. And yet some said they felt lucky. “Just material things,” one person told me. A woman named Michele Pigott, who had lived in Lahaina since 2011, said that this was the third house she had lost to a fire. (The first two were in California.) She was almost immune to being displaced again. “Piece of cake,” she told me. “There’s not a goddam thing you can do.”

But anger was pulsing under the surface. As one mother said to me of the disaster response, “How could so many people fail at their job at the same time?” Among the first failures were the warning sirens. Although Maui has eighty of them, none were activated when the fire began. A week after the disaster, Herman Andaya, the administrator of the Maui Emergency Management Agency, defended his decision not to use the sirens, saying that they were primarily for tsunamis—even though the agency’s Web site lists brush fires as one of the reasons for the “all-hazard siren system” to go off. Andaya said he had been concerned that the sirens would send people fleeing to higher ground, into the flames. He also said he was afraid that people wouldn’t even hear the sirens, because almost all of them are along the coastline, and that he did not regret his decision. The following day he resigned, citing health reasons.

Another problem was the lack of firefighters. The Maui Fire Department has long been short-staffed and underfunded. Despite the vast increase in wildfire country on the island, the last time a new station was built was in 2003. West Maui’s population has grown from roughly eighteen thousand to twenty-eight thousand over that span, and is serviced by two stations and three trucks. No more than sixteen firefighters were initially on duty in Lahaina on the afternoon of August 8th. “They did an extraordinary job,” Bobby Lee, the president of the Hawaii Fire Fighters Association, told me—“before they ran out of water.” County water levels were already low, and then the fire hydrants lost too much pressure. Some ran dry. The fire’s extreme heat had caused water lines to break, something that also happened in a catastrophic urban fire in Fort McMurray, Canada, in 2016.

Many survivors have said that they received no evacuation orders from the police. When Mayor Bissen was later asked why, he said that, in fact, police officers had driven the streets, calling from loudspeakers. But that had happened later in the evening, near where fires were still burning on Lahaina’s north end. After a local reporter pressed him on the failure, Bissen said, “You can decide what the reason was, whether it was somebody did something on purpose, or somebody did something out of negligence, or somebody did something out of necessity. There are probably a lot of reasons you can apply to why we do what we do as human beings.”

I asked the Maui County police chief, John Pelletier, about all the roads out of Lahaina that had been closed. He said, “There was always a way out, if people were willing to go that way. Nobody was barred from going out of Lahaina town.” He continued, “We were encouraging everybody to get out, but it just depends on the dynamic. It may not have been the way that they maybe wanted to go.”

The nature of the disaster, and the chaos and information void in the aftermath, lent itself to rumor and conspiracy theories. Selden, the ande scientist, told me that there are two kinds of disasters: open and closed. A plane crash is the latter—there is one site of wreckage and a manifest listing who was on board. Lahaina is open. There is no list of people who were in town that day, and the burn area is large and unfixed. Speculation about the demographics of the victims was rampant. Because school was not starting until August 9th, people thought a lot of children might have been home. As of late August, only two families had reported the loss of a child; the police had not confirmed their deaths or identities.

Keyiro Fuentes, who was fourteen years old, was at home, asleep with the family dog, when the fire swept onto his street. His mother came back from work to get him, but the police blocked her, saying that they had already cleared the area. Days later, the family found Fuentes’s body in the house. His father wrapped the body in a tarp and, with his older son’s help, drove Fuentes to a police station. “ The first thing I said was, ‘Mr. Officer, I have a body and it’s that of my little brother,’ ” Josue Garcia Vargas, Fuentes’s twenty-year-old brother, recalled. One officer at the station seemed to be in shock. “His hands were shaking,” Vargas said. “I kept telling him the name, and he kept saying, ‘What? What?’ ”

In mid-September, the police confirmed Fuentes’s death. The identification was delayed because Fuentes was adopted, and the police had to obtain DNA samples from his biological family, in Mexico, to confirm that he was who the Vargas family said he was. But the Vargases had already held a memorial. A week after the fire, when Fuentes would have turned fifteen, his mother threw him a birthday party.

Months earlier, Fuentes had told Vargas about a girl he had a crush on in his class. She hadn’t seemed interested, so Vargas suggested that Fuentes flirt with the girl’s cousin to make her jealous. Both girls had attended the memorial. “They were both crying, man,” Vargas told me when we met, tears rolling down his face, although he was smiling. “He made them cry. That made me happy.” Fuentes had been a tough, fiery, and sweet little kid, who loved mixed martial arts. “He wanted to be a police officer,” Vargas reminisced. “He saw when my mom got screamed at by one of our neighbors and he got mad and said, ‘I’m going to be an officer so this will never happen to you.’ ”

When the family had found Fuentes, Vargas added, their dog’s remains were there, too. “We think they were hugging each other,” he said, now hugging himself, struggling to speak. He reminisced, of his brother, “He was always there, making his presence known, saying ‘Wassup, bro!’ ” He paused. “It’s hard for me to accept the reality of what happened.”

On August 29th, Pelletier announced that recovery crews had completed ninety-nine per cent of their land search in Lahaina. More than three hundred people remained unaccounted for, but the estimated number of deaths had not changed. The Galinatos’ neighbor, a forty-three-year-old E.M.T. named Tony Simpson, was still missing. The day of the fire, Simpson’s parents were at home in Belize, his sister Nichol was in Thailand, his other sister, Nova, was in Connecticut, and his brother was in New York. After a couple of days, none of them had heard from Simpson, an they started to panic. They made dozens of calls—to his employer, to the Red Cross, to the F.B.I., to the police. Nichol posted Simpson’s photo in a Maui-disaster-relief Facebook group. Nova filed a missing-persons report and submitted a DNA sample to an F.B.I. office in Connecticut.

The family had agreed that it made sense to do what they could from a distance, rather than get in the way of the authorities. But, after two weeks, Nichol and her husband, Angel Priest, made the forty-hour journey from Thailand to Maui. Their first stop was the Family Assistance Center, which was housed in a Hyatt Regency hotel. The complex was full of displaced people wandering a maze of courtyards, shuttered shops, and gardens. Nichol sat to give a DNA sample; ande had an instrument on-site. She asked if her sister Nova’s DNA was already in their system. The workers didn’t know.

Nichol Simpson, holding a missing-persons flyer for her brother Tony, who was unaccounted for in the weeks after the fire.

Nichol soon learned that a large percentage of victims were recovered within a few blocks of Simpson’s home. When she told other families on the island where her brother lived, they’d offer condolences. Nichol tried to visit Simpson’s house in the burn zone but was stopped by the National Guard and told she needed an official escort. She called the police, and a receptionist suggested that she call the E.O.C. When Nichol asked what the E.O.C. was, the receptionist didn’t know. (E.O.C. is the Emergency Operations Center.) Nichol reached a person at the E.O.C., but learned that she could not, in fact, get an official escort into the burn zone. She was also told, by a field worker, that the residential area had been fully searched. That is, except for multistory buildings. This only confused her more. Simpson’s house was two stories. Had it been searched? Unclear.

Nichol and Priest talked to unsheltered people in encampments. Simpson had a strong tie to that community; he had moved to Maui with a friend who chose to live outside. “We’re literally stopping people on the street and asking them, ‘Do you live here? Can you help us find a place to go search?’ ” Nichol told me. “Tomorrow we’re going to find some random cave somebody suggested.” I asked if they really believed that Simpson was hiding out somewhere. “Absolutely,” Nichol said. Simpson had led an eclectic life. He lived off the grid for two years, “on mangoes, basically, like a friggin’ fruitarian.” She added, “We could just see him showing up later with some crazy story.” Like he’d been living in a cave for two weeks. “Maybe he can make a big Hollywood movie about it,” she said, letting out a belly laugh. “Actually, he would hate that.”

After ten days, Nichol and Priest decided to fly to Belize to be with her parents. Before they left, they drove to the Lahaina post office to get Simpson’s mail forwarded to them. “We were really grasping at straws for small things that I could take back to my family,” she told me. “Because we have nothing of his.” This was true of many victims’ families. The Galinatos had lost most of Alfredo’s belongings, although his wedding ring had been recovered by search-and-rescue workers.

On the way to the post office, Nichol received a call from the Maui P.D. The police had matched her DNA with her brother’s remains, which they had found on August 11th—twenty-one days earlier—in a burned structure near his house, along with the remains of several others. As people had sought shelter, they landed in others’ homes, businesses, or cars, and in some cases died together. The location and commingling of remains delayed the processing of samples, and comparisons with the families’ DNA. This situation also resulted in an initial overcount of victims; two different body bags might later have been found to contain one person.

Nichol was not only heartbroken by her brother’s death but frustrated by the lack of clear communication from the authorities. “We’re thinking, They’ve recovered a hundred and fifteen bodies. They’ve recovered no more in several weeks. We don’t match any of those bodies, so Tony must still be missing,” she told me. “It brought us a lot of false hope.”

The Morning After the Fire, when Saribay was leaving the church parking lot, he saw smoke in the direction of a house belonging to his kids’ grandparents, in a neighborhood called Leiali‘i. He drove there and found his brother, who told him that another house, bordering their friend Archie Kalepa’s property, was smoldering. The fire department had already been there, but the fire had flared back up.

Saribay and his brother ran across neighbors’ gardens, grabbing more hoses. They broke Kalepa’s fence and soaked his yard. Saribay’s shirt had melted the night before, but he’d found a backpack containing women’s clothes that he had changed into. Saribay has a mischievous streak, which, despite what he had been through, hadn’t gone away. “I fucking fought that motherfucker while I was in a red fuckin’ blouse,” he said.

They extinguished the fire. Leiali‘i had been built seventeen years ago, as part of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, which allots homesteads to people who have at least fifty per cent Hawaiian blood. And the neighborhood was saved. Of its hundred and four houses, only two burned down. “At 10:30 p.m., when I evacuated, the flames were as high as the trees right behind my house. I thought it’d be gone,” Rodney Pa‘ahana, the president of the Leiali‘i Association, a community group, told me. “We were astounded,” he continued. “God put a finger on us, as if to say, The Hawaiian people need to stay and rebuild.”

Kalepa had been in California during the fire, but he came home on the first flight he could. When he arrived, Saribay apologized for breaking his fence. “Fuck my fence!” Kalepa told him. “You’re the guy who saved my house!” Within forty-eight hours, that house became one of Maui’s first community-organized emergency hubs. Kalepa told me that the donations, which ranged from money to food and supplies, had been overwhelming. People were sending poi—a traditional Hawaiian staple consisting of paste made from ground taro—from four islands away. Lahaina residents started calling the house “the local Costco.”

The cost to rebuild Lahaina will be an estimated five and a half billion dollars.

“We have one chance of fixing this,” Archie Kalepa said, of the rebuilding process. “And, if we get it wrong, all of Hawaii’s going to fail. Not just Lahaina.”

I met Kalepa on the cul-de-sac outside his house in late August, under a cluster of pop-up tents. There were more than two dozen coolers, towers of water bottles, Clorox wipes, a bleeping Starlink router (for Internet), and a machine that converted moisture from the air into water. Friends and volunteers were lugging boxes and ice, setting up rooftop solar panels, and peeling bananas to make banana bread.

Kalepa asked if I wanted to see the line where Saribay had held off the fire, gesturing toward the back yard. It all seemed fairly normal. But at the edge—beyond the grass, palm fans, magenta stalks, and yellow frangipani flowers with pink centers—there was a gap where the fence had been. On the other side of that gap, the world was suddenly black-and-white. A foundation of scorched cinder blocks suggested the ghost of a house. Rusted rebar poked the air. There was a shovel, bent like a bow tie. A hollowed pickup truck was snapped in half. The air was stagnant with the lingering, acrid smell of smoke, rot, and death.

Kalepa, a ninth-generation Hawaiian, recently turned sixty. He is a former lifeguard and big-wave surfer who provides ocean training to Navy seals. In the weeks since the fire, he has become one of Maui’s most prominent community leaders. “I never wanted to be in this position,” he told me. “I was really enjoying my life.” He is now serving on Mayor Bissen’s five-member Lahaina Advisory Team, which will consult on the town’s rebuilding. “We have one chance at fixing this,” Kalepa said. “And, if we get it wrong, all of Hawaii’s going to fail. Not just Lahaina.” One of the community’s biggest fears is that the process will favor developers, tourists, and the wealthy. Kalepa, other activists, and water-rights groups have been strenuously advocating for the local community. On September 8th, Governor Green announced that he was reinstating the state’s water code. Several weeks later, the water deputy, M. Kaleo Manuel, was returned to his post.

An organization called the Fire Safety Research Institute has been selected to investigate the government’s response to the catastrophe. Initial findings are expected by December. But responsibility for the fire falls in many places, on many individuals, across the decades. “For the last hundred and fifty years,” Kalepa said, “Hawaii’s gone in the wrong direction. This situation we’re in right now? It brought that to light.”

People Often View disaster survivors’ stories as they would an apocalypse film—a frightening but faraway and anomalous event, witnessed from a safe place. But these stories are missives from our immediate future—postcards from what, one day, might be your circumstance, in this era that some climate-change experts now call the Pyrocene. Record-breaking wildfires are happening more frequently all over the world, with studies directly linking climate change to the increase in fire duration, size, and severity. Wildfires in the U.S. caused more than eighty billion dollars in damage from 2017 to 2021, a nearly tenfold increase from the previous five years.

Hawaii has made gestures at addressing climate change; in 2015, it was the first state to pledge to convert entirely to renewable energy by 2045. And yet critics have jumped to blame the power company, Hawaiian Electric, for focussing on renewables, claiming that it was doing so at the expense of maintenance that could have prevented the West Maui fire. Similar debates are playing out all over the country, where the same funds required for infrastructure maintenance and improvements, in this hot new world, are also needed for the green-energy transition.

Hawaiian Electric’s C.E.O., Shelee Kimura, testified at a congressional hearing that thousands of aging utility poles had not been tested for termites or rot since 2013, but she also said that power lines had been de-energized for more than six hours before the afternoon fire began, and that the company was therefore not responsible. Her assertion, and the fire’s true cause of ignition, are under investigation, and the company now faces more than a dozen lawsuits, including one filed by Maui County.

On October 8th, the two-month anniversary of the fire, Governor Green welcomed tourists back to parts of West Maui. Many community members were outraged; they felt that they weren’t near ready. Just a few days later, more human remains were found in Lahaina. Six people are still missing, and there is one body that has not yet been identified. “Imagine what happens when you gotta live in temporary housing, surrounded by ash, and go to work back in those hotels,” Nā‘ālehu Anthony, a filmmaker and an activist, told me. “People just hit this wall where they’re saying, ‘We’re not going to do that anymore.’ ”

Even though returning to work was hard to stomach, it was crucial to Maui’s economy, which is heavily reliant on tourism, and necessary for residents, who were struggling with bills and insurance. Many residents were worried about their mortgage payments, which are still due even after your house burns down. “For what, a piece of dirt?” Saribay said. His kids were O.K., which was “all that matters,” he said, but he had lost three of his houses, his tattoo parlor, and his boat. He was living in his kids’ grandparents’ house in Leiali‘i. Saribay told me that he had taken a forty-hour course to obtain a hazmat certification, so that he could be part of the effort to clear the rubble from Lahaina. But the idea had become a nightmare. “I just don’t want to be in there right now,” he said.

“Fifty to sixty per cent of the people that passed away was from my neighborhood,” Saribay told me. He has been dealing with trauma: “My nights are a fucking question mark,” he said. “I’m so tired. My mind races.” He has thought about leaving Hawaii altogether, and has felt financial pressure to sell his land—a common experience among homeowners, some of whom reported receiving calls from real-estate investors just days after the fire. “I could just be outta here and say, ‘Fuck Hawaii,’ ” Saribay continued. “I’m not gonna, but fuck.”

He has had delays with his fema relief application—he still doesn’t know how much money or what kind of housing assistance he will get.“Everything will be O.K. if the government really helps us, but they’re not,” he said. “It’s the people of Maui who’s helping each other.”

One Friday evening, I attended a community meeting at Kalepa’s house, which had become a weekly event. People offered advice, consolation, ideas. One man discussed new air purifiers that had been donated by a nonprofit, which residents could take home with them. Pa‘ahana, the Leiali‘i Association president, gave a teary speech arguing that Lahaina should be rebuilt as a giant beach park, with all the shops and homes staying up near the highway. “I know I’m gonna get a lot of flak from the billionaires and businesses,” he said. “But, if we do this right, they will thank us when we’re not here anymore.” As he spoke, fat raindrops started falling. Kalepa told the crowd, “The blessings are pouring out for us.”

Many Hawaiians want to make this moment an opportunity. “It’s very rare to have people plan a new town after hundreds of years of history,” Pa‘ahana told me. “But we get a chance.” The tropical shower stopped as suddenly as it had started. A line of volunteers carried platters of opakapaka, venison, coconut, and poi to folding tables set up in the cul-de-sac. Saribay was bopping around, taking pictures of the food and cracking jokes. “He’s so full of life,” Kalepa said, grinning in his friend’s direction. As it got dark, kids sat on the asphalt playing duck-duck-goose. Anthony, the filmmaker, told me, “The reason Archie Kalepa stood this up is because his community needed help, and because the idea of aloha is not how much you can keep. It’s how much you can give away.”

The first week and a half after the fire, apart from the machinery and the dogs, Lahaina was silent. No birds or bugs were alive. But even among the ashes there is virescence. The oldest banyan tree in Lahaina, planted a century and a half ago, beaten and blackened by fire, has sprouted green buds. They appear to glow against the surrounding moonscape, like time travellers from our once and future planet. ♦

“Everything will be O.K. if the government really helps us, but they’re not,” Saribay said. “It’s the people of Maui who’s helping each other.”

[skyblue-haxi]

I love how math questions are like if Sara has 5 notebooks and buys them for $3, how much does 2 trillion and five hundred and fifty thousand seventy two notebooks cost? And all I can think about is how 5 notebooks only cost a fucking 3 dollars.

[thementalillnessstore]

weird

I feel weird.

I probably made you feel weird too when I texted you. Nine months of no contact and then bam, I’m back in your DMs telling you that you were on my mind. We’re both in college now but my loneliness makes me do weird shit like texting you.

I think I have an addiction to you. To texting you, to your voice in those voice memos, to having sex with you, to getting hurt and broken over and over and over again by you. That definitely feels kinda weird. I liked hearing about who you’re seeing and who you’ve made out with and how I don’t know them at all. I liked hearing about how you love taking the metro and how your school is full of entitled rich kids who pay nine hundred dollars for box seats at baseball games and how your friend-but-more got so drunk she had to go to the ER and how a pretty boy perked up when you got called out. Isn’t that so fucking weird?

I definitely have an illness. I mean, I know I have a couple, that’s why my psychiatrist put me on meds. I think I told you that, right? Well, if I didn’t, now you know. But I have some other sort of affliction, I think, that makes me think about you at night and reread our texts from a year ago where we made fun of your ex and talked about Phoebe Bridgers and Moses Sumney, and I invited you to my birthday party and when you said you couldn’t go because you misunderstood my text, I had a twenty four hour long mental breakdown and wanted to kill myself and was a zombie all day until you realized your fuckup and told me you could actually, in fact, attend while I was in the makeup department at Nordstrom and I couldn’t stop smiling or wanting to cry, because I knew how weird it was to be that upset over some guy I fucked a couple times.

I still check every story I post to see if you viewed it, and I still refresh my DMs to see if you texted me and Instagram just didn’t tell me. It does that sometimes. But it’s been over a week and your little DM slot says “Seen last week” and then I just get this weird angry-sad feeling where my heart seizes up and aches, and I want to throw my phone out my window. Just like last time, and the time before that too. I still think about how every story I post might be the one to make you remember I exist or how it will affect you, as if you’re doing anything more than just clicking aimlessly past.

I still think about how sometimes it feels like you’re the only person who’s ever been attracted to me or thought I was pretty or worth kissing or having sex with. I still get shocked when I realize that you’ve wanted to text me or see me naked, and then it makes me want to turn myself inside out so you can see my guts and what they really mean and how fucked up in the head I am sometimes (Holden Caulfield, eat your heart out). I still get so nervous that you think I’m weird or annoying or clingy. As if you even think anything about me anymore.

I’m so lonely. You’re the only person who has ever touched me and it’s been almost a year since the last time that happened, and now I feel like I don’t have any friends and I’m almost jealous that you get to go have fun and get high and have a bunch of friends while I sit alone in my room, listening to my sad playlist and writing about you at one in the morning on a Friday night. You told me to just put myself out there if I wanted casual sex and that made me feel so weird because I hate putting myself out there and I hate casual sex and I don’t know if I want to do it with anyone else. Which is weird because you were a blip and it’s not like we even really cared about each other. Right?

Weird is still being attached to a boy you kissed at sixteen. Weird is almost killing yourself because college is scary. Weird is realizing you don’t know where home is anymore. Weird is living vicariously through other people who are having way more fun than you. Weird is getting Kit-Kats every night. Weird is being chronically online. Weird is wearing a sweater in seventy five degree heat. Weird is always being there but never getting it in return. Weird is watching people fall apart at two in the morning. Weird is texting you on a Sunday night and then unsending the text.

I hate feeling weird.

[spookyjudgement]

Ah yes. The united states healthcare system, where if your insurance feels like you don’t need a vitamin d test done you have to pay for it out of pocket (even if darker skinned people are much more likely to have vit d deficiencies and you are Not White Or Pale) and it will cost TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE FUCKING DOLLARS