#like please tell me this is just something because of the mass covid deaths and not like. a eugenics purge about to happen

[arctic-hands]

Dunno if it's just me or The Times, but lately when I go to the hospital–either E.R or just for appointments–they'll not only ask me if I have a will or an advanced directive (normal), but now when I say "no" they've been asking me if I want information on how to get one (new, abnormal, strange and eerie). My sleep specialist went so far as to print out the information packet for me

What do they know that I don't know 👀

[daniella100]

Goooood morning. Morning good.

I slept very late and am kind of off but it’s perfect because today is my Shabbat the day devoted to rest. Rest rest rest.

And sports. And grateful thoughts! It’s lovely.

And blog! The blog gets a bit tough…

That I watched a football player drop dead on the field last week is horrible. He basically dropped dead. Was resuscitated twice. More than 200 athletes have dropped dead in fields in the past 2 years. Thankfully I did not watch it live; it would have shocked me profoundly. I could have, it was last week’s “game of the week”, the Bills Bengals game. It was suppose to be a great game.

That it happened on National Television in front of America’s eyes at the start of 2023… that the player basically resurrected twice…that a lot of people are questioning what happened….that the collision prior to his collapse was a normal, light, safe hit. …. that doctors are talking about this… that the first words the player wrote out of his comma were: did we win?… that he is out of harms way…that he had the entire country praying for him is absolutely astounding. I couldn’t have written a more dramatic story. Hmm, strike that, I could:

Why did he fall?

Was he vaccinated? Does the vaccine have severe effects on athletes? Why all these sudden deaths? If it does we need to know it.

I kind of followed the election of the new Speaker of the House last week. I saw that it took them a LOT of debate to get the votes. I bet the media and the opposing party mocked it entirely, the fools. DEBATE is healthy. Censorship is not. Labeling anyone who thinks differently than you a conspiracy theorist is the real Supremacy. That this White House wanted to banish doctors who warned about the mass vaccinations it wanted to IMPOSE on us is Supremacy, it is dictatorship. Initially they said one shot then two then three than every 6 months. Initially they said that if vaccinated you wouldn’t get covid then that you wouldn’t go to the hospital than that you wouldn’t die. Most people that go to the hospitals because of covid these days are vaccinated. They answer to it that they did such a great job with mass vaccination, most people are vaccinated so it’s only normal that the people in the hospital for covid symptoms are vaccinated. Duh- they shouldn’t been in the hospital for covid if they are vaccinated.

I’m not anti vax. I’m anti lies. Take as many shots as you’d like. It’s your life your freedom to choose. And please not tell people the vaccines are free when the people paid 36 billion dollars for it. Because 36 billion dollars is a whole crap of money. By whole lot I mean Galaxy size. 36 billion dollars … 1 billion dollar would take you 2.000 years to make with a 500K annual salary. Yeah, very free indeed. 2.000 years, that bring you back to Jesus’ time! Imagine that, just in time to watch what they did to a free thinker, free speaker.

I want to know why these athletes are falling dead. I love sports. And when I love something, I really love it. I want to know why athletes are falling dead. I want to know why athletes are suddenly falling dead.

I WANT TO KNOW WHY ATHLETES ARE FALLING DEAD ON THE FIELDS.

And shove that Ministry of Truth up the appropriate asses.

[dramaqueeenamby]

Waves: Quarantine

A/N: It's been way too long since I've done something for the Wavesverse, and I apologize deeply. I have a few requests related to this series to complete, but I couldn't knock this idea.

Words: 4K

Warnings: None

Tags: @babe-im-bi @notacamelthatsmywife @missyperle @queenoftheworldisdead @tashawar @valkryienymph @letsshamelessqueen-m @hello-therree @mani-lifes @liquorlaughslove @toni9 @koko-michelle @theequeenofcurses @taylortheeshowpony

Waves

Summer placed her phone inside of the mount and made sure that it was secured before she sat back in her bed, getting comfortable with the mass of pillows supporting her back, and smiling tentatively. “Hi, guys.”

Summer!

Someone tell me this isn’t a joke???? Please???

She lives!

Sis, blink twice if you need help.

Summer rolled her eyes. “Ya’ll better stop. I know it’s been a minute since I’ve hopped on live, but it hasn’t been that damn long.”

Summer continued to read the comments where more than a few people pointed out she hadn’t gone live on Instagram in over three months. Her mouth dropped. “Ya’ll lying. It has not been almost six months, has it?” She placed her hand over her mouth when people started dropping dates in the comments. “Okay, I stand corrected. Damn, I’m sorry, guys.”

Don’t be sorry, bestie. Do better!

Damn, ya’ll are so entitled. Celebrities have lives too.

What life? We all been in quarantine.

Rich people quarantine be different from us poor folks, I guess.

“So that’s actually one of the things I wanted to talk about.” Summer cleared her throat. “And I’m going to try really hard to make sure I word what I want to say as clear and as effective as I can, but I know this is still going to end up as a salacious headline. So, it is what it is.”

Oooh, Summer about to drop some tea.

I don’t see her wedding ring, ya’ll…..

I’m scared omg.

Watch this be nothing but a role announcement.

She shrugged and took a deep breath. “Okay, so a few days ago, I did the Buss It challenge, after being harassed by Sanda. And can I just say that filming was a challenge in and of itself? Not necessarily the movements but preparing? I’ve got two kids, twins, who are like the Tasmanian devil. I was literally up at 3 something in the morning trying to record it because my wild children won’t let me be great.” She chuckled. “Kids are something else.”

Summer truly jumped through hoops and was a damn near acrobat trying to figure out when she could not only get herself done up but actually record the challenge. Being the perfectionist that she was didn’t help, but the fact that she couldn’t recall the last time she’d put on makeup and dressed up was a whole other fiasco.

Quarantine definitely brought out her bum side.

“All of that aside, I truly was satisfied and happy with the final product when I posted it. In hindsight, I should have just left it that, but I wake up every day and choose chaos, so I decided to read the comments.” She blew out a breath. “One of the most frequent comments and really, insults, I’ve received my whole career. Primarily, since I was cast as Storm, revolves around how I look. I.e., my weight. I’ve been called fat, obese, out of shape, and so many other things.”

It was 100% true. The minute Marvel announced that she’d been chosen to play Storm, the racists came all out of the woodworks. She was too short, too chubby, too dark, too black. And Summer didn’t care, not a bit.

“Even,—and I’ll tell you guys this, when I first started my SS training, that’s what I call it, SS for Storm Shape, there was a—person who worked for Marvel at the time who came to visit me while I was training.” She smiled thinking back on that day. She could still recall it so clearly. “He basically was pissed because to him, I still looked the same, fat and out of shape.” She adjusted her top and shifted in her bed. “That same day, I deadlifted and bench-pressed over 200lbs” She paused for effect. “What I need for people to stop doing is stop fucking projecting—and I’m going to cuss in this, so if you don’t like it, oh well. I work for Disney, but I’m a grown ass woman, and I’m going to say what I want.”

I am screaming. Summer said we getting alll the tea today!

So, it’s wrong to point out that someone is physically unhealthy now, cool?

The problem is that no one wants to see a fat superhero. It’s not realistic.

^^^^ Tell me you have a small dick without actually telling me you have a small dick.

“I saw Lizzo, whom I adore, post a Tik Tok where she basically said that she workouts to have the body she wants not what ya’ll want, and honestly? Same. She said that her body type is no one’s fucking business, and that’s so true. Ya’ll love to hop on this internet and pick apart people you don’t even know and criticize bodies you don’t even have to live in and move around with. And for what?” She shook her head, slamming her fist into her open palm as she spoke. She was fully invested now. “I know we in quarantine, but damn, pick another hobby cause being a bully is not it, sweetie.”

I really needed to hear this today.

Using Lizzo as a point of reference makes everything you’re saying null and void. Lizzo is clearly overweight and at risk for diabetes, heart disease, just to name a few…..

I been saying this! You can’t look at a person and say they’re unhealthy.

Bodies come in so many forms, and all are beautiful.

“Now, I bring all this up because a lot of people were commenting on my Buss It challenge and pointing out the fact that I’ve gained weight, and guess fucking what? I have, and you know what else?” She leaned over to whisper while covering her mouth with her hands for focused effect. “I don’t care.”

Summer laughed and shook her head. “As others have pointed out as well, yes, we have a gym in our house. I 1000% acknowledge the fact that having the resources that I do as a celebrity and someone who has money puts me in a different category. Hell, my husband has a whole fitness app. I recognize that. If I wanted to keep up with my workouts, emphasis on wanted, I could have. I own up to that, but I just didn’t feel like it, and that’s okay. What’s not okay is to send and leave mean messages calling me all kinds of names.”

Summer had thick skin. She always had. Growing up with her family, who always ensured to feed her self esteem and make sure she knew that she was beautiful, definitely paid off. It was just a combination of quarantine and not having a lot of opportunities to keep herself busy with work that had her feeling some type of way.

“And that’s something else I wanted to bring up.” She blew out another breath and tried to gather her emotions. This was the subject she was almost certain she’d grow teary eyed discussing. “I love my husband to death. My children are everything. Christopher’s family is like my own, but— I haven’t seen my family, like my mom, grandma, brothers, etc in almost a year.” She paused, dwelling on that. Almost an entire year since she’d been able to physically hug and interact with the people who made her who she was. “And I’ve always made it clear how much I fucking love my family. I live in Australia. I can’t do a drive by with grandma so I and my kids can at least see her on the doorstep.” She quieted again, eyes darting off as she quietly cursed. “I’m trying really hard not to cry right now.”

Please don’t cry, bestie.

This is the side of quarantine that people don’t talk about enough.

Has this woman never heard of FaceTime????

I feel her pain. I live in Europe, and my family is in the states. This quarantine has been brutal.

My grandma died from COVID, and I couldn’t even go to the funeral. Summer is bringing up a good point.

“Damn,” Summer chuckled bitterly and wiped at the tears that fell. “I’m okay, I promise. I just bring this up because quarantine has also been very hard for me in that aspect. At certain points, I’ve been down, I’ve been in my head a lot, and I just was not, for the most part, in a space where I felt like I had to keep up my fitness regimen. And that’s okay. I put my mental wellbeing ahead of making sure my body is socially acceptable. Sue me.”

I really appreciate her honesty.

Summer never goes beyond surface level in interviews, so seeing her this vulnerable is really surprising.

Are we supposed to feel bad for her? She’s rich. She can afford whatever help she needed.

These comments are not passing the vibe check.

Ya’ll are all mental health advocates, but when a black woman is opening up about her struggle, it’s discarded?

“And let me make this clear too, I have an amazing husband who is so patient and so kind. He’s one of the best people I can go to when my anxiety hits, so I don’t want this to come across as me complaining that I’ve been alone. I have him and our children. I just miss the rest of my family. That’s all.” She dried her eyes and started to read the comments, unsurprised by the mixed reaction. She expected as such and was unaffected. At least until she saw one comment.

@ChrisEvans: ❤️❤️❤️

“Evans!” Summer wasn’t expecting to see his name pop up. It’d been such a task convincing him to join IG, let alone teaching him how to operate it. “Let’s go live.”

Not my husband and wife in my head about to go live!!!!

Imagine being able to call Chris Evans your best friend

I still say they smashed idc

It’s Christopher Jamal Evans hopping on this live for me.

^^^ I’m so sick of y’all with that shit.

“Let me try to add him,” Summer spoke to herself, scrolling through the comments to find his so she could request him. “Alright, I requested him. Let’s see if he answers.”

She wondered if she should have sent him a text asking if he was available when he appeared on her screen, effectively splitting it with her on the top and him on the bottom.

“Punk.”

“Kid.”

Summer smiled and greeted, “Hi, best friend.”

He chuckled. “How you doing, Summer?”

“Clearly not as good as the people watching,” she chimed. Summer saw nothing but heart eyes and hearts in the comments. “These people really love you. You truly are a manipulative bastard. He’s an asshole, guys.”

“Don’t be jealous, Summer. It’s so unbecoming of you.”

“You can go to hell.”

“Language,” he playfully reprimanded. “Where are the kids?”

“At preschool. Things are finally starting to open back up over here. Thank God.” She clasped her hands together. “Y’all, please wear masks. Don’t be Karen’s.”

Chris laughed, grabbing his chest. “We’re getting there, Summer.”

“The lies you tell,” she countered. “Don’t A Starting Point, me. Ya’ll are far from getting there, and I’m tired of it. I wanna see my family.”

He sighed. “I know, but how are you feeling today?”

“I got rid of the kids, so that’s definitely a weight lifted,” she answered honestly, laughing when she saw judgmental comments in the chat. “Listen, if you’re a parent, you know where I’m coming from. You love your kids, but my god, sometimes you just need some space.”

“As soon as this all blows over, I told you to send em’ by me for a couple of weeks.”

“Best friend, I already purchased their tickets.” He laughed. “As soon as I get the green light, they are all yours. Feel free to keep them.”

“You guys see how she is?” He pointed to Summer, leaning and squinting to read what was being said. “I do love kids, especially the twins, they’re amazing.”

“He is really really great with them, guys,” Summer added. “One thing about Evans, he’s patient as hell and really, just a big kid. Why do you think him and Christopher get along so well? 40 going on 4.”

“I resent that.”

“Is it a lie though?”

He hesitated. “No.” They both laughed.

I’m loving the dynamic between these two so much.

Is it just me or are they flirting with each other…..

Ain’t nothing inappropriate about this conversation. Ya’ll are reaching…

Ya’ll remember that blind item that came out years ago alleging Chris (Evans) was the biological father of the twins? Hmm…..

^^^^^This kind of bullshit is the reason we’re in a global pandemic.

As always, Summer and Evans ignored any foolery that was being dropped in the comments when she caught a comment that didn’t contain some ridiculous rumor.

“Yes, it is true that Evans and Christopher weren’t allowed to do press together anymore. Ya’ll, they literally could not stay serious for more than a minute. I felt so bad for the poor interviewers.”

“Hey, we were not that bad,” Evans protested, his Boston accent more prominent.

She gasped. “You guys were terrible, Evans, and you know it. I was so mad when they put me with ya’ll those few times. I could barely hear the interviewers over your laughing and stupid commentary that literally no one asked for.”

“We did not.”

“There’s deadass video proof, Evans.”

“Fake news.”

She opened her mouth but caught herself. “I was about to say something.”

He laughed and asked, “Do you remember how we all got drunk before the Infinity War premiere?”

“No, ya’ll got drunk. I was big and pregnant, remember?”

“No,” he dismissed. “You were drinking with us.”

“Evans, how was I drinking when I was pregnant?” She challenged and reminded. “I got drunk with ya’ll for the Endgame premiere, not Infinity War.”

“That’s right,” he remembered and chuckled. “You think we’ll get in trouble for saying this?”

She shrugged with one shoulder. “You’re dead, Christopher never gets in trouble for anything, and I do what I want. I think we’re good.”

Kevin Feige watching this live right now like 🥴🥴🥴🥴

I never realized how arrogant she is……

LMAO. Not the whole cast showing up drunk to the biggest premiere of their lives.

Chris Evans is too damn fine to be approaching 40 and still single.

Their friendship is so goals omg

@ChrisHemsworth: Snitches

Summer’s jaw dropped as she caught the last comment, swiping up to click the name and make sure that she was reading correctly. “Christopher, what the hell are you doing on my live?”

Evans brows furrowed. “Hemmy is here? Shouldn’t he be working?”

“That’s what I want to know,” Summer supplied. “And how long have you been watching?”

@ChrisHemsworth: Long enough.

She smiled nervously and looked off to the side. “I feel weird now. I don’t like when he watches my lives.”

“Aren’t you guys married?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be shutting the fuck up?”

Evans lifted his hands in a defensive manner. “Touchy subject, I see.” They shared another laugh as he cleared his throat. “Why don’t you add him now? I’m supposed to be helping Scott cook.”

“My favorite Evans,” she gushed and furrowed her brows. “You, cooking? Since when?”

“Get out of here.” He waved her off and reminded. “I’m not the one who constantly causes near fires when in the kitchen.”

“So, you really just putting all my business out there like that?”

“Summer, it’s not secret to anyone that you can’t cook for shit.”

“Wow, it really be your own best friends.”

He chuckled. “Love you, kid.”

“Love you too, punk,” she blew a kiss. “I’ll text ya’ later.”

“Alright.” He smiled for the camera. “Thanks for having me everyone.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said jokingly. Evans and Summer said goodbye one last time before he left the live. She blew out a breath and ran her hand through her hair. “Baby, comment something so I can add you. It’s too many comments to wade through.”

Summer adjusted her phone and checked the time on the clock on the wall. It’d been a while since the kids were away at school, and she didn’t want to get so caught up that she was late picking them up.

@ChrisHemsworth: I can’t. I’m too drunk.

Summer released a mixture of a laugh and a snort reading his comment. “You are so damn petty.” She clicked his name and adjusted her outfit while waiting for him to answer. She almost cursed when it seemed like he wasn’t going to join, only for her to smile when his face appeared on her screen.

“Hi,” she greeted in a soft voice with a small smile.

“Hello, Sandcastle.”

“Did you just—I swear to god, it’s always something with you.” Summer rubbed her temples and shook her head. Christopher smiled in response. “Why aren’t you working?”

“I am.”

“You are?”

“Yes.”

“If you’re working, how are you talking to me?” She asked, sassily.

“Umm, a little thing called multitasking, ever heard of it?”

“Wow. You are an asshole.”

“That’s mean.”

“You’re mean.”

“Christopher, you are literally a child.”

“Does a child have muscles like this?” He flexed, and Summer stilled. Christopher stayed in ridiculous shape, but this was another level. He’d never been this massive, and she wasn’t too proud to admit that. Just not aloud.

She faked a yawn. “Am I supposed to be impressed?”

They really just be roasting each other all the time, and I’m here for it.

Summer must be legally blind because this man is stupid fine tf

It’s gotta be steroids. That’s not natural.

^^^^^He’s the god of thunder.

Summer rolled her eyes at the typical nature of the comments. These were the reasons she limited her time on social media and especially stayed away from reading the comments. Her attention was redirected to the top of her phone. It was a text from Christopher asking her to call him.

“But we’re—oh, I get it.” She realized he wanted to talk to her, not her and her tens of millions of followers. “Alright, guys, I’m gonna get off here so I can talk to my husband, alone.”

“She just doesn’t want to share me with you all, that’s all.”

“Don’t even start, Christopher,” she lectured while he laughed and got serious, for a minute tops.

“Hope you all are taking care and staying safe,” he spoke honestly. “And we’ll talk to you soon.”

Summer waved and smile. “Bye, guys. Remember to be kind.” Summer offered a final smile before ending the live. Closing up the app, she moved to open FaceTime and called up Christopher. He answered almost immediately. “You know I hate when you watch my Lives. Now, how much did you see?”

“Enough to know you’re coming to see me tonight.”

She laughed aloud. “Funny.”

“I’m serious, Summer.” Focusing on him, she realized that there was no humor in his voice nor his expression. Summer also noticed that he didn’t have the Thor wig on yet, which was probably why he was able to go live with her. He was waiting to get into hair and makeup. “Leave the kids with Liam. It’s not like he’s doing anything.”

“Christopher!”

“What? Is he not a professional unemployed bastard.”

Summer’s smile remained as she shook her head. “You are so mean.”

“I’ll handle the flight arrangements. You, my beautiful wife, just make sure you get on the jet so I can handle you.”

“Christopher, you’re working. People with everyday jobs don’t just up and show up to their spouses workplace because they miss them or need a break from the kids. That’s how folks get fired.”

Christopher started to move around, walking somewhere, she realized. “What are you doing?”

“Hey, Tike.”

Summer’s eyes widened slightly. “Christoper!”

“Sup, man?” Taika asked casually, as Summer laughed again. Taika Waititi was such a character.

“You mind if Summer comes up for a few days?”

“Sure, man,” he replied almost right away. “Bring the kids and chickens too.”

“I am not bringing those damn chickens,” she immediately protested.

Christopher made a sound. “Ha, so you are coming!”

“I didn’t say that.”

Taika joined Christopher so that he was in camera. “Hey, Summer, why don’t you come on join? You can have a cameo. Chickens, too.”

She rubbed her temples. Taika’s and Chris’s friendship would never not make sense to her. They were cut from the same cloth. “One, hey. Two, I was already in Ragnarok. I’m good on the cameos. Three, what is with ya’ll and those creepy looking chickens?”

“Whoa, creepy? What did the chickens ever do?”

“Exist,” Summer answered dryly. She still hadn’t forgiven Evans and Christopher for convincing her to let the kids keep those damn things. Her home was becoming more and more of a farm with each animal that joined the household.

“Tough crowd, that one, ehh?”

“Always,” Christopher agreed.

“I can hear you both,” she reminded and groaned loudly. Summer would love to spend a few days away from the kids. Chris would be working, yes, but she’d at least get some time for herself. Even better, alone adult time with her husband. That had also been a bit tricky during quarantine because of her rambunctious twins. Still, she disliked using her status as a celebrity to gain things, and this would definitely be a case of using status for pull. “I don’t know….”

Deep in her thoughts, she hadn’t realized that Chris had walked away and returned to wherever he was prior to finding Taika, most likely his trailer.

“What if you only stayed a night?” Chris tried to bargain. “The flight is only an hour and a half. That will give you more than enough time to come here, let me fix you dinner, run you a nice bath, maybe get in the good ole’ horizontal tango—”

“You know I hate when you call it that,” she reminded quietly, admitting. “That does sound nice, though.”

“Or, I can come to you—“

“Absolutely not. Christopher, you’re already doing so much back and forth as it is.” One of the good things to come out of quarantine, to Summer at least, was that it forced many people to take a much needed break. Her husband was one of those people. Christopher had been working nonstop since she met him. Project after project, film after film, many of them Marvel films, which put a whole other layer of difficulty what with the strenuous physical requirements. Even now as he shot Thor 4, he was in the best shape he’d ever been, muscles nearly tearing the cotton of his clothes. He looked amazing, but it was what they couldn’t see that she was starting to grow a little concerned over. Christopher wasn’t as young as he once was. He had to slow down, eventually.

Summer realized this would be a perfect chance to have a conversation about just that with him, which all but led her to her final decision.

“Alright,” she conceded, finger up as she made her demands. “Three days, and I stay at the house while you shoot. We may be returning to normal, but we’re still in a pandemic. I won’t go around anyone except you.”

“So I get you all to myself? Hardly consider that a stipulation.”

“And…we talk.”

“After the horizontal tango—“

“I swear to God, if you don’t stop calling it that—“

“What was that, sweetheart? I wasn’t listening.” She saw that he had paused the screen, causing Summer to remember that she hadn’t even consulted with the babysitter. “Making flight arrangements for you.”

“Shit, let me text Liam and make sure he’s available.”

“He gets reception in the box?”

“Christopher! For the last time, your brother is not living in a box.”

“Do you know that for certain?”

“Goodbye, Christopher,” she prepared to end the call before smiling softly. “I love you, Christopher, and thank you.”

He winked. “I’ll always do anything for you, Summer. Anything.” A beat. “Don’t forget to leave the clothes. You won’t need them.”

“Christopher!”

[nancypullen]

Deeeeeep Breath

Has your heart been as heavy as mine?  The world is on fire, Putin is a mad man and there are elected officials in AMERICA cheering him on. Covid is still killing thousands but we’re supposed to act like it’s over. Inflation is hurting everyone, not just in the U.S. but around the world.  It’s a lot. I‘m reading too much news, following too many journalists on social media, and I feel like I have a lump in my throat all the time because I’m so sad for so many. There’s a healthy dose of anger mixed in for the obstructionists and those intent on performing political theater for their deplorable base.  What happened to common decency?  So, having said all of that - I have to add that I’m incredibly inspired by the people of Ukraine, especially the badass women.  There are grannies in trenches with weapons, there are mothers walking up to fully armed Russian soldiers and telling them, “Put these seeds in your pocket so at least sunflowers will grow when you die here.”  Villagers are gathering en masse to block roads and stop convoys of tanks.  Very young Russian soldiers are being captured, admitting they don’t know what they’re doing or why they’re in Ukraine, and they’re being allowed to call their mothers.  As always, power hungry old men with fragile egos are sending young men to their deaths.  I find it interesting that  the gun-loving, cosplaying “warriors” who have filled my social media feed in the past, the same sort that attacked our own capitol claiming that they were defending democracy, have sided with Putin.  I fight for democracy harder than they do. Russian news has been airing encouraging remarks from the likes of Tucker Carlson and Trump. The same people who crumple and scream “communism” when asked to wear a mask are cheering for an actual communist invasion of a democratic country. Turns out they’re not good people. Who knew? <eyeroll> BUT... That’s not what anyone visits this ol’ blog to read.  Just wanted you to know why I’ve been missing in action lately. I’ve been wrapped up in world events, prepping this house for sale, giving myself an ulcer about the move, and trying to shed the winter weight that slowly crept up.  I’m trying to get from fat to chubby.  My sweet Matthew turned 37 on the 22nd and I have to admit...I don’t think I’m going to lose the baby weight.  I’ve had a lot on my plate, figuratively and literally.  So yesterday I escaped to my desk and, you guessed it, made some earrings.  Kneading and mixing that clay is so therapeutic for me.  I made this batch yesterday and they’re shipping to my sister today. A little something for spring...

A little something for St. Patty’s day...

And some random stuff...something feminine and something bold, because aren’t we all a bit of both?

Pardon my horrible presentation, but you should know that this is what it looks like when I’m trying to snap a picture.

This ain’t a studio, folks. Doing something with my hands (besides eating) centers me and I needed that.   Let me tell you about something else that has helped settle my anxious heart - a wish journal.  A dear, dear friend told me about hers, explaining that you simply write down what you want from the universe with a please and a thank you, and basically set your intentions.  She said that she delighted in going back through hers and seeing how many of her wishes were fulfilled. Think about it, when you actually write down what it is you want, you can think of it as a wish, a prayer, a goal, a fantasy, whatever - and the odds are that it will stay in your mind and subconsciously you’ll make decisions that bring it closer. Those of you who know me know that I am not a religious person, but I do believe that there is more to this universe than any of us understand. How often do we actually ask for what we want?  Maybe it’s just me that hesitates to do that. I was taught to always put others before yourself, that it’s selfish to ask for what you want, etc. In fact, I have a very hard time actually voicing what I want, especially if I think it will put anyone out the least little bit.  But I no longer think it’s selfish to make a request for what you want from life.  I don’t think it’s selfish to say, “Hey Universe, I’ve put a ton of love and kindness and laughter into the world, perhaps we could balance the cosmic scales with this or that.”  I know that it has lifted my heart to write down what I want - everything from specifics for our move to Maryland to peace and safety in Ukraine. I have wished for the broken hearts of friends to heal, I’ve wished for good health for loved ones, and I’ve even wished for a surge of creative juices which I seem to have lost during the pandammit.  Sure, people will scoff (ask me if I care) but there’s something about the writing of the request that relieves the stress associated with the subject.  I’m not a person who often says I WANT anything, but there’s a lot of freedom in it.  It’s a shame that I turned 58 before learning that. Let me drive it home for you - there is nothing wrong with asking for what you want. There’s also nothing wrong with working hard to get what you want. Some things are beyond our control though, and we might just have to release that into the ether with a pretty please. When my friend told me about hers I immediately ordered a plain, sky blue (because the sky’s the limit, right?)  journal from Amazon.  When it arrived I painted the cover.  I’d recently sorted and tossed a number of my paintbrushes and didn’t have the fine tipped brush I needed for the job.  It’s a little clumsy, but you can tell it’s a dandelion.  Make a wish!

Because I am who I am , I even added some glitter to it.  Wish requests should sparkle, right?   Right now I need all of the sparkle I can get. Anyone else feeling drab?  Because I’m still avoiding pretty much every place but the grocery store I’m in need of a hair cut.  My hair has gotten way too long for a woman my age.  It’s got a very 70′s Farrah vibe without the Farrah face or figure.  Not a good look.  So I made an appointment for one o’clock on Tuesday.  I’ll mask up and hope I don’t exit looking worse than when I entered.  Hmmm, maybe I’ll jot a little something in the ol’ wish journal.  Dear Universe, please have mercy on the brave stylist who has agreed to wade into battle and conquer my hair. May my tresses be subdued and project a joyful countenance, one that will minimize my deepening forehead wrinkles and the intense “What the hell is wrong with you people” lines that have developed between my eyebrows over the last two years. Thank you. Okay, that wish turned a little bitter toward the end.  I’ll need to rephrase.  Maybe just, I wish for a flattering haircut that is easy to maintain.   That’s probably enough nonsense from me today. I’ve got to run over to Sally Beauty for a curbside pickup.  My life is so glamorous that I received a “BoughtMilk” price gouging settlement of $18.90 and spent it on hair color for my roots.   It’s the circle of life.   I hope that you’re smack dab in the middle of a good day. In fact, that’s my heartfelt wish for you. I’ll write it down. Dear Universe, please shower the readers of my babble with love, security, joy, and plenty. They’re good people who deserve sweet lives. Thank you. Stay safe, stay well, make a wish! XOXO- Nancy

[qqueenofhades]

I was already distressed about the political and social situation in the US, and then this happens. Are there any examples of societies that fought back against fascism and won, without civil or international war breaking out? Surely there must be some success stories in history. How did other societies overcome fascism, are there lessons to be applied to our current situation? Please tell me we're not doomed, because I have no hope for the future.

Sigh.

Okay.

I’ve been through... a lot of the stages of grief by now. That is, rageposting on tumblr, venting to my friends via text, drinking, crying while drinking, lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling, feeling the crushing weight of certainty that we’re all screwed and nothing matters, crying while talking to my sister, crying generally, lying in bed some more, and am currently still in bed while writing this, but am struggling to put on my internet historian aunt hat and offer some comfort to the stricken masses.

First off: This is bad. I’m not even going to pretend this isn’t bad. We all knew RBG had cancer again, but it was pretty fixed in our minds that she would somehow manage to hang on until after the election. 45 days before the biggest presidential election of all time, in the middle of this year, when names including Ted “Zodiac Killer” Cruz and Tom “Time for Roe vs. Wade to go, block federal funding from being used to teach about slavery, send in the military to crush the BLM protesters” Cotton have already been floated as some of her possible replacements? With Trump and McConnell determined to work as fast as possible to steal this seat as brazenly as they can, because they are literal fascists who don’t care about their own example (Merrick Garland was nominated in FEBRUARY of an election year and McConnell held it up for being “too close to the election?”)

Ugh. Anyone who doesn’t get that this is bad or acting like people are overreacting doesn’t get what’s at stake. And when, as we’ve said before and are saying again now, the future of everyone who isn’t a white straight rich Republican man in this country depends on an 87-year-old woman with cancer for the fourth time? Something’s wrong here. RBG’s death did not have to leave us in this total existential panic, and oh yeah, maybe this could have ALL BEEN AVOIDED AND WE COULD HAVE ALSO HAD THREE (3) NEW LIBERAL JUSTICES SECURING PROGRESSIVE LEGISLATION FOR A GENERATION IF SOME OF YOU HAD JUST FUCKING VOTED FOR HILLARY CLINTON IN TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING SIXTEEN.

(Why yes I am still mad about that, I will be bitter until the end of time that we were consigned to four years and counting of this completely avoidable nightmare because of apathy, misogyny, and Leftist Moral Purity TM, but we’re talking about the future and what can still be done here, not what’s in the past.)

Anyway. Here’s the bright side, which admittedly sucks right now, but it’s been the answer all long:

VOTE.

You have to fucking vote, and you have to fucking vote for Biden/Harris. Everything that we’ve been talking about is no longer a hypothetical; it’s happening right now. This is not just some Awful Worst Case scenario, and it’s not somehow being spouted by privileged white liberals ignoring the struggles of the masses. (Viz: that awful fucking text post with its simpering self-righteousness: “are you punching nazis or just telling oppressed people to vote blue?” I hate that text post with a fiery passion and it’s the exact kind of morally holier than thou leftist propaganda that wouldn’t surprise me if it was generated by a troll farm in Krasnoyarsk.) My dad is disabled and lives on Social Security. Trump’s second-term plan to end the payroll tax takes SSID out by mid-2021, so... I guess that’s my dad fucked then. I’m a gay woman with long-term mental illness, no healthcare, no savings, no current job, and a lot of student debt. My sister has complex health problems and relies intensely on publicly funded healthcare programs. All my family have underlying conditions that would put them at worse risk for COVID (age, asthma, immune issues.) These are just the people IN MY HOUSEHOLD who would be at risk from a second Trump presidency. It says NOTHING about my friends, about all the people far less fortunate than us, and everyone else who IS ALREADY DYING as this nation lurches into full-blown fascism. That is real. It is happening.

Here’s the good news and what you can do:

Democrats are fired up and mad as hell, and they’ve already donated $31 million between the announcement of RBG’s death last night and today, and that number is climbing every second.

You can help by donating to Get Mitch or Die Trying, which splits your donation 13 ways between the Democrats challenging the most vulnerable Republican seats in the Senate. That also has raised EIGHT MILLION BUCKS in the less-than-twenty-four hours.

You can donate RIGHT NOW to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, vote if your state offers early voting, request your mail-in ballot, or hound everyone you know to ensure that they’re registered.

You can call your US Senators (look up who they are for your state, ESPECIALLY IF THEY ARE REPUBLICAN OR YOU LIVE IN A SWING STATE OR ARE UP FOR RE-ELECTION IN 2020) and phone the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 to voice your insistence that they respect RBG’s last wishes and refuse to vote on any Trump nominee until after January 2021.

The other good-ish news is that I woke up to an email from the Biden campaign this morning about how they’re well aware of this and they’re already on it. BUT WE CANNOT COUNT ON EITHER THEM OR THE SENATE DEMOCRATS TO BE ABLE TO STOP IT. Because Joe Biden is not president and the Senate Democrats do not have a majority, if the Republicans manage to rush a nominee and a vote and all 52 GOP senators vote for that nominee, hey presto, tyranny by majority, a SECOND stolen Supreme Court seat, and a 6-3 hard conservative majority for the next generation. Even if Roberts or Gorsuch sometimes defect on procedural grounds, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer (who is also 82 and thus ALSO might soon be replaceable, thus resulting in an EVEN WORSE ideological swing) would be outnumbered on everything. This is terrible. I’m not even gonna pretend it wouldn’t be.

BUT:

If Joe Biden is elected with a Democratic Senate and House, IT MATTERS. It gets us off the fascism track, it gives us the ability to make progressive law and have it enacted without going to die in Mitch McConnell’s Kill Stack, it gives Biden the executive authority to nominate liberal judges and change Trump’s worst outrages on day 1, it stands as a huge example of a nation managing to reject fascism by democratic process, and while yes, we’d still have a terribly rigged Supreme Court, Democrats would control all the other branches of government and be able to put safeguards in place. The other option is outright fascism and the end of American democracy for good. This may sound alarmist. It’s not. It’s literally what the situation has ended up as, as all of us who were begging people to vote for HRC in 2016 saw coming all along.

So yes. That’s what you need to do, and what WE need to do. We need to make as much goddamn noise as possible, protest, contact elected representatives, make sure everybody pulls their weight and ferociously fights the promised attempt to ram through a new justice before Election Day, all that. But even if that does happen, THEN WE NEED TO FUCKING DONATE, ORGANIZE, AND VOTE FOR JOE BIDEN AND DEMOCRATS UP AND DOWN THE BALLOT. ALL OF US. NO EXCUSES. NO MORE TWITTER LEFTIST ECHO CHAMBERS. NO MORE. THEN, EVEN WITH A RIGGED SUPREME COURT, WE WILL ALL BE SAFER ON NOVEMBER 4TH AND CAN TRY TO FIX WHAT’S BROKEN.

The stakes are just too high to do anything else.

May her memory be a blessing, and a revolution.

[swtsuitou]

Memorial action for a sex worker. ‘I don't want to end up dead in a love hotel’

1st of August 2021: Memorial action for a sex worker. ‘I don't want to end up dead in a love hotel’

On the 1st of June 2021, a sexworker was killed in a love hotel in Tachikawa, Tokyo.

 Every time a sex worker dies, people say things like “Who cares if a prostitute lives or dies?” - “Whore deserves anything anyway” or even “Whores just shouldn't live on this planet spreading throughout the whole society both by mass media and everyday people on the internet, and even by the killer .

 The suspect of this case also said “I thought it's better that sex workers don't exist anyway” and “Female sexworkers are a cause of aging and declining population of Japan.

  Right after the incident, the mass media reported the victim's real name. But tell me, why would you even like to know her real name?

 You! Yes, exactly you! You, who you wanted to know the victim's real name – didn't you simply flinch a moment while the scary truth of how she was brutally murdered? And then, didn’t you simply return to your everyday life? Aren’t you the one who is just a consumer of the sheer existence of us sex-workers? Aren’t you the one who didn’t do a damn thing against all the prejudices and discrimination we sex-workers are facing day in day out?

  We want to work cheerfully, with health and safety, without being insulted and getting hurt. We are not your free pornography.

  Thankfully, some of you may pity on us and want to save us.The “anti-poverty activist” Takanori Fujita claims that the sex industry as such should be eliminated and is advocating for the the complete abolition of sex industry. Business owners of sex industry should not be included in  the COVID-19 compensation payment , he says. But dude, go fuck yourself, we say. She didn't get killed because sex industry exists. She was killed because discriminatory claims like “The sex industry as such should be eliminated”exist.

To say it simply: There's no shortage of clients like you. Clients who want to hear sad miserable stories about our lives full of poverty and violence. If you're willing to pay the right price or offer some kind of oh-so splendid "help," we might be able to tell you some “Oh, you poor girl”-style personal stories that might be to your liking.

 But you know, things like this are part of our job. We are not your “poor girls”. Don't exploit our lives! If you really want to “help” those “poor girls” grudgingly working in bad circumstances, then please think again about what you really desire. If you think that women who undress and spread their legs outside by their own volition outside of romantic relationship or marriage are something that simply can't exist, if you see women who do this simply as “poor brainwashed girls”, if you want us to be just weak and unhappy, then you should think again about what it really is that you're trying to protect.

  Although one does not need a quolification nor specialised knowledge to start with sex work, that doesn't mean sex work is for everyone. We are not “selling our bodies”. Sex workers are specialists to fulfill the fantasies of the clients, ultimate emotional labourers, and also care workers. Disrespecing and exploiting sex work is almost like being complicit in a discourse that seeks to keep domestic labour unpaid or extremely underpiad job. All we want is the same kind of respect and safe working conditions that clinical counselors, spa workers and other health professionals enjoy.

  As always, nobody is grieving about the death of a sex worker. Nobody is celebrating the life of a sex worker. We are only being watched by curious eyes, we are the target of insults and they are being consumed. That's why we want to grieve her death. We want to show the society that there are people who grieve the death of every sex worker who died. And we want to expose this patriarchal society.  All of your prejudices like “Who cares when a woman dies who spreads their legs for money” have killed her. They are killing us, too. We will never ever accept such a society.

  On Sunday, August 1, at 1:00 p.m., we will hold a memorial for the sex worker, the victim in front of Tachikawa Station and some of the bigger Tokyo train stations that have red light district nearby.

  We will spend half a day going around Tokyo, standing at several stations for about an hour each, and finally make an appeal in front of Tachikawa Station before breaking up. We will not do it in a hotel area or any other place where it would interfere with the business of stores.

 1:00pm Ueno -> Ikebukuro -> Shinjuku -> 7:00pm Tachikawa

  We will be collecting eulogies from everyone, posting them on our blog, and reading them on our behalf during the day's activities. Anonymous messages are welcome. Please write in Japanese or English.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdvxieudLPo-1aVDxQ1sR3TLUI7xeJD1nmRQzyJrZPesp35mw/viewform?vc=0&c=0&w=1&flr=0

[wasthereamassshootingtoday]

COVID- 3/12 Update

Wow! A lot can change in so little time, can’t it? But not all for the bad!

Almost 63,000 of the 81,000 cases in China have recovered! Around 3,000 people have died and the rest are still recovering. Those are very good numbers! Especially considering that cases in China appear to have leveled off. This is a good sign.

As of 3/12/2020 7:16pm EST, there are 1,315 active cases in the United States. 373 of these have been in Washington State and 216 in New York.

However, only 7,695 people have been tested for COVID in the United States. This is an alarmingly low number and signals to me that we have many more cases in the US that re not yet reported to due to the lack capability of our current medical infrastructure to perform COVID tests quickly.

Per capita, the US performs 23 tests per million people. Compare this to South Korea who is running 3,692 tests per million people. Our testing capability is only 16,000. This delay in testing is dangerous and will lead to further disease spread. We cannot be truly sure of how many people in the US have COVID right now and we likely won’t have true numbers until the outbreak has passed. Visit this link for more information.

Please visit this website for the most up-to-date information, maps, and statistics.

As you have probably heard, there have been some major COVID developments in the news recently.

Firstly, Italy has entered a nationwide lock-down. All nonessential travel and group gatherings have been halted through April 3rd in an effort to curb the outbreak. My friend in Italy tells me there are high fines for being outside without a good reason. Many “nonessential” shops and services have been shut down.

This is in response to the spike in COVID deaths in the country, which killed almost 800 people in 24 hours. The current death toll is around 1,000. There are about 12,500 reported cases in Italy thus far. This appears to be an extremely high mortality rate, especially when the rest of the world is hovering at 2-4% and for Italy it is around 8%.

There are many reasons this rate appears so high and why the outbreak there is worse that in so many countries and this article explains it all well. Basically, Italy is older than many other European countries, the fact that the disease was going around for a while without people realizing, and they tested a lot of people recently explains a lot of the high rate of disease there.

I have a feeling that the number of cases will continue to rise but the death rate will decrease. People with mild cases tend not to go to the doctor and there are asymptomatic carriers transmitting the disease as well. So in times like this were the disease is still relatively new and tests can only be done so fast, many milder cases no diagnosed. This makes the death rate seem higher than it is. So don’t panic. Italy is having a pretty bad outbreak right now, but the mortality rate will even out and the government has input good disease control measures.

Second thing in the news: no more travel from Europe to the US for a month! (Except Great Britain) Trump inputted this measure to prevent further disease spread after being called out for his inaction. I hate to agree with Trump on anything and I find just about everything he has said about the disease insensitive and borderline inane, but I think this was a decent move.

Thirdly, sports. I know nothing about sports, but apparently the NCAA Tournament was canceled, the NHL suspended its season, and the MLB is halting spring training. So there’s that. This is part of something public health workers call social distancing. Basically, you stop large crowds of people from forming as not to further spread disease.

Fourth, the economy? Apparently the DOW is tanking. I know less about economics than I do about sports so I will let someone else explain this.

Next, hoarding! This is not the apocalypse so please stop buying mass quantities of soap, hand sanitizer, canned goods, masks, and toilet paper. It is not helping and is causing shortages. You won’t need all of it. Please stop. This is creating further panic and creating more stress and disruptions.

Lastly, WHO has declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Don’t be alarmed. This is not a measure of disease severity, but rather just how far it has spread. This does not change the disease; it is merely a classification that will hopefully spur global action. We actually have several pandemics currently going on, such as HIV/AIDS and cholera, which has been ongoing for many years. The last declared outbreak was H1N1 in 2009.

Shout out to all my college kids out there! Following the lead of Harvard, many colleges around the country are shutting down, extending spring breaks, or moving to online classes. Personally, my university announced today that it is moving to online classes after spring break. I think this is an overreaction, but is is an effective means of stopping disease spread. So, there’s that.

Also, coronaviruses have existed for decades (they are the most cause of the common cold). Think of the term coronavirus like dogs, and COVID, SARS, and MERS and MERS are breeds of dogs. COVID is merely a sub-type of coronavirus. It is new and likely came from a live animal market.

So all those Facebook people declaring that coronavirus is governmental conspiracy because it appears on the back of a Lysol bottle are wrong. COVID was also not created in a lab, it was not designed to distract from an election, and it is not from bioterrorism.

Sometimes diseases just occur. It happens. It is actually very common for imaginal viruses to spillover and spread into humans. (COVID likely went from bat to pangolin to human, mutating along the way). It happens all the time; this virus just happened to be a bit more popular than the others.

Finally, the disease itself. It is not the flu. Please stop saying it is. COVID causes fever, cough, and shortness of breath. If you are young (<65) and not immunocompromised you will likely have a short illness and be fine relatively quickly. If you are in an at-risk demographic, then you have the possibility of developing pneumonia and having an extended hospital stay.

I know all of this sounds really scary! People are reacting very strongly, the media is stirring up panic, and our government is focused on the wrong things. But you will be alright. Just practice everyday precautions:

1. Wash your hands for at least 20 seconds after touching your face, using the bathroom, coming in contact with a sick person, handling food, etc.

2. Wear a face mask ONLY if you are sick.

3. Don’t hang out around sick people.

4. Don’t be around other people if you are sick.

5. Avoid large gatherings and unnecessary travel when you can.

6. And above all don’t panic. You will be fine. Just use reasonable precautions and use your common sense.

Stay safe and healthy everyone!

[duhragonball]

Cult Classic

I had a really exhausting week, so I’m going to try to chill out by writing this thing about cults that’s been bouncing around in my head since... oh, like January 6th?   For some reason?     But it’s also about my insanely long OC fanfic slash vanity project slash concept album.  Join me, won’t you?

Okay, so back in... geez 2018?   Has it been that long?   Around October 2018 I started working out the details for the big climax of the “1000 years ago” section of my fanfic.  From the start I had this idea that the Legendary Super Saiyan would be locked into a death struggle with pretty much the entire Saiyan population, led by a Saiyan King who just can’t handle being upstaged.   But I had to figure out a lot of details to make that actually work.   What I finally ended up with was the Jindan Cult. 

Why a cult?  Because I wanted my King character to be the main villain, but also be physically weaker, but also he needed to be powerful enough to challenge the heroine. I came up with all these different ways to beef up his power level without making him a Super Saiyan himself, but ultimately I wanted him to have an army of Siayans at his back.   That led me to consider some sort of magic elixir that would make them all stronger, but especially the king, since he’s ultimately in this for himself.  At first, I considered having him mind-control all of his goons, but I spent the mind control nickel in earlier arcs, and I’ll have to use it again later, because Towa and Demigra use it.   Then I thought of drug addiction, which is sort of like mind control but not literal brainwashing or anything like that.  And that led me to the cult concept.  

One major inspiration for me was the real-life cult called “NXIVM”, which made the news back in 2018 when their leaders started getting arrested, including “Smallville” star Allison Mack.   Every time I read about it, it felt like something from a movie, but it was real.   I guess the celebrity angle made it more bizarre to me, because it’s sort of like “Hey, this isn’t just some group of randos; someone you’ve heard of is in this thing.”   Not that I ever paid much attention to “Smallville”, but you get the idea.  She didn’t just join NXIVM, she eventually became one of the top recruiters.   Some of the character arcs in my fic were my own attempt to understand how a person goes from Point A to Point B. 

The big plot hole, though, in my mind, was that I came up with this whole master plan for the bad guys, but it involved sending wave after wave of Saiyan cultists to die in pointless, unwinnable battles against Luffa.    I couldn’t have them win much, because if they beat her, they’d just kill her, and the story would be over.    It struck me as fishy that these Saiyans would sign up for a war where the casualty rate is 100%, but I tried to lampshade it as best I could.   “Yeah, all those other chumps couldn’t beat Luffa, but I’ll pull it off because I’m special!”   It still seemed a bit unlikely.  

But then 2020 happened, and I guess the main thing I learned from that year was that people will accept almost anything in order to believe a comfortable lie.  The joke I’ve seen on the internet is that we need to retire the expression “avoid it like the plague”, because it turns out a lot of people don’t actually avoid plagues very well at all.   The horrifying thing about COVID-19 is how easily people will accept the climbing death tolls.   “Oh, well this person was already in bad health, so they would have died eventually anyway.”   I don’t want to get too political here, but I’m pretty sure a lot of the anti-mask, coronavirus-is-a-hoax crowd are the same people who made up tall tales about “death panels” in Obamacare.    “They’re gonna euthanize your grandma!” they would say, but now they say your grandma is acceptable losses if it means reopening bars and restaurants.

Actually, I do mean to get political, because holy fuck, Qanon stormed the Capitol Building.    Look, if you don’t believe Joe Biden won the election, I don’t know what to tell you, except please get far away from me, right now.  If you’re not familiar with Qanon, a few years ago some guy on an image board posted a bunch of cryptic messages and claimed to be an important government figure who would know about important things.    People started “deciphering” his “clues” and when he stopped posting new ones they started inventing their own “clues” and interpreting them any way that suited them.    This led to an overarching narrative that Donald Trump was actually part of this massive sting operation to arrest hundreds, maybe thousands of left-wing politicians, celebrities, and whoever else.    Any day now, he was supposed to have Hilary Clinton arrested, and also JFK Junior would somehow show up and help him, even though he’s been dead for 22 years.  Every day, these Qanon guys would add on more bizarre lore to their “theories”, and every day none of their predictions would come true.  Then Trump lost the election, which put them in a bind, because their whole mythology is based on the idea of him saving the world as POTUS, and now he wasn’t even going to be POTUS for much longer.  

I’m pretty sure this had a lot to do with the lies about election fraud.    Trump himself refused to accept defeat, and his supporters didn’t want to accept it either, so they all told each other that it wasn’t real, and they believed each other so much that they dug in their heels.   But then they’d take this stuff to court and the judge would be like “Uh, what evidence do you have of mass voter fraud?” and they would just be like “lol nvm!”  I mean, if there was proof for any of this, why would they not want a judge to see it?   But for Qanon, it was more than just being sore losers.    They needed all their whackamaroo predictions to come true, and Trump losing re-election would upset the applecart.  

So then they started telling themselves that they could win this thing through the boring certification process.   I think it was like, December 14 when all the states had to certify their results.   So they held out hope that nothing was over until then.    Then they pinned their hopes on the Electoral College, and that there would be enough faithless electors to hand Trump the victory, in spite of the voters.   I found this one amusing, since I used to see tumblr suggesting the same thing back in 2016, when they were still trying to come up with ways for Bernie Sanders to win.  

Then they decided Mike Pence could fix everything, because on Jan 6, Congress would officially count the Electoral Votes and formally declare the winner, and Mike Pence would step in and overrule the whole thing, because the Vice-President oversees that process.    Except he just oversees it, he can’t legally change the outcome, especially on a whim.    And then the riot at the Capitol happened, and I’m pretty sure all these Qanon types thought it would mark the beginning of a nationwide uprising, with all seventy-odd million Trump voters going apeshit, but it... didn’t work out that way.  

Then they convinced themselves that everything was building to January 20, because the innauguration was actually a clever trap, and once Joe Biden took the oath of office, he could then be arrested for treason, so you see, they had to make it look like Trump lost the election, because it was the only way to fool Joe Biden into incriminating himself... or... something.   But Jan 20 came and went, so the latest fallback position I heard was that there’s a double-secret REAL inauguration day, and it’s in March, and the January 20 one isn’t legitimate, even though Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2016, but whatever.    That, or the guy we see in the White House now is actually Trump disguised as Joe Biden, or a Joe Biden android or something.   

I think I sort of understood that Qanon is a cult, but I didn’t really put the pieces together until the events of January unfolded.    Pre-November, it just seemed like a conspiracy theory, without any real timetables or prophecies, like Flat Earth.    But once the end of the Trump Administration was in sight, it really started to look like all the doomsday cults I’ve heard about over the years.  The predicted events wind up failing to come true, and they invent new predictions to explain away the old ones.   It’s not about the veracity of the claims as much as the claims themselves.    People want to believe there’s this whole elaborate explanation for everything.    They wanted to believe that Trump was this hypercompetent superheroic messiah, because the alternative is to face the uncertain reality: that he had no idea what he was doing, and real people were going to suffer for it.  

I think I sort of worked that idea into my fictional cult, but I backed into it.   NXIVM was a sex cult, not a doomsday cult, or an elaborate conspiracy theory, so I was mostly fixated on all the depraved things the cult could do to its members.   But they all share the same lure: a belief system that promises to make everything fit. I’m not sure what the hook was for NXIVM, but Allison Mack didn’t go in thinking about how much fun sex trafficking would be.   That came later, after she was convinced that NXIVM had all the answers, and one of those answers involved sex crimes, apparently.   In the same vein, Qanon attempted to explain mass arrests and executions by claiming that Hilary Clinton eats babies or something.   “Well, I don’t want babies to get eaten, so I guess breaking into the Capitol building seems like a reasonable course of action.”  

Weighed against real life, a bunch of Saiyans accepting a 100% casualty rate doesn’t seem so outrageous.   It also helps that sometimes the leaders of these groups can buy into their own hype, and think they’re infallible when they’re really not.    This week, I started reading the Darth Plagueis novel again, and I’ve seen the Sith from Star Wars referred to as a cult, but I never gave it a lot of thought until I noticed that Plagueis buys into the whole Dark Side of the Force thing a little too hard.   At times, he’ll wax philosophical about how the Jedi are the real bad guys when you think about it, and he’s not just saying that to be manipulative.   He honestly believes that the Sith can save the galaxy from decline, which is stupid and hypocritical, because they’re the ones causing all the decline.    I always got the impression that Darth Sidious understood that it was all about accumulating power as an end unto itself, and any high-minded talk of necessary evil was just to keep the rubes in line.    Rise of Skywalker plays into that idea nicely.   He somehow survived Episode VI, but he let the Empire collapse, because if he can’t rule it, he doesn’t want it to exist at all.   But he’s still playing himself, because he thinks he can win by following the same failed ideology that got all the previous Sith Lords killed.   

That’s pretty much all I have to say about it right now.    I need to move on to other topics, because Towa’s not doing a cult thing, so my fic is moving in a different direction.   But I feel better for getting this out of my head.

[firelord-frowny]

honestly like!

i HATE!!!! the very CONCEPT of guns. and i’m theoretically SO fundamentally opposed to violence. 

but that opposition is based on an idealist assumption that no one is doing anything that they need to be stopped from doing. 

and there are obviously a fucking hell of a lot of people doing a fucking hell of a lot of vile shit, and no amount of ~peaceful protesting~ or litigating or campaigning or Reaching Across The Aisle is going to stop them, and it’s fucking RIDICULOUS that anyone at all thinks people should just wait patiently for The Powers That Be to spontaneously manifest a conscience and finally quit trying to maim and murder people For Funsies. 

i would LOVE it we could just hug them into submission and invite them over for tea and chit chat and take their ugly ass hand and smile at them and show them that I’m Just A Normal Person Like You and have them finally decide to stop wanting me to die. and honestly, some people REALLY CAN be reached through those kinds of methods. and i don’t think people should stop trying to do that. and if anything, i think MORE people need to be trying to do that.

but i ALSO think that more people need to start punching some bigots in the fucking face. 

if self proclaimed conservatives and right wingers and proud wimpy boys get to go around committing terroristic acts against other peoples, and if the politicians and ceos they stan for refuse to take any actions to stop them at best, and at worst go out of their way to FACILITATE the suffering of all but bigoted, well-off white people....

then we should get to punch them in the fucking face and not have anyone say WORD ONE about it. 

they wanna be all big and bad and parade around threatening and committing violence against teachers and health care workers and black people and asian people and jewish people and indigenous people and women of all backgrounds, then they should be fucking tough enough to cope with a goddamn punch in the face every now and then. they should WELCOME every fist that ever collides with their flesh. 

if they want a fucking fight, we should GIVE THEM A FIGHT! and make sure they fucking lose.  make sure the pathetic little ~civil war~ they’re begging for is HUMILIATINGLY short. chase their fucking asses into the most barren, useless parts of the world where they can be vile all by themselves. 

bc i SWEAR TO GOD, the only reason why these people have any power at all to impact anything or anyone is because people LET THEM. not because they’re soooo smart, or they’re soooo dangerous, or there are sooooo many of them. it’s STRICTLY because an enormous majority of bare-minimum-decent people care more about Taking The Moral High Ground than about actually doing what’s necessary to disable evil people from doing evil things.

This is a hella problematic way to put it, buuuut

black people know not to do or say certain things to a cop because we’ve been conditioned to fear the consequences of even the most benign ~infractions.~ We swallow our fucking pride and whip out those “yes sirs” and “no sirs” and we move slowly and we try to keep our hands visible at all costs because we’ve seen, over and over again, for DECADES (centuries, really) what those people might do to us if our hand isn’t totally visible for a fraction of a second. And sometimes it doesn’t even work. Sometimes we do everything in our power to demonstrate that there’s no need to hurt us, and we get murdered anyway. 

WOULDN’T IT BE NICE if those wack ass bigots could learn to fear the consequences of being disgusting out loud and in public? 

Imagine if, over the last several decades, malicious bigots were met with SWIFT physical consequences every time they did some fucked up shit. 

do you think they’d be so bold now? 

i don’t. 

i think if they thought for one second that whoever they pull a gun on might pull one out back at them, then they would keep their fucking mouths shut and behave. i think if they LEGITIMATELY thought that they’re actual lives and their actual freedom were at stake, they wouldn’t say SHIT. Because they know that whether or not they have to wear a mask or get vaccinated or whateverthefuck has absolutely NO real impact on their place in the world. there is NO. WAY. that they would be all up in arms over something so fucking absurd if they thought anyone would actually try to hurt them in response. 

they don’t think anyone is going to show up at their dumb lil protests with tear gas. they don’t think an angry BLM activist is going to shoot up their country club in retaliation against the oppressive policies they support. they don’t think anyone is going to stop them on the street and start screaming in their face and threaten to kill them. they don’t think they’re going to lose a damn fucking thing. they think they’re literally going to just waltz into some of the most secure buildings in the world and wreak havoc, and that NO ONE is going to do shit about it. 

that’s the problem :) :) :) :) :) :) 

the problem isn’t that these people exist. i mean, it fucking sucks that they exist and if they could somehow cease to exist, whether by alien abduction or some sort of freak simultaneous lightning strike or WHATEVER, i would be THRILLED. but just existing doesn’t hurt anyone. Having a stupid belief doesn’t automatically make someone dangerous. It just makes them a shitty person.

But to have a stupid belief and to feel SO ENTITLED to acting upon those beliefs???

those motherfuckers need to fear for their safety. those motherfuckers need to be SO PETRIFIED that they dig themselves underground and bury themselves alive and NEVER resurface. 

i don’t understand how, at this point, with over half a million people DEAD because of the actions of these assholes, and with thousands of people CONTINUING to drop dead over it every day, the so-called “good guys” still don’t see fit to resort to drastic measures to render these people INCAPABLE of causing further harm. 

so many people have died. not just in the time of covid, but decades before that. so many people are murdered in the name of carrying out the pettiest whims of the most wretched people on earth. People get injured. People get poisoned by their own water supply or the very air they breathe. People get sick because they’re forced to live under unhealthy circumstances, and then they DIE because they can’t afford treatment for the illnesses they developed because of the unhealthy circumstances that made them sick in the first place! Children starve. Global warming sets people on fire and drowns them and destroys homes and lives and landscapes. 

literally, at WHAT point does it become acceptable to finally just declare war on these fucking demons? WHEN do we meet them where they’re at and start punching back instead of just curling up and trying to survive the attack?

i KNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW that there are groups out there who are taking direct action in some form or another. but CLEARLY it’s not enough.

and i ALSO know that there are MANY PEOPLE who have the actual skills and resources to stage a legitimate countereffort, and they’re just. not. doing it. 

we’ve got all these vile-ass ~ex military~ types boasting about their arsenal and how they intend to use it to reign terror upon innocent people. these fuckfaces who are LITERALLY HOLDING PUBLIC OFFICE and saying Out Loud that they want to attack us. and their peers exalt them for it. 

you CANNOT tell me that there are 0 ~ex military~ people who are sympathetic to the cause of resisting these malicious bigots. you CANNOT tell me that there aren’t people in public office who know that something MUST be done, and who have the POWER and ACCESS to do something - even if it’s “unlawful.” 

but they’re not doing it. :) because they’re weak. :) and they fear for their lives in a way that ~the right~ has NEVER had to contend with. A democratic state senator knows someone might hunt them down and try to kill them if they say anything ~too radical~. a republican state senator is confident that he could literally call for the public execution of someone and be met only with a pathetic verbal reprimand from some spineless liberal congressman who bends over backward to be Respectful And Fair as they gently try to explain why it’s not okay to facilitate mass death in every demographic but their own.

can somebody with the actual power and means to do so PLEASE start doing ANYTHING to terrorize these people back to the bland, tasteless, spiritually bankrupt cesspit they congealed in? When one of these american terrorists brandishes a gun in someone’s face, can someone PLEASE brandish their own gun right back at them? THEY should be the ones who are too terrified to speak up. Not us. THEY should be the ones compelled to look over their shoulder. 

im so sick of a world where mass suffering and exploitation are accepted as Just The Natural Order Of Things. instead of a harrowing dystopia that should be burned to the ground quick, fast, and in a motherfucking hurry.

[deargodsno]

Last year, as the initial round of COVID raged and much of MAGA nation refused to mask or socially distance, it was common to hear folks refer to the Trumpian right as a suicidal death cult.

Most recently, MSNBC’s Joy Reid and Stephen Colbert agreed with the designation during a discussion on the latter’s program. According to both, refusal to get a vaccine as the Delta variant surges, and the seeming willingness of Trump’s followers to continue risking illness or worse, qualifies such persons as members of a death cult.

There were, of course, the requisite Jim Jones analogies.

But as much as I respect both Reid and Colbert (the former is a friend whose show I’ve been on several times), this position has always been wrong.

The truth is worse — and here I am speaking specifically of those who are resisting obtaining the vaccine, rather than those whose access is limited by location, poverty or issues with mobility to a vaccine center.

Stories are spilling out every day — outpourings of regret from persons who steadfastly refused to get the vaccine, now awaiting intubation, coming to realize they were wrong.

That they are bellowing contrition and asking for prayers in the hopes they won’t die proves this is no suicide cult.

Few of the 900-plus at Jonestown drank the Kool-Aid only to sputter at the last minute, “Oh wait, you mean it’s cyanide?! Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

The members of Heaven’s Gate didn’t don their black Nikes, take phenobarbital, tie plastic bags over their heads, cover up with shrouds, and then start praying to see another sunrise.

They laid down to die, expecting to be spirited away in a UFO behind the Hale-Bopp comet and have everlasting life.

That is a suicidal death cult.

This is different, something more dangerous, sociopathic, and sadistic — not suicidal but homicidal.

As I said last year, this is a mass murder movement.

These are people who didn’t and don’t want to die. They simply thought there was no way they would.

To them, COVID was a virus of the big city and those who live there, of old people, or persons with multiple pre-existing conditions (of which they didn’t believe their cholesterol-lined arteries and COPD qualified as examples).

It was only killing the weak.

And they were strong — cowboy strong, to be precise, or at least Sturgis motorcycle ridin’ strong.

High on a delusional mix of rugged individualism, toxic masculine bravado, pseudoscientific faith in vitamin supplements, and a belief that God would pull them through, they were convinced they were safe.

Only others were at risk — the less good people.

The ones who don’t do CrossFit, or go to a megachurch, or better still, a CrossFit in a megachurch.

The ones who don’t settle for the “power of positive thinking,” like FOX host Jesse Watters, who insisted that’s all he would need should he become infected.

The ones who place their faith in science rather than a Bible study group.

And for people like that? Who cares? To the right, those people don’t count.

Indifference to the suffering of others is why Trump’s minions wouldn’t mask. They didn’t care that they might infect people, despite being asymptomatic.

When you would tell them repeatedly that wearing a mask was less for the wearer than for others, they shrugged. If other folks are at risk, they should stay home and let the rest of us get back to the gym, the hairdresser, concerts, movies, and tailgate parties before the big game. I mean, this giant foam finger isn’t gonna wave itself.

Their freedom to do as they pleased was more important than other people’s lives.

Suicidal people don’t act or think that way. Homicidal people do.

Indifference to others is why they routinely violated social distancing requirements in stores, getting in people’s faces, coughing on them, yelling at them, just for being asked to wear a mask in keeping with a retailer’s policy or state or local mandate.

Because although they weren’t concerned about getting COVID themselves, they ultimately didn’t care if you did.

Suicidal people don’t act or think that way. Homicidal people do.

Most who refused to mask (and reject the vaccine now) are not full-blown virus deniers. Instead, they simply didn’t believe — and still don’t — that it can harm people like them.

But if you know it can harm others who aren’t like you, and you still refuse to take the measures that reduce the risk of spreading the virus to them, you are a sociopath.

If you refuse a vaccine when you have no valid health reason to do so (as almost no one does), thereby keeping the virus alive longer by increasing the risk of mutations, you are saying that other people’s lives don’t matter to you.

And if you expected to be infected, hospitalized, and die, you would never take these risks.

That’s what these ICU confessions signify — that they care about their own lives quite a bit, whatever they might think of others.

Now that it’s caught up with them, the tears flow, and the panic sets in their faces as they wonder what they’ve done to themselves.

Because they never wanted to die, they just didn’t care if other people did.

[kirliancamera1]

Rede Vamp Brazil (https://redevampirica.com) interviews Elena Alice Fossi of Kirlian Camera (English text attached hereunder) 🔥🔥🔥

Question 1: Be very welcome to AcessoRedeVamp, it's a true honor to realize this interview with you Elena Alice! You are a great singer and more every time we see you on stage your performance transmits great emotion and this electrifies all of us! You tell a real story with your performance and this is amazing and rare these days! At the same time, we perceive an expressive revolt against an old world and its stagnant postures. How have you handled 2020?

*** EAF – First of all, I wanna thank you for your words. Being able to communicate with the people who follow us is the most important thing to me. Singing becomes ephemeral if doesn't convey a message. Also for this reason I consider that the stage is the base of a musician, so you can imagine how I miss it. In this sense, it can be said that the category we belong to is very unlucky, not only because it's forced not to work, but rather 'cause concerts are pure lifeblood for a musician's soul. In any case, both Angelo and I can't stand self-pity people, so we immediately jumped into new musical projects, putting top concentration on composition. At any rate, we couldn't be simple observers of an event on this scale, so right from the beginning we tried to dig deep, looking for, and comparing news, data, statistics, whether they came from mainstream channels or from alternative sources. In Italy, for example, the economy has been torn to pieces and furthermore, the same politicians who mourn the dead on TV... cut so many funds for health facilities for a long time, so they may be considered taking part in such a mess. This situation has created a real drama, especially for families who have lost their loved ones without even having a chance to say goodbye one last time. But, it's also true that the worldwide exploitation of this pandemic has given us, we citizens, an opportunity to wake up. No need to use words such as anarchy or rebellion to understand that the old world is showing all kinds of holes. "Divide et impera" is the motto of several governments, so we citizens must not fall into the trap of making war on each other, each nonsense comes up! This is the time to show ourselves united. And, most of all, it’s time not to turn ourselves into servile dogs of a “Power” becoming more and more antidemocratic.

Question 2: Do you feel that the marks left by the year 2020 will bring some effective changes to this "abstraction" called humanity? Will there be a "new normal" or will we just return to an average 2019 when this whole pandemic passes?

*** EAF - If I’d been told about what we have experienced for almost one year, I’d have thought it was a joke, bullshit. But unluckily this is not the case. Such an event has brought much grief and is ruining the economic system of many nations, as already said. But in addition to the injury, here it comes the insult from the absurd and chaotic dictates imposed on us. I'll give you some examples of what's happening here in Italy. “Don't go out after 10 pm”. While people keep on getting sick or even dying, here comes the policeman with a ticket 'cause you left home for a goddam moment. I have this picture on my mind, of a person in pajamas, carrying the garbage bag full of stinking mussel shells at less than one hundred meters from home in a totally deserted night. At that point a flash on him. It’s the police who writes a ticket to that dangerous criminal. And then, for everyone's sake, the Christmas mass was moved from the usual midnight to 8 pm. How the hell can you think it's not a mockery? And... the last “gag”! Before Christmas, our Minister of technological innovation made an appeal to telephone companies so that video calls were free on Christmas days... But what year does she live in? But... is she not able to understand that in Italy almost everyone has either unlimited gigas or wifi? Nothing changes if the telephone companies for a couple of days give us video calls because we already use free services such as Whatsapp, Skype, Zoom, Telegram, and so on and so forth... Ok, in a vain attempt to avoid death, they are putting us in an induced coma! Seriously, all this offends our intelligence! And, when you realize you are inside a joke, you don't like to discover you're the main character, do you?! So, to answer your question, I couldn't foresee how a post-covid society will be reshaped, but the severe weakening that now is burdening us will have some major impact, no doubt. Currently, most folks are obsessed with fear, so are unable to reflect on the consequences of unconstitutional actions such as those foolishly propagated by many States. Furthermore, the pharma companies, the giants of the online shopping industry and many other powerful satanic puppet masters who are used to appear as philanthropists are ready to get their hands on everything, well pleased with the next “big reset”. So, after the pandemic, things will change a lot! For sure, from a human point of view, the feelings will be devitalized.

Question 3: Hologram Moon is a great name! Evokes conspirations like what really is the moon and this strangeness opens a vast creative field to find answers or even new questions... please tell us a bit more about this album, his name, songs...

*** EAF - "Fake is your face" is one of the phrases that most resonate in me when I sing "Holograms", or when in “Lost Islands” the old world said “Goodbye”! It's as if you had to face a new reset, as if you discovered everything you've always believed is swept away in an instant. There's the awareness that in the face of a new and suffocating truth, when the sky collapses, only true love can resist and guide you. In this sense, the final track of the album, “Travellers’ Testament” is a real stone on my heart, as it describes a fantastic journey to a planet. The astronaut is now impatient to fulfill his dream, but he will never arrive on that planet. The landing will take place on a space station. The moon landing's been questioned over and over again and certain evidence of the fact's inconsistency eventually seems credible. But we cannot say what reality is in any scientific way, especially when we're already prepared to believe a reassuring source. This is a simple starting point to embark on our history. More than finding answers, our sacred duty is to open the door to new questions, ask doubts, not take anything for granted. “Hologram Moon” is a purely poetic vision, but also a way to question everything. The mind can atrophy very easily. Habit, for example, can be complicit in this and the so-called comfort zone can be just complicit as well. The hypnosis that we suffer every day without realizing it, also grinding so many and bad TV shows, and so on... So, let's remain thinking and dreaming! This is a message from us.

Question 4: How was the experience of working with Covenant's Eskil Simonsson on the beautiful "Sky Collapse"?

*** EAF - We had come across Covenant several times before doing this collaboration; on festival occasions, in the dressing rooms... But it was a chaotic situation, so... we gave each other a fleeting smile, a kind greeting, but nothing more. Then, when Angelo and I wrote “Sky Collapse”, we immediately thought that a deep and sincere voice like Eskil's would add something precious to the song. Even before recording the two-voice song, we met at a charity festival. We had called him as a guest just to sing this song together, which was yet unreleased. He made himself available immediately. It was a nice gift for us and when the moment came, I think that on stage you could feel my strong emotion all the way down the hall!

Question 5: Well, I think now we will have our fan moment! Let's talk about some Kirlian Camera songs that our DJs and the audience of the REDE VAMP love it? Do I speak the name and may you tell a little about the meanings, influences, or a curious story?

*** EAF ***

>>> NIGHTGLORY. It refers to the triumph of the night, perhaps as a momentary spiritual retreat. I'm talking about that precious moment that regenerates your very existence into yourself. The music of this song was born in a symphonic form, very different from how Nightglory was then arranged. This is a song and an album that has been appreciated by many people only after some time, partly because of a promotion that described the album as the most commercial in our history, which is absolutely harmful and misleading. Invisible Front and Eclipse were even more listenable, for example... Sometimes words spoil your work. It would be better to listen to music only, ignoring its promotional presentation. Fortunately, Nightglory has recovered over time till becoming one of the most requested live songs of ours.

>>> BLACK AUGUST. In this song there are various hints coming out from a dark moment in my life, I mean a period that risked devouring me. Wounds that take time to heal. Sky Collapse can be considered the final act of that period, even if the music of the two songs sounds very different, as you know. Black August blends various stylistic dimensions in a single “body of music”, so many didn't know how to label it at the time, as it effectively goes running free, out of the box. A very atypical song that has gained some actual success despite its distinction, which has also brought us closer to fans of dark metal and so-called electronica.

>>> HELLFIRE. I chose this piece to add an echo to the dark period I was talking about above, in order to exorcise all that negativity, so we went to deal with a theme showing gospel traits but containing some demonic references in the lyrics. Then I didn't know THE 8th PRESIDENT was waiting for us at the SCARLET GATE OF TOXIC DAYBREAK, with his COLD PILLS! A wordplay whoever is following us will understand!

>>> K-PAX. I wrote this piece in a night when everything seemed dreamy and I almost didn't realize where I was anymore. No, I wasn't under the influence of drugs or alcohol, but all my memories were mixing in tremendous chaos that needed to reinvent itself and turn into an immaterial fog, in a light but lost dream. Angelo literally translated the music and melodies I had written on the staff, giving both them and my voice the perfect terms to guide the journey. In fact, it's not a complete and static text, but a sequence of dreamy and painful phrases at the same time. I felt that Angelo listened to me attentively since he knew how to translate my notes so perfectly into written sentences as if he were sending me back into my music. It was magical and at K-Pax Angelo and I discovered the other life of ourselves, bringing to light so many breathtaking emotions and it was just the departure, after the suffocating mists of Still Air, an album we love, and the crepuscular decadence of Stalingrad Valkyrie.

Question 6: There is a cover of Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd from Kirlian Camera that is a true work of art. The Mad World cover performed by Spectra Paris is fascinating. Are there more covers from other bands that you would like to record?

*** EAF - Well yes, there are ideas, but we prefer to evaluate which are the best. Meanwhile, I tried to produce a version of a Johnny Cash song and I made Angelo interpret it: I really like the result. It may be used by Stalingrad Valkyrie.

Question 7: I love your lyrics! What can't Elena be missing when creating new lyrics or musical arrangements? Are there any poetry, films, books, comic books, or other influences?

*** EAF - Mostly everything happens unconsciously. You don't know how many times I realize why I wrote a certain phrase only after a song was released! But I can say that my imagination works mostly by processing images. So, the movies are very helpful in this. Similarly, Angelo and I tap into imagery that could be part of the quantum physics new era, where multiverse and multidimensionality are both playing an important role. This world appears like a really tiny thing when compared to everything else.

Question 8: Elena, I read in an older interview about a "Young Ladies Homicide Club" I found an undeniable reference to the films Noir and the figure of the characters called "Vamp" and all the charm and spectral magnetism ... but I was a little curious. .. what is this "Young Ladies Homicide Club"?

*** EAF - Let's say I imagined an unreal club created by apparently dead or so to say "disappeared" models in order to get rid of fashion people who were acting a bit too naughty! The work to clean up that world wouldn't be lacking, as, after all, it happens in all professional areas. As for myself goes, I gladly opted in a flash and without second thoughts for singing and making music, leaving everything behind, buying a couple of synths and a decent microphone, which I then enriched with various electronic devilry, kicking away possible easy money, foolish nights, cocaine, heroin, stereotyped relationships, and absurdly worshipped wines! Every so often I like to play with the ridiculous and grotesque ghosts of some fashion designers, photographers, and evil spirits, then going to recreate noir stories in which everything happens. I also drew some digital comics with a noir-glam flavor, a few years ago... It was a fun pastime, while with Kirlian Camera I'd been exploring deeper and more fundamental universes.

Question 9: Is there more news on the way for the incredible Spectra Paris and also for Stalingrad Valkyrie? May you talk a bit more about them?

*** EAF - Stalingrad Valkyrie is a project I am very fond of, in a special way. So I insisted on getting it back to life after a period of hibernation which lasted too much in my opinion. "Martyrium Europae", the most recent album, proved me right, even if it’s not a commercial project. Well, it seems our listeners have appreciated the attempt to combine different musical sources in a unique style, certainly linked to the more symphonic and dramatic Kirlian Camera pages, but also quite free to express itself on his own, trying to avoid the most standard patterns of neofolk, progressive and industrial, without on the other hand completely ignoring their now distant origins. So, in its small way, the new album turned out to be a success and I'd really like this project to keep on living with further fresh ideas. We're currently working on a new chapter that will be released on vinyl and some digitals, which contains previously unreleased songs and versions.

Question 10: Elena, our Rede Vamp is a platform about Cultural Vamp and Vampires production ... and there is a question that our interviewees never escape. Is there a character or perhaps a vampire story that you never forgot?

*** EAF - Needless to say the vampire who most impressed me over time can't be anyone other than... Angelo Bergamini!!! Not many know that Angelo was the leading actor in a short film entitled "Himre Bakai", shot in the late nineties or so, directed by Antonio Bocchi, the later owner of the dark-electronic project Lux Anodyca and author of detective books. I don't think the film is regularly available or downloadable at the moment, but I know it was also screened at the time in various festivals and reviews, also getting some good feedback! Angelo (Himre) and Antonio told me that one day the film "will see the light ”, but at the moment... he lies in the dark, by the book, of course!!!

Question 11: Elena, thank you so much for your time and generosity! You and Kirlian Camera have many fans on our events and radio shows, please leave a special message for our audience! Are there plans for a new gig in Brazil after all this pandemic?

*** EAF - While it's true that we've never been able to play in Brazil so far, I'm sure your Land is actually right for us, 'cause I can feel that's full of feeling and passion, so we'd love to perform for you very much, 'cause in spite of the fact it's so far away, I feel a deep affinity and a certain familiarity with your world. And while we wait, confident that sooner or later we'll succeed in our aim, I wanna greet all those who had the kindness to listen to me, with a quote from the American scientist and politician Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

[spyvstailor]

GRAVEYARD DIRT & SALT

CHAPTER FIVE: BENNY

“South Carolina abouts they have this critter called a 'Boo Hag', said to be a skinless sort of vampire and they like to ride you to death and steal your breath. If they like you, they keep you alive, sucking your air, sustaining themselves. But if they don't, if you struggle or make them angry, they skin you and wear your skin. Just walk around like they wear pants or such. But they can't stay riding you forever, they gotta be home and in their skin before sunrise or they become trapped forever without skin.”

Please support me, I’m still out of work because of COVID, so anything you can toss my way can really help. I’m going to need to feed my kitties soon! Reblog this if you can’t donate to please support a nearly starving author!

Read the newest chapter here below the cut if you want, since ko-fi can be unreliable!

Chapter Five: Benny

When everything went to hell, Benny had been at the top.

  Maybe he still was? He had no idea how Vegas handled the swarms of the dead.

  Probably no better than Atlanta.

 God, what a fucking hole in the ground to be caught undead in. Why had he even agreed to come here to the middle of Satan's nutsack to make a deal?

  By the time he waded through the packed streets, filled with fleeing idiots, days had passed and the wave of infection had spread.

  When he made it to the edge of the city, it was almost completely overrun.

 And his private helicopter, that last hope he had of leaving Georgia, was useless, no pilot. So, he was wading his way through the land of good ol' boys and peaches, heading home.

  Because what else did he do? Just stay stuck in Georgia with the undead on his ass? Forever? The idea seemed to tickle him. It was divine retribution for all his sins. This was hell. He was in hell. Well, thanks but no thanks. He'd take his chances back in Vegas with his well-stocked warehouse and his penthouse in The Golden Rose.

  God, he missed The Golden Rose. Melody's pretty little voice chirping 'Hello, welcome to The Golden Rose', every time he passed through the lobby, or the weird night gamblers bellying up at the bar around two in the morning, sipping on complimentary Flash-bang's, the signature drink created by Bruce behind the bar. Sure he had more employees than Melody and Bruce, the others, the late-night workers who always were just a little bit off, but friendly enough. The kids fresh out of school, old enough to work at the casino, who tried too hard to impress the boss. Sven in the kitchen, who never seemed to leave, always yelling at him for coming down and making those 'nasty little sandwiches' as he called them, the open-faced ones made with peanut butter and sliced bananas on plain white bread, the sandwiches Valerie had gotten him hooked on when they were first dating. They were her favourite midnight snack and they had fast become Benny's too.

  Valerie.

  Ten years. Holy fuck had it been ten years?

 Plucking at a stretchy beaded bracelet he wore, Benny snapped it hard and shook off his thoughts of Valerie. They didn't do him any good in this new society.

  From where he sat. Perched on the railing of the bell tower, looking down across a darkened Georgia, barely peeking over treetops that surrounded the convent, Benny exhaled.

  Annie had given him the stink-eye at their new spot, full of bird shit and leaves and any kind of crap that the winds blew into the little tower, but Benny had sat her down gently onto the bearskin rug and the sleeping bag on top of it and promised her they would clean it up in the morning.

  He didn't tell her what he was thinking, he didn't tell a lot of people what he thought, no one wanted to hear his bullshit. His old man used to say 'if I want your opinion, I'll beat it out of you' and he meant it.

  The truth was, the trouble on the wall, the nun dying, had reminded him how dangerous it was. He had become too soft and spoiled lately, the dead were thinning out and he had forgotten what it was like when the outbreak first happened when it was really bad.

  They were safer in the tower, should anything happen to the gate, there was a heavy church door to open and a narrow ladder to climb before anything could get at them.

  And, sitting on the trapdoor that led to the ladder, Benny knew Annie was safer here than anywhere else.

 It had been a long, long time since anyone had relied on Benny and he took his job seriously. Nothing would happen to Annie as long as he was alive and kicking.

  During his flight from Atlanta, he had somehow wound up arm in arm with Annie and her mother Laila. They had sort of run across each other and just kept running in the same direction.

  Benny had immediately liked Laila, she was tough as hell and he had to admire that about her. Not that he knew much about her or the kid, they weren't real big on talking and he also had to admit he liked it that way.

  But Laila had his back and he had hers and they made a good team, but when she went out one morning to scrounge for breakfast and never came back he didn't think for a second the dead had gotten her. He knew her, she was a survivor.

  Something else happened.

 So he stuck around the area, hoping he'd find something which would let him know where Laila had gotten off too. And somehow, sticking around the small town, he wound up running into that marine and that Grayson kid, and when the kid started talking about men taking his sister, Benny started thinking. He wasn't a gambler by nature, despite him living in a casino in Las Vegas, but he would bet everything he had that when they found these men, he would find Laila.

  And Jesus, if he didn't also kind of like that marine.

 Not that he'd ever admitted that out loud. Admitting you liked someone, admitting you wanted to be someone's – what? Drinking buddy? At his age? Embarrassing.

  But he liked him just fine. The Cajun was a tall puppy dog, but there was something about his optimism that balanced Benny's nihilism nicely.

  On the wall below, three nuns kept vigil over Sister Mary Patrick's body. They couldn't retrieve her until morning, so they kept a quiet, mindful watch.

  And just like those nuns, Benny would keep a silent watch over Annie all night long, he would sleep when she was old enough to take care of herself.

 Sitting by the nuns' water pump in their convent yard the next morning, he watched Annie as she brushed her teeth, brushing his own with the travel toothbrush he kept in his jacket pocket. He liked to travel as light as possible, gun, bullets, knife, toothbrush and tube of toothpaste, and while he'd never admitted it, reading glasses for emergency reading, because fuck if he wasn't getting old.

  He noticed the marine traveled with a goddamn apartment on his back and that was just fine for him. Marines were trained for distance and roughing it, they were pack mules. And just as dumb.

  He needed more bullets for his tidy little Springfield, come to think of it.

  “She's a good kid,” someone said from his left. It was a male voice and not Grayson's.

 Benny ignored the marine for a moment, not wanting to chat about the fucking weather or some bullshit, spitting his toothpaste foam into a bucket of water to be dumped over the wall with the rest of the handwashing and face washing water.

  There was a nun's body being buried out behind the church right now and he didn't feel like jibber-jabbing.

 “We did our best last night,” the Lieutenant said, easing down beside him on one of the folding chairs the nuns had set up around their water source. For what? Water pump gossip? Maybe.

  “Dead nun though,” Benny replied, sipping at some water to rinse his mouth.

  The marine was quiet beside him, gazing out across the dewy lawns.

  “I didn't mean to put the squeeze to you,” he began. “Yesterday in the church. I know you don't like talking about yourself.”

  “Sure you did,” Benny returned.

 Withdrawing for a moment to regroup, the marine went on, “fine. I did a little, but...it's hard trusting people nowadays, yeah?”

  “Hard to trust people before this bullshit,” Benny shot back.

  “Fair.”

 There was a tension to the marine that told Benny he was gearing up for something, angling to reach for something during the entire conversation.

  “You got something to say, don't pussyfoot,” he said calmly.

 “Not that I don't believe you, but I want a reassurance that you're not trying to fuck us on this deal with the copter,” the marine said.

  Benny nodded. “Yeah, I thought you'd think that. I wouldn't blame you. But it's real.”

  “Well, we go in smart then,” the man stated.

  “We go in smart,” Benny agreed, stretching out his legs and resting them on another chair across from him.

  Beside him the marine remained seated, quiet in the growing daylight.

  “We done?” Benny inquired.

  “You ever hear about the boo hags?”

  “The what?”

 “South Carolina abouts they have this critter called a 'Boo Hag', said to be a skinless sort of vampire and they like to ride you to death and steal your breath. If they like you, they keep you alive, sucking your air, sustaining themselves. But if they don't, if you struggle or make them angry, they skin you and wear your skin. Just walk around like they wear pants or such. But they can't stay riding you forever, they gotta be home and in their skin before sunrise or they become trapped forever without skin.”

  “And the moral of this story is...?” Benny prompted.

  The Lieutenant shrugged, folding his arms. “Nothing really, I just think about the Boo Hags sometimes.”

 “My granny used to tell me about this guy she knew from Corpus Christi, used to hate wearing pants. He wasn't crazy or anything, just said they were too hot and itchy, so he'd walk around in his boxer shorts everywhere.”

  Around them, the nuns went about their morning routine, chores, and preparing for their morning mass after burying their fellow nun.

  “Well,” Benny said. “Maybe he was a little crazy, I guess.”

 Annie came to him and climbed into his lap, watching the activity around them quietly. It was a strange sort of calm to the morning, despite the funeral. It felt like the soft morning's Benny had at his grandparents, warms sunlight, peace, and quiet before the hectic activity of the day. It brought him back home to a home he mourned every single day of his life, a home he had only fleetingly as a boy before it was replaced with the boozy smelling mornings of his parents home.

 “Mornings like this feel like my Mamere getting ready for church,” the Lieutenant said. “She used to sing when she was getting ready in the mornings, and she'd sing,

There's a land that is fairer than day,

and by faith we can see it afar;

for the Father waits over the way

to prepare us a dwelling place there.”

 In his lap Annie rest her head against Benny's chest, listening to the marine as he sang in a fine, deep baritone. Benny knew the song well, it was his grandmother's favourite. When she finally came and took him home, to his real home with her and his grandfather, away from the chaos of his mother and father's lives.

  They were the only people who ever really loved him.

 The hymn brought back memories of Sunday mornings dressing for church, of Sunday evenings with the smell of roast chicken and his granny's baked apples, sweetened with brown sugar, butter, and cinnamon, sticky and warm.

  He didn't live with them long. They were hit by a drunk driver and killed two years after he moved in with them. Benny went back to the chaos and Edna and Merle were buried in Oak Grove.

 At the sound of the gentle singing, a few nearby nuns gathered in closer, curious, and quiet. Raised Baptist by his grandparents at least, Benny joined in with the marine, singing only very, very faintly, as though he were doing it for his granny and no one else. He would sing in a voice only barely above a whisper.

  It was Annie who joined in the singing, almost eager and happy to do something that wasn't fighting and surviving.

In the sweet by and by,

we shall meet on that beautiful shore.

In the sweet by and by,

we shall meet on that beautiful shore.

We shall sing on that beautiful shore

the melodious songs of the blessed;

and our spirits shall sorrow no more,

not a sigh for the blessing of rest.

In the sweet by and by,

we shall meet on that beautiful shore.

In the sweet by and by,

we shall meet on that beautiful shore.

To our bountiful Father above

we will offer our tribute of praise

for the glorious gift of his love

and the blessings that hallow our days.

 “My granny used to sing that one too,” Benny finally admitted, in the stark silence at the end of the song. “Yours lived with you?” He asked.

  The Lieutenant nodded. “Yeah, my grandparents raised me.”

  “Where were your parents?” Benny asked.

 “Due to circumstances beyond my control, nowhere in sight,” the Lieutenant replied, a grin in his voice. “My ma was hospitalized most of my young life,” he added in a more serious tone. “The man who impregnated her was...not important.”

  “Pump and dump?”

  “Of sorts, not really given permission for it though,” the Cajun finished tentatively.

  Benny felt his blood chill a little. “I get you.” He said, not wanting the marine to have to open up old wounds.

  “You?”

  “I lived with my grandparents for a while, yeah. My parents were...selfish pricks, they lived in Galveston.”

 “I get you,” the marine repeated his own words. Easing back in his chair, the Cajun asked, “where you from? Where'd you grow up? You said you lived in Forth Worth?”

  “My grandparents lived in Fort Worth, so I guess I moved between there and Galveston mostly.”

  “What happened to the twang? You lose it or hate it?” The Lieutenant inquired.

  Benny chuckled. “I haven't lived there for years.”

  “Can never really shake the twang though, yeah?” The Lieutenant teased.

  “I guess not. You? I know Cajun when I hear it, but where you from in Louisiana?”

  “Eunice.”

 “Eunice? That's...down south, isn't it? Way down the bayou,” he mocked the Lieutenant's accent, prompting the marine to laugh.

  “Yeah, yeah it is.”

 “Annie,” he turned to the kid in his lap. “Why don't you head inside the infirmary, okay? I'll be right there to get you set up for the day.”

 The girl slipped down to the ground and nodded, heading obediently for the building where Grayson was already getting his shit together.

 Sullen, a little pissed that he was forced to face things he had buried long ago in Texas, Benny remained quiet for a good long time. Long enough that eventually the anger dispersed.

  Benny sat still and silent so long that eventually, it was just him and the Cajun, who remained, squatted down on his haunches, resting.

  “We're running on a very short timeline,” Benny finally said to the man.

  The marine nodded. “Yep.”

 “That girl, if she is still alive, won't be so young and vibrant if she's with these men, I can tell you that right now. Feel like with no law, men will become animals, women will become prey.”

  “What's going on in that tiny bird brain of yours?” The Cajun asked.

  “You need to stay here and train up some of these damned nuns, right?”

  “Yeah.”

 “Think you could trust me?” Benny asked suddenly, turning away from the middle nothing he was staring at and pining the Cajun with a look.

 For a good long while the marine eyed him back, blue-grey eyes hard and scrutinizing. At rest the man's face was regal, but villainous, betraying his genuine kindness, at rest his face was the face of a man you didn't want to fuck with.

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “You're going to have to know so,” Benny urged.

  “Alright, I know I can trust you.”

  “It might be riskier, but time is important, isn't it?”

  “What's your plan, fancy man?”

 “When I was poking around the church earlier, I spied some priest shit, a get up for a proper man of the Lord. Might give me a pretty good shield, might get me close enough to those men if I can find them, to get inside their group.”

  “Espionage?”

  “Whoa, slow down there Bayou-bred, that's a big word for you.”

  The two men hushed up as Grayson began to head over towards them.

  “Fuck off, Grayson!” Benny shouted.

  “Fuck you, assclown!” Grayson snarled back, veering off in anger towards the wall and the gate.

  “That kid is going to murder you in your sleep some night, paon.” The Lieutenant mused.

  “Ah well, he's a good kid, needs toughening up. Mouthy little fuck though.”

 The two men settled a little again, their ruffled feathers smoothing out in the tranquility that followed the exchange between Benny and Grayson.

  “You could get yourself killed ducking in on a group like a priest. If they find out you're not or if they happen to find out what you're up to.”

  “I know,” Benny replied. “But I'm good at it.”

  “Good at it?” The Lieutenant asked.

  Benny smiled. “Getting into places I shouldn't be as someone I'm not.”

  The Cajun was quiet, before sighing. “Okay. Cut the shit, what the fuck are you?”

 “I'm goddamned good at what I do. You just worry about these nuns. When I head out, you need to do one thing for me. You just need to trust that whatever happens once I leave this convent, I'm not going to fuck you over. Annie will stay here, she'll be my guarantee that I won't let anything happen.”

  “Okay.”

  “You tell anyone you need that I ran off in the night, just not Annie. You tell her I'll be back. You need to do this for me. Can you do this?”

  “I don't like handing the reins over, but...you're right. Time is important and these nuns can't be left alone. Splitting up might be the best bet for everyone. I'll play my part.”

  “Pact?” Benny offered, holding out his hand. He knew it was childish, but he wanted God (if there be any) to witness his honesty. For once in his goddamned life of other names, other faces, he wanted some higher power to see his bluffing ass telling a truth.

  The Lieutenant leaned back a little, before saying, “brothers. It makes you blood. You don't cross blood.”

  “Brothers,” Benny swore, the two men shaking hands firmly.

 Releasing hands, the two men sat back a little, trying to look like two men just sharing a conversation, as Mena poked her head out of the convent cloister and started their way.

  “We meet up tonight, dead of night when everyone is asleep, in the back room of the church,” Benny said softly, hurrying before Mena could join them.

  The Lieutenant nodded.

  “Gentlemen,” Mena greeted in the high toned, pretty magnolia blossom voice of hers. Pure sugar, pure south. “Good morning.”

  “Why Miss Mena, you're as pretty as a bluebell this morning,” Benny teased, mocking her southern accent.

 She offered him a stern, but sparkling warning look, the corners of her mouth lifted a little like a cat. She looked like she was grateful for the teasing distraction, grateful because otherwise, it was pure mourning and fear that remained should she not have anything to distract her from it. “You may mock me all you want, Mr. Malone, but I lost one of my flock last night and I'm not in the mood. Now, we've buried the poor woman, and we were promised training. The sooner the better, I think.”

  “Are you thinking of staying? You and Annie are very welcome to.”

 They had gotten the nuns started with whatever makeshift weapons they could find and while the Lieutenant gave them a rifle handling and maintenance crash course, Mena had once more sidled up beside Benny as he stood in the shadows of the eastern side of the church, watching the chaos, while idly thumbing through a small bible he had found in the church.

  “You're thinking of the wrong man,” he replied, motioning with his head at the marine. “He's probably yours for life though.”

 She smiled. “We love having you here, Mr. Malone. All of you.” She hesitated, before adding, “I sort of forgot how boring convent life can be until you all arrived to shake things up. Granted, we suffered a loss, but...I think we're stronger with you and the Lieutenant and even Annie and Grayson. We're no longer cloistered, we're a community center, a...a home.”

  He opened his mouth about to say something, before considering it, finally he relented. “I know a nun's faith is sacred to her, but...why did you become a nun? You seem...unhappy with your lot.”

  “I wouldn't say unhappy,” she replied. “I'm ungrateful in a small way. I became a nun to help people. Work missions and aid the poor and those most unfortunate. I suppose, I just...never felt like I was helping much here. Feel sort of immured behind these walls.”

  “Immured?”

  Before Mena could answer his question,  the Lieutenant joined them, easing against the church for a rest in the shade.

  “So?” Benny asked him.

 “Well, they don't like the idea of hitting anyone, seem hesitant, but I think when push comes to shove they know how to do it.”

  Scoffing, Benny turned to Mena. “What about you, debutante? Wanna fight with the others?”

  Mena laughed. “I'm afraid I don't care much for fighting.”

  “You need to learn how,” he went on.

  “I know how to throw a punch, Mr. Malone,” Mena argued gently.

 Inhaling calmly, Benny scooped the nun up easily in one move and had her stomach perched on his shoulder as she dangled over it in shock, her legs and knees digging into his chest in shock.

  “So you're telling me,” Benny began as Mena struggled to be put down, trying to maintain her dignity while being treated like a sack of flour, “you know how to prevent being carted off by someone like this?”

  “Mr. Malone, please?!” Mena shouted, panicked. Her ever calm facade breaking into a sort of girlish embarrassment. Shrill and just a little tremulous.

  “Don't break the nun,” the Lieutenant warned with a small grin.

 Sensing the rest of the nuns' attention and maybe wanting to cheer them up just a little with a distraction from the death of Sister Mary Patrick, Benny perked a little more, hefting the woman on his shoulder as she squirmed.

  “Are you kidding me?” He demanded loudly. “I'm two steps away from giving her a noogie. This is fun. I'm going to hold her down and snicker-snag on her if she can't break away.”

  “Don't you dare! Put me down!” Mena shouted as the rest of the nuns began to notice the noise and started wandering over towards them curiously.

  “Look at how small she is,” Benny laughed. “I could toss her over the wall into a pile of leaves like a little mouse. Hey, give me a hand, I want to try playing keep-away with this shrimp.”

 “Are you seriously bullying me right now, Mr. Malone?” Mena demanded, still draped over his shoulder, her veil fluttering to the ground, all dignity lost. “Lieutenant, please?”

  “I can't step into another man's training ring,” the Lieutenant lied. “It's not courteous.”

  “Courteous?!” The nun hollered.

  “Think if I put her down and follow her she'll lead me to her pot of gold?” Benny asked, spinning with the nun.

  A stray knee from the poor nun hit Benny in the mouth and he reeled back a little, blood drawn.

  “Alright, play time's over, kids,” the Lieutenant stepped in, moving to take Mena from Benny.

 As soon as the Cajun set Mena right again, kneeling to get her veil for her, she was puffing up like a little ruffed grouse and twirling around to poke at Benny in the chest.

  He was too distracted by the taste of blood on his lip to notice.

 Behind them the nuns that had gathered were all trying to conceal their amusement at the scene, a few of them giggling into their veils, some turning their soft laughter into mild coughs.

  “Serves you right,” Mena stated. “The indignity!”

  Benny, idly licking at his torn lip, grinned and held his hands up. “Hey, okay. Put the guns away, shrimp, you win.”

 “Blood has been drawn, no harm done,” the Lieutenant said. At Mena's sharp look, he amended that statement to a soft, “maybe?”

  “I am an Abbess,” Mena snarled, whirling on Benny again, her little finger pointed at him like a rifle. “I deserve a modicum of respect.”

  “A what?” Benny asked, pocketing his hands. “Hey, don't get mad, country mouse, you said you could handle yourself, and boy, did you sure prove me wrong.”

  “I,” Mena began, a little louder than her normal soft-spoken Southern belle coo. She stopped short and seemed to inhale, calming herself. “I...will not let you goad me into a fight, just to prove myself capable, Mr. Malone.”

  “One punch,” he pushed. “Just one solid punch and I'll leave you alone.”

  Mena was quiet, still trying to smooth her habit and veil back into place after her manhandling.

  “It might give you back a bit of that lost dignity,” Benny added in a whisper, leaning towards her.

  “Sock him, Mother!” One of the older nuns shouted.

  “And just like that the teachings of peace and forgiveness of Christ have been forgotten,” Mena murmured.

  “If you punch him then he'll stop being a bully,” another nun suggested.

  “I don't think Sister Mary Patrick would approve of this,” another nun pointed out.

  “Like it nothing, she'd love to see this cheeky man popped in his cheeky face,” yet another nun added.

  “I will not,” Mena declared. “We are not animals and I refuse to hit a man without due cause.”

 “He just picked you up like you were a duffle bag, just hit him in his pretty face and get it all over with,” Sister Mary Agnes, one of the few nuns Benny could tell apart suggested. “I would,” she added, before crossing herself quickly in a form of silent absolution.

  “Aw,” Benny gushed. “She thinks I'm pretty. Come on, Abbess, just give me one solid punch and prove yourself capable. Come on,” he went on, “I know there's an animal concealed under those robes of yours, let the lioness out.”

  “Lieutenant?” Mena asked.

  The tall man sort of took a thoughtful step back on one foot and considered it quietly, before he answered with a simple, “hit him.”

  Mena was quiet, sizing up Benny for a bit.

  He could see her small hands curling into fists at her side and tightened his jaw to take the hit.

  Instead, Mena's hands relaxed and she shook her head, turning to Annie who was watching.

  “We don't hit people who don't deserve it,” she explained to the child. “A lady must always take the high road.”

  “As short as she is, the high road would be the best option,” Benny murmured.

  Mena leveled her chin almost indignantly, still looking at Annie.

 “Good for you, Mother,” Mary Elizabeth said. “Remember Matthew 5:39. But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.”

  “If he keeps taunting her I'll show him both cheeks,” one of the older nuns grumbled.

 Benny laughed to himself. He didn't know much about each individual nun yet, but he knew he liked the older nun with just that one sentence.

 “We are not a boxing club,” Mena went on. “Though we will train to defend ourselves, senseless violence is never the right path. Despite how much a man may want to be hit by a lady.”

  “It's always been my dream,” Benny added playfully.

  “I'm gonna hit him for you,” the Lieutenant broke in.

  Laughing, Benny backed away, hands up. “Okay, I wanted to get hit, not knocked out today.”

  This seemed to break up the gathering, nuns moving off, heading back to their training.

  Mena, still a little fired up, remained for a moment.

  “No hard feelings, Thumbelina,” Benny said. “I just wanted to see your form.”

 “I'm sure you felt enough of my form while I was riding high on your shoulder,” she returned a little bitterly, before walking off.

  Benny sidled up beside the Lieutenant, still grinning. “She was real mad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Has kind of a temper.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I kind of liked it.”

  “Easy now.”

  “Don't tell me you've never thought of picking her up,” Benny went on. “She's so fucking small.”

  The Lieutenant smiled. “I mean, I could.”

 “Hell yeah, you could. You could pick me up, big guy.” As they walked off, heading for the infirmary, Annie following behind, the fancy man added, “but don't ever fucking try, because I will lay you out.”

  Chuckling, the Lieutenant opened the infirmary door for the shorter man and said, “you could never, little fancy man.”

 Inside the infirmary Grayson sat on his cot, reading a well-thumbed copy of some real crime book, looking bored and still angry.

  “Hey kid,” Benny greeted. “You need to learn some fighting too or do you think you'll pull some karate moves out of your ass when the time comes?”

  “Could kick your ass,” the kid grumbled.

  “Want to give it a try?” Benny offered sincerely. “See what you got?”

  “You have, like, thirty years on me, think I'd win, grandpa,” Grayson replied.

  “Only one way to find out.”

 “You think you'll be ready to head out tomorrow morning?” The Lieutenant asked the kid, playing his part perfectly to Benny's delight. At least the marine had a poker face. “We have to get to that airfield before noon if we want to find proper camp before dark.”

  “I was ready two days ago, what have you two been doing?”

  “Keeping these nuns safe first and foremost,” Benny said. “You know, about eleven lives versus one? Using our brains.”

  Grayson glowered at him.

  “Can the shitty attitude, we're trying,” Benny went on firmly.

 “Tomorrow,” the Lieutenant said firmly, breaking up the tension, “we will continue on the hunt for these men. Right now, I have to head out to get something for dinner for all of us.”

  “Not taking your life partner with you?” Grayson asked.

  “Surprisingly progressive, kid,” Benny mused, folding his arms. “I don't even think it's an insult.”

  “More observational than insulting,” the Lieutenant added.

  “You could do worse than me,” Benny teased.

 “Could do better too, paon.” The marine retorted dryly, offering Benny a small grin as he grabbed up his rifle. “Don't kill each other while I'm gone, yeah?”

  “Can I hang him from a flag pole again?” Benny asked. “Seems to be the best way to take the bite out of him.”

  “Fuck you, Benny,” Grayson growled.

  “That is no way to speak to your elders, son!” Benny replied.

  “Come on, kid. Let's head out for a hunt.” The Lieutenant said, stepping in calmly.

  Grayson jumped up, eager to finally help, but couldn't resist grumbling, “don't call me 'kid', old man.”

  “Don't call me old, son,” the Lieutenant murmured, ducking out of the infirmary after the boy.

  Alone in the infirmary now with Annie, Benny inhaled and turned to her.

  “You like those two?”

  She shrugged.

 Looking at the child in his care, Benny wanted to say something to her, to emote. But emotions were never his thing, once he opened that pandora's box they wouldn't stop. So he reached out and ruffled her hair, the two puffs on top, at least.

  He liked the kid, he really did. Hell, he could almost admit to himself that he loved her and if it wasn't for circumstances and his fucking weak need to be helpful, he wouldn't be leaving her at the convent.

  There were mornings, before they ran into the marine, that he would wake up from light, cautious sleep, to find her sitting up and watching him.

  She never said much, and he always wondered what was going on in her undeveloped little noodle, she didn't even really speak much even when Laila was with them. Horrors, he assumed, something that kept Laila on edge and wary of their surroundings, haunted the two of them and when Benny found the mother and child, or rather when they had found him, they were almost feral.

  He assumed it was something to do with the wedding ring on Laila's finger, of the way it took Annie months to finally take his hand without him telling her to.

  She kept close to him now, she had lost her father – as far as Benny knew, and now her mother and the child was wafting on the breeze, drifting around with no moorings. Nothing to tether her to safety and comfort, but for him.

  And Benny hated that it had to be him that poor girl relied on. He wasn't reliable, not to people who loved him – at least. He had cut his moorings a long time ago, or...maybe they had rotted with Valerie. Moldering in the grave with his beautiful wife, her cold hands clutching the last strands of the rope that had kept him from drifting.

 He didn't mind being tethered by Valerie, he liked it even. Whenever he'd go off and come home, he had a home to come to. She would be there, bright and smiling, her flower garden always in bloom, it seemed, even in the cold Rhode Island winters, when the wind came across the Atlantic frigid and cruel.

  She had died in the winter, or the early spring, rather. March. The witches tit of a month, the cold, brown spring.

  Valerie wanted to be buried, not cremated, so they had to wait another month before she could be buried.

  Benny was gone long before that. He had left the night she died, just walked away.

 He liked the poetic idea of their beautiful home and everything in it rotting with his wife, like the idea of her garden drying up and withering. No one deserved her things, or her garden or even dare come near anywhere she had walked.

  If he could, he would have built a stone wall, higher than the one that kept them safe at the convent, wider than it needed to be, all around Rhode Island. He would have kept everyone from that state. It would become a shrine to Valerie. His angel. Patient and sweet and everything he didn't fucking deserve.

 So with no option to do any of that, he burned Rhode Island from his mind, it didn't exist in his world. It was a crater, with his wife dead in the center.

  Everything he owned, everything that remained clinging to him when he walked away, was thrown into the ocean to fucking disappear. Except for his wedding band, wrapped like a napkin ring around a rolled-up photo of her, that he kept in his sock, secured by the knife strap he wore.

  When he began to feel too alive, he would torment himself, like a form of self-harm, only instead of cutting his body, he wounded his soul. He would unroll that photo and wear that ring and he would feel every moment of sorrow all over again.

  Was that healthy? Was grieving like that right? No. He knew it was sick.

 But life was fucking sick, because she was good and he was not, and she died, starving to death because the cancer that had started in her uterus had swept viciously through her body, into her stomach and everything she ate, would be thrown up, black and diseased. And she withered fast, like a rose when the frost touches it.

  But she didn't wither fast enough not to suffer.

 And even now, with the fucking infected, or the dead, whoever you asked, when they ravaged and tore people apart, he somehow lived. At first, he wanted to live, it was human nature to fight to survive.

  Valerie wanted to live too, and she died. So he would live for her if only to eat all the pain he couldn't eat of hers.

 And then he had Annie and Laila, and while they were never anything more than people surviving together, Benny had formed an attachment, the first kind of real attachment to the two of them. He had begun to re-weave that tether that had rotted away from Valerie and then one morning, Laila was just gone.

  She had left a note, she always did when she went out on her own to scavenge.

  But she never came back.

  And Benny felt another tether begin to rot.

  He was a man struggling to hold on to a handful of sand in a wind storm.

  So he held Annie's tether tight because he knew she held his just as tight.

  Yes. He did love the child.

 He wished the world was better for her, but he thanked the chaos and the randomness of numbers that he had her, and if these men had Laila, if she fell prey to them, he would get her back if she was alive and he would hand over the tether that Annie held that connected to him, back to her mother.

  But he was still stunted and fucked up emotionally, so all of this, loving the kid and wanting everything for her, came out in a hand rubbing the top of her head. Because Benny's parents didn't hug and Benny didn't know what to do with a child, he and Valerie had never had one and they never talked about having one. And then she died and he had never been around children except when he was one.

  So he tousled her hair and thought to himself that maybe someday he'd be able to express himself to someone else.

 Maybe someday Rhode Island would exist on his maps again. Maybe Valerie would finally rest in peace because he could move on and grow and learn to be a human being.

  Or maybe he would die trying to get Laila back to her mother and that girl back to her brother and maybe there would be no lesson for him to learn, no more room for him to grow.

  Maybe Georgia would become to Annie what Rhode Island was to Benny. Not because of him, he didn't assume the child held any love for him, she was only clinging to him because she was lost, no perhaps she would bury Georgia behind a wall, because of her mother, because of her father, because of the dead and because every day she woke up, she had to see a corpse.

  No child should ever have to live in a real nightmare.

  Or.

 Or maybe someday, Annie would stitch Georgia back together, maybe there could be hope for her future. The dead were thinning out and maybe her mother would return and maybe she'd find happiness, though he knew she would still have nightmares about the dead, he had nightmares about the dead, about Laila and Valerie and Annie, all roaming across the wastelands of his dreams, their eyes cloudy, milky with rot, because the cornea's had no blood flow, their fingertips turning black, their skin waxy and bloated.

  Since it had begun, Benny had seen too many children among the dead, small forms, corpses that hungered, but never seemed to eat, only tear and shred and maim.

  The thing was, the dead or the infected didn't make very loud sounds. They shuffled and they slogged, their feet dragging, but they didn't moan like the movie zombies, they would give off mewl-like moans. Something almost like the air just rising up from their bloated bellies. It was soft enough to miss if you weren't listening for it. And it wasn't often like they were sleeping and then would moan or when they mimicked and exhale of air. They were near silent forms moving like manifest destiny towards eternity.

  Beside him, Annie was very much alive and he would make sure she stayed that way. Benny was nothing if resourceful and he could use those resources to the best of his ability.

  If brute strength and survival were what the Lieutenant did best, Benny's abilities were subversive action and artful manipulation.

[joeyarnoldvn]

2021, February

Biden Law, Five Years Lockdown Monday the first day of February of 2021. Canada Kidnapping Themselves Tuesday. All About Hive Blog Wednesday. Alex Jones and DR. STEVE PIECZENIK Thursday. Are you ready for Weapons of Mass Distraction Friday. Amazon Spies Saturday.

Instagram Rising

I was banned on Bittrex Sunday the 8th. My Cash App is $joeyarnoldvn Monday. Cronyism Sucks Tuesday. Gold-Backed Crypto Wednesday. Protonmail problem on my 36th birthday Thursday. Just kidding. Brother Joined Hive Friday. Shoveling Snow Saturday.

Ice Killed Texans

Happy Valentines Day Sunday the 14th. President's Day. Party at Five Monday. Texas Freezing Tuesday. Vietnamese pho dinner was yummy. Travel Post Banned For Not Being a Travel Post Wednesday. Photoshop Funny Thursday. We Need County Coin Friday. Why is Sweden banning masks Saturday.

Can't Disrupt Commerce lol

Strung up pea strings. The Healthy American Sunday the 21st. Pho dinner. Musical chairs. Weekly Oatmeal Show - Episode 001 Monday. Gina Carona Interview with Ben Shapiro Tuesday. Digging up potatoes. Bible study revived. Being Dead Due To Birth Wednesday. Captain Biden Flying Around Zapping Brown Kids Thursday. My-Body-My-Choice No-Mask Sign Friday. Cleaned Out a Chicken House Saturday. DEADLY-ALLERGIC to YOUR-OWN-BODY Sunday.

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Oatmeal Monthly - 2021-02 - February of 2021 Published in February of 2021

I enjoyed watching season 1 of Tell Me Your Secrets

By Oatmeal Joey Arnold

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Biden Law, Five Years Lockdown Plan

2021-02-01 - Monday

Hello Pocahontas

Americans to be placed under Extreme Lockdown House-Arrest for at least 12 months, that is the plan. You will be stuck in your house like they did in China. You will starve to death and die. The plan is to begin this before 2022, as in as soon as possible. Your loved ones will die from Covid Vaccines which is already murdering hundreds to thousands of people. This is a hole straight down to the pits of Hell.

Canada Kidnapping Themselves

2021-02-02 - Tuesday

Biden, Harris, Napoleon Dynamite Voting Meme

When Canadians return to their home country, Canada, they're federally kidnapped, imprisoned in Covid Concentration Camps for many days, and then charged at least $2,000. Wow. Justin is so liberal. Let's all move to the Land of the Moose. 2 masks at least says CDC. Go to their website and read the article.

Try To Withdraw Money

If you try to take your money out of your bank, they'll flag you, stick the IRS up your butt. Just try it, I dare you. When you try to withdraw cash, watch what happens, and don't get me started with if you ask for gold when you try to cash out. Paper money was supposed to be an "I-Owe-You" check which is supposed to be exchangeable for actual gold, a place-holder.

All About Hive Blog

2021-02-03 - Wednesday

Picture of Joey Arnold

Hive is like Facebook except it pays you to post. Did you know Covid is also called SARS-COV-2? Wait a minute, whatever happened to SARS-COV-1? Did we have a pandemic for the first one? How are we already in the second one? Was I sleeping while the first one was going around? How many years ago was the first one? Is China stealing oil from Texas? Why was Joe Biden refused a Pentagon security clearance? There has been documented cases where people were missing over 90% of their brain tissue but where still able to function like a normal person. One person to even had just a thin layer around the inside of the skull. Literally an empty head and yet could still function as a human. They are destroying the second amendment right now. You have no idea.

Alex Jones and DR. STEVE PIECZENIK

2021-02-04 - Thursday

Trump Terminator

Big interview between Alex Jones and DR. STEVE PIECZENIK today, 2nd hour of the show. The dollar could lose over 20% of its value under Lord Biden before 2022 and much more the following 12 months. It is likely the dollar will die sooner or later meaning you must convert your dollars into something else while you still can. This is financial advice. You have been warned. Your money is on fire but not in a good way. You're leaking value each day. You might as well give me your money as you're losing your money each second. You're wasting your money as you let inflation destroy the value of fiat. Was the Burma Election stolen like it was in America? If you think Biden won, then you do NOT know who won in Burma. I don't care what military is doing. Who won the election in Burma? I'm asking who got the most real votes excluding the fake votes. I want to know who really won. Please let the REAL WINNER be the leader of what you call Myanmar. Whoever actually won should be allowed to run that country, period. Military should help whoever got the most legal votes in that nation. Period. I don't know who won. I am just saying let the real winner have the power, good or bad.

Fall or Rise of Empires

This is what Mike Adams said today. He said something bad could happen over night, that is to the extent the dollar crashes, they'll try to blame the crazy Redditters, the conservatives, for destroying the money, they'll come up with crazy excuses, conspiracy theories, and then say how they saved us by giving us Biden Coins or whatever they want to call it. They are trying to have one centralized global digital currency, no cash, no decentralized cryptocurrencies. So, I agree this could happen at any time, especially if three or more stimulus checks come out in 2021, as they spend more and more money, as people demand silver, gold, etc. The centralized banking system could fall in the next few years or sooner. As that happens, either the good guys or the crazy globalists and baby eaters can take over as that happens. So, in other words, we are in a major transition in global history similar to the rise or fall of other great empires like that of Rome, Babylon, Persia, England, China, etc. But I can't say if we are in the middle of the fall or the rise of an evil authoritarian regime.

Are you ready for Weapons of Mass Distraction?

2021-02-05 - Friday

Alex Jones

Happy birthday brother. Are you ready for Weapons of Mass Distraction? In order to buy guns in 2021 in America, you either have to right now or potentially soon will have to pay too many taxes, additional taxes, including gun related taxes, and pass a test which includes questions relating to if you want to own a gun. If you answer you want a gun, you fail the test because only crazy bad guys want guns. If you want a gun, pass a test. The only way to pass the test is to answer you do not want a gun. Once you answer you do not want a gun, then the genie in the bottle comes out and says in the voice of Robin Williams in Disney's cartoon movie, Aladdin, "As you wish." There were at least two 2020 USA General Election court cases which heard evidence meaning the other dozen or more cases were unconstitutionally dismissed by compromised judges. There is one case in Arizona which is leading towards potential ballot auditing. There may be other legal cases pending in other states in the United States of America. New court cases may rise. Others are ongoing. Some may be, if they haven't yet, potentially, refiled or retried. In some cases, you can do that. It's not double-jeopardy in some cases. It depends but you can sometimes do this depending on the details. A federal case for example could be then tried on the state level. That is not double jeopardy. You can pressure your local counties to call for ballot audits today. Join the revolution.

Nullifying Federal Executive Orders

North Dakota is planning to nullify (on a state level) unconstitutional federal executive orders. If you're not living in this state, you should either go there or encourage your state to call up North Dakota. Hello Texas, Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, etc. In the world of rock paper scissor, you can see state and federal power. However, never underestimate the power of the county sheriff which trumps over them. You should make friends with your local sheriffs and talk to them about the rule of law regarding what you have to do in your county, legally speaking. Don't go against the sheriffs. Find out what they expect from you as a citizen of the county you're living in.

Amazon Spies

2021-02-06 - Saturday

Trump

Amazon vans have cameras actively spying on people, as in anybody and everybody as they drive around delivering packages, not just their customers but also neighbors and everyone else as well. They collect the data in order to develop a China Social Credit Score Database. Even if you're not on Facebook, they'll still have your data. If you do something that our overlords deem not right, your social credit score begins to go down and down. A lower Social Credit Score means you will not be able to buy and sell, travel, have food, have protection, have safety, have a job, have schooling, have a house, have children, have parents, have organs, have water, have power, have Internet, have apps, have trash, have doctors, have hospitals, have health care. When you call 911 and say somebody cut off your arm and you are bleeding to death, the operator will answer the phone and say, "Sorry, your social credit score is too low, please raise it to an acceptable level and try your call again. Have a good day. Good bye."

I was banned on Bittrex

2021-02-07 - Sunday

I was banned on Bittrex

Banks and big tech companies are making special cities all around the world. Covid to End on the 31st of March of 2025 according to WorldBank.org.

My Cash App is $joeyarnoldvn

2021-02-08 - Monday

Facebook Restricted

My Cash App is $joeyarnoldvn and what is yours? Let's have a party before the dollar dies. Let's come up with backup plans and come together in local communities while we still can. Now is the time.

Cronyism Sucks

2021-02-09 - Tuesday

Cronyism Sucks

George Washington did NOT say, "My fellow Americans, read my lips, I hereby grant you some rights which we can then take away if there is a pandemic or if you feel a little unsafe regarding your neighbor's cannons." You can either help your state leave the United States of Satan or you can leave that state. A woman in Vancouver, Washington went to a hospital. Nurses and doctors tried to stick a needle in her arm against her wishes. She said no. The hospital called the police who came and kidnapped her for not breaking the law. No crime. The hospital and the police committed crime against her. And believe all women. And what if I told you she was black and black lives matter. And police are bad. The police might as well sell her to sex trafficking. Don't we want to defund the police? And I am Pro-Choice too. My Body My Choice. And none of your business. Thousands of people go to Oakes Farms Market in Florida daily without masks in 2020 and many of them go there seven days a week because it's the new Disneyland, the happiest place on earth, even some of their staff are 80 years old or older and yet are not getting sick. But if you do want to wear a mask, have at it. Hundreds of new customers come in each day from out of state, some come as far as like New York. You can tell they're new because when they enter the store, their jaws drop like as if they're cartoon characters.

Cash App

My Cash App is $joeyarnoldvn and what is yours? Let's have a party before the dollar dies. Let's come up with backup plans and come together in local communities while we still can. Now is the time. I will invest in a gold-backed cryptocurrency, as much as I can. Is there such a thing yet? Sign up to be a First Responder today, just call, not toll-free, at 1-800-Get-A-Gun-Duh. Don't kill your chickens, wait until they die of old age, say a little prayer to remember the wonderful life Chicken Little had and then get out your knife and prepare for a feast in honor of the life of the little guy. Study shows over 80% of Covid-19 Patients have vitamin D deficiency. Nurses stick stuff inside babies causing hearts to stop. After that, they try their best to restart the infant's hearts. Too many do die. It is covered up. You don't hear about it. Most viruses die in the air within seconds. Over 85 percent of child trafficking related things seem to be happening on Facebook Messenger.

Gold-Backed Crypto

2021-02-10 - Wednesday

Find me on Instagram at Joeyarnoldvn

Gold and silver are accepted as legal currencies in Utah, Oregon, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Missouri. Before 2030, globalists will most likely murder over 6 billion people. The good news is, number one, we can try to stop some of that, and, number two, regardless, you don't have to be one of them, you don't have to die, there may be only a billion people left on our planet soon. Come join me and survive this coming Holocaust. The greatest Holocaust ever. Save as many people as you can. But at the same time, you don't have to die. Get out of the big cities. Find a farm while you still can. You are running out of time. Find a community of like-minded people and get a room, I mean a community, a neighborhood, a state where you can find like-minded people. Do it while you still can.

Genocide Coming

Because there may be over 7 billion people who support the globalist agenda, they will end up dying most likely in the next few years. You must be prepared for this probability or worst case scenario. Every day you're still not dead yet is precious. You get what you promote. Justice is coming. There are consequences and rewards for the actions we take in life. Will you buy smart underwear which will be connected to the NSA? How do we detox from the lead which is in the soil? I have a friend named Tim Osman. Please don't Google his name. You can make money posting to blockchain social networks, I can help you sign up for free, no credit cards, no money required. I post on these websites and I make money. I did not put any money into them. You can take the money out. You can wire the money to crypto exchanges, banks, wallets.

Protonmail Banned Me on my 36th birthday.

2021-02-11 - Thursday

Protonmail Banned Me on my 36th birthday.

Protonmail Banned Me on my 36th birthday. Step one, find out how many people died annually for the last ten years in your country. Step two, please post those statistics for each individual year including 2020 in your report. We will copy and paste what you find everywhere. Thank you very much. Leftists say you have to say chest, can't say your baby is sucking on your breasts. You have to say human milk. You cannot say it is the milk of the mother. Oh My God. Russia killed the ALL-MIGHTY DOLLAR! I hate you RUSSIA! Are you happy America is becoming Venezuela in the next few years or much sooner because you do nothing, isn't that really cool that you're helping this republic and the world crumble? Are you excited as millions of people die? Do you wake up each morning happy that you don't care about this? Covid Vaccine has over 5 different viruses which it programs and mass produces in your cells to eat up your body from the inside-out, to attack the proteins, to kill your babies, to give you HIV, to kill your immune system and cause you to die from the common cold within months to the extend you're lacking enough essential vitamins.

Regarding Gold-Backed Cryptocurrencies

But the idea of a gold-backed cryptocurrency could at least in theory become a 2-in-1 deal where it might be backed by gold and yet as a fail-safe if all else goes wrong, if governments and others come in to confiscate the gold, you would still have something like Bitcoin or whatever type of cryptocurrency it may be. I see that as a potential two in one deal. Of course the risks, liability, privacy risks of having governments seek to imprison people for having gold which might be connected to a cryptocurrency, I understand that might be too big of a risk in some situations, it may be harder to be anonymous if police were to spot you holding some gold. Finding ways to stay as anonymous online in the mist of tyranny is a worthy cause and that is why I value the 4th amendment of the U.S. constitution. Cartoons and other children shows are actively singing songs and otherwise encouraging toddlers to wear masks, to not shake hands, hug, or get close to other people; to simply not be humans at all, this will scar these kids for the rest of their lives, deep intellectual abuse.

Brother Joined Hive

2021-02-12 - Friday

My brother joined Hive - When I Was Young, Busted Knees, No Helmets, No Limits

Mother cries as insulin for his son who could die without it costs more than $500 even as it only costs pennies to make. Biden did this. Watch the video of this mother in her car video. Listen to her passion as she speaks truth. They say even after everyone on the planet is vaccinated, we still must have lockdown globally, even in ten years from now. Are you happy for living on Planet Wall-E as Fat People stuck in The Matrix? Over ten million starved to death in 2020 thanks to people staying at home and being safe. We kept ourselves so safe, we ended up dying because we had no food. We are so scared, we make the problem worse. The odds of coming up with the exact numbers of the 2020 U.S. General Elections, Mathematician Expert Edward Solomon says there aren't enough stars in the known universe to have it come up by chance apart from electronic manipulation, statistically, it's astronomical, he went on to say there aren't even enough atoms in the universe. Biden won exactly the same percentage points across multiple precincts at designated times a day just long enough to put him in the lead. One example in Fulton County, Georgia on starting at 12:54 AM on Wednesday, the 4th of November of 2020, the percentage was set 5.5555%, and every 30 minutes to an hour plus a few times on Thursday, that is eleven separate times, each time it was exactly 5.555% percent, and that is humanly impossible to replicate by hand without the help of voting software.

Elmo Vaccine

Elmo got the vaccine and people on Sesame Street are locked in their homes like as if they were living in China. Children are being brainwashed. This is worse than sexual abuse. Green means you can travel. Different colors means different things under the Chinese Credit Score which is going to Europe, Australia, Canada, and is also slowly getting into America. If the centralized powers don't like you or your friends, then you can't work, school, travel, buy, sell, have your kids, have Internet, have a phone plan, health care, police care, fire care, water, sewer, garbage, food, etc. There is an alleged James Clapper interrogation audio tape which I'm listening to right now.

Shoveling Snow

2021-02-13 - Saturday

Michelle Obama, "Joe Biden, get your hands off my dick."

Before getting the Covid Vaccine, read the ingredients, the insert. And tell yourself, oh, I am putting this thing in my body, that is awesome. And oh, I am putting this other thing in my body. It is not a vaccine. Ignorance is Bliss. It's cool when you don't know you don't know something. It's cool when millions of people are likely to die or very close to it in 2021 because of Covid Vaccines.

Money is Dying

Cannot wait for the dollar to die. A study found that over 80% of those who got Covid were vitamin-D deficient. And the Flu magically disappeared during the winter. If you're going off the CDC website, you should make a list of the exact numbers.

Happy Valentines Day

2021-02-14 - Sunday

Joe Biden in like 2003

Happy Valentines Day. America has been dead for 209 years. They try to kill people via nano bots which goes into the body to cause flu like symptoms. That is fused with 5G, geoengineering, chemicals, waves, a variety of things working together. You must actively try ten times harder to counter as much of it all as you can, your ignorance is bliss, your children will suffer to the extent you try not to counter things you are yet to know. I repeat, things you are yet to know. Apple cider vinegar, 2 tablespoons a day but broken up gradually throughout the day, can help you. Encouraging healthy pH blood level balance minimizes cancer, detoxifies the liver, dissolves viruses, and helps the heart. The brain-gut connection. Is it true the last U.S. President to take the oath for the united states for America was back in around 1812? Has America been dead for over two centuries now? Did you know there is a star inside our earth? Biden is telling Americans to wear masks until 2022.

Reducing Zombism

Candida is a type of fungus which helps decompose dead bodies but the problem comes when the people are still alive while Candida is excessively growing and eating up your body even before you are actually dead. Therefore, you want to look at fasting, at starving those little guys at least once every ten years if not as often as you can to minimize how much of them you have inside of your biology. Borax detoxes fluoride from the brain. Inside your body are the bad guys, the fungi, which wants your body to die, and the good guys, which are the bacteria which wants your body to live, that is the civil war within your chemical makeup. The pineal gland in our brain is a spiritual window into the Supernatural Internet which transcends space and time, it truly is the third eye, but fluoride blocks it. Does the earth have two moons?

Party at Five

2021-02-15 - Monday

Star Wars Luke Kenobi Father Vader Anakin Floor is Lava Game Sucks He Was And Died Hahaha Meme

Party at Five. RINOs are Republican In Name Only and PINOs are Patriots In Name Only. Thousands of refugees are being allowed into California and Texas from Mexico but without being tested for Covid, no masks, no safety. But if you want to go anywhere or do anything, you have to get tested. When immigrants come in, as they do right now, they are NOT being tested for anything really, they can pass on diseases to you and you are not allowed to do anything period.

Texas Freezing

2021-02-16 - Tuesday

Girl from Firefly show

A 28 YEAR OLD WISCONSIN MOM DIES DAYS AFTER SECOND PFIZER SHOT. Why are kids sneaking out of the White House? Is Tom Cruise part of an off-planet corporation called Umbrella? You can find really old videos on the Internet of really tall people, some of them may be 14 feet tall or taller as you can see people and horses almost reach the height of this man's knees. Did you really think those videos were fake? Many times you'll find truth hiding in plain sight. Truth is often lying underneath your nose all along. This takes the Mandela Effect to a whole new level. Is the South Pole actually the North Pole? It's below zero degrees in Texas right now, they refusing to turn the power back on as people freeze to death, they're shutting down stores as people starve to death, and they're refusing to plow roads. You can literally watch videos of giant semi-trucks crashing into other trucks, at least three giant trucks, one which was going at least 70 MPH and the others were going pretty fast too, several people died in just that pile up alone.

Who is Oatmeal Joey Arnold?

I am single, 36 years old, I live in Shelton, I am Christian, no kids, I live with my parents, I don't wear a mask ever, I listen to Alex Jones, I love Trump, I am a little bit crazy, I don't work. I don't have a job. I just sit on a computer all day writing on my blog and that is it. Was the inspiration behind the Star Gate movies and shows stolen from the Native American Indians? Weather manipulation meetings at your local town hall in a county or state near you, why are you not there to ask them questions? Things got so bad in India that they created a task force and then ended up banning the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That's how EVIL India is. Hey folks, how could India keep out our SAVIORS? We all know Bill Gates is the second coming of Jesus Christ. Kissinger wrote a report back in the 1970s regarding how to control the African population.

Travel Post Banned For Not Being a Travel Post

2021-02-17 - Wednesday

White Culture Dont Have Any Joke Yes We Do

Texas Dark Winter to last for weeks, people are freezing and starving to death, people are so excited as the globalists take over the world, Biden said the Dark Winter was coming, he was right. Be prepared for a new biological weapon, a new Covid disease, coming either this year in 2021 or at least before 2025. It will kill at least 4 billion people. Don't tell me I didn't warn you. I'm on record trying to tell you how bad things are. If you're reading this, you're guilty of not caring. Please, do something. The clock is ticking. Will China be aiming nuclear weapons at 24 targets across the globe, will it be real, will it be staged, will it be an excuse to lockdown the world, what is going to happen? Will it be exactly 24 different places in different countries around this planet? Will this be a good thing or a bad thing? Will the good guys or the bad guys be able to take control of whatever that might happen in February of 2021? Will it be any day now? Will people fall for false flags? Is there anything we can do right now?

Bill Gates Over Biden

Biden won't speak to world leaders. Boris Johnson said Bill Gates is really the head of the G8. This is how globalism works. They're getting the general population used to the world being run by technocracy. In a secret video, Mark Zuckerberg told his Facebook staff he didn't trust the Covid Vaccine. So, why isn't Mark telling his 2 billion users this? Why keep such a thing a secret? In the 1960s, America asked Russia to start a world war against China but Russia declined. That was declassified.

Photoshop Funny

2021-02-18 - Thursday

1776 Put Mask On Americans No Way

Funny story today, somebody used photoshop to try to fool me ahahahahhaaa! Biden is taking over the Texan Power-Grid, red alert, warning warning. We know their plan. We know the patterns. They'll say deadlier strands are out there now. This will likely be by the fall of 2021 if not a lot sooner. The strands will generally be less deadly. But it's extremely coordinated, scripted, they will all try their best to make you gulp down this Kool-Aid of Death. Shifting into Techno-Scientific Dictatorship, they're phasing the general public to accept this shift in world history globally, most people are stuck in a trance and they do NOT even know it. Even if you tell them, they will say to you, "You are crazy." THEY'RE PUTTING CHEMICALS IN THE SKY THAT MAKES THE SNOW GAY. The power grid was an attack on water-power devices, especially in the 1930s. Some people had water-powered devices. They didn't need electricity because they water-powered devices.

Scaring Children to Death

A ten year old was admitted to the hospital because he was losing weight because he was refusing to eat for so long because he was afraid he would get Covid and die. Sergeant Major said they don't call it a Lie-Berry for nothing. Did you know they used to have water-powered mechanical devices? You were not told real history. A lot of stuff covered up. Why not get back to water power? Aren't you even just a little bit curious? People had free electricity thanks to tap water in the early 1900s. So, why would people give that up? What happened? Why trade that in for a monthly electricity bill?

We Need County Coin

2021-02-19 - Friday

Lauren Chen was on Friday Night Tights

Steele mentioned the idea of CountyNet. Also, he mentioned an idea of a CountyCoin which loses value the farther away from the county the coin moves in order to incentivize investing back into the same community as opposed to going excessively and obsessively overseas aggressively, as in too much and too often. I confess I fell for fake news when I thought Babbit died. I was wrong. Steele says Wall Street and others stolen 100 trillion dollars. People in power plants in Texas were ordered to lower down, to power down to zero percent in most cases, the documents are here, you can read the documents, they were ordered to do this on purpose, this is KILLING PEOPLE, and YOU DO NOT CARE. Do you have no friends or family in Texas? 2021-02-14 - Sunday - 08:51 PM EST - The 14th of February of 2021 - DOE Order Number 202-21-1 was issued for Texas (ERCOT), for more info, go to Energy dot gov, their official government website.

Texas Being Murdered

The Department of Energy (DOE) was ordered to turn off the power in Texas which is causing people to die. They're literally murdering people and nobody cares. The evidence is right there, we can all grab and share it. But nobody cares that thousands to millions of Texans are starving and freezing to death. I said, to death. The Department of Energy told Texas they CANNOT produce more energy, that is why people are dying. DOE Order Number 202-21-1 mentions ERCOT (ISO), this document can be read on their official government website, you can go there, you can read it, you can pass it on to your friends, or you can let your friends die in the cold in Texas with no power. Texas electricity bill for your power, just this week now, went from $50 per Megawatt to over $9000 per Megawatt. Breaking News,  Megan Fox is an Anti-Masker which means she is Pro-Vitamin, we are all going to die.

Why is Sweden banning masks?

2021-02-20 - Saturday

Alpha Heater

Why is Sweden banning masks? Many times, they ban people from YouTube but then let other upload the same videos or similar videos and profit from them. The Covid Vaccine is not a remedy but an operating system.

The Healthy American

2021-02-21 - Sunday

We Stole It Fair & Square

Stores are not legally allowed to discriminate or disrupt commerce which comes from even the customers who refuses to wear masks. Stores can say it's private property. However, because the stores are open to the public, thanks to the 4th amendment, thanks to other things as well, prohibiting customers is discrimination among other things as well. The maskless buyer is not trespassing if he or she is not disrupting commerce. Moreover, when you prohibit customers from stores, then you are engaging in the disruption of commerce which may be illegal among other things as well partly because the customers are part of the free market exchange system which we call commerce. Stopping customers means you are disrupting commerce. That is illegal. You should go to jail for disrupting commerce. It may be many different things, not just that. Stores and states must be held accountable for violating laws. Stores are public. They cannot enforce masks. Churches however are legally considered to be private and can enforce masks.

Weekly Oatmeal Show - Episode 001

2021-02-22 - Monday

Coco Cola White Polar Bear Fired For Being Too White

Sound of Freedom is a great movie. The only preparedness that counts is the preparedness that happens when you don't yet need it. One day without notice, you will wake up and you will go to an ATM and it will not work. You will have no food in your house for many weeks to many months or longer. It takes less energy to walk on two legs than it takes to run four legs. The majority of suicides are from white male adults. Second spot is held by black male adults. Why was Bill Gates thrown out of 32 countries? New monthly vaccines for the virus of the month. Are you excited? He said now we have to difficult work of "Untying this knot," that is code for crazy people have to be sent off to re-educational FEMA camps where they will either recant or be murdered.

Gina Carona Interview with Ben Shapiro

2021-02-23 - Tuesday

Gina Carona Interview with Ben Shapiro

Gina interview. Why did NASA stop looking for life on Mars in 1976, why did they transition after that to geology, to looking for rocks? Trump got over 80 million votes while Biden got less than 40 million. Why are so many world leaders saying Covid-19 is permanent? They refuse to test it on animals because it kills animals or worse. No animals were harm in the making of this post. God save the animals. I'm glad we skipped animal-testing.

Being Dead Due To Birth

2021-02-24 - Wednesday

Tell Me Your Secrets

The only time your name is written in all uppercase capital letters is on your tombstone and yet that is how it's formatted on birth certificates, when parents sign it IN CURSIVE LETTERS when you are born, that is necromancy. When they say you can't leave the hospital with your own newborn infant baby without signing it, that is theft or worse. Legally speaking, it is a literal death sentence as you are literally selling away your baby. You need to live in groups of at least ten people. Zombies will be coming from the big cities. Protect your family from the walking dead. Why are so many big people being arrested around the world each day? Why?

Who Controls The Military Right Now?

Was an executive order or other items signed officially in 2019 authorizing a former (allegedly incumbent) U.S. President full control of the military even up to 60 days after an alleged inauguration of a alleged new administration (that is the new but fake President of the possibly defunct United Corporate States of America) which would end in or around, approximately, on the 20th of March of 2021? Please let me know such things were not signed. Please let your friends know nothing at all happened in 2019 at all. I'm only asking. I have no idea what happened.

Captain Biden Flying Around Zapping Brown Kids

2021-02-25 - Thursday

Captain Biden Flying Around Zapping Brown Kids

My gender is oatmeal. That is the kind of sex or gender I am. In India, doctors are saying women who get the Covid Vaccines are showing signs of the beginning stages of sudden breast cancer. Wow. This is amazing. Sign me up. Now we can all be Booby-Free Angelina Jolie. Please stick ten of those things in my arms today. Quick, this cannot come fast enough. Make boobs not great again. Please tell your friends how awesome this is. Learn To Say No Just For One Day Article. Tree Court Article.

Globalist vs Brazil

In Brazil, they're trying to force the government to not only waive all liability for the Covid Vaccines but also to sign over military bases over to them as well, it's insane but crazy things happen daily if only you knew the half of it. Back to American news. The Supreme Court has committed treason against the constitution and the republic of these American states. They've ruled saying whoever cheats the most in an election gets to be the alleged president of this defunct fake corporation which we illegally call in all caps THE UNITED STATES OF [not 'for'] AMERICA. Cheating is not only allowed but now also endorsed by the highest court of the land.

My-Body-My-Choice No-Mask Sign

2021-02-26 - Friday

My-Body-My-Choice No-Mask Sign

Masks Causes Bacteria Pneumonia. My-Body-My-Choice No-Mask Sign. Their goal is to make all humans unable to naturally reproduce by 2030. Why is South Africa cancelling the Covid Vaccine? There is also related news in Brazil, India, etc. See, people are dying from vaccines. They've been spending billions to trillions of dollars covering up vaccine deaths for decades globally. They murder people who expose this or worse in most cases. You have no idea how bad it is. Bill Gates and others are involved in giving vaccines to people around the world. That is why Bill Gates is banned in so many countries. In other news, there may be someday selling cloned synthetic children meat to encourage people to eat. Hell, they may have it ready already. Celebrity meat actually. The only we defeat this invisible enemy is to decide our own destiny. 80% of people who died of Covid in Canada were in nursing homes. 101 Pocketball Journal Scans Uploaded.

Covid Vaccines Are Murdering People

Why are over 75% of U.S. military troops refusing the Covid Vaccine? Because vaccines kill people. But more than that, the Covid Vaccine is not a vaccine. It utilizes mRNA which turns your cells into virus factories. That is what mRNA is. See, the M on mRNA means MESSENGER. This is Basic Biology & Science 101 For Dummies here. The vaccine literally sends messages or mRNA into the cell nucleus to tell it to make specific items. Covid-19 and the alleged vaccines in response to it are both GMO-like chimera monsters. They're a combination of different viruses, different things, I'm talking Frankenstein on a microscopic level. I've been talking about this many times. That is why so many people and so many countries are saying no to the vaccines. And again, the Covid Vaccines are not even vaccines to begin with. I wouldn't even be surprised if nano-tech is involved among other things in regards to these things which are murdering people right now. Sadly, they're blaming the mRNA deaths on Covid. So, they're trying very hard to make you think that you need to take monthly vaccines. And the more people die, the more they'll say, "Hurry up, you need even more vaccines, etc." Remember, they have spent billions to trillions of dollars covering up vaccine deaths. They murdered many people who tried exposing them. Fake news would never tell you all of this because they're fake news.

Cleaned Out a Chicken House

2021-02-27 - Saturday

Alex Jones Predicting Covid-19 Back in 2010

Wear a mask or I'm calling the cops. Alright, call the cops. I'm suing them. In 2020, over 40 million alleged votes for Biden were fake. In 2008, it was reported that HAARP was learning how to steer hurricanes via high-atmosphere heat injection, kind of like guiding a kitten with a string. Watch out for Bioterrorism says Bill Gates. Which reminds me, kind of funny how Texas was suddenly colder than Montana. Wow. Out of nowhere. What happened on this day in 1933? Reich Fire. Hitler. Germany. Klaus Schwab says you will ONLY ONLY ONLY eat bugs and will love it.

What is in the Covid Vaccine?

Some of the ingredients for the mRNA Covid Vaccine includes some of the most commonly consumed things including vinegar, salt, sugar, plus a few very common preservatives found in so many food items. Too many people buy processed foods which includes preservatives in them. So, why are these commonly consumed items in the vaccine? It is there to trigger autoimmune responses in your body's immune system. It may takes years for your body to get there, but slowly over time, your body will begin to develop allergies to salt, sugar, vinegar, etc. These allergies may spiral out of control into even worse problems over time. Now, that is just the tip of the iceberg. But it is a good thing to start with and share with others. Don't believe me. Don't take my word for it. Go get a list of the ingredients to these vaccines and post them here. I will wait for your awesome responses. Thank you so much in advance for responding with the real list of ingredients. Prove me wrong. Easy to do. Just show me the ingredients. Show me these items, like salt, is not in the vaccine.

DEADLY-ALLERGIC to YOUR-OWN-BODY

2021-02-28 - Sunday

Covid Vaccine Ingredients

Your body will become DEADLY-ALLERGIC to YOUR-OWN-BODY. Why is Pfizer giving their customers one thing but their staff a different thing? Pfizer got a new drug out which is going to help people deal with one of the side-effects of their own vaccines. So, they make money trying to fool you into getting one and then even more money when you have to come back to take some of their drugs to deal with the deadly side-effects. Have fun, kids. You WILL swell up like a balloon. I warned you. Why were thousands to millions of 2020 ballots had computer-printed vote marks as opposed hand-written vote marks all for Biden and none for Trump?

Trump 2024 is Retarded

Downvote because Trump won in 2020. See, they can steal it from Trump in 2024 too. We have to call for FORENSIC-STYLE ballot audits in each county each day. Call people. Email people. You can make a difference. Call the military. Call Congress. Call judges. Write letters. Protest in person. Make videos. Write articles. Share things everywhere. Do something. If you are reading this and you are doing nothing, then you deserve Biden and the Chinese takeover of America.

Who is Oatmeal Joey Arnold?

Telling The Truth in a World of Lies

Biden Law, Five Years Lockdown Plan

Canada Kidnapping Themselves

All About Hive Blog

Alex Jones and DR. STEVE PIECZENIK

Are you ready for Weapons of Mass Distraction?

Amazon Spies

I was banned on Bittrex

My Cash App is $joeyarnoldvn

Cronyism Sucks

Gold-Backed Crypto

Protonmail Banned Me on my 36th birthday

Brother Joined Hive

Shoveling Snow

Happy Valentines Day

Party at Five

Texas Freezing

Travel Post Banned For Not Being a Travel Post

Photoshop Funny

We Need County Coin

Why is Sweden banning masks?

The Healthy American

Weekly Oatmeal Show - Episode 001

Gina Carona Interview with Ben Shapiro

Being Dead Due To Birth

Captain Biden Flying Around Zapping Brown Kids

My-Body-My-Choice No-Mask Sign

Cleaned Out a Chicken House

DEADLY-ALLERGIC to YOUR-OWN-BODY

[jadedbirch]

Apocalypse Forever

I haven’t been this relaxed in years.

Outside is the Plague, the End of Days, Apocalypse Nowish.  The panicked masses have cleared out the supermarkets, profiteers are complaining about sitting on more “product” than they can push, and the hospitals are erecting tented cities in anticipation of the inevitable influx of the ill.  Right now, more people are having anxiety than COVID-19 symptoms thought that might change soon. It took weeks longer than it probably should have for our leadership to strongly encourage us to work from home, but at long last they did.  Our leaders - the ones who, despite being the most vulnerable due to their advanced age, are also the most glib and happy to accuse you of being “too emotional” at the smallest provocation.

Outside is the Plague, but I am inside, safely cocooned in my introversion.  I’m not lonely, I don’t get lonely.  The loneliest I’ve ever felt was when surrounded by people trying to engage me in small talk.  But that’s not all I’m armored with.  I’m enveloped in an impenetrable shroud, and it’s giving me a surprising leg-up during these fraught times.  It is the chain mail of chronic illness, coupled with the sword and shield of depression.  I am Kirsten Dunst’s character in Melancholia, watching with settled relief as the titular planet approaches on its unchangeable course towards annihilation.  I too float on the river of my melancholy, bolstered by the waters of my own detachment.

Social distancing is something I’ve been practicing for my whole life. I go on Twitter and I see global panic.  I go on Facebook and I see a wall full of articles bestowing blame, sharing recommendations, lists upon lists of how to survive this contagion.  On my first Saturday after we got the reluctant permission to telecommute, I make a list.  I call it “Fun things to do while Plague.”  My list is simple.  It’s things that I do anyways, because I’m often house-bound.  Things I do because every day when I wake up, I’m not sure that my body is going to do as I ask.  How will my pain levels be?  Will I have to cancel my plans?  Will I be able to go to work?  

It’s a relief to have all my plans cancelled for me.  It’s an unburdening like no other to know I will not have to get dressed for work, will not have to sit in traffic, will not have to grit my teeth and smile through the pain when people ask me how my weekend was and how did I spend it.  To shed my human skin and revert back into the lizard bog witch shape that is my true form.

It’s a relief to know that I will be able to get more time with the bone stimulator I’ve been prescribed to treat the avascular necrosis which I developed in addition to my usual life-long friend, Ehlers Danlos. (“Exceedingly rare,” they say, even more so than my already rare genetic illness.) They tell me I can use it up to ten hours a day, but the most I’ve managed so far, even with working from home, has been eight and a half.  It’s a relief not to have to tell people every day, “Please slow down” or “I’m sorry, I can’t walk that far.”  It’s a relief not to have to see those “Take the stairs” signs plastered all over our office building, and not to have to wonder what people think of me - an ostensibly healthy looking person - when I press that button for the second floor in the elevator.  It’s all an incredible relief.

There are books on my shelves that I haven’t gotten around to reading because carrying a book with me has become just one more thing I can’t easily do.  Every ounce counts when your body can betray you with a sneeze.  My Kindle contains multitudes and weighs next to nothing.  Perhaps now that I am home and don’t have to carry the books further than my couch, perhaps now is the time I will read them.  They’ve been in quarantine too but now they can come out to play. My abandoned friends.

I try not to be too smug.  Sure, I already have enough toilet paper to last me for the next month, because I never know when my body will decide to rebel against me.  I already happened to have a box of disinfectant wipes because having defective collagen pretty much means I don’t have functional barriers against the outside world.  I go through my emergency preparedness kit that I put together years ago and I laugh at my past self.  These contacts are the wrong prescription, but even funnier - my eyes have joined the rest of my treasonous body parts rendering me no longer able to wear contacts.  But hey, at least the water purification tablets might still come in handy.

I reach out to my extravert friends and ask them, with sincerity they probably have a tough time detecting, “Are you alright?” We must look out for each other  in these tough times.  I send a message to my extravert fiancée.  “Hi I love you.  That’s all.”  I don’t want her to fly here from Canada and get sick just so we can see each other.  This, like the rest of our long-term long-distance relationship, is not something most people can understand.  I’d rather have her far away but alive and well, sending me photos of her cat whom we both call “Daughter” even though her real name is Jasmine.  I worry about her.  I worry about my extraverted and elderly parents, who do not accept our relationship, but who love me more than life itself, and don’t see those concepts as diametrically opposing.

I worry about my mother who also has Ehlers Danlos when she says to me, “I welcome it, let it come.”  I don’t know how to tell her that I understand exactly what she means without upsetting her.  That to me death too would be a great relief, just like this social distancing I am relishing so much.  The unburdening of my own body, of societal norms, of words and labels, of the weight of people’s thoughts and hopes and wishes.  I’ve been wanting to disappear for a very long time, and now I can. Nay, it isn’t being granted mere permission.  Now my disappearance can be touted as selfless, heroic, for the good of society.

I haven’t been able to write in a very long time, but I am writing today.  One of the things on my list is “Try writing again - it doesn’t have to be long.”  I am crying as I write this, and that too feels like an unburdening.  Like this is the culmination of some spell I have conjured, and it’s flowing out of me in words and tears. Pure magic.

I am not an idiot.  I know terrible, devastating things are happening out there.  I know it will get a lot worse before it gets better.  But I also look at my little list of “Fun things to do while Plague” and I hope that it doesn’t end any time soon because I really look forward to fulfilling it.

It is a great relief, when you’ve been waiting for so long for something terrible to happen, to know that it has arrived.  Perhaps this will make those of us who survive stronger, better people.  Perhaps Mother Nature knows better than we do.  Who am I to second guess Nature, even when she has always seemed to place so many obstacles in my way.  Who’s to say it wasn’t for a day like today, to give me a leg-up (even if a necrotic one) while the world crumbles.

[quakerjoe]

Look Up the word SOCIALISM. Please. It has fuck-all nothing to do with guns.

I ran across this comment:

“I am for gun rights.. does that make me less socialist?”

Are you fucking kidding me? There are really people THIS stupid. This is why America is about to collapse like the Soviet Union did. It’s not because we were outspent like they were, it’s because we’re suffering under TWO pandemics right now- Covid-19 AND TOTAL FUCKERY because far, FAR too many people are just that ignorant.

As a veteran, I was trained to use firearms. They’re tools for hunting and killing. End of story. Want one? I’m all for it! Everyone who’s willing to put in the effort to train and get a license for one should have one if they really want to. I’m all in, hoss.

However, when you’re equating having a killing tool that makes it way too easy to put someone to death with alongside a political style of governance, you’re a fucking idiot. Only in #Murica do people have this issue. By my account, the 2nd Amendment should be shit-canned. It’s outdated and nobody takes it seriously anymore. How so?

“A well regulated militia...”

Let’s stop right there. When this was written, children, there was no standing army in the new USA. At best, each state was, in theory, expected to raise their own militias and even then, they owned their own weapons that they had to buy themselves (and we’re talking the same rifles they also used for hunting with). A British Regular of the time, a professional, well-trained soldier, could fire 3 rounds per minute. A yokel from some Colonial/State militia? One. Maybe two at best. Training was nothing less than lax back then and it was insanely expensive. 

To the point- if you want to join a state militia, i.e. the National Guard, then fine; own a gun. In the more modern sense, if you want to join a branch of our fine armed forces, then you’ll train and you can have a gun. No problemo. Once you’re discharged and leave, you can transfer your training creds and easily get a civilian license to own and operate one. Easy-peasy. Right?

But no. Not in #Murica. Here, people no longer read and deteriorated cognitive skills only let too many yokels retain what they want to hear, like NRA talking points on FOX fuckin’ “News”. These selfish cunts are so wound, stupid and bent on being free-range ammosexuals. What the fuck are they afraid of? I’ll tell you.

Smart people.

The whingers on the far right... motherfuckers one and all... with their bibles in one hand and guns in the other... They fail to know what hypocrisy is here. Be that as it may, they’re scared of smart people. They know that more often than not, they’re ability to have an intelligent conversation is rather stilted and smart people can kick their asses when it comes to how politics work, what Jesus actually said in that bible they never read, and how viruses work for that matter. These wank-socks need their guns to make them right in an argument.

To compound things, these knuckle-dragging, inbred, mouth-breathers are mostly a bunch of “nigger haters” and they know that the “Justice” system will continue to jail the Black Community for the most minor infractions, essentially re -instituting slavery while they can literally go into Federal property, armed, take it over, vandalize it, and then leave scott-free. Precedence has been set. They can shoot Black people with little to no repercussions. Precedence has been set.

I could go on and on, but I’d like to bring this question to your attention: What the unholy fuck does that have to do with socialism? Eisenhower was not only a president but he was a general during WWII and his policies were very socialist. By today’s standards, the man would be what right-wing fuckwits would call a “radical leftist”. So would Abraham Lincoln.

Capitalism, as it stands today, un-regulated and un-tethered, has done what for the USA? Massive class warfare and overwhelmingly unfair practices by the top financial elites? Yep. All the rules of olde that were put in place after the Great Depression that were designed to keep that from happening again have been dismantled since Reagan’s time and mostly by the GOP while the Democrats say and do little to nothing about it and they’re only getting more complacent about it. I’m not saying that Capitalism is bad; far from it. However, if it is left to its own devices, it will work like a cancer, not like a working form of governance. No system is perfect, but Capitalism is the most vulnerable, especially in a nation with a base in democracy like the republic that the USA used to have and doesn’t anymore. Once disinterest and complacency set in, the rich and powerful will swipe democracy out from under you like a table cloth without a care as to how many dishes they break or how big the mess will be; you won’t see it coming and you’ll be the one left having to clean up after. The food and drink will be gone along with the silverware, but the mess is all yours to enjoy. You know- like NOW.

Switzerland has a government a lot like ours. It’s a Democratic Republic. “Everyone owns guns!” Um, true to a point. Men do. Women do. BUT. They’re all trained. Come legal age and graduation from high school, you’re in the army, Fred. You do your bit for country and then when you get out, you keep your gun. NO AMMO. Repeat- NO AMMO. That’s all under lock and key where you, as a reservist for life, would go to train periodically.

Chicken-shit fuckwits in #Murica are too fucking scared and/or lazy to join the armed forces or law enforcement. BUT they still want their guns without having to earn the right or privilege. THAT is what pisses me off. No “militia” skills, but boy they’re fast and happy to endanger everyone else just so they can sit out in the woods with their friends, shoot beer cans and have circle-jerks around the ol’ campfire while talking about race cars and titties and swapping jokes about how many “niggers” it takes to do something.

It’s not just a redneck stereotype; it’s the real deal. Those industrial-grade gun fuckers out in Michigan who thought it’d be just fine to “occupy” the capital while armed make the rest of us who earned the right and privilege to have firearms look bad. You also know damn well that there really aren’t BLACK people acting like these infantile taint-barnacles either. You don’t see hordes of women packin’ heat on the way to the clinic for a routine checkup, do you? They ought to, especially when there are anti-abortion fucks out there ranting about shit they know nothing about, spewing their lies by twisting biblical verse when in fact the bible is NOT anti-abortion. It is only mentioned ONCE, and the verse is FOR abortion. Imagine a woman coming in for a pap, palming a .357 on her way through a crowd of these ignorant cultists who think they’re doing “the lord’s work”...

All of this shit isn’t particular to any form of government except for American-style “democracy” where uninformed opinions are now given the same merit and weight as that of a well studied, well informed fact. Anyone who wants to “make America great again” would have noticed that the policies in place that made us a world power to begin with were all backed by SOCIALIST principles, providing a regulated and more fair framework on which the gears of capitalism were attached to run like a smooth, well tuned machine. Today, that framework is shot to pieces and the whole system works more like the junk drawer in your kitchen.

Today, #Murica has a framework made of PLUTOCRACY, welded together with FASCISM and let’s not forget that it is painted in Red Socialism for the Wealthy, White Supremacy, and Blue, sunny-skies of Nationalism that keeps the masses proud of this country because of what we were, not who we truly are. Those days are far gone; days when the NRA was FOR GUN REGULATIONS and were all for proper education, safety and training, in an era where SOCIALISM built our infrastructure, rich fucks were taxed heavily to keep them from gaining too much power over the masses, and we were on the rise in industry, sciences, and education.

Today, smart people are feared, intelligence is out of fashion, and pride in how stupid and ignorant one is has become the national pastime. As a nation, its people are arrogant and endlessly selfish and too stupid to know to punch up when punching down is easier because Americans, in general, are lazy. Even worse, they’re offended by everything while BEING one of the most offensive people to wander the Earth.

Don’t believe me? Keep an eye on the comments to this post...

[leah-ocarina]

Reminder that while the disabled don’t owe the able-bodied a reason as to why we can’t wear a mask, we sure as hell have a responsibility to inconvenience ourselves to keep others safe. I say this as someone who is at risk of unconsciousness from wearing a mask too long (severe overheating), and as someone with PTSD so bad the state of Indiana doesn’t think I can handle a normal work environment (not mask related and I won’t claim it is, but I empathize with where you’re coming from). Some tips on how to protect yourself and others:

• If your area doesn’t have instacart/click list, call and ask if they’ll put your stuff in a cart so you spend minimal, if any, time inside. I know how crippling phone anxiety is, but this could be your life or the life of someone else. If you need to, ask a friend or family member if they can call for you. Yes it’s awkward, but at a time like this people will understand.

• In the waiting room at a doctor’s office, request to be put somewhere isolated from others. They won’t think you’re weird, I promise. They’ll appreciate you being considerate.

• You may have to give a brief explanation, and that sucks but do it. If there’s some sort of drama related reason you can’t (no shade, just can’t think of a better way to phrase it!), that’s one thing, but if it’s just something you don’t want to do, I’m going to have to insist you do it anyway. You can say something like “I’m trying to keep everyone safe and would rather not discuss why,” but if they insist either hang up and try somewhere else or power through it. Again, they aren’t entitled to that knowledge, but our bodies live by different rules and that’s just the way it is.

• Don’t go anywhere unecccesary. I’m sorry if you have cabin fever. If “I want to go out” is the only thing causing you to expose yourself and others in public, maskless, then you’re just going to have to deal with it. That takes it from ‘difficult to manage’ to just plain selfish. (And honestly this goes for the abled too.)

• Ask for help. Ask your friend. Ask your neighbor. Ask your cousin you rarely talk to. Ask for help if you need something from somewhere where you can’t wear a mask for some reason. We’re all living in the same pandemic. 90% of people will appreciate you trying and will not judge you. Embarrassing? Sure. But it’s better than infecting someone and ending up with manslaughter.

In the case where it’s totally impossible to avoid going out without a mask:

• Stay farther than 6 feet away from people. That’s a clear sign that you’re still being conscious of it.

• If someone approaches you about not wearing a mask, say “please dont get close to me, I’m doing my best to keep distance as a mask is medically impossible.” If they keep giving you shit go find an employee. This sucks and is humiliating, but mask safety is not about you. Chances are people will back off if you tell them to keep their distance to be safe.

• If you can get a cane or something, hold it out between you and the person approaching you and say something like “If you really care about COVID safety you won’t come closer than this”

The truth is pushing for people not to no-mask shame will change nothing. The truth is this is about the lives of people other than yourself. The truth is sometimes we have to do all of the accommodating ourselves. This is not a legal requirement, and yes it’s inconvenient and potentially invasive. But we don’t get to sit back and say “well the ableds don’t have to do it, so I’m not going to 🤷” People’s lives are at stake. We have a responsibility to step up. Not to be able to live normally and having to do all this extra shit is the hand we were dealt. You don’t get to opt out just because it’s not fair. Do absolutely everything you CAN or morally you’re in the wrong and you shouldn’t whine when people say so. This has nothing to do with equality and everything to do with avoiding mass death.

(Disclaimer, if you have done absolutely every last thing you possibly can to keep yourself and others safe, you have every right to complain if someone gets snippy with you!)