#maybe it’s the alabama in me

[icaruspendragon]

Hey I just wanted to say thanks, because idk why this didn't just occur to me, but I've been missing "family" meals, the kind of meals I get to make for people and sit down with people I love since I came out and had to leave my house, and idk why but you posting about having family dinners with your friends where you host them made me realize that like, that's something I can still do. If I don't have the people who will invite me over to eat a meal anymore I can always be the person who invites others over myself and idk, I just wanted to say thanks

this warmed my heart in ways i don’t know how to describe.

family dinner started because i’d get some friends over on tuesdays to watch supernatural prequel the winchesters and i’d make them dinner for their troubles. i was feeding like five people max. but then the show ended and one of my friends got a new job and had to move an hour away so we moved it to the weekend so she could still come.

and then i realized that cooking is actually a form of self care for me (let’s not examine too closely how my self care is still taking care of others, it’s been discussed enough in therapy). so we started inviting other folks. and family dinner went from five people regularly to seven. and then i’d have friends from out of town come and it’d be 15-17. and now it’s not unusual for a dozen people to show up at my house on a saturday night to drink and eat and make merry.

there’s a particular kind of warmth that comes from leaning against the entry to my dining room, glass of wine curled against my chest, seeing so many of the people i love sitting around my table as they laugh and bicker and eat a meal that i used so much love to make. food that i spent hours creating because they gave me the confidence and the desire to learn how to make new things. because the effort it takes for me to make pasta or gnocchi or sauces or broths from scratch is worth it. the hours i will spend standing over a hot stove as i make gumbo or chicken and dumplings or fried everything is worth it. the easy smiles and whiskey-reddened cheeks and raucous laughter and full bellies and warm togetherness is worth the trouble.

it makes me understand the last supper (you know, minus the foreboding of betrayal). there’s a divinity in making a meal to share with those you love.

i’ve yet to find a better way express my devotion than to say, “take this, all of you, and eat of it. for it is my love given up for you.”

because even though the darkness can be chasm-wide and canyon-deep, my love is wider and deeper. it’s the bridge over the consumption of it all.

when people sit at my table and break bread that my hands have tenderly prepared i see the point of it all. loving and be loved in return.

and sometimes that love is stored in poetic words and grand gestures. and sometimes, that love is stored in a stockpot full of soup. but they both accomplish the same thing at the end of the day. warmth and safety and care and devotion.

it’s love. plain and simple and small.

[gaymothman]

nobody ever fucking listens to the marginalized communities living in southern states about what the actuality is of what your lives are going to look like when they entire country goes as Red as Alabama already is. We are surviving and many of us are still thriving despite it all, but i am brutally sick and fucking tired of the hopelessness and fearmongering about your rights being stripped away when there are people living in your fucking country that have already lost those rights under a democratic administration. If you actually give a fuck, look to see how we've been surviving it for the last 4 years, or better yet, for the last 150. Maybe more mutual aid organizations should exist across state lines and those privileged enough to be living with more rights than us could at least stop fucking ignoring us for once.

[frances-baby-houseman]

One fun thing about being in Atlanta is my brother in law went to Vanderbilt and my aunt and her son went to Alabama so it was a VERY EXCITING 15 MINUTES!

I know how Vandy felt from when unranked Northwestern defeated #4 Ohio State in 2005 (as I wrote about last week.) It made me very nostalgic!

[brittlebutch]

look. in no way was Always Watching a good movie, let alone a good marble hornets movie. unfortunately it is also true that the Alex Kralie missing poster lives in my head rent fucking free and i can never forget about it

[emoticonnie]

Southern stereotypes hold people back from reading southern characters as 3 dimensional characters

[g1rlr0b1n]

Does anyone else ever think about how Damian might have had a semblance of a normal childhood if Dick had just like chosen not to relinquish guardianship of him? Because, I think about it a lot actually.

Like I know why he did but what if he didn't? Like what if Dick and Barbara raised him together? Like what then? Sure, it would be awkward because your bio-dad would also technically be your granddad and your father would also be your brother, but overall I think it would have been better for Damian.

I'm sure there are fics about this, drop them in the comments for me, will ya?

[the-great-horse-cocktail]

Idgie and Ruth are queer and you cannot convince me otherwise.

Exhibit A: Literally every outfit Idgie wears, but especially the one at Ruth’s birthday party. Like, theoretically there are straight women that dress like that, but I’ve never met any of them. Also, she literally does drag at one point and it’s iconic. Exhibit B: They have a food fight. In movies, food fights only occur in cafeterias or between the main couple of a rom com. For some reason, in Hollywood’s mind, food fights either equal love or high school.

Exhibit C: They literally co-parent Ruth’s child. They take care. Of a kid. Together. That’s some Fluff AU bullshit right there

Exhibit D: Lakescenelakescenelakescenela

(Starts at 1:08)

[sagehaubitze]

dealing with the shitty guilt of not having done any photography recently like it's supposed to be a job or something instead of just the joy of creating/capturing/sharing. blugh.

If I may bitch for a second; I have a lot of friends who deal with SAD in the winter but my depression gets notably worse in the summer. Longer days and heat are not my friend. It's Alabama, it's nearly 100f out there right now (which is not out of the ordinary, heat wave or not), and in THAT level of heat and humidity my asthma gets destroyed, I walk outside and can't breathe. So I can't spend time outside. I can't hike. Feel like shit inside. It's especially rough in June because everyone wants to have pride events in the middle of the damn day (in the AL heat). I feel like I can't *exist*. I'm just stuck. it blows.

[specialmouse]

every so often i remember that they discontinued my medicaid and i jolt out of fear

[plaid-n-converse]

my city has put positive messages on the main electronic billboards for TDOV and I don't know why that makes me want to cry a bit

[regulationlistener]

cant tell if every businesses individual job search systems got worse or if i just havent used them in a while so i forgot.

[common-grackle]

sandra bloom is a theatre kid canon

[mcmansionhell]

we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.

The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.

It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.

And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.

Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.

A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.

Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.

At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.

And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! Student loans just started back up!

[i-drink-soysauce]

RARE POST THING FROM ME-

i had no other way to share the video

[wonderjanga]

Stuck

Billy has been Captain Marvel since the middle of April. It’s the beginning of July. And that’s not how long Billy’s been Marvel as a whole, no, he’s been a hero for nearly two years. That’s currently how long Billy’s been in his Marvel form.

This all happened because of a, quite frankly stupid mistake. It wasn’t even a magical mistake, just an ignorant and naive one.

Billy: *walking past an alley and hears the sound of someone hurt*

His first mistake was even stopping because of that voice.

Billy: *hesitantly walks into the alley* “Hello? Is someone hurt-”

Thief: *stabs him and pushes him over before realizing he just stabbed a little kid* “Holy shit! A kid!?” *sounds horrified*

The thief then fled the scene, not even bothering to try and actually steal when he realized what he had just done. When Billy finally broke away from the fuzziness of his mind and came to it, he was laying face up on the ground and feeling a sharp pain blossom from his side. His hand moved and he could feel some blood seep past his fingers. Uh oh.

So, on the verge of death and partially delirious from the worsening blood loss, he said his magic word and was lightninged into Captain Marvel. Even as the Captain, he continued laying on the ground. The reason being that he was replaying what happened in his mind and trying to ignore the leftover blood that had been left on the alley floor. It was definitely seeping into his cape, yet he couldn’t find it in himself to get up. Why he was too busy thinking about how absolutely fucked he was over the all the concerned yelling from the DTC.

Marvel: ‘Oh my Gods. I’m going die.’

Mercury: “BILLY, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU EVER GO IN A CREEPY ALLEY???”

Solomon: “He thought someone was in trouble, Mercury. Calm down.” *actually sounds the slightest bit panicked*

Zeus: “Calm down?! Solomon, the boy got STABBED!”

Hercules: “Solomon, what do we do? Is the Batson boy going to die?”

Solomon: “No. Not if he stays in his godly form at least.”

Achilles: “You hear that, Batson? Don’t you dare utter that word until we find a way to fix this!” *if Billy could see him, he would be wagging his finger*

So yeah. Thats why he’s been Marvel for a little over month and a half. See, it turns out that he can’t really do anything. His body was in stasis, completely frozen in time. That meant the wound wouldn’t heal or disappear like he prayed it would. No, it would just be there until he maybe switches back and dies from blood loss, which is something he’d rather not do. You can see his dilemma.

So what did he do to combat the impending feeling of dread that he’ll never get to be Billy again? He threw himself into hero work because to be quite frank, he needed a distraction. And that’s how you could see Captain Marvel in fucking Oregon, then South Dakota, and then Alabama helping whoever. He literally expanded his patrol to cover the entire country aside from cities that were already protected by heroes. After about two of doing this, of course, this caught the attention of others, but the last person he expected was Amanda Waller. She came to him alone after he stopped a car crash in Washington.

Amanda: “Captain Marvel.”

Marvel: *looks over* “Aren’t you Ms. Waller? Is there a problem, ma’am?”

Amanda: “Yes. You’ve been seen going around the entire country. I thought you supers only stuck to your cities.”

Marvel: “I… Well, most of us do. I just have a lot of free time on my hands lately. Do you need me to back off?” *really doesn’t want her to want him to back off because running around the country has actually been a really good distraction*

Amanda: “No. Not for now. Tell me, what do you mean by free time?”

Marvel: “Uh…” *confused as to why she cares* “I guess you could say I switched to heroing full time.”

Amanda: “Interesting.” *stares at him intensely*

Marvel: *starts to get nervous cause her stare reminds him of Batman a little* “Y’know, Miss Waller, Supes tells me your bad news all the time. Something about you hating us?”

Amanda: “He’s right. I don’t respect your kind and the slightest.”

Marvel: “My kind?”

Amanda: “Superheroes. You’re a threat to national security but you can also be useful if you’re on the government’s side.”

Marvel: Is this you proposing that I join up with you guys again?

Amanda: “Unfortunately, yes. Before the 60s, superheroes used to practically work for the government. So, I have a proposal for you.”

She wanted him to do some contractual jobs for the government. Which was no biggie. He remembers doing a few with the other Fawcett heroes and even some with the JSA.

Marvel: ‘Do you think we can trust her, Solomon?’

Solomon: “Just barely. I don’t believe she’ll stab you in the back, not yet anyways. I assume you’ll be working with that so called ‘Suicide Squad’ so she’ll likely want someone to keep them in line. That and aside from the shark man, they probably want another heavy hitter.”

And with that, Marvel shrugged and said “sure, why not?” It was more work for him to busy himself with anyways. Now, he won’t admit it to any of coworkers, but those Suicide Squad guys are actually pretty fun if you ignore that half of them are psychopaths and murderers. Captain Boomerang especially. The man was really funny when he cursed out people. There was also Harley Quinn, or Harley as she asked him to call her, who was also pretty funny too. Also, there was a lot of killing that occurred on these missions. Like, a lot.

Harley: “Geez, Cheese! I didn’t think I’d ever see a super so blood lusted before!”

Marvel: “Ah… my bad. It’s been a long while since I’ve been allowed to do something like this without having to worry about Mr. Batman Sir kicking me out the league for it.”

Captain Boomerang: “Huh…? Mate, are you saying you’ve killed people before?”

Marvel: “Yes?” *honestly surprised they didn’t know* “Back in the olden days when your parents were maybe kids, heroes were allowed to kill. That included me. Though I only stuck to murderers and rapists and all the junk. *wipes a bloody hand on Deadshot’s back*

Deadshot: “Wha- don’t wipe your fucking hand on me!”

Marvel: *stares for like three seconds before wiping his hand on him again*

Deadshot: *takes out his gun as if that’ll do anything* “I just said stop that.”

Though, his contracts for the missions ended after about a month and he said bye to them about a month later.

After his relatively short time with them, he went back to basically patrolling the country again. Which, although it wasn’t mentioned before, made his popularity as a sensational hero increase because this man wasn’t just protecting his city, he was protecting his country.

Now, left to his own devices once again, Billy let his mind wander as he was rescuing people from a burning building in California.

He thought about Fawcett. About his job at Whiz. Gosh, he was probably- no, definitely fired due to the month and a half of absence. (He wasn’t. Mr. Morris and the staff were all worried sick about what happened to him.) There was also Freddy. He’d only see the boy every now and then when he looked down to the crowds in the city. He wondered if he was upset. He’d hoped not. At this moment, Billy really really wished he had told Freddy about him being Captain Marvel. That way he wouldn’t feel so alone.

Oh, but you can’t forget the Justice League. Don’t think any of this behavior has gone unnoticed. They have been thinking about ways to bring this up to Marvel for a while. The team finally hit its breaking point when Batman shared that Marvel had been seen talking with Amanda Waller, and working with the Suicide Squad. How they found out? On one of the missions, the Squad had gotten caught and taken into a secret organization’s base. (They weren’t actually. They were mostly pretending so they could just get inside.) This was an organization Batman had been monitoring for a while. As a result, the man had obviously hacked the system and made sure to get updates on anything new. Imagine his surprise when he sees the pictures of each Squad member, including Marvel, all rocking the organization’s prison uniforms. So yeah, not Billy’s best moment for Bruce to catch him in.

Supes: “I just don’t understand! Why would you work with them?! They’re villains!”

Marvel: “I’m sorry! I just needed something to do. They’re really not that bad once you get to know them.”

Supes: “Not that- NOT THAT BAD?!”

Marvel got yelled at for like 20 minutes and only after making numerous promises about, never working with them again, did they finally let up.

Another month later, and that brings us to the present. It’s still the beginning of July. Billy didn’t know how much longer he could take this. He was growing restless because he might have to be Marvel forever. His villains were growing restless due to the fact that he kept leaving Fawcett and was barely around anymore. And unbeknownst to him, Freddy and Mr. Morris were already restless looking everywhere for him.

Thankfully, the Wizard finally came up with a solution that might actually work. It involved the Rock and a whole bunch of complicated magic. Billy wasn’t willing to explain. Anyways, the first thing Billy did when he finally was allowed to be Billy again, was go find Freddy.

Freddy: *walking down the sidewalk, keeping an ear and an eye out for any news of Billy*

Billy: *looking around for Freddy and spots him from behind* “Freddy…?”

Freddy: *pauses and whips around* “Billy!?”

Billy and Freddy: *stare at each other for a bit*

Billy didn’t even get to register what was going on before Freddy rushed over as fast as he could. The other boy dropped his crutch in favor of crumpling against his friend in a tight hug. They ended up sobbing together on a bench after that.

[cleolinda]

Reporting from Birmingham

HOLY SHIT THE LINE

I’m in a blue oasis so this will probably not hold true for the rest of the state, but holy shit. This line wound through a hall in the library, around a big outflow room, and doubled back into the hall again. My mom said that when she drove past early this morning, the line was ALSO down the block. Later, she saw three buses from a senior living facility pull in on her way to our house. And then she and I went at lunchtime.

People were there to VOTE. I saw—well, on second thought, I’m gonna cut out some people-watching detail here, but I saw a lot of things that struck me about ages, health conditions, personal responsibilities. A number of people had clearly gone to a lot of effort to be there. Some of the voters looked young enough that this might have been their first chance to vote. Somewhere behind me, I heard a man say something in part like “…what a turnout like this…,” and the woman who must have been with him reply, “Well I think we know what it means.”

In other words, a big turnout for Kamala Harris. I’m sure there were Trump voters in that line, but this is, on the whole, not a Trump town. We always go blue. I haven’t seen many yard signs in my neighborhood at all, but I’ve only seen Harris/Walz. My mom has seen exactly one Trump sign this year. (This is why I say my observations will not hold for all of Alabama.) So this is what I expected, but at the same time, THE LINE. I know I’ve stood in line out on the street before, but I do not recall the line ever winding around and doubling back like that. The observation that women over 50 who remember what shit was like before Roe v. Wade are turning out to vote with a vengeance—I think I was seeing that as well, yeah. There were some seniors on a mission in that library.

The thing is that a lot of people are pissed off for a lot of different reasons this election, and then on top of that, there’s a lot of excitement. It’s like the thrill of 2008 plus the urgency of 2020. And everyone in that line still knew that Alabama’s nine electoral votes will go red anyway. Sure, we have downballot races—I just chose the “straight party voting” option, you make one mark and that’s all you have to do, plus one (1) Walker County measure we were voting on—but we all knew that we couldn’t do much to help in this big generational event of a presidential election. Run up the popular vote a little, maybe. But we were all still there by the hundreds on people’s lunch hours, not missing out on this.

Imagine what the enthusiasm’s like in states where it’ll make a difference.