#nobody: me: time to write an essay about taylor again

[godforbidfate]

the most insane thing about being a veteran taylor fan is that we've literally watched her grow up? i know people say this all the time but i have such cognitive dissonance in my head that i've forgotten that we saw her at 18 years old, being picked on by critics, getting overly excited at awards shows, dating some random guys...like the interviews of her from even ten years ago are this little girl with a high pitched voice going on about how she hid away in her room to write on her guitar and i totally forgot that That Taylor existed??? part of what got me interested in her in the first place is that she was a few years older than me but she was just being herself! writing songs about high school! making dumb jokes and being goofy and loving music! she was just another girl and she was my best friend and she wasn't the best new artist, she was just taylor.

now she's this big spectacle, a thing that people feel entitled to, and she's grown into this Woman who has handled so much scrutiny in her career only to continue to be one of the most successful, most celebrated, most talked about celebrities of our generation. if not, THE most. i think we all knew when we first found her that this is what she would become, but to watch her change from a random country teenager into someone who has broken nearly every record she can in an industry that is (financially) dying is absolutely mind-blowing when you think about where she started and where she was when i first started listening to her.

and what's so frustrating i think about people who are only just now becoming fans is that they either ignored that part of her career, partook in the universal hatred of her during that part of her career, or just straight up were not old enough to be present during that part of her career. which doesn't make them good or bad fans, they just will never understand what it was like to be someone around her age watching her field this fame while also growing up and becoming who she's meant to be! like i get it, you love would've could've should've, but do you understand how absolutely inSANE that track is in the context of her career and her life and our relationship to that? were you there when she Called Out John Mayer by Name in a seven minute song about how he low-key groomed her while mimicking his guitar on an album she wrote by herself at 19 just because a man was mean to her and said she couldn't write songs?

there are so many moments like that in her career, things that she did that absolutely Changed the Game and were a big deal and now compared to her recent successes, they're almost forgotten about. she's broken so many records and done so many things that now her successes from the beginning of her career are almost negligible. sometimes when i stop and think too hard about where she started and who she was and how much she's grown...it makes me wanna throw up

[spacerangersam]

Could you tell me more about some of your ocs???? (Only if you’re up for it tho)

I’m always down to gush about my ocs! But I do have a lot of them, especially with the story I'm currently working on, and I don’t always know what to say, so sorry if this is a bit all over the place. This isn’t even everyone, I left out a few like the main antagonist, Irene and a few other side characters for the sake of this not being essay length but yeah. Here are some of the main guys:

(also, unless otherwise specified, they're all welsh)

Simon Huw Taylor, 32, tenant of flat no. 6, he/they, bi and ace (maybe on the aro spectrum, but idk. It’s none of my business).

He’s the main character of my story, Where the Lost Souls Meet. He’s a pretty quiet guy who likes to keep to himself, much to his own detriment. He’s been travelling around all his life, never really interacting with people his own age, leaving him with mediocre socialising skills. He can see ghosts, has been able to since childhood, and is a mortician while doing psychic ghost stuff on the side. His mum could also see ghosts and she also did the ghost business, which is why he and his parents were moving around all the time, basically living in their van/hotels). To honour her, Simon uses her maiden name for ghost work (meaning his name is then Simon Huw Hughes, which I just thought was cute). She died a few years back, his father even earlier, leaving Simon the last of his family line and all alone in the world.

His whole life revolves around death, which isn’t healthy but Simon would rather die than go to therapy and actually address his problems, so it stays that way for a while. He does try to quit smoking though, so that’s something. He is also a liar. Dear god does he love to lie about everything and anything, to everyone. Well, I say loves to lie, he doesn’t really love it. He does it both to keep himself safe and to keep others from worrying about him. Honestly, he’s fine, he’s functional, and he definitely has family who loves him. Just don’t ask to meet his ‘sister’. He also tries to protect people by keeping a certain distance from them, not wanting to hurt them like he’s been hurt because of [REDACTED], which is why he kept moving around even after his mother died. But he desperately wanted top surgery and so stopped in this town with a well-known trans-safe doctor to get it done, and unfortunately for him landed in a manor turned flat filled with people who very much would like to be his friends, please.

He has no hope for the future, no plans, having a fairly pessimistic look on life because of [REDACTED], and is basically just waiting for the day he finally dies. Again, will he do anything about this? Maybe, eventually, at some point.

He doesn’t like / struggles to watch TV and movies, his ideal night involves doing puzzles and maybe a spot of reading, he loves puns and he’s a vegetarian. I love him and his terrible coping mechanism. Go king, communicate absolutely nothing and never let people share your burdens. 

Also, his neighbour dies in front of him during an argument one day, which isn't great, going on to haunt Simon in a distinctly violent fashion, which is the thing he's desperately trying to deal with in the story.

more losers under the cut

Charlie Tops, 35, tenant no. 5, he/him, trans bi+ace. He’s a very sweet guy, very open, with major himbo energy, just without the muscles. He makes the best tea and the worst coffee. He writes kid's books in the vein of Winnie the Pooh / Peter Rabbit, taking over the job after his grandfather passed, now writing them for his own daughter, Lottie. But Lottie’s getting older and losing interest in those types of books, and so he’s losing interest in writing them and having a mild panic over what he’ll do next. He’s kinda obsessed with taxidermies. His flat is quite literally filled with them and no one likes it, nobody wants to be in there, and the vibes are way off (except Will for, who thinks it’s very interesting, actually).

He’s deeply in love with Simon and they have a thing. An unexplained, deeply intimate thing that neither talk about, mostly because Simon can’t communicate for shit (which he feels deeply guilty about, and he keeps telling himself that he’ll break it off but can never quite work up to it), and Charlie’s worried if he asks, Simon will end it. He really struggles with Simon’s whole silent martyr ordeal even outside their thing because even if he doesn’t know the extent to which Simon is trying to hide his problems, he knows there is something being hidden, but again, is worried about pushing too hard and losing him completely. It’s messy, but they’ll work through it. 

He can’t see ghosts but does know about them, unlike the other Woodward tenants, and feels a bit left out /awkward about the whole thing. He had an amicable divorce from his wife Irene after he realised he was ace, she realised she was aro, and that they were both trans, the two staying friends and her staying on as the illustrator for his books. And as I mentioned earlier, he does have a daughter, Lottie.

William Isaiah Beaton, 30, tenant no. 7, he/him, gay, English. An archivist for the local museum who moves into the manor in chapter one, and comes off as a tough, rude ex-vet.  And that is true, to a certain extent. He is rude, and an ex-vet. But he wasn’t in the army for long, he got mowed down by a car on base like, two weeks after arriving, leaving him with a permanent injury to his leg. He feels he failed to live up to his father’s expectations, and in shame, never told the truth to his father about having to leave the forces. Will has… a lot of complicated feelings about that, and his relationship with his father, and his relationship with his religion. He works some of that last one out with help from Penny.

It’s a bit of a spoiler, but whatever- he can see ghosts. He doesn’t realise that’s what’s happening though and instead is fully convinced he’s just losing his mind, and that crash did irreparable damage to his head. Nah though, just ghosts. Has a guilty love of werewolf media and cake, and cares a lot about bugs and plants (he even ends up taking Simon’s plants off him, because Simon kills every plant he owns, without question). He has limited zero social skills and finds big groups overwhelming, but nevertheless, he will be dragged into this friendship group (if Penny has any say in it, at least). He came to Hangar for a reason, though he doesn’t say why.

He also definitely fancies Simon and has no idea how to handle that. It’s the first time he’s fancied a man (or at least, a man-adjecent person) who isn’t straight, and that coupled with the fatc Simon actually seems to like him is just a lot for him to process. The two of them bond over their shared loved of history / interest in the history of the manor.

I should make it clear: this isn’t a love triangle, this is poly thing.

The ghouls:

Florence Blossom (left), 40, and Gwenllian Baker (right), 42. Both were performers in a small acting trope who died in 1941 (though not at the same time or in the same way, funnily enough) in the manor Simon lives in. They love each other very much.

Florence is a bit judgy, loves a good moan, and is very anxious about everything and everyone, always. Her anxiety tends to make her come off as a bit snappy. She can control the lights.

Gwen is a bit vacant, with her head absolutely in the clouds at all times. She struggles a bit with empathy and reading the room, leading her to be mindlessly cruel sometimes. She never means it though and genuinely cares about Simon and Florence, and will look after them both in her own weird ways. she can lock, unlock, close and open doors

Now back to the living:

Agatha Jeorme, 55, tenant  no. 1. She’s kinda like if an angsty teen was stuck in the body of a middle-aged woman, and we love her for that. She’s the daughter of the landlord and hates it. If she had any other skills / if her father had helped her get a better opportunity elsewhere like he did with her brothers, she would have jumped on it. But instead, he gave her the job of looking after Woodward. She hates him, deeply. She often shovels off small jobs onto Simon because she knows he won’t say no, and is having an affair with the next-door neighbour’s wife. I kind of made her sound like a bastard, and she is kinda, but a fun one I hope, and she does learn to be less of a bastard as the story goes on. 

Gwynfor Geraint Jones, 34, tenant no. 2, he/she, bigender, aroace. Just a chill guy who loves rock music and slasher movies. She’s in a QPR with Adam, them being the first two to move into Woodward. this isn't entirely related to his character, but he's called gwynfor geraint after two twins i went to primary school with. their names always stuck in my head, in so i thought i'd put them to good use.

Adam Diana Keats, 36 tenant tenant, no.3, she/her, aroace trans woman, Scottish. She’s a librarian with a love of reading, especially poetry, and a bit pushy, a bit bossy, but ultimately well-meaning. She’ll drag Simon out of his room but with the intent to encourage him to mingle and hang out with the Woodward crew, you know. She hates Will on sight. There’s more I could say, but that would be spoilers. also, despite her dark academic vibes, she does love a good animal print

Penny Sion Seagrove, 29, no.4, she/her, lesbian. A tired, friendly gardener who would love it if everyone would get along and be friendly. She sometimes sticks her nose in places she shouldn’t to figure out people’s beef with each other (cough, Adam and Will, cough) to see if she can find a way to squash it for them, which doesn’t usually work. She tries anyway. She’s Catholic, shares Simon’s love of puns, and is dating Alice.

Alice Rhodri Blackwood, 30, she/her, trans lesbian. She lives in town with her best mate Mickey. She’s a loud, cheery, extroverted goth with an interest in witchcraft who can also see ghosts. She has slightly different opinions about ghosts and how they work from Simon, but she’s still his go-to when he’s having ghost issues. 

Mickey Dolores Palmer, 29, she/her, English (Yorkshire). Idk what her deal is, and she just is, you know. A very nervous, clumsy, mousy person who works at the local museum. She tends to jump to conclusions and is not a fan of ghosts. Unfortunately, she can also see ghosts, so that’s not great for her. She's doing her best.

god i wrote way too much for this, sorry asdfghj. but uh, also, i did a voice claim video for some of these losers, if you're interested. also,t hank you so much for asking. i do love talking about these idiots

[venusinmyrrh]

9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 19, 25, 28, and 30 for the book asks!

ok here we go!

9. if you were stuck on an island and could only have three books with you what would they be?

D.V. (Diana Vreeland), A Natural History of the Senses (Diane Ackerman), and Book of Longing (Leonard Cohen). all books that richly reward rereading.

10. the worst book you have ever read?

Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony (Eoin Colfer). I believe the term is "jumping the shark".

11. the best book you have ever read?

probably still The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood). I read it senior year of high school and it's never really left me. "I feel like the word shatter."

12. a book/book series you wish you could read for the first time ever again?

Heir Apparent (Vivian Vande Velde), which I read when I was eleven or twelve, and apparently nobody on the planet but me has ever heard of it. it's like you don't even care what would happen if Tron took place in a medieval fantasy universe except instead of evil capitalists the real enemy was evangelicals, and also wizards. jeez.

14. an overrated book?

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six (both by Taylor Jenkins Reid). the framing devices of both books necessarily require telling instead of showing, her toothless plots and bloodless characterizations do not have the courage of their convictions, and she writes about beautiful women like they are exotic aliens from another planet.

15. an underrated book?

Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (Rachel Pollack), which I hardly ever see on tarot book rec lists but I think everyone who's interested in tarot simply must read.

19. a book you came across randomly but ended up loving it?

I came across Dress Code: Unlocking Fashion from the New Look to Millennial Pink (Véronique Hyland) because I was actually looking for Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History (Richard Thompson Ford), and I'm so glad I went for it! I started reading a digital copy from the library and actually stopped and went out the next day to buy a physical copy to annotate.

25. a book that had you bawling your eyes out?

I never, ever cry at books... unless it's Joan Didion's essay "Letter from Paradise, 21° 19' N., 157° 52' W" from Slouching Towards Bethlehem. the description of nineteen-year-old soldiers' graves at Pearl Harbor got me.

28. the last book you read? did you like it?

My Body (Emily Ratajkowski). incredible. blisteringly intelligent. feels like it took my half-formed thoughts right out of my head and put them into words. existing as a woman in modern culture means being full of contradictions, and I appreciate the way she articulates them without trying to resolve them.

30. give any 3 book recs to your followers!

the feminist trifecta of 90s Bitch (Allison Yarrow), We Were Feminists Once (Andi Zeisler) and Female Chauvinist Pigs (Ariel Levy). all of them sharp, snappy reads, well reasoned and well researched. all of them will make you so very, very incensed about the state of feminism from the 90s to today.

[onetimetwotimesthreetimess]

the party doesn't start until i walk in LCBAB reaction let gooooooo

He put on a nice sweater, one without holes in it, and fluffed his hair a bit. He wanted to look nice but also not make it apparent that he had made some effort.

oh alec you virgo (is there gonna be any reaction to your fic where i stop mentioning alec virgo ass? maybe not)

It should be normal to think constantly about your friends 24x7 without it having any romantic intent.

the word alec is looking for is obsession. it always romantic feeling with friend and never a job

Alec wanted to meet the person who introduced the word beautiful. He wanted to ask that person what or who made them use this word and then tell them that beautiful was nothing compared to what Magnus looked like.

dont raise the dead just so you can be a simp its against the death code, dead ppl HR gonna have your head

Magnus jolted awake at that and started screaming. He took out the knife from under his pillow and launched it at Alec.

“Don’t come near me or I will kill you.” Magnus shouted.

when magnus keep a knife under his pillow its revealing detail on him and his background. when i keep a knife under my pillow im a danger to society????

“2nd May.”

no way in hell magnus is a Taurus at least pick a Scorpio date

And Alec was just—Alec.

and water makes things wet. we all know this

“I’m sorry.” Magnus said earnestly and it was all it took for Alec to forgive it.

alec needs to STAND UP i know he can. no virgo should forgive forget that easy stand UP

“Are you really using your childhood trauma to get out of being punched for saying stupid shit?“

Jace pretended to wipe fake tears from his face. “Is it working?”

the fact that you are making me relate to jace...evil?!?!?!?

Because how the hell was he supposed to survive without talking to Magnus for an entire week.

stream midnights by taylor swift it such a good album i know right

“Why does it matter to you? What the fuck does it matter when it is?” Magnus asked angrily.

me when im writing every essay. alec should have replied with "nothing" purely for the aesthetic

i was gonna make a joke about birthday as birthslay but my brain not functioning

Magnus held his face gently and Alec leaned into the touch. “I love you, Alexander. I’ve been in love with you since the day you had that law test and you forced me to quiz you for 48 hours and I hated absolutely every minute of it but I still did it. I love you more and more every day and I don’t know how to stop. And even if I knew, I wouldn’t want to stop.” Magnus breathed.

again stand UP

Alec was 32, and if he was being honest, he didn’t know why people had to work too.

actually nobody knows this it is another Bermuda triangle

“He is in a meeting with Abigail, right now. But he should be free any time now. I’ll just check in.”

um the amnesia au tease? are we okay?

Alec was fine with other people having a thing for Magnus. As long as they don’t act on that desire.

oooh amnesia au gonna wreck alec, serve him right for being a simp we cant be all too lovey-dovey around here

“I tried for ten years and these three convinced you in one night?” Alec said petulantly, bringing a chuckle out of Magnus.

maybe if u stop thinking with emotion and start thinking in strategic mode

this fic is just angst + trauma + alec being mega whipped to the point he can start a whipping cream brand + ari being the cutest + tease for hiadt when alec got dumped and his ex-husband moved on with his ex gf. again LAYERS

“Don’t raise the dead just because you want to be a simp” sent me. Your reactions like always are superior anh>>> I cracked so hard at the entire thing

Simp Alec would never stand up for himself and if you think it’s bad in LRHWY, wait till you read about HIADT Alec getting walked all over himself lmao. Also yes!!! Loved throwing that lil bit of amnesia au tease lmao.

I have honeslty no idea how this fic ended up being as angsty as everyone is saying it was lol. That’s what I’m saying—I can never tell which chapters or fics are going to be angsty and which ones are not. I’m in this with you homies jsjssjsk

P.S. Ari really do be the cutest I am love only one girl

[blackwoolncrown]

”This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt. It’s a time that I acted as a violent agent of capitalism and white supremacy. Under the guise of public safety, I personally ruined people’s lives but in so doing, made the public no safer… so did the family members and close friends of mine who also bore the badge alongside me.

But enough is enough.

The reforms aren’t working. Incrementalism isn’t happening. Unarmed Black, indigenous, and people of color are being killed by cops in the streets and the police are savagely attacking the people protesting these murders.

American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth.”

>>Copied here in case anyone gets paywalled when they click the above. The full article is...a lot.<<

WHY AM I WRITING THIS

As someone who went through the training, hiring, and socialization of a career in law enforcement, I wanted to give a first-hand account of why I believe police officers are the way they are. Not to excuse their behavior, but to explain it and to indict the structures that perpetuate it.

I believe that if everyone understood how we’re trained and brought up in the profession, it would inform the demands our communities should be making of a new way of community safety. If I tell you how we were made, I hope it will empower you to unmake us.

One of the other reasons I’ve struggled to write this essay is that I don’t want to center the conversation on myself and my big salty boo-hoo feelings about my bad choices. It’s a toxic white impulse to see atrocities and think “How can I make this about me?” So, I hope you’ll take me at my word that this account isn’t meant to highlight me, but rather the hundred thousand of me in every city in the country. It’s about the structure that made me (that I chose to pollute myself with) and it’s my meager contribution to the cause of radical justice.

YES, ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS

I was a police officer in a major metropolitan area in California with a predominantly poor, non-white population (with a large proportion of first-generation immigrants). One night during briefing, our watch commander told us that the city council had requested a new zero tolerance policy. Against murderers, drug dealers, or child predators?

No, against homeless people collecting cans from recycling bins.

See, the city had some kickback deal with the waste management company where waste management got paid by the government for our expected tonnage of recycling. When homeless people “stole” that recycling from the waste management company, they were putting that cheaper contract in peril. So, we were to arrest as many recyclers as we could find.

Even for me, this was a stupid policy and I promptly blew Sarge off. But a few hours later, Sarge called me over to assist him. He was detaining a 70 year old immigrant who spoke no English, who he’d seen picking a coke can out of a trash bin. He ordered me to arrest her for stealing trash. I said, “Sarge, c’mon, she’s an old lady.” He said, “I don’t give a shit. Hook her up, that’s an order.” And… I did. She cried the entire way to the station and all through the booking process. I couldn’t even comfort her because I didn’t speak Spanish. I felt disgusting but I was ordered to make this arrest and I wasn’t willing to lose my job for her.

If you’re tempted to feel sympathy for me, don’t. I used to happily hassle the homeless under other circumstances. I researched obscure penal codes so I could arrest people in homeless encampments for lesser known crimes like “remaining too close to railroad property” (369i of the California Penal Code). I used to call it “planting warrant seeds” since I knew they wouldn’t make their court dates and we could arrest them again and again for warrant violations.

We used to have informal contests for who could cite or arrest someone for the weirdest law. DUI on a bicycle, non-regulation number of brooms on your tow truck (27700(a)(1) of the California Vehicle Code)… shit like that. For me, police work was a logic puzzle for arresting people, regardless of their actual threat to the community. As ashamed as I am to admit it, it needs to be said: stripping people of their freedom felt like a game to me for many years.

I know what you’re going to ask: did I ever plant drugs? Did I ever plant a gun on someone? Did I ever make a false arrest or file a false report? Believe it or not, the answer is no. Cheating was no fun, I liked to get my stats the “legitimate” way. But I knew officers who kept a little baggie of whatever or maybe a pocket knife that was a little too big in their war bags (yeah, we called our dufflebags “war bags”…). Did I ever tell anybody about it? No I did not. Did I ever confess my suspicions when cocaine suddenly showed up in a gang member’s jacket? No I did not.

In fact, let me tell you about an extremely formative experience: in my police academy class, we had a clique of around six trainees who routinely bullied and harassed other students: intentionally scuffing another trainee’s shoes to get them in trouble during inspection, sexually harassing female trainees, cracking racist jokes, and so on. Every quarter, we were to write anonymous evaluations of our squadmates. I wrote scathing accounts of their behavior, thinking I was helping keep bad apples out of law enforcement and believing I would be protected. Instead, the academy staff read my complaints to them out loud and outed me to them and never punished them, causing me to get harassed for the rest of my academy class. That’s how I learned that even police leadership hates rats. That’s why no one is “changing things from the inside.” They can’t, the structure won’t allow it.

And that’s the point of what I’m telling you. Whether you were my sergeant, legally harassing an old woman, me, legally harassing our residents, my fellow trainees bullying the rest of us, or “the bad apples” illegally harassing “shitbags”, we were all in it together. I knew cops that pulled women over to flirt with them. I knew cops who would pepper spray sleeping bags so that homeless people would have to throw them away. I knew cops that intentionally provoked anger in suspects so they could claim they were assaulted. I was particularly good at winding people up verbally until they lashed out so I could fight them. Nobody spoke out. Nobody stood up. Nobody betrayed the code.

None of us protected the people (you) from bad cops.

This is why “All cops are bastards.” Even your uncle, even your cousin, even your mom, even your brother, even your best friend, even your spouse, even me. Because even if they wouldn’t Do The Thing themselves, they will almost never rat out another officer who Does The Thing, much less stop it from happening.

BASTARD 101

I could write an entire book of the awful things I’ve done, seen done, and heard others bragging about doing. But, to me, the bigger question is “How did it get this way?”. While I was a police officer in a city 30 miles from where I lived, many of my fellow officers were from the community and treated their neighbors just as badly as I did. While every cop’s individual biases come into play, it’s the profession itself that is toxic, and it starts from day 1 of training.

Every police academy is different but all of them share certain features: taught by old cops, run like a paramilitary bootcamp, strong emphasis on protecting yourself more than anyone else. The majority of my time in the academy was spent doing aggressive physical training and watching video after video after video of police officers being murdered on duty.

I want to highlight this: nearly everyone coming into law enforcement is bombarded with dash cam footage of police officers being ambushed and killed. Over and over and over. Colorless VHS mortality plays, cops screaming for help over their radios, their bodies going limp as a pair of tail lights speed away into a grainy black horizon. In my case, with commentary from an old racist cop who used to brag about assaulting Black Panthers.

To understand why all cops are bastards, you need to understand one of the things almost every training officer told me when it came to using force:

“I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”

Meaning, “I’ll take my chances in court rather than risk getting hurt”. We’re able to think that way because police unions are extremely overpowered and because of the generous concept of Qualified Immunity, a legal theory which says a cop generally can’t be held personally liable for mistakes they make doing their job in an official capacity.

When you look at the actions of the officers who killed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, or Freddie Gray, remember that they, like me, were trained to recite “I’d rather be judged by 12” as a mantra. Even if Mistakes Were Made™, the city (meaning the taxpayers, meaning you) pays the settlement, not the officer.

Once police training has - through repetition, indoctrination, and violent spectacle - promised officers that everyone in the world is out to kill them, the next lesson is that your partners are the only people protecting you. Occasionally, this is even true: I’ve had encounters turn on me rapidly to the point I legitimately thought I was going to die, only to have other officers come and turn the tables.

One of the most important thought leaders in law enforcement is Col. Dave Grossman, a “killologist” who wrote an essay called “Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs”. Cops are the sheepdogs, bad guys are the wolves, and the citizens are the sheep (!). Col. Grossman makes sure to mention that to a stupid sheep, sheepdogs look more like wolves than sheep, and that’s why they dislike you.

This “they hate you for protecting them and only I love you, only I can protect you” tactic is familiar to students of abuse. It’s what abusers do to coerce their victims into isolation, pulling them away from friends and family and ensnaring them in the abuser’s toxic web. Law enforcement does this too, pitting the officer against civilians. “They don’t understand what you do, they don’t respect your sacrifice, they just want to get away with crimes. You’re only safe with us.”

I think the Wolves vs. Sheepdogs dynamic is one of the most important elements as to why officers behave the way they do. Every single second of my training, I was told that criminals were not a legitimate part of their community, that they were individual bad actors, and that their bad actions were solely the result of their inherent criminality. Any concept of systemic trauma, generational poverty, or white supremacist oppression was either never mentioned or simply dismissed. After all, most people don’t steal, so anyone who does isn’t “most people,” right? To us, anyone committing a crime deserved anything that happened to them because they broke the “social contract.” And yet, it was never even a question as to whether the power structure above them was honoring any sort of contract back.

Understand: Police officers are part of the state monopoly on violence and all police training reinforces this monopoly as a cornerstone of police work, a source of honor and pride. Many cops fantasize about getting to kill someone in the line of duty, egged on by others that have. One of my training officers told me about the time he shot and killed a mentally ill homeless man wielding a big stick. He bragged that he “slept like a baby” that night. Official training teaches you how to be violent effectively and when you’re legally allowed to deploy that violence, but “unofficial training” teaches you to desire violence, to expand the breadth of your violence without getting caught, and to erode your own compassion for desperate people so you can justify punitive violence against them.

HOW TO BE A BASTARD

I have participated in some of these activities personally, others are ones I either witnessed personally or heard officers brag about openly. Very, very occasionally, I knew an officer who was disciplined or fired for one of these things.

Police officers will lie about the law, about what’s illegal, or about what they can legally do to you in order to manipulate you into doing what they want.

Police officers will lie about feeling afraid for their life to justify a use of force after the fact.

Police officers will lie and tell you they’ll file a police report just to get you off their back.

Police officers will lie that your cooperation will “look good for you” in court, or that they will “put in a good word for you with the DA.” The police will never help you look good in court.

Police officers will lie about what they see and hear to access private property to conduct unlawful searches.

Police officers will lie and say your friend already ratted you out, so you might as well rat them back out. This is almost never true.

Police officers will lie and say you’re not in trouble in order to get you to exit a location or otherwise make an arrest more convenient for them.

Police officers will lie and say that they won’t arrest you if you’ll just “be honest with them” so they know what really happened.

Police officers will lie about their ability to seize the property of friends and family members to coerce a confession.

Police officers will write obviously bullshit tickets so that they get time-and-a-half overtime fighting them in court.

Police officers will search places and containers you didn’t consent to and later claim they were open or “smelled like marijuana”.

Police officers will threaten you with a more serious crime they can’t prove in order to convince you to confess to the lesser crime they really want you for.

Police officers will employ zero tolerance on races and ethnicities they dislike and show favor and lenience to members of their own group.

Police officers will use intentionally extra-painful maneuvers and holds during an arrest to provoke “resistance” so they can further assault the suspect.

Some police officers will plant drugs and weapons on you, sometimes to teach you a lesson, sometimes if they kill you somewhere away from public view.

Some police officers will assault you to intimidate you and threaten to arrest you if you tell anyone.

A non-trivial number of police officers will steal from your house or vehicle during a search.

A non-trivial number of police officers commit intimate partner violence and use their status to get away with it.

A non-trivial number of police officers use their position to entice, coerce, or force sexual favors from vulnerable people.

If you take nothing else away from this essay, I want you to tattoo this onto your brain forever: if a police officer is telling you something, it is probably a lie designed to gain your compliance.

Do not talk to cops and never, ever believe them. Do not “try to be helpful” with cops. Do not assume they are trying to catch someone else instead of you. Do not assume what they are doing is “important” or even legal. Under no circumstances assume any police officer is acting in good faith.

Also, and this is important, do not talk to cops.

I just remembered something, do not talk to cops.

Checking my notes real quick, something jumped out at me:

Do

not

fucking

talk

to

cops.

Ever.

Say, “I don’t answer questions,” and ask if you’re free to leave; if so, leave. If not, tell them you want your lawyer and that, per the Supreme Court, they must terminate questioning. If they don’t, file a complaint and collect some badges for your mantle.

DO THE BASTARDS EVER HELP?

Reading the above, you may be tempted to ask whether cops ever do anything good. And the answer is, sure, sometimes. In fact, most officers I worked with thought they were usually helping the helpless and protecting the safety of innocent people.

During my tenure in law enforcement, I protected women from domestic abusers, arrested cold-blooded murderers and child molesters, and comforted families who lost children to car accidents and other tragedies. I helped connect struggling people in my community with local resources for food, shelter, and counseling. I deescalated situations that could have turned violent and talked a lot of people down from making the biggest mistake of their lives. I worked with plenty of officers who were individually kind, bought food for homeless residents, or otherwise showed care for their community.

The question is this: did I need a gun and sweeping police powers to help the average person on the average night? The answer is no. When I was doing my best work as a cop, I was doing mediocre work as a therapist or a social worker. My good deeds were listening to people failed by the system and trying to unite them with any crumbs of resources the structure was currently denying them.

It’s also important to note that well over 90% of the calls for service I handled were reactive, showing up well after a crime had taken place. We would arrive, take a statement, collect evidence (if any), file the report, and onto the next caper. Most “active” crimes we stopped were someone harmless possessing or selling a small amount of drugs. Very, very rarely would we stop something dangerous in progress or stop something from happening entirely. The closest we could usually get was seeing someone running away from the scene of a crime, but the damage was still done.

And consider this: my job as a police officer required me to be a marriage counselor, a mental health crisis professional, a conflict negotiator, a social worker, a child advocate, a traffic safety expert, a sexual assault specialist, and, every once in awhile, a public safety officer authorized to use force, all after only a 1000 hours of training at a police academy. Does the person we send to catch a robber also need to be the person we send to interview a rape victim or document a fender bender? Should one profession be expected to do all that important community care (with very little training) all at the same time?

To put this another way: I made double the salary most social workers made to do a fraction of what they could do to mitigate the causes of crimes and desperation. I can count very few times my monopoly on state violence actually made our citizens safer, and even then, it’s hard to say better-funded social safety nets and dozens of other community care specialists wouldn’t have prevented a problem before it started.

Armed, indoctrinated (and dare I say, traumatized) cops do not make you safer; community mutual aid networks who can unite other people with the resources they need to stay fed, clothed, and housed make you safer. I really want to hammer this home: every cop in your neighborhood is damaged by their training, emboldened by their immunity, and they have a gun and the ability to take your life with near-impunity. This does not make you safer, even if you’re white.

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE A BASTARD?

So what do we do about it? Even though I’m an expert on bastardism, I am not a public policy expert nor an expert in organizing a post-police society. So, before I give some suggestions, let me tell you what probably won’t solve the problem of bastard cops:

Increased “bias” training. A quarterly or even monthly training session is not capable of covering over years of trauma-based camaraderie in police forces. I can tell you from experience, we don’t take it seriously, the proctors let us cheat on whatever “tests” there are, and we all made fun of it later over coffee.

Tougher laws. I hope you understand by now, cops do not follow the law and will not hold each other accountable to the law. Tougher laws are all the more reason to circle the wagons and protect your brothers and sisters.

More community policing programs. Yes, there is a marginal effect when a few cops get to know members of the community, but look at the protests of 2020: many of the cops pepper-spraying journalists were probably the nice school cop a month ago.

Police officers do not protect and serve people, they protect and serve the status quo, “polite society”, and private property. Using the incremental mechanisms of the status quo will never reform the police because the status quo relies on police violence to exist. Capitalism requires a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor and it requires the cops to bring that underclass to heel.

Instead of wasting time with minor tweaks, I recommend exploring the following ideas:

No more qualified immunity. Police officers should be personally liable for all decisions they make in the line of duty.

No more civil asset forfeiture. Did you know that every year, citizens like you lose more cash and property to unaccountable civil asset forfeiture than to all burglaries combined? The police can steal your stuff without charging you with a crime and it makes some police departments very rich.

Break the power of police unions. Police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops and incentivize protecting them to protect the power of the union. A police union is not a labor union; police officers are powerful state agents, not exploited workers.

Require malpractice insurance. Doctors must pay for insurance in case they botch a surgery, police officers should do the same for botching a police raid or other use of force. If human decency won’t motivate police to respect human life, perhaps hitting their wallet might.

Defund, demilitarize, and disarm cops. Thousands of police departments own assault rifles, armored personnel carriers, and stuff you’d see in a warzone. Police officers have grants and huge budgets to spend on guns, ammo, body armor, and combat training. 99% of calls for service require no armed response, yet when all you have is a gun, every problem feels like target practice. Cities are not safer when unaccountable bullies have a monopoly on state violence and the equipment to execute that monopoly.

One final idea: consider abolishing the police.

I know what you’re thinking, “What? We need the police! They protect us!” As someone who did it for nearly a decade, I need you to understand that by and large, police protection is marginal, incidental. It’s an illusion created by decades of copaganda designed to fool you into thinking these brave men and women are holding back the barbarians at the gates.

I alluded to this above: the vast majority of calls for service I handled were theft reports, burglary reports, domestic arguments that hadn’t escalated into violence, loud parties, (houseless) people loitering, traffic collisions, very minor drug possession, and arguments between neighbors. Mostly the mundane ups and downs of life in the community, with little inherent danger. And, like I mentioned, the vast majority of crimes I responded to (even violent ones) had already happened; my unaccountable license to kill was irrelevant.

What I mainly provided was an “objective” third party with the authority to document property damage, ask people to chill out or disperse, or counsel people not to beat each other up. A trained counselor or conflict resolution specialist would be ten times more effective than someone with a gun strapped to his hip wondering if anyone would try to kill him when he showed up. There are many models for community safety that can be explored if we get away from the idea that the only way to be safe is to have a man with a M4 rifle prowling your neighborhood ready at a moment’s notice to write down your name and birthday after you’ve been robbed and beaten.

You might be asking, “What about the armed robbers, the gangsters, the drug dealers, the serial killers?” And yes, in the city I worked, I regularly broke up gang parties, found gang members carrying guns, and handled homicides. I’ve seen some tragic things, from a reformed gangster shot in the head with his brains oozing out to a fifteen year old boy taking his last breath in his screaming mother’s arms thanks to a gang member’s bullet. I know the wages of violence.

This is where we have to have the courage to ask: why do people rob? Why do they join gangs? Why do they get addicted to drugs or sell them? It’s not because they are inherently evil. I submit to you that these are the results of living in a capitalist system that grinds people down and denies them housing, medical care, human dignity, and a say in their government. These are the results of white supremacy pushing people to the margins, excluding them, disrespecting them, and treating their bodies as disposable.

Equally important to remember: disabled and mentally ill people are frequently killed by police officers not trained to recognize and react to disabilities or mental health crises. Some of the people we picture as “violent offenders” are often people struggling with untreated mental illness, often due to economic hardships. Very frequently, the officers sent to “protect the community” escalate this crisis and ultimately wound or kill the person. Your community was not made safer by police violence; a sick member of your community was killed because it was cheaper than treating them. Are you extremely confident you’ll never get sick one day too?

Wrestle with this for a minute: if all of someone’s material needs were met and all the members of their community were fed, clothed, housed, and dignified, why would they need to join a gang? Why would they need to risk their lives selling drugs or breaking into buildings? If mental healthcare was free and was not stigmatized, how many lives would that save?

Would there still be a few bad actors in the world? Sure, probably. What’s my solution for them, you’re no doubt asking. I’ll tell you what: generational poverty, food insecurity, houselessness, and for-profit medical care are all problems that can be solved in our lifetimes by rejecting the dehumanizing meat grinder of capitalism and white supremacy. Once that’s done, we can work on the edge cases together, with clearer hearts not clouded by a corrupt system.

Police abolition is closely related to the idea of prison abolition and the entire concept of banishing the carceral state, meaning, creating a society focused on reconciliation and restorative justice instead of punishment, pain, and suffering — a system that sees people in crisis as humans, not monsters. People who want to abolish the police typically also want to abolish prisons, and the same questions get asked: “What about the bad guys? Where do we put them?” I bring this up because abolitionists don’t want to simply replace cops with armed social workers or prisons with casual detention centers full of puffy leather couches and Playstations. We imagine a world not divided into good guys and bad guys, but rather a world where people’s needs are met and those in crisis receive care, not dehumanization.

Here’s legendary activist and thinker Angela Y. Davis putting it better than I ever could:

“An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment-demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.”

(Are Prisons Obsolete, pg. 107)

I’m not telling you I have the blueprint for a beautiful new world. What I’m telling you is that the system we have right now is broken beyond repair and that it’s time to consider new ways of doing community together. Those new ways need to be negotiated by members of those communities, particularly Black, indigenous, disabled, houseless, and citizens of color historically shoved into the margins of society. Instead of letting Fox News fill your head with nightmares about Hispanic gangs, ask the Hispanic community what they need to thrive. Instead of letting racist politicians scaremonger about pro-Black demonstrators, ask the Black community what they need to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. If you truly desire safety, ask not what your most vulnerable can do for the community, ask what the community can do for the most vulnerable.

A WORLD WITH FEWER BASTARDS IS POSSIBLE

If you take only one thing away from this essay, I hope it’s this: do not talk to cops. But if you only take two things away, I hope the second one is that it’s possible to imagine a different world where unarmed black people, indigenous people, poor people, disabled people, and people of color are not routinely gunned down by unaccountable police officers. It doesn’t have to be this way. Yes, this requires a leap of faith into community models that might feel unfamiliar, but I ask you:

When you see a man dying in the street begging for breath, don’t you want to leap away from that world?

When you see a mother or a daughter shot to death sleeping in their beds, don’t you want to leap away from that world?

When you see a twelve year old boy executed in a public park for the crime of playing with a toy, jesus fucking christ, can you really just stand there and think “This is normal”?

And to any cops who made it this far down, is this really the world you want to live in? Aren’t you tired of the trauma? Aren’t you tired of the soul sickness inherent to the badge? Aren’t you tired of looking the other way when your partners break the law? Are you really willing to kill the next George Floyd, the next Breonna Taylor, the next Tamir Rice? How confident are you that your next use of force will be something you’re proud of? I’m writing this for you too: it’s wrong what our training did to us, it’s wrong that they hardened our hearts to our communities, and it’s wrong to pretend this is normal.

Look, I wouldn’t have been able to hear any of this for much of my life. You reading this now may not be able to hear this yet either. But do me this one favor: just think about it. Just turn it over in your mind for a couple minutes. “Yes, And” me for a minute. Look around you and think about the kind of world you want to live in. Is it one where an all-powerful stranger with a gun keeps you and your neighbors in line with the fear of death, or can you picture a world where, as a community, we embrace our most vulnerable, meet their needs, heal their wounds, honor their dignity, and make them family instead of desperate outsiders?

If you take only three things away from this essay, I hope the third is this: you and your community don’t need bastards to thrive.

RESOURCES TO YES-AND WITH

Achele Mbembe — Necropolitics

Angela Y. Davis — Are Prisons Obsolete?

CriticalResistance.org — Abolition Toolkit

Joe Macaré, Maya Schenwar, and Alana Yu-lan Price — Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?

Ruth Wilson Gilmore — COVID-19, Decarceration, Abolition [video]

[youcouldmakealife]

2021 Favourite Books

I read a lot of books every year. I started reading an awful lot of books every year starting 2017, which is when I started considering it an extension of my job, because, again, the only writing advice I feel applies to every writer in every situation: read. A lot. It’ll make you a better writer. Also it’s really fun!

But reading so many books means whittling down the list at the end of the year becomes...tough. So I cheated. As you do.

I’m breaking this into a few subcategories, because like. I read a lot of books this year. 

These are in no order, because ranking hurts enough when it’s just deciding the top 10, no way you’re getting me to rank them on top of that, not happening. 

First, here’s your ‘Taylor is trying to read more classics (and reread some childhood classics as an adult) and some are really really great’ cop out list because I'm not letting Jacques the Fatalist get on my Top 10 Novels, I don't know why, it honestly deserves to be there, sorry Diderot:

Classics Can Be Great List (For Cheating Cheaters):

The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles

A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail Lermontov

Jacques the Fatalist - Denis Diderot

Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings - Jorge Luis Borges

Winnie-the-Pooh series  - A.A. Milne

Special mention to...

Mrs. Bridge - Evan S. Connelly 

!!!! EVAN!! CONNELLY!! WITH A BOOK ABOUT A NARRATOR WHO IS EVER ANXIOUS TO PLEASE AND IS AFRAID OF EXPRESSING FIRM OPINIONS. WHAT. ARE. THE. CHANCES. 

It's also a really great example of unreliable narration from an intentionally very limited third person POV so obviously that's my jam. I literally did not realise the Connie connection until I was putting together this list, almost eight months after reading the book itself. Cue hanging my head in shame.

Annnd:

Top 10 Not Novels (includes non-fiction, short story collections, etc etc):

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life - George Saunders

These Precious Days: Essays - Ann Patchett

Between Friends - Amos Oz

The Office of Historical Corrections - Danielle Evans

Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A True (as Told to Me) Story - Bess Kalb

You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories About Racism - Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar

Yearbook - Seth Rogen

Festival Days - Jo Ann Beard

The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI's Original Mindhunter - John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker

Milk Blood Heat - Dantiel W. Moniz

My Top 10 Novels:

The Sweetness of Water - Nathan Harris

Hail Mary - Andy Weir

The Last Graduate - Naomi Novik

The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood

Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead - Emily R. Austin

The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster (...this is cheating but also not, so.)

Homeland Elegies - Ayad Ahktar

No One is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood

These Violent Delights - Micah Nemerever

Come With Me - Ronald Malfi

Other good books I read this year!

A Desolation Called Peace; The Arsonist's City; Detransition, Baby; Beauties: Hockey's Greatest Untold Stories; Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know; The Jasmine Throne; Sufferance: A Novel; Life Among the Terranauts; A Marvellous Light; The Greenhollow Duology; The Book of Accidents; Vespertine; The Dead and the Dark; Ghost Forest; Transit; The Sentence; The Girls I've Been; Summer in Orcus; Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982; The Darkness Outside Us; Come With Me

[lonepiper5758]

Royai Week 2021 - Day 5

Illicit Affairs

[Song prompt] illicit affairs, taylor swift

An essay exploring the ways in which Royai is not described by this song.

AN - I completely respect both the inclusion of 'Illicit Affairs' as the song prompt for Royai Week 2021, and the method in which it was selected by the Mods. When I first listened to it, and then listened to it again, I wanted to write something inspired by it. However it failed to give me any inspiration to write creatively about Royai. Instead what it inspired was the urge to write a critique of why this song is not reflective of Royai.

Please don't think that I am having a go at anyone who likes this song or feels that it gives off a good Royai vibe. I'm just responding to the prompt in the way that it prompted me to do so.

That 'Illicit Affairs' by Taylor Swift is a good song is not being disputed, as reviewed by Angie Martoccio in a Rolling Stone article -

"And on “Illicit Affairs,” she (Taylor Swift) expertly packs a tale of infidelity into just a few short verses, complete with abandoned perfume, secret language, and the lies that seamlessly stitch it all together."

Any song that includes the lyric 'A dwindling, mercurial high' has got to be given credit. It's musically beautiful and lyrically powerful. But is it Royai?

One of the intriguing things about Royai is that it's such a subtly expressed relationship within canon. We know for sure that Mustang and Hawkeye have known each other for a long time, and have a profound understanding of each other communicating at times with a mere glance. They share a deep trust of, and commitment to each other to the extent of risking great physical harm and personal hardship for each other. And they know each other well enough, despite their relative rankings within the military, to blow up at each other occasionally. Their deep care and love for each other is evident.

Extrapolating beyond what is explicitly expressed in canon is what fandom exists for, and many within the fan community see Mustang and Hawkeye’s relationship as also being a sexual one. Whether you see their relationship as expressing itself sexually or not does not change the premise that this song isn’t truly Royai.

'Illicit Affairs' contains some images which are no doubt reflective of Royai, a shared secret code language, and a relationship that has many details which are kept hidden. This gives the song a nice Royai vibe. However that vibe is superficial, and whether you hold to the more canon defensible position that Royai is a profoundly loving and loyal relationship with no sex, or that it is full of lustful moaning and sweaty bonking, either way the overarching sentiment of this song is far from expressing the nature of our beautiful ship.

There are three significant points at which this song not only fails to express Royai, it actually expresses the antithesis of Royai.

Firstly, Royai is not an illicit affair.

‘Illicit’ in this sense can have two meanings, illegal and relating to infidelity.

As for Royai being illegal, we all know, Arakawa cites the pesky ‘fraternization laws’ of the Amestrian Military as the reason why Mustang and Hawkeye can't be together in a physical relationship. If you take the view that Royai is a non-physical relationship, then there is no illegality and the song misses the mark.

The only place the song lands is if you hold to the idea of a sexual relationship, in which case Royai would transgress the ethics and rules of the military. It could also be argued that Mustang and Hawkeye have broken faith with their own morals as they would have sworn to be bound by those rules, and have broken that oath.

This is a pretty technical application of the term 'illicit affair’ and not really in keeping with the feel of the song, which is far more about interpersonal relationships than the keeping of rules and institutional ethics.

To quote the Rolling Stone article again 'Illicit Affair' is a 'tale of infidelity', and that's the meaning the word 'affair' evokes; infidelity, betrayal, adultery. An ‘illicit affair’ is most readily going to be understood as a relationship in which the participants are being unfaithful to an existing partner, in order to secretly be with a new partner.

This is the first point at which this song expresses a relationship that is the antithesis of Royai. There is absolutely no infidelity in the relationship between Mustang and Hawkeye. Neither of them has a significant other who’s trust they are betraying in order to be together. Rather, Royai is all about fidelity. The loyalty and trust these two show towards each other is the absolute bedrock of their relationship. If you take the view that their relationship is non-physical then it is their fidelity to each other that both defines and expresses their relationship. So to say that Royai is an ‘illicit affair’ is to completely mischaracterize their relationship.

Secondly, the relationship in this song is dying, as illustrated in the lines -

It's born from just one single glance

But it dies, and it dies, and it dies

A million little times

This is the constant theme of the lyrics from the outset, that what started as a wonderful thing is corrupting and dying.

Again this is the complete opposite of Royai. Exactly when the ship started is a subject for debate. Whether you hold that Royai started pre-canon, during Ishval or sometime soon after, there is no time at which we see it diminishing in its strength, let alone dying. Far from Royai diminishing over the course of canon, their relationship just gets stronger and closer. To illustrate two images from the Manga.

Chp 58

Above is the earliest point in the narrative that we see Hawkeye and Mustang together. Following is one of the last times. These two images indicate a relationship that is coming together and becoming stronger and more dynamic. Not one that is dying a million little times.

Chp 108

Thirdly, the last lines of the song pose some difficulty in accepting this as a Royai song.

And you know damn well For you I would ruin myself A million little times

If you interpret ‘ruin myself’ as to risk physical injury or endure a harmful situation for the other, then this is a plausible Royai sentiment. However times such as Hawkeye’s preparedness to shoot Mustang if he destroyed Envy, or Mustang’s acceptance of Hawkeye’s death in refusing to perform human transmutation, show both understand that holding to their shared sense of the right thing to do is paramount. If they betray those truths they hold most deeply, or ‘ruin’ themselves, then they will have ultimately betrayed each other and their relationship. So in that sense they would not ‘ruin’ themselves for the other because to do so would be the end of themselves and their relationship.

So while this is a really cool song, Royai’s qualities of steadfast loyalty, longevity and the character of the relationship being intrinsically tied to the characters of Mustang and Hawkeye mean that Royai is far from being an ‘Illicit Affair’

____________________________________

Resources

1. “The Godforsaken Mess of Taylor Swift’s ‘Illicit Affairs’”

By Angie Martoccio

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/taylor-swift-illicit-affairs-1033805/

2. Song Lyrics via LyricFind

Make sure nobody sees you leave Hood over your head Keep your eyes down Tell your friends you're out for a run You'll be flushed when you return Take the road less traveled by Tell yourself you can always stop What started in beautiful rooms Ends with meetings in parking lots

And that's the thing about illicit affairs And clandestine meetings And longing stares It's born from just one single glance But it dies, and it dies, and it dies A million little times

Leave the perfume on the shelf That you picked out just for him So you leave no trace behind Like you don't even exist Take the words for what they are A dwindling, mercurial high A drug that only worked The first few hundred times

And that's the thing about illicit affairs And clandestine meetings And stolen stares They show their truth one single time But they lie, and they lie, and they lie A billion little times

And you wanna scream Don't call me kid Don't call me baby Look at this godforsaken mess that you made me You showed me colors you know I can't see with anyone else

Don't call me kid Don't call me baby Look at this idiotic fool that you made me You taught me a secret language I can't speak with anyone else And you know damn well For you I would ruin myself A million little times

Songwriters: Jack Michael Antonoff / Taylor A. Swift

illicit affairs lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

3. Fullmetal Alchemist Manga - Images from Chp 58 and Chp 108

[swiftgronmasterpost]

Glee Live Tour Part 3 - ShirtGate

The first thing you need to know about ShirtGate is that Lea and Dianna started holding hands during Amber’s solo at the end of Somebody To Love back in May of 2009 at the fox upfronts.

Here’s the first known instance of the handhold:

Notice how nobody else holds hands?

They did this all through the 2010 Glee tour as well as the start of 2011 Glee tour.  Sometimes they would link arms or hug instead and at one point they even played footsie but that part of the song was Their Moment.

But then something happened and they quit holding hands.  Here’s a visual of every instance of that moment in the tour throughout all the shows.  Notice how they stop holding hands for about 10 days starting on June 6:

So what happened on June 6th?

Well Dianna tweeted this the night before:

Then the handholds stop.  Was Lea mad at her for mentioning that moment publicly?  Did the network forbid them to hold hands after Dianna tweeted that?  Did Lea encourage her to tweet it and then get mad at Dianna when she walked it back by saying she was hacked?  Was Dianna actually hacked? (I really don’t think so.)

Whatever happened it does seem to have caused some kind of issue because they stop holding hands (not only that but Lea goes out of her way to put her arm behind her back) but then...Dianna shows up on on June 11th on stage wearing not the Lucy Caboosey shirt she was supposed to be wearing but this:

Let the revelry begin!

Girl was feel. ing. her. self!!!

my favorite moment when she tugs on the shirt to flaunt it and make everyone see:

Twitter and the L Chat explode.  Everyone thinks Dianna has come out!  But...

Early the next day, perhaps even that night, Dianna takes to tumblr and pens a 3,500 word essay explaining that she isn’t a lesbian, she simply wore the shirt to advocate for gay pride (which had started on June 2, nearly two weeks earlier.)

I’m going to post the essay in full in the next entry but here’s the part that stands out to me;

Dianna performs at the next day’s show in Toronto again and there’s still no handhold but then she tweets this mysterious message and then is absent from the Detroit show:

Rumors about why she missed the show swirled and for a long time it was thought that the official party line was that she was sick while fans speculated that she was being punished for trying to out herself (and subsequently Lea, the top two billed women stars of a show that hinged on both their heterosexual appeal to men).  

However she did perform at the June 12th show, why punish her one show later?  

It’s possible news of her little outing adventure didn’t get back to the true powers that be until the next day and they held her back from the Detroit show.

However years and years later (summer of 2020 actually) Kevin and Jenna reminisced about the Glee 2011 tour on their podcast Showmance and they mentioned that Dianna actually missed the Detroit show because she forgot her passport so while they let her into Canada, they wouldn’t let her back into the states.  I have confirmed with some Canadians that this is pretty common.  Canada is a bit more lax at the border.

Who knows what happened.  But I firmly believe she was trying to out herself.  I’m not sure if she missed the Detroit show as a punishment or if it was a coincidence.

Back to the Somebody To Love handholds - While Dianna misses the Detroit show Lea holds hands with Chord and then Achele doesn’t hold hands again during the June 14th show either.  

But the next show on June 16th Dianna reaches out and gives Lea a shoulder rub.  Then the handholds are back in full force.

Lea tweets this mysteriously in the next day or two while backstage during Born This Way (in which she usually didn’t perform):

Achele holds hands (or plays footsie or links arms) during the rest of the tour except when Lea puts her arm behind her back in London on June 28th and when Dianna was out sick on June 29th and July 2nd and they end the tour like this:

Conclusion - 

Dianna and Lea were 100% on during the tour.  Even if she had already met Taylor (which of course there is no public record of) Dianna is still very much involved with Lea, even if they are having their ups and downs.

Lea’s public boyfriend ended up showing up on tour and that may have been the cause of some ire between the two, resulting in some missed handholds and Dianna running off with Naya but I do not believe in any way Dianna would be involved with Taylor and then acting like this with her ex-girlfriend.

I also believe that ShirtGate was probably very traumatizing for Dianna.  She was probably forced to write that essay under the threat of losing her job.  I think that’s part of why she’s never come out and possibly why she never will.  To try and out yourself and then be shoved back into the closet on such a public stage would be traumatic for anyone.

(Gifs sourced from Achele references)

Click here to keep reading!

[highlifesupernova]

Kanye West is My Problematic Fave

Can we separate our favorite works of art from the artists who created them?

I'll admit at the outset of this piece that I don't know the answer to this question. Over the last three years, one of my favorite musicians has put on that red hat, released a terrible record about a misogynistic religion, and stood between an unrepentant homophobe and accused domestic abuser on the porch of a replica of his mother's home at a third listening party for an album that seemed like it would never be released. What does that mean for our relationship with his work?

The common thread among my favorite musicians is theatrics - I love nothing more than discovering a universe of sound, concept, and drama in a piece of music. I loved the idea that Sufjan Stevens would release fifty state albums. One of my favorite records of all time is a concept album about the American civil war by Titus Andronicus. Lady Gaga won my heart when she bled out on stage at the 2009 VMAs as commentary on paparazzi culture. I've been a fan of Kanye West (which sometimes feels more like being a Kanye West apologist) since he turned near-universal vilification after interrupting Taylor Swift's award acceptance speech on that same night into one of the most artistically complete albums I know - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

Although its artist remained polarizing, MBDTF achieved triumphant consensus among the public and critics alike. It topped best-of lists, produced the immortal singles "POWER" and "All Of the Lights", and earned a perfect 10 from the era's authority on "cool" music, Pitchfork (it also arguably set Pitchfork on the path to its fall from grace, but that's a whole other essay). The record is funny, sad, relatable, introspective, maximalist, and heavy on pop appeal. The Kanye West of MBDTF was disarmingly self aware. In lieu of apologetics, West invited us to experience his hedonistic, lush creative mind for an hour and eight minutes. He was unrepentantly an asshole, and reminded us that we all kind of were, too. He sold us darkness as an indulgence.

In addition to, or perhaps as a result of, being an incredible musical achievement, MBDTF gave West control over his public narrative. He'd been a talented, erratic figure in pop music for years, but with this crowning achievement he became the center of pop culture. He was no longer the egoistical Chicago producer with the backpack - he was the unconventional genius who had made one of the greatest hip hop records of all time. He moved into high art spaces, becoming a figure at fashion week, and ascended to the highest highs of celebrity, marrying one of the most famous women in the world. The public gave West a pass for his behavior because it seemed accessory to his brilliance.

The incident with Swift eventually began to take a backseat to West's music. In the years following the release of MBDTF, including the album cycle for Yeezus, his public persona was brash but ultimately benign. He declared himself a god, had some more close calls at awards shows, and liked some of the Gaga songs. He seemed to maintain control of his image, and his fans, including me, got used to defending him for his art.

Over time, possibly as West's mental health deteriorated, this showboating personality became an erratic one. He went through a MAGA phase, a cowboy phase, and ultimately a Jesus phase, each time expressing opinions that were difficult to rationalize with his prior moral alignment and unpopular among the young hip hop fans who hold him in high regard. It has gotten harder to be a fan. In an era where we've called into question whether a bad action can discredit someone's work, and sometimes find that to be justified, enjoying West's music makes me feel like I need to be ready to defend him as a person. I don't think I can in good faith. It's also hard to hang up my nostalgia for West's earlier work and my abiding adoration of his albums from the early 2010s.

The difficult thing about the case of Kanye West is that he has yet to cause material harm. He has come out with radioactively bad takes ("slavery was a choice"), aired his wife's dirty laundry in public, and associated with some of his more concretely morally delinquent peers. He hasn't, to the public's knowledge, hurt anyone. Engaging with West's work post-born-again-Christianity era might feel strange, but it isn't repugnant in the way that celebrating R. Kelly or Chris Brown is. Giving attention and accolades to someone with shitty opinions versus someone who has used their wealth and status to actively cause harm doesn't feel quite the same, and I don't think it should. Fans cling to this as evidence that we can separate West from his art, or perhaps that we don't need to. I have personally rationalized my support for West in this way.

I started this post intending to come to a different conclusion than the one I've come to since the release of Donda. I was going to talk about how our reactions to art aren't logical or rational, and how I think it's human nature to struggle with denying ourselves the things we love. Admittedly, I was writing this to defend my continued consumption of West's work to myself on the eve of the new record's release. I still think that reasoning holds, but I also think it applies to feeling betrayed by an artist and finding one's opinion of their art tainted as a result.

The Independent gave Donda a zero-star rating, citing accused intimate partner abuser Marilyn Manson and noted homophobe DaBaby's involvement with the record as an inexcusable flaw. This review has been derided to hell by the wider internet, and I don't disagree that perhaps it'd have been more professional to publish a refusal to review the album, but I also can't argue strongly in West's favor here. Even if his apparent statement of solidarity with Manson and DaBaby was an attempt at a demonstration of Christian forgiveness, it is a bad look for West to deliver that absolution without comment in a public platform. I was raised Catholic, and having to sit in that weird little confessional booth really drove home that Christian God expects repentance before he's granting anyone forgiveness. Forgiveness can be earned -- and there are many times when the public could stand to be a bit more merciful -- but it is certainly not given for free. Nobody is obligated to forgive Marilyn Manson, DaBaby, or Kanye West. If the album is unlistenable to someone in the context of their actions, that is a fair reaction.

For the record, I actually quite like Donda. I think it's a fine album and the rollout was entertaining. I also know its release was engineered for maximum shock value, and I don't like that Manson's alleged victims were collateral damage.

There's a shade of grey here that I think is often passed over when we talk about separating art and artists, a shade I think West actually leaned into perfectly in the lead up to MBDTF; the art we like can be taken in context of the things we don't like about it. Kanye West makes incredibly innovative music, and is also very difficult to defend as a public figure in good faith. Those two things have never been mutually exclusive, and synergism of the two is what has made West the cultural icon he is. We don't have to talk ourselves into things being unproblematic in order to like them, and it's okay to sit with unresolved discomfort about art.

[eveningclouds]

tlgad anon idk if u will see this coz u sent this this morning but i have ur mssg belowww i just copy/pasted it so i could put it under a readmore and also respond to it w more ease :P

I personally love tlgad because she’s telling someone else’s story, but she connects it back to herself in a way that’s unexpected but really fits. I don’t mind self-references— in fact, I tend to prefer the more obviously personal songs because nobody else can write them. The story-telling is top notch, and the build up during the bridge to “and then it was bought by me” is just perfect.

i think we both agree that it’s interesting how she ties the speaker’s story to that of someone else!! i also appreciate the storytelling aspect of this song. i think my issue of it has more to do with the mechanics (i don’t think it utilizes repetition as well as it could, for example)

Also, I love how subtly it deals with the topic of sexism. The Man is great, but since the sexism in tlgad isn’t the main focus (or it is, but it’s within a greater story) it has more of an impact, at least for me. Like, the way Rebekah is judged for marrying into a rich family or already having a failed marriage (“how did a middle class divorcée do it?), and how the town is constantly criticizing her but masking it with a compliment (“the wedding was charming, if a little gauche,” “their parties were tasteful, if a little loud”). Also, their insults to her: they call her mad and shameless, the latter of which is a word often used to describe women who don’t try to conform to society’s expectations. And the Bitch Pack— which was a real thing Rebekah’s friend group called themselves. The town uses that name as an insult, as you can hear in Taylor’s voice as she sings. They can’t stand that she’s bringing all her city friends to this exclusive area. They mock her for her use of finances: “blew through the money,” “losing on card game bets” (not that she’s playing cards, not that she’s gambling, but that she’s losing). You just feel their judgment throughout the entire song, without Taylor ever saying “they judged her.” And yet, Rebekah doesn’t stop. She embraces the Bitch Pack name, she keeps filling the pool with champagne and swimming with the big names. She even bites back at her judgmental neighbors (dying the cat dog key lime green). But neither is she painted as a crazy woman without feelings: the line about how she can be “seen on occasion, pacing the rocks, staring out at the midnight sea” evokes feelings of grieving contemplation, especially once you’ve heard hoax (“stood on the cliff side screaming give me a reason”). It’s affecting her even if she doesn’t want to show it. When Taylor shows up at the end, it’s as if she’s keeping to Rebekah’s legacy. It’s actually very similar to The Lucky One from Red— she’s telling someone else’s story (this time that of a celebrity that came before her) before connecting it to her life during the bridge. However, in The Lucky One, Taylor wishes she could follow in her muse’s footsteps (“you took the money and your dignity and got the hell out”) but can’t, because her name is up in lights— she’s been ensnared by Hollywood society. In tlgad, she’s not trapped anymore: instead, she follows Rebekah’s example of rejecting it all and having marvelous time ruining everything.

agreeeee w all of this; i especially like what u said about the gambling & the bridge!!! i’m very gnsjdfhjfdaja about. the way taylor talks about & writes about feminism tbh but this is def one of her better ones considering the topic imo

i think this is what i mean by self referential though, where it sort of ... requires? you to have a broader understanding of the artist’s discography/album in order to understand the song. i think that that’s def sth rly cool & i love when songs build off of each other, but i think that this song specifically is markedly weaker when listened to in isolation compared to the other songs off of folklore because it is so reliant on external context. idk if this makes sense because i just finished writing an essay for another class and i’m tired ndsfjdjkfhd...like i feel as if there is a difference between personal songs (i love those too!!) & overly self referential songs which risk either being too on the nose or weaker out of context ykwim

This turned out much longer than I intended lol. I love this song— I literally printed out the lyrics and annotated it like poetry when it first came out and have done a close reading on the bridge for the fun of it. It’s so good. But thanks for coming to my Ted Talk 😅

thank you for writing all of this it’s so cool 2 hear peoples’ opinions on songs!!!! & omg...ur mind...i really appreciated reading this, i loved ur insight on the feminist aspect of the song & the way you connected it to the lucky one because i never considered the latter (& will def relisten to that song again)!! 

[jlf23tumble]

Hi Jen! It’s not something I relate to at all, but maybe you have some insight? There are groups of fans who find a lot of pleasure in their faves doing well chart/sale-wise. I do not give any of my fucks about how well someone I enjoy does with others. I’m curious as to why people love the measures of ‘success’. It also goes along with the fact that the same people often celebrate/make fun of others being ‘lesser’ than their fave. Do you get the psychology behind it?

U r so weird, I was literally just about to make a super salty tag post about this very subject, because YEAH, can’t relate, I am not paid to care about charts or positions or who’s tweeting about it or how much work I have to put in to making it happen or where Niall is v. Harry v. Louis or vice versa or et al., I wanna fling myself into the sun with how tedious it is. I do see inklings here and there from those who feel obliged to bring us along on a lower-level Sony employee’s quarterly report journey, but I think it varies by person…that said, here’s a mix of my observations, none of it organized too well and all of it one gal’s opinion:

The embarrassment of stanning a boyband member is very real, so the investment in how your fave overcomes this stigma in a tangible, chart-topping way is incredibly important in giving your involvement as a fan legitimacy past boyband land (related: the layers of misogyny and sexism in how you’re perceived as being a boyband fan vs. a fan of someone who has been deemed successful by a “non-teen”/male audience via solo chart success, oh, the essays I could write).

The previous point is especially hilarious around Harry in particular because, let’s face it, thanks to Taylor Swift, he was for a long time the most famous guy in the band to people like my mom, so on his way to the top of the charts as a solo artist, he still gets One D questions, and because One D is a joke to a lot of the “legitimate” music press, there’s this extra need on the solo stan side to prove that he’s more than that. And at the end of the day, you can tout how many people tweet they don’t know a D and love a Fine Line all you like, but Harry still got the reunion questions (just as they all do) multiple times today…in exchange for some extra press that’ll help boost him up the chart, oh, the cycle!

There’s also the psychological aspect of people wanting to back “a winner” that somehow morphs with the notion that only One Shall Emerge Successful from a boyband, so your fave being no. 1 above the rest of the band justifies your time spent being their fan, especially when you’re justifying it to someone IRL.

For a lot of the twitter crowd, this hella entertaining post directly lines up with a prevailing attitude, swap out any of the names.

For Louis’s fans, there’s the handwringer’s lament, the irrational fear that if he somehow doesn’t “make it”, he’ll never be allowed to record or tour again (which is ludicrous, given that none of them are struggling indie artists), so an incredible emphasis is placed on every single number possible; there’s also a lot of comparisons to Harry and Niall that don’t work in reality but do maintain a certain underdog stance. 

I haven’t paid as much attention to what’s happening in Niall’s fanbase, other than it’s easier to compare Niall v. Harry because they’re on second albums and vying for Stevie Nicks’ hand, but the promo approach is interestingly similar? Yet fan reactions aren’t? Hmmm.

Zayn remains above the fray, his fans love him, he doesn’t worry about promo, he kills it…much to think about, but I haven’t unpacked it.

Overall, it’s fascinating from a psychological standpoint because on one hand you CAN compare all five of them to each other–they started in the exact same spot–but on the other, their paths have diverged wildly in the past five years, they’re at different points now, they have different audiences, different sounds, different goals, different resources, they’ve faced different setbacks and tragedies, they have different teams and bts arrangements, so many different moving parts. Where am I going with this, lmao? tl/dr, I find it real inchresting when solo fans bitch about what someone else in the D is doing vis-a-vis their fave when it says a lot more about their own status as fans than their perception of their fave’s “success.” That feels like the core psychology, but again, it’s a small sampling on purpose because I legit don’t care about numbers, my goddddd, nobody could pay me enough. (If you want to add your perspective in the replies, go for it…shitty anons will be deleted, we’re in a global pandemic, none of this actually matters, etc. etc.)

[inthefallofasparrow]

Article via Medium

“I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.”

“This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt. It’s a time that I acted as a violent agent of capitalism and white supremacy. Under the guise of public safety, I personally ruined people’s lives but in so doing, made the public no safer… so did the family members and close friends of mine who also bore the badge alongside me.”

“But enough is enough.”

“The reforms aren’t working. Incrementalism isn’t happening. Unarmed Black, indigenous, and people of color are being killed by cops in the streets and the police are savagely attacking the people protesting these murders.”

“American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth.”

Article via Medium

                         (click link through to Medium or ‘keep reading’ to continue)

“WHY AM I WRITING THIS

As someone who went through the training, hiring, and socialization of a career in law enforcement, I wanted to give a first-hand account of why I believe police officers are the way they are. Not to excuse their behavior, but to explain it and to indict the structures that perpetuate it.

I believe that if everyone understood how we’re trained and brought up in the profession, it would inform the demands our communities should be making of a new way of community safety. If I tell you how we were made, I hope it will empower you to unmake us.

One of the other reasons I’ve struggled to write this essay is that I don’t want to center the conversation on myself and my big salty boo-hoo feelings about my bad choices. It’s a toxic white impulse to see atrocities and think “How can I make this about me?” So, I hope you’ll take me at my word that this account isn’t meant to highlight me, but rather the hundred thousand of me in every city in the country. It’s about the structure that made me (that I chose to pollute myself with) and it’s my meager contribution to the cause of radical justice.

YES, ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS

I was a police officer in a major metropolitan area in California with a predominantly poor, non-white population (with a large proportion of first-generation immigrants). One night during briefing, our watch commander told us that the city council had requested a new zero tolerance policy. Against murderers, drug dealers, or child predators?

No, against homeless people collecting cans from recycling bins.

See, the city had some kickback deal with the waste management company where waste management got paid by the government for our expected tonnage of recycling. When homeless people “stole” that recycling from the waste management company, they were putting that cheaper contract in peril. So, we were to arrest as many recyclers as we could find.

Even for me, this was a stupid policy and I promptly blew Sarge off. But a few hours later, Sarge called me over to assist him. He was detaining a 70 year old immigrant who spoke no English, who he’d seen picking a coke can out of a trash bin. He ordered me to arrest her for stealing trash. I said, “Sarge, c’mon, she’s an old lady.” He said, “I don’t give a shit. Hook her up, that’s an order.” And… I did. She cried the entire way to the station and all through the booking process. I couldn’t even comfort her because I didn’t speak Spanish. I felt disgusting but I was ordered to make this arrest and I wasn’t willing to lose my job for her.

If you’re tempted to feel sympathy for me, don’t. I used to happily hassle the homeless under other circumstances. I researched obscure penal codes so I could arrest people in homeless encampments for lesser known crimes like “remaining too close to railroad property” (369i of the California Penal Code). I used to call it “planting warrant seeds” since I knew they wouldn’t make their court dates and we could arrest them again and again for warrant violations.

We used to have informal contests for who could cite or arrest someone for the weirdest law. DUI on a bicycle, non-regulation number of brooms on your tow truck (27700(a)(1) of the California Vehicle Code)… shit like that. For me, police work was a logic puzzle for arresting people, regardless of their actual threat to the community. As ashamed as I am to admit it, it needs to be said: stripping people of their freedom felt like a game to me for many years.

I know what you’re going to ask: did I ever plant drugs? Did I ever plant a gun on someone? Did I ever make a false arrest or file a false report? Believe it or not, the answer is no. Cheating was no fun, I liked to get my stats the “legitimate” way. But I knew officers who kept a little baggie of whatever or maybe a pocket knife that was a little too big in their war bags (yeah, we called our dufflebags “war bags”…). Did I ever tell anybody about it? No I did not. Did I ever confess my suspicions when cocaine suddenly showed up in a gang member’s jacket? No I did not.

In fact, let me tell you about an extremely formative experience: in my police academy class, we had a clique of around six trainees who routinely bullied and harassed other students: intentionally scuffing another trainee’s shoes to get them in trouble during inspection, sexually harassing female trainees, cracking racist jokes, and so on. Every quarter, we were to write anonymous evaluations of our squadmates. I wrote scathing accounts of their behavior, thinking I was helping keep bad apples out of law enforcement and believing I would be protected. Instead, the academy staff read my complaints to them out loud and outed me to them and never punished them, causing me to get harassed for the rest of my academy class. That’s how I learned that even police leadership hates rats. That’s why no one is “changing things from the inside.” They can’t, the structure won’t allow it.

And that’s the point of what I’m telling you. Whether you were my sergeant, legally harassing an old woman, me, legally harassing our residents, my fellow trainees bullying the rest of us, or “the bad apples” illegally harassing “shitbags”, we were all in it together. I knew cops that pulled women over to flirt with them. I knew cops who would pepper spray sleeping bags so that homeless people would have to throw them away. I knew cops that intentionally provoked anger in suspects so they could claim they were assaulted. I was particularly good at winding people up verbally until they lashed out so I could fight them. Nobody spoke out. Nobody stood up. Nobody betrayed the code.

None of us protected the people (you) from bad cops.

This is why “All cops are bastards.” Even your uncle, even your cousin, even your mom, even your brother, even your best friend, even your spouse, even me. Because even if they wouldn’t Do The Thing themselves, they will almost never rat out another officer who Does The Thing, much less stop it from happening.

BASTARD 101

I could write an entire book of the awful things I’ve done, seen done, and heard others bragging about doing. But, to me, the bigger question is “How did it get this way?”. While I was a police officer in a city 30 miles from where I lived, many of my fellow officers were from the community and treated their neighbors just as badly as I did. While every cop’s individual biases come into play, it’s the profession itself that is toxic, and it starts from day 1 of training.

Every police academy is different but all of them share certain features: taught by old cops, run like a paramilitary bootcamp, strong emphasis on protecting yourself more than anyone else. The majority of my time in the academy was spent doing aggressive physical training and watching video after video after video of police officers being murdered on duty.

I want to highlight this: nearly everyone coming into law enforcement is bombarded with dash cam footage of police officers being ambushed and killed. Over and over and over. Colorless VHS mortality plays, cops screaming for help over their radios, their bodies going limp as a pair of tail lights speed away into a grainy black horizon. In my case, with commentary from an old racist cop who used to brag about assaulting Black Panthers.

To understand why all cops are bastards, you need to understand one of the things almost every training officer told me when it came to using force:

“I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”

Meaning, “I’ll take my chances in court rather than risk getting hurt”. We’re able to think that way because police unions are extremely overpowered and because of the generous concept of Qualified Immunity, a legal theory which says a cop generally can’t be held personally liable for mistakes they make doing their job in an official capacity.

When you look at the actions of the officers who killed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, or Freddie Gray, remember that they, like me, were trained to recite “I’d rather be judged by 12” as a mantra. Even if Mistakes Were Made™, the city (meaning the taxpayers, meaning you) pays the settlement, not the officer.

Once police training has - through repetition, indoctrination, and violent spectacle - promised officers that everyone in the world is out to kill them, the next lesson is that your partners are the only people protecting you. Occasionally, this is even true: I’ve had encounters turn on me rapidly to the point I legitimately thought I was going to die, only to have other officers come and turn the tables.

One of the most important thought leaders in law enforcement is Col. Dave Grossman, a “killologist” who wrote an essay called “Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs”. Cops are the sheepdogs, bad guys are the wolves, and the citizens are the sheep (!). Col. Grossman makes sure to mention that to a stupid sheep, sheepdogs look more like wolves than sheep, and that’s why they dislike you.

This “they hate you for protecting them and only I love you, only I can protect you” tactic is familiar to students of abuse. It’s what abusers do to coerce their victims into isolation, pulling them away from friends and family and ensnaring them in the abuser’s toxic web. Law enforcement does this too, pitting the officer against civilians. “They don’t understand what you do, they don’t respect your sacrifice, they just want to get away with crimes. You’re only safe with us.”

I think the Wolves vs. Sheepdogs dynamic is one of the most important elements as to why officers behave the way they do. Every single second of my training, I was told that criminals were not a legitimate part of their community, that they were individual bad actors, and that their bad actions were solely the result of their inherent criminality. Any concept of systemic trauma, generational poverty, or white supremacist oppression was either never mentioned or simply dismissed. After all, most people don’t steal, so anyone who does isn’t “most people,” right? To us, anyone committing a crime deserved anything that happened to them because they broke the “social contract.” And yet, it was never even a question as to whether the power structure above them was honoring any sort of contract back.

Understand: Police officers are part of the state monopoly on violence and all police training reinforces this monopoly as a cornerstone of police work, a source of honor and pride. Many cops fantasize about getting to kill someone in the line of duty, egged on by others that have. One of my training officers told me about the time he shot and killed a mentally ill homeless man wielding a big stick. He bragged that he “slept like a baby” that night. Official training teaches you how to be violent effectively and when you’re legally allowed to deploy that violence, but “unofficial training” teaches you to desire violence, to expand the breadth of your violence without getting caught, and to erode your own compassion for desperate people so you can justify punitive violence against them.

HOW TO BE A BASTARD

I have participated in some of these activities personally, others are ones I either witnessed personally or heard officers brag about openly. Very, very occasionally, I knew an officer who was disciplined or fired for one of these things.

Police officers will lie about the law, about what’s illegal, or about what they can legally do to you in order to manipulate you into doing what they want.

Police officers will lie about feeling afraid for their life to justify a use of force after the fact.

Police officers will lie and tell you they’ll file a police report just to get you off their back.

Police officers will lie that your cooperation will “look good for you” in court, or that they will “put in a good word for you with the DA.” The police will never help you look good in court.

Police officers will lie about what they see and hear to access private property to conduct unlawful searches.

Police officers will lie and say your friend already ratted you out, so you might as well rat them back out. This is almost never true.

Police officers will lie and say you’re not in trouble in order to get you to exit a location or otherwise make an arrest more convenient for them.

Police officers will lie and say that they won’t arrest you if you’ll just “be honest with them” so they know what really happened.

Police officers will lie about their ability to seize the property of friends and family members to coerce a confession.

Police officers will write obviously bullshit tickets so that they get time-and-a-half overtime fighting them in court.

Police officers will search places and containers you didn’t consent to and later claim they were open or “smelled like marijuana”.

Police officers will threaten you with a more serious crime they can’t prove in order to convince you to confess to the lesser crime they really want you for.

Police officers will employ zero tolerance on races and ethnicities they dislike and show favor and lenience to members of their own group.

Police officers will use intentionally extra-painful maneuvers and holds during an arrest to provoke “resistance” so they can further assault the suspect.

Some police officers will plant drugs and weapons on you, sometimes to teach you a lesson, sometimes if they kill you somewhere away from public view.

Some police officers will assault you to intimidate you and threaten to arrest you if you tell anyone.

A non-trivial number of police officers will steal from your house or vehicle during a search.

A non-trivial number of police officers commit intimate partner violence and use their status to get away with it.

A non-trivial number of police officers use their position to entice, coerce, or force sexual favors from vulnerable people.

If you take nothing else away from this essay, I want you to tattoo this onto your brain forever: if a police officer is telling you something, it is probably a lie designed to gain your compliance.

Do not talk to cops and never, ever believe them. Do not “try to be helpful” with cops. Do not assume they are trying to catch someone else instead of you. Do not assume what they are doing is “important” or even legal. Under no circumstances assume any police officer is acting in good faith.

Also, and this is important, do not talk to cops.

I just remembered something, do not talk to cops.

Checking my notes real quick, something jumped out at me:

Do

not

fucking

talk

to

cops.

Ever.

Say, “I don’t answer questions,” and ask if you’re free to leave; if so, leave. If not, tell them you want your lawyer and that, per the Supreme Court, they must terminate questioning. If they don’t, file a complaint and collect some badges for your mantle.

DO THE BASTARDS EVER HELP?

Reading the above, you may be tempted to ask whether cops ever do anything good. And the answer is, sure, sometimes. In fact, most officers I worked with thought they were usually helping the helpless and protecting the safety of innocent people.

During my tenure in law enforcement, I protected women from domestic abusers, arrested cold-blooded murderers and child molesters, and comforted families who lost children to car accidents and other tragedies. I helped connect struggling people in my community with local resources for food, shelter, and counseling. I deescalated situations that could have turned violent and talked a lot of people down from making the biggest mistake of their lives. I worked with plenty of officers who were individually kind, bought food for homeless residents, or otherwise showed care for their community.

The question is this: did I need a gun and sweeping police powers to help the average person on the average night? The answer is no. When I was doing my best work as a cop, I was doing mediocre work as a therapist or a social worker. My good deeds were listening to people failed by the system and trying to unite them with any crumbs of resources the structure was currently denying them.

It’s also important to note that well over 90% of the calls for service I handled were reactive, showing up well after a crime had taken place. We would arrive, take a statement, collect evidence (if any), file the report, and onto the next caper. Most “active” crimes we stopped were someone harmless possessing or selling a small amount of drugs. Very, very rarely would we stop something dangerous in progress or stop something from happening entirely. The closest we could usually get was seeing someone running away from the scene of a crime, but the damage was still done.

And consider this: my job as a police officer required me to be a marriage counselor, a mental health crisis professional, a conflict negotiator, a social worker, a child advocate, a traffic safety expert, a sexual assault specialist, and, every once in awhile, a public safety officer authorized to use force, all after only a 1000 hours of training at a police academy. Does the person we send to catch a robber also need to be the person we send to interview a rape victim or document a fender bender? Should one profession be expected to do all that important community care (with very little training) all at the same time?

To put this another way: I made double the salary most social workers made to do a fraction of what they could do to mitigate the causes of crimes and desperation. I can count very few times my monopoly on state violence actually made our citizens safer, and even then, it’s hard to say better-funded social safety nets and dozens of other community care specialists wouldn’t have prevented a problem before it started.

Armed, indoctrinated (and dare I say, traumatized) cops do not make you safer; community mutual aid networks who can unite other people with the resources they need to stay fed, clothed, and housed make you safer. I really want to hammer this home: every cop in your neighborhood is damaged by their training, emboldened by their immunity, and they have a gun and the ability to take your life with near-impunity. This does not make you safer, even if you’re white.

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE A BASTARD?

So what do we do about it? Even though I’m an expert on bastardism, I am not a public policy expert nor an expert in organizing a post-police society. So, before I give some suggestions, let me tell you what probably won’t solve the problem of bastard cops:

Increased “bias” training. A quarterly or even monthly training session is not capable of covering over years of trauma-based camaraderie in police forces. I can tell you from experience, we don’t take it seriously, the proctors let us cheat on whatever “tests” there are, and we all made fun of it later over coffee.

Tougher laws. I hope you understand by now, cops do not follow the law and will not hold each other accountable to the law. Tougher laws are all the more reason to circle the wagons and protect your brothers and sisters.

More community policing programs. Yes, there is a marginal effect when a few cops get to know members of the community, but look at the protests of 2020: many of the cops pepper-spraying journalists were probably the nice school cop a month ago.

Police officers do not protect and serve people, they protect and serve the status quo, “polite society”, and private property. Using the incremental mechanisms of the status quo will never reform the police because the status quo relies on police violence to exist. Capitalism requires a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor and it requires the cops to bring that underclass to heel.

Instead of wasting time with minor tweaks, I recommend exploring the following ideas:

No more qualified immunity. Police officers should be personally liable for all decisions they make in the line of duty.

No more civil asset forfeiture. Did you know that every year, citizens like you lose more cash and property to unaccountable civil asset forfeiture than to all burglaries combined? The police can steal your stuff without charging you with a crime and it makes some police departments very rich.

Break the power of police unions. Police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops and incentivize protecting them to protect the power of the union. A police union is not a labor union; police officers are powerful state agents, not exploited workers.

Require malpractice insurance. Doctors must pay for insurance in case they botch a surgery, police officers should do the same for botching a police raid or other use of force. If human decency won’t motivate police to respect human life, perhaps hitting their wallet might.

Defund, demilitarize, and disarm cops. Thousands of police departments own assault rifles, armored personnel carriers, and stuff you’d see in a warzone. Police officers have grants and huge budgets to spend on guns, ammo, body armor, and combat training. 99% of calls for service require no armed response, yet when all you have is a gun, every problem feels like target practice. Cities are not safer when unaccountable bullies have a monopoly on state violence and the equipment to execute that monopoly.

One final idea: consider abolishing the police.

I know what you’re thinking, “What? We need the police! They protect us!” As someone who did it for nearly a decade, I need you to understand that by and large, police protection is marginal, incidental. It’s an illusion created by decades of copaganda designed to fool you into thinking these brave men and women are holding back the barbarians at the gates.

I alluded to this above: the vast majority of calls for service I handled were theft reports, burglary reports, domestic arguments that hadn’t escalated into violence, loud parties, (houseless) people loitering, traffic collisions, very minor drug possession, and arguments between neighbors. Mostly the mundane ups and downs of life in the community, with little inherent danger. And, like I mentioned, the vast majority of crimes I responded to (even violent ones) had already happened; my unaccountable license to kill was irrelevant.

What I mainly provided was an “objective” third party with the authority to document property damage, ask people to chill out or disperse, or counsel people not to beat each other up. A trained counselor or conflict resolution specialist would be ten times more effective than someone with a gun strapped to his hip wondering if anyone would try to kill him when he showed up. There are many models for community safety that can be explored if we get away from the idea that the only way to be safe is to have a man with a M4 rifle prowling your neighborhood ready at a moment’s notice to write down your name and birthday after you’ve been robbed and beaten.

You might be asking, “What about the armed robbers, the gangsters, the drug dealers, the serial killers?” And yes, in the city I worked, I regularly broke up gang parties, found gang members carrying guns, and handled homicides. I’ve seen some tragic things, from a reformed gangster shot in the head with his brains oozing out to a fifteen year old boy taking his last breath in his screaming mother’s arms thanks to a gang member’s bullet. I know the wages of violence.

This is where we have to have the courage to ask: why do people rob? Why do they join gangs? Why do they get addicted to drugs or sell them? It’s not because they are inherently evil. I submit to you that these are the results of living in a capitalist system that grinds people down and denies them housing, medical care, human dignity, and a say in their government. These are the results of white supremacy pushing people to the margins, excluding them, disrespecting them, and treating their bodies as disposable.

Equally important to remember: disabled and mentally ill people are frequently killed by police officers not trained to recognize and react to disabilities or mental health crises. Some of the people we picture as “violent offenders” are often people struggling with untreated mental illness, often due to economic hardships. Very frequently, the officers sent to “protect the community” escalate this crisis and ultimately wound or kill the person. Your community was not made safer by police violence; a sick member of your community was killed because it was cheaper than treating them. Are you extremely confident you’ll never get sick one day too?

Wrestle with this for a minute: if all of someone’s material needs were met and all the members of their community were fed, clothed, housed, and dignified, why would they need to join a gang? Why would they need to risk their lives selling drugs or breaking into buildings? If mental healthcare was free and was not stigmatized, how many lives would that save?

Would there still be a few bad actors in the world? Sure, probably. What’s my solution for them, you’re no doubt asking. I’ll tell you what: generational poverty, food insecurity, houselessness, and for-profit medical care are all problems that can be solved in our lifetimes by rejecting the dehumanizing meat grinder of capitalism and white supremacy. Once that’s done, we can work on the edge cases together, with clearer hearts not clouded by a corrupt system.

Police abolition is closely related to the idea of prison abolition and the entire concept of banishing the carceral state, meaning, creating a society focused on reconciliation and restorative justice instead of punishment, pain, and suffering — a system that sees people in crisis as humans, not monsters. People who want to abolish the police typically also want to abolish prisons, and the same questions get asked: “What about the bad guys? Where do we put them?” I bring this up because abolitionists don’t want to simply replace cops with armed social workers or prisons with casual detention centers full of puffy leather couches and Playstations. We imagine a world not divided into good guys and bad guys, but rather a world where people’s needs are met and those in crisis receive care, not dehumanization.

Here’s legendary activist and thinker Angela Y. Davis putting it better than I ever could:

“An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment-demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.”

(Are Prisons Obsolete, pg. 107)

I’m not telling you I have the blueprint for a beautiful new world. What I’m telling you is that the system we have right now is broken beyond repair and that it’s time to consider new ways of doing community together. Those new ways need to be negotiated by members of those communities, particularly Black, indigenous, disabled, houseless, and citizens of color historically shoved into the margins of society. Instead of letting Fox News fill your head with nightmares about Hispanic gangs, ask the Hispanic community what they need to thrive. Instead of letting racist politicians scaremonger about pro-Black demonstrators, ask the Black community what they need to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. If you truly desire safety, ask not what your most vulnerable can do for the community, ask what the community can do for the most vulnerable.

A WORLD WITH FEWER BASTARDS IS POSSIBLE

If you take only one thing away from this essay, I hope it’s this: do not talk to cops. But if you only take two things away, I hope the second one is that it’s possible to imagine a different world where unarmed black people, indigenous people, poor people, disabled people, and people of color are not routinely gunned down by unaccountable police officers. It doesn’t have to be this way. Yes, this requires a leap of faith into community models that might feel unfamiliar, but I ask you:

When you see a man dying in the street begging for breath, don’t you want to leap away from that world?

When you see a mother or a daughter shot to death sleeping in their beds, don’t you want to leap away from that world?

When you see a twelve year old boy executed in a public park for the crime of playing with a toy, jesus fucking christ, can you really just stand there and think “This is normal”?

And to any cops who made it this far down, is this really the world you want to live in? Aren’t you tired of the trauma? Aren’t you tired of the soul sickness inherent to the badge? Aren’t you tired of looking the other way when your partners break the law? Are you really willing to kill the next George Floyd, the next Breonna Taylor, the next Tamir Rice? How confident are you that your next use of force will be something you’re proud of? I’m writing this for you too: it’s wrong what our training did to us, it’s wrong that they hardened our hearts to our communities, and it’s wrong to pretend this is normal.

Look, I wouldn’t have been able to hear any of this for much of my life. You reading this now may not be able to hear this yet either. But do me this one favor: just think about it. Just turn it over in your mind for a couple minutes. “Yes, And” me for a minute. Look around you and think about the kind of world you want to live in. Is it one where an all-powerful stranger with a gun keeps you and your neighbors in line with the fear of death, or can you picture a world where, as a community, we embrace our most vulnerable, meet their needs, heal their wounds, honor their dignity, and make them family instead of desperate outsiders?

If you take only three things away from this essay, I hope the third is this: you and your community don’t need bastards to thrive.”

Article via Medium

[fairest]

November 5, 2019

I keep thinking about the section in David Reif’s introduction to Sontag’s journals that she didn’t write in her journals when things were going well so we don’t know what her going well process looked like. 

I am going to go back and add to a few paragraphs but I’m not going to do any checks, everything will be undersupervised.

At the lunch hour women travel in groups of more than two and men are in a buddy system or alone. Leopard print is at the head and on the toe. 

I am 42 years old and I don’t care for the music of Frank Ocean. 

The internet plays well. 

The web loading here is slow.

For a long time I used to get mad at people who used the word stream of consciousness. 

People that I’ve never met have followed me around before. 

I asked the couple or the business partners if they could make room for my tray. 

Read half of the article on different types of misogyny, found myself rooting for the misogyny yet to come, and scared that the strands of lettuce were going to stick to the bottom of my tongue. 

Nobody cares about you when you’re embarrassing. 

Last week I was thinking about people who start essays with what I am interested in here is. 

I can see my reflection in the computer screen and my fingers look like they are the waiter coming with the check. 

We were in the Meridian Mall all the way at the end of the JCPenny when I walked into the Hurricane Simulator and the girls shot videos. 

I was thinking today crossing Wacker that the reason people hate socialism is all those pictures of Russia are so drab and gray, who wants that. When people say “look what happened in Russia” they really mean “look at what those pictures of Russia look like.” There’s a sign on the door. 

A lot of the time when I am out in the world I think to myself “the built environment” without understanding what that means.

One of the things I look forward to most during the day is how much my right index finger is going to hurt and in what way.

Everytime we walk into the long-term care facility my mother grabs a visitor’s badge and I will never grab a visitor’s badge they would have to kill me before I would wear a visitor’s badge at the LTC facility. 

Last week I read a lot of Liveblog and wrote in my Daily Planner which I don’t use to plan my day but has become more like a diary and always feels like a duty feels like work. 

I refuse to contact anyone and tell them what they did wrong. 

I’ve been trying to listen to music on the Bandcamp app and then listen to music on the Spotify app, the same song, and see if I can tell the difference. 

I would like to find the spot down by NYU where Megan Boyle parked on her way to Marie Calloway’s reading and just stand in the spot, see if I feel any different. 

I bought an iPad this morning that will be delivered on Thursday. Promised David I would download the FinalDraft mobile app so we could work on our 9/11 script. 

Went to the NEA web site today but I missed the deadline. It was about 6 months ago. When you miss a deadline by 6 months you have to wonder if you’re actually way early for next year. 

Never started keeping the right kind of calendar for being a writer. I’m in the office today but I’m going to stay home tomorrow. This morning I got the right seat on the plane and we never took off. 

Today I thought about re-reading Noah Cicero’s novel about the couple or the friends during the Iraq war. I had a good idea for Gates of Eden, for the framing device, I got it from reading Baxter’s Munich Airport on the train this morning. 

I wrote in my pink notebook that a good title for Gates of Eden would be Halfway up this Street.

Just remembered that I left a lemon herbal tea in the machine, going to go and get it. Someone just showed up with an Italian dressing on their salad.

I’m old enough to just skip over the new Frank Ocean track. I don’t need to try again, see if this time I feel different.

I worked on the Rebecca story this morning or maybe it will be called Another Candy. I moved sections of the story down to an area I call “the dump” -- there are a lot of dumps in my files. When I was on the train I had ideas for Gates of Eden which I am calling Drafted.

After reading a few best sellers & then 200 pages of Henry James I am settling into a better routine of the idea of what I might be reading. It’s been almost two months since I published the novel and I am finally at a place where I can think about writing again. But what does that even mean. It’s the only thing I’m thinking about. Sometimes now I feel like I am with the machine in the TV show Lost. The pressure is real.

What I mean is, clearing a space for the kind of reading that will support Gates of Eden/Drafted/Halfway Up This Street. Absolutely sick that I finished What it Takes because now that it’s over I don’t want to write another thing like that again. I think there is a song ‘Now That it’s Over” by Ryan Adams, I think I was thinking about him watching Taylor Swift’s Tiny Desk concert this morning. I was crying a lot through the Taylor Swift concert and it gave me a headache the way my sister said she got a headache from laughing at me when I was in the Hurricane Simulator. 

[bountyofbeads]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/music-black-culture-appropriation.html

I'd encourage all of you to read -- actually read -- the reported essays in the #1619project. If these ideas or facts are new to you, if they upset you or make you uncomfortable, if they challenge your idea of America, ask yourself: why?

For centuries, black music, forged in bondage, has been the sound of complete artistic freedom. No wonder everybody is always stealing it.

By Wesley Morris | August 14, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 18, 2019 7:52 PM ET |

I’ve got a friend who’s an incurable Pandora guy, and one Saturday while we were making dinner, he found a station called Yacht Rock. “A tongue-in-cheek name for the breezy sounds of late ’70s/early ’80s soft rock” is Pandora’s definition, accompanied by an exhortation to “put on your Dockers, pull up a deck chair and relax.” With a single exception, the passengers aboard the yacht were all dudes. With two exceptions, they were all white. But as the hours passed and dozens of songs accrued, the sound gravitated toward a familiar quality that I couldn’t give language to but could practically taste: an earnest Christian yearning that would reach, for a moment, into Baptist rawness, into a known warmth. I had to laugh — not because as a category Yacht Rock is absurd, but because what I tasted in that absurdity was black.

I started putting each track under investigation. Which artists would saunter up to the racial border? And which could do their sauntering without violating it? I could hear degrees of blackness in the choir-loft certitude of Doobie Brothers-era Michael McDonald on “What a Fool Believes”; in the rubber-band soul of Steely Dan’s “Do It Again”; in the malt-liquor misery of Ace’s “How Long” and the toy-boat wistfulness of Little River Band’s “Reminiscing.”

Then Kenny Loggins’s “This Is It”arrived and took things far beyond the line. “This Is It” was a hit in 1979 and has the requisite smoothness to keep the yacht rocking. But Loggins delivers the lyrics in a desperate stage whisper, like someone determined to make the kind of love that doesn’t wake the baby. What bowls you over is the intensity of his yearning — teary in the verses, snarling during the chorus. He sounds as if he’s baring it all yet begging to wring himself out even more.

Playing black-music detective that day, I laughed out of bafflement and embarrassment and exhilaration. It’s the conflation of pride and chagrin I’ve always felt anytime a white person inhabits blackness with gusto. It’s: You have to hand it to her. It’s: Go, white boy. Go, white boy. Go. But it’s also: Here we go again. The problem is rich. If blackness can draw all of this ornate literariness out of Steely Dan and all this psychotic origami out of Eminem; if it can make Teena Marie sing everything — “Square Biz,” “Revolution,”“Portuguese Love,” “Lovergirl” — like she knows her way around a pack of Newports; if it can turn the chorus of Carly Simon’s “You Belong to Me” into a gospel hymn; if it can animate the swagger in the sardonic vulnerabilities of Amy Winehouse; if it can surface as unexpectedly as it does in the angelic angst of a singer as seemingly green as Ben Platt; if it’s the reason Nu Shooz’s “I Can’t Wait”remains the whitest jam at the blackest parties, then it’s proof of how deeply it matters to the music of being alive in America, alive to America.

It’s proof, too, that American music has been fated to thrive in an elaborate tangle almost from the beginning. Americans have made a political investment in a myth of racial separateness, the idea that art forms can be either “white” or “black” in character when aspects of many are at least both. The purity that separation struggles to maintain? This country’s music is an advertisement for 400 years of the opposite: centuries of “amalgamation” and “miscegenation” as they long ago called it, of all manner of interracial collaboration conducted with dismaying ranges of consent.

“White,” “Western,” “classical” music is the overarching basis for lots of American pop songs. Chromatic-chord harmony, clean timbre of voice and instrument: These are the ingredients for some of the hugely singable harmonies of the Beatles, the Eagles, Simon and Fleetwood Mac, something choral, “pure,” largely ungrained. Black music is a completely different story. It brims with call and response, layers of syncopation and this rougher element called “noise,” unique sounds that arise from the particular hue and timbre of an instrument — Little Richard’s woos and knuckled keyboard zooms. The dusky heat of Miles Davis’s trumpeting. Patti LaBelle’s emotional police siren. DMX’s scorched-earth bark. The visceral stank of Etta James, Aretha Franklin, live-in-concert Whitney Houston and Prince on electric guitar.

But there’s something even more fundamental, too. My friend Delvyn Case, a musician who teaches at Wheaton College, explained in an email that improvisation is one of the most crucial elements in what we think of as black music: “The raising of individual creativity/expression to the highest place within the aesthetic world of a song.” Without improvisation, a listener is seduced into the composition of the song itself and not the distorting or deviating elements that noise creates. Particular to black American music is the architecture to create a means by which singers and musicians can be completely free, free in the only way that would have been possible on a plantation: through art, through music — music no one “composed” (because enslaved people were denied literacy), music born of feeling, of play, of exhaustion, of hope.

What you’re hearing in black music is a miracle of sound, an experience that can really happen only once — not just melisma, glissandi, the rasp of a sax, breakbeats or sampling but the mood or inspiration from which those moments arise. The attempt to rerecord it seems, if you think about it, like a fool’s errand. You’re not capturing the arrangement of notes, per se. You’re catching the spirit.

And the spirit travels from host to host, racially indiscriminate about where it settles, selective only about who can withstand being possessed by it. The rockin’ backwoods blues so bewitched Elvis Presley that he believed he’d been called by blackness. Chuck Berry sculpted rock ’n’ roll with uproarious guitar riffs and lascivious winks at whiteness. Mick Jagger and Robert Plant and Steve Winwood and Janis Joplin and the Beatles jumped, jived and wailed the black blues. Tina Turner wrested it all back, tripling the octane in some of their songs. Since the 1830s, the historian Ann Douglas writes in “Terrible Honesty,” her history of popular culture in the 1920s, “American entertainment, whatever the state of American society, has always been integrated, if only by theft and parody.” What we’ve been dealing with ever since is more than a catchall word like “appropriation” can approximate. The truth is more bounteous and more spiritual than that, more confused. That confusion is the DNA of the American sound.

It’s in the wink-wink costume funk of Beck’s “Midnite Vultures” from 1999, an album whose kicky nonsense deprecations circle back to the popular culture of 150 years earlier. It’s in the dead-serious, nostalgic dance-floor schmaltz of Bruno Mars. It’s in what we once called “blue-eyed soul,” a term I’ve never known what to do with, because its most convincing practitioners — the Bee-Gees, Michael McDonald, Hall & Oates, Simply Red, George Michael, Taylor Dayne, Lisa Stansfield, Adele — never winked at black people, so black people rarely batted an eyelash. Flaws and all, these are homeowners as opposed to renters. No matter what, though, a kind of gentrification tends to set in, underscoring that black people have often been rendered unnecessary to attempt blackness. Take Billboard’s Top 10 songs of 2013: It’s mostly nonblack artists strongly identified with black music, for real and for kicks: Robin Thicke, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, the dude who made “The Harlem Shake.”

Sometimes all the inexorable mixing leaves me longing for something with roots that no one can rip all the way out. This is to say that when we’re talking about black music, we’re talking about horns, drums, keyboards and guitars doing the unthinkable together. We’re also talking about what the borrowers and collaborators don’t want to or can’t lift — centuries of weight, of atrocity we’ve never sufficiently worked through, the blackness you know is beyond theft because it’s too real, too rich, too heavy to steal.

Blackness was on the move before my ancestors were legally free to be. It was on the move before my ancestors even knew what they had. It was on the move because white people were moving it. And the white person most frequently identified as its prime mover is Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New Yorker who performed as T.D. Rice and, in acclaim, was lusted after as “Daddy” Rice, “the negro par excellence.” Rice was a minstrel, which by the 1830s, when his stardom was at its most refulgent, meant he painted his face with burned cork to approximate those of the enslaved black people he was imitating.

In 1830, Rice was a nobody actor in his early 20s, touring with a theater company in Cincinnati (or Louisville; historians don’t know for sure), when, the story goes, he saw a decrepit, possibly disfigured old black man singing while grooming a horse on the property of a white man whose last name was Crow. On went the light bulb. Rice took in the tune and the movements but failed, it seems, to take down the old man’s name. So in his song based on the horse groomer, he renamed him: “Weel about and turn about jus so/Ebery time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow.” And just like that, Rice had invented the fellow who would become the mascot for two centuries of legalized racism.

That night, Rice made himself up to look like the old black man — or something like him, because Rice’s get-up most likely concocted skin blacker than any actual black person’s and a gibberish dialect meant to imply black speech. Rice had turned the old man’s melody and hobbled movements into a song-and-dance routine that no white audience had ever experienced before. What they saw caused a permanent sensation. He reportedly won 20 encores.

Rice repeated the act again, night after night, for audiences so profoundly rocked that he was frequently mobbed duringperformances. Across the Ohio River, not an arduous distance from all that adulation, was Boone County, Ky., whose population would have been largely enslaved Africans. As they were being worked, sometimes to death, white people, desperate with anticipation, were paying to see them depicted at play.

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Other performers came and conquered, particularly the Virginia Minstrels, who exploded in 1843, burned brightly then burned out after only months. In their wake, P.T. Barnum made a habit of booking other troupes for his American Museum; when he was short on performers, he blacked up himself. By the 1840s, minstrel acts were taking over concert halls, doing wildly clamored-for residencies in Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

A blackface minstrel would sing, dance, play music, give speeches and cut up for white audiences, almost exclusively in the North, at least initially. Blackface was used for mock operas and political monologues (they called them stump speeches), skits, gender parodies and dances. Before the minstrel show gave it a reliable home, blackface was the entertainment between acts of conventional plays. Its stars were the Elvis, the Beatles, the ’NSync of the 19th century. The performers were beloved and so, especially, were their songs.

During minstrelsy’s heyday, white songwriters like Stephen Foster wrote the tunes that minstrels sang, tunes we continue to sing. Edwin Pearce Christy’s group the Christy Minstrels formed a band — banjo, fiddle, bone castanets, tambourine — that would lay the groundwork for American popular music, from bluegrass to Motown. Some of these instruments had come from Africa; on a plantation, the banjo’s body would have been a desiccated gourd. In “Doo-Dah!” his book on Foster’s work and life, Ken Emerson writes that the fiddle and banjo were paired for the melody, while the bones “chattered” and the tambourine “thumped and jingled a beat that is still heard ’round the world.”

But the sounds made with these instruments could be only imagined as black, because the first wave of minstrels were Northerners who’d never been meaningfully South. They played Irish melodies and used Western choral harmonies, not the proto-gospel call-and-response music that would make life on a plantation that much more bearable. Black artists were on the scene, like the pioneer bandleader Frank Johnsonand the borderline-mythical Old Corn Meal, who started as a street vendor and wound up the first black man to perform, as himself, on a white New Orleans stage. His stuff was copied by George Nichols, who took up blackface after a start in plain-old clowning. Yet as often as not, blackface minstrelsy tethered black people and black life to white musical structures, like the polka, which was having a moment in 1848. The mixing was already well underway: Europe plus slavery plus the circus, times harmony, comedy and drama, equals Americana.

And the muses for so many of the songs were enslaved Americans, people the songwriters had never met, whose enslavement they rarely opposed and instead sentimentalized. Foster’s minstrel-show staple “Old Uncle Ned,” for instance, warmly if disrespectfully eulogizes the enslaved the way you might a salaried worker or an uncle:

Den lay down de shubble and de hoe,

Hang up de fiddle and de bow:

No more hard work for poor Old Ned —

He’s gone whar de good Niggas go,

No more hard work for poor Old Ned —

He’s gone whar de good Niggas go.

Such an affectionate showcase for poor old (enslaved, soon-to-be-dead) Uncle Ned was as essential as “air,” in the white critic Bayard Taylor’s 1850 assessment; songs like this were the “true expressions of the more popular side of the national character,” a force that follows “the American in all its emigrations, colonizations and conquests, as certainly as the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day.” He’s not wrong. Minstrelsy’s peak stretched from the 1840s to the 1870s, years when the country was as its most violently and legislatively ambivalent about slavery and Negroes; years that included the Civil War and Reconstruction, the ferocious rhetorical ascent of Frederick Douglass, John Brown’s botched instigation of a black insurrection at Harpers Ferry and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Minstrelsy’s ascent also coincided with the publication, in 1852, of “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” a polarizing landmark that minstrels adapted for the stage, arguing for and, in simply remaining faithful to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, against slavery. These adaptations, known as U.T.C.s, took over the art form until the end of the Civil War. Perhaps minstrelsy’s popularity could be (generously) read as the urge to escape a reckoning. But a good time predicated upon the presentation of other humans as stupid, docile, dangerous with lust and enamored of their bondage? It was an escape into slavery’s fun house.

What blackface minstrelsy gave the country during this period was an entertainment of skill, ribaldry and polemics. But it also lent racism a stage upon which existential fear could become jubilation, contempt could become fantasy. Paradoxically, its dehumanizing bent let white audiences feel more human. They could experience loathing as desire, contempt as adoration, repulsion as lust. They could weep for overworked Uncle Ned as surely as they could ignore his lashed back or his body as it swung from a tree.

But where did this leave a black performer? If blackface was the country’s cultural juggernaut, who would pay Negroes money to perform as themselves? When they were hired, it was only in a pinch. Once, P.T. Barnum needed a replacement for John Diamond, his star white minstrel. In a New York City dance hall, Barnum found a boy, who, it was reported at the time, could outdo Diamond (and Diamond was good). The boy, of course, was genuinely black. And his being actually black would have rendered him an outrageous blight on a white consumer’s narrow presumptions. As Thomas Low Nichols would write in his 1864 compendium, “Forty Years of American Life,” “There was not an audience in America that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real negro.” So Barnum “greased the little ‘nigger’s’ face and rubbed it over with a new blacking of burned cork, painted his thick lips vermilion, put on a woolly wig over his tight curled locks and brought him out as ‘the champion nigger-dancer of the world.’ ” This child might have been William Henry Lane, whose stage name was Juba. And, as Juba, Lane was persuasive enough that Barnum could pass him off as a white person in blackface. He ceased being a real black boy in order to become Barnum’s minstrel Pinocchio.

After the Civil War, black performers had taken up minstrelsy, too, corking themselves, for both white and black audiences — with a straight face or a wink, depending on who was looking. Black troupes invented important new dances with blue-ribbon names (the buck-and-wing, the Virginia essence, the stop-time). But these were unhappy innovations. Custom obligated black performers to fulfill an audience’s expectations, expectations that white performers had established. A black minstrel was impersonating the impersonation of himself. Think, for a moment, about the talent required to pull that off. According to Henry T. Sampson’s book, “Blacks in Blackface,” there were no sets or effects, so the black blackface minstrel show was “a developer of ability because the artist was placed on his own.” How’s that for being twice as good? Yet that no-frills excellence could curdle into an entirely other, utterly degrading double consciousness, one that predates, predicts and probably informs W.E.B. DuBois’s more self-consciously dignified rendering.

American popular culture was doomed to cycles not only of questioned ownership, challenged authenticity, dubious propriety and legitimate cultural self-preservation but also to the prison of black respectability, which, with brutal irony, could itself entail a kind of appropriation. It meant comportment in a manner that seemed less black and more white. It meant the appearance of refinement and polish. It meant the cognitive dissonance of, say, Nat King Cole’s being very black and sounding — to white America, anyway, with his frictionless baritone and diction as crisp as a hospital corner — suitably white. He was perfect for radio, yet when he got a TV show of his own, it was abruptly canceled, his brown skin being too much for even the black and white of a 1955 television set. There was, perhaps, not a white audience in America, particularly in the South, that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the majestic singing of a real Negro.

The modern conundrum of the black performer’s seeming respectable, among black people, began, in part, as a problem of white blackface minstrels’ disrespectful blackness. Frederick Douglass wrote that they were “the filthy scum of white society.” It’s that scum that’s given us pause over everybody from Bert Williams and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson to Flavor Flav and Kanye West. Is their blackness an act? Is the act under white control? Just this year, Harold E. Doley Jr., an affluent black Republican in his 70s, was quoted in The Times lamenting West and his alignment with Donald Trump as a “bad and embarrassing minstrel show” that “served to only drive black people away from the G.O.P.”

But it’s from that scum that a robust, post-minstrel black American theater sprung as a new, black audience hungered for actual, uncorked black people. Without that scum, I’m not sure we get an event as shatteringly epochal as the reign of Motown Records. Motown was a full-scale integration of Western, classical orchestral ideas (strings, horns, woodwinds) with the instincts of both the black church (rhythm sections, gospel harmonies, hand claps) and juke joint Saturday nights (rhythm sections, guitars, vigor). Pure yet “noisy.” Black men in Armani. Black women in ball gowns. Stables of black writers, producers and musicians. Backup singers solving social equations with geometric choreography. And just in time for the hegemony of the American teenager.

Even now it feels like an assault on the music made a hundred years before it. Motown specialized in love songs. But its stars, those songs and their performance of them were declarations of war on the insults of the past and present. The scratchy piccolo at the start of a Four Tops hitwas, in its way, a raised fist. Respectability wasn’t a problem with Motown; respectability was its point. How radically optimistic a feat of antiminstrelsy, for it’s as glamorous a blackness as this country has ever mass-produced and devoured.

The proliferation of black music across the planet — the proliferation, in so many senses, of being black — constitutes a magnificent joke on American racism. It also confirms the attraction that someone like Rice had to that black man grooming the horse. But something about that desire warps and perverts its source, lampoons and cheapens it even in adoration. Loving black culture has never meant loving black people, too. Loving black culture risks loving the life out of it.

And yet doesn’t that attraction make sense? This is the music of a people who have survived, who not only won't stop but also can’t be stopped. Music by a people whose major innovations — jazz, funk, hip-hop — have been about progress, about the future, about getting as far away from nostalgia as time will allow, music that’s thought deeply about the allure of outer space and robotics, music whose promise and possibility, whose rawness, humor and carnality call out to everybody — to other black people, to kids in working class England and middle-class Indonesia. If freedom's ringing, who on Earth wouldn't also want to rock the bell?

In 1845, J.K. Kennard, a critic for the newspaper The Knickerbocker, hyperventilated about the blackening of America. Except he was talking about blackface minstrels doing the blackening. Nonetheless, Kennard could see things for what they were:

“Who are our true rulers? The negro poets, to be sure! Do they not set the fashion, and give laws to the public taste? Let one of them, in the swamps of Carolina, compose a new song, and it no sooner reaches the ear of a white amateur, than it is written down, amended, (that is, almost spoilt,) printed, and then put upon a course of rapid dissemination, to cease only with the utmost bounds of Anglo-Saxondom, perhaps of the world.”

What a panicked clairvoyant! The fear of black culture — or “black culture” — was more than a fear of black people themselves. It was an anxiety over white obsolescence. Kennard’s anxiety over black influence sounds as ambivalent as Lorde’s, when, all the way from her native New Zealand, she tsk-ed rap culture’s extravagance on “Royals,”her hit from 2013, while recognizing, both in the song’s hip-hop production and its appetite for a particular sort of blackness, that maybe she’s too far gone:

Every song’s like gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin’ in the bathroom

Bloodstains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room

We don’t care, we’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams

But everybody’s like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece

Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash

We don’t care, we aren’t caught up in your love affair

Beneath Kennard’s warnings must have lurked an awareness that his white brethren had already fallen under this spell of blackness, that nothing would stop its spread to teenage girls in 21st-century Auckland, that the men who “infest our promenades and our concert halls like a colony of beetles” (as a contemporary of Kennard’s put it) weren’t black people at all but white people just like him — beetles and, eventually, Beatles. Our first most original art form arose from our original sin, and some white people have always been worried that the primacy of black music would be a kind of karmic punishment for that sin. The work has been to free this country from paranoia’s bondage, to truly embrace the amplitude of integration. I don’t know how we’re doing.

Last spring, “Old Town Road,” a silly, drowsy ditty by the Atlanta songwriter Lil Nas X, was essentially banished from country radio. Lil Nas sounds black, as does the trap beat he’s droning over. But there’s definitely a twang to him that goes with the opening bars of faint banjo and Lil Nas’s lil’ cowboy fantasy. The song snowballed into a phenomenon. All kinds of people — cops, soldiers, dozens of dapper black promgoers — posted dances to it on YouTube and TikTok. Then a crazy thing happened. It charted — not just on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, either. In April, it showed up on both its Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and its Hot Country Songs chart. A first. And, for now at least, a last.

The gatekeepers of country radio  refused to play the song; they didn’t explain why. Then, Billboard determined that the song failed to “embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart in its current version.” This doesn’t warrant translation, but let’s be thorough, anyway: The song is too black for certain white people.

But by that point it had already captured the nation’s imagination and tapped into the confused thrill of integrated culture. A black kid hadn’t really merged white music with black, he’d just taken up the American birthright of cultural synthesis. The mixing feels historical. Here, for instance, in the song’s sample of a Nine Inch Nails track is a banjo, the musical spine of the minstrel era. Perhaps Lil Nas was too American. Other country artists of the genre seemed to sense this. White singers recorded pretty tributes in support, and one, Billy Ray Cyrus, performed his on a remix with Lil Nas X himself.

The newer version lays Cyrus’s casual grit alongside Lil Nas’s lackadaisical wonder. It’s been No.1 on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100 singles chart since April, setting a record. And the bottomless glee over the whole thing makes me laugh, too — not in a surprised, yacht-rock way but as proof of what a fine mess this place is. One person's sign of progress remains another’s symbol of encroachment.  Screw the history. Get off my land.

Four hundred years ago, more than 20 kidnapped Africans arrived in Virginia. They were put to work and put through hell. Twenty became millions, and some of those people found — somehow — deliverance in the power of music. Lil Nas X has descended from those millions and appears to be a believer in deliverance. The verses of his song flirt with Western kitsch, what young black internetters branded, with adorable idiosyncrasy and a deep sense of history, the “yee-haw agenda.” But once the song reaches its chorus (“I’m gonna take my horse to the Old Town Road, and ride til I can’t no more”), I don’t hear a kid in an outfit. I hear a cry of ancestry. He’s a westward-bound refugee; he’s an Exoduster. And Cyrus is down for the ride. Musically, they both know: This land is their land.

Wesley Morris is a staff writer for the magazine, a critic at large for The New York Times and a co-host of the podcast “Still Processing.” He was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

Source photograph of Beyoncé: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images; Holiday: Paul Hoeffler/Redferns, via Getty Images; Turner: Gai Terrell/Redferns, via Getty Images; Richards: Chris Walter/WireImage, via Getty Images; Lamar: Bennett Raglin/Getty Images

[kaisha-writes-blog]

I did a really long thing (sorry)

Thank you so much for tagging me in this @hklunethewriter! I love the idea and had so much fun reading your answers. Also, I’m brand new to tumblr and only four people out of the 400 I followed have followed me back, so a huge shout out to you guys - and to @hklunethewriter for being kind enough to tag me! Standing nervously in front of the microphone, I can almost hear one of you clapping at the back of the room. 

So, this seems relatively simple, but knowing me I’ll still do it wrong so I’m sorry in advance if I answer the wrong questions. I don’t have 11 followers, so I’m going to tag the four I have, and then just other blogs that I think look interesting. Feel free to totally ignore me and go about your day. 

Note: I hope you’ve got plenty of syrup because this is 100% WAFFLE. I write like I talk, and I talk a lot, so this ended up being much longer than I intended. I’m sorry. I exhaust myself. 

1. What’s your favourite writing spot?

For sure the snuggle chair in my living room (people think I made that name up, but I promise that’s what it’s called in the catalogue). My youngest kitty Cleo likes to sit by me, and walk across the keyboard when I’m trying to type, so that’s always a lot of fun. I consume several hot drinks in the glow of my laptop screen and my crappy ASDA lamp until my eyes start to close. Often I wake up there, and the cycle begins again. 

2. Is there a song you only listen to when you’re writing?

Um, not really. Sometimes I’ll have an idea in my head for something I’m going to write and will make little playlists that inspire me. I’ll listen to them throughout the day, but I find it really hard to hear myself think if music is playing because I just sing to it instead. 

3. What’s your stance on ambiguous endings?

I’m in two minds! Personally, I really like that certain endings are left open to interpretation. I like reading fan theories on the internet, and having the freedom to use my imagination to picture different scenarios, and the air of mystery that comes with saying ‘well, we’ll never know for sure.’ On the other side of the coin, though, if I’m really invested in a story (which happens a lot, because I’m seemingly unable to like things on a low-key level) then I much prefer the closure of a sure, solid ending.

4. Do you believe ‘Death of the Author’ holds up when, especially in our current time period, authors are likely to give and assign parts of themselves to their characters? Do such books exist anymore?

I personally see no harm at all in authors assigning elements of their lives, their personalities, or things that inspired the events they depict to their characters/writing. Though I’m not massively knowledgeable on the subject, as I stated earlier, I agree that interpretation by the reader is key and personally find that being given room to view things in my own way makes for a much more interesting read. I’m a big believer in showing my reader what I’m saying, rather than telling them what’s going on - and while I’m sure that there are books that have been written in mind of this notion, and are intentionally vague, I often find the backstory to the novels I read almost as interesting as the novel itself. 

5. Is writing more of a stress relief or stress causer for you?

I often write for catharsis or enjoyment, so I’m leaning much more towards stress relief. I may, however, answer differently in 24 hours time when I’m frantically writing my assignment for university 12 hours before it’s due to be handed in. Organisation is the enemy, apparently.

6. Adverbs. Thoughts?

I like adverbs, generally speaking, but a pet peeve of mine is seeing them used too frequently! I think it’s Stephen King (could be totally wrong, do NOT quote me on that) who believes that an over-use of adverbs is indicative of timidity? I said earlier that, rather than telling my reader what’s going on, I prefer to show them - and as such, I am often (not always) of the belief that the writing leading up to the adverb should be of a high enough quality to nullify it. Each to their own, though, of course!

7. Has tumblr made you a more productive/”creative” writer, in your opinion?

Mostly yes, but a little bit no. Yes, because I see a lot on here that inspires me to write - whether it’s the work of other writers, a photograph of a beautiful sunset that moves me, a text post of some song lyrics I haven’t heard in FOREVER or a quote I can relate to - I find it all so inspiring. No, because I follow an inordinate amount of ‘cute cat’ pages and find them horribly and fantastically distracting.

8. Who in your life supports your writing the most?

100% my fabulous, brilliant, amazing Nana. I’ve been telling her stories since I was old enough to talk, and I’ll never for one moment forget her constant interest and encouragement. Like many, I’ve explored a wide range of potential interests and career paths in my 23 years; each time, the spark has crackled out, and I’ve given up early and moved onto something else. Understandably, most people in my life started to find it hard to believe in me - but she never did. I’d say “I’m gonna go to college and do this other cool thing I find mildly interesting” and she’d be like “well, ok, maybe this will be the one.” She tells me every time I see her that I could sweep the streets and she’d be proud of me, if it was what made me happy. Her support really is unconditional. 

9. In what medium (books, movies, TV, video games, etc.) do you find the most inspiration?

Honestly, it changes all the time, but at the moment I’m finding a lot of my inspiration through music - particularly Taylor Swift, because she’s a lyrical GENIUS and I adore her. I’ll hear a lyric and start to build a whole scene in my head of what prompted her to write that, and it’s so much fun.

10. Lastly, do you have a link to published work that I, HK Lune, can see/reblog? 

I don’t! I’ve written a few bits and pieces to the point of completion, but have never felt confident enough to share them online, and focus primarily on my university work nowadays. You can read my essays, if you’d like? :D 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I’ll start by tagging my faithful followers

@cheezbot @jkirs1 @long-live-beau @quilloftheclouds 

Then I’ll tag the lovely person who tagged me 

@hklunethewriter

And now I’ll tag some cool blogs. 

@catsnmeows1 @turtleconservancy @taylorswift @catsthefun @hilariouscats @meow

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OH and even though nobody will answer them, I’m going to post questions so I don’t do the game wrong. They are as follows:

1. If you could meet one author for lunch, who would it be?

2. What are your thoughts on visual stories? (apps like Choices: Stories You Play, Episode, etc.)

3. What was the first book to make you cry?

4. Do you ever base your characters on people you know?

5. Name the worst book you’ve ever read, and tell me why it was bad.

6. Do you have a trademark writing ‘quirk’?

7. Do you have any (un)helpful pets? (I couldn’t resist asking this one. Also, if the answer is yes, please send me photos.)

8. What advice would you give to a person who is new to writing?

9. Tell me your ideal writing environment.

10. Sad endings: realistic, or unnecessary?

11. You’ve decided to write under a pseudonym. What is it? 

[atenementfunster]

all the more reason, chapter 4

ao3 link here!

Roger Taylor, dead as a doorknob, and his best friend John Deacon (also dead) meet some blokes who are decidedly NOT. Dead, that is.

(aka that ghost au that no one asked for, featuring Gay Panic™, John’s sass, and Brian being too endearing for this world. the overall vibe of the fic is not sad, if that’s a concern for you!)

“John, what if he wants to get drinks? He’s gonna look insane, sitting at a table and talking to an empty chair. Or what it he asks for my number? I haven’t owned a phone in almost a year, John!” It’s a good thing no one can hear him - Broadway Market is busy, and no amount of hacking and hollering would drown out Roger’s frenzied yelling.

“These are the things you’re worried about.” It’s not a question. John is even smirking at him, the ass.

“Yes, and they’re all valid concerns!” Roger’s arms wave through the air, a display of his mounting panic. If anything, John’s grin gets bigger, and Roger stomps over to him, pointing a finger in his face with conviction. “We can barely explain why he can talk to a dead guy. How do I see him again and not explain ‘oh, sorry no, the bloke at the bar can’t see me so don’t bother ordering me a pint’? Am I supposed to tell him? How am I supposed to explain something like that?!”

“Roger, you might want to take a second to breathe in between emotional crises.”

“And would you stop smiling at me!” He stops walking, feet planted firmly on the worn sidewalk. The anger starts to shine through the panic, and Roger wants to take John by the shoulders and shake him. This must show on his face, because John raises his hands in surrender.

“Alright, alright. For the record, I think this is all a little premature.” He’s using his best placating voice, and Roger wants to scream. “You haven’t seen him in two days. Who’s to say he’ll invite you out for drinks at all?”

Despite his anger, he wrinkles his nose and stares incredulously at the blasphemer. “What, you saying I’m not a catch?”

“I think we’ve been over this.” At least the cheeky smile is gone. A win is a win. “Besides, you have to actually find him again for any of this to matter.”

Roger clenches his teeth to keep from pouting. “What, d’you think I’ve been sitting on my thumbs? I’ve been looking. It’s not like he’s got a damn bell.”

“I know you have,” John says, placating.

Like a teapot taken off of it’s burner, his shoulders drop and he huffs. John has a unique way of extinguishing his hot-headed temper. “I just wish this was easier. There’s not exactly a rulebook for this shit.”

John’s large hand pats his shoulder twice, consoling. “You’ll have to write one then.”

“Yeah,” Roger snorts. “Sure.”

The sidewalk leads them past a rack of bikes and into a familiar doorway. Roger stares at the sign, a simple A frame propped up a few feet away, and swallows. “I didn’t think I needed to remind you,” John says as they enter the Market Cafe, “but you are a catch.”

“Aww, Deaky,” Roger mumbles, a grateful smile catching the melancholy and doing it’s best to snuff it out. He bumps John’s hip with his own, but his lack of attention and momentum sends his other hip into a table. John laughing at him is somehow even better than the compliment, throbbing aside.

They sit by the canal imagining the earthy smell of coffee brewing, of beer-soaked wood warmed by the sun. The light shines across the water in marbled waves, and Roger wonders if John had come to this place when he was at University like he had. Maybe they’d seen each other in passing and not even known it. Had John heard him play here, the few nights a month he’d managed to pry himself away from his essays, from the books he was slowly losing interest in? The railing in front of him is rough and cold to the touch, and Roger can imagine it, knows exactly what it feels like when clenched tight in an angry fist.

“So,” John says quietly, interrupting his downhill thoughts, “and am I invited to these pre-planned dates?”

The question takes Roger aback. “What? Of course you are.”

The crow’s feet at John’s eyes are on full display, and Roger realizes too late what he’s admitted to. Blustering, he adds quickly, “I’m not just assuming that he’s gonna want to pick me up for a night on the town after seeing me again, John.”

“Wishful thinking?”

Even though he knows he’s being teased, Roger still blushes. It’s an angry red, and he turns away, shaking his head so his hair goes a bit crazy around his face. “Maybe.”

“Well, I’m honored.” John’s done him the favor of bowling over the point, and maybe that’s why they get along so well. For all his teasing, he knows when to let up, when to throw Roger the ring buoy to keep him from drowning in anger or embarrassment. “That’s why we’re here, anyway.”

“Wait, what?” And here he thought it was for the express purpose of making him sad.

“Every student at London College drinks or studies here,” John says, like it’s a well-studied statistic.

Roger just gapes at him. They’ve been friends for months, but he knows next to nothing about the goings-on that were once John’s life. “Even you?” He can’t help but push whenever given the chance.

“Maybe,” John’s reply is lofty, elusive.

Roger’s back to pouting, one leg crossed over the other in derision. “Fine then, keep your secrets.” Though there’s genuine disappointment, Roger is willing to sacrifice curiosity for the sake of John’s privacy. Meeting after they’ve died is probably something of a comfort to someone like John, and Roger, for all that he wants to put, doesn’t want to make his friend uncomfortable. Besides, it’s not like he’s disclosed much.

His brooding is interrupted rather suddenly when his view is obstructed by a wide back and too much hair. Roger’s squawk and raised arms elicit a nice set of giggles from John, and Roger would be happy to appreciate it if he weren’t currently being sat on.

It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last, but still, Roger jumps up and kicks at the girl’s shin. She sips at her coffee, unperturbed, and pulls out an intimidatingly organized-looking notebook as Roger seethes. At least her rubbing her arms at the sudden chill makes him feel somewhat validated. John’s outright laughing at him now, and he’s tempted to stomp over to him and sit in his lap. It would only end in him getting dumped on the floor, though, and he doesn’t feel like taking the loss.

Once he finds a new mercifully vacant seat, Roger turns back to John and gives him an petulant look when the giggles keep coming. “Anyway,” he interjects, eyebrows furrowed with derision and elbows propped up on his knees as he leans into John’s space.

John finally quiets, looking over at the girl’s hazy form once more before turning back to Roger. “If you must know,” he says lightly, eyes still alight with amusement and fingers interlaced over a knee, “I studied Electrical Engineering.”

Roger lights up like a Christmas tree.

“Really? Did you build anything? Circuit boards or?”

Johns raised eyebrow perfectly conveys his desire to put his hand over Roger’s mouth. “Yes, yes, and one, but it was only for a midterm.”

Roger’s practically wiggling on the stool. “What did you build, then?” He wants to know how long he was in school for, and if he graduated, and if he was planning on going further with his schooling; all questions that end in the eventuality of “gee, Roger, probably not, considering I died” so Roger’s not too keen to ask. He has some tact.

John probably knows he’s itching to ask all that and more, but seems grateful that he hasn’t. His smile is fond. “An amp, actually. You might’ve even liked it. I know you liked to play guitar.”

Roger grins. “That I did. Drums were my thing, though.” The past tense sours his tongue, and he purses his lips. Frustration tastes like acid, and the bitterness bleeds into his words. “Fuck that. I’m still a drummer, dammit.”

The venom seems to take John by surprise; Roger’s clenches a fist before letting out a breath. “What a pair we make,” he says with a huff, tossing his hair and averting his gaze for a moment to collect himself. When he turns back, John’s smile is faded like the sun perched behind him, but it’s still there, resolute. He reaches over and gives Roger’s knee a squeeze, and it takes a fair amount of self control on Roger’s part to not mirror the action.

“And you’re still an electrical engineer. I now expect you to build me an amp, I hope you know.” Roger points at him. “Ghost amp.”

“Ghost amp,” John affirms with a nod, solemn, hands back in his lap and eyes closed. When he opens them, his gaze darts from Roger’s face to something over his shoulder, and suddenly he looks like a cat that was just presented with a rather large platter of tuna.

“Look at that,” he says, smug. “Looks like I was right. Your Brian is very predictable.”

“He’s not my-” comes out of his mouth, already a reflex, but then the words catch up to him, and Roger’s eyes bug out before he turns with a jerk and nearly falls off the stool.

Walking through the door is indeed Brian May, a mass of frizzy curls and too long legs, and Roger jumps up off the stool and hides behind the door frame. John watches, unimpressed.

“You might want to work on not leaping behind the nearest object every time you see him,” John points out. “If you want him to actually like you, that is.”

“We discussed this!” Roger hisses. “I look like a loser, sitting by myself talking to nobody!”

A flash of irritation shoots across John’s face, so quick Roger could have imagined it. “If you’d like to actually sit by yourself, that can be easily arranged, you know.”

Shame floods his gut like a tidal wave. “Sorry, John, I’m an ass,” Roger says, hands dropping to his sides, turning his back on the doorframe and away from Brian.

John nods. “You are, but I forgive you.”

“I don’t deserve it,” Roger bemoans, dropping to a knee at the tiny table, holding his hands up as in prayer. John laughs, a surprised sound, and Roger bows his head. He gets an open-palmed smack for his efforts.

“You’re a fool, and grovelling is unbecoming. Now go to the bar before he catches you talking to nobody.” The bugger uses air quotations and everything. Roger sticks his tongue out at him, but climbs to his feet, and John’s smile tells him he’s forgiven.

Thankfully, Brian doesn’t seem to have spotted his lunacy, and is ordering what looks like the largest espresso he's ever seen. Toying with the idea of waiting by the canal, Roger shifts from foot to foot, trying to look busy while owning nothing of which to do so while he decides if he wants to approach him or not. Luckily, the choice is out of his hands a moment later, when a light voice calls his name.

“Roger, isn’t it?”

Making the mistake of first catching John’s eye, who grins at him and raises the most mocking thumbs up he’s ever seen, Roger turns.

“Yeah?” he says, hand up in half a wave, in what he hopes looks like a pleasantly surprised expression. Brian’s smile doesn’t scream why did I just greet this git so he must be doing something right.

“Oh, hi.” Shyness threatens to throttle his words, but he pushes on, leaning against the railing, John in his peripheral. This is tantamount to torture. “Brian, right?” Roger asks, as if he doesn’t know his name, his eye color, exactly how short cut his fingernails are.

Brian seems delighted at being remembered, and ducks his head with a little smile. “That’s me.” It’s only been two days since they formally met, Roger marvels, so why are they both so bad at this? And that’s a thought that lodges itself in his brain and sticks there - Brian’s just as awkward as he is, and he doesn’t have the whole living-dead dichotomy to worry about.

He can do this.

“Ditch class for a cuppa or done for the day?” Roger asks, tucking his hands in his pockets. Casual looks good on him, and he knows it.

“Done for the weekend, actually,” Brian says, and takes a sip of his coffee, which looks like it’s trying its best to emulate tar.

“Then why on Earth are you drinking that.” Roger points to the offending cup, nose wrinkled.

Brian, seemingly unmoved, takes another sip while holding Roger’s gaze. Roger mimes gagging, and that elicits a smirk. “Didn’t get much sleep is all,” is what Brian says when he’s done teasing him.

“Oh yeah?” Roger asks with a provocative roll of his eyebrows. John snorts, and it cuts Roger short, his peanut gallery a stark reminder. He’s gotten too comfortable - what is he gonna do, bring Brian back to a home he doesn’t have? Go to Brian’s house and seduce him? He’s dead, he’s pretty sure he can’t have sex with Brian, alive or otherwise. And anyway, should he?

The mounting panic has him blinking quickly in the face of Brian’s amusement who, instead of getting offended, is blushing prettily and laughing, gaze averted.

Well, shit.

“Sorry, get ahead of myself,” Roger says, waving a hand and trying to focus on breathing through his internal moral struggles. Two years ago, he would have been leaning against Brian by now, trying to bum a smoke off him, suggesting he get him a drink. Now, things are about as different as they can be, and Roger finds the thought cloying.

“Quite alright,” Brian says, though he still seems a bit embarrassed. “I won’t pretend to not be offended by your distaste for my drink, though.”

Roger brightens at that. “Well, not everyone can have taste, I suppose,” he says, waving at hand.

“Can I get you one? You can even put milk and sugar in it, if you’d like.” And God, Brian looks so earnest, and Roger only has a second to choke on his grief, to contemplate the what-ifs. The moment passes, and he smiles, and it’s only a little shaky.

“Just finished mine, but next time?” Roger acquiesces, even though he should know better. Brian’s smile is worth it to him, he realizes. It’s kind of worth everything, and the thought is terrifying.

“Bold of you,” Brian says, brows raised and lips pursed. His stance is hunched, everything about his posture designed to make himself seem smaller, unnoticeable. His smirk is shy, and Roger realizes that he’s treading unfamiliar ground too. It’s a bolstering thought.

“Been called worse,” he says. Still, he has an image to uphold, and he flips a lock of hair over his shoulder, body angled so he can see John. Said friend is currently pantomiming tying a noose around his neck, and Roger flips him the bird with a hand behind his back.

Brian is now chuckling at him, a deep purring sound, and oh, his canines are really pointed. What a good thing for him to know. “I didn’t say it was a bad thing,” the canines say.

Roger swallows, and he doesn’t have to look at John to know he’s laughing at him. Luckily, his attention for all things Brian May’s hands saves him from saying something stupider than he’s already managed - he’s caught a glance at Brian’s fingers as he reaches to scratch at the back of his head, and sees a familiar sight.

“Do you play?” he asks, standing up on his toes before lowering his heels back to the ground.

Brian’s movements slow, and he opens his palm in front of them both, shifting from foot to foot while his smile shifts from something sly to something more authentic and warm. “Yeah, you?”

“Used to,” Roger says, and is proud that his voice doesn’t waver. “More of a percussionist, but I loved my guitar. What do you play? You look like the Fender type.”

His entire posture changes, and Roger knows he’s found something closer to the real Brian May. Eyes sharper and hunched shoulders leaned closer Roger, he sets down the cooled remnants of his espresso. “I do like a Tele, but my dad and I, we recently just finished making one.”

“A guitar?” Roger’s incredulity is matched only by his fascination. “What, out of bits of wood and metal?”

“A fireplace, mostly.”

Roger blinks, and then laughs, loud and bright. “Come off it, really? That’s blinding!”

Shy smile back in place, Brian ducks his head and laughs along with him, shaking his head a bit so his curls bounce this way and that. “He did most of the work, really, but I love it.”

“Oh, I’ll bet. That’s brilliant, you gotta show me sometime,” Roger crows.

“You can come by tonight, if you’d like,” Brian says, fast and all at once, as though he’s inviting him before he has a chance to regret it. It’s charming, but unease creeps across Roger’s skin, and he smiles while trying to catch John’s eye. John, who’s nodding emphatically, giving him shoo, shoo hands, followed by a thumbs up. He doesn’t deserve John Deacon, really.

“Sure,” Roger says, “but only if you’ll let me play it.”

He has absolutely no idea if he’ll even be able to touch the thing. Brian, luckily, seems to have similar thoughts. “I wouldn’t hold your breath, but I have other guitars,” he says, that clever little smile curling his lips again.

Roger eyes the setting sun, and nods, sticking his tongue between his teeth as he smiles. “I can live with that.”