#not a hyperbole I have tried I have put every bit of energy I possibly have

[crabussy]

god I forgot how much staring at a screen for all my waking hours fucks me up and makes me miserable

[chainofclovers]

Ted Lasso 2x8 thoughts

I am so lucky that the creators of Ted Lasso decided to make this entire show specifically for me. #blessed

If last week felt like a bit of breathing room (albeit tense, poignant, character-progressing breathing room) with distinct narrative lines, this week’s episode was a chaotic yet tightly-written swirl of pain and hope and sadness! No neat subject headers for this one, y’all. Just my brain and heart in the inadequate form of a bulleted list. It is the medium available to me at this time.

I am going to remember the moment when Ted calls Sharon and tells her his father killed himself for the rest of my life.

(I could say a bunch of stuff about his face and what he says and how he tries to hide his tears from Beard right after and how insanely much I adore this character and ahhhhhhhh but I’m just going to leave that scene there in our collective memories.)

Jamie. JAMIE. Higgins has given some great advice about love on this show, but his musings about his up-and-down relationship with his own father were not helpful in the context of Jamie’s dad, who is an abusive piece of shit. I really adore that all of the main AFC Richmond staff members are realistically a bit hit-or-miss with their advice and life philosophies (some are mostly miss this season, of course).

And I am completely in awe of the moment when Jamie punches his father. The way he just stands there after Beard kicks his dad out of the locker room. The way you can hear a pin drop. And Roy—Roy who is learning in so many areas of his life about his influence on people, learning that the things he needs aren’t necessarily the same as the things other people need—is the one to cross the room and hug him. Hold him, really, with the tenderness Ted used when he hugged Rebecca outside the gala in 1x4. God.

I’ve thought a lot about how s1 was about giving people a soft place to land. There’s always an angel there when you need one. There’s always an opportunity to be kind. If you look for someone, you find them. If you look for the good in someone, you find the good. And as everyone works through their individual journeys in s2, that can’t always be the case anymore. But there are still so many moments of angels on this show, and it’s not about chance and serendipity and fate [not that it was about that in s1] but about the effort it takes to become someone who can be there for someone else. Or who can be there for yourself. I’m so proud of Jamie for physically fighting back against his father. I’m so proud of Roy for being the one who recognized what Jamie needed.

I have every feeling in the world about how Ted is almost totally frozen both times (s1 and s2) he witnesses Jamie’s father abusing him. In s1, he was still there for Jamie after, and I have every reason to believe he’ll be there for Jamie after this incident as well, but that frozen stance HURTS. He’s in so deep with his pain about his own father that it’s like he physically cannot snap out of it to act in the moment. It seems entirely outside of his control, and it breaks my heart, because Ted wants so badly to be a good father, a good coach, a good friend, a good partner, a good patient. He’s there for people in all kinds of ways, even in his current less-than-capable state. He takes care of Sharon post-concussion and even gets her a new bike! During the disastrous match at Wembley his coaching is ineffectual and everything is chaos but he’s the last one standing on the pitch! But this really awful thing keeps happening to Jamie and Ted is just…frozen in the face of it. Like one of those nightmares where you’re running in place.

The frozen-in-place nightmare also kind of applies to the way the total separation between Ted and Rebecca feels, too. I have never for a moment doubted the writers’ intentions in setting these characters up as soulmates on parallel journeys, and I’m actually really digging (on a story level) how disconnected they are right now. It is IMPRESSIVE that their absence in each other’s lives feels like such a glaring loss, one we cannot forget even as there are so many other things happening onscreen. It is 100% not just shipper goggles making me process information about Ted while thinking about Rebecca and information about Rebecca while thinking about Ted. I know there are a lot of really angry and frustrated people in the fandom right now (both T/R shippers and T/R antis and non-shipping fans who don’t get why s2 is different from s1) and while I understand being frustrated by choices characters make, and frustrated by the feelings the show makes us feel that we just want to feel more of or less of, I continue to agree with pretty much every narrative choice happening right now.

Agreeing with the narrative like this?! This is such a unique experience for me as a viewer—to feel like I’m on a ride that is at once absolutely wild and incredibly sensible and well-crafted, and to feel simultaneously completely invested and anticipatory and speculative but also totally willing to trust where it goes. I long for Ted and Beard to really talk. I long for Ted and Rebecca to stop missing each other. I long for Roy to have a serious conversation with Ted about what’s happening with him. I long for Keeley to find a vocation, something that drives her beyond her projects. I long for so many things! But I wouldn’t long for them if this show was less good. If the show was less good, I wouldn’t have a wish list a mile long because I wouldn’t be so attuned to the details and potential lurking in every scene. THIS IS SUCH A GOOD SHOW, I CANNOT HANDLE IT, I LOVE IT SO MUCH.

(To that end, a great deal of the Ted Lasso tag and so many Twitter reactions reactions to the show feel super stressful right now and I am kind of just trying not to look?! I love this fandom so much because of the amazing conversations that happen and because of brilliant fic and because there are some awesome people I never would have encountered were it not for this show. That little bubble is wonderful and I’d stay in this fandom no matter what in order to keep experiencing those things. But fans’ catastrophic reactions to every little thing that happens, every little choice a character makes that isn’t the “perfect” choice? The takeaway that the writers—on this show of all shows—wake up in the morning ready for another day of torturing shippers rather than another day of writing a beautiful story they genuinely want to write? I do not enjoy those parts at all. I would like to opt out of those parts. I’m having such a magical experience watching this show and talking about this show and listening about this show and writing about this show with a variety of people who feel all kinds of ways. I truly wish I could somehow transfer the energy of this experience onto all the people who are hating it right now. I don’t mind at all that people are having vastly different reactions to this show and are sharing their honest feelings, including the really angry ones (I can appreciate something and disagree with it!), and I get that sometimes the language of fannish reactions is intentionally, ironically hyperbolic. But there feels like this very serious trend of people legitimately thinking writers on this show are targeting shippers and have lost respect for their characters, and I just feel like an alien from another planet when I see that stuff. I guess I just feel like people make art because they want their art to be visible to other people and to themselves, but that doesn’t typically involve specifically catering to or torturing a subset of that audience?)

I am more fascinated by Sharon Fieldstone than ever before. I have been running through every single action with her and Ted so many times. The confirmation that she’s living in club-provided housing (that could not look more different from Ted’s club-provided flat). Ted clearly noticing the many bottles. Sharon’s face while she tries to casually recycle them. (Sharon could legitimately have a more problematic relationship with alcohol than Ted does, and I find that extremely interesting and am very curious to find out what happens there.) Sharon leaving him voice notes while she’s concussed, probably because she’d been thinking about him shortly before the accident. The way Ted calls her and does all the funny voices and it’s not frustrating like all the times he uses his silliness and allusions to deflect during their prior conversations because this time, those behaviors are just a part of him showing care for another person. The way they stretch each other, and Ted is still wrong about the things he’s been wrong about, but they both grow all the same.

While it is pretty much impossible for me to imagine that this show would include an actual romantic relationship between Ted and Sharon (it would be beyond unethical even if they could write it well, and Sharon in particular is so professional and committed to her work, and it would erase so much of the powerful message about the importance of seeking therapy from a professional who is not your friend or partner, and I would totally hate it), watching this episode was the first moment I had this queasy little feeling that it’s possible that Ted could end up developing really complicated feelings about Sharon since, at this point, he’s been honest with her about things he’s hardly spoken about before and you can really form an attachment to people you feel safe with in a new way. (I mean, I’m sure Michelle knows what happened with Ted’s father, but I’m not even certain if Beard does.) He’s so broken right now, and Sharon is such a great person and so different from anyone else in his life (even though Rebecca is also different, and Beard is also different, and Roy is also different, and so on), that I could see things getting really fuzzy for him. I continue to have faith in the way the storylines on this show are handled. I’m just. Putting this here.

(In saying that, though, I also wanna make it really clear that I don’t just automatically assume anytime a new female character is introduced that they’re going to end up becoming a romantic complication. Like, Phoebe is allowed to have a teacher who is an attractive woman and AFC Richmond is allowed to have a sports psychologist who is an attractive woman and Keeley is allowed to talk to Jamie Tartt without it threatening what she has with Roy and all these people can exist as human beings without the introduction of romantic drama.)

Isaac gives every player one haircut per season, OH MY GOD. The JOY during the haircut scene. YES.

KEELEY AND REBECCA. Their text thread. The affirming video call right before Rebecca goes into the restaurant. The way Keeley sits all snuggled up against Rebecca in her office.

I was pretty thoroughly spoiled for the Sam and Rebecca plot through 2x8, and I was bracing for something far more problematic and tortured than what happens in this episode. The words I would use to describe their scenes: awkward, cute, cringy, and understandable. There are a million reasons why this relationship isn’t sustainable, but I felt completely understanding of both their choices here. This show has a lot of thesis statements, but I keep going back to the idea from 2x1 that there are people who enter your life to help you get to the next point, and I think it’s entirely possible that Sam and Rebecca will mutually be that for each other.

I find comparisons between Rupert and Rebecca super upsetting. There are absolutely meaningful things to say about the irony of ending up in a situation with an uncomfortable resemblance to certain taboo elements of an ex’s situation. But that ex is abusive and manipulative and cruel and Rebecca has exhibited NONE of those behaviors, and it makes me really sad to think that people feel that the writers on this show have betrayed Rebecca in giving her this storyline.

As always, I reserve the right to keep blathering about this show. I’ve had a headache for a couple of days, but my head is also so full of 2x8 thoughts that I couldn’t keep them in even if the circumstances for writing this were not ideal. I kind of hate that I’ve included frustrated fandom thoughts within the analysis of what I felt was an absolutely gorgeous, complicated, heartbreaking, near-perfect episode of television, but if ya can’t be a little dramatic on your own tumblr while you’re feeling raw and under the weather, where can ya?

[beelspillowpet]

Brothers reactions to a fem disaster bi MC who swoons over like every fem demon they see in the devildom?

Just got finished screaming over how much I LOOOOOVE THIS PROMPT. BI DISASTER YEEEEAAAAHHHH

Thank you for being the first to request something from me! 😭😭😭 I apologize in advance that these hcs aren't SUPER FOCUSED on the MC being a female themselves, but I tried my best with sneaking it in there when I could!

I've decided that along with MC, the brothers are also bisexual for the prompts too! You can be a mess together! <3 Sorry it took so long!

~

Lucifer

Oh. You seemed so interested in that girl who passed you by. You were smitten, he might say. Never mind it, he didn’t want to assume anything of it. Maybe you were just really fond of that girl's appearance.

The next girl he spotted you talking with, he was a bit concerned. You shouldn’t be off making friends with just ANY demons. They could be plotting to take your soul if you aren’t careful. Your palette seemed to be meshed, you were now talking to boyish women and feminine men. It was starting to come together for him now that you are, in fact, bisexual. A truly chaotic one, at that.

Over the next few weeks, he sees you flourish more and more with your obsession over women and men together. It’s not like you’ve forgotten about him, far from it. In fact, sometimes he listens to you rant about how beautiful this girl is at RAD, talking about her eyes or her lips. Other times he listens to you cry over how absolutely GORGEOUS this man is. He will never admit that he finds your taste in men and women to be quite similar to his. Almost exactly the same.

He listens to you sometimes talk to his brothers about how unrealistically, unreasonably cute, that girls are. You don't have nearly as much energy talking about men than you do women, but it's still there. He doesn’t really indulge you as much as he should, but he gives you enough input to invite you to keep ranting about BEAUTIFUL women and men.

Mammon

Same, dude. Same.

Mammon is a powerful bisexual, and you are the one who made him realize this(?!). He pretends he's not listening to you half the time, but he's hanging on your every word. When you two hang out, sometimes you push your D.D.D to his face to show you another model you've found on Devilgram. "His abs are SMOKIN' hot, Mammon, look!!" He has to agree. He's got a nice body. "Look at her soft face! She's SO unbelievably cute! And those curves, oof!”

He's watching you swoon and he can't believe it. You're both chaotic disasters, swooning over man and woman alike. You put much more life into your talks about women than you do men, and it worries him sometimes that he might not actually give him the time of day whenever he works up the courage. When you talk about those cute women, he does mostly still think about you. You have such beautiful eyes, and soft hair, when he's allowed to touch it. He wonders why you haven't seen it yourself.

At some point he let's it slip that he, himself, may or may not be bisexual, when you catch him scrolling through Devilgram of some of the models you've shown him in the past. The two of you spend hours on end, swooning over every male and female in sight.

Leviathan

You two are feral bisexuals. Especially fond of girls. Leviathan and you have both played those H-games. You know the ones. He catches you from time to time, listening to ASMR of girls patting your head or talking you through a rough patch in your life. He definitely knows when you're listening to lewd audio clips of women too.

He thinks for a while that you're a lesbian, and he's completely fine with that. It isn't until your attention abruptly SHIFTS when you find a SMOKIN' HOT anime boy that he realizes you are a disaster of a bisexual. Sometimes it's like a day and night shift with you. When you see girls at anime conventions you swoon uncontrollably. Gripping his arm and giving those compressed SCREECHES from the throat with shut lips. He can't help but think you're hyperbolic sometimes.

Deep down inside, he feels the exact same way. It's just too embarrassing to act like that though. But even though he feels that way, he watches you shuffling over to the cosplayers and otaku girls and asking for pictures. If you're lucky, you might even score a number from one of them! How dare you have better social skills than him? It's SOOO not fair??

He decides one of these days he'll take a page out of your book. He'll happily geek out about girls to you (especially if there's a Ruri-Chan cosplayer!?) and occasionally about the guys too. You both lean towards females anyway, and he's glad he's found someone just like him.

Satan

Oh. Girls? Guys? He's here, and he's listening.

He doesn't have any picture books, but the way the books describe some of the women? *chef's kiss* He loves it! He's watched you attempt to capture their beauty on paper (or tablet and laptop!) and smiles at your attempts. He calls them attempts because that's what you call them. "Nothing I do can truly capture the beauty that is any female that exists here." And he AGREES.

He finds your ridiculous chanting of GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS to be a riot. He joins in if it means pissing Lucifer off with the noise pollution. When you shift to guys, he's still as vocal as before. You probably aren't that great at drawing guys yet, but that's cool. He appreciates your enthusiasm. You catch him staring at you from time to time, and you wonder if he ever thinks you're as cute of a girl as the other ones you two fawn over.

Like a distorted clock, you talk about girls for at least two hours of his time, and then another hour about boys. He can't believe how much energy you put into loving women. He wonders if you're like Asmo, and just appreciate women a little bit too much. After all, the previous mention of chanting GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS is still fresh on his mind. You really are a messy bisexual, but you're his favorite messy bisexual, at least.

Asmodeus

OH HECK YEAH. YOU BOTH ARE A WRECK!

GIRLS. BOYS. GIRLS. BOYS. It's a never ending cycle with you two. It's like you're rabid animals, constantly going out to The Fall for the scoop on the next hottest guy to walk in. When you see a girl though, it's like you're straight out of a cartoon. You don't howl or whistle or anything of the sort that may be unsightly or rude but you ARE WATCHING. RESPECTFULLY.

You and Asmo are unashamed when it comes to flirting with men and women alike. You share tips that have worked in the past for each other, and having the Avatar of Lust give you pointers is a nice bonus overall. Asmo thinks for a while that you are a normal bisexual, but he's proven wrong when you find a group of beautiful women, who you hyper focus on for the next few weeks. He's honestly impressed.

It's like your attraction to men has almost disappeared, and he worries that perhaps you don't love him more than any woman you run across in the Devildom anymore. Your attention to men is still there with passing comments of "yeah he's really cute" but you're RIGHT BACK to the topic of GIRLS. he can't blame you. Women are QUEENS, just like you're an absolute QUEEN to him. He's more than happy to indulge some lewd talk about women, and you both spend hours doing exactly that most nights.

Beelzebub

Oh, that's cool. Someone else in this house likes both men and women. He's glad you're comfortable sharing so much with him. Usually when you do go for jogs in the morning, he watches you at his side while he listens to you. There's apparently this blonde woman with dark skin and she looks absolutely DIVINE. His brain focuses on imagining a pretzel with salt sprinkled over it, and he drools. He likes that thought, very much.

It's when you see said jogger does he truly realize your fixation on women is something to be feared.  You're practically floating when she jogs by, almost wanting to go after her. Beel stops you, and asks if you're okay, worried that you might trip over your own feet if you swoon any harder. He thinks its cute. You start to dress like this jogging woman, wearing her color scheme in hopes that she'll notice you. Maybe he'll try to help and play wingman for you.

He doesn't open up about it at first, but eventually he does finally speak up when you bring up a man you see at the gym with him from time to time. He blushes a bit because he knows immediately who you're talking about. You like that guy, and Beel really likes him too. When you two see him at the gym, you both swoon a bit too much. While spotting Beel one time, he passed by and Beel nearly dropped his weights on his chest. This caused a bit of attention your way and flustered, you helped Beel set the weights back up and make sure he was okay. That wasn't the first or last time an accident happened at the gym either.

At the Fangol games, it's even worse, somehow. You sit as close as possible to the field, and halftime is your FAVORITE time. All those cute cheerleaders? Cheering for their teams? You forget in all the glory that is the ABSOLUTE BEAUTY OF WOMEN that you're supposed to be rooting for Beel. You spend the rest of the game reimagining the routines that were performed, and Beel is right there admiring them too. Quietly, at least. You're a bit too enthusiastic about your love for women, and Beel thinks you're cheering louder for them than you are for him when he's playing. He doesn't mind it too much though. He'd probably be the same way, provided he let loose a little more.

Belphegor

He doesn't bother with you. It's like you talk a mile a minute, only interested in girls for the most part. Occasionally you'll talk about a hot guy, and well, he's listening but... It's sort of hard for him to fall asleep with all your rambling about women. With such detail, it's like you're trying to give him material to imagine while he sleeps.

Belphie tries his hardest not to tell you to quiet down sometimes. He's forced to come to RAD, he's stuck by your side, mostly because your taste in men and women are quite similar to his. He's been sorely lacking on the cute girls and guys here at RAD, but he can count on you to provide eye candy for him. Not that he's going to act on it. Most of the time, he's too busy trying to block out your constant rambling. He notices it's mostly about women.

He thinks you're insecure at first, trying to appeal to him, presumably a straight guy, while appearing interested in men to seem straight too. He let's it be known for your comfort, if you like girls more than guys, then it's fine. He's not one to care or judge others on their interest. An anarchist at heart, and your chaotic bisexuality freak-outs are what he lives for. If you were more quiet about it, he would find it easier to fall asleep to. He manages to do that a few times.

Let's it slip while talking about a dream he had that he's interested in guys too. Maybe a little more than you are, though. 50/50 at best. He doesn't really encourage you to talk more about the girls you absolutely DROOL over, but whenever you two are out and you spot a woman, he's always side eyeing you and telling you to wipe your mouth. He sometimes makes a show of it, teasing you by panting like a dog, or telling you to heel. It's all in fun though, and he lets up before it gets too embarrassing.

[katytheinspiredworkaholic]

WIP Wednesday Thursday

Title: Extraordinary

Pairings: HotchReid (side pairings Morcia, WillxJJ, others in flirtation)

Summary: League of Extraordinary Gentleman/Vampire AU;

Within the FBI there is a specialized team full of an elite selection of people. Unique individuals with very particular skill sets. And their job is to take the unusual cases: the ones that need to not only be solved, but are undetermined if the unsub is human, or something else entirely.

In a world filled with Vampires, non-human creatures, and subspecies unknown, there is only enough information to have them vaguely regulated. Rules that are so easily, and violently broken, all while hidden in plain sight among the unsuspecting public. Unrivaled for eons.

That’s where the BAU comes in.

Official Posting Date: Now posted on tumblr and Ao3, Click Here

Links: (Masterpost) (Snippet 01) (Snippet 02) (Snippet 03) (Snippet 04)

(TW/CW: This is pretty tame, Emily is just a little intense and eager because Spencer is... well, Spencer, and when she realizes all he can do? Oh she is chomping at the bit. Some trance-like things and witchy stuff and Hotch being territorial without being able to admit it.)

(the story so far/what you need to know for this clip at least: this takes place in chapter 02, what you will all see on Saturday evening, and this version is insanely unpolished (I’m about to go through and fix it up and give it a good make-over) but basically this is the first time Spencer is meeting Emily Prentiss and it makes... an impression. Also, Emily has been at the BAU for about 0.2 seconds and Hotch is already done with her. The sibling energy I love to see. It’s also hella long, as an apology for missing last week and being a day late. All you’ve missed is Spencer about ran into Emily turning a corner and she saved him from spilling his case files and coffee all over the floor. Now they are talking)

–

.

“I apologize, I thought you were an intern or still in the academy.”

“It’s alright, everyone does,” Spencer says without taking offense. He wouldn’t have gotten where he was or lasted very long if he did; however, if he had a nickel for every time someone had been surprised by his age, he’d be as rich as Father Rossi. His full hands actually aids him as he mentions, “I don’t usually shake hands with people, so don’t think me rude. I’m Dr. Spencer Reid.” He offers her a smile in exchange, and it is mirrored on her face just as her surprise kicks up another notch. 

“Doctor, my my I am in for a trip on this team, aren’t I?” she laughs, and it’s a melodic thing that stretches over an expanse of time and history. Ballrooms in Russia and palors of France, Elizabethan and the roaring 20’s and everything in between all rolled into one. He’s not sure how he sees it, an impossible thing, but he can read it like a book and that must have something to do with what she is. “Emily Prentiss, it is a remarkable pleasure to meet you Dr. Reid. Now, I have to ask--” her tone is so charming and playful and probing he barely notices the nuance, “And I’m sure it’s taboo around here, but I have to know -- your regeneration process. Tell me what it is or what you do. You look so young.”

“I am young,” he states simply, finally stunned by a question he’s not usually asked. 

“Yes, yes, we all can’t be a thousand years old like your fearless Vampire leader,” she waves off and Spencer’s eyes widen because… he hadn’t known Hotch was that old. Sure he’d said he’d been alive for the better part of a millennia, but he always said it like a hyperbole. A turn of phrase that’s off by a couple centuries. But --

 A thousand years old. 

That would put him… 

God, that would put him alive, as a human, just before the start of The Crusades. 

“Oh, did he keep that to himself? Oops, my bad. Pretend you don’t know. Anyway -- so are you a Shifter? Or use a particular spell? Oh, or is it a curse? I’m fascinated by curses, I don’t use them often myself but the rigidity of terms using a power so chaotic is just such a fun juxtaposition that I--”

“No, no, I’m… normal, human,” Spencer interrupts her, still the smallest bit shell-shocked, but now connects a few dots himself as she speaks. Realizes very suddenly that Ms. Prentiss appears ageless because she is ageless. She’s also a Witch. One of the broadest terms for subspecies categories, which really doesn’t do it justice. A Witch could be a number of things. Someone who uses magic and science and the very Earth itself paired with the spiritual planes to do impossible things. Witches are beings so powerful they should be uncategorizable. Something Spencer is fascinated by as well. He’s never met anyone like Emily. “I look young because I am young. I’m 27, I’ve only been with the BAU for the past three years. I’m a little excited to not be the newbie on the team any more,” he tries to joke, but Emily’s gaze has gone distant and sharp all at once.

“You’re only 27? And you’re a doctor?” She asks in clarification, Spencer nodding along each time. “You’ve been a doctor, since becoming an FBI agent?” 

“Um, well -- I’m not a medical doctor. I do have three doctorates, though; in mathematics, chemistry, and engineering,” he finds himself shrinking a bit under her intensely interested gaze. “What?”

“Chemistry?” she asks, vaguely more distant.

“That was my first doctorate,” he murmurs back, not sure what has her looking so contemplative. 

“You’ve achieved all of this: three doctorates, FBI agent, BAU -- in 27 years?” she questions, a grave yet wondrous sound.

“Technically I did all of that in 15 years. I graduated high school when I was 12,” he manages to do more than mumble, and Emily’s wide-eyed stare has him spewing forth information like it requires an explanation. “I have an eidetic memory, and I can read 20,000 words a minute, and my IQ is 187 so by human standards yes -- I’m a genius, and borderline on the advanced brain developments scale. But I’m still human. Nothing paranormal or extraordinary.”

The pause that follows is palpable.

“Oh,” she says in an exhale, “Oh, you young soul. You have no idea, do you? What you are capable of...” She tilts her head as she steps closer and Spencer is very suddenly aware that he’s not sure she’s blinked since they started speaking about his qualifications. What he can do, how he got to where he is. No one usually shows this much interest, he makes them uncomfortable for reasons he doesn’t always understand. 

Emily doesn’t look uncomfortable, she looks… hungry. 

“You are so very, very extraordinary. Exceptional, really. Look at all of what you’ve accomplished with just 15 years of life.” That astonished sound again, like she can’t believe her luck--

And then she’s in his space, gaze boring into his, and Spencer can see galaxies in the depth of her eyes. His breath stolen from him and feet rooted to the floor. So he doesn’t step away as she leans just the smallest bit closer, words resonating with echoes across ages.

“Imagine what you could do with a thousand.” 

“Prentiss,” the deep voice of Hotch’s monotone (edged in something vaguely aggressive, and more than a little aggravated)  breaks through their moment. The trance fading like a fog from Spencer’s eyes. “No recruiting. It’s in your contract.”

“You have such a gift, it’s a shame to waste it,” Emily whispers in a rush as Hotch approaches them from down the hall. More earnest than intimidating, now.

“Prentiss!” 

“Think about it,” she winks, and then turns to give Hotch a smile that’s all teeth so sharp she resembles a shark. “Oh, what a sour face. What’s wrong? Were you planning on asking him first? You snooze, you lose.” 

“Conference room,” he instructs, pointing the way Spencer had just come. “Team meeting in 20 minutes. Try not to summon anything between here and there.” She sticks her tongue out at him childishly as she leaves, and sends a quirk of a smile Spencer’s direction that shifts her whole expression into something comically entertained. He’s never seen Hotch interact with someone like this, like they were… familiar, even exasperatingly so. The closest in comparison is probably Father Rossi. But this is less like old friends and more like sibling rivalry. 

The space Emily had just vacated is suddenly filled with Hotch, an overwhelmingly welcomed presence and it eases the tension out of Spencer’s spine and shoulders that he hadn’t even realized was there. 

“Are you okay?” he asks, low and quiet. They’re the only ones in the hallway, but secrecy is a hard habit to break.

Spencer nods, still gaining his bearings once more. “I think so. That didn’t feel like hypnotism. I don’t know what that was.” 

“Prentiss doesn’t manipulate minds or the wills of other people,” Hotch tells him, which is soothing if not for the foreboding question of what just occurred. “She doesn’t need to. She can do a lot of things: change her face, her voice, make illusions and talk circles around anyone -- even you.” Spencer looks up to him at that, aware that his level of intelligence is the only thing that keeps him safe from JJ or Hotch’s influence. His mind can’t be bent, or tricked.

“Then what was she doing? I felt compelled but… not against my will. What was that?” he asks, also quiet but much more high in pitch as his confusion turns his voice to a winded sound.

Hotch’s thin, stern frown does nothing to alleviate the apprehension caught up in his chest like a bad cold. 

.

“Possibility,” he states, grim and not liking that Spencer had fallen prey to such a short moment with Emily Prentiss and her promise of what her craft could do for him. Hotch is well aware that Spencer’s gift of soaking up every speck on information he’s given like a sponge isn’t something to let wither and die like so many before him. There’s so much he could do with an infinite life, such as his and Emily’s, but the curse of living forever alone is not something to be taken lightly. And not to be decided by someone who still has so much more life to live unaided by other forces.

However, Emily was right about one thing. Hotch can’t deny that he’s thought about it. More than considered it as a definite possibility. 

An offer, all his own.

–

Tagged list so far: @physics-magic​, @thaddeusly, @ssa-noa, @ssa-sarahsunshine, @tobias-hankel, @reidology, @mintphoenix

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER PRE-GAME 9/30/2020: 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE/CONFESSIONAL (2019)

Spoiler alert. Or whatever. It’s not going to matter, you don’t care.

So, I've been away for a minute. Just about any reason to be away from Tumblr is probably a good reason, but I have an especially good one. I'm finally working on a "real" writing project, which demands, and deserves, all of my attention. My social media abstinence isn't just a matter of time management, though. Once I had a long term obligation on my plate, I became very aware of how the short term satisfaction I get from posting mindless rants was eating away at the fuel I have available for sustained efforts. When I wind myself up with a 500-1000 word blog post, it generates a lot of electricity, but I blow it all as soon as I experience the catharsis of posting it, and I'm further pacified by ego-stroking likes and reblogs. Not to sound like a sanctimonious luddite--I mean, I'm still here, after all!--but it turns out that the staying focused on the long haul has been surprisingly revivifying. In fact, I haven't been talking about my big fancy project for the same reason; I don't want to lose any of the juice I've been storing up by wasting it on the shallow pleasure of describing it. Also such things should probably be somewhat confidential until they're approaching the publishing stage, but I digress! There is an actual reason I'm saying all this, that has more to do with this blog.

(Don’t get all excited, I’m not doing EVIL ED right now, I just need a relatable image.)

As I got deeper into my experience of "real" film writing, I started to reflect on the meaning of my personal writing. Like, the point of it. I tend to write in a sweaty, compulsive, sadomasochistic haze, in which I'm sometimes hyperbolically generous, and sometimes--perhaps more often, unfortunately--as nasty as humanly possible. Sometimes the movies deserve it, when they're lazy, pretentious, or otherwise demonstrate an open contempt for the audience aka ME. Often, though, I'm just creating an opportunity to vent my generalized rage and frustration. That can be very entertaining for myself and (hopefully) my teensy-but-devoted readership, but lately I've asked myself whether there isn't some negative tradeoff for all this amusement. In this phase of my life, it's reasonable to assume I'll make more and more friends and acquaintances who create things I don't always care for, but I don't necessarily think they deserve to be abused for it. As much as I have a right to say whatever I want, technically, I'd be embarrassed if I were caught just jacking myself off by making fun of their work in public. And more to the point, I don't necessarily want to contribute to the growing atmosphere in which people feel more afraid to try and fail, because the public so commonly misidentifies sarcasm and mean-spiritedness as intelligence and superiority, and that form of petty darkness spreads across the internet a lot faster than a movie can reach a wider audience. After all, I'm in the process of potentially turning myself into one of those well-meaning failures right now. I could stand to be a little more deliberate about how I speak, and about what, in general.

My father is an art critic, and once in an extra petulant moment, teenage-me asked him in an accusative tone what he thought the point of his profession was. He replied calmly that he wouldn't publish any comment that he didn't think the artist could make use of somehow. I don't know if he always stuck to that policy, but the thought sure stuck with me.

So anyway, over the last few months I've been giving myself a bit of an attitude adjustment, through a combination of personal reflection, and hard work on something meaningful/not for the internet. I've been feeling all proud of myself and shit, but today reminded me that any path to enlightenment is always marked by setbacks, doubt, and temptation. For today, in complete innocence (or at least a melange of innocence and ignorance, as I very much invite this type of problem), I managed to watch TWO (2) movies about an academic film-cum-psychology project, focused on a gang of college buddies who inevitably reveal what bad people they are under the unique conditions of the project, and then the project turns out to be run NOT by its presumed-dead originator, but by the originator's even-crazier lover. It's amazing how particular something can be, and still be utterly obvious and cliche. In my defense, I really tried to turn the second movie off, because it was...just instantly terrible, but the seed of suspicion had taken root--is this randomly selected movie ACTUALLY EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE PREVIOUS MOVIE?--and I just had to find out if this could be true. I suffered, deliberately, for another hour and a half, to confirm my awful hunch. I don't know how I would have felt if I had turned out to be wrong (better? worse?), but I don't have to worry about that now. Now I just have to worry about my overpowering impulse to be as ugly as possible about what I have personally subjected myself to.

(The completely deceptive poster for our not at all witchy or eerie opening feature.) 

In need of a passable time-waster this afternoon, I put on 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE. Released in March of 2019, Caitlin Koller's claustrophobic black comedy feels oddly like a product of 2020. A group of estranged, middle-aged college pals of the BIG CHILL ilk--which one of the characters calls out, out loud, just so ya know--come together for a fallen comrade's funeral, only to find themselves trapped in his widow's increasingly creepy cabin in the woods. Said comrade was driven to suicide by the failure of a psychological experiment he conducted that plunged its subject into madness, and if you don't realize right away that the obnoxious and unstable cast are the new subjects of their not-quite-dead friend's renewed project, then you're firing a lot slower than 24 frames per second. The dialog is often decent, aiding a handful of funny, natural performances...but it's hard to forget that you're just waiting for the conspicuously crazy widow to reveal that the "unexplained events" in and around the cabin are part of a controlled attempt to get the guests to devolve into their worst selves, which isn't such a difficult task considering the undesirable state they all arrive in.

It just made me ask myself, what was the point of this? Why do people make movies that are entirely predicated on the shock of the twist, knowing that if the twist isn't so shocking--or is baldly obvious from the start--then the whole experience just falls apart? Why not hedge your bets with a little more depth, or purpose, or style, or really anything more reliable than a smug attempt to prove that your script is smarter than your audience? Even if you do manage to pull off this dubious accomplishment, it reduces your movie to something like the experience of having somebody jump out of a closet and scream in your ear to "get" you. I've always felt concerned that if somebody ever tries to "get" me like that, I might just automatically punch them in the face. But anyway, whatever shred of good will this movie could have accrued with its plucky performances is blown away by the final insult, when the cops arrive to clean up the inevitable bloody mess. The responding officers are hilariously unimpressed and unsurprised by the byzantine scheme that has resulted in a shocking act of violence, because the cabin's "guest book", which our heroes all filled out, was actually the signatory page of a complicated waiver form granting full permission to the hosts to, like, do whatever the hell they want to everybody. Presumably this shit just goes on all the time, leading the local law to shrug off anything that happens to or because of the dumbassed lab rats who frequent the cabin? I dunno. I mean, what can I say? ACAB, I guess!

At the time, I managed to resist the urge to take to the internet and decry the crimes of this lame-o party joke. I really don't like the sensation that a movie is just trying to trick me into thinking something that isn't true. But, this isn't, like, an affront to cinema. People make annoying, below average movies all the time, and maybe you kinda have to, if you eventually want to make better movies. I imagine myself in the shoes of the people who actually put some elbow grease into this production, having to wade through the rantings of internet ghouls like myself while they're trying to see how their efforts are paying off. Making a movie is probably a lot harder than I think it is.

But that's part of the point I'm heading toward. I'm always amazed by people's willingness to pour huge amounts of energy and capital into something to which there is ultimately very little point. I mean, I have bad, unoriginal, boring ideas every single day of my life. But I almost never DO any of them. I have a hard enough time convincing myself to just get out of bed in the morning, let alone devote blood, sweat, and money to deliver unto the world material evidence of my personal mediocrity. I can't imagine thinking it would be worth it, for myself or the unfortunate people who are subjected to my project, to actually execute on my bad ideas. I'm being judgmental, but honestly, I don't even know if my attitude makes me better or worse than someone who accomplishes the task of completing and selling a movie that's mainly a waste of time. Movies are so complicated, and realizing them requires the consensus of so many people, that it's sort of incredible that there are people capable of making one that doesn't have a powerfully compelling motivation behind it. People who are able to do such a thing obviously have something that I don't, and it isn't just "consideration for the audience."

So, I could probably stand to be more forgiving--or just, less eager to absolutely flay someone alive on my dumb little blog because they so opened themselves up to my arsenal of elaborate insults. But like...not all the time. Sometimes, a movie really fucking asks for it, and in revealing itself to me, it has effectively signed a waiver giving me patent freedom to do whatever I want to it. CONFESSIONAL is the latest movie to give me such a gift. After the final credit rolled in 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE, I looked for a little palate cleanser. As little as I like movies that put their single egg in the motheaten basket of a "shocking twist", I also have a problem with what I identify as canned theater. Not that I think all movies have to be lavish productions, but I think they should try to do something that is natively cinematic. It's very rare that I'm impressed by anything that is literally all talk. So, I went in search of some more familiar form of trash to help me recallibrate, and trash is definitely what I got.

(Me crying over my own bad decisions.)

To be fair, I kind of should have known that I was in for a challenging experience. The 2019 found footage thriller CONFESSIONAL is more or less based on the "confessional" part of sleazy reality TV shows, isolating each cast member in a soundproof stall so they can spill the rotten contents of their guts. Unfortunately, I spotted a review suggesting that the movie succeeded, against all odds, at remaining visually dynamic despite the unchanging scenery, and I was intrigued. The reviewer was correct, impressively; the monotony of the coffin-like environment with its dark foam walls was the least of my concerns. Other problems superseded that threat, immediately. The plot concerns a group of college pals who come together to remember a recently deceased friend--a filmmaker who expired mysteriously while completing a psychology-tinged project in which she recorded all of her friends' most shameful personal secrets. Now, somebody else has taken over the project...someone who "has never been identified", according to an early title card in this movie-within-a-movie (EVEN THOUGH THIS PERSON WILL BE EXPLICITLY IDENTIFIED AT THE END OF THE MOVIE SO LIKE WHY), but who seems likely to be the decedent's ex-lover...who continues to expose their subjects' most shameful secrets on film. I mean, what the fuck? Did I somehow manage to pick a second movie with almost the exact same plot??? I couldn't believe it. I didn't know if I could take it. My prospects only got worse when the cast showed up and started talking. I tried to turn the movie off. I backed out and walked away from it, twice. But I couldn't leave it alone. I had to know if it was really the same movie.

CONFESSIONAL concerns characters who are contemporaneously in college, which actually goes a long way to making everything worse. Each of these walking cliches is connected in some way to Amelia, a film student whose mysterious death has created a campus scandal, leaving shattered hearts and lives in its wake. The living have each received a blackmail-flavored invitation to speak about the deceased in a tiny "confessional booth" somewhere on campus, where, predictably, they find themselves locked in until they confess whatever they know about Amelia, and their classmates. I don't know why practically every single movie about young people has to be so miserable, but this is one of those. I assume that it has something to do with the fact that youth is simultaneously so desired and so ignored. People in their teens and early 20s are so sexually coveted, yet so easily dismissed as individuals, that we wind up with all this media that panders to them relentlessly (or at least, panders to the legions of ticket-buying perverts who enjoy watching them prance around), without almost any consideration of how they actually think and act, and look. Movies like FAT GIRL and  WELCOME TO THE DOLL HOUSE may be accused of their own form of pandering, a venal form of voyeuristic schadenfreude, but at least they reflect something of the awkwardness, isolation, and incompleteness of adolescence; something more than the dissociated, pornographic fantasies of adults who have long since forgotten what it was like to be powerless and ignored, or desired by people who don't even like you.

Not that CONFESSIONAL is supposed to be a work of grim realism, but it is most definitely rooted in a fantasy about college life that makes its contrived, message-y plot a lot harder to take. With almost the sole exception of "the nerdy one", every single character looks like a Bratz doll, oozing an exaggerated indecency that belies the movie's pretentious insistence on addressing the sex & gender Issues of the Day. What you get is a really good example of what happens when millennial characters are modeled, not on any actual millennials, but on other forms of marketing that are aimed at millennials, which are themselves just based on other preexisting youth-targeted commercials, et al ad nauseam. Even setting aside the deliriously slutty wardrobe choices, makeup appears to have been laid on with a trowel, coating each actor in a thick creamy layer of spackle that only makes any scars, pits, or other evidence of individuality look utterly bizarre. Accordingly, everybody preens, pouts, and generally behaves as if they're about to take off their clothes, which might be a huge relief given the profusion of chafing, cheapo mesh and straps they're laboring under.

So, ok, not every movie can have a great costume department, but the dialog here is a perfect match for the disastrous aesthetic decisions. Actually, this is the real reason I almost walked out on CONFESSIONAL. If I may ramble briefly, without substantiating any of my broad-ranging claims: Sometime in the late 90s/early 00s, horror cinema seemed to suffer a degenerative slide away from genuine thrills and chills, and into a version of the genre that is best characterized as the Slutty Halloween Costume approach. Any sense of existential dread, revulsion, or bodily vulnerability was widely replaced by a cutesy, Hot Topic-y preference for fast fashion and sex appeal, in which bloodshed more facilitated an informal wet teeshirt contest than any real fear induction. Horror's new mall goth look came with an equally shallow, boring verbal affectation: a sullen, sleazy, tooth-sucking sarcasm, that ushered in a new era in which, instead of making fun of the scummy coked-out dialog in porno movies, we now expect everybody to just talk like that, because it's hot. There's probably a line to be drawn between this unfortunate development, and the boneheaded real-world trend of identifying "sarcasm" as an important personal selling point on dating sites, but I won't try to prove that here. For now, I will just say that as soon as I heard the CONFESSIONAL characters start to speak, with their sneering, insinuating tones, with the vocal fry, with the head wagging, the jutting jaws, the smoldering gazes, the juvenile dragging-out of horny grownup words like de-bauch-er-y...I almost lost my nerve. Listening to these little creeps hissing and spitting for 84 minutes is a lot like being hit on by some barfly who continues to bludgeon you with his hot breath and corny lines without ever noticing that you've thrown up into your pint.

Uh, anyway. So what actually happens in the movie. Why would anyone ever allow someone to record video of them revealing the ugliest, most embarrassing parts of themselves? Especially a kid, for whom popularity and reputation are often a matter of life or death--literally and specifically, in the case of this story. The flimsy reason is that the late filmmaker, Amelia, was the most awesomest girl ever. Everybody loved her, because she was so sweet, and so smart, and so cool, and so nice, and so deep, and so original, and so talented, and so sexy, and just like, the bestest most perfectest girl in the whole wide world. N.B. "The greatest of all time" is, perhaps counter-intuitively, a really bad quality that makes for really shitty, boring characters. For better or worse, Amelia is rarely on screen (and when she is, she's no Laura Palmer, frankly), so it's up to the viewer to just sort of imagine a type of person who could make you act against your best interests on account of you just like them so much. After all, so many of the characters were obsessed with her in some way, that it's like they're here to help you clap your hands and believe in this seductive, compelling part of the movie, that just isn't actually there on the screen. The anonymous antihero behind the confessional booth scheme slowly extracts from each character the selfish, destructive behavior that in some way contributed to the tragic loss of the most amazing person of all time--and part of the result is, if not a very interesting excuse for Amelia's death, then a story so wacky that I really wish they had centered the movie on it, instead of on the tawdry soap opera we're locked into. Even if that imaginary movie had been really bad, and it probably would have been, at it would at least have been entertaining.

Part of what leads up to the death of Amelia is the existence of a secret school fight club, led by a stereotypically sleazy gender studies major, named Major, who is out to prove men's inherent superiority. The club is called CFB, or Cock Fights Back, which is somehow a garbled pun relating to cock fights, and Trump's famous line of "locker room talk": "grab'em by the pussy" > "pussy grabs back" > "cock fights back". CFB is different from your ordinary fight club in that the fights are always between girls and boys, and the boys are always blindfolded, in order to prove that a fully-abled female is no match for even a handicapped male. To complicate things, a new designer amphetamine is gaining popularity on campus, called "odds-on", meaning that it makes you the odds-on favorite in your CFB fight. As awkward as that is, it also seems that men are never the guaranteed winners of these fights, which makes you wonder why Major insists on continuing to host them. As much as I would have preferred to watch a stupid movie about this stupid idea, I'm stuck instead with a movie in which Major is such an aggressive MRA because he's secretly gay, and he thinks that hating women is a great way to hide that...as if that isn't what we all openly suspect about aggro MRAs. Secret gayness is a big part of this movie, involving multiple characters, although it amounts to very little other than the perpetuation of some stale, harmful cliches about how unfulfilled homosexual urges lead to suicide, sexual abuse, and murder. CONFESSIONAL is just as reliant on this grim vision of gay life, as it is on its weirdly obtuse discussion of drug addiction, for the suffocating sense of self-importance that it uses to try to elevate itself above its porn-y trappings. None of the movie's hot button issues are given any real thought, but are only dragged through the mud to create the illusion that there's a point to all this, thus relieving the film of any sense of innocence that could have made its condescending sleaziness forgivable.

Admittedly, I can't really remember all the details of the film's tortured intrigue anymore, even though I basically just saw it. A lot of its meandering revelations just left me thinking, "Why did I need to know that? Why should I care?" I do know that about half way through this ordeal, I became really anxious about whether it would turn out that CONFESSIONAL did NOT have exactly the same plot as 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE after all, and I put myself through all this for nothing. But no, I was right to begin with. The wonderful Amelia's ethically dubious film project has been picked up by the unhinged lesbian character who loved her so much she wanted to become her, and killing Amelia and usurping her confessional project was apparently the best way of doing that. I guess exposing all the dark, violent secrets of all these tangentially involved characters was just an added bonus, or whatever. Ultimately, this ugly, ignorant PSA about something-or-other only deals itself further damage by relying so heavily on the potential of its clumsy twist to blow your mind, which it does not at all.

So that was it, that's how I burned a whole afternoon allowing my mind to implode-not-explode under the ponderous force of TWO (2) movies about exactly the same exhausted cliche that is still being peddled by certain pretentious assholes as fresh and exciting, and beyond the capacity of the audience to anticipate. There's probably a whole slew of other movies that employ this overly familiar "surprise", but I don't have it in me to dig them out of my long-suffering brain. Feel free to contribute in the comments. For now, I must prepare myself for the ordeal of Blogtober, during which I will *hopefully* choose my screening selections and words more thoughtfully than I have in previous years, when this blog was motivated by just as much abject misanthropy as these movies, which do nothing but willfully insult the audience's intelligence. Maybe today's detour into degradation will help me go forth toward more additive experiences, having purged several lungfuls of meaningless venom from my system, and this season will bring with it more interesting, provocative posts than the last. Or maybe not! In any case, I promise to keep trying my hardest to make it funny.

PS I actually love both FAT GIRL and WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE. I’m “just saying”. 

[f4liveblogarchives]

Fantastic Four Vol 1 #198 & #199

Mon Aug 26 2019 [12:46 AM] Wack'd: It probably bares pointing out that this story is being billed as "The Greatest F.F. Epic of All!". I disagree [12:46 AM] maxwellelvis: I thought that kind of hyperbole on the covers died out with the Silver Age [12:46 AM] Bocaj: I wonder what the greatest FF epic of all is [12:47 AM] Wack'd: Thus far I'm not sure anything's topped the Lee/Kirby epic of the Four being trapped in Latveria, if only for its sheer manic energy as it ping-pongs wildly from one twist to the next, only to end on a shaggy dog note when Doom gets bored and lets them leave [12:47 AM] maxwellelvis: Some people would argue it's the original Galactus Trilogy. [12:48 AM] Wack'd: I mean. If you define "epic" as "more than two issues". Otherwise it's probably the Thomas/Conway/Buscema one where a janitor gets a sentient cosmic cube to turn the world into a bonkers 50s mashup [12:48 AM] Wack'd: Isn't Galactus just 49-50? Otherwise I guess you could include that [12:48 AM] maxwellelvis: Man, that story got kinda last-episode-of-The Prisoner-y in the middle when they're both captured. [12:49 AM] maxwellelvis: People count the Silver Surfer stuff in #48 as part of it. [12:49 AM] Wack'd: That's probably fair [12:49 AM] Wack'd: Anyway! Reed has the Pogo Plane and is going to get Doctor Doom [12:50 AM] Wack'd: Weirdly, he figured this out because only Doom could've designed all the neat stuff he saw at his new job, funded the rocket that got him his powers back, and captured his friends so easily [12:50 AM] Wack'd: And not because his boss is the spitting image of his old college roommate [12:51 AM] Wack'd: Seriously there's one bit where it looks like Reed might recognize Son of Doom and instead it's like "that face? where have I seen that face?" [12:51 AM] maxwellelvis: How could he know what Victor Von Doom looks like? WE barely see his face even in flashback. [12:51 AM] maxwellelvis: I just assume he always has a shadow around that he lurks in. [12:51 AM] Wack'd: Pffft [12:52 AM] maxwellelvis: Like, from what I remember from his origin story, we see his face when we see him as a boy, but as he grows to college-age, his back is turned to us or his face is obscured more. [12:52 AM] Wack'd: The Four have left Latveria alive. Numerous times. But okay.

[12:53 AM] maxwellelvis: When did Doom start hiring goons? I thought his only human employee was Boris. [12:53 AM] Wack'd: We've seen him have human goons numerous times! [12:53 AM] maxwellelvis: Oh [12:53 AM] Wack'd: Just last issue a human goon he had in the 60s came back! I made a joke about what a ridiculous continuity pull it was and everything! [12:54 AM] maxwellelvis: Right [12:54 AM] Wack'd: Okay this feels like a little much but I'm sure everyone will forget he could do this soon enough

[12:54 AM] maxwellelvis: It's just weird because I'm used to him having an army of robotic henchmen, aside from the Doombots even. [12:54 AM] Wack'd: He does run a country. It'd be weird if there were no federal jobs [12:55 AM] maxwellelvis: These guys, to be specific. His Servo-Guards. [12:55 AM] Wack'd: I never said he didn't have robots

[12:56 AM] Wack'd: Man, those are some Tony Stark lookin' goons [12:56 AM] maxwellelvis: Wow, they look way less efficient than the Servo-Guards. [12:57 AM] Wack'd: Anyway Reed tries to rewire one of the robots and as a safeguard it explodes, knocking him unconscious and into a nearby lake [12:57 AM] Wack'd: Yeah, Reed's gonna die less than halfway through the issue, I buy this

[12:58 AM] Wack'd: "Face down in the water." Keith Pollard wins yet another art award [12:59 AM] maxwellelvis: Don't they write the scripts after the art is drawn? [12:59 AM] maxwellelvis: This could be on Marv's head. [01:00 AM] Wack'd: To the extent that this wasn't a myth perpetuated to justify Stan's writing credit, it was dying out by the 80s as comics became more of an auteur medium [01:00 AM] maxwellelvis: Ahh [01:00 AM] Wack'd: So possible, but unlikely [01:00 AM] Wack'd: Last time Doom was thwarted when someone pointed out he probably didn't want to destroy all the historical artifacts in the building so he's learned literally nothing. Very in character for him

[01:01 AM] maxwellelvis: This is the same guy who burned an original Renoir because he didn't like looking at it. [01:02 AM] Wack'd: Also apparently the statue Alicia's sculpting is "a gift to the UN when they vote not to condemn Latveria for its...more aggressive policies" [01:02 AM] Wack'd: Presumably also why Doom's "stepping down"--makes him look good in the run-up to the vote [01:03 AM] Wack'd: Little does he know the UN has no power and any condemnation they issue is basically just to make themselves look good! A rare day one manages to get one over on Doom [01:04 AM] Wack'd: Doom's also convinced the spaceship explosion killed Reed. For some reason. Even Sue has to point out that's a really dumb assumption [01:05 AM] Wack'd: Love me a good "Ben doesn't know when to quit" moment

[01:08 AM] Wack'd: Love a resistance. Don't love that they're big into hereditary monarchy

[01:08 AM] maxwellelvis: Especially because the guy Doom overthrew was a genocidal monster. [01:09 AM] maxwellelvis: Or maybe Doom just does that thing were every Latverian nobleman he undermined and disposed of, in his mind, he always saw the face of the man who killed his father. [01:09 AM] maxwellelvis: Y'know, like Batman. [01:10 AM] Wack'd: Possibly. Marvel Wiki says Rudolpho appeared in person occasionally through the 70s but doesn't mention anything about him being the guy who killed Doom Daddy [01:10 AM] maxwellelvis: I didn't mean to imply that. [01:11 AM] maxwellelvis: But Doom IS the kind of guy who would probably hold him just as accountable as that man was. [01:11 AM] Wack'd: Fair [01:12 AM] Wack'd: So we get to see a bit of the statue carving and the back of Doom's head looks like he's melting and Ben says he "has a puss that makes mine look like Robbie Redford's" [01:12 AM] Bocaj: I wonder if Doom will ever do a T'Challa and make Latveria a democracy so he doesn't have to put in the hours anymore [01:12 AM] maxwellelvis: Never [01:12 AM] Wack'd: Is basically every interesting or sympathetic aspect of this guy besides his origin a massive retcon [01:12 AM] Bocaj: Historically, Doom has walked away from ruling the world at least once because he found it tedious [01:12 AM] maxwellelvis: He loves being in charge [01:12 AM] Wack'd: I'm starting to feel like it id [01:13 AM] maxwellelvis: That sounds more like he didn't realize how much work the entire world would be compared to Latveria. [01:13 AM] Wack'd: So Son of Doom shows up and is like "it's time for the transference" [01:13 AM] Wack'd: I feel like we can all see where this is going [01:13 AM] Bocaj: Whats funny is that I think Doom keeps trying to conquer the world after the Emperor Doom story [01:14 AM] Bocaj: I guess wanting is better than having [01:14 AM] maxwellelvis: He's transferring his mind into his son's body, isn't he? [01:14 AM] Bocaj: He also definitely had some airs of ennui during God Emperor Doom in Secret Wars [01:14 AM] Wack'd: I also guessed this but apparently not [01:14 AM] Wack'd:

[01:15 AM] Wack'd: He's gonna give Son of Doom all the Four's powers [01:15 AM] maxwellelvis: Ah [01:15 AM] Wack'd: Minus one [01:16 AM] Wack'd: hahahahaha

[01:16 AM] Wack'd: This is basically a Superdictionary entry [01:16 AM] Bocaj: HAY THAT MACHINE [01:16 AM] Bocaj: THAT’S THE SAME MACHINE HE USED AS A SKRULL DETECTOR IN AVENGERS EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES [01:17 AM] Bocaj: "It does more than one thing. SHUT UP!" [01:17 AM] Wack'd: Huh! [01:17 AM] Wack'd: Deep cut! [01:18 AM] Wack'd: Love me some casual mook dialogue

[01:18 AM] Wack'd: God so much of this issue is just letting Reed show off [01:19 AM] Wack'd: "How will we climb this mountain?" "I'm a rope now!" "How will we hide from this drone?" "I'll make myself look like part of the mountainside!" "How will we cross this moat?" "I'm a bridge now!" [01:20 AM] Bocaj: So him giving Reed his powers back is thus implied to be not about Doom's self-serving definition of a fair fight but to fill that fourth bubble? [01:20 AM] Wack'd: Probably yeah [01:21 AM] Wack'd: Marv Wolfman: Should I pace this slower so that everyone that's been complaining about Reed not stretching has time to nut? [01:22 AM] Bocaj: pfft [01:22 AM] Wack'd: I fucking love these two

[01:24 AM] Wack'd: I would watch a sitcom about these people [01:25 AM] Wack'd: ...weren't you trying to put a king back on the throne?!?

[01:25 AM] Bocaj: Maybe they don't know what democracy means [01:26 AM] Wack'd: Latveria doesn't seem to have a robust education system [01:27 AM] Bocaj: But they do have a robot education system [01:27 AM] Bocaj: Every latverian schoolchild is taught how to make a Doombot [01:27 AM] Wack'd: So all of the rebels but the main one get trapped between sliding doors and gassed, thus massively simplifying the plot [01:28 AM] Wack'd: Zorba is distressed his men might be dead but Reed reassures him they can still win, which I'm sure was his main concern [01:29 AM] Wack'd: So it turns out Hauptmann is the brother of the original Hauptmann, who died in that Latveria epic [01:29 AM] Wack'd: I forgot [01:29 AM] Wack'd: He's totally on board with overthrowing Doom since his brother...was killed by Doom? Died on Doom's watch if nothing else. [01:30 AM] Wack'd: FINAL SHOWDOWN TIME [01:31 AM] Wack'd: I like that Doom assumes this was a clever ruse on Reed's part and that he did not, in fact, almost die

[01:31 AM] Wack'd: Anyway not final showdown time I guess! Cliffhanger time!

[01:32 AM] Wack'd: Boy the "soul-shattering secret" thing kinda makes me wish I hadn't looked him up

Mon Aug 26 2019 [01:32 AM] Wack'd: FANTASTIC FOUR VOL 1 NO 199: [01:34 AM] Wack'd: I like that Doom plays the piano. That it's just a thing he does and incorporates into his plans just because he likes it.  It's a nice little thing

[01:34 AM] maxwellelvis: That's an organ setup [01:34 AM] maxwellelvis: Just as cliche and ten times as bombastic [01:34 AM] maxwellelvis: Which suits Victor [01:36 AM] Wack'd: Anyway Zorbo is...back outside, now? And he's leading a mob? [01:37 AM] Wack'd: Doom tries to fire on them with his suit weapons but the entire mob pulls out guns and draw on him [01:37 AM] Bocaj: Normal guns? A trifle for one such as VICTOR VON DOOOOOM [01:38 AM] Wack'd: You'd think [01:38 AM] Wack'd: But he backs down and redoubles on his promise to retire [01:38 AM] Wack'd: The mob has formed, essentially, because they don't believe him [01:39 AM] Bocaj: Do they know his plan to put his son on the throne? [01:39 AM] Wack'd: Yes [01:39 AM] Wack'd: Zorbo is threatening to expose the "dark secret" behind Son of Doom [01:39 AM] Bocaj: So they're fine with that but they just don't believe Doom is really retiring? [01:40 AM] Wack'd: Well, they don't know what it is yet [01:40 AM] Wack'd: Zorbo is keeping us them in suspense [01:41 AM] Wack'd: stupid 👏🏼 baby 👏🏼 word 👏🏼 games

[01:43 AM] Wack'd: So apparently UN is threatening to expel Latveria [01:43 AM] Wack'd: This is a weird set of circumstances to slowly unfold over the course of the story but I'm digging it [01:44 AM] Wack'd: Meanwhile: Reed punches out of his sphere and frees the others while Doom is distracted with statue stuff [01:45 AM] Bocaj: Ego is his downfall as happens [01:46 AM] Wack'd: I hadn't thought about it until now but it's very interesting to me that this arc ends not with Reed learning to value his other virtues in lieu of his powers (before of course getting them back) but with him completely forgetting his midlife crisis and reforming the team

[01:47 AM] Wack'd: Like in modern comics there'd be some kind of character beat before the big return but nah, Reed can stretch again! All problems are solved forever! [01:49 AM] Wack'd: Anyway they fight some mooks, dodge some lasers, the usual, before reaching Doom. And Alicia, who is being threatened with a dislocated finger

[01:50 AM] Wack'd: So naturally the Four surrender [01:50 AM] Wack'd: Doom's speech here has big Mother Gothel energy

[01:51 AM] Wack'd: Zorbo frees the Four and Alicia. Quick turnaround time, but then the arc is ending [01:52 AM] Wack'd: The Four show up, reveal Son of Doom as a clone, fight fight fight [01:53 AM] Wack'd: ...huh. Did not see this coming

[01:54 AM] Wack'd: So anyway Son of Doom declares he has no interest in his dad's petty cruelty and thirst for revenge, and the two duke it out [01:55 AM] Wack'd: It's...pretty cool

[01:56 AM] Wack'd:

[01:56 AM] maxwellelvis: I don't think I've ever seen Doom have a breakdown like this before. [01:56 AM] Bocaj: "Learn some self-care, Doom!" "NEVER" [01:57 AM] Wack'd: As with the thing with Agatha and Nick Scratch I kinda wish the hammer had dropped sooner so we had more room to explore this dynamic [01:58 AM] Wack'd: But we definitely get some good mileage out of it in the final moments

[jasecomplex]

Death By Astonishment

The following is a real story about psychedelic drug use, if the subject matter bothers you please refrain from continuing. It’s important that the reader be at least somewhat familiar with what DMT is in order for any of this to make any kind of sense, I realize that in order to have found this report you're likely well acquainted with the subject, but I want for everyone to be able to appreciate this. Dimethyltryptamine, (DMT) is the most powerful class of psychadelics we are currently aware of. It also happens to be endogenously produced, meaning our bodies actually produce the compound, so from the moment you’re born to the moment you die you have the most powerful psychedelic drug in your brain, so do all mammals as far as I know. It is thought to be the cause of dreams, near death experiences and some alien abduction stories. The typical "smoked" freebase DMT trip is very fast in onset and very short lasting, usually around 15 minutes in total. The molecule is destroyed by the monoamine oxidase in your stomach before it's able to pass your blood brain barrier and have the desired effect. Combining DMT with an MAOI (monoamine oxidase inhibitor) allows it to be ingested orally, this is known as ayahuasca, which I'm led to believe has become quite popular among the yuppie class who like to travel to South America to exploit the last remaining vestages of an ancient land, ritual and people before they're all bulldozed over for that sweet sweet palm oil. (I kid, I kid.) My only experience is with DMT freebase. The MAOI in ayahuasca typically leads to severe gastrointestinal distress, pain, diarrhea, and vomiting are typical of the experience, and I'm not all that interested in shitting and puking my brains out as they are simultaneously sucked into the interstellar vacuum. There are multiple “levels” of the DMT trip, the most intense being what’s known as a “breakthough” dose, which is said to be the most powerful experience a person can have, after having been through it, I’m inclined to agree.

I want to note that I did not undertake this experience as a rank amateur. At this point in my psychedelic journey I was smoking DMT at least once a week and had well over dozen trips under my belt, as well as several acid trips, mushroom trips, mdma, and 2cb. You could say I fancied myself a psychonaut who could handle his shit. I have since been humbled.

Like many people who have tried getting into DMT, I was having no luck actually breaking through, I would get close, but never actually to the point of a full breakthrough experience. I thought that maybe I had broken through a couple of times, but one thing I’ve since come to realize is that there is no “maybe” to a breakthrough experience, if you have to ask upon exiting a DMT trip, “Did I break through?” the answer is no. You did not.

One thing that I feel obligated to get out of the way now is that this effort of mine, to describe my experience will be a colossal failure. I will do my best, but I will fall short, language is simply insufficient to convey a breakthrough experience to someone who hasn’t had the experience. I like to think of describing a breakthrough as trying to describe a 3 dimensional object you’ve never seen by a memory of its shadow. That being said, there will be no hyperbole in the following paragraphs, everything will be described to the best of my abilities. The gravity of the situation cannot be overstated, this is an experience that changed me at my core, an experience that shattered my perceptions of the universe and scattered the powdered remnants into the cosmic wind. The report will be split into two parts, the first will entail the experience as I remember it, not necessarily in the exact chronological order in which they occurred, time is a bit strange in the DMT world, and I've pieced what I can remember into a series of events that to me makes sense. The second part will be about how I have processed this experience over the past couple of years (yes, it has taken me that long to finally feel comfortable writing up a report), and how it has changed my core beliefs involving religion, consciousness, and indeed existence itself.

Part One: The Experience

It was a hot summer Saturday, my wife was at work and I was home alone with nothing to do, so I decided dropping some acid would be a good way to spend the day. I had recently gotten some 120μg tabs and I decided 2 would be a good dose, as one never seems to do all that much to me. One thing I love doing while on acid is listening to Terence McKenna, his way of speaking, the lateral thinking he displays and the novel ideas he puts forth are always more entertaining and inspiring to me while on acid. On this fateful day I happened to come across a video in which he describes smoking DMT while peaking on acid, and it seemed to make breaking through much easier, and I happened to have a stash of DMT and was nearing the 4 hour mark of my trip. In hindsight the hubris that follows is almost comical. I nonchalantly got my bong out, spread a layer of cannabis in the bowl, measured out 50mg of DMT, and put another layer of cannabis over the DMT. For any not in the know, the purpose of the cannabis was less to add to the high and more to protect and absorb the DMT, DMT is destroyed by open flames and becomes liquid when heated, so the bottom layer absorbs the liquid and stops it from just running into the water while the top layer keeps the flame from directly contacting your expensive DMT. When you "smoke" DMT you're actually vaporizing it, combustion destroys it.

I looked at the clock on my stove, which I can see from the living room, 4:32. I flicked my bic, placed the flame to the bowl and inhaled as deeply as I could. One hit. One hit is all I was ABLE to do, as before I even remember exhaling I was gone, I don't know if I coughed, I don't know how long I was able to hold it in. Fast is an entirely insufficient adjective to describe how fast freebase DMT hits you, especially when you're already peaking on LSD. It doesn't seem physically possible how fast it hits you, it's as if your brain starts dumping it endogenously in preparation for the freebase that's about to hit it, it's the closest thing to an instantaneous effect I've ever felt. I just messed up, bad. This is something entirely different from the experiences I've known to this point, this was somehow REAL, this combination had done something to alter the very fabric of reality, and I knew immediately that I had made a huge mistake. I remember looking at the purple and orange, sun and moon tie-dye tapestry we have hanging on our wall (yes we're hippies, get over it) and having the colors and spiral shape spread across the entire room, with every piece of furniture taking on orange and purple colors, and then distorting and spiraling upwards as if I were about to receive a visit from the Cat in the Hat. The visitor I actually received was far less pedestrian than a talking cat from a Dr. Seuss story. This orange and purple spiraling was the only open eye visual I managed to see, as immediately after taking the hit I fell back on our old futon and was no longer able to hold my eyes open. Eyes closed, mind opened.

Everything was black and eerily silent at first as I felt myself begin to be pulled/pushed upwards, away from my body. Looking up I saw blackness, with a pinprick of white, this white was what I was floating towards, slowly, and inexorably. I looked down, I could see… myself, my body, the crappy futon that had long outstayed its welcome, there was a hole in my ceiling through which I could see myself getting smaller as I moved upwards towards the waiting unknown. That’s when the real terror began. I knew I was never coming back, that my wife was going to come home and find me comatose, and that old futon that I hated so much would be where I died. I was going to leave my wife alone, forcing her to find me in that condition, scarring her for life because I had thought myself capable of concomitant psychedelic use when nothing was further from the truth. I felt powerless, stupid, selfish, I hated myself in that moment. This was terrifying, because I knew it was real, there was no doubt in my mind. As I continued being pulled from above and pushed from below, getting further and further from my body the layers of myself began peeling away. Slowly, every aspect of me that I could call “me” was being discarded, the last part of myself that I desperately clung to was my wife, the memories of her, both of loving tenderness and bitter arguments, I didn’t want to lose her, she had to be forcibly torn from my grasp, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. This was ego death, this was me dying, and from this point on I didn’t really consider myself to be myself, there was no ego attached to me with which perceive the event. I will continue to use “I” and “my" but that’s only because that’s how our memory works, I wasn’t me anymore, I understand the confusing, and unintuitive nature of this perspective, of being conscious, of witnessing, participating, thinking, reacting, and feeling without an "I" to be. With the fading of my ego came the fading of my resolve to cling to myself, and with much fear and trepidation of what was to follow, I finally let go of myself completely, I allowed myself to die. Once I let go, and accepted my dying, an overwhelming calm swept across me and the pervasive blackness all around began teeming with activity, light, and voices. These voices, singular in tone and pitch and yet innumerable in repetition and seeming sources were feminine in energy, maternal, and loving. The love I felt from those voices, the care, the worry for me, I’ll forever hold onto that feeling, there was a genuine, unabashedly accepting quality that left no doubt in my mind that the amount of love they felt for me was complete. The voices kept repeating the same mantras “We just don’t know, we don’t know, we just don’t know.” And though the words were vague, the meaning was crystal clear and unambiguous to me. They didn’t know what was on the other side, and they were sending me to find out, they were worried about me, they loved me and didn’t want any harm to befall me, but they were grateful that I was going to find out, that I had volunteered. For some reason I have always attached the name "Gaia" to these voices, they seemed to belong to the earth itself somehow.

As I looked down again I could no longer see myself, instead what presented was ethereal, green, verdant energy in wafting tendrils like a kelp forest composed of light, swaying gently in calm sea. There were spots of light in all colors, photons slowed to crawl so that I could examine them, appreciate them, name them individually. I then turned my attention upwards and the pinprick of white light had grown exponentially and was now a shimmering white wall, pulling me towards it, beckoning me to enter it and behold the majesty within. There was a voice on the other side, masculine, less kind and loving than the one that had ushered me to this point, but far from malicious.

As I came to the wall the light that had surrounded me again faded to blackness and the loving voices stopped. What I could hear now from the wall was a continuous, low humming sound that didn’t grow louder as I neared it, but somehow fuller, more complete, as if it were a frequency that had begun resonating inside of my mind. As I neared the wall I began to feel a tingling sensation from being near it, as if it were composed of a static electric charge. I entered the wall, it didn't open for me, but I was able to pass through with no resistance. As I did there was a crinkling, crackling noise, reminiscent of a potato chip bag crumpling. My vision was entirely white, I passed through it.

The sight I was confronted with directly on the other side should have left me mortified, but it didn’t. There, suspended in space was my own decapitated head, but it wasn’t macabre or gruesome in any sense. My head was being used as a projector, images beaming out of my eyes showing my life playing out, the stresses, pains, and pleasures I’ve enjoyed and endured. Then the voice spoke up, there was no body to this voice, it was a calm, masculine, objective sounding voice, no love, but no malice either, it said to me “This is what it took” and a set of images played out that he seemed to control. These images were my own memories, of times I’ve displayed curiosity in the face of adversity, how I’ve shown courage, made sacrifices and refused to believe what I was told, choosing to find out for myself. Simply in getting here I had to make myself an enemy of the culture in which I live, a criminal, ostracized and having to keep who I truly am under wraps from family and coworkers. I am brave, perhaps a bit foolhardy at times, but I have shown a sense of courage that most are unwilling to match. It should be known that I have severe depression, and don’t often think positively about myself. I considered myself a coward, weak, and deserving of the ostracism I fear. Being shown all of these things that are undeniably true, and also positive, filled me with a heretofore unknown sense of satisfaction with myself, who I am, who I am becoming, how I think, and how I think about my thoughts. I’ve never had myself shown to me in such an objective light. He wasn’t trying to make me feel good, he was simply showing me who I am, who I was in life. Indeed if I were a different person, with a different set of experiences, if I were an abusive, Machiavellian, greedy, and all around shitty person, being shown my life’s actions without the filter of my ego would have been hell. Bad people aren’t bad in their minds, they have justifications for their actions that allows them to hold onto the myth that they are decent people. This entity’s purpose seemed to be to show those who come to him who they are, objectively, without emotion, without justification.

When he was finished there was a loud, echoing snap noise, someone snapping their fingers in a cave. At this sound, I dissolved. Each and every molecule and atom of my being separated and dispersed throughout the universe, I was nothing, I was everything. “I am God.” Just like that, with three tiny, prodigious words, everything I knew as a devout secular atheist vanished. How can I say there is no God when I AM God? What is God? God is existence, God is consciousness, and I am God. Before my eyes was laid infinity, the scope, the scale, the grandeur of the universe, it was too much to handle but I had no choice, it was there and so was I. This is the part of the trip that sadly has lost the most detail, I’m left with more of an absolute impression than the individual details. I recall traveling vast distances, visiting distant worlds and observing alien life. I saw the Mandelbrot of existence in its entirety all at once, viewing every individual fractal spire in intimate, individual detail while simultaneously marveling at the beauty and immensity of the image as a whole. I was pervasive throughout the Universe and could travel wherever I wanted at a whim, instantly. I knew everything, I watched stars go from disparate gas clouds to supernovae, seeing every second of their lives in an instant. This was pure happiness, knowledge on a scale impossible to contain in a human mind. I then began falling, slowly at first, accelerating constantly.

I didn’t pass through any of the “levels” I had crossed when coming, instead I fell into blackness, but I was falling from every direction, the atoms composing my being returning from their cosmic diaspora, coalescing back into myself, and as I fell I became myself again. Piece by piece I began to remember who and what I was, I looked down and I was falling towards the Earth, I could again see my body through a hole in my roof, I was falling towards it with the acceleration of gravity. I passed through my roof, then my ceiling, I landed back inside of myself and immediately opened my eyes and inhaled deeply, awake, aware. I looked around the room, everything was tinted green, the walls were covered in impossible constantly transforming opalescent geometric patterns, I looked at one of my dogs, Spicy, a short, squat bulldog/pitbull mix, someone had clearly been having fun in photoshop with her, colors and contrast altered unnaturally, her brindle pattern fuzzing into the air itself, she was a spectrum of matter fading into nothing at the edges, and I said out loud “Thank God, everything is back to normal.” Compared to where I just was this was normal, this was the reality I know, just altered somewhat. I looked at the clock, 4:37. 5 minutes. All of that happened in the course of 5 minutes, coming out it felt like literal weeks, while I was there time seemed not to exist at all, or at least not in the linear way we know it. But I was back, after knowing for sure that I wouldn’t be, and I was happy, I couldn’t wait for my wife to get home, to hug her, to know for sure that I came back and everything was the same. But nothing has been the same, how could it be after what I’ve experienced? I truly see the world differently, my core beliefs, altered irreparably by a 5 minute experience. This was by far the most terrifying event in my life, I died, that’s not hyperbole, I lost who I was and thought I would never get it back. Scary though it may have been, it was also by far and away the most powerful experience I’ve ever had, this is an experience that redefined the words “power” and “awe” for me, I didn’t know what those words meant, the true definitions aren’t to be found in a dictionary, they must be experienced to be  comprehended. Do I regret my irresponsible actions, putting myself into a situation I wasn’t ready for? Absolutely not, I can’t say this experience was one I necessarily enjoyed in the moment, but I haven’t regretted doing it for even one second. Would I have done it if I had known what I was in for? Absolutely not, I haven’t repeated this combination because every time I think about doing it I’m viciously aware of what I’m likely to go through, that kills the desire outright, it’s scary as hell now that I know. Do I recommend anyone else combine LSD and DMT? Absolutely not, I only say this because of how immensely terrifying the experience was, I’m not going to stop anyone from going down the road I went down. but I cannot in good conscience recommend someone else repeat my actions, this is a decision to be made by mature adults, for themselves, you are the master of your own destiny and will reap what you sow. Will I do it again? I’d like to think yes, but not anytime soon I’m honestly scared of DMT now, it was my favorite drug from the moment I got my first good hit (despite the taste) I’ve now done it 3 times in the past two years, despite it being right there, beckoning. Was this an overall positive experience? Absolutely, no single experience has changed my thought processes and opened my mind more than this one, I really think I learned more about this universe in that single trip than in all my years of school.

If you are thinking of trying this combination, it’s imperative that you have ample experience with both LSD and DMT separately, and remember that it’s not LSD *plus* DMT, it’s LSD *times* DMT. One piece of advice for anyone embarking on this journey, just let go, you will come back, don’t cling to yourself, your loved ones, or anything in this world that you deem important, you’re leaving all of that behind when you agree to take these molecules into your body, it’s not a decision to make lightly.

Part 2: Processing

It’s now been 2 full years since this experience, and I’m not sure if I’ve gone 8 full hours without thinking about it at least once. This was a legitimate religious experience. I didn’t think religious experiences were actually possible until I had one. The term had the same significance to me as the term “fairy tale”. Now it carries more significance than I'm sure it does to 90% of devout Christians, a truly religious experience is far more profound to the individual than anything that can be found in the Bible.

Now, on being God. This whole “I am God” thing really threw me for a loop and I had to think a long, long time about what that meant. Do I think I’m the Christian God? No, I don’t believe in the Christian God, I don’t believe I’m anymore God than anyone else, but I think everyone else is also God. God is existence, consciousness. It’s not some separate entity to be worshipped, because everything is God. I believe Our brains do not generate consciousness, rather consciousness is a dimension and our brains tune into it like radios of sorts. All matter is conscious on some level, everything that exists knows on some level that it exists, what it is, and how it should behave. That "level" is dependent on the level of complexity, a giant boulder is far less complex than the inch worm crawling across its surface, and as a result the inch worm, despite being far smaller, and containing far fewer atoms is on a higher level of consciousness. The reason we are “more” conscious than other animals is that we are more complex than other animals, specifically in our brains. Were we to create a machine or program (or more likely a combination) that is as complex as the human body, with the complexity of our neural network it would be as conscious as we are.

This experience, coupled with the knowledge that DMT is endogenously produced, and there can indeed be endogenous DMT trips, has led me to a rather left field theory concerning religion in general. All religions have their base in endogenous DMT trips. At least all religions concerning religious experiences. Essentially my charge is that religions are just perverse, high stakes versions of the telephone game we played as children. One person had an endogenous DMT trip, told people about it as best they were able, those people then relayed the experience to others, minus or plus certain details, and thus a belief is born and subsequently spread. Then some people gathered many different experiences and beliefs and wove them into a single story, a religion. This of course would require the original stories to be extensively bastardized and warped to fit a specific intent. However genuine the origin, religion seems to draw the very worst type of people to lead them, and within a few generations the true story is lost to a strict set of rules and limitations. I’m not a fan of religion. So many people killed, tortured, persecuted, immolated, exiled and all other manners of brutality and humiliation, for nothing. Since this experience I’ve done more open minded research on religion than I had in my life up to this point, and I’ve come to a pretty unsurprising conclusion; all religions are wrong. Some are less wrong than others, Buddhism, in my opinion (and at my current knowledge level) is the closest to being correct, and much can be learned from the teachings of Buddha, specifically on the psychological implications of his beliefs on happiness and suffering. Regardless of your personal religious beliefs you would benefit from studying Buddhism and incorporating many of the philosophies into your own personal grand unified theory. In fact, based on the reading I've done, I 8think that there are more truths to be found in general with religions based on philosophy moreso than religious experience, wonder why? Now I could be entirely wrong here, and I go through life knowing that at any moment a piece of information could come along that would require a complete rethinking, beliefs should be transient and subject to information. Base the beliefs you accept on the information you have, don’t base the information you accept on the beliefs you have.

One thing that I cannot shake is the similarity between my experience and some stories I’ve heard in some religions. Most notably the entity who showed me my life, if other people have met this entity before, I could very well see him being the origin of the “Peter at the gates of Heaven” story (and every other similar myth, of which there are several) judging your life, determining whether you get into Heaven or Hell. Like I said, if I had been an awful person, this experience would have been hell, and were I the most virtuous, least flawed person on the planet it would have been Heaven. As it is I’m a decent person, I’ve done things I regret, but overall I am a good, kind, just, and honest person, and while I wouldn’t exactly call it Heaven, it was closer to Heaven than Hell.

Could this have just been a drug induced hallucination with no significance beyond that? Certainly, and I never allow myself to forget that possibility. However, anyone who thinks there is no significance to these experiences beyond interesting, purely chemical alterations of brain chemistry and neural pathways is someone I can almost guarantee hasn't had an experience on this level. You can’t see what I’ve seen and felt what I’ve felt and say it’s just the drugs, you can’t have traveled distances and beheld scales which dwarf everything you thought possible and think “I was just high.” I had no idea that a person could endure an experience so powerful, but I have, I know they exist, and I’m somewhat saddened by how few ever get to see and experience an event so intense so utterly astonishing. Falling in love, marriage, the birth of a child, losing the one most cherished to you, these are are all experiences that are bound to be powerful and have profound effects on a person, none of these hold a candle to a breakthrough. I’m not trying to offend any parents or people who have lost loved ones in saying this, but I’m convinced that there is nothing that can happen in a normal human life that’s as intense, strange, and indescribable as a breakthrough. If there is an experience more powerful, I don’t think I’m interested in having it.

I no longer fear death. Before this experience, being a secular, naturalist atheist, my biggest fear was death, but now that I’ve been on the other side, seen what there is, I no longer fear it. I do think there is more to this universe than we can see before us, and I don’t think oblivion follows this life. If you’re reading this, congratulations, you’re alive, try to enjoy it, and don’t reduce the joy of others. Just try not to live in fear of the end, you’ll be amazed at what’s on the other side, it’s more than you could ever imagine.

@JaseComplex

[whitneyrmcguireblog]

On Black Breastfeeding Week

By Whitney McGuire

It’s Black Breastfeeding Week according to Instagram and I’m sad. I don’t want to waste time describing the sadness, and maybe that’s not even the right word to describe how I feel, but tears are welling up in my eyes and my heart aches a bit.  I’m a black woman. I had a baby 4 months ago. I am not breastfeeding.

I don’t have time to entertain judgments, even those cloaked in support. And trust me, there are a lot. I’ve already lashed out on a woman for communicating the assumption that I stopped breastfeeding due to cosmetic reasons. Now that I think about it, I’m like, “so what if it was?” I only have time to be present - to see that my first child, who’s somewhat traumatic entry into this world (for me) revealed parts of myself of which I wholeheartedly am in awe. 

Presently, I see flashbacks of endless pregnancy nausea (worse than morning sickness. I had that too.) and breastfeeding classes at my midwife’s office. The joyful expectation that I will be a great mother who breastfeeds her child for at least a year. A. Great. Mother. I learned latching techniques, different hold positions to make for a comfortable feed for me and baby, and an understanding that every woman can and should breastfeed her child. “Was my former co-worker actually hyperbolizing when she said she couldn’t produce breastmilk for both of her children as she broke down in the break room every other day?” I faded out of my inner questioning and listened to statistics being tossed at me from the breastfeeding counselor making it patently clear that the act by omission -- not breastfeeding your child -- is basically considered child abuse. It didn’t take long for my instagram explore page algorithm to catch up , depicting images of pregnant women, or women with young children, happy and glowing. I knew not to click on those images. I am pretty cognizant of strengthening my muscle not to compare. But sometimes I skipped my workouts. Sometimes those images brought me to profiles that inevitably revealed a woman with one or both breasts exposed and the back of a baby’s head cradled lovingly, happily sucking away. Images like this made me feel warm and proud. Like I was about to join a sisterhood of like-minded, revolutionary, strong women championing the normalization of breastfeeding. A few looked like me. Many didn’t.

After giving birth, a lactation consultant visited me the day before I was discharged from my 7-day stay. She sat on the foot of my hospital bed. I sat in a recliner nursing my new child. He was very small. He decided to come four weeks early. The consultant quizzed me. “Do you know why breastfeeding is so important?” I listed stats I’d memorized from my breastfeeding class and hours of prior research on the topic. I wanted to be a GREAT mom. I had already delivered via emergency c-section and was repeatedly reminded how dangerously high my blood pressure was due to preeclampsia. I already wasn’t starting this motherhood journey the way I’d hoped. So, I didn’t want to fuck this quiz up.  She affirmed the correctness of my answers and gave me a warm smile and nod. I took that to mean that she agreed with me. I was going to be a great mom.

By the second week of my son’s life earthside, I had one nipple that was chaffed, sore, bleeding occasionally. Yes. I used the organic nipple balm. The other nipple was functioning but was unfortunately attached to the less milk abundant breast. My son began to fuss. Loudly. His entire body stiff, arms splayed open in frustration. Until this point, his latch had been great. Something changed, however. Now, he kicked aggressively and cried abundant tears when my nipple made contact with his mouth. He was not eating enough. I researched why this could be. I tried different holds, pumping even the sore nipple with tears of agony welling up in my eyes to try to produce more milk to freeze for future bottle feedings. I wanted to be prepared to give myself time to heal when/if this happened again. Pumping on a chaffed nipple was what I’d hoped was peak “this sucks,” for me. They tell you pumping more will help you produce more milk. I’ve heard many testimonials to this truth and a few to the contrary. For me, pumping only produced more tears. My nipple eventually healed after I began using a plastic nipple guard my friend, also a new mother, purchased for me. Feedings became easier. Finally, I felt like one of those moms I admired. Some I knew. Others I didn’t. Moms who look like they take time and energy to be patient loving attentive moms. My son enjoyed the nipple guard too.

One month after my baby’s birthday, I sat on the stoop of our brownstone Apartment cradling him prepared to finally breastfeed outside of my home or the pediatrician’s office/ ob/gyn clinic. It was a hot day. We didn't have air conditioning. I was proud to possibly perform what I considered an amazing phenomenon of the human body, in public. I wanted to look anyone in the eye who passed and glanced in my direction during this sacred, beautiful act. I was ready to make my activism seen...known.  I wanted to challenge any glances contrary to approval. Proud. Stern. Stately. I am proudly a black woman. I was also proudly a breastfeeding woman -- just with a nipple guard. Eventually it was time to feed my baby.  I realized I left the nipple guard upstairs, so I took out one of my breasts and attempted to put my bare nipple in my baby’s mouth. He hollered and protested. A foiled attempt however, not the final one. 

Two weeks later the kicking and screaming started again, even with the nipple guard. I relied on the advice and support of my fellow new moms one of which paid for an in-home lactation consultant. This one was different than the hospital counselor. She was more thorough. She weighed my baby before and after feeding. She observed his latch and informed me that I probably didn’t need the nipple guard anymore. “He’s doing perfectly! Great latch!” I smiled in affirmation. But felt the sting of impending failure creep up from that nipple guard comment. I had been using it religiously for a little over a month. Maybe that was too much time. She watched me pump for 20 minutes. Observed that I was producing a “perfect” amount of milk and put me on a more strict pumping schedule so I could start to store milk. I hadn’t been able to store milk during the days leading up to her visit. His appetite had grown voracious. I was pumping and feeding around the clock. Days blurred together. I was so tired. I resented my husband for being able to leave the house to go to the laundromat or the corner deli. I cried more. My child’s appetite grew more insatiable.

I lamented a bit on instagram stories about my journey thus far. Many mothers expressed their similar journeys and frustrations with breastfeeding. They connected me to other moms and doulas. A few moms directed to lactation support groups. The thing was, I had anxiety about leaving the house. I was unsure that I would be able to perform the act of breastfeeding in front of other moms. I began to feel my goal of being a great mom slipping away. How was I only 1.5 months in and already fucking up?

A very good friend of mine, a mother of four young children, also a black woman, informed me that she too was unable to adequately breastfeed her first 3 children. She supplemented the little breast milk she was able to produce with formula and donor milk. She too pumped often, on the highest setting sometimes. Her first three children had been delivered via cesarean. All three had some amount of trauma attached the circumstances of their birth, from hospital staff to insurance, her first was the most traumatic of them all. Yet, all of her children are remarkable. My idea of a great mother was becoming more layered. As a result, I massaged the thought of formula feeding and tabled it.

I’ll never forget asking my husband, through tears, to run to the drug store to get formula one particularly rough night. I counted every ounce of formula I gave my baby. I tried to reserve his consumption of it for times when he wouldn’t latch at all, which became more and more frequent. Every time I prepared a bottle of formula for him I cried. I couldn’t watch my husband feed it to him. Each time he was fed from the bottle, his crying stopped. He was full, not of breast milk, but of a manufactured substance. He would burp and fall asleep just like he did when he was full of breast milk. He was full. He was at peace. Did he know the difference? Maybe I wasn’t a great mom at the moment, but I was starting to feel like a pretty ok one.

Feeding my baby formula two weeks into his third month still evoked intense sadness for me, but somehow it also allowed me to experience more freedom: longer naps, sporadic phone meetings for work, time out of the house with or without my baby. The sadness led me to once again seek out lactation support. A doula I met on Instagram told me how bad the formula advice was that my friend gave me. I disagreed but thought this doula’s perspective was worth exploring. Maybe my friend wasn’t as educated as this doula was on the subject. Maybe this doula wasn’t as educated about the validity of one’s inability to breastfeed.

I walked 2 miles (part of my personal recovery from my csection) to another lactation counselor’s office. I’d called the day before to make sure someone would be there. I showed up. She wasn’t there. My hopes of reclaiming my great mom title came crashing down. It didn’t help that I had also just had an argument with a close friend that morning. I was reeling with anger and frustration. “WHY HAS ALL OF THIS BEEN SO HARD?!” My pregnancy was mired in sickness. I developed a disease that came pretty close to taking me, my baby, or both of us out of here. And now breastfeeding wasn’t going well? I felt faint and dizzy from the thoughts of failure. I accepted defeat during the two mile walk back home and immediately made my son a bottle of formula. 

I’m four months into being a mom and I’m learning more and more each day that I am not just an ok mom, I’m a good mom. I know this based on the fact that my child is happy and according to his pediatrician, quite healthy. He exudes joy. He is taken care of and loved with every fiber of his parents’ (and grandparents’) being. I’m still sad, however. When hashtags and my instagram algorithm remind me that other moms would look at what I feed my child in pure disgust, I get sad. When I see my friends effortlessly whip out a boob to soothe their fussy child forming an instant, animalistic, instinctual, necessary bond, I’m sad.  My mother breastfed me for two months before switching to formula. She had to go back to work. She tells me she couldn’t produce enough milk to store. I too had a voracious appetite, apparently.  I didn’t know this until after I gave birth. Why would I? I didn’t fit the description of the “formula fed baby” I pieced together from the statistics freely tossed at me during breastfeeding class.

Simply put, my baby preferred the bottle over my breast. Ultimately, he decided for himself and left me in the grey of a seemingly black and white issue: breastfeeding is best, formula is worst. Pick a side. What of those of us whose children picked a side for them? Are we cast out of the club? Do we form our own club? As a black woman, I’m pretty exhausted with aspects of my existence being defined in reaction to othering. And now, it seems like there’s no way for me to cross the isle into Breastfeeding Mom Land. Even if breastfeeding women empathize with my situation, I will still envy their ability to breastfeed because I cannot. I will still, somehow be othered and quite frankly, as a result, judged. Motherhood is not a monolith. Our experiences, while somewhat similar, are wholly our own. So are our children (archaic concepts of the ownership of people aside). The best lesson from motherhood so far is that my child is not a vessel for my insecurities or fears. He is not a projection of the aspirations I have for myself. He is his own person with his own karma, abilities, and abundant future (hopefully joyful) experiences. 

The movement for public breastfeeding is in the lead for breastfeeding causes and this messaging exists in a variety of media. Black breastfeeding is a distant cousin. Still present. Not as amplified. Which is why I wholeheartedly support Black Breastfeeding Week and its mission. I want other black mothers to know of this movement. I want them to do their independent research on breastfeeding, take classes, form support networks early and often (or at least know where to go for breastfeeding support). Very few moms discuss how incredibly hard breastfeeding actually is. Even fewer discuss the inherent effects of racism on black mothers from the healthcare system to the availability of general education on the topic of breastfeeding. #Blackbreastfeedingweek will hopefully change that.

I am choosing to nurture my child holistically. I’m not sure whether this means stepping away from social media to eliminate the trigger of seeing a woman breastfeeding, especially since I’ve received so much helpful advice and support from complete strangers on social media. I am sure that it involves formula, albeit organic. I’m certainly not happy about my ejection from the breastfeeding club, especially when I tried so hard to get in. Expending more time and resources to be told what I’ve already tried, about which I’ve cried so so much about to this day, no longer interests me. I’m really only interested in being present for my baby’s beautiful growth which I’m overjoyed to witness, even behind occasional tears.

[democratsunited-blog]

Will Democrats Fumble the 2018 Midterm Elections?

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=4189

Will Democrats Fumble the 2018 Midterm Elections?

Last Thursday, The Atlantic ran a story that was pretty darn embarrassing for the national Democratic leadership – or should have been. Five black women who’d won House primaries around the country told assistant editor Elaine Godfrey the party had completely blown them off: no support, no contact, not even a congratulatory call or email when they won. “I have yet to receive one red cent from the local, the state, or the national party,” said Jeannine Lee Lake, who beat five other Democrats in a House primary in Indiana on May 8th. Lake said she totally understands that the party can’t realistically throw money into every House race, especially in heavily Republican districts like hers. Even so, why the cold shoulder, especially at a time when Democratic officials are constantly yammering about black women being “the backbone” of the party? “It’s the height of hypocrisy,” Lake said. “We bring millions of votes into these campaigns, and we’re gettin’ no love.” At the very least, Lake said, “the optics look bad.”

The next morning, the optics looked worse. On Friday the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which works to elect Democrats to the House, rolled out ten new additions to its “red-to-blue” program, aimed at flipping Republican seats in November. Ten new all-white candidates, that is. The DCCC had already come under fire earlier this year, when its program – which gives selected candidates funding, organizational, and field support that are essential to winning – had anointed a couple dozen contenders early on, with not a single black candidate among them. Now, with 53 candidates included, just three are black. (Check out the roster on the DCCC site.) But if Democrats are embarassed by this shameful lack of representation, you wouldn’t know it: The DCCC could not even wait out out the weekend, while a viral story about its exclusion of black women was making the rounds, before announcing they were getting behind a bunch more white people.

This sort of clumsy tone-deafness has been the defining characteristic of the Democratic Party’s midterm efforts thus far. The Democratic leadership appears determined to alienate, as often and thoroughly as possible, the very people who could lift it to victory in 2018 and beyond: not just black women (who famously put Senator Doug Jones over the top in Alabama last December), but pretty much everybody to the left of Chuck Schumer.

If that sounds hyperbolic, just look at the week the party had before its “red-to-blue” blunder. The previous Friday, June 8th, the DNC’s rules committee had infuriated progressives with a gratuitous slap at Bernie Sanders – a resolution that requires future presidential candidates to swear allegiance to the Democratic Party or be left off primary ballots. In practical terms, this was a nothingburger: Sanders can still run for the party’s nomination in 2020 if he takes the new blood oath. But the relative meaningless of the resolution made it even more mystifying: The only thing it would accomplish – besides giving a shot of schadenfreude to Democratic elites who blame Sanders and the left for the party’s wipeout in 2016 – was a raft of ugly headlines that would inflame the Bernie people (otherwise known as 43 percent of Democratic primary voters in 2016.)

The headlines screamed, of course, of a “Bid to Block Bernie Sanders.” (That was Fox, and Fox was gleeful—as was the conservative TownHall, whose headline exalted, “DNC Just Took Another Swipe At Bernie Sanders and His Supporters.”) The Twitterverse went predictably bonkers at this latest evidence of the party’s hostility to the left – including a well-documented pattern of strong-arming grassroots progressives out of this year’s congressional primaries in favor of well-heeled, center-left whites.

“I scratch my head and ask why they would want to make the party more narrow and more exclusive,” said Mark Longabaugh, a senior Sanders adviser in 2016. Sanders campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, asked, “Do they really want Bernie and his millions outside the party?”

If the Democratic Party has learned anything from 2016, it’s certainly not effective public relations. After passing a resolution that was bound to piss off a large chunk of the party, not to mention progressive-minded independents, the Democrats had no public explanation, much less convincing spin, for what they’d just done. Committee member Maria Cardona, a former Clinton staffer, told Yahoo News: “The entire committee backed this. It was unanimous.” Which, naturally, only made it sound worse to the Bernie crowd – see, the whole party leadership hates us! “It was done,” Cardona went on to non-explain, “to ensure that the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party is actually a Democrat.” (Actually, others admitted off-the-record, the slap at Sanders was designed to assuage the angry Clintonites who still want to punish the progressives for their sins of 2016.)

But wait—the elites weren’t done yet! While half of the party seethed over the Sanders ruling, a longtime DNC member (and Clinton superdelegate) from California named Bob Mulholland cc’d reporters on a memo he’d written to party chair Tom Perez and vice-chair Keith Ellison, claiming that a Sanders supporter who’d been attending DNC meetings since 2016, a West Virginia woman named Selina Vickers, was a Russian agent working to undermine the party from within. What tipped him off? Vickers, who’s been attending DNC meetings (on her own dime) to keep track of party reform efforts, had told Mulholland that she’d voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the 2016 general election. And since Stein attended a 2015 Moscow dinner with Vladimir Putin — well, what more proof do you need? Mulholland had none. But Vickers, as a Stein voter, had to be a Russian plant, even if she did run as a Democrat for state House this spring. (She lost by less than 500 votes – but clearly this was just a ruse for her nefarious foreign operations.) “Someone is picking up her expenses,” Muholland wrote – clear evidence that “the Putin operation is still alive.”

And thus, as The Washington Post‘s David Weigel noted, the Democrats made their way into the headlines again, this time for a “special kind of absurdity.” Vickers told Weigel she’d voted for Stein because her state, West Virginia, was going for Trump overwhelmingly and she wanted to give a vote to keep the progressive Mountain Party, the state’s Green party affiliate, on the ballot in 2018. Instead of a Russian provocateur, Vickers was one of the many progressives across the country who’d been moved to act by the results in 2016 – the kind of Democrat the party should be encouraging and nurturing, rather than, you know, publicly accusing of treason without a shred of proof. “It would be laughable if it weren’t so embarrassing,” said DNC member Michael Kapp. Which is a pretty fair summation of the Democratic Party’s whole mid-term effort thus far. This thing would be downright hilarious if it didn’t matter so goddamn much.

Let’s be clear: There is no shortage of squalling babies on either side of the divide that’s killing the party’s ability to be an effective vehicle for the Resistance. The fightin’ Sandernistas can be every bit as petty and short-sighted as the clingin’ Clintonites. But it’s the latter group that still holds the power in the national party to veto reforms the progressives want, to funnel resources into centrist House campaigns (and away from more progressive candidates), or to slap down Sanders and his supporters for no discernible reason but settling imaginary scores from 2016. All of which they – the self-proclaimed adults of the party, who claim to have a corner on electoral wisdom and strategery that all Democrats should heed – have been doing with reckless abandon practically since the moment Trump was declared the new president.

Democrats have everything going for them in 2018. Here is a party that gets to run against an historically unpopular and palpably dangerous Republican president – Donald F-ing Trump, everybody! – with an equally historic explosion of progressive energy and organizing behind it. At the very least, the Democrats should be able to secure a House majority in November that would give the party a small purchase on power – and a serious way to throw tacks in Trump’s road to tyranny. On an average mid-term year since the Civil War, the party out of power has won 32 new seats—and the Democrats, with every conceivable political wind at their back, need only 24. Still, no matter what new daily atrocities belch up from the White House, the party’s chances grow more remote all the time – since almost every day also seems to bring a fresh new insult to grassroots Democrats and left-leaning independents.

It started with electing Perez, the choice of the Clintonites, as party chair in the wake of 2016. The former labor secretary began with talk of unity, then immediately axed senior party officials who’d backed Sanders in what progressives called a “purge.” Then the DCCC began “shaping” its field of candidates for 2018, following a centrist “Blue Dog” model that Rahm Emanuel, then DNC chair, used to great controversy in 2006—the midterm election that sent a bunch of gun-toting, budget-slashing, Jesus-talking conservative Democrats to Washington. Twelve years later, and a political world removed, the party’s idea of a “winning” candidate would be the same: Someone who’s well-off enough to “self-fund” in the millions, or well-connected enough to raise big money from others, and who’s also willing to follow the Washington consultants’ advice about strategy and “messaging.”

Among other messaging “tips,” the DCCC advised candidates to steer clear of talking about gun control in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre. It’s also tried to banish the term “single payer” from the Democratic vocabulary, despite the fact that most Americans support it – and despite the fact that 78 percent of Democratic voters say they want to hear their party talk about universal healthcare “a lot” in 2018.

The party is sending a clear message, all right: We haven’t changed a bit. “Democrats are well known for their chronic inability to seem like they stand for anything,” wrote Rafi Schwartz at Splinter. “Instead, they come off as wishy-washy centrists who compromise on everything, and get nothing in return. Trying to shut down or rhetorically camouflage all talk of single payer is pretty excellent evidence of that.”

It’s all in the name of winning, of course! The kind of winning the Democrats have been doing, presumably, over the last four election cycles – when the party and its strategic wizards presided over a massive loss of power at local, state, and federal levels. Nevertheless, the strategy used over that catastrophic stretch is by and large the same one the party is following this year by, among other things, meddling in local elections (which the Republican Party, as a matter of policy, does not do). “I hope for a wave” in 2018, Nancy Pelosi told the Austin American-Statesman in February, “but I believe you make your wave.” Which is exactly what the grown-ups in the Democratic leadership were doing, she said, despite all those annoying catcalls and complaints from the left. “This is a cold-blooded, strategic, focused campaign to win the Congress for the American people,” Pelosi said. “We don’t waste time. We don’t waste energy. We don’t waste resources.”

They also don’t win elections – even with a fast-rising demographic advantage and an electorate that leans more and more leftward in its views. The one thing the Democratic leadership has done undoubtedly well in recent years is divide its own members into warring factions. Which is a kind of achievement, when you consider that the Democrats in 2018 are arguably more ideologically unified than ever before. For all the ballyhooed “divisions” between the progressive and centrist wings of the party, they have little to do with where the party actually stands on policy issues. In the ’00s, the Democrats had bitter disagreements over such consequential matters as the Iraq War and abortion rights. The left and center-left still differ on trade policy, and on whether to push for single payer or opt for an Obamacare revamp. But that’s about it, as the New America Foundation recently found in a survey of Democrats: The rest of the disagreements are largely matters of tone and strategy – and long-smoldering factional resentments that party leaders can’t seem to stop fanning.

If only it didn’t matter so much. But in a moment of rising authoritarianism, with democracy itself at stake, the Democrats are the only hope our political system offers for peacefully turning back the Trumpian tide. If the party blows its chance at a House majority, there will be even less of a check on Trump for the last two years of his first term. And so we can only hope against hope – the great “we,” that is, that constitutes 60 percent of anti-Trump Americans – that the favorable political currents this year are too strong for even the Democratic Party to drown itself. At this point, it’s a thin, wistful hope: Please, Democrats, don’t blow this one completely. And it’s all we’ve got. 

Read full story here

[houseinva]

At the start of round 2 I was indifferent towards the idea of sex with Ben. In fact, I leaned more towards not wanting sex at all with him. But Ben sure was a charmer, at least when he wanted to be; he knew how to make all the right moves, say all the right words, and put me in all the right positions (no pun intended) to make that indifference turn into an infatuation and ultimately an addiction.

And so I became Ben’s side-piece, only I thought I was at least part of the main course. I didn’t know that I was balancing out Ben’s real main course, his relationship that was void of sex and affection, by giving him all  my heart, my body, and all the attention and energy imaginable. I grew to adore Ben like no other.

I gave Ben authentic love, which is precisely what he sought; he ended up getting the best narcissistic from me in the universe. True, authentic, unconditional love isn’t easy to come by these days…

…whereas finding a side piece is. Being fooled into believing you’re the main squeeze when you’re really just a mistress is enough came to destroy my entire sense of self.

    At the time I was clueless as to what was really taking place. I had no idea what narcissistic supply even was. I legitimately thought that Ben really dug me, I thought that we were an “item.” Only we weren’t’ really an item, I was an item, an object, an extension of Ben to use as he saw fit. In the beginning he saw fit to use me for good things and I loved it, I didn’t question his motives, I thought he was honest, loving and inherently good.

    But good things never last for long; at least that’s what I’ve come to discover… and there’s really nothing good that ever comes out of narcissism. You’ll never read a story about a narcissist that has a happy ending, that’s for sure.

    Before I get ahead of myself, let me stop and go back to the amazing times I spent with Ben at the starts of round 2, unknowingly (and eventually even knowingly) as none other than his side piece, as nothing but a piece of supply. I fought for my spot though, not knowing what I was signing up for....

The sex went from an okay learning experience for me to… out of this world, incredible for us both. Sex with Ben was something I never imagined possible between two people, at least not with one of those people being me. Our one day each weekend quickly turned into marathon, hours-long sex sessions, one event after the next. He was gifted in bed and he knew it; plus he knew how to add on all the bells and whistles, there was nothing he wouldn’t do sexually, nothing he couldn’t do well sexually, and nothing that was too taboo for him. Plus he was hot, he was extremely handsome, he was fit, he had a gorgeous body, he was flexible, he was versatile, and he knew how to put on quite a show; it seemed like Ben’s purpose on Earth was to spread sexual enjoyment. While Ben always claimed to be a versatile top, suddenly he wanted to bottom all the time for me. I had not seen us going in that direction but Ben was accurate in his assessment, and I truly fell in love with his bum, I did. That ass was solid, it was large, it was beautiful, and it was amazing. While I learned the basics of sex from my ex, it was Ben who took things to a whole new level. He always gave me pointers on how to improve (and I’d do them, and watch as he became more and more impressed), and so I credit Ben for being the one that actually broke me into the world of sex. He was a connoisseur when it came to sex, and he was adamant about instructing me on the right way to do things in bed. I also credit Ben for being the one that corrupted me in truly exposing me to the “dark side.”.

  Ben prided himself on my sexual progress, he loved mentioning how bad I was when we first met compared to how much I’d excelled in bringing him pleasure on the regular. Watching me grow sexually and singing my praises also made his already large ego grow to ginormous proportions. Thanks to his one-on-one instruction in the sack, I turned into his preferred sexual partner in the DMV. Ben was definitely heavy on the flattery and flirtatiousness, which made my insecurities disappear, his words were hyperbole at its best:.

“You’re my favorite top, hand’s down. Any time you want sex don’t hold back – just text me. If I’m having sex with someone else I’ll even get up and leave so you can fuck me!”

I wasn’t always sure what to make of Ben’s grandiose words, as they sometimes seemed a bit back-handed, often sending me in two different directions, scratching my head. Like with the above he was clearly singing my sexual praises… yet did he intentionally throw in the part which, to me at least, reiterated that I was not worthy of monogamy or being his boyfriend one day?  Or like these… they just seem a bit back-handed or perhaps phony, I don’t know…

…maybe I was just overthinking like Ben would often suggest.

But regardless of mixed messages, his actions always showed me how much he enjoyed being with me instead of anyone else, and he had no shortage of options.

    I felt almost honored, like I’d hit the jack-pot, for Ben to have picked me to “make over” and fill my time with this bind-blowing pyrotechnic sex.

I was definitely the more old-fashioned one in the couple when it came to all things sexual, that’s for sure.

Ben could bring out the sexual side of us both, while I remained hidden, tail between my legs, and I’d still come out feeling more and more confident each time. Before I knew it, Ben spending his one weekend day with me was a given I grew accustomed to. There was one day when he came and left 13 times for sex in leas than 24 hours! It was odd but I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity, us being together was definitely not boring, and with time it just kept getting better and better.

Soon I found myself craving Ben: his smell, his taste, his everything just turned me on to the point where if I saw him walking into my building from afar, I got butterflies in my stomach. I had just become comfortable having sex with my ex when everything went to hell, and since then, I’d been a sexual recluse. I hadn’t been sexual up until Ben reentered my life and things went from nothing to balls-to-the walls. It got to the point where the only person I could imagine in a sexual light was him, and when I tried with others it was always a let-down, I couldn’t help but compare everyone to Ben, who was a master when it came to anything sexual. Ben was sex-bombing the hell out of me, I didn’t have to leave my house for anything, he always came to me, he always initiated sex, he always took away the awkwardness I felt with other, and left me with no insecurities about myself. Ben was one that seemed very confident in his looks and performance, it’s like he viewed himself almost as a sexual god. He dubbed himself my sexual “coach” and transformed me into what he claimed he saw in me when we first met.

“When I saw your dick, I knew what you could become,” he told me, which I found strange, given that he’d never once complimented anything about me during round 1, if anything it was the opposite.  “I knew when I first met you that one day we’d be just like this. I’ve got you exactly how I wanted you.”

Despite the fact that the statement seemed inaccurate based on my recollection of history, hearing that made my self-esteem rise above sea level, it rose to the heavens, I felt on top of the world at last. He wanted sex in every way, shape and form, sex in every possible location, he brought all these sex toys and oils and just about everything under the sexual sun to house in a cabinet in my bedroom. The things that came out of Ben’s mouth or through his fingers via text never ceased to amaze me…

While I continued sensing some occasional back-handed compliments, or “jabs” as I’d call them, I could never prove he was actually doing this or intending to leave me second-guessing things. So I chose to just accept them all as compliments, and I truly believed every word he said. Why wouldn’t I?

Minus the gratuitous sexual content, the majority of what Ben said was so beautiful and so full of kindness and positivity that I stopped trying to analyze the situation and accepted what I saw via his actions: Ben wanted me as an integral part of his life. Before I knew it, he was over both days each weekend, then during the week after work. It turned out his boyfriend actually liked working - which was all he did - leaving Ben with nothing else to do but me.

Ben showed me more attention than I’d ever received in my life, he paid me more compliments than I’d ever thought possible, and he gave me more sexual pleasure in 18 months than I’ll probably have in the rest of my lifetime. During round 1, Ben ended our stint on a sour note – but in round 2, he managed to exceed anything I’d thought could exist in real life romance. He was beyond a gentleman, he was… my angel, he was my savior, he’d given me a reason to live and believed I was still worth something. HIV left me feeling so alone and without hope for a future, but having Ben there with me changed everything and made having HIV a moot point. I couldn’t have found a more loving, kind and perfect man to be at the center of my universe. Except that I wasn’t the center of his universe sadly. But overall, looking back, those were some beautiful, memorable days; every spare second Ben had, he was either by my side, or hitting me up to make plans to be by my side. He’d text me on Monday, asking me to pencil him in the next weekend. And before I knew it, it wasn’t just one day each weekend, it was the whole weekend, and then it after work drugin the week, too. Making plans? Why bother; it’s not as if he had to talk me into anything at that point, I was hooked, I’ll admit it, I was addicted to Ben. Addicted, no joke, that’s the only way I can describe it. If I went 2 days without seeing him it felt like I was going through a withdrawal.

But it was rare that I went 2 days without seeing Ben, so it wasn’t all that bad, at least not at the time. Ben wouldn’t let me go 2 days without seeing him as making plans with me was his top priority.

 I’ll never forget waking up one morning to someone holding me in bed. I just about had a heart attack when I realized it was… Ben.

He was such the opposite of how he was during round 1. Not one, single time – in 18 months – did we see each other without having sex, sex, and more sex. But it was more than just sex: Ben became my best, closest and tightest friend.

Ben was not only my best friend, he was also my one and only PPIC – Poz Partner in Crime. For the first time ever, I consistently forgot all about having HIV. Ben made for an incredible escape, but unlike round 1, he wasn’t here for the short-term he made very clear.

I’ve never had someone sweat me like Ben did, it was such a compliment, it was so much fun.

And not once did I ever consider wanting to spend that time with someone else, I was perfectly content passing every free moment with my Benjamin. He was soooo good to me, he beyond catered to my every wish, need and fantasy that it was like being in heaven. Ben changed my life completely..

While I was the one that insisted on footing the bill for whatever we were ordering in to eat, or for occasional gas money since Ben always drove to me, he didn’t spend money on me ever, nor did he need to. He often came by having gone to the 7-11, bringing me 2 things I loved: Gummy Bears and Simply Lemonade, the best. It was a kind gesture, just thinking back on him carrying a bag into my place still makes me smile. I don’t think there was anything Ben could have meant more than those gummies and lemonade, and of course, our amazing time together.

Ben could come off as a bit haughty and reserved at times, perhaps standoff-ish with others, like he didn’t want to interact with other people and was introverted. So the fact that he had so much interest in seeing me all the time made me feel so special; the fact that he was giving me God’s gift to the world of sex on the regular, when my life had been sexless for practically its entirety, gave my existence a whole new meaning. I had found a diamond in the rough, and I believed that diamond was here to stay with me forever.

If someone had told me that in several months, our relationship would be the complete and polar opposite, I’d have said that wasn’t possible, I’d have thought they were smoking crack honestly; this sort of friendship was so monumental it was divine. And if someone had suggested Ben’s fame and notoriety would reach far outside of DC, landing him with fans throughout the nation, the backing of the federal government, and access to everything from the most advanced technology to a “get out of jail free card” for enjoying all the sex, drugs and risky business imaginable, I’d have been 100% certain they were smoking crack.

                Looks like somebody’s smoking crack – oh wait – that”s just Ben!

    Things in the world of narcissism are like the Twilight Zone, I hate to admit that I now know narcissistic personality disorder so well I could probably lecture on it... but at that time, I was blind to reality, I could only see Ben’s beautiful ass and was blind to everything else. We couldn’t be in the same room together for more than 2 minutes without our clothes coming off… nobody’s ever had that effect on me…

I appreciated everything Ben did for me, I looked forward to every moment I had with him, and somehow my time with Ben laying around my condo turned into the highlight of my life.

I was certain that nothing could ever break the bond we shared. Given the amount of time Ben spent focusing on me, on getting together, I thought these beautiful times were here to stay.

Ben swore that nothing could come between us, nothing at all, and I believed him. For whatever reason, Ben became perfect in every way, shape and form to me.

Well, in almost every way, shape and form; there was one thing I didn’t find perfect: Ben’s nick-name  for me wasn’t very complimentary.

At first I thought it was cute, but then it seemed a bit ageist at the same time. I was maybe 5 years older than him, but when it came to life experiences, Ben was eons ahead of me so I didn’t view him as younger, I always saw him as my equal. I chose not to make a big deal about it and instead embrace it, and from that point forward I was “pops” and he was “son.” I often sent him little memes by text, with images of fathers and sons, in hopes of making him laugh whenever I could. But I won’t deny that constantly being called the name of a father, or often a grandfather, didn’t eventually takes it’s tole and make me feel like I was a geezer.

But at the time being, nicknames were cherished, they were interpreted, good or bad, to at least mean one thing: I was special to him, and I even had a special name.

Even if that nickname reflected an old geezer, he seemed to look after me quite well. At least I thought that’s what he was doing at that time… looking after me… although later on I’d wonder if Ben wasn’t looking at me under a microscope. That would eventually be the million dollar question…

Talk about charming, talk about selfless, talk about a freak-in-bed nymphomaniac, but in a good way, Ben was at my place every spare second either one of us had, and I took it as a huge compliment because Ben was super picky, Ben could have anyone he wanted but yet he wanted me. But on top of that our friendship seemed to get stronger by the day; Ben made a point of telling repeatedly how much our friendship meant meant to him above all else. Although he always came over taking off his clothes, acting as if sex wasn’t an option, it was a must, and I happily followed his lead.

Ben was just sooooo into me that I was beside myself:

“He must have finally saw the true me, and that I’m not like all the other guys out there, that I really do care about him, that my words aren’t fake, that I treat people kindly,” I often thought to myself, knowing that Ben had experienced a lot of the opposite in his formative years. It never dawned on me that maybe Ben’s interest in me was something completely different altogether…

To say Ben went out of his way to form a bromance with me wouldn’t do it justice; he sweated me like nobody’s business, he gave me everything I ever wanted (and even things I never wanted as I didn’t know they existed) in a partner. As time marched on, even at the 18 month mark, we hadn’t lost interest in sex, nor saw it become the slightest bit boring. Strangely things only got better, even hotter, for the both of us when it came being intimate.

At the 10 month mark of round 2, I found myself suddenly enthralled with Ben sexually, I was craving him when he wasn’t there, and I always made sure to be my Sunday (and Saturday) best every weekend.

Us spending all this time together, us having sex nonstop, us planning on doing things we never did but spent an awful lot of time talking about… Ben initiated all of it, he had the balls that I was missing. Ben groomed me into what he wanted me to be in bed. For 10 straight months I’d say we averaged 20 hours a week having sex; and it never got lame, not for me, not for him – he couldn’t get enough – he was even sneaking out after midnight during the week to come over and fuck all night long. So much for my fears of Ben disappearing on me…

It was like the heaven’s had finally smiled down upon me and given me exactly what I was always looking for in a lover.

While I grew to really love Ben a great deal in those initial 10 months I didn’t feel threatened by or jealous of his ex, of have a problem with being the “side piece.” Ben had truly hooked me up in giving me his body to use as a blank canvas so I could figure out the ins and outs of sex; then again, he enjoyed every carnal moment of it, too. In those 10 months we never had an argument, we never bickered one single time, we were inseparable the moment we were in each other’s presence and forever making love. It was weird, it was inexplicable, but it seemed to work perfectly just how it was.

Ben was so dominant, and I was so submissive, yet…. I was the top and he was the bottom, although he always pretended he wasn’t. But he was so overtly sexual in all he said, in all he texted, in all he did, he was the ‘ying to my sex-less yang. He  enabled me to break out of my shell and finally feel like I was desirable, even with HIV.

Unlike my ex, this time the sex, the bond, for both parties not just for one, this was finally authentic – it wasn’t fake, it wasn’t psychopathic, this was the real deal – and Ben had a heart behind his, well, penis. Ben was truly the full package, but I still didn’t allow myself to develop feelings for him outside of loving him like my bestest friend.

Damn, he was quite the little man-slut; and I loved every bit of it, it was everything I couldn’t be myself, it was fun. Ben definitely grew to be my favorite guy in my history of guys, hands-down, every night with him was an adventure, every moment spent with him was full of laughter and hot sexual tension.

I was love-bombed beyond my wildest dreams (and nightmares). Ben made me his number 1 guy (next to his sexless bf, that is) and he was determined, assertive and didn’t take no for an answer; in fact, he didn’t really have to ask, I never said no, I wanted whatever he did, and plus I trusted him.

This was every gay man’s dream come true. I couldn’t believe what I was experiencing, it was amazing, he was everything I ever wanted in a guy… with all this sluttiness I didn’t know existed added in there.  It was blast. This wasn’t just a fleeting interest, this was something special, whatever it was.

Ben pulled out every trick in the book to show me he was an honest, loving, caring friend who truly loved me. I’d never been treated like this in my entire life. This was a unique friendship that I thought would last a lifetime, Ben was someone I could always rely on, he always followed through with what he said. He was amazing, he was perfect, he was… using a lot of techniques specific to narcissistic abuse, particularly the first phase of the relationship, idealization or “love-bombing,” only I didn’t know it yet, nor did I know the true power something like this could have over me, or over many people for that matter. This form of manipulation and brain-washing is a power like nothing I’ve ever encountered, it made me trust Ben no matter what, it made me obey him no matter what, it made me crave him no matter how horribly he treated me, it made me do things I’d have never considered doing otherwise. It left me addicted to and longing for Ben despite all the abuse that was to follow. There’s a reason why psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, and even cults use this very same technique to brainwash their victims: because it’s effective, very effective, in converting you into their slave. There’s a reason why it’s so difficult for people to go “no-contact” with a narcissist when it’s a no-brainier decision they know they should do yet they can’t. It makes one trust a predator no matter what, it makes one crave this person like a drug, and it makes one believe the unbelievable and do the unthinkable at their command. It bypasses logic altogether, it creates a biochemical bond enshrined into one’s brain by a slew of neurotransmitters.  If someone tells you that another person cannot control you without your consent, they’re dead wrong. They haven’t experienced it is all, but I’m jumping the gun again.

Ben was monumental in my life honestly, especially given my loneliness living now with HIV. When someone touches your life (and you) in such a way, that’s a person that becomes extremely influential and special, it’s someone who, no matter how much time passes, just thinking about them leaves you feeling giddy.

I didn’t realize that Ben was a predator, and he’d marked his territory, he’d gotten me hooked, and I became dependent on him like a drug. Yet I still felt content despite knowing that I was losing control. I thought our plan was clear-cut and established: we had a bond that was special, and it was going to last forever this way. The problem was Ben never bothered to share his real plan with me ever, instead, he just reiterated this other plan that wasn’t really a plan for him at all, it was a “my truth”: a term later coined to describe Ben’s lies. They weren’t really lies but rather they were what he wanted to be true when the words left his mouth.

Eventually I began to notice, like in round 1, Ben would finish his sexual praises of me by adding on things like, “But, I don’t need the sex, I could take it or leave it, and we can always just be friends.”

This would throw me for a loop: he was the one that wanted the sex all the time, he was the one that said this was always how he saw things from the get-go, he was the sexual aggressor, too; and he was the only “real” sexual partner I’d had in my life, in my opinion at least. Yes, I’d had sex  with others, but outside my ex, I’d never felt comfortable having sex, I never actually enjoyed and loved having sex. Our sex was instrumental in making me a sexual person, our sex wasn’t just sex, it was something that was life-altering. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever experienced. And hearing him say that made it all seem like it was meaningless to him.  Hearing him say that also seemed to be a power play, a control maneuver, like it didn’t really matter to him if he never had sex with me again. He knew at that point he’d hooked me, and our sex meant everything to me.

Then one day he threw out a line that was all too familiar:

“I think me being here all the time, giving you sex all the time like I’m doing, might be getting in the way of you meeting other guys, and getting yourself out there. Plus I don’t want you to get too attached. I think I’m need to stop the sex between us like it’s been.”

While this initially may sound like Ben was looking out for my best interests, to me this took me right back to round 1, where he controlled the sex between us, and I had no voice in things. He’d given something he knew I’d cherished, he knew how lame and sexless my life had always been before, and now that I had it, now that I was loving it, now that he’d conquered what he’d come for, he could flex his muscles and feel all the more powerful by threatening to take it away. Now at least that’s how I interpreted it, although I was biased ever since round 1. Suddenly I felt like Ben again was using this as a means of instilling fear and controlling the sex we shared like he was the dictator, and I was to obey whatever he said. Only this time I spoke up:

“If that’s what you want, then so be it, but I’m not having sex with you anymore, Ben. You did this in round 1: you made it sound like you were doing me a favor, but it comes off like – honestly – you’re trying to put me down and control me. If you want to have this relationship with me like you said you always planned on having, you need to stop worrying about me and my feelings, I’ll look out for myself; instead look out for you own feelings. That’s the only way this can work.”

Ben thought for a moment, and agreed to this. However, he’d rewrite that statement down the road; he’d claim that because I told him to not worry about my feelings that this also translated to telling him to let go over his feelings and fall in love with me concurrent with his other man. Like my words actually had that impact on him, please. But one day he’d blame my request that day for the reason why he found himself caught between two men. I never anticipated him translating my statement to mean something like that, although I’m sure he didn’t actually believe it either, but rather found a way to turn what I’d said back around against me as that became one of his favorite past-times, flipping the script as i referred to it.

But Ben made true to his words and stopped making the occasional, disparaging remark that did a great job at putting me in my place and feeling like I had no leverage, and finally… I felt at peace again with what we had. Ben surprised me one day when he referred to us having dated - yes he said dated - the year before, in round 1. What, what, what?!?!?

“You said we dated, Ben, did you know you said that?”

“Well, we did, for 3 or 4 months we dated, yes we did.” I was so shocked, and pleased, I felt validated finally for the first time ever with Ben. All that time when we were together during round 1, he made a point of saying that we weren’t dating. I was so ecstatic, not to have officially dated Ben, but because he finally validated the fact that we had something special, whether he wanted to admit it or not at the time:

“You’ve dated hundred of guys compared to me, Ben. And I have to admit something… the fact that you were so instrumental, so influential, and such a key part of my sexual awakening – but the fact that you minimized it, you denied it, you wouldn’t even acknowledge or validate that reality, it really made me feel small. Because something that meant a lot to me meant… nothing to you, or at least based on what you said. But hearing what you said today made me feel alive.  Finally you admitted that I actually was an important part of your life for the first time, too. Thank you, Ben. You have no idea how much that meant to me.”

Things continued as they had been, only the sex seemed to be happening even more frequently, our relationship only got stronger and better. This was a friendship so unique I’d never heard of anything like it. And, no joke, I respected his relationship with his beau completely, and despite knowing it was failing, I never wanted anything more than what I had with Ben: awesome sex, no drama, no-strings-attached, and no power plays. I actually gave Ben advise all the time on how to save his relationship, I often played Devil’s advocate and took his boyfriend’s side when he mentioned their issues. And his boyfriend’s side I often took legitimately, hoping to open Ben’s eyes and view things a bit differently. I didn’t want them to end. Perhaps a bit selfish, I believed if they ended, Ben and I might end, too. I knew that Ben was getting everything from me that he wasn’t getting from home – and things at home weren’t going to change, that I was sure of, as when a relationship becomes sexless, and both partners are getting it elsewhere, you can drag that along for as long as you want but it can’t be fixed at that point. I feared that if they broke up Ben would have no reason to stick with me, he wouldn’t have his boyfriend’s off schedule to fill his time finding a place close to his work where he could do as he pleased and not worry about me trying to make a scene in his relationship. Call it selfish, me saying what I did to help and keep them together, but I also said what I did because I truly thought I was speaking the truth, whether it benefited me or not. I wasn’t really looking at the big picture then anyway, I couldn’t take my eyes off the here and now. Ben always swore, even up until the very end, that no matter what happened with him and his boyfriend there was one thing that would not ever change: us. He swore by those words, then again he swore by many words, and in the end there were a lot of swear words, that’s for sure. But words sworn and promises kept and all of them ultimately broken... that’s another chapter but we’re not there yet. 

Ben still was devoted to his boyfriend despite never saying anything positive about the guy – for example, he never missed picking him up after work, although he said that was because he had to stay true to his word. Just like he did with me, me went above and beyond to make sure he was a man of his word and he was accountable to the things he promised others. I found it impressive, it was like he was forcing himself to break out of his nature and stick to doing things for others, he was adamant about being a man of his word. He admitted to me one day that he did have narcissistic “traits,” but claimed that this way of thinking, behaving and living was against his life philosophy and so he chose to live a different path.  I believed him; I picked up where my blog had left off and began this, because I was now convinced my blog could have a happy ending. I believed that people with personality issues, narcissism and the like, got a bad rap; that all those negative articles you’d read were one-sided, written by people with bad experiences. You never came across an article actually written by someone with the disorder, you only saw the opposite. So this portion of my story was intended to show the other side, only I didn’t know at all what I was dealing with at that point, that the other side was pure evil and hell fire. Instead I was distracted by the beautiful promises, and all that sex, sex, and more sex.

For 10 months our fling was absolutely perfect, we didn’t have a single argument.  He couldn’t have seemed  happier himself, and I was ecstatic, too. Ben and his beau had ended up not breaking up, but they weren’t having sex or getting along either, at leasat according to Ben. So instead he was always with me, my friends all thought we were together.  Ben was growing increasingly angry and hostile towards his boyfriend and his never-ending cheating, too, and it looked like their break-up was once again imminent in the very near future. When Ben spoke of his boyfriend’s lying and cheating, I found it a bit hypocritical. According to Ben, he was cheating on him with random guys here and there all the time; whereas Ben was having an all-out affair with me and spending more time over than he spent at home. Ben only had negative things to say about his boyfriend, though, he vented to me all the time and as a result I never heard anything good mentioned. I never imagined that he actually had feelings of love for him.

Instead I wondered why he even bothered remaining in the relationship, although when I asked he told me something that I wasn’t expecting: “He was the first guy that made the noise in my head go completely silent.” Hmmm… that was rather interesting. I asked him about me, and he responded: “You on the other hand are quite the opposite. But I’ve learned to tune out all your noise, Alex, I’ve learned to deal with you quite well, unlike during round 1.”

Regardless of my noise, Ben continued to treat me like royalty. I believed in my heart of hearts he felt really bad for what he’d done to me in round 1: I’d just been intentionally infected with HIV by my ex, he came along and could have been my rock, but instead he treated me like shit and discarded me; that discard was one of the most painful experiences of my life. And all over as stupid word:  narcissist.

Only I never once considered that word had maybe enraged him to the point where all this song and dance was merely a way of silencing me for calling him out on his secret.

I never once considered this a possibility; with Ben’s never-ending attention, constant sex, incredible compliments, and his offers to help out with everything, what I saw was someone that genuinely wanted to see me succeed and find happiness. He was perfect to me. Only that he did have a boyfriend, and didn’t seem at all phased about dragging me along, subjugating me in a role that was somewhat demeaning.

Ironically, Ben’s concern about me isolating myself from the world kinda turned out to be how things ended up for me. But I was clueless as it was happening, little by little, instead I was captivated by his words, overflowing with kindness, and oozing with charm and admiration.

Our feelings became so intense that one night Ben professed his love to me: he said he loved me just as much as his boyfriend, he called me his boyfriend without the title, he swore that if forced him to make an ultimatum, he’d never pick one over the other; must be nice for Ben to have the luxury of so many offers at his disposal. He swore nothing would come in between us, and I believed it. I remember the look in his eyes and the smile on his face when he speaking these words: it felt like the room was growing fuzzy, I felt like he was hypnotizing me to be completely honest; it felt slightly fake even, but it still felt beautiful. And I chose to go along with it, it felt like it was coming from a good place, from his heart, although in hind-site I doubted Ben could truly love to be honest. That was just my gut instinct, whether I wanted to acknowledge it at the time or not…

I was in utter disbelief; I was certain from round 1 that Ben falling for me was not possible, yet somehow the impossible managed to occur. I was shell-shocked, I was perplexed, I was ecstatic.

I’ll admit that I eventually began to take Ben’s “love,” attention, and sexually grooming me for granted; he came over so frequently, the thought of things ending didn’t cross my mind. Our relationship wasn’t just physical sex and talking about love. Ben could find no fault with me, he seemed to be enamored with everything about me, and he made me happy.

Ben never stopped stressing that our friendship was so solid, so important to him, that nothing could ever impact it; time and again he reinforced that nothing – not his current boyfriend, not any future boyfriends – would ever impact what we shared. He was a gentleman, he was glowing light, and he was a master con artist and manipulator, he took pathological lying to a level so advanced that when I became aware of his lies, I didn’t bother questioning him. I can’t put into words the power a narcissist can have over his prey… it’s something that’s not even believable until you actually experience it. I even read up on the disorder while he was courting me, and continued throughout the relationship, only I didn’t believe a word I read as being applicable to Ben. I believed it was a “spectrum” disorder like autism, Ben being only a slight big effected. Or maybe I’d gotten it all wrong I thought, there were soooo many times when I was certain he’d done something horrible to me, only to have him come over with a smile on his face, saying he forgave me for going overboard regarding whatever it was that I accused him of doing. Perhaps I was wrong about Ben having narcissistic ways? Or perhaps the textbooks got it all wrong? Or perhaps the textbook got it right: I would be the one always apologizing, he would be the one always acting like the victim, and every time I’d catch him in the act he’d gaslight me into doubting myself.

When I expressed concern that I could be scapegoated as the cause of Ben and his boyfriend’s problems, suggesting that it might be easier than facing their actual inner demons, he was quick to reinforce that I was incorrect:

Out of any guy I’d met in my life, Ben turned out to be the best one, I felt so lucky to have him in my life, I was so proud to claim him as my bestie. He was so kind, so thoughtful and so good to me; Ben was definitely wild and crazy but yet well-behaved, he was “just right.” He was social when he needed to be, yet still reserved and perfect to be with one-on-one, which I loved. Ben was always so damn mellow and peaceful. I never saw him get upset, at least not yet in round 2. He was always so polite, never rude, never boastful, he was so humble yet he was secure, he was attractive, he was vivacious sexually, he was everything I needed, everything I’d ever wanted, I felt so comfortable with him and I’d never, ever felt this way in my life, not even with my ex during his fake honeymoon phase – this was truly a gift, I’d finally met my match. It was like Ben had been made just for me almost, nobody had ever complimented me this well. As pathetic as this may sound, my experience with round 2 and Ben was the absolute highlight of my life; I’d do anything for that boy, and he knew it, too. I adored him, and I could tell he loved the attention. It was amazing, and I felt like finally – at last – I’d met a true, loving friend that was meant to be.

I always felt safe when I was with Ben. He always left me feeling like nothing bad could happen to me as long as I was with him. I’m not sure why. 

One day out of nowhere, Ben stopped texting every day like he’d always done; when I continued texting like normal, he became a bit short with me. When I tried talking to him by phone he seemed distant and cold all the sudden, not saying much at all before hanging up abruptly. Despite these changes, I was blown to smithereens when everything suddenly did a complete 180 in the blink of an eye.

Ben said he needed space, only he was rather abrupt and vague with his words, he didn’t explain anything at all honestly: he just kinda blurted out that he needed a break out of nowhere, and it went straight over my head initially. Ben needing “time off” seemed odd since he did all the making plans, initiating our time together, all the sex, everything was on his time already – I just took whatever he gave – so he already controlled our time together and our space apart. I wasn’t texting more frequently than before, and he was the one that started doing it daily to begin with. It seemed like a double standard and I couldn’t understand why Ben was blaming me for his sudden change in character. He was suddenly not the person I’d just spent 10 perfect, blissful months with.

    Just like in round 1, everything came crashing down in a whirlwind of drama, everything I thought was real and truthful, showed itself to be the polar opposite. Here Ben had set the pace for everything, and the moment I started going along at the same exact pace – I didn’t do anything he hadn’t been doing the entire time – he then slammed on the breaks and didn’t give 2 shits about doing this to me. Why all the sudden was he saying he needed space, and a break, and time to focus on… his boyfriend? Wait a second, who’s that, I thought it was… kinda me?  HUH? His boyfriend… that guy who was only described in positive words by me, and not Ben? What, what, what?

I hadn’t gone after Ben at all; I didn’t have any feelings towards him until he brought up being in love with me 10 months in. I’m not trying to lay the blame all on him, but in all sincerity, this relationship had been his creation.

He was suddenly a different person, he was exactly the opposite of who I thought he was. Here he’d said he had me exactly how he’d wanted me, how he’d envisioned having me all along since round 1. So what the hell was this going on? 

Not once did I ask him to give up time with his boyfriend to be with me, that was all his doing.  Never once did I ask him to stay when he’d leave my house to go and pick his boyfriend up. I actually gave Ben good advice on his relationship, it was advice that wasn’t aimed at derailing it either, but rather advice on how to keep things on the positive. I was shocked reading his texts, initially I thought he was joking. But then I realized: Ben was flipping the script, he was painting me out to be the aggressor, the one going after a guy that already had a boyfriend, whereas this had been the opposite of what he said.  Was he delusional? How could he not be seeing reality? Our entire relationship was Ben’s creation. But I didn’t read Ben’s mind apparently, and failed to realize that despite his harsh words about his boyfriend, that he was still in love, and they were having issues and he needed space apart to deal with them. Yes, he’d asked me to back off but without any other explanation, it was kinda text-shouted among other things, I didn’t get it at first as it was thrown in among other things. He was so hard to read, often what I read him as being I’d later discover was incorrect. Suddenly he wasn’t happy and kind like he was before, suddenly everything changed. And suddenly my perfect Ben wasn’t so perfect after all, he went off on me like a wild animal, he had no mercy, no concern at all for my feelings at all. This was bizarre, this was strange, and I couldn’t believe it was actually happening.

Thinking about Ben’s words that summer, and how much they contradicted all he was saying now… it really hurt, I felt betrayed, I felt beyond confused, I felt like I was in the twilight zone. Only I wasn’t; I was at my house, holding my phone in my hand, shaking. And this was actually happening.

I truly believed Ben viewed me as his second boyfriend, I believed in his promises of our friendship lasting forever, but all of this was suddenly meaningless to him, and I was crushed. The boyfriend without the title, me being on the same playing field as his boyfriend, his selflessness, his kindness, his helping me get better, those were all things he said without me ever enticing him to do so.

Could he have done those all to maliciously ensnare me into letting my guard down and letting him take over my mind with lies? He said these remarks all out of his own free will, how could he suddenly flip-flop like this? I assumed he was under stress and displacing his anger on me at the time. Then several days later I got word that he’d broken up with his boyfriend. I tried to be as polite and understanding as possible, and I told Ben that he’d be missed as we’d initially made plans that Friday night, me tellng him to be good despite the breakup. Only his reaction took me by surprise, it wasn’t something I had expected given my words weren’t rude or mean-spirited..

I didn’t know how to respond; I didn’t know why he was so pissed off… how was I guilt-tripping him with anything? But the next text I sent came back saying that it couldn’t be sent, Ben did exactly what he did in round 1: he blocked me. I was beyond pissed off. This was the ONE thing that I hated more than anything, as it triggered me right back into feeling like I was in the past, in the midst of abuse, and I was livid, I was sad, and I felt desperate, I felt like a part of me died that day.

Ben had broken the one promise I made him agree to in order for me to participate in his vision of us being together. I became angry, and one thing was certain: I was not going to let him get away with it again. No way in hell. Ben was going to be held accountable for that one damn promise, after all, I’d stayed true to my word in everything I’d said I’d do for him.

Ben came into my life, he’d brought me the warmest, brightest, most intoxicating love I’d ever experienced; he’d made me all these promises I didn’t ask for – and they all were nothing but words in the end. I was somewhere between having a seizure and a panic attack as I tried reaching him by phone using various numbers, only to have him hang up as soon as he heard my voice. If I thought the feeling his first discard left in my stomach was queezie, this was 10 times worse. I was set on a mission to make him keep his word… after all… he knew about the psychopath in my recent past. For him to do something like this, which resembled that incident quite a bit, went against his entire mission statement: to help me get better. This didn’t help me get anything but worse. Why the hell did I even want him in my life if he’d done this to me… twice? Why couldn’t I clearly see the writing on the walls and leave? All it took was noting his smell on my pillow, or anything that reminded me of Ben, and my mind was right back stuck on him. And it wouldn’t stop being stuck either… at least not for quite a while.

First and fourth songs written / performed by me, and as always, for Ben.

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Scroll down read about covert narcissism in the Huffington Post.

                Imagine that a dear and beloved friend gave you the gift you always dreamed of — your very own Rolex watch! Not only did you treasure the gift, but you have been ecstatic ever since your incredibly generous and kind friend bestowed you with this wonderful and thoughtful gift. Although surprised with the gift, it didn’t shock you, as you were privy to stories about his generosity and kindness to others, who similarly longed for something he was able to give them.

A few months after receiving your gorgeous Rolex, you notice that the crystal has taken on some scratches, which seems unlikely since Rolex watches are known for their scratch resistant sapphire crystals. Three months after that, the unbelievable happens: the watch begins to lose time! You don’t dare mention it to your friend for fear of appearing ungrateful and disrespectful. You choose to keep it a secret, as the watch is more than just a timepiece to you; it is symbolic of the closeness that you and your friend share. After all, you think, it’s not a big deal that your beautiful watch loses only a few minutes a day. No harm, no foul.

To your great surprise, six months after first receiving your cherished gift, your scratched and poorly functioning but beautiful Rolex stops working altogether! Confused but curious, you bring it to a watch repair shop, where you learn that the treasured gift from your treasured friend is a fake; nothing more than a $75, made in China, counterfeit!

With the best intentions, you kindly and sensitively email your friend to let him know he was duped into buying a counterfeit watch. You recommend that he pursue some form of compensation from the criminal jeweler who sold it to him. Although “duped” and “criminal” may not have been the best choices of words, you trust your friend to take it in the spirit in which it’s intended. His response confuses you, as the shared experience of disappointment and frustration you expected was countered by anger and defensiveness. He blames you for prematurely jumping to conclusions, judging him, and being irresponsible and reckless with the valuable gift he unselfishly gave you. The situation gets even more bizarre when you realize that the group of seven men who belong to your shared social circle are carbon-copied on this particular email conversation.

Shocked and dismayed, you reflexively respond to him alone with a firm “chill out” and “back down” message, while asking why he would include the guys from your group in this conversation. This response lights him up like a match thrown into a puddle of gasoline. In a fit of indignant anger, he demands that you return the watch to him so he can disprove your “baseless and vindictive” allegations.

Following your well-meaning attempts to calm him down, diffuse his defensiveness and get him to stop blaming you, you notice that his personality shifts to one that is aloof, cold, and disinterested in hearing anything more about your experience of disappointment. Being confused and stunned by the sum total of his anger and apparent retaliation for your simple heads-up about the watch, you naturally comply by returning the watch to him. You don’t dare challenge his bizarre request because its abundantly clear that doing so would trigger him to an even higher level of histrionic and displaced anger. Plus, you are already embarrassed because all the guys in your group are now privy to this private matter. Little did you know that, by returning the watch, you also forfeited any possibility of clearing your name and restoring your reputation that has been tarnished by this unfortunate and unfair smear campaign.

You will be left trying to reconcile how and why your friend’s empathy, altruism, and sincerity disappeared in an instant and unexpectedly transformed into a laser-focused crusade to hurt you. After careful consideration, you decide to let the whole situation go, as the cards are already heavily stacked against you. Unfortunately, it’s too late and the domino effect can’t be stopped as you learn through the grapevine that your former friend has masterminded a smear campaign that will culminate in an expressed directive to exclude you from all future group activities. The “out of left field” abandonment by your friends will add another layer of trauma and betrayal.

You will be left with a “WTF” set of feelings, while trying to piece together what happened and why. Similar to other victims of covert narcissists, you will sadly realize that your “friend” and the friendship were never real. You may also come to the deeply disappointing conclusion that your counterfeit friend deceived you and others by creating multiple layers of fabricated personality traits, which were designed to benefit him. In other words, you will be shocked at the realization that your friend’s generous, unconditionally loving and altruistic persona was nothing more than an Oscar-worthy performance that was developed, practiced and honed through a long list of other discredited and discarded “friends.”

What you will soon learn is that this beloved friend was always a covert narcissist and the friendship you so dearly appreciated and valued was nothing more than a counterfeit, much like the Rolex watch.

Covert narcissists are masters of disguise — successful actors, humanitarians, politicians, clergy members, and even psychotherapists who are beloved and appreciated, but are secretly selfish, calculating, controlling, and vindictive. They create an illusion of selflessness while gaining from their elevated status. Although they share similar basic traits with the garden variety narcissist, i.e., the need for attention, affirmation, approval and recognition, they are stealthier about hiding their selfish and egocentric motives. Unlike the in your face narcissist, who parades his narcissism for all to see, the covert narcissist furtively hides his real motives and identity.

These narcissists are able to trick others into believing they are honest, altruistic and empathetic individuals. They are successful at pretending to be a more likable version of themselves, knowing that if their true identity was uncovered, they would not be able to maintain the respect, status and prestige that they have so manipulatively obtained.

Compared to overt narcissists, covert narcissists are more reserved and composed. By not advertising their deeper narcissistic values and motives, they are able to achieve their goals, while protecting their innermost insecurities and vulnerabilities. Unlike overt narcissists, they expend a great deal of psychological energy containing or hiding their callous, indifferent, and manipulative inner selves. Even though covert narcissists have repressed the full scope and magnitude of their personality disorder, on a semi-conscious level, they are aware that their fantasies are embarrassing and unacceptable.

Because covert narcissists are able to create and maintain a facade of altruism and unconditional positive regard, they are able to function in positions that are traditionally not attractive to narcissists, e.g., clergy, teachers, politicians, psychotherapists and others. Even though they are able to replicate the known characteristics of these positions, they are often deeply insecure and secretive about their lack of knowledge or inability to perform the most essential tasks. For example, a covert narcissist who is a psychotherapist will have mastered the stereotypical career-specific, idiosyncratic behavior patterns such as reflective listening, supporting and accepting feedback, and gestures that mimic unconditional acceptance.

However, this covert narcissist psychotherapist will be deficient in the most critical area of the job. Although they attempt to demonstrate honesty, sympathy and empathy with their clients, they ultimately fall short. They are simply unable to master the key elements of the position, as they are inherently judgmental, controlling and emotionally aloof. These therapists often become agitated at their clients when challenged or questioned. Clients who do not let them control the process will often trigger a narcissistic injury.

These secretive and slippery narcissists react to their unmasking with the full force of their arsenal of weapons that you would never guess existed. When they perceive a threat to their carefully and meticulously crafted public persona, all bets are off! Since their personal and professional reputation is built on a foundation of lies and misrepresentations, they will protect it by any means necessary. Their reflex to attack the perceived threat is fueled by an adrenaline-infused survival instinct that is no different than if they were cornered by a pack of hungry wolves. They will try to crush the threat, while positioning themselves as the victim of a premeditated vindictive and grievous harm.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ross-a-rosenberg/unmasking-your-counterfei_b_10367886.html

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Imagine

My Life is a Movie

Brutal  Irony

The Nurse & the Snake

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Idealization Commences

Life is beautiful

Blissful Ignorance

Red Flags

Eyes Wide Shut

Devaluation Reigns

Different Strokes

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Confronting Him

Email Rollercoaster

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Stuck

Til Death Do Us Discard

The Clone

No Contact, No Fun

Ben in the End

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Why Not Leave?

Huffington Post: The Red Flags

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House In Virginia

Watch: Psychopath : Lesson 7 The Blame Game (Projection)

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Prologue

Home

Imagine

My Life is a Movie

Brutal  Irony

The Psychopathic / Narcissistic Bond

Huffington Post: The Red Flags

The Nurse & the Snake

Original Music

The Psychopath

The Psychopathy Checklist, Revised (and Interactive)

Idealization Commences

Life is beautiful

Blissful Ignorance

Red Flags

Eyes Wide Shut

Devaluation Reigns

Different Strokes

Projection

Confronting Him

Email Rollercoaster

Smear Campaign

Epilogue

Recovery

House In Virginia

Watch: Psychopath : Lesson 7 The Blame Game (Projection)

Watch:  10 Traits of a Psychopath

Resources for Recognizing and Recovery from Toxic People

Watch:  Lars von Trier – A Tribute

The Narcissist

Narcissism

The Narc

Hoovering

Side Piece

Stuck

Til Death Do Us Discard

The Clone

No Contact, No Fun

Ben in the End

Manipulative Personality Disorders

Why Not Leave?

Huffington Post: The Red Flags