#or that other other one who said we belong in a psych ward

[ships-n-bats]

IchiRuki Twitter is a Hellhole

The experience is like shoving my hand into a bucket full of feathers and nails.

Sometimes I get the soft, fluffy grace of feathers (i.e. a cute IR post), and other times I get a handful of nails that turns my hand into a bloody pincushion (aka yet another IR anti stirring up shit and name calling the IR community).

Tumblr is a garbage heap too, but at least I have a better experience searching through tags and can block key words or phrases easier. Twitter just throws you to the wolves, like good luck bitch; have fun suffering ig.

[aprillikesthings]

I only ever watched the first twenty minutes of this a couple of years ago so I'm watching this today (yes, for my fic ahaha) and will note my thoughts:

"they're AGAINST so many things but are they FOR anything?" I mean, ....some of them were

The opening scene where he's walking down the street and a bunch of hippies start walking with him and grinning is hilarious

There's a shot of a young woman who is supposedly having "a freak out" (a bad trip) being dragged into the hospital by cops, and she sounds somewhat lucid to me ("do my friends know where I am? where are you taking me??? where am I??") but also, I don't think putting her in a cop car and dragging her to the hospital was likely to improve her mental state. (All they can do is give you a bed, keep an eye on you, and maybe sedate you; tho I suspect they also just restrained people sometimes.)

they interview a doctor who says "there's no way to predict who will have a bad trip [on LSD]" but we sorta did know how to prevent them?? Set and setting was talked about for years already. That said: a lot of people of that era did in fact use it very irresponsibly, or did stupidly high doses, and even gave it to people without their consent.

"They try to live without money but still beg" I mean. yeah the problem is that you can't live without money. But some of them were trying to make money obsolete to some extent (like the Diggers).

Watching a scene recorded at the offices of the San Francisco Oracle, I can't help thinking "man those would be worth money now" (I checked ebay just now--actual print copies of original issues are in the $100 range)(I have scans on DVD, which is by far the cheapest way to own/read it)

They interview a guy working there and he says "life should be a joy, and it's a drag!" and he talks about the "absurdity" of people driving to work every day in metal boxes by themselves, and like, he's not wrong. He also mentions the "alienation of middle-class life" which again: not wrong, especially at the time. Suburban life was just so much more stifling.

"They want a group of mutual support and affection to belong to" Well yeah that's. a normal human desire?? Does Harry Reasoner think that's a bad thing?

Oh hey they cover the Diggers feeding people in the Panhandle once a day: "This feeding typifies the hippie ideal of standing apart from society by means of mutual help and love. It contains its own ironies, for the daily feed is itself dependent on the food being offered by the very society that is being rejected" jfc so much of this just has big "And yet you participate in society!! Curious. I am very intelligent" energy lol

Okay so a doctor dude calls out how hippies say they love everyone in a very general sense but are incapable of loving another specific person that "might make demands of them," and tbh I think that was sometimes true. He also talks about how many of them seem to be using LSD because they struggle with managing negative feelings (especially anger), and again: not entirely wrong. (It's worth noting that in interviews with people who'd been teenagers during the Summer of Love, there were a LOT of stories of people escaping abusive homes, including numerous accounts of CSA, which imho puts the "they do LSD bc they can't deal with negative emotions" in a very different light)

A couple of hippies point out: Y'know we do drugs in part just to increase our sensory experience, right?? Like it's great listening to music on it. You know that, right????

"LSD will damage your chromosomes!!" Thankfully, that one was disproven.

So they interview a young guy in a psych ward about his experiences with LSD, and this poor kid describes what was obviously severe social anxiety, and that taking LSD a few times cured it--he was no longer anxious that other people would reject him, because LSD gave him that (very common on LSD) effect of feeling "at one" with all people/living things/the universe, and instilled in him the concept that all humans are beautiful. "I'm not afraid of people anymore, because even if they reject me, they're still beautiful." Harry Reasoner is like "but it's fake" my dude shut up. oh my god. Harry: "but what about dangerous people?" Kid: "yeah, there's dangerous people, but they're still beautiful." Harry' just like "okay but you SHOULD be afraid of other people" and the kid's just like. Nah.

Like, they're researching using hallucinogens for treating things like anxiety NOW. Because it sometimes works!

Tbh this kid seems pretty lucid and smart. And the reason he's in there is that he "talked about God too much" so his mother had him committed.

Harry: "So tell me what God's like." Kid: "First of all God is everything, so he's like everything. He is everything. There's nothing that he isn't." This kid doesn't seem crazy to me. He's saying shit tons and tons of people have said!! Someone give him a copy of Julian of Norwich's "shewings." He's not alone.

Holy shit they interviewed this kid's mom and wow. Yeah she's just. Refusing to actually validate anything her son has said to her. "I can't describe to you the feeling that it gives you when your son says to you, 'Can't you feel it, God is everywhere...' But I told him, 'You don't see God until you die!'" Your son is saying the same shit mystics have said throughout history, lady; and he's expressing himself very clearly for a teenager. I'm not going to quote all the bullshit she says but she clearly just has a very sensitive son who had anxiety, and LSD gave him a sense of wonder at the universe, and she thinks that means he's crazy. (She does mention that drug use should be a medical issue and not a criminal one, so points to her for that; but based on what they showed, her son shouldn't have been locked up.)

They also interview a teenage girl who is there after multiple suicide attempts. She was on LSD when the people she was with sexually assaulted her, and shortly after she first attempted suicide. And again they interview the mom...who describes a textbook case of major depression after a traumatic event: "She lost interest in herself, she was very lethargic. She didn't want to do anything, even things she used to do." The girl attempted suicide two more times. Mom is trying to do the right thing, here. But again, this wasn't the fault of LSD?? It's the fault of the people who assaulted her?

God, this is heartbreaking: "When I found out, I didn't know what to say. And she asked me, 'Are you angry at me?' and I said, 'Why would I be angry [at you]?' I just didn't think this would happen. I wanted something better for her." ;_;

They bring on some doctor of neuropsychiatry who says absolute word vomit ("This is really a very serious malignant form of modern civilization which means that we no longer have the stamina to really hassle with our youngsters in a purposeful way of learning," and he keeps going! Sir, are you DRUNK?)

They go to a crash house run by the Diggers and act like giving homeless kids a place to sleep and food to eat is harming them. But you see this even NOW in cities with high homeless populations--the idea that housing/feeding them is only enabling them. (Don't even get me started that shit it makes me furious.)

They admit the hippie movement sounds real attractive to young people and openly list the reasons: "The way they dress, the way they advocate love as opposed to hate, peace as opposed to war, self expression as opposed to inhibition. All these things put them in the role of courageous and warm-hearted rebels against cold stiff square old-fashioned authority." I mean. Yeah????? I know people hate on boomers a lot, but for real, they were rebelling against pretty hardcore "conform or die" messaging from the 50's, plus the Vietnam War.

"Doctors see a universal danger in use of LSD: they feel that normally rebellious young people may be turned into emotional cripples. At a time when they should be meeting and solving problems of sexuality and personal identity, they deaden their drives with a magic pill which solves nothing. They may never grow up." This is at least half "suffering is good for you" rhetoric. Also by "sexuality" they don't mean "figure out if I'm gay" lol they mean "realize you might want sex, and therefore get married and have children."

The talk to a few people at one of the Digger crash houses. One of them is like, "I like it here. I have my own room and I cook food for everyone." She literally just....found a sense of meaning by helping people out and being around people with the same ideals as her. This is not a bad thing.

BAAAHAHAHAHA THEY GO TO THE GRATEFUL DEAD HOUSE

They admit plenty of the hippies are hard workers trying to create a better world--but because that better world is at least partially inspired by their experiences on LSD, those ideas are completely dismissed.

Look at this BABY-FACED JERRY GARCIA

Anyway the members of the Grateful Dead talk about how they do want a more peaceful world and a simple life (hahhhhh) and that, yes, most people decide to be hippies after doing LSD, but that plenty of people do it a few times and stop, because they've learned what LSD had to teach them.

They show people at a rock show, dunno where, but there's a liquid light show projected onto the stage and people are dancing, and ironically this is SUPER useful for my gd fic because I couldn't find any CROWD SHOTS from the original Fillmore or Avalon! Anyway apparently said theaters didn't sell alcohol, useful to know.

More scare-mongering about bad trips--which they admit could be brought on by being hungry and sleeping outside. (but giving them a warm place to sleep and food to eat is bad??)

OH HEY they talk about the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. (I looked it up and TIL: They didn't close until 2019.)

Some discussion of how other drugs were starting to come onto the scene--and they show a guy slumped over on the couch at the clinic. (On a related note: for real, heroin is bad. Like the anti-drug people are actually right on that one. Don't do heroin.)

The guy who started the clinic said that a lot of the older doctors who volunteer there, themselves have kids who are hippies. So there's this need to understand their kids better and a drive to help people like their own children. "The attitude [towards hippies who need healthcare] of 'let them die' changes when it's their own kid." Yeah I bet it does.

More from the guy who started the clinic: "One thing that people don't realize is that the Haight-Ashbury is a symptom, not a cause. And that the kids are attracted to the Haight-Ashbury because of some deprivation, primarily intellectual deprivation, in their former mode of life. And I think this is why [kids from] the middle class are so intensely involved in the Haight-Ashbury: because it is a product of the middle class. It's not a peripheral movement, it is a direct reaction against the forces that control the United States. And it's not an anarchist movement*, the hippies aren't interested in any philosophy, including communism! They just want to live their own life."

(*Some of the Diggers might disagree on that one lol)

Back to Harry Reasoner: "The way the hippies want to live seems in the end to consist of childish postures. They claim they want to be left alone, but they are masters at setting up public occasions which are bound to draw attention if not interference. Just as an unruly child will act up in a way that attracts adult intervention, and then complain about it." LOLOL this is literally just "they're having fun in public and it's not to my tastes, so I don't like it." Like their example is a band playing on a fire escape and people on the street dancing. That's Wholesome, my dude; you just don't like the music or the kind of dancing. But they BLOCKED TRAFFIC OH NOES. The cops show up, the band stops, the crowd starts singing "God Bless America" at the cops, lolol. Oh and then the Grateful Dead announce they're gonna play in the Panhandle, so the crowd wanders off. The Dead then play Dancing in the Street, which even Harry Reasoner admits is funny.

"They object to the ills which beset society: social hatreds, money-grubbing, spiritual waste. But their remedy is to withdraw into private satisfactions." ....okay he's not entirely wrong there. Like, it's difficult to talk about hippies as this monolithic group that all want one thing, because that absolutely was not true. But for plenty of them, the goal was just to have a good time.

Finally, he lays out his theses:

"You can say three things about them. They, at their best, are trying for a kind of group sainthood. And saints running in groups are likely to be ludicrous. They depend on hallucination for their philosophy. This is not a new idea and it has never worked. And finally they offer a spurious attraction of the young: a corruption of the idea of innocence. Nothing in the world is as appealing as real innocence. But it is by definition a quality of childhood. People who can grow beards and make love are supposed to move from innocence to wisdom."

I.....what does that mean. Why are saints in groups "ludicrious." When was it tried before that didn't work. How the fuck does this guy define innocence and wisdom and why are they mutually incompatible??

And boy oh boy would he hate to find out that a very common idea among these people's kids/grandkids is going to be "I'm allowed childish pleasures and whimsy, as long as I pay my bills etc., if they make me happy and I'm not hurting anyone." Like, I watched this thing because I'm writing fanfiction about a cartoon (theoretically) aimed at children. Daci is downstairs playing a video game. This house has dozens of stuffed animals in it. We go to comic conventions.

Harry Reasoner would be so mad at us for doing all that stuff, instead of doing the marriage/kids/house in the suburbs thing ahahahhaaaaa

In this case, sir, the hippies won. Sorry.

[supersonic1994]

as the local fight club blogger - how did u interpret the ending of the book? I love love love the book and have lots of different interpretations for it, but I always struggled with the ending; and I barely see anybody talking abt it in general

the ending surprised me! I had watched the movie before I managed to finish the book, and because as you said nobody talks about the book ending I was really shocked. I felt that the ending the narrator was given was particularly haunting. he is no longer tyler durden but no matter where he goes or what he does to escape from him—the narrator believes that they had died together and now they’re in heaven (or perhaps this is what he tells himself for escapism) but there is no separation. “God asks me what I remember. I remember everything.” Is the narrators response in the last moments of his and tylers life together. hes unable to let go of his past because it’s constantly pushing at the forefront of his mind. he knows he can’t go back because he doesn’t exist in the world outside of heaven, “because every once in a while, somebody brings me my lunch tray and my meds and he has a black eye or his forehead is swollen with stitches, and he says: “we miss you Mr. Durden.” I think it’s ironic that the narrator felt so trapped in his single serving life that he made up tyler durden, but the result of that is what blinds him, and truly traps him, in the end. this is the problem with nihilism that had been idealized by tyler through the novel.

If I were to read more into it I would say that as an ending the psych wards temporality more closely resembles purgatory wherein the narrators mind he can only leave once he’s sinless—once he stops being recognized for who he was and what tyler did. no one stays in purgatory forever. even if the narrator calls the workers angels and the psychologist god, there’s a sense that one day the narrator will be able to return to society. purgatory is meant to be a place for having a spiritual cleansing before people who are supposed to go to heaven actually go to heaven. the narrators spiritual cleansing would be shedding the skin and associations of tyler. I think this reading leaves the ending more open, since there’s possibility of change and movement.

If you’re reading the text through the lens of a gay man in the 1990’s struggling through self acceptance, sexuality, and the AIDS crisis—he has “killed” his partner, taken on his last name, and now he is hospitalized with sores and bruises on his face that others [other hospital staff that belonged to project mayhem] can recognize. this to me is a more bleak ending—it would be an ending where the narrator can never leave the hospital, and the world continues on without him, and is ultimately destroyed (as is project mayhems goal).

[drowningworms]

Psych wards are psychotic and evil

By the way, friends, if you ever have a mental breakdown or are suicidal or anything like that don't go to the emergency room. The following is not just one bad hospital. It's basically all of them. I've talked to other people in other parts of the country.

I had a massive breakdown summer of 2023 from a new anti-anxiety med and a lot of stress. We called for an ambulance and got 4 cops instead. And I got a nice strapped down ride to the ER. To be fair, I was not in my right mind at the time and was unpredictable.

But it wasn't fair.

ER psych wards are straight out of 1923.

They use hours of stress positions and cold to torture the inmates into "submission" ("coercive measures"). And it doesn't matter if you are already submissive. I was obviously in control of myself by then and fully cooperative. The bastards wanted their fun anyway. After the hours of stress positions, they continue to keep "patients" unsettled with over medication of "anti-psychotics", verbally shame them from being sick, and keep them in a constant state of anxiety and discomfort after they have "coerced" them into submission while way too many heavily armed cops roam around doing their own bullying. All the time denying them obviously needed medical care including simple first aid. The "nurses" and "doctors" themselves have lost their empathy and replaced it with sadism. And they ruin the good hearts the younger ones to be just like them.

I didn't hear a single compassionate word given to anyone.

There are not private rooms. It is a open, tiled area buried in the basement behind many doors and guards and closed to visitors with a bathroom and guardhouse in the center with a few alcoves and no doors. While I was strapped down for hours with my arm cranked behind my head, with my shirt pulled up for cold torture, and the cuffs tightened and biting into my wrists (but they could still shove two fingers into my flesh and squeeze them in there so it was "legal") the other inmates were just wandering around me and I was utterly vulnerable should one of them decide to do anything to me. People are all dressed in paper gowns and sitting on hospital beds, wall benches, and wandering to pass the time.

I have so many stories just from 18 hours of being in there witnessing the worse psychological and physical tortures they were doing to the people they knew had nobody. It was a constant provocation of the most vulnerable people in the hospital in order to excuse more "coercive measures".

I watched them kill an old woman's dog.

It was going to be 115F that day. So early in the morning around 5am she started asking for her phone to call her brother to go get her dog out of her trailer and save it from heat death. They told her she could use their phone. But she didn't know the number (who knows anyone's number anymore?) She asked for her cell phone in her belongings right behind them and they said they would get it and then they strung her along till 3 in the afternoon, making her beg and plead and be oh so polite so she wouldn't end up on a bed with her arm cranked behind her head for being too loud or give them an excuse to simply straight up tell her no for being too "disrespectful."

They were petty too, loudly telling people breakfast was on it's way 3-4 hours before they knew breakfast would get there just to make people feel hungry and get them anxious and waiting assuming it was coming any minute now. As the staff kept reminding us breakfast would be here any minute every few minutes.

And they take away even the ability to escape by suicide. An escape so many would surely make if they could. I doubt Hell would be much worse. The only reason I got out so "soon" was I had an advocate (spouse) trying to bring me home. To be fair people are sent there for being "suicidal". But I don't see how it could do anything but hasten their descent towards taking their own life.

They, like prisons, don't help anyone. It's just for storage and terror. And it caused me trauma that continues to give me flashbacks months later. I'm not sure what state I would be in now without a loving family and a spouse who loves compassionately and deeply to heal me. Or my long-time counselor. Or my chickens. I held my little bunny for hours as my little angry little tribble did his best to comfort me. I slept with terrible dreams for nearly 48 straight. I couldn't even eat for a week. It feels even now like it set me back a year in my recovery from the pit I only recently crawled out of.

I think the second worst thing was the insanity of it all. Why hurt people who are already hurting so much? I get the whole Nietzsche thing is in play. So fucking what? It's still insane.

The worst thing was meeting a young resident doctor who was obviously gay and Latino. He knew what it was like to be oppressed. I could still hear some basic goodness in his voice. But he was already cold and compassionless. They were ruining his good heart just as they had done to so many others. And he will become twice as much a son of hell and traumatize thousands more over his long life.

And I know that is only a snapshot of the evil in our empire.

[emmatheyoshi]

I don’t normally post full stories on here (usually just drabbles), but I feel like this belongs on here for AU lore purposes.

Fear

Emmett and some other hotel residents talk about Charlie’s naivety and how it may hurt her in the future.

Emmett sat at the bar, looking down into his glass of root beer. “You good, bud?” Husk asked. Emmett looked up at the older man and sighed, “I’m just….worried.” “Why? What’s got ya worried?” Emmett looked back at his glass. “I’m worried about Charlie.” “Why? Why are you worrying about her?”

Emmett sighed again. “She’s so….set on this path of redeeming people, and I’m scared her naivety is gonna come back and kick her in the ass. We’ve all been trying to get her out of that ‘everyone can be redeemed’ mindset, even Alastor has, but….it’s not working.” Husk nodded, “It’s getting frustrating, isn’t it?” Emmett nodded, “You said it best: she’s willing to fix everyone’s problems except her own. She started this whole plan when I was about fifteen; I was just beginning to realize the severity of my trauma at that point, especially the trauma that Heaven caused me. She just….she didn’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to be redeemed….why I didn’t want to be redeemed. I fear that it’s going to cause her to get hurt in the future.” “What are you two talking about?”

Emmett looked at Alastor, who was holding a sleeping Miriam, “I’m worried about how naive Charlie is.” Alastor sighed and nodded, “I learned about her plan while I was still in the psych ward. I didn’t know much about her then, but I knew that she was very naive about it.” “It’s heartbreaking,” another voice chimed in. It was Vaggie.

Vaggie walked over and sat down on one of the bar stools. “I love her to death, but I can’t help but worry that she’s gonna get hurt.” “I think the fact Niffty and I killed Adam opened her eyes a bit,” Emmett added, “But she’s still so naive about it.” “She doesn’t know as much about the human psyche as she thinks,” Warner, who was sitting in one of the arm chairs in the lobby, piped up. The other four nodded in agreement.

“We had a lot of fights when she first brought up the idea of having people redeemed,” Emmett admitted, “We still have fights sometimes.” “I’ve got a theory,” Alastor replied, closing his eyes, “Charlie’s romanticized trauma and recovery/coping mechanisms.” “That’s not a theory, that’s a fact,” Emmett confirmed. “She doesn’t understand that all sinners aren’t traumatized souls either,” Vaggie added, “Some people are evil for the sake of being evil.” “She’s got her head in her ass,” an Irish voice chimed in.

Aoife walked over to the bar and sat on the counter, “And…it’s not in a bad way, she’s not meaning to be ignorant.” “She just doesn’t know as much as she thinks she does,” Husk added. “Exactly!” “So….what do we do?” Emmett asked as he looked over at Charlie, who was talking to Niffty and Angel Dust. Vaggie sighed, “She’ll probably hate it, but she’ll eventually face the harsh reality of trauma recover/coping with trauma. All we can do for now….is wait.”

[mulherrviado]

So i have been a HashiMada enjoyer and apologizer for about ten whole years now. I know people who obviously were here before it, going back to the days we only had the statues in valley of the end. So, said that, i have seen a lot of ways people shipp them, and how they view each other separately, and i have shipped them in different ways and with different minds: first as a fresh teenager with only 14 years, and now, as a young adult of 24. With all this said, i need to vent about something that never seem to change.

Why people mischaracter Madara so much, till the point he is not even Madara anymore, just an oc with spiked hair.

Now, now. I know we all have free will, and my free will is tired of seeing the same thing over ten years. I block people who treat him like that, because i was one who did the same thing. I also know we don't really know Madara. Our point of view of him in the past is entirely told by Hashirama's memories, and although I know he was speaking the truth and looked at Madara with love (?), he wasn't Madara himself. The only Madara we see being him, is war Madara. And that men is a shell of the former self, he is completely out of touch with reality, to the point he was clearly delusional and psychotic. He belonged in a psych ward in the after life, not back on earth.

With all this being said, if the bits we have of his true personality and moments he shows it in war, why water it all down to some week, whiny 90's uke yaoi protagonist, and not Uchiha Fucking Madara?

Yes, this is just vent and totally biased on my opinion. But I'm also not the only one who view this and i don't want to offend anyone (I'm not talking about you as a person, I'm talking about the views of a fictional character).

[blackbird-brewster]

Idk what to do. I can’t stay in this state. They haven’t passed any new anti-trans laws here yet, but it’ll happen soon. There’s also just so much trauma and shit here and it’s killing me slowly to stay, but I’m terrified to leave. All my family is here. My lost pets and loved ones are buried here. I know it’ll kill me to stay, but the fear of moving is just so big. The fear of what my family will say or think terrifies me.

Hello Anon,

First off, thank you for trusting me with your worries. You're absolutely not alone, I've actually been through this exact same thing. I'm going to put my reply behind a cut because it involves mental health stuff/homophobia/etc. <3

I want to share my story, because it might help you. Or at the very least, I want you to know you are in good company here. I understand completely. I spent about 90% of 2014-early 2016 in and out of psych wards, hospitals, and ICU. I lost someone very dear ot me at the end of 2013 and it was the catalyst for a complete psychotic break and then a subsequent series of horrific mental health crisises.

At the time, I was living in Texas (born and raised). My family is super conservative (I have since cut them all off), it's the American south, super conservative, and I had been out as queer since age 15. It was never a place that was safe for me. But it's where I ended up.

Due to my mental health, I lost my job, then my apartment, and I ended up being homeless. Which obviously didn't help the mental health issues. I lived in my car for over a year, everything I owned in the world fit in a tiny Chevy Aveo compact.

My circumstances, my location, everything -- (as you said) was killing me slowly. I attempted to take my own life multiple times because I just saw no other way out of my situation.

I knew if I stayed, I wouldn't survive. I knew if I stayed there, it was a death sentence. Like you, my family was there, my past loved ones were buried there (I've seen too many deaths in my life, so this was doubly true and important), my life was there. But it wasn't much of a life at all.

In early 2016, my car got repossed while Iw as out of town. I was very lucky that the repo company allowed me to collect my belongings (since it was literally the only things I owned, since I was still living in that car) So what was I to do when the car I lived in was gone? I had nothing, I had nowhere to go. That place was suffocating me day by day. I had met a woman on here and we'd been in a sort of long distance online relationship for a handful of months.

I decided there was absolutely nothing worth staying in Texas for. I ended up selling what little I had, clearing out my tiny bit of money, crowdfunded the rest -- and I bough a one-way ticket to Aotearoa. My flight was 10 days after I bought the ticket. I gave everyone in my life a 10 day notice that I was moving across the globe on a whim. My family scoffed, they thought it was stupid, told me I'd be back, told me just like everything in my life 'it was a phase', etc. But I did it any way.

And you know what, Anon? Eight years later, I'm a permenant resident here, I'm thriving, my life is so fulfilling and beautiful. While the woman I moved here for wasn't my forever, this country was. My current partner and I have been together for five years, and they are my forever.

I will NEVER regret buying that one-way ticket. It literally saved my life. My handful of friends in the US know that if I had stayed, I wouldn't be here today to tell you this story. It HURTS, god it hurts deep in my soul, to be so so so far away from those handful of people who will always be my best friends. It really hurts to know how many huge events I've missed because I live a world away, but at the same time, we all agree that it's much easier to long for each other than for them to mourn my death.

So I'm not sugar coating it, moving away from people you love is SO difficult, and you will miss them always. But (depending on where you move to) you can visit them, and if not in person, technology can connect you with one click. I talk to my friends every single day and we make it work. (I'll never go back to the US)

It's a VERY hard choice, but ultimately you need to ask yourself what's more important: your life or other people's opinions.

I hope you choose your life. Because the world needs you, Anon and it would be a dimmer place without you. Don't let your location hollow out your soul, don't let your location take your life, it's just not worth it. Move, relocate, start over in a safe environment. I am so very proud of you and I love you, I know you've got this. <3

[auxiliarydetective]

Eros and Psyche AU - Part 2!

This technically still belongs to Day 29 of the OC Pride Challenge (which you can find here) but since there's no real prompt for day 30 and I had to split this into two parts, I figured I might as well post part 2 today.

Charlie returned the next day. And the day after that. And multiple more days to come. Every day, there was a different experiment where Charlie got to make Egon happy with the simplest tricks in his book. Throughout these various days, Charlie found himself befriending Egon and the other Ghostbusters, even the perpetually sarcastic and annoyed Peter Venkman. After a while, it wasn’t just experiments either. They would ask Charlie to help with some equipment, organize some data, or just make some coffee. Little by little, Charlie became part of the team. Sometimes, he’d even spend his nights at the firehouse, cleaning the uniforms or just watching over the Ghostbusters in their sleep. Not that he hadn’t been doing that since coming to Earth, but now he was there officially. He was sure that the Ghostbusters never even noticed when another ghost came to assault them in the middle of the night. It happened every now and then. Probably a result of them catching so many of their fellow specters. But whenever it happened, Charlie was there, warding off the ghosts with arrows of light. Eventually, Charlie really became a part of the Ghostbusters and it went down as follows:

Charlie came into the firehouse with a smile on his face. Ecto-1 was there, that meant everyone had to be here too.

“Morning, Janine,” Charlie said, coming up to Janine’s desk first, as usual. That had become tradition by now.

“Morning, Charlie,” Janine greeted back.

“How’s the situation, are there many calls?”

“Oh, the usual.”

“Do you think anyone’s sleeping?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“GOOD MORNING!” Charlie yelled up through the hole of the fire pole.

“Morning, Charlie!” Ray shouted back. “Come on up!”

Charlie flashed another smile at Janine, then hopped up the stairs. When he reached the top, he paused. The Ghostbusters were lined up behind the little dinner table, waiting for him to come upstairs.

“Did I do something wrong?” Charlie asked, looking fully perplexed.

“No, don’t worry,” Winston said.

“Not at all,” Egon agreed. “Come closer.”

So, Charlie did. That was when he spotted a bundle on the table. A flight suit complete with patches, elbow guards, a belt, some sort of pouch, boots and a camera. Venkman came strolling around the table and threw an arm around Charlie, pulling him closer.

“Today is a great day, Charlie,” he said, “because today, my friend, you have the chance of becoming part of the glorious Ghostbusters.”

“Who, me?” Charlie gasped.

“Yeah, you,” Ray confirmed. “We couldn’t think of anyone better suited for the job.”

“You’re not scared of ghosts, are you?” Venkman asked.

“No, not at all, I am a ghost,” Charlie said before realizing what he had said and correcting himself to: “Y’know, with my ESP and all that.”

“Your ESP is part of the reason why we chose you,” Egon explained, completely ignoring Charlie’s slip-up. “We’ve been wanting to document the various specters and beings we encounter and that includes taking pictures. But since we’re always too busy fighting the ghost, we need someone else to do it for us.”

“And that’s where you come in,” Ray concluded. “If you’re up for it that is.”

“Sure!” Charlie called out. “I’d be honoured!”

Quickly, Charlie took the various items from the table and got suited up. Now he stood there in front of his friends, a proud Ghostbuster. Well, assistant Ghostbuster. Ghostbusters cameraman. No, he was a real Ghostbuster. Only a few minutes later, they were off to a call. Charlie sat in the back of Ecto-1, so close to Egon that he could faint.

The call was an easy one, according to Egon and the others. But Charlie could prove his worth immediately. While the others trapped the ghost, he had his camera pointed at the specter constantly, trying to get the best angles and shots possible. When they were done trapping the ghost, they went outside again. But now, a team of reporters waited outside. Immediately, Venkman greeted them as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Egon answered the technical questions. He described the supernatural in words that Charlie found mesmerizing, giving his world a whole new perspective. But then, suddenly, the reporters were focused on Charlie.

“What’s your name and what is your affiliation with the Ghostbusters?” the reporter asked, almost shoving the microphone into Charlie’s face.

“Well, uh, I’m Charlie Drake,” Charlie stammered, “and I work for the Ghostbusters. But all the credit goes to them, I just take the pictures.”

“So you’re a reporter?”

“No, not at all, I-”

Luckily, Egon was there to the rescue. He wrapped an arm around Charlie’s shoulders protectively, making Charlie’s heart beat even faster, though for a different reason.

“Charlie takes our documentation and research pictures,” he explained. “He’s also an ESP extraordinaire and paranormal expert. But if you’ll excuse us, we still have a lot to do today. If you want an extensive interview, make an appointment.”

With that, he led Charlie back to Ecto-1. Once they were back in the car and Ray started driving, he told him:

“The reporters can be a bit pushy. You’ll get used to it eventually but it you don’t, just redirect them to someone else.”

“Yeah, Venkman always likes talking to those guys,” Winston remarked with a smirk.

That was the first call with many more to follow. Between calls, Charlie developed the photos. Sometimes with Ray and Egon, sometimes just with Ray and sometimes just with Egon - which was obviously the best constellation. Charlie liked Ray, he liked him a lot in fact, but he loved Egon and even the littlest moments alone with him were pure gold. He loved listening to him talk about what they found in the pictures, about the classifications, about the different forms of aura, their strength, the tiny occurrences Charlie had managed to catch.

That had been the first call. But there was another that stood out. This particular one took the Ghostbusters to the aquarium. A few days earlier, Charlie’s equipment had been upgraded to include a first aid kit. Just in time, too. It had been an emergency call, made by the frantic aquarium director who said his visitors were in great danger. The culprit, he said, was a huge octopus. So, all five of the Ghostbusters hopped into Ecto-1 and raced to the aquarium, sirens blaring. When they reached the aquarium, a group of reporters with a camera was already there, as well as a large crowd of evacuated visitors. By now, Charlie was a little more used to reporters, though a camera crew was something new. He helped the others put on their proton packs, then - after Peter had gotten his share of attention - they went inside. Using a flyer as their map, they made their way to the exhibit hall where the octopus had been sighted. They had barely gone far into the building when they already walked on wet floors.

“The creature must have smashed the glass of one of the tanks,” Egon theorized.

“How big do you think it is?” Winston asked. “Is it just a big octopus or is it a huge monster?”

“I dunno,” Peter murmured. “With normies you never know.”

They kept walking, constantly looking around for signs of the beast.

“We’re getting close,” Charlie announced after a while.

“Can you sense it?” Ray asked.

“You better believe it.” Charlie shuddered, a grin on his face. “Makes my skin crawl.”

Ready to shoot, Charlie held the camera up to his face. They were really close now. Just one more corner to turn. Ray saw it first, gasping audibly.

“Wow!”

“It’s a kraken,” Egon remarked.

“How are we gonna get something this big into the trap?” Winston murmured.

“Well, only one way to find out,” Peter declared, grabbing his particle thrower.

Quickly, before he could shoot, Charlie got a photo in. But the moment the camera flashed, the kraken woke up. Quickly, the Ghostbusters all grabbed their particle throwers, stepping into the main area of the exhibit hall. It was a circular room with multiple pillars holding up the ceiling and tanks all around. Soon, it turned out that the proton packs only did very little damage. The kraken only let out pained screeches. But when Egon managed to hit its eyes, that was when it happened. In a fit of rage, the Kraken slammed one of its fleshy tentacles through the room, smashing one of the pillars. Winston was quick enough to duck away, but Egon wasn’t. The tentacle hit him and swabbed him off the ground like a fly, sending him crashing into one of the tanks.

“Egon!” Charlie cried out against the loud rushing of water spilling out through the broken glass.

He started running, slipping across the ground and dodging the various sea creatures now wobbling across the floor. Egon had been swept out of the aquarium, lying motionless on the ground. Raw panic eating at Charlie’s nerves, he fell to his knees next to him. Immediately, he checked his heartbeat. Thank the gods! He was still breathing.

“Egon!” Charlie hissed. “Hey, Egon!”

Egon groaned quietly, then started moving.

“Take it slow, don’t push yourself.”

“It was a good call to make the proton packs waterproof,” was the first thing Egon said once the disorientation wore off.

“Yeah, that was a genius call,” Charlie agreed with a smile.

He had spotted a wound at the back of Egon’s head and was now digging through his medkit.

“Take off your glasses for a second, I need to put a bandage around your head.”

“I don’t like being blind,” Egon mumbled, but he did as he was told.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make it quick.”

So, Charlie hurried with his medic duties. He made sure to be gentle, carefully holding Egon’s head. Once he was done, he patted his cheek and smiled.

“There we are. But you probably shouldn’t jump into battle straight away again.”

“Egon!” Peter yelled from across the room. “Egon, use that large brain of yours and come up with a plan! We need a plan!”

At the same time, Ray was grabbed by the kraken and lifted off the ground.

“Charlie, are you getting this?!” he shrieked.

Out of pure reflex, Charlie held up his camera and snapped a picture. Peter and Winston pointed their particle throwers at the arm the kraken held Ray in, prompting it to let him go.

“Now would be a good time, Egon!” Winston called.

But Egon just sat there, looking around the room, trying to find some sort of solution.

“I have a plan!” Charlie suddenly gasped. “Until now, we’ve only tried capturing it, but how about we try fighting it with its own weapons?”

“You know how to do that?” Egon asked.

“Of course! Give me your proton pack.”

Quickly, Egon slid the proton pack’s shoulder straps off and picked the heavy equipment up off the ground, putting it on Charlie’s back. In return, Charlie handed over his camera.

“Guys, try keeping it in the middle of the room!” Charlie shouted.

Then, he pointed his particle thrower at the ceiling. He started burning sigils into the concrete above the kraken, careful not to mess up the perspective or shape. It wasn’t that easy after all. But finally, the sigils started to glow, bright light raining down on the kraken. Charlie cheered, but he cheered too early. The kraken’s arm shot out to grab him, snaking itself around Charlie and the proton pack, pulling him into the light. Immediately, Charlie felt nauseous, the world started spinning, he felt like he was dissolving. Then, everything stopped and he fell down, into the void. From then on, he barely noticed anything happening. He caught a glimpse of bright light, possibly from a trap, felt himself be picked up and covered beneath some sort of fabric, heard the siren of Ecto-1, bits and pieces of conversation… But after a while, it all stopped.

Egon and Winston carried Charlie out of Ecto-1, his body covered by a banner from the aquarium. It had been an impulse decision because they hadn’t wanted the crowd and the reporters to see what had become of him. Now, looking back at it, it might have been a stupid decision, considering it looked like they were carrying a corpse. Janine shrieked when she saw this.

“My god, what happened?!” she gasped, running over from her desk.

“Charlie got in contact with a surge of psychokinetic energy,” Ray said as Egon and Winston carried him towards the stairs.

“Is he dead?!”

“No, he’s alive. He’s gonna be alright. I think.”

“You think?!”

“We’re sure,” Peter lied. “Just… get back to your desk, alright? We’re gonna take care of him. For now, he’s asleep and we’re gonna see how he feels when he wakes up.”

“Okay… whatever you say…” Janine murmured.

Upstairs, Egon and Winston put Charlie into Egon’s bed. They pulled the banner away and stared for a few seconds. Before them lay a creature that looked like the Charlie they knew but also wildly different. This creature had long, twisted horns that had been quite the obstacle while carrying him, pointy ears, fluffy white hair and light blue skin. A bow and a quiver with various metallic arrows were swung over his shoulder.

“It’s the silhouette we saw on the Aura Video-Analyzer,” Winston remarked. “What do you think happened?”

“Whatever sigil Charlie burned into the ceiling must have weakened him,” Egon theorized. “Just like it took the kraken’s power away and shrunk it, it must’ve destroyed Charlie’s human disguise.”

“Do you think we should figure out who he really is?”

“Maybe. For now, I’d like to know about the sigil he painted. - There should be a book on one of the shelves in my lab, a lexicon of runes and sigils. Would you get that for me?”

“Sure.”

As Winston left, Egon stayed behind. Carefully, he pulled the quiver and bow off of Charlie’s shoulder and leaned them against the nightstand. Then, he pulled the blanket up to Charlie’s collar. He wanted to leave, but then his attention went back to the bow and quiver. Curious, he pulled one of the arrows out of the quiver. It seemed to be made entirely of rose gold.

“Egon!” Peter called from outside the room, causing Egon to jump.

Before he knew it, the arrow’s tip was nudged into his fingertip and dissolved into sparkling dust. At first, Egon felt no different. But then, when he looked at Charlie again, his heart suddenly beat faster and he felt all warm and fuzzy inside. It was almost like a feeling he knew, like when Charlie had had his hands on his cheeks before, but a lot stronger.

“Egon!” Peter called again.

Reluctantly, Egon left the room and closed the door behind him. As it turned out, the proton pack Egon had worn hadn’t been fully waterproof and would have to have some parts replaced. Quickly, Egon got to work. Once he was done, he headed back to the bedroom to check on Charlie. But when he opened the door, Charlie was gone, along with the bow and quiver. Egon started to get a horrible feeling. Could he have lost his connection to this realm entirely? Did that mean he had just dissolved? Was he, perhaps, really dead? No, he couldn’t be dead. According to all the measurements they had taken, Charlie was a demon or demigod and that meant he couldn’t die. But what if he did? And if he hadn’t, would he even come back?

Three days went by and there was no sign of Charlie. In the meantime, Egon went out of his way to research who Charlie really was. Maybe it was invasive, but he had to know. Perhaps Charlie needed help to get back to the human realm and that was why he wasn’t back. He had to want to come back, right? They hadn’t done anything wrong, had they? Either way, Egon needed to see Charlie again. He found himself thinking of him even more than usual, in situations where it was really less than practical. One thing was clear: Egon would be more than willing to summon Charlie if necessary. Or Chandrah, as he had found out. A demigod capable of strong spells of love. But then did that mean… that Egon was in love? No, that couldn’t be. He barely felt any different from before the arrow had touched him. Or maybe that was exactly the point. Had he always been in love? Either way, he would have to see Charlie to make sure.

On the fourth day after Charlie’s disappearance, the Ghostbusters had yet another emergency call: Apparently, the museum was being terrorized by a mammoth. As it turned out, this job was even harder than the kraken job had been. Within only a few minutes, the Ghostbusters were all on the ground. The mammoth came stomping towards them with an aggressive cry, ready to crush them. Egon crawled backwards frantically, the heavy proton pack wearing him down. Suddenly, a beam of light shot through the hallway, hitting the mammoth right between the eyes, causing it to stumble backwards and fall. Egon turned around and couldn’t believe his eyes.

“Charlie!” Ray cried out, scrambling to his feet.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Charlie said with a smile.

He stood there in his demon form, quiver over his shoulder, proudly holding his bow. As everyone else got to their feet, Egon stayed down, motionless in shock. He only started registering what was going on again when Charlie held his hand out to him to help him up.

“Charlie, you came back,” Egon gasped, cupping Charlie’s face in his hands.

“I’m sorry I left,” Charlie stammered, “I was scared, I was-”

He was suddenly quiet when Egon pressed a kiss onto his lips.

“Woah, lovebirds!” Peter shouted. “Can you wait ‘till after we have this ghost locked up?!”

It was just now that Egon truly realized what he had done. He cleared his throat awkwardly.

“Right.”

[himero-love]

“how could you not know something was wrong earlier??”

*tells me that they worship me & love me so deeply* *chooses furniture & house decor with me the day before our breakup & lets me place a $300 order for our shared room* *agrees that we should “stay strong, focus on our love together as a team” against a potentially scary law situation* *talked about saving up enough money to go to julian or big bear together & that i had to “just listen to them abt money decisions & we can go :)” the day before they broke up with me* *not tell me that them going to the psych ward was dependent on me* *talks about how stable our relationship had grown to be* *invites me to join them for christmas AGAIN THE DAY BEFORE*

& they kept asking me why i couldn’t see it coming & couldn’t accept it so easily. they hid their hurt from me months past AND BROKE MY TRUST MONTHS AGO AND I TRIED SO HARD TO REGAIN IT IN THEM BECAUSE THEY SAID EVERYTHING WAS OKAY ONLY TO BLAME IT BACK ON ME. THEY SAID THEY WOULDNT TURN THEIR WORDS ON ME AND MADE A PROMISE THEY WOULDNT AND THEN THEY LITERALLY DID. WHEN I MADE SURE TO MAKE IT CLEAR TO THEM & TOLD MY CLOSE OTHERS SO THEY COULD KEEP AN EYE ON HOW THINGS PLAYED OUT & THEY SAID THEY WOULDNT PUT IT ON ME AND THEY DID. THEY TOLD ME I WAS THE MANIPULATIVE ONE.

I’m not even sad right now, or angry or ANYTHING, but god will i remember that it’s a testament to my strength & how GODDAMN hard I’ve worked that I’m okay. I let someone who gaslit me into my life so deeply, into my friends’ and family & house & holidays & outings. After all this emotional abuse & toil, after countless hurt, after a broken ass car & having to haul THEIR belongings & furniture out for their dad- they didn’t have the guts to get it their damn self- after their lies & being evicted with the deadline on last christmas, after multiple times at a psych ward/crisis center WHERE THEY RELIED ON ME & CALLED ME ONLY TO FUCK ME OVER THE FOLLOWING DAYS WHEN THEY COME BACK, may i never forget that i’m enough. that my life was worth so much more than this. that this hurt and grief cannot be the sum of my being, that i deserved joy & trust & love. that my body’s betrayal and trauma to please be released so i can be happy in this only home that i have for certain. may i never stop loving myself even when it’s hard. i don’t even know what that would be like anymore. but i’m trying hard to learn.

when i die, may i be full of joy and light. please

[notfriendlyhougen]

I swear when it comes to FFXIV, I see post after post about racism in the community and colonialism literally everywhere in the game, but I never, ever, see any posts about the blatant ableism in the community that's been around for god knows how long. I'm honestly sick of nobody pointing it out, so I'm doing so myself.

As someone's who's autistic and has a myriad of other shit going on (depression, anxiety disorders, paranoia, so on so forth) the treatment I've gotten from the community regarding these disorders have been fucking cruel. If someone relapses, has a meltdown, or calls someone out for being blatantly fucking ableist, all shots are fired, blocklists are deployed, and we get a callout post saying we're delusional and belong in a psych ward. I've literally had comments like "a psych ward will be able to tell you what's real and what's not real!" said straight to my fucking face and when I call that out saying it's incredibly fucking ableist I get nothing but witch hunting, genuine stalker behavior, and harassment in return. When I say people in the community have ruined my mental health to the point where it's hard to play the game anymore, so much so that I'm started to put the fucking WoW community on a higher social pedestal, people are saying "oh you're just overreacting, they're not doing that" as if they fucking know what's going on in my head.

Listen, we all know things happen in our heads differently. But the first step to not being ableist is understanding what goes on in other people's, especially neurodivergent people's, heads and being fucking considerate and not saying we need to get locked up in a mental hospital for simply thinking or acting differently.

For one, being locked up in a psych ward was traumatic for me, and a similar situation would probably negatively affect many other autistic people, and two, back in the 50s when someone got diagnosed with autism, the first suggestion was to institutionalize them for the rest of their lives because they'll never "be fixed," and all the shit you're saying is no different than that.

That and the amount of ableist slurs and comments that go around the community and the game is genuinely sickening and people need to fucking stop.

Perfect community btw. Don't @ me with your bullshit takes and just shut the fuck up and listen to neurodivergent people for once in your life

[dont-worry-about-1t]

I worked at a “good” psychiatric hospital as a tech for 3 years. While I can say that many of the situations in the notes did not happen while I worked there- withholding food and drink, taking previously approved belongings, sexual abuse- the fact remains that it was more like a prison than a place of healing. Restraints, seclusion, drugs… those are all common practice wherever you go. And it’s horrific. Although we heavily self-vetted our staff to prevent assholes who wanted to abuse vulnerable people from working there (a practice that left us in mandatory overtime and half staffed the entire time I worked there… because half the people who applied were those type of people), it can’t be denied that these practices are baked into the system. For every patient whose hands I held for hours while talking to them to keep them from peeling off their skin until they could calm down, there was one who I had to hold down to be medicated. I believe that a better way is possible. Because it was. Before Regan, the US actually had a half-decent mental health system, with many halfway houses, group homes, long term care facilities, and care communities. Inpatient still existed, but was much more rarely used and the facilities that existed were generally nicer (except state run facilities, which have always been a nightmare). This is part of the problem but of course not all of it. The fact remains that even with advances in psychiatry, mental health problems are still seen as individual defects or diseases rather than the result of societal issues, personal traumas and vulnerabilities, or even just a different way of being. And the way to enforce “normality” is medication (usually helpful, not always!), and literal force if that doesn’t work. Therapy in the hospital is sporadic and about 30 minutes/session. Groups were primarily run by us, as techs, and not therapists or psychiatrists. While most of the patients were grateful to dance, play basketball, have guided journaling, play Pictionary, or have impromptu guitar concerts (until our snuck in guitar was taken away for being “dangerous” and the second one was too), I don’t think this can be called therapy. Just a way to break up the torturous boredom and monotony of a psych ward. The rest of the time there was, for the patients, a mix of horrible boredom, rigid schedules and enforcement of rules, and fear of punishment or of other patients-overbooked and underfunded means all types of people were forced to cohabitate, whether appropriate or not. Not what one would call a “healing environment.” All this to say-we were a “good” hospital, with “good” staff. And the abuse was still there. It still happened. I was still complicit and many of my patients still suffered. You can refuse your meds… until the psychiatrist rules you psychotic or dangerous. You can stay in bed… until the new policy is to lock you out of your room during the day. You can get therapy… once or twice during your week stay because there’s only 3 therapists for the whole hospital. I have a lot more I can say but this is already stupidly long.

Suffice it to say: we always said no one should work there longer than a year, or it makes you a worse person. I was there for 3, until I finished my education. I am a worse person now than I was; even years later. I will never go back to one of those places. The system is broken. And until we tear the whole thing down and reform it, people will continue to suffer a cycle of institutionalization->back to their previous situation with no additional support->crisis->institutionalization. It’s an endless feedback loop of abuse and crisis. No good clinician stays. No healthy patient leaves.

and here is the thing. all psych wards are bad. every single one. I don’t think there is such a thing as a good psych ward—I’m willing to believe that there are some good people who work in psych wards, who have good intentions, and who might end up helping some people. but the psych ward as a whole? There are no good psych wards. The structure of a psych ward inherently prevents it from being good. Even if you personally think you had a good experience in a psych ward, most likely what that means is that the abusive practices weren’t used on you. But those things are still there. even if you weren’t put into solitary confinement, it is extremely likely that your psych ward still had a room for that. even if you weren’t drugged without your consent, it is very likely other people were being drugged without consent!! even if you weren’t strip searched, or tied to your bed, or starved…it is VERY likely that your psych ward has protocols for all these things and regularly does them to many people who come through the ward! And it is vital to think about how your race, class, and other identities affected your experience before making broad claims about things “never happening” in psych wards.

Psych wards are inherently violent, oppressive, and unethical based solely on the fact that they are a form of incarceration, but even beyond that? If a psych ward is committed to enforcing compliance and incarceration, it is going to have some of those abusive measures that I listed above, and that is going to be standard protocol. Even if there are good people working in a psych ward, their reach is going to be limited—the power of the institution means that they constantly have to weigh the decision to break the rules and help someone, or to follow violent protocols. Most clinicians and staff will choose not to lose their job and even if they find it personally distasteful, will still choose to enable these types of violence. Good people on the inside are not able to fundamentally change the reality of what psych wards are and what they can do.

I strongly believe that people who say they have good experiences are the outlier and also are likely to be white and rich. Even if people don’t think that their experience was abusive, a lot of people generally find it boring, unhelpful, and mediocre. And so, so many people are experiencing abuse in a daily fucking basis in these places. Even if there are individuals who manage to escape the worst of a psych ward, the fact that the psych ward has the power, structure, and protocol to do these things to anyone is a problem.

[xtruss]

Life Inside The Brutal U.S. Prison That Awaits Julian Assange

Over Two Days This Week, A U.K. Court will Hear Julian Assange’s Appeal Against Extradition to the U.S.

— Deconstructed | February 20 2024 | The Intercept

People Walk by a Graffiti Depicting Julian Assange on Leake Street in London on February 19, 2024. Photo: Hesther Ng/SOPA Images/LightRocket Via Getty Images

Starting Tuesday , A U.K. Court Will Review Julian Assange’s Appeal Against Extradition To The United States. At the center of the extradition controversy is concern that Assange will be tortured and put in solitary confinement in what’s known as a CMU — communications management unit — in federal prison. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by Martin Gottesfeld, a human rights activist who was formerly imprisoned in two of the nation’s CMUs. Gottesfeld shares his experience incarcerated in CMU facilities, where his access to visitors including his wife were severely restricted.

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed, I’m Ryan Grim.

Later today in the United Kingdom a court will be reviewing, over the span of two days, a high court decision made to extradite Julian Assange to the United States. This could be the final appeal, the final hearing that Julian Assange has before he’s sent over here to the United States.

At the center of the controversy over the extradition in the court proceedings has been whether or not Julian Assange will be tortured, will be mistreated, here in the United States, whether or not he will be put in solitary confinement and, specifically, in what’s known as a CMU, a “Communications Management Unit.”

Now, the Department of Justice sort of pretended to make some kind of offering to the U.K. high court that they would not do this. But then, in the very next sentence of their pleading, they said, unless we decide that we actually would need to do this.

So, to talk today about what a CMU is, and why this has been the focus of human rights advocates who are concerned that he may actually wind up in one of these, we’re going to be joined by Martin Gottesfeld, who himself has spent a significant amount of time in an American CMU.

Marty, thank you so much for joining me on Deconstructed.

Martin Gottesfeld: I’m happy to be here, Ryan.

RG: And so, Marty, before we get to your experience in the CMU, let’s talk about how you wound up in prison in the first place, because I actually think that’s relevant to this conversation. Because it does appear like this is a place where a lot of people who are essentially political prisoners wind up.

MG: Yeah. And I was not the only one, although I do think my case is representative of the larger group, largely representative of the larger group.

So, the government alleges that I am a master hacker with Anonymous. The government also alleges that during a 2014 human rights and child custody matter, I launched one of the largest distributed denial of service —DDoS — attacks that the government had ever seen, to try to free Justina Pelletier, who is being held against her will and against her parents will in a Boston Children’s Hospital psych ward, and then in various residential facilities throughout the state.

The case reached the very highest levels of the political system, with people on both sides, parties on both sides of the aisle commenting on it. Mike Huckabee, Sean Hannity, others on the right, and then the Massachusetts HHS Secretary, uh, Polanowicz; he actually ended up getting involved from the left to eventually send Justina home, which is where most people felt she belonged the entire time.

And before that case, I had been involved — I don’t want to say with, but I guess kind of alongside — Anonymous, protesting the American troubled teen industry, which is also just a political lightning rod, and has been subject to congressional hearings, GAO reports, media exposés, for well over a decade, for the torture and death of American children for profit.

RG: And so, your journey in federal custody actually began in New York. Talk about that a little bit before we get to the CMU, because you actually wrote a piece for us about what it was like in the first jail you were in. And, if I recall correctly, wasn’t Chapo there too?

MG: So, that wasn’t my first jail. I was arrested in Florida, and then I made a very long extended journey through the federal system to get back to the Northeast. And then I started writing for the Huffington Post, back when you were the D.C. bureau chief. And very shortly after I began writing for the Huffington Post and started a hunger strike seeking pledges from the 2016 election to curtail institutionalized abuse against children and political prosecutions, the Justice Department transferred me to MCC, New York, the Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York, and it’s 9 South SHU and 10 South Sam’s Unit.

And that is where Chapo was held at the time, and it’s also where Jeffrey Epstein later died. And the communications program they have in those units is kind of connected at the hip to the CMUs. It’s run by the same so-called counterterrorism unit inside the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, which is part of the Justice Department.

And yeah, I wrote a piece there for the Huffington Post — several pieces, actually — about that facility, calling on public officials to do something to reform the facility, because I foresaw, even in 2016, that people were going to die there. And then, sure enough, a few years later, Jeffrey Epstein died there.

RG: It was my sense that your willingness to write for us — both at The Huffington Post and then later at The Intercept — while you were behind bars was one of the things that led to you eventually getting moved to a full-on CMU. Do you think that that’s accurate? What do you think? What drove the decision making that got you stuck in that hole?

MG: Oh, I definitely think it was the journalism. Twelve days after my first Intercept article was when they transferred me to the CMU. And that Intercept article was about El Chapo, his confinement, the conditions of his confinement, the human rights violations, and that was what directly precipitated the move to the CMU.

And then, on top of that, when they transfer you to a CMU, there’s not really a lot of due process involved in that decision, and the courts have tolerated that, but they do have to give you this one-page paper with the supposed justification, right? And mine just basically said, you’re a member of Anonymous, Anonymous is this group that we have to watch. So, therefore, we’re putting you in a CMU.

The problem with that, of course, is that there were other guys in the federal prison system associated much more with Anonymous than I was who never were placed in the CMU. So, Jeremy Hammond was one… And I’m trying to remember the gentleman’s name, but he wrote for the Intercept a lot, but his articles didn’t really challenge federal judges, challenge federal prosecutorial discretion. He just kind of satirized the whole thing. And they were very good, but they didn’t really make people uncomfortable the way my writing made people uncomfortable. I named names.

RG: Right.

MG: And I named facilities. I named specific human rights violations, and that, I think, made them very uncomfortable.

And I can tell you, too, from how I was treated, and the other cases that were there, which I guess we’ll get into in a little while, it certainly seems that I was placed there to suppress my first amendment-protected conduct.

RG: Right. And so, where were you sent, and what’s the place like as you first get there?

MG: I spent time in both CMUs, there are two in the federal system. I was first sent to Terre Haute, Indiana, and that’s kind of the first, and that’s the harsher of the two CMUs. And then, later, I spent time in the CMU in Marion, Illinois.

When you first walk into the CMU, it’s a relatively small unit, there were only about 30 guys there when I first got there.

RG: This is the Terre Haute one.

MG: Yes, the Terre Haute one. It’s actually the old federal death house. So, they built a new federal death row elsewhere in the compound, and then they put the CMU in the old federal death house. So, like, I’ve been inside Timothy McVeigh’s cell. And there are guys who say they’ve seen the old electric chair in the basement, that they have not moved that.

And you can actually see the new death house. Like, we have a very small quote-unquote “outdoor rec area,” right? Where you can go and get fresh air. But they make sure that, within sharp view of that place, whenever you’re outside, you see the actual building, where in 2020 and 2021 they killed 14 people.

RG: What is your cell like? Because this is the place that people assume we will send Julian Assange if the U.S. successfully extradites him.

MG: The cells are very small. They were built in a former era — the building itself dates to, like, the 1930s — and they were built, I think, for a single person, even back then. So the cells do not actually meet the minimum square footage that the Bureau of Prisons publishes in its own policies, in terms of the minimum needed for a human being.

And then what they did is they went in, and they retrofitted a bunk bed onto each one, so that they can double up, and they did do that in the time that I was there. It’s a sardine can, and it’s smaller than you would get elsewhere in the Bureau of Prisons. It’s a concrete and brick building without air conditioning so, in the summer, you just bake. And if there’s a lockdown, and you’re not out of your cell for three or four days, they’re just baking you, they’re just cooking you like a turkey.

RG: So, while you are there, there are two of you? How much room is [left] after the bunk beds are put in there?

MG: There’s less than 56 square feet in the whole cell, and a lot less if you don’t count the toilet, the actual bunk. Now, I spent time there both single-celled and with a cellmate, it depends on the number of guys they have in the unit. But when you’re a journalist like I am, you’re one of the first people they double.

When they try to double you up as a journalist, they doubled up… They doubled me up with a guy who was a known informant, who was actually in the law library as an informant, right? And when I reacted negatively to that, they acted like I was the one who was misbehaving, you know?

But, again, these are all political cases. So, to force you to bunk with an informant and risk violence, right? Because that’s something that’s a direct risk of violence. And the Bureau of Prisons does not care. They do not care.

RG: Yeah. In general, do people want to be doubled up or not?

MG: No. People generally want the single cell. You have no modicum with privacy any other way.

RG: Right. So, you’re doubled up. How often can you get … If there’s not a lockdown, how often are you out of that cell?

MG: So, you’re out, actually, most of the day. They pop the doors around six, seven in the morning. During the weekday schedule you’d be out until just before four, and then there’d be a count, and you’d be released after the count anytime between like 4:30 and 5:30.

Sometimes the guards are lazy, right? And they don’t want to do the count right away, or they don’t want to unlock you right away after the count. So, even though the count’s done, you can be in your cell till 5:30, 6 o’clock. Then you’re out for dinner, and then you stay out until about nine o’clock.

On the weekends, there’s an additional count at 10 o’clock in the morning. And so, you lock in at like 9:45 and be out around 10:30, 11.

RG: And so, what’s the communication management part of it? Like, what’s different about Terre Haute or Marion, compared to a typical federal prison? When it comes to your ability to communicate with the public, with your attorneys, with your family, and so on?

MG: So, the unit is entirely self-contained. It’s part of a larger federal complex, but if you’re a regular prisoner in that complex, those times that you’re out, you’re not stuck in your housing unit. You can go to the athletic facilities, you can go to the sports fields. There’s a lot more to do.

In the CMU, when you’re out, you’re still kind of stuck in this sardine can. And the communications management … So, elsewhere in the federal prison system, you get between 300 and 500 minutes a month of phone time, and that’s kind of in flux now with the First Step Act and all that. And you get in-person contact visits; like, your family can come and hug you.

In the CMU, you get two 15-minute phone calls a week, max. You have no contact visits, you basically never leave the little unit until you’re either released or you’re transferred.

Those phone calls elsewhere in the Bureau, they say they monitor, but there’s so much call volume that they cannot really effectively monitor; they kind of keep recordings for a little while in case they have to go back and do something. But in the CMU, your phone calls are monitored in real time, and they can be cut off in real time. And so, several times I was speaking with journalists, and they would just cut the call off. And they would never provide any justification for that.

After NBC dropped the four-part docuseries on my case, they just deleted my wife from my contact information, never provided me any written justification for that, effectively banned me on the phone without providing any written justification whatsoever. And you get lawyers involved, and nothing really happens. The system is completely unwilling to check their discretion. The judges just don’t want to hear it.

The judges in Terre Haute get spun. They hear that this is the terrorist unit for Al-Qaeda guys, and that whatever they file is frivolous. And these judges are mostly former federal prosecutors. Like, you’re dead on arrival in court.

I have a federal habeas pending now that I’ve been released, but it’s been pending since July, fully briefed, right? And the judge won’t rule on it, just to give you an example. And federal habeas is supposed to jump to the front of the list, it’s the very first thing a federal judge is supposed to rule on. And in Terre Haute, it becomes the very last thing. Especially if it looks like you’ve got a case.

RG: Let’s talk a little bit about who goes out there, because I remember from more than ten years ago, there was a lawsuit, or there were complaints against the CMUs on religious grounds, where the argument was, you’re sticking all of the Muslims in these prisons, and you can’t do that, that is discrimination based on religion. The Bureau of Prison’s response to that was, oh, well, we’ve got a couple people convicted of ecoterrorism here and there. And so, they kind of just threw them into it, and said, well, look, it’s not all Muslims anymore, so you don’t have your case anymore.

When you were there, what’s the kind of demographic, and what’s the profile of the kinds of people that you’re with?

MG: At any given time, it’s between about 30 and 45 percent Muslims, most of them. It tends not to be the big cases that you would actually associate with a unit like that. It tends to be, like, some 20-year-old guy who got indoctrinated over the internet and was trying to fly to Syria, and they catch him at the airport, right? And he’s never actually hurt anybody. In some cases, these people were entrapped, right? And it tends to be those kinds of cases.

These are not really the serious terrorism cases that one would think they are, but these cases are worth a lot of money. The Bureau of Prisons gets a lot in their budget based on building these guys up as some international threat, even though they’ve never hurt anybody, and had no serious potential to hurt anybody. That’s the majority of the Muslim cases there.

Then you have probably about 15 percent political cases. And then the rest… They actually started changing the demographic after I started complaining that there was a high concentration of political cases, so now they’re running through guys who get caught with a cell phone in federal prison. That was largely a reaction to my coverage.

It’s definitely not what the public is sold. And these CMUs, they cost millions of dollars, they hire dozens of so-called intelligence analysts to review the cases there. My understanding is that the qualifications of these so-called intelligence analysts wouldn’t meet the bar at the state department or anywhere else. A lot of cases, these are just former prison guards who have no special intelligence training that I’ve ever seen, right? But they do get these exorbitant salaries, once the Bureau of Prisons kind of designates them as intelligence analysts.

And the CMUs, they were started during Iraq and Afghanistan, and the idea there was that, by mining the communications of these jihadis, they would come up with actionable intel to use in the war effort. And the one thing that — to my knowledge anyway — the CMU has never, ever produced, is actionable intel to use in any war effort whatsoever.

RG: So, how often would you wind up in solitary? What’s that system there?

MG: So, I started doing the prerequisites to file a lawsuit that they didn’t like, and they called that extortion, and they threw me in solitary.

RG: How long, that first time?

MG: So, that was about a month and a half. And then they celled me up with that informant. And when I started talking to the media saying they celled me up with an informant, they threw me in solitary for another three, four months. Those are the two stints that I did in solitary in the CMU.

And the solitary cells in the CMU, by the way, are even worse than the regular cells. They’re insect infested, cockroaches everywhere. There are serious sewage issues. The water is not really drinkable. And so, they go out of their way to make those solitary cells very, very heinous, and it’s something that Julian, I’m sad to say, can expect to experience himself the first time he reaches out to a journalist, the first time someone tries to file a lawsuit to vindicate his First Amendment rights, you know? It’s hell.

RG: What kind of insect infestation? That sounds utterly terrifying.

MG: Spiders, cockroaches, various other insects that we couldn’t identify. I actually, at one point, got in — it took some effort — but I got in a North American field guide to insects and bugs, just so that we could identify all the various creepy crawlies, and so that we would know what’s potentially venomous and what’s not. Because they don’t provide any training, any safety. There’s nothing to tell you, don’t get stung by that one, don’t get stung by that one, right?

And there’s an insect there that’s called a “cow killer,” OK? And it’s called a cow killer …

RG: That doesn’t sound good.

MG: Yeah, it’s not because its sting is so venomous that it would actually kill a cow, but the sting is so painful that it can cause a stampede. So, one of these things stings one cow, the cow bucks because it’s in so much pain. This causes a stampede, and you end up with a herd of dead cows, right? And that insect was crawling around the rec yard out there. And, again, there’s no signage, no warning, no anything. If you don’t have the knowledge of the guys who are already there to say, hey, don’t get stunned by that guy, you might step right on it.

RG: What’s it like trying to sleep, knowing that the cell’s crawling with bugs?

MG: In my cell I always slept on the top bunk, even when I didn’t have a cellmate, because they’re just less likely to get at you up there. But yeah, I’ve woken up there with a cockroach staring at me, like, on my chest, just staring at me, and I’m like, oh hi. Had to brush him off the bed.

Guys wake up with spider bites, you know? Like, a big rash going all the way down the leg.

Yeah. Just, nothing is done. I filed remedies all the way up to Washington, in the Bureau of Prisons, saying, you guys got to do something about this. And they basically said, we don’t see any bugs, you guys are fine. And they just lie. I mean, they lie, in writing, on federal documents, they sign them … You know, if you see something, anything from the government talking about the conditions in the CMU, from my perspective, they’re just lying.

RG: And this is all related because — as people I’m sure have gathered by this point in the conversation — you’re the kind of person that is going to be a squeaky wheel. Like, they can do whatever they want to you, and you’re not going to stop pushing back and fighting for your rights. That is also the kind of person that they’re going to retaliate against constantly.

MG: Yeah. They’re trying to break you. That’s their goal. Really. I mean, they’ll never admit to it, but there’s a widely known thing among the CMU prisoners that, if you kind of go to them and you say, hey, look, I’ll stop, just get me out of here. And you drop all your lawsuits, and you stop complaining, that’s the one time they’ll let you out.

And no staff ever threatened me, but I’ve talked to a lot of guys who were threatened, who staff told them, if you don’t stop, we’re going to make sure you never see your kids again. If you don’t stop, we’re going to keep you here. Or, complaining is not the way to get out of this unit, right? That’s the one you hear the most, is that complaining is not the way to get out of this unit.

RG: The way you got into it, and the way you stay in it.

MG: You stay in it. Yeah, exactly. I think that’s the implication.

RG: Right. And Julian Assange is not the kind of person, either, that is just going to just sit back and accept the fate that he’s dealt. He’s somebody that’s always been completely about transparency.

MG: I mean, the only reason they’re prosecuting Julian — let’s just be real here — is because he told the truth about some things that people in power found really embarrassing.

RG: Yes.

MG: Without that, there would be no prosecution. They’re, they’re, they’re grasping at straws to try to make a federal violation out of something that is arguably protected press conduct. And that’s why the Obama administration didn’t prosecute him in the first place. They had the so-called “New York Times problem.” If we prosecute him, how do we justify that we’re not prosecuting the New York Times?

So, I understand he’s become somewhat of a controversial figure because of a lot of the media narrative that has been run against him. But there was a time in this country ten years ago when he was widely perceived as a hero, and very little in terms of his conduct has changed since that time.

So, his case, my case, many other cases that are at the periphery of prosecutorial discretion, right? Those are the kinds of cases that end up in the CMU. And we as a country, I think, have to ask ourselves an existential question of, can we tolerate these kinds of units?

Because you go to prison, and you’re supposed to keep your first amendment rights, right? There’s no valid, what they call penological reason. There’s nothing relevant to protection of the public, rehabilitation, any of what the supposed goals of prison are that says you shouldn’t be able to speak, you shouldn’t be able to speak to the media, you shouldn’t be able to file in court. But those are the things the CMU exists to curtail, right? That’s why those units are there.

And the actual stated purpose of the unit — keep the public safe, help fight the war on terror — again, the units never produced a single piece of actionable intel for that. And they’ve slept. They’ve missed more than a few of these things.

There was a shootout in Texas where the mass shooter was trying to get a female federal prisoner freed from the female-equivalent of these CMU’s. And there was no intelligence to say that he was going to do that, they didn’t stop that. She was in one of these units, supposedly to stop that very kind of mass killing. And these people missed it, and Americans died.

And had they not put her there in the first place, frankly, it wouldn’t have happened. I’m not saying that justifies the shooting, of course. But if you’re going to put people in these kinds of units to stop terrorist actions, and you’re going to take millions of dollars from taxpayers to do it, then you ought to at least stop the terrorist actions. And they’re not even doing that. They failed at that.

RG: Let’s even grant them, though, in some imaginary world, where they actually managed, at some point, to do that with somebody who was convicted of a charge of terrorism. How do they justify putting Julian Assange or you in a CMU, when there’s not even any claim that you’re even remotely connected, that either of you are remotely connected to terrorism?

MG: We actually had a district court ruling in my case. The federal judge, who’s not a pro-defendant judge, he’s known as a hanging judge, a very harsh sentencing judge, right? He was Aaron Swartz’s judge. And we actually had that judge rule that the government could not say, could not imply that anything I did was terrorism, right? Mine was an activism case. We actually had a ruling from the bench before the trial and sentence, right? That argument would literally be frivolous in my case, because a district court already decided the matter, and the government never appealed it to challenge it, right?

So, the thing is, they don’t really have to justify it at all. That’s, really, the scary thing. The relevant precedent in the Supreme Court is called Sandin v. Conner, OK? And the Supreme Court basically said, unless what the prison is doing is an atypical and significant hardship as compared to the normal hardships of prison life, then the prisoner has no due process to challenge his placement, wherever the system wants to put you.

So, what they do in the CMUs … You asked before, how often are you out of your cell? So, you’re out most of the time. The reason you’re out most of the time is not out of the goodness of their heart. It’s because they have to say we treat them just like any other prisoner. This is a general population unit, they actually try to maintain that the CNUs are a general population unit. But then you look elsewhere in what they say and in what they do, and it becomes very clear that this is not really a general population unit. But, so long as they keep lying and saying it’s general population, and as long as the federal courts continue to credit them that it’s a general population unit, they can really put whoever they want in these CMUs.

RG: And I guess when it comes to the definition of atypical, it’s in the eye of the judge and the prison. Because when I think about what you said about getting just, what, two 15-minute calls a month? That to me feels like an atypical and radical departure.

MG: Yeah. That’s mentioned with no-contact. I wasn’t able to hug my wife for four years.

RG: I feel naïve asking as if they’re going to give some rational answer to it, but what did they say to you when you would challenge them, and say, this is an atypical deviation from the rest of the federal prison system?

MG: No, they just say it’s a general population unit. You have all the same things everyone else on the compound has. It’s because we have to manage your communications to ensure public safety.

RG: They go back to the public safety argument.

MG: Yeah, even though we had a federal judge rule that mine was an activism case with no real public safety ramifications. And the government in my case failed to prove that anything that I did affected a single human individual. They put it before the jury, right? They asked the jury to find that something I did had affected, or even potentially affected a single human being, and the jury would not convict on that.

So, they got me for financial damage to multimillion- and multibillion-dollar institutions that tortured and crippled a human child, but that’s actually what I was convicted of. And when the government sought to convict me for actually being a potential danger to even one human person, they were not able to convict me of that. But they still sent me to a CMU.

RG: What was the time in solitary like for you? What are the phases that you go through?

MG: So the first time I was in solitary I was on a hunger strike, and that actually lasted 42 days; it was the second longest hunger strike I did in federal prison. The longest one, which we covered together at HuffPost, was a hundred days, and that was during the election.

So, after that hundred-day hunger strike, I had lost a lot of muscle mass. I prepared for that hundred-day hunger strike for six months. People ask me all the time, how do you do that, how do you survive a hundred days? And the answer is: you prepare ahead of time. I prepared for nine months to survive that.

So, the second time, I didn’t have that preparation. I had lost a lot of lean body mass. It was actually much more concerning from a health perspective the second time than the first time, but that colored my experience in CMU solitary quite a bit. Because it’s one thing to be in solitary, it’s another thing to be in solitary and reject, I think it was, 105 straight meals where I did not eat.

I was trying to fight my case at that point, I was still up on appeal, I was trying to change attorneys. Your legal calls are pretty much entirely at their discretion. They open your legal mail, they opened and read my legal mail right in front of me when I was in solitary the first time, even though they’re not supposed to do that. Legal mail is supposed to be kind of sacrosanct. Like, they can inspect it for contraband, they can like make sure no drugs fall out when they open the envelope, but they’re not supposed to read it.

But they went through my incoming legal mail, reviewing for content, and actually confiscated things; like, parts of my appellate brief they would not let me have. When I was trying to change lawyers, they made that very, very difficult, and it was something that, had I not had my lovely and talented wife Dana on the outside fighting for me — and that’s something most of these guys do not have, a spouse, a significant other — I wouldn’t have been able to do that.

So, they make it very, very hard to fight your case, and that adds a lot of stress, too. If you feel you have meritorious claims, you want to get these claims heard before the court.

So, the first time I’m in solitary in the CMU, I’m on a hunger strike, I’m trying to change attorneys, they’re interfering with my legal mail. I mean, they’re basically trying to drive you to kill yourself. To me, that seemed like what the goal was. Like, if I had hanged myself in that cell, they would’ve just wiped their hands of it, and they would all consider that, you know, a squeaky wheel, as you put it, had now been silenced.

RG: Right. Do you have books in solitary? Do you get to leave at all to go outdoors, but only by yourself? Like, how does that work?

MG: So, there are books. The Bureau provides, really, kind of shoddy, like, pulp fiction kind of stuff. Thankfully, in the CMU, since you have this concentration of political prisoners, and it’s really a very smart crowd in that unit compared to the rest of federal prisons. So, the books have been interspersed with books that other guys received from their families. So, you actually have really good reading material, it is one of the best libraries in the Bureau of Prisons, is the irony.

But it’s not that way because the Bureau provides good reading materials, it’s that way because they only allow you to keep so many books in your cell. So, you either can donate them or give them away, but what ends up happening is that the library gets filled with really interesting… And a lot of the classics, a lot of the Western canon. I’d say there’s a better selection there than there is in most public high school libraries. So, that’s one of the good things, I did get a lot of good reading.

RG: So, how much time did you spend in both of these CMUs?

MG: So, I was in Terre Haute from April 1st, 2019 through January 21st, 2021, then I was in Marion from January 21st, 2021 to, I think, November 10th, 2022. And then, again, in Terre Haute from November 10th, 2022 till, I think, June 9th of 2023.

RG: What was it like when you finally got out of there?

MG: Words fail me, because you’re out in public again. Like, they just put you on a greyhound bus; when I was released, it’s like, they just drop you off at the bus station, and you’re out in public again, and you can talk to people.

RG: Like, 24 hours earlier, you’re just…

MG: Yeah, you’re completely cut off, isolated from the world. They blocked Dana, so I couldn’t talk to my wife for seven months, with no kind of process, no official anything ever handed to me to justify it. And you get out, and you get to the Greyhound station, and it’s just … Can I borrow your cell phone, I need to make a call real quick.

And they didn’t want me to leave with my legal work. So, I had 210 pounds of documents about the CMU, and about my case, between the two, right? And I still have them, but they would not allow my lawyer to come to the prison the day before I was released to pick up my legal documents, even though their own regulations kind of specify that they have to allow a prisoner to exchange legal documents with an attorney, and they knew I was being released. They were really hoping that they would make it logistically difficult for me to bring my legal documents with me, and that I would then trust them to mail these documents home. But, having spoken to guys who had been through the CMU program — and some of them, it’s like their 2nd, 3rd, 4th trip through the CMU program — I was not prepared to rely on the Bureau of Prisons to mail these very sensitive, very compromising legal documents home.

So, I actually had to carry, by hand, 210 pounds of legal documents to the Greyhound stop, and then Dana arranged for somebody to meet me there. And I put the legal documents in that person’s car, and then that person — you know, bless her heart — took them to UPS, and had them shipped home for me. And that’s the only way that I have these documents that show, in detail, the kind of thing that Julian can expect. And the writeups, the bogus disciplinary charges that I got for trying to speak to the media, trying to litigate, trying to tell people what’s going on, trying to help other guys who I feel are wrongfully incarcerated in the CMUs, [to] litigate.

And there’s one case in particular that I really want to mention, and that’s Donald Reynolds, Jr. His case is related to Operation Fast and Furious, which was when the Justice Department walked high-powered, fully-automatic, so-called cop-killing firearms to the Mexican drug cartels. You had mentioned Chapo earlier, right? And so, this was when the Justice Department was actually handing those cartels armor piercing firearms.

RG: Yeah. This became a scandal under the Eric Holder Attorney Generalship.

MG: Yeah. So, Donnie was a Black NRA member, firearms collector. He had a lot of historic weapons, like World War II-era firearms, and a lot of high-powered stuff. And they went to him, they asked him to become an informant for them, he refused. They buried him as a first-time nonviolent offender with a life-plus-75-year sentence; so, they actually hit Donnie off with a longer sentence than El Chapo received. And it looks to me and to others like Donnie is wholly innocent, and they basically just did this to keep him quiet.

And we actually had The American Conservative from the other side of the aisle do a months-long investigation into Donnie’s case. And The American Conservative ended up recommending clemency for Donnie, because of the prosecutorial irregularities. And then a different organization — similar name, The American Conservative Union — on the other side of the aisle, not really known for taking a pro-defendant, anti-law enforcement kind of stance, also recommended clemency for Donnie because of these prosecutorial irregularities.

RG: What charges did they end up hitting him with?

MG: Drug trafficking, and using firearms in pursuit of drug trafficking. But here’s the thing: they never found any drugs on Donnie. Never. They searched his house, they searched his parents’ house. They never found anything.

RG: And he was a player in this entire scandal. So, the thinking is, from your perspective, that holing him up somewhere is an effective way to do PR for this scandal. Is that what you’re thinking? Or what’s the rationale for why in particular they would go after him?

MG: I think that, in his case, you have a lot of what are called Brady violations, which are discovery violations. Donnie’s defense was entitled to information about Operation Fast and Furious to prepare his defense, which he never received. And if it comes out that this information was never turned over to his defense attorneys, well, then that’s a big issue. Because then his conviction is going to have to be overturned, and if they choose to continue to prosecute the case, he’s entitled to all this information about Fast and Furious, which the House committees were trying to obtain from the White House, and the Obama White House asserted executive privilege to quash those subpoenas.

Well, you can’t assert executive privilege to quash Brady, right? Donnie’s entitled to that information if they’re coming for his liberty, which they are. And Donnie had no idea that it was Fast and Furious. It took years for information to come out about Fast and Furious for Donnie to put it together that this was likely Fast and Furious.

And then, when these months-long investigations were done, lo and behold, the names involved in his case are some of the same names involved in Fast and Furious. The dates all line up, as one would expect them to line up. It’s really uncanny. So, there’s a piece at The American Conservative about it called “The Knoxville Kingpin Who Wasn’t,” and that has more of the details about it.

But this is another great example of a CMU case, right? The Obama administration literally asserted executive privilege to stop any investigation into Fast and Furious. Here you have an innocent guy who is being held in a CMU to keep a lid on that, even to this day. And I’m convinced of that, and I think the facts do bear it out, but if people can read the investigation, then they can come to their own conclusions.

RG: What’s he like?

MG: Donnie’s a great guy, he’s a smart guy. He was a businessman. He ran four businesses before they locked him up, he was married before they locked him up, he’s a father. His father worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, had a security clearance. He’s a great friend to have, and he doesn’t deserve at all what’s happening to him, and I really hope someday the truth comes out.

Donnie is one of the many guys who helped keep me safe while I was there. He was also the unit barber, so he cut everyone’s hair. And he’s a funny guy, he’s got a great sense of humor. You’d think after they do all this to you, it’d be very hard to keep your head up, right? And Donnie maintains this sense of humor.

RG: How old is he now?

MG: He’s a few years older than I am, so he’s in his 40s, he’s in his early 40s.

RG: And looking at life.

MG: He’s doing life. He’s been locked up longer than I was. He’s been locked up since, like, 2011 … I might be off by a year or two there. And he’s been in the CMU practically the entire time.

RG: And you mentioned, keeping you safe. What is the violence like there? It’s a small place, and I don’t know if that makes it less or more violent.

MG: Yeah. Six months before I got there, one of the jihadis garroted to death one of the minimum security prisoners there, and stabbed another guy 11 times. And they just completely covered that up. There was a press release that there had been a death at the Terre Haute federal complex, but they did not mention that it was the CMU. There are multiple theories about what predicated that attack, but the one thing that everyone seems to agree, is that the Bureau of Prisons knew ahead of time that it was going to happen, and did nothing to stop it.

There is sectarian violence, but I’m a brown Jew, and they put me in a unit full of radical jihadi Muslims. Like, it’s hard to say that that itself wasn’t an assassination attempt. What they weren’t banking on, though, is that the government’s saying this whole time that I’m a member of Anonymous, right? And Anonymous has a fairly good reputation in the Middle East after the Arab Spring. So, you know, it didn’t work out the way they thought it would.

RG: So, you were cool.

MG: Yeah, I was cool. And I do a lot of legal work for guys. I’m like the resident jailhouse lawyer, anywhere I go. And so, that always keeps you safe. Like, if you’re headed to federal prison through no fault of your own, pick up a Black’s Law Dictionary and get good with the law, because you will become an indispensable person.

But the thing is, about prison, especially about that unit, is it’s never going to be one-on-one. Like, it’s him and his boys versus you and whoever’s going to get your back. And that’s also what is potentially so very dangerous about these units. These units are a powder keg just waiting for a spark to go off. And, in 2018, before I got there, they had that spark go off and, and one person died, and another person was stabbed 11 times.

RG: And, since you got out, you mentioned all of that information that you were able to take with you. I know you’ve been in touch with Julian Assange’s legal team. I don’t know what you can say about that. How are they feeling about this upcoming hearing? And were they able to make use of any of the insider CMU knowledge that you were able to give them?

MG: So, in terms of their feeling about the hearing, I’m going to defer to them. You’re going to really have to speak to them on that matter.

They were limited. By the time I got out, the lower-court proceedings had already been concluded, and so, they were limited to that record on appeal. So I don’t know that they were able to actually use any of the documents that I got [over] to them, because it was just too late by the time those documents got there.

Now, if the case gets reversed, if he gets to go back to the lower courts, then I think, potentially, some of the documents that I have are really potentially useful. I don’t know what they’ve used and what they haven’t used. Presumably it’s a public docket and we can see.

But I think unfortunately, very unfortunately for Julian, my experience and my records in the legal sense will not really come to bear until the next CMU extradition case. And, at that point, all this stuff can be briefed in the district court, in the lower court, where it’ll become part of the record of the case, and be arguable on appeal, and on appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

RG: I think one thing I just want to leave people with, you know, you’re no fool, you knew what kind of system you were getting into. And the prosecutors offered a plea deal that would’ve given a significant — because I remember you and I talking about this at the time — would’ve given you a significantly shorter prison sentence. I don’t remember exactly the details now, but I remember you saying, it’s not about that. I am not ashamed of what I did. Like, I was standing up for Justine. I’m going to take this all the way to the jury, and if the jury finds me guilty, then so be it.

That’s just an unusual amount of courage, I would say, to willingly stare down a much more extended sentence under brutal conditions. And I think that it’s a fact that that is unusual courage, because I think something like 95 percent of federal cases — some extraordinary number of federal cases — end in plea deals.

MG: Yeah, it’s higher than 95. The trial system is so unfair in the federal system. I mean, it’s not a fair system. And I would invite anyone who finds that shocking, as I did initially… I get that it’s a shocking thing. This is America, you expect the courts to be fair.

Go do a little research on the federal system, look at cases like mine. They would not even let me plead defense of another, right? Like, they wouldn’t let my jury consider it, that I acted to defend a human life, right? They found that defense inconvenient, so they simply prevented the jury from hearing it.

RG: Yeah, I think any system that has a 95-plus percent success rate for the prosecution, you can pretty fairly say is tilted in their favor. And that’s why so many people take deals.

MG: Well, they want you to believe that these prosecutors are just that good, and they’re just that righteous.

RG: Absolute geniuses. Yes.

MG: Yeah. But, again, just look at it, and just look at the cases they’re bringing. Look at the case they’re bringing against Julian. Look at the case they brought against Barrett Brown or Jeremy Hammond.

RG: Now, Barrett Brown, that’s who you were trying to think of earlier.

MG: Yeah, yeah. But just look at the cases they bring, and look at the cases that they do not bring, right? You had the 2008 financial crisis, right? Who went to jail? The whistleblower. You have the Bush torture program, right? Who went to jail? The whistleblower.

RG: Right. And look at the war crimes that Julian Assange exposed, the only people to go to prison, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, right?

MG: Julian, yeah.

RG: Well, Marty, thank you for fighting, and thank you for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

MG: Thank you for having me, Ryan.

RG: That was Marty Gottesfeld, and that’s our show.

— Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Jose Olivares is our Lead Producer. Our Supervising Producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Legal Review by David Bralow and Elizabeth Sanchez. Leonardo Faierman transcribed this episode. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s Editor-in-Chief. And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief of The Intercept.

Thanks for listening. See you soon.

[madamebristow]

Going, Going. Gone. (Remember The Time)

I'm changing the title! But, here's chapter 3!

Warnings

Amputation

Mention of Death

Enjoy!

The day after Mario and Peach’s talk, Mario, Mia, Toadette, and Rosalina go down to Peach’s infirmary to check on Daisy who’s still not talking to anyone. The four eat lunch with her keeping her company. “Blowing off your human world? Wow,” Toadette exclaims. Mario rolls his eyes as he bounces his daughter on her leg. “You're blowing off Sarasaland. Wow.” “No,” Toadette shook her head. “I'm postponing Sarasaland until Toad is better. Junior did the same thing for his father.” “And I stayed,” Rosalina sighed. Mario chuckled. “And you stayed because you have no place else to go.” Rosalina gives Mario an offended look. “Sorry,” Mario sighed as he gave Mia one of her toys.

“How’s Toad’s infection? Is it getting any better?” “Don’t know, haven’t seen him yet.” Mario gives Toadette a confused look. “What do you mean? You're his wife.” “You really think he wants to talk to me?” Toadette asks with an irritated tone. “I mean, what am I supposed to say to him? ‘Hey, remember the time that I quit on us, you got pissed and took my seat on a plane that crashed, and now you're trading in your little brown boots for a peg leg?’ Sorry. My bad?” Mario sighs as he starts bouncing his leg that Mia is on.

A few minutes later, Bowser Jr. comes into Daisy’s room with his notebook and bag of pencils. “Hey,” He greets the five. “Hey, Juinor, you're talking to your dad, right? Keeping him updated,” Mario asks the young Koopa. Junior sits down on the floor and starts to draw. “Yeah. Not about king stuff, though. He doesn't need that kind of pressure right now.” Mario rolls his eyes. “What is wrong with you two?” Junior looks up at Mario with a confused look on his face. “I just said that-” “No,” Mario interrupts him. “I'm just saying, they're fine. They're gonna be fine. Toad's not gonna lose his leg, and Bowser is coming back. They're coming back. So let's act like it. They're gonna be fine.” He turns to Daisy who’s looking at him, deadpan. “We're all going to be fine.” Daisy still doesn't respond.

“How long are we saying that this is okay?” Toadette asks Mario. Mario sighs before responding. “As long as she needs.” “I, for one, find it refreshing,” Rosalina says. “They say, if you don't have something nice to say, She never has anything nice to say. Come on, Sarasaland. I'm wide open. Just hit me.” Daisy doesn’t say anything to Rosalina. She turns her head the other way. Mario and Toadette giggle as Rosalina gasps at Daisy.

+++++++++++++ Later in the day, three toad guards stand outside Daisy’s room, staring at her. “So she doesn't speak at all?” The Yellow guard says, confused. “She hasn't yet. She just stares and breathes,” The Blue guard shudders. “It's kind of weird, but the way that the King and Queen talk about her, it's like she's a legend, you know?” Another guard says. The Yellow Guard chuckles “Mm. And now she's like an end table.” The Blue Guard hits the yellow one on the arm. “That's horrible. Stop it.” Suddenly, Daisy throws the flower vase on the end table in her room at the window. The guards scream and run off into the castle.

+++++++++++++++ The next day, Mario goes back down to Daisy’s room to see the head doctor and another doctor arguing in front of her room. “I said no more damn restraints!” “: Look, she is clearly a danger. She doesn't even belong here! She is violent and uncommunicative, and I'm worried. There is nothing physically wrong with her. She belongs in the psych ward.” The head doctor storms off in a huff as the doctor runs after him. “Sir! Sir!” Mario shakes his head and runs to Daisy’s bedside. “Okay. Okay. It's time. It's time to get up. They are gonna take you upstairs and they're gonna pump you full of antipsychotics. And you're gonna go slack-jawed and cuckoo's nest and you'll never be you again.” Mario’s voice starts shaking as he gets on his knees and holds the princess’ hand.

“Dais, please, I am begging you. Please. You have to say something. I’ve already lost Luigi, I can’t lose another sibling. Daisy, please. Do you hear me? Say something, please.” A few sobs escape from Mario as he brings Daisy’s forehead to his. Are they really going to be fine? Or is this reality?

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

Thanks for reading!

[roving-boi]

Dear Diary

So, a lot happened I guess. To start, I don’t live with my dad anymore. A few days before school started I made the last minute decision to live with my mom. The new house is actually pretty nice. I have my own room, I go to a new school now. But it was kinda ugly making the leap. My dad was very angry and when I went back to his house to collect some of my belongings he basically kicked me out and screamed at me. It’s been about a month and He’s tried to contact me since but I haven’t said anything to him. I probably won’t talk to him again for awhile.

Things at my moms house have been alright. I have a functioning shower, my own space and bathroom, and nobody criticizes me. School is kinda weird though, and I’m not used to like a million people crowding the halls. I don’t really like being exposed to so many people. It makes me feel so little and small, like my existence is not really that significant. I wonder how many other people feel the same way. I think there’s just too many people, how does one expect to find the love of their life if there’s like 8 billion people and millions all around you. Human relationships are so weird.

I guess things are better for me lately though. I’ve been more relaxed and less stressed out. And I think my acne is starting to clear up. I’m happy to be spending time with my brother and my mom. My step dad and I had like a long talk with my mom and we sorted everything out and I got closure and an apology for how he treated me as a child. I feel relieved and I’m happy my mom is helping me get my life back on track. My dad refused to give me my social security card so I had to get a replacement which was a pain in the ass. Now I have to go get an ID and then soon after get a license.

I’ve been having dreams about jay still, I’m still angry about what she did. Since I’ve lived here I’ve had a dream I kicked her ass in the school bathroom and another’s where I shoved her into dirt. Selu recently got out of a psych ward for trying to overdose. I’m so mad that nobody seems to care but me. Jay most likely doesn’t care at all and neither of her friends who pretend like they do. Nobody cares. This world is so sick and I want to throw up.

Anyway on a more lighthearted note, I hope to decorate my new room soon. I’m thinking of putting up white Christmas lights or something with some posters. I wanted to paint my room pink but my mom said no but it’s alright.

[jswdmb1]

If I Had a Boat

“And if I had a boat

I'd go out on the ocean

And if I had a pony

I'd ride him on my boat

And we could all together

Go out on the ocean

Me upon my pony on my boat”

Lyle Lovett

I currently coach high-school boys in a park district basketball league.  One of the players is a friend’s son, and they needed to put an “adult” down as a coach.  She asked if I would be interested in helping as I had recently expressed a desire to coach again now that my kids no longer need my services. I asked her if they were up for me coming to practices and games to do what they needed, and they agreed.  During the first practice, I mostly watched, and then I asked them what kind of league this was.  They started naming teams of kids, which gave me some pause.  One is made up of varsity football players with a kid that is 6’ 5” in the middle.  Another team is last year’s JV basketball team, who just missed this year’s varsity team cut.  Most of the others are club teams that have been together for a while.  None sounded like a group of undersized friends of varying levels of experience looking to have a little fun on Sunday afternoons.  I didn’t say much as I like to keep things positive other than let’s see how things go, and we’ll take it from there.

They lost the first game we played last week by 52 points.  Remember that we are playing with a running clock, no press, and the other team had to drop behind the three-point line once they got up by fifteen, which was early in the first quarter. It is almost impossible to lose by that much in that amount of time under those conditions.  But these kids never gave up.  There are only eight on this team, so it is a short bench.  That means lots of minutes with little rest, and I never saw a decrease in energy.  Despite the long odds and disappointing results, I was pleased to see their effort never diminished.  The challenge was now on me to figure out how to accentuate the positives we could take from the defeat and build on it.  Our weekly practice was in a few days, so I had some time to think through it.

When Wednesday night came, I gathered them around before practice and gave a brief talk.  Remember that none of these kids belong to me, and I don’t even know most of them.  Still, I felt responsible for letting these young men know that days like last Sunday would happen.  It’s a reality you must accept in life; the sooner you hear it, the better.  Besides, who better to listen to it from than me?  I like to think I know a thing or two about bad days (who doesn’t – I don’t pretend I have the market covered on them).  The question was how to articulate it.  The best I could come up with was, “Boys, you are going to have days in life when you get your ass kicked, and Sunday was one of them.  The question is not why this happened, but what life is trying to tell me and how I can use that to improve.” That may be paraphrasing, and then I went on with some basketball stuff, but you get the gist of it.  Nothing particularly creative there, and possibly even cliche, but something that needed to be said, and I said it before moving on.

The problem with giving advice, even if it is decent, is that often you don’t take it yourself.  Or worse, no one is around to give it to you when you need it most.  I have had a decent share of my ass getting kicked in the past few months. A lot of those (most) were inventions of my own imagination.  Worse, I let them get to me and spent a lot of time asking why.  Little to no time was spent either figuring out what I could learn from these experiences or simply moving on because the event was so trivial.  It took a legitimate ass-kicking a few years ago really get the message home.  A few months after my dad died, I finally broke down.  I took a break and spent a few weeks in an outpatient program.  It was essentially spending time in the psych ward, but I got to go home at night.  Most of the people there were coming straight from the hospital.  Many had gone through a recent suicide attempt.  Others were suffering from addiction issues, bipolar disease, and one who heard voices (one of the nicest people I have ever met).  It was a profound experience that may have saved my life.

The biggest thing we learned was that you must find ways to express yourself.  A daily exercise in the program was journaling.  You would sometimes be asked to take what you wrote and read it to the group.  The point was that getting it out of you and onto paper was the first step, but saying it aloud made it real.  I wrote and said some things that were bottled up for years and finally gave some legitimacy to what I had kept inside for so long.  Finding this side of me was liberating and exciting.  I even thought I saw hints of creativity in my writing, which I never believed I had.  When my release came, I knew I wanted to keep doing it, but I wasn’t sure how.  That’s roughly when I started this blog, and rough is a good word to describe my work.  Not that it has smoothed out much in the last few years, but I feel it has come together with some practice and inspiration.  The source of that inspiration was my favorite DJ and best friend in the world, Lin Brehmer.  

If you are reading this, you know my love for music and that WXRT is my favorite radio station.  I discovered it around the same time Lin took over as the morning host in 1991.  Coming out of the 80s as a teenager had me awfully confused from a musical sense (among many other senses that were confused).  The music on XRT grounded me and, more importantly, expanded my horizons.  Remember, there was no internet or streaming music at this point, so self-discovery of new music, while possible, was difficult.  Especially if you didn’t get a hint about the latest hot new band, an upcoming show at the Vic, or where to get some of this fine music at the non-corporate neighborhood record stores.  DJs on the station, like Terri Hemmert, Marty Lennartz, and Frank E. Lee, were like professors guiding a young student along his way.  While I loved them all, there was a guy that stood out who seemed to really take me under his wing.  That, of course, was Lin.

I did not listen to Lin in the mornings so much at the time because I wasn’t usually up until well after he signed off at 10:00.  But I heard him often at night when they would play his latest Lin’s bin segment.  It was often on the way home after taking my first job in accounting.  His soothing voice and wise words (often funny) helped right the ship after a particularly bad day.  I would think, “I wish I had that job,” and dreamed of someday losing the shackles of my office work and spinning records while waxing poetically about whatever came to mind.  That, of course, never happened because I don’t have any talent for such a job, but isn’t that what dreams are for? 

Many years later, this blog is my realization of that dream in my own little way.  Everything about it is stolen from Lin.  This includes the connection to music in the title, the mix of topics that inspire me whenever they happen (which accounts for the haphazard timing of my posts), or the attempt to find a little more meaning out of this life than what appears on the surface.  I don’t even think to pretend that I come within the same universe as Lin, but he taught me that it doesn’t make any difference.  It’s about what is inside you and living your life true to that.  You don’t have to be somebody else.  Just be yourself.  

That is why yesterday was so tough.  My first instinct after hearing of Lin’s passing was to be pissed.  Another good guy in this world who was important to me was taken too soon.  Most influential men in my life are gone and left this world much earlier than I felt they should have. I just went through this less than six months ago with my father-in-law, Mike.  Now, I must deal with it again, and I really don’t think it’s fair.  Why can’t it be someone kind of rotten?  There are many great candidates to nominate, but I quickly stopped creating a list.  That is not what Lin was about.  I spent the rest of the day yesterday going about my day and thinking through what his life really meant to me.  Here was a man I had never met but who had so much influence on my life, and I found myself as profoundly sad as I ever had.  Instead of questioning things further, I went with the feeling.  I ended the night with a couple hours of listening to Terri Hemmert’s beautiful selection of songs honoring Lin.  I finally had to turn it off because it was getting too sad.  I knew there would be plenty of time for that today.

As I write this, I am listening to the tribute show on the air at XRT.  It started with me crying (took twelve minutes from the start of the tribute), but it quickly moved into writing as those emotions needed to flow somewhere.  I have not been able to write a thing of worth since Mike died, but today this essay poured out of me in about 45 minutes.  I have been able to do nothing else since I sat down at the typewriter.  There was no way I couldn’t.  If Lin taught me anything, it is to go with your heart and treat every day as the gift that it is.  It is simple advice but awfully hard to follow.  Kind of like what I told those boys at that practice recently.  

After my talk, they went out, practiced their asses off, and looked better than I ever saw them in my brief stint as their coach.  I said so afterward and encouraged them to take that with them into the next game, and we will see results.  That game just happened to be a few hours after Lin’s death, and just like in a fairy tale, they went out and lost by 42 points.  I don't say that as a joke.  I was truly heartened to see them work and improve over a very short time. In one week, they doubled their point total (from 15 to 31!) and cut their margin of the deficit by 20%.  I don’t care how you want to analyze things, but those are metrics that really show success regardless of the final outcome.  

That may not be true, but there is no denying that while I was standing on those sidelines, I could hear Lin’s voice telling me it was.  He had an optimism on life that was tinted with just the right touch of cynicism that really spoke to me.  It is summarized as enjoy the moment but recognize it for what it is worth and not what it could be or isn’t. So, despite everything else that was important to me that I learned from Lin to enjoy, like music, writing, fun, good food, and baseball (we differed on teams, but the passion is the same), nothing matters more than his signature catchphrase “It’s great to be alive.”  That could sound ironic on a day like today, but it doesn’t in any way whatsoever.  That’s because Lin was genuine when he said it, and I truly believed he lived his life exactly the way he preached.  As sad as I am, I feel pretty good about that, and I also think I made a pretty good choice for a role model.  What is even cooler is that thousands upon thousands of people feel the same way I do.  And isn’t that what life is really about?  Living it to the fullest and making a difference in the lives you touch. And Lin is an excellent choice if you are searching for a role model.  His death does not eliminate him from the job; it may even accentuate it.  It is a perfect tribute to him, and in return, I guarantee you will find out that you have a new best friend in the whole wide world.

[wyn-n-tonic]

I'm No Saint

Word Count: 1.2k Warnings: Smut but not, like, explicit smut I don't think. Author's Note: Right, so like... it's not xReader because it's not written in second person but, like, it's still a pretty blank slate and I personally feel like first person tense is easier to imagine yourself in as the I and me statements make me feel like I have ownership and autonomy in the story? Anyway, if you enjoy this and would like to check out more of my writing, please check out my MASTERLIST and my original story available on Kindle Vella: Flash In the Pan (a new chapter comes out 8/1)! *narrator voice* She's back on her bullshit, lads.

"Mm, 'tiago, baby," I reach out for him, my finger tips brushing the scar that runs the length of his neck. "What's wrong?"

The mattress shifts beneath his weight and I watch through half opened eyes as he pushes himself into a sitting position. "Go back to sleep, mi amor," he says as he turns towards me. "I didn't mean to wake you."

"Uneven breathing and tossing and turning? Darling, don't lie to me."

"Don't." He huffs a laugh and his head shakes. "Don't you start with that darling nonsense because—“

"Because what?" I sit up, holding onto the sheet across my bare chest with one hand as the other supports my weight.

Dim light flows from the bathroom and catches on the silver of his hair, more of which pops up every day with each new stressor or heartbreak or bad dream. I hate how much I love them, knowing it's not just his age that causes them but his pain too.

"Because first it starts with darling," he says, silhouette turning towards me. "And then it becomes honey and sweetheart and let me make you some tea. I can't take it, not tonight. I can't take being—“

"Loved, Santiago?" I ask him.

"Babied," he insists.

"Babied?!" I push myself up further and let the sheet slip as I reach for his shoulder. "How do I baby you, Santiago?"

"Because you won't stop trying to take care of me," he bites back. "Always, with your soft hands and soft voice. I'm not broken."

"Nobody ever said you were broken, my love. Maybe you did, maybe you do. But not me. If you were broken—somebody I thought I had to spend my life fixing—I would not have married you, I would have—“

"Put me in a fucking psych ward. Or a prison. Where I belong."

"You're being dramatic, Santi. Fucking prison? Really? The people who belong in prison are the ones who called the shots, not the ones who had to deliver them. Do I wish you had never enlisted? Do I miss the sweet boy I fell in love with at sixteen?" I pull him back flush against my chest, wrap my arms around him and press my lips into his cheek. "Yes, my love. To both questions. But I wouldn't give you up for anything. But I have to wonder...if you hadn't enlisted, would we be here right now? Would I have ever found my way back to you?"

He pulls away and turns to look at me with those deep brown eyes, so full of warmth and glassy with pain. "You're not the cold man you think everybody thinks you are, Santiago."

Silence falls between us and I watch as he scrubs a hand down his face, finally releasing a deeply held breath. "I'm kind of cold right now actually," he says while a smile cracks across his face. "Why do you insist on keeping it freezing in here?"

"You're changing the subject."

"I know but I can tell I said something that hurt you so I'm trying to walk away from it right now, okay?"

"Okay."

He looks me up and down and his smile stretches wider. "I can tell you're kind of cold too, sweetheart."

"Really?" I ask him. "You're turning this into a sex thing?"

He twists and leans forward, pressing his lips into mine. "Don't all my bad dreams end between your legs though?"

"That makes me sound like I'm your nightmare," I tell him. "Is that really how you expect to get in pants right now?"

Santiago pushes me back into the mattress and crawls above my body, bracing himself on his forearms. He's so beautiful and so... bent in places he wasn't when we were children. His hand smooths my hair back, thumb rubbing gently against my forehead and I can feel him growing against my hip.

"I'm telling you that you're the good that came out of my worst nightmare and you're the good that greets me at the end of every single one."

"And, yet," I begin, tracing the soft lines at the corner of his eye with my thumb, "here you are telling me I baby you because I love you."

"Because I don't deserve it."

I shake my head. "Maybe not." I run my finger around his orbital bone and up to the bridge of his nose before following the curve of it all the way down to the tip. "But that's not exactly your decision to make now is it?"

"Well then maybe I just think you don't deserve the shit I put you through."

I scrunch my nose. "Again, not really your decision to make. Like it or not, you're stuck with me so, are you gonna do anything with that dick or are you gonna tell me what a sad boy you are all night?"

"Screw you, sweetheart."

"That's what I said."

He buries his face into my neck, shifting all his weight into one side of his body and runs one hand down the length of mine. He stops when he comes to the hinge in my knee, fingers curling around and dipping into my flesh and he pulls until I'm hooked around his hip. Leapfrog. He calls it leapfrog whenever my leg is raised like this. Tells me how cute it is that I just naturally lay in this position that opens my hip so perfectly for him to just slide in.

"Made for me," he speaks into my neck. "Like it or not."

His hips move against mine, lifting slightly as he readjusts himself to rest his tip at my entrance and his grip on my leg tightens. "So wet already."

"I never dried up."

"That shouldn't have been so fucking hot," he says, biting into my neck as he pushes into me in one fluid motion.

"Is your solution to hurting," I wince slightly, "to make me hurt as well?"

He laughs, lips dragging up my jawline and to my lips. "Play with my hair," he tells me as he starts building pace in his small movements.

His hair is soft between my fingers, his overgrown curls running wild. I flex my nails along his scalp and pull the strands taut at the top of his crown as he grinds his hips down against mine.

His mind is still in that dream though, that terror. I can see it in his eyes. Because I can't fix this, I can only be his bandaid to the bad days. My body goes rigid and I push a hard breath out before he's shuddering against me, collapsing against me.

I've been a lot of bandaids lately.

"Santiago, my love," I cradle his head against my chest and feel him twitch inside of me at the endearment, "I think we should talk to that therapist again."

He nods as best he can and sniffs loudly as he maneuvers his arms to encircle my body. "Yeah, we can do that."

Silence falls between us again and his breathing evens out. I think he's asleep and I'm about to coax him awake when he looks up at me.

"Hey, baby?"

"Yes, my love?"

"I liked it when you called me Tiago earlier." I feel my eyebrows pinch and he stutters over his words to continue. "When you were barely awake," he says, "you called me Tiago. I liked that."

"Why?" I ask.

"Because," he takes a breath, "I'm no saint."