#projecting on the fact that ive been REPEATEDLY failing to get my hands on his official merch

[keijiqahara]

☆

KAISER was the world’s, never really yours. You get reminded time and time again whenever he leaves you alone at home for games far from home and when he gives the same smiles to you as he does his fans. And yet. And yet. Your heart still aches the same even as the years go by, still yearns for his love to be yours, and yours only. They said that hope prevailed wherever love was present, but you weren’t sure if what you ever had with him was love or simply the ghost of an affection you once both had for each other. He said he was yours, so why were you looking at him blowing kisses to his fans through the screen of your tv instead of having your lips against his in that moment? He said he was yours, so why were you clenching his jersey in your hands on your shared bed while he was out partying instead of him embracing you in his warm arms? He said he was yours, and yet he found it so easy to leave you be. You said you were his, but why does your heart sink whenever you see him? You knew the answers to these questions, that this relationship was long overdue, but gosh, it was so hard to let go.

There were times when you thought you knew him as Micha, your beloved boyfriend and not Kaiser, German prodigy of the football world. It was those rare days when he was finally home, and you had your arms wrapped around his waist, his back facing you. You had thought, "But no one else could have him in their arms just like i have now, so he must really be mine." But you knew better. You've kept it up well, painted the illusion you wanted to see, for years deceiving your heart. However, the facade had grown evanescent now. Sure, he was physically close to you right then, but what you really knew was that while you were drowning in the depths of the sea, he was at the surface bound by a glorious ship. Silently hoping for that man to dive in and save your shattered soul, while knowing it would never come.

[quillandink333]

Scarlet Carnations ~ Part IV

BotW Link X Zelda ~ Detective AU

Rating: T

Word Count: 5.1k

WARNINGS: death, murder, loss, trauma, blood and gore, terrorism, organized crime, self-harm

Summary: Inspector Zelda Hyrule, assisted by the faithful Constable Link Fyori, is infamous for cracking the most confounding of cases in a town dominated by crime. Her latest assignment is to solve the murder of her own godmother, Impa Sheikah, the late CEO of Sheikah Tech. Incorporated, while staying under the radar of the dreaded Yiga organization.

Part I • Part II • Part III • Part IV • Part V • Part VI • Part VII • Epilogue • Masterlist

It was nine o’clock in the morning, two days after I’d made my arrest, and Paya’s trial was in its opening stages. I was watching from the gallery. Normally, as the one running the investigations, I would be the first witness to take the stand, but today, for whatever reason, the lead prosecutor, Urbosa Sigatur, planned to summon me second after Auntie Purah. Urbosa was far from a stranger to me, however. She and I had collaborated on several cases in the past, and she shared with me many of my own ideals. She’d once even known my mother before her untimely demise. And so I decided not to question her judgment, however unconventional it may have seemed.

The prosecution’s opening statement had been based on the fact that the stolen Sheikah Slate, along with a bloodstained bullet, had been found in the defendant’s room, which, until recently, hadn’t been searched as it had been deemed irrelevant to the case. With these conclusive pieces of evidence, she’d stated, the defendant had been charged with both the theft of the Slate and the murder of its owner, Impa Sheikah.

The stolen object was the most central piece of evidence in the prosecution’s case. It had once been a target of my own immense interest, even before its theft. But that had all changed following its recovery. The riddle, though having been solved by means of professional reprogramming, still made little sense to me if any. “Carnation” was its answer, according to Auntie Purah herself. Much to my dismay, the secrets that the riddle had supposedly kept hidden had turned out to be nothing but my own fantasy. Every last piece of data that had once been stored in the Slate had been deleted, meaning the possibility of proving a motive for its theft was next to nonexistent. The only thing left in its memory was a diary entry, written by Auntie Impa the day before her murder. This in itself, however, held the potential to serve as a lead to her killer’s identity, at the very least.

The diary entry, as projected onto the courtroom wall by the Slate, went,

“Today was the first day of Zelda’s holiday visit. It is hard to believe that the last long term visit she paid us was already over a year ago. We have all missed her dearly. She seems as interested in my sister’s work as ever. It brought me joy to see the two of them bonding over their shared passion once again.

“However I must admit, I would still love for her to also spend some quality time with Paya some day soon. I sensed some resentment coming from her directed at my dear granddaughter. Perhaps it is something to do with that boy. Either way, it seems their relationship has hardly changed since she left the nest.

“I cannot say for certain whether anyone will ever be able to read this, but I have faith that Purah will figure it out. I am no good with machines like these, but I believe in her. At any rate, I hope she is the one who gets to read this message, but in the event that it happens to fall into the wrong hands, I will sign off here.”

With this, the prosecution’s argument, though a bit scattered across several different points, seemed sturdy enough so far. That Auntie Impa had seemingly known that her life would be taken the following night after writing her final message, combined with the fact that she’d received no threats from the outside world up until then, was one of the strongest pieces of evidence in our arsenal.

Paya’s defence lawyer, one Revali Twii, had made several attempts to dismantle her argument by claiming she had no possible way of knowing whether or not the victim had received a threat from outside the estate by phone. These attacks were easily deflected. As a foreigner to this city, Mr. Twii had been unaware that, thanks to the Sheikahs’ company, household phones here were all equipped with recording devices. Naturally, Ms. Sigatur had already listened to each recorded call since a month before the murder and had detected no discernible threat in any of them.

And yet in spite of all that, the argument shifted heavily in favour of the defence when it then carried out his cross examination. With how confidently Urbosa had stated her case, I never could’ve imagined how easy it would be for the opposing side to shatter it into countless, tiny pieces.

Mr. Twii’s primary line of questioning was a solid one, to say the least. He concurred with my deduction as presented by Ms. Sigatur that the parlour indeed was not the true scene of the crime. However, he claimed that the real crime scene could not possibly have been the defendant’s bedroom either. His basis for this was the gunshot. Paya’s room was in the same hallway that the sleeping quarters of the current witness, Auntie Purah, as well as myself, were in. Mr. Twii had her testify about the sound of the gunshot that she’d heard. In addition to the fact that it hadn’t seemed loud enough to have come from the very next room over, she’d only heard it once: from the parlour.

No doubt he intended to question me about the same thing when the time came for me to take the stand. I’d been itching to speak my mind and set things straight so badly that I’d had to cross my legs just to keep myself from getting up too soon by the time court was finally adjourned for a half-hour recess.

Now the prosecutor and I were together in a private room reserved for witness prepping. Normally I did just fine testifying on my own, but in this trial, everything was at stake, and I couldn’t seem to stop my heart from racing no matter what I tried. Thankfully I had Urbosa here, and simply talking with her had done much to calm my nerves already.

“You’re originally from out of town too, aren’t you?” I noted, thinking back on her performance.

“That I may be, but unlike that lawyer, I’ve spent enough time here to know of the perils this city is facing, and who’s been holding it together in spite of all that.”

“Right.” My lips rested against the curve of my index as my leg bounced restlessly underneath the table. “That schmuck really doesn’t have a clue, does he?”

“No, not likely. Though he’s quite the formidable opponent, I must say.” She leaned back in her chair, looking pensive, but not the least bit agitated. “My case took quite the beating out there.”

My heart rate was starting to pick up again. “You don’t think you’ll...lose...do you?”

“Who, me? Lose?” She let out a hearty bout of chuckles. “Young lady, are you quite sure you know who you’re speaking to?” I returned her laughter halfheartedly, unable to shake the foreboding feeling lying at the pit of my stomach. Urbosa cleared her throat, preserving her calm smile. “All jokes aside, I wouldn’t worry even if we do end up losing this one. The true criminal is still out there somewhere, and there is no such thing as a perfect crime.”

“I suppose...” Perfect crimes may not have existed, but neither did perfect investigations. If they ruled Paya out as a suspect, then only one other, “safe” option would remain.

“Alright, out with it. What’s on your mind?” Her hand had landed on my shoulder as she’d reached across the desk, over my half empty glass of water. “And why are you so set on getting Paya convicted, if I might ask? Sibling rivalry is one thing, but this is...”

I avoided her perceptive gaze, staring intently at the latch on my bag. What could I possibly tell her? “It’s just,” I stalled, eventually settling for a vague, “I’m running out of time.”

After a long pause, she leaned back, letting go of my arm. “I see. Well, whatever it is, know that I’ll be on your side no matter what, little bird.”

Oh, if only she’d known.

“So to sum up, you were outstandingly negligent in your investigation of the defendant’s bedroom.”

My jaw unhinged at what I’d just heard come out of the attorney’s mouth. I’d just finished giving him an explanation of my findings in as much detail as I could, during which time he’d been surprisingly polite, until now.

“You likely saw the Slate along with the bullet and made your arrest right then and there. You didn’t even stop to consider the possibility that you hadn’t found all there’d been to find in that room, did you?” I opened my mouth to respond, but he cut me off again. “In fact, I’m willing to bet you didn’t even attempt to look for the murder weapon.”

“Excuse me, Sir,” I retaliated with chest puffed up, “but my team and I searched the property from top to bottom, repeatedly, for two whole weeks, and—”

“Yes, I am well aware. However, you failed to complete a thorough search of this so-called ‘true crime scene’ before you arrested Ms. Sheikah. Do you deny it?”

I was floundering for words. Why bother questioning me if he merely intended to cut me off and answer his own questions? “I-I...”

“Objection.”

All eyes fell upon the prosecution. I breathed a heavy sigh of relief.

“The defence is harassing the witness, Your Honour.”

The judge gave a slow, considerate nod of his head. “Objection sustained.”

Twii gave Urbosa a subtle but unmistakable side-eye. I thanked her silently. “Speaking of the murder weapon,” he continued in his signature, holier-than-thou tone, “I have here Exhibit F: a list of traits possessed by the elusive firearm responsible for the victim’s life.”

This wasn’t good. The list in question had been compiled by the prosecution based on traits of the fatal wound revealed by the autopsy, as well as other traits shared by the two bullets that were found at the estate. It contained information like its .38 caliber and that it had likely been fired twice at point blank, to name a few examples.

“My question for you, witness, is the following. What did you find during your ‘investigation’ regarding the weapon?”

This was fine, I kept telling myself. He still had yet to present the most fatal piece of evidence in the record. “As I’ve said before, none of our searches turned up any sign of it, other than what’s listed on that piece of paper you’re holding.”

“Is that so?” The sarcasm rooted in his voice had me sweating bullets. “In that case, Ms. Hyrule, I’d like to turn your attention to this passage here at the bottom.”

That was “Inspector Hyrule” to him, but of course, he couldn’t care less for such trifling things as common decency.

But when I read over the passage at which he was pointing, my throat closed up.

“Allow me to read it aloud for the court.” He snobbishly cleared his throat. “And I quote, ‘The murder weapon and the circumstances surrounding it strongly suggest an Octoric M&P revolver,’ end quote. I’d also like to add that this particular model is favoured by the district bureau of police, who issue them out to many of their detectives for self-defence.”

I gritted my teeth, annunciating each word as I spat, “Get to the point.”

The smarmy bastard was hardly even phased by my unmasked hostility. “Now, now, Ms. Hyrule, you’ve no reason to worry,” he waved off. “After all, I have no intention of accusing you.”

When he spoke that last word, my heart stopped, and deep down, I knew it was over.

“Firstly I wish for you to clarify a few things for me, as you were one of the first to discover the scene of the murder when it happened.”

I gave a slow, strenuous nod, losing strength in my knees by the second, but standing my ground all the same. “Go on.”

“The defendant showed no sign of having a gun on or anywhere near her person when you arrived, correct?”

“Correct,” I lied.

“Good. Now that we’ve established that the defendant was unarmed, I’d like to present another piece of evidence.” He laid out flat a second sheet of paper on the stand in front of me. “Exhibit H. This is part of a record kept by the precinct where the witness is currently employed, alongside the rest of her team. It details a list of the firearms given out to detectives each day, as well as the time when each one was issued and when it was returned to custody at the end of its designated officer’s shift.”

And there it was. I’d known all along that it had only been a matter of time until he’d bring out this piece of evidence, but, evidently, I’d failed to prepare myself mentally for this. Perhaps a part of me had hoped not to be on the stand when it happened. All I could do now was hold my peace and pray that it wouldn’t get worse from here.

“This page corresponds with the day before the murder. Now, Ms. Hyrule,” he addressed, summoning a swarm of butterflies in my stomach, “I’m sure you’ll recognize this badge number here. Would you please read it aloud for me?”

I swallowed my nerves and did as he’d requested. “FB7732Z438LL.”

“Thank you.” He flashed me that shit-eating grin of his. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the number belonging to one Constable Link Fyori, the witness’ very own investigative partner.” A few whispers drifted through the gallery following that announcement. “One who reads this will also notice that, after his revolver was issued out to him the morning before the murder, it was never returned to the precinct’s custody thereafter. In fact, it is still missing to this day.”

With this, the whispers grew in number, creating a din of distrust that had the attorney smirking from ear to ear.

“Objection.”

The whispering dissipated. Twii’s shoulders sagged as he hypocritically shot Urbosa a look that said, “What now?”

“Mr. Twii, how is this relevant? Unless you have definitive proof linking Constable Fyori to the crime, I see no point in bringing it up.”

The judge gave a pound of his gavel with a bone-chilling shake of his head. “Overruled. The court will allow the defence to continue, provided that it has good reason.”

My mouth fell open, and so had Urbosa’s.

“Thank you, Your Honour. I was just getting to that, my good prosecutor.” Now even she seemed on edge. The tension in the air was thick enough to cut through with a knife. “I may not have proof as things stand currently. However, that is about to change. You see, I have reason to believe that our witness here is covering for someone.”

The courtroom broke out into an even louder din of murmurs, as if I couldn’t clearly hear each backhanded remark the members of the gallery were making at my expense.

The pounding of the judge’s gavel echoed throughout the room, and the whispering ceased once again.

“You must be mistaken.” I stood as tall as I could with how close my legs were to giving up on me. “I happen to be one of the most trusted detectives in the force. Why do you think I was put in charge of this case despite being one of the first on the scene?”

“Ah, but that, dear witness, was your superiors’ fatal mistake.”

Damn that solicitor. “What do you mean?”

“Although my client has elected not to testify to the court, she has let me in on a certain piece of information—one that I believe will make the jaws of everyone here drop to the floor.”

Surely not. Surely even she wouldn’t dare stoop so low.

“Inspector...” The attorney looked me dead in the eyes. The air was suffocating. “What do you have in your briefcase?”

Everyone was staring at me and murmuring amongst themselves, more raucously than ever before, like I was the one on trial.

“N-No, it’s—it’s not what it seems,” I wavered. Then mustering my shattered courage, “You!” I pointed my finger at Twii. “Prove to me that the defendant wasn’t lying. I demand to see proof!”

But my demands were met with silence. Even Urbosa was looking at me with cold contempt and disappointment.

“Bailiff.”

An officer appeared from the sidelines. He seized my bag.

“Wait, stop!”

I tried to wrest it from his grasp, but he was too strong. I watched helplessly as he opened it up, reaching in and revealing the murder weapon for all to see.

“No...!”

“Bailiff, what is the number engraved on that weapon?”

He seemed to recite the number in slow motion, twisting the knife with every digit. “FB7732Z438LL.”

“No, please!” I screamed. “It wasn’t him, he’s been framed! Please, Your Honour, you have to believe me!”

Amidst the roar of the crowd, I saw the conclusive shake of the judge’s head. With a pound of his gavel, he said, “I hereby order the immediate detainment of Link Fyori under the charge of first degree murder.”

I met eyes with my partner but half a second before I saw him be dragged out of his seat with brute force.

“No!”

“As for this witness, she shall receive her sentence after being questioned by the police for the concealing of evidence, contempt of court, and perjury.”

I cried out when an overwhelming pain shot through my arm. My family watched from the gallery in either horror or disgust, or a mixture of both perhaps. I tried with all my might just to get the bailiff to stop hurting me, but it was futile.

“Your Honour, just a moment please.”

With the judge’s approval, the man’s grip on my arm lightened up. The one who’d spoken had been none other than that wretched defence attorney.

“Inspector, if you don’t mind, I have one more question to ask you.”

I held my breath, bracing myself. Though there wasn’t much he could say at this point that could possibly make the situation worse.

“Why?” he finally asked. “Why did you feel the need to conceal such a critical piece of evidence?”

My entire face boiled over with heat. I looked around, taking in the courtroom’s atmosphere, and my whole being was filled to the brim with indescribable anger and shame. Barely able to swallow the charged whimper lodged at the cusp of my throat, I choked out the words, “No comment.”

The trial had ended while I’d still been in the middle of interrogation by my own peers. I was lucky enough to get off with a fine, but it was because of that hour-and-a-half-long lecture that I only found out about Paya’s “not guilty” verdict after the entire courtroom had been cleared out. This was no surprise to me, of course, but still a disappointment, to put it lightly. What was a surprise was that no one, not Paya, nor Auntie Purah, nor even Urbosa, had bothered to wait for me.

That was fine. They could think whatever they wanted of me. I’d simply have to redeem myself by proving Link’s innocence in his trial.

It was to this end that I made my way to the district’s Centre of Detention.

When Link appeared behind the iron bars of the visitors’ room, he was already sporting a worn and faded prisoner’s uniform, surely having just undergone an interrogation of his own. Though, from the looks of him, his had been considerably more thorough than mine.

I cleared my throat. “Hello, Link.”

“Hello,” he replied.

Deathly silence filled the air. The harsh ticking of the clock on the wall behind me was slowly starting to crawl under my skin.

“They, uhm...didn’t go easy on you, eh?”

He shook his head, eyes wandering without aim.

Why did it have to be so hard to talk to him sometimes? He’d never been so unapproachable back in our days as teenagers. Though now, I supposed, recent events were only making things even more difficult for me than usual.

“Look...” I took a deep breath, shifting in my seat. “I’m sorry. Alright? I couldn’t cover for you forever. They were bound to find out eventually. Please, don’t be upset.”

“What? Zelda...” His demeanour morphed from listless to urgent, almost apologetic, as he struggled to find his voice. “Why would I be upset with you? I never asked you to cover for me in the first place.”

“I know.” Now it was I who couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eyes. “I just knew that you couldn’t have possibly... I mean, you would never—”

“I didn’t.”

He’d caught me with my mouth hanging open, when he’d cut me off.

“I didn’t kill her. I promise you.”

Of course he hadn’t. It was obvious, even though the revolver had borne no fingerprints and, with the gloves that he always wore, he wouldn’t have left any. What motive could he have had? He was an amnesiac, and even if he hadn’t been, he still wouldn’t have had a reason to kill my godmother.

I took out my pen and notebook, the only things left in my case that hadn’t been confiscated. “Tell me what you know, Link. Everything.”

A beat. Then he straightened his posture and began to explain his side of the story. As it turned out, my intuition had been spot on. This whole mess was the design of the Yiga organization. Link told me about his encounter with them before the murder. They had blackmailed him into surrendering his revolver to them, after which he would never see it again.

Though, even without a hint of deceit in his tone or manner, I had questions about the means by which the Yiga had blackmailed him. He had virtually nothing to lose. Didn’t he?

In any case, I honestly had considered showing him the gun that I’d found on the scene that night, but somehow I’d had the distinct impression that he’d known nothing about it, despite the very object in question belonging to him. I’d thought perhaps someone from the organization had switched out his weapon for another without his noticing. It was no secret that even the police bureau was infested with their ilk. In the end, I hadn’t been far off the mark.

The whole time he spoke, he had his head lowered, hair falling in front of his eyes, as if something were holding them back from meeting mine. Then he muttered, “When I had my encounter with the organization, I...remembered.”

His limited annunciation meant I had to take a moment to decipher the syllables of the last word he’d uttered. Then they sank in. “Wait. What? You mean you...” It felt beyond strange to even speak the words after so long. “You got your memory back?”

He lowered his head further. Was that a nod?

My mind went back to what he’d said to me on that one occasion in the office, not long after this whole mess had first begun. “Link, you...” My hands curled into themselves around the strap of my satchel. “All this time...why didn’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t,” he pleaded. “It would’ve been a hindrance to the investigation.” I hated to admit it, but he was right. Dropping that bomb on me would only have thrown my conscience deeper into its already tangled web of turmoil.

Amidst all the questions swirling in my mind, one suddenly appeared, eclipsing all the rest. “Why did you disappear back then?”

At this, he finally looked up and met my gaze. But when he did, his eyes were wide, almost trembling. His look seemed to cast the whole room into a great, looming darkness.

“Oh, it’s...it’s okay if you’d prefer not to talk about—”

“No,” he exclaimed. “I must.” But the way his shoulders came up to meet his ears and how rapidly his chest rose and fell told me it wasn’t going to be an easy story to tell. “It was the Yi—” He choked on his words. “The...organization.”

There it was again. The name of the group I’d been chasing without rest ever since their appearance eighteen years prior. “I knew it...” I mumbled without thinking.

He steeled himself, then continued. “That day, my father was picking me and my sister up after school. Normally we would’ve ridden home with him in his automobile, but that morning, he and I had planned to surprise Aryll by getting...I think it was ice cream, on our way back. Anyway, we decided to walk home that day. But...” His face darkened yet again. “But then...”

Pressing him for more details would have been beyond cruel. I could only imagine the horrors that those blackguards had put him and his family through. “How many of them were there?”

“I’m not sure. All I know is that they had us outnumbered.” I nodded along, without thinking, as he continued his tale. “They were all armed with what looked like military grade shotguns, and they wore those masks with the inverted Sheikah family crest... I’ve always known that I’d seen that image somewhere before.”

No one knew why the organization had chosen this symbol for themselves, though I personally suspected it to be a show of opposition.

“Anyway, after they sh...shot father,” he struggled, a hand coming up to his now quavering lips, “they must’ve felt threatened by Aryll and me, because the next thing they did was...shoot her, too.” The way his tone had started to oscillate and how his face had drained itself of colour made my stomach churn. His anguish was so clear, it was devastating. “One of them had said something to the ends of, ‘We can’t have you scamps telling on us.’ But before they could...’shut me up’ as well, I fled.” Another pause. He kept on breathing. “I was too terrified to notice which way I was going. The whole time I ran, they kept firing at me. They were too reckless to aim properly, though, mind.”

“Well...that’s lucky, at least,” I tried. This was met with a sigh of reluctant agreement. “Still, how did you make it out of that with your life?”

“They stopped chasing me when I made it out of the back alleys and into the open,” he explained. “I suppose they couldn’t risk revealing themselves.”

Now it all made sense. Seven years ago, when he’d vanished without a trace, it was as though he���d never even existed in the first place. No one could get in contact with him or his family, and yet, no one batted an eye about it. It had seemed I’d been the only one who’d thought of it as anything less than perfectly normal. Just like when my mother had lost her life.

“We never had the chance to get ice cream that day.” He looked all but ready to burst into tears with that sentence. That was the moment I realized, no matter how drastically the last seven years of hell had changed him, there was still a fragment of that playful, hollow-legged sixteen-year-old left deep in his dark, forgotten core. If there was a way to bring that bright-eyed child back out into the light, I would find it, even if it spelled my demise.

Even so, there was one thing left that had yet to be explained. “What about your amnesia?”

“Ah...” His brow furrowed in thought. “I don’t know what caused that, to be honest with you.” He seemed to be racking his mind, but to no avail. “By the time those thugs finally gave up, I didn’t recognize my surroundings. I remember trying to find my way home, but I suppose I just ended up getting myself even more lost from there.” It was no wonder. The street names in this town were of little help in navigation, and it wasn’t hard to understand why he might have been apprehensive to ask for directions in such a bustling and hostile environment, especially after what he’d just been subjected to. “So I fell asleep in the streets that night,” he concluded with a shivering exhale. “The next morning, I woke up without the slightest notion of who I was.”

My heart took a plunge at the thought of his young self curled up in some alleyway, like a baby bird who’d fallen from the nest. “It must have been some sort of mental defence mechanism,” I conjectured. “That’s the only explanation I can come up with.” He slowly nodded his agreement. “After that, then, I suppose the rest is history.”

“Indeed...”

The visitors’ room fell into a deep, reflective silence, one nothing like that which had had me gasping for air moments ago. I watched the weary feelings of dread swim in his once bright blue eyes, tearing him apart.

He’d spent five whole years in that cold, cramped ward without even a name by which to call himself. And now we were back where we’d started. He may have regained his memories in the end, but at what cost?

I no longer felt the need to hunt down those who had wronged me. Now, my only desire was to slip between the bars that stood between the two of us and whisk him away to a far off land, where no one would ever hurt us again. But I pushed the impossible daydream aside. Even if escape were an option, we’d only be running straight out into range of Yiga fire.

“After your trial tomorrow...well, at the very least, I’ll lose my badge,” I smiled waywardly. Then, letting it fade and rolling my shoulders back, “Until then, I swear, I’ll do everything within my power to prove your innocence. Then we can go out for ice cream together.”

His eyes shimmered with unshed tears when he looked up at me then. Now that I thought about it, this seemed like the first time I’d ever seen him come close to crying, even in the time before the incident. Of course, he’d seen me in tears countless times back then. I wondered if he remembered them.

“Zelda...?” My name had started to leave his lips with conviction, but weakened on its way out. “There’s...something else I should tell you.”

“Anything.”

Just then, I caught him straightening out the cuff of his black-barred sleeve, concealing the fair skin of his wrist, out of the corner of my eye. “Never mind.” He again cast his gaze downwards, muttering an inaudible, “It’s nothing,” under his breath.

[presidentrhodes]

Spider-Man Far From Home spoilers

I just finished watching it and, honestly, I’d say it was a pretty good way to bid farewell to the first three phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

Spoilers under the cut. This is pretty long and rambly. 

1. Midtown high is supposed to be a school for geniuses but these little shits use comic sans in tribute videos and steal watermarked Getty Images pictures to put in them. I loved it, particularly with the song choice and the fact that Vision’s picture was from the Civil War airport standoff in Leipzig — that means only Peter could’ve provided it and no one bothered to ask how he got it. 

2. Tom Holland really wasn’t kidding when he said the film was a love letter to RDJ/Tony Stark. He was everywhere, his sacrifice was being recognised around the world: they even had a documentary on him, which was available in the in-flight entertainment, plus, there were murals and photographs in Venice and Prague. He was very much present throughout the film. 

3. EDITH. In a nutshell, it’s an augmented reality-enabled AI that controls a tactical and defensive system Tony built to protect Earth in the aftermath of his demise. Think Ultron’s perfect self minus the winning personality — EDITH controls a bunch of massive Stark Industries satellites in orbit that are equipped with thousands of weaponised drones. It can remotely target individual threats and take them out with simple voice commands. It also is able to connect to any network in the vicinity, so, Peter was able to see what his classmates were doing on their devices. 

I’ve already seen so many angry posts comparing EDITH to Project Insight without taking into account a) intent; and b) the reality of the MCU. Tony didn’t build EDITH for the same reason Zola built Project Insight. The former was meant to be a last or first line of defence, controlled by an Avenger Tony personally trusted. The latter was a means to subjugate the world population to Hydra’s will. 

All tech in the MCU is dangerous when it falls into the wrong hands — that’s why they’re called the wrong hands and why Steve once said the safest hands are their own. The supersoldier serum gave us Steve Rogers; it also gave us the Winter Soldiers, a bunch of dangerous, invincible highly-trained assassins. Pym particles gave us Ant-Man and the Wasp as well as time travel; it also gave us Yellowjacket, who immediately wanted to weaponise the tech. The Iron Man suit gave us Iron Man; but also gave us Iron Monger, who wanted to build an army of metal soldiers. Wakanda’s highly-advanced weapon systems were able to withstand a full-scale invasion from the Outriders, but those same weapons almost started a global war in Killmonger’s hands. Project Insight and Ultron showed us the bad side of AI; JARVIS, Vision, FRIDAY, Karen and EDITH, to an extent, showed us the good side of AI.

The point is, technology in the wrong hands will always be a bad thing yet people only seem to gripe about Stark tech while ignoring every other piece of advanced technology we’ve seen weaponized or misused. I wonder why. Since the MCU canonically isn’t made up of one big Luddite colony, there’ll always be new technology being developed and bad guys finding ways to abuse them. 

Just look at the holographic tech Mysterio designed while at Stark Industries. Even before he was fired, his ambitions were grander and afterwards, he weaponized it and willingly sent people to their dooms so that he could play a hero. When 16-year-old Peter Parker, MJ and Ned — literal children — found out the truth and Mysterio risked being exposed as a fraud, he actively tried to kill them. Mysterio beat the shit out of Peter and threw him in front of an incoming high-speed train, so, no, I don’t care if Tony Stark was mean to him by firing him, he was a piece of shit who tried repeatedly to kill a kid. 

Tony, meanwhile, spent $600+ million on the holographic tech to design B.A.R.F — a technology with some really promising applications in the MedTech sector to help people overcome their PTSD and trauma. That’s the fucking difference between a superhero and a supervillain.

Sure, EDITH also has massive privacy concerns. That’s on Tony, but after the Decimation, I think people have bigger problems to worry about than whether Peter Parker is snooping on their text messages. Ultimately, EDITH offers Peter, and whoever else is going to fill up the Avengers roster in the future, a plan B to strike the bad guys from a safe distance. I

4. Tony left Peter in charge of EDITH. Not the Avengers, not SHIELD, and definitely not the US Department of Defense — a fact that actually pissed off Mysterio. Tony left it in Peter’s hands because he knew Spider-Man took the meaning of responsibility far more seriously than he ever did. All those years ago, Peter told him if one could do the things he could, and they didn’t, and then the bad things happened, they happened because of them. And, honestly, if anyone deserves to have control over such a potentially dangerous piece of tech that can help in future battles, then it’s Peter — even more so than Tony. 

5. Again, Peter is 16 in this film and still coping with loss and trauma. He willingly gave controls of EDITH to Quentin because Mysterio had everyone fooled, including Nick Fury/Talos — they’re both highly experienced soldiers. Fooling them wouldn’t have been easy and Mysterio’s plan was extremely well thought-out and perfectly executed. Peter redeem himself in the end and takes back control of EDITH. 

6. Peter and MJ were super adorable. Spider-Man is the only franchise apart from Iron Man, where the secondary lead characters are allowed to grow without it all being about the main hero. MJ is allowed to explore her feelings for Peter and measure them against Brad’s affection. Ned is allowed to also grow in his character and be more than Spider-Man’s best friend/guy in a chair. 

7. Happy and May were also adorable.

8. Happy ruined a perfectly good bed of tulips just to rescue May’s nephew and give him the TLC/pep talk he needed after, again, Beck pushed Peter in front of a high-speed train that would’ve killed an ordinary person. 

9. Peter confusing ACDC with Led Zeppelin is the most Gen Z thing ever. Happy watched Peter design his own suit and it reminded him of the times he spent watching Tony tinker in his lab. You could feel Tony’s absence pretty viscerally in that scene on the jet. 

10. Peter tingle. Lol. 

11. Happy’s words about Tony were beautiful. He said something along the lines of, “Tony was my best friend. He second-guessed everything he did. He was a mess. But the one thing he didn’t second-guess was picking you.” That really furthered the Iron Dad Spider Son narrative.

12. Iron Zombie was the w o r s t thing ever. Again, Beck emotionally manipulated 16-year-old Peter Parker and said if Peter was any good, his mentor would still be alive just as he projected an illusion of a decaying Iron Man corpse attacking him. To give you a sense of how manipulative he really is, he told his guy in the chair that Peter’s blood will be on his hands because he had failed to report a missing drone part that MJ had discovered in Prague. 

13. Peter finally understanding that he doesn’t have to be the next Tony Stark or Iron Man. He just needs to be the next Spider-Man and Peter Parker. 

14. Peter choosing to safeguard EDITH. 

15. J. Jonah Jameson and J.K. Simmons. That is all. He’s the MCU equivalent of Alex Jones and I love him so much. I wonder if this means we’ll see Doctor Strange offer Peter his help to erase everyone’s memories about the reveal of his secret identity. 

16. Every Nick Fury scene automatically becomes 2000x funnier when you realize it’s Talos posing as Fury and 90% of the time, he has no idea what the fuck is going on and he’s just winging it as he goes along. Also, he was furious that he and his wife, as members of a shapeshifting species, were unable to detect Mysterio’s ruse. 

17. Mysterio was a douchebag. Apart from trying to kill actual kids because he feared they might expose him, he did nothing worthy of a hero. He was jealous and angry about Tony, and he wanted to usurp Iron Man without doing any of the hard work. He willingly put people in danger, was prepared to sacrifice people to make his actions seem more realistic and wanted to take credit for saving the day and preventing an Avengers-level catastrophe. I’ve already seen reviewers trying to sympathise with Mysterio, and his persistent attempts to kill a 16-year-old kid because Tony was apparently mean to him. 

18. And, no, Tony did not steal B.A.R.F tech from Mysterio as some review sites are claiming. The narrative is unreliable at best because we hear only Quentin’s point of view — the same Quentin who had been using his holographic tech to deceive people and put them in harm’s way because he wanted to shake the Queen’s hands or some misguided bullshit. He deserved to fired. Plus, he was a Stark Industries employee. Tech companies almost always own the patent to whatever tech you design or invent for them when you’re on their payroll. It’s how corporations work.

19. Tony quoted Henry IV to Fury when he told him to give EDITH to Peter and said Spidey wouldn’t get the reference (Heavy is the head that wears the crown) because it’s not Star Wars. It was a nice, poignant moment — made funnier when you realize that’s Talos in disguise, which means at some point, Fury had to have a conversation with him about Shakespeare and Star Wars. Someone pls write the fic. 

20. The most important thing is that this film actually tried to address the Decimation. Endgame pretended to gloss over it to give Gay Joe Russo his 15 minutes of fame. But this film actually started with May and Peter organizing an event to help the displaced. Pepper sent a huge check and apologized for not being able to make it in person. :( 

20a. I love Jake Gyllenhaal. I had expected Quentin to be a dramatic thot but he really brought a lot of depth to the character. 

Overall, I liked the film a lot more than I had anticipated. Some people are going to scrutinize this film to death to prove Tony was the ultimate MCU villain and, hey, if that’s the hill they choose to die on, I don’t really care. After 11 years and 23 films later, if they still think that Tony was the real villain all along, then nothing we say or Marvel does, will change their mind. 

Personally, I thought this film was a good send off to Tony, now that they’ve firmly established that Peter Parker/Spider-Man is going to be the new face of the MCU and will carry with him the Iron Man legacy. He wasn’t always right and a lot of his choices tended to backfire but, in the end, his motivations were good and he still went out as the man who saved the world. He, unlike Beck, or Vulture before him, never tried to kill a child, not even when he brought him to a parking lot brawl among friends. 

Now, if only Marvel can just leave Tony’s legacy alone and let Peter, and the rest of the MCU, thrive on its own instead of retconning established Iron Man lore to fit new narratives. 

[krungle]

Major Liberal Talking Points...

...That you will see repeatedly over the next few months/year.

1. Republicans had control over the House, Senate and White House and still didn’t get anything done:

Truth is all about the Senate. Republicans had a simple majority (51 seats out of 100) of the Senate. However it takes a 2/3′s majority (66 votes out of 100) to pass almost anything in the Senate (or more precisely, to bring something to a vote because of the Filibuster Rule of the Senate). 

The Democrats repeatedly blocked Bills in the Senate, many containing things the Democrats demanded having, because these Bills also gave either the President of the Republicans things they wanted. For instance: the Democrats blocked several measures that would give DACA people (all of which are now adults) a pathway to citizenship because in one case (a budget Bill) it would fund The Wall, and in another case (Immigration Reform Bill) it would end Chain Migration and the VISA Lottery.

So the truth here is that the Republicans got a ton done, and are continuing to do so, in spite of interference from the Democrat Party, interference based on not forcing compromise but an ‘all or nothing’ policy of legislation. i.e.: Give us everything and get nothing in return.

2. The Special Council Reports in the past were delivered unredacted... so what are they hiding under the redactions?

The law for the Special Councils were changed by the Democrat Party after the impeachment of President Clinton. Under the new laws Bill’s Affair with Monica Lewinsky would never have come to attention of the Congress in the first place. Remember the Special Counsel was tasked to investigate Real Estate deals known as White Water, not blow jobs in the Oval Office. This is precisely why the Democrats changed the laws.

The new Law states that the Special Council hand his report to the DOJ, the head of the DOJ, the Attorney General, then reviews the report and writes his own report submitting that to Congress. Under the Law the Democrats wrote, they do not have the legal right to see any of the Special Council’s Report, not one word of it, much less any of the work material behind it.

Also under the Law that the Democrats wrote, the President has the legal right to review the DOJ Report and any other paperwork handed over the Congress and to redact it as the President wishes claiming Executive Privilege before it gets to Congress, even demanding that the Attorney General completely rewrite the report if the President Wishes. This is a legal right that President Trump is fully and completely passing on.

Under current law the DOJ cannot hand over an unredacted report to the Congress. However the DOJ is being really nice with the redactions and color-coding them to show why they made redactions at certain points, according to four legal categories.

Finally the Attorney General, under the current Democrat made law, has the sole responsibility to report to Congress, however in this case Attorney General Barr is having the Deputy Attorney General (an Obama Administration holdover who appointed the Special Council in the first place, Rod Rosenstein) and Robert Mueller (the Special Council himself) are working together on the redactions. It is highly unlikely that these two Never-Tumpers would allow Barr to hide anything from Congress. 

3. Charlottesville proves Trump is Racist

I made a post at the time of the Charlottesville event detailing what actually happened there and what Trump said about it. Here are the facts.

AntiFa and BLM were protesting and even vandalizing statues and monuments across the country. Many people became upset at the vandalization of historic monuments and wanted to stop this destruction of U.S. History. A group who presented themselves as being mainstream Conservative on several social media platforms formed a protest in response to BLM and AntiFa targeting of a statue in Charlottesville, Virginia in a way of drawing a line against vandalism, the destruction of historic landmarks, and the rewriting of history. Unknown by many who answered the call the organizers were not mainstream, not one bit.

Friday night about 525 (exact number is in my original post and gotten from AntiFa sources) torch carrying protesters carrying descended on a Confederate Statue in Charlottesville, Virginia. The organizers had convinced the people who showed up for a march that was scheduled for Saturday that BLM and AntiFa had planned on tearing down the statue that night and the group had to surround the statue to protect it. Once the group of protesters arrived at the statue a series of Tweets went out to summon a flash-mob of BLM and AntiFa counter-protesters that outnumbered the protesters by a large margin and who surrounded the protesters. The police formed a circle separating the two groups but did nothing as the BLM and AntiFa counter-protesters threw objects over the police into the protesters.

At about this same time the organizers of the pro-statue/history protest showed their true colors as the began chanting Anti-Semitic and racist chants. Many of the other people there refused to chant along with the White Supremacists but knew it was not safe to try to walk away through the bottle and rock throwing mob that surrounded them. Eventually the pro-statue protesters left the park and dispersed.

Reports were that over hundred more protesters came into town over night to join the White Supremacists for the scheduled Saturday March. However the count of the marchers on Saturday was just over 300 in number. This means that only about 200 of the 525 or so of the people at the statue on Friday night remained to march on Saturday. The rest, the majority of the people there Friday night, had left town once they saw the protest was a White Supremacist thing and not mainstream Conservative as it had been billed.

It was this 300 or so people who walked away from the protest that Trump was referring to when he said that there were good people on both sides of the protests in Charlottesville.

4. Trump Tower meeting proves the Trump Campaign colluded with Russians

First there is nothing illegal or even odd about one campaign getting dirt on another, in fact this is normal. But that is not what happened here.

Let us take a look at the Russian, Natalia Vladimirovna Veselnitskaya, involved in the ‘scandal’. She is a lawyer with connection to the both the Russian and Ukrainian government, has connections with Fusion GPS and Uranium One. Through Paul Manafort, who was still being secretly paid by Ukraine for consulting, Natalia was introduced to Jared Cushner and Donald Trump Jr. as having some undisclosed dirt on Hillery that she was willing to give for free.

Once she got to the meeting at Trump Tower she did not discuss Hillery but instead began lobbying for a loosening of economic sanctions against Russia, if Trump got elected, in exchange for loosening of Russia’s adoption rules and limitations for Russian orphans to US families.

Trump Jr. walked in, stayed for about five minutes or so then walked back out. Jared hung around for a little longer but also ended up concluding that the entire thing was based on false pretenses and was a complete waste of time.

The Mueller Report states that Russia had made many attempts to infiltrate the Trump Campiagn but failed to do so. This may have been one of those attempts if it wasn’t a blatant attempt by Hillery to sabotage the Trump Campaign. But any way it is looked at nothing illegal or even improper on either Jared Cushner’s or Trump Jr.’s point took place, either going into or coming out of the meeting.

5. Walls are a 14th Century solution to a 21st Century problem

This is a completely false narrative. Every single time a wall has been built throughout history, ancient history to modern history, they have worked and worked well.

In modern times the Israel Wall has stopped terrorist bombings and other activity in Israel. All that terrorist organizations such as Hamas can do now is to fire rockets over the walls. Attempts to tunnel under the wall have been thwarted several times.

Obama gave Jordan over a half a billion dollars to Jordan to build it’s own wall, and the US Congress is continuing to give Jordan more money every year towards that project.

Hamas (of Palestine) and the Muslim Brotherhood (of Egypt) were working together to cause problems in both Israel and Egypt until a wall was built near the Egyptian Border. The two groups are no longer exchanging weapons and other hardware with each other and the terrorist activities of both have been reduced substantially as a result.

5a. The Berlin Wall - Although the Berlin Wall stopped over a thousand defections a day from Communist East Berlin into Democratic West Berlin and reduced those numbers to less than two dozen over the next sixty years. (Wikipedia includes defections by people, like ballet dancers and musicians, who were in West Berlin on VISAs and defected in their numbers, significantly inflating the defection numbers even though those defections had nothing to do with climbing over the Berlin Wall) It must be kept in mind that the Berlin Wall was about keeping people in while the Mexican Wall is about keeping people out. Keeping people in is making prisoners of people; keeping people out is not making a prisoner of anyone.

6. We have the Right to see Trump’s Tax Returns

The President is not above the Law, nor is he below it. Every one of us has the following Constitutional Right:  Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. 

This includes the President. Since the Mueller Report specifically states that the Trump Administration in no way colluded with Russians, there is no ‘probable cause’ to suspect pay-offs from the Russians (or anyone else) to Trump so therefor the Right of Trump to ‘Secure in their papers’ remains sacrosanct.

Although Congress may have passed a law that says the IRS must hand over tax returns to Congress when asked, there are many laws that the US Supreme Court have found to be Unconstitutional in the past, including Jim Crow Laws, Poll Taxes and Abortion Prohibitions. This law, even if it is being interpreted correctly in this case (which I doubt), may just be one more law that SCOTUS will find unconstitutional.

So, no, the Congress has no Right to see any specific person’s tax returns. The congress does have a right to see any number of random and anonymous tax returns but not any specific person’s. Even a judge cannot insist on seeing a specific person’s tax returns until Probable Cause of misdoing is proven.

7. The World is going to end in twelve years

As one person so eloquently said: If someone says to you ‘give me all your money or you are going to die’ the person is a shyster who is lieing to you and just wants your money.

8. Trump wants to take away your Healthcare

Just like ‘Republicans want to take away preexisting conditions’ was a lie, so is this. Trump believes that States can better figure out how to give healthcare to the needy than people in Washington, D.C. can. I happen to agree that the closer people the solution is made the better the needs of the individual is met.

Trump has been hinting at Block Grants to States so they can apply the money how they best see fit, whether that be keeping the Medicaid Expansion or opening a series of Free Clinics or something else, each individual States are best at figuring out how best to aide their own people.

The best that the Federal Government can do is to change things, like buying health insurance across State Lines and Torte Reform, to reduce or at least keep down healthcare costs for everyone, especially small businesses and the self-employed.

One thing Trump has in mind is to cap prescription costs to an average of the cost of that item on the World Market. This would help many people, especially those that are complaining of no longer being able to afford their medication, medication that now costs much more in the USA than it costs anywhere else on the planet.

Right now many people are forgoing Obamacare because the deductibles are so high it makes the insurance worthless. In other words you are out so much money before the insurance pays squat you’d already be broke long before that.

Of course those on Medicaid Expansion that pay nothing for everything are not in this boat at all, although that boat is what is supposed to pay for theirs, which it cannot, never has been able to and never can. However those who are part of the FreeCare is what the Black Grants to States that Trump is contemplating to ‘replace’ Obamacare.

9. Trump is anti-LGBTQ+

9a. As ‘proof’ people point to Trump’s rejecting Transsexuals in the military. However people are not giving this policy any thought at all. Rejecting Transsexuals is not discriminating against them, but allowing them in is giving them special treatment, treatment that no other people get.

Transsexuals suffer from Dysphoria. Two of the major symptoms of Dysphoria are eating disorders and suicidal thoughts. Either one of those, by itself, is a valid reason to reject someone from military service, yet Transsexuals, by definition, have both psychosis.

Therefor allowing Transsexuals into the military is giving them special treatment and is not ‘equal rights’ but ‘special rights’. Not only that but anyone in the military has access to stuff that can take out entire city blocks, if not entire cities. Allowing someone who is suicidal, someone who might decide to take as many with them as they can, access to such things is unconscionable. And before you try to argue against this point do you support taking away guns from people who the police think may be a danger to themselves or others? Don’t be self-contradictory with me.

9b. Trump took away the housing allowance for the SO’s of gay couples living overseas and serving the Executive Branch. This is true, but only half of it. The full of it is straight couples who are not married, the SO does not get the extra housing allowance either. This was another case of Obama disobeying the law and giving gay couples extra privileges that no one else had.

When Trump reversed this illegal Obama policy, Trump recognized Gay Marriage for all people employed in the Executive Branch, something that Obama did not do and something that Congress has failed to do for the rest of the Federal Government employees. In this way Trump is well ahead of the curve for Gay Rights, even further ahead of the curve than Obama was.

9c. Trump is the first President to hire into a Cabinet position an openly gay person. Although Wikipedia notes that Richard Grenell, US Ambassador to Germany is “the highest-ranking openly gay official ever in a Republican administration“ this source could have left out the word ‘Republican’ and been even more accurate, for no Democrat Administration has put a gay person is such a high position ever. Every State Department position that has come open since Trump appointed Ambassador Grenell has had him on Trump’s Short List.

9d. I present as final proof that Trump is actually Pro-Gay is the fact he has tasked the State Department to push for Gay Rights across the globe especially as it relates to fighting laws and punishment against gay people. Many Liberal groups and liberal press have twisted this around to be something bad but their arguments make no sense and can only be accepted if your only thought is to hate Trump no matter what.

10. Trump is anti-immigrant

Trump married an immigrant. Like with most legal immigrants, his wife had to go through a long and expensive legal process to become a permanent resident then a citizen. This makes Trump uniquely positioned to understand immigration laws and processes.

Trump, like Ben Franklin, believes that the USA has enough low-skilled workers to make due with from our own pool of citizens. What we need is skilled workers to fill positions that our nation is currently lacking the people to fill. To Ben Franklin this was a call for Blacksmiths, Wheelwrights and carpenters.

If a nation continues to import low-skilled labor then the Blue Collar and lowest paid (not the same thing) workers both suffer from stagnant or decreasing wages, just as we have seen here in the USA for nearly twenty years. Wages, like everything else, is based on Supply and Demand. The higher the demand and lower the supply the higher the price (wages).

Through lower taxes and lower regulations Trump has brought manufacturing back to the USA. Manufacturing is what created the Middle Class and only by having a strong manufacturing sector can a nation have a strong Middle Class. Period. But we need Americans to fill these jobs, have Americans that can fill these jobs. These Americans are generally from the poor-class, Americans that with manufacturing jobs leave the poor-class and enter the Middle Class. The poor-class is made up of Poor Whites (which tends to be generational), Blacks and Hispanics (Latinos). If our nation imports workers that compete with those people we are hurting minorities hard.

What Trump is doing by fighting ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION is protecting the most vulnerable sectors of our nation, protecting minorities and the poor, and increasing the wages of the lowest paid and blue collar workers. Again, illegal immigration effects Blacks, as a race, more than any other demographic. Do you hate blacks that much?

11. Hate Crimes have increased under Trump

Trump has tasked the DOJ and FBI to get an accurate measure of hate inspired crimes and hate groups in the USA. Although Obama may have given this lip-service, Trump is actually pushing for more accurate reporting, and getting it. Hate Crimes probably have not increased, only the reporting of them has.

The numbers of White Supremacist groups and memberships have remained basically even. Although Hate Crimes are reported to the DOJ from local police agencies, the FBI gets their own numbers for groups and memberships.

What has increased without a doubt since Trump has been elected is Hate Crime Hoaxes perpetrated by members of the group that is the made-out victim. I can make a post even longer than this one posting the hoaxes but if you just do a little of your own due diligence and go back to incidents you have heard about over the last few years and search for updates you will find almost always one of two things: it is either still unsolved or it was a hoax. Really. Pick any ten and you might find one that was proven to be real, and I doubt you ever find more than two that are proven to be real, but more than half will be proven to be hoaxes. Try it, I have.

12. Trump is a X-ist

Aristotle stated in his treatise titled “On Rhetoric”, which is used in every University in the USA  as a guide to public speaking and discourse, that a person who devolves to calling another person names and attacking their character has no valid argument left to debate the other person’s ideas with. this means those who spout off a long list of -ists in relation to Trump have admitted defeat to any debate of his policies that they might have.

[zoemurph]

to have a friend, chapter 10: $233

on ao3 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

haha im dying!

thank you for being patient. i have one essay left, a group project (that includes another essay :P), a final quiz, a flash fiction piece, and a final. and i'm done with my first semester of college? i'm actually...taking next semester off so...probably more consistent updates after this. phew. oh and i won nano? wild

i'm exhausted and genuinely don't like at least 75% of this chapter, but it's done. please please p l e a s e read the end notes for a little disclaimer thanks

warnings: anxiety, depression, panic attacks, let me know if any other warnigns should be added

enjoy~

Sometimes Connor has the really strong urge to hold Evan’s hand.

It’s a weird feeling. This desire to just reach out and take Evan’s hand in his own and not even say anything, just hold it.

Sometimes Connor thinks that romantic feelings are bullshit. Especially when it’s seven in the morning and Evan sees him waiting by the locker and lights up like the goddamn sun and Connor’s stomach tries to become an Olympic gymnast.

Like right now.

Evan stands next to Connor, their arms almost touching, as he talks to Alana. They’re still trying to figure out a name for their club, because for whatever reason, Alana refuses to use The Fuck Project.

Jared thinks it’s hilarious, which has somehow worked against the name.

Alana is going on about the details. Evan nods, and he probably knows what’s going on, but Connor’s zoned out. Alana has this in the bag and also Connor isn’t actually involved in their little pet project. Even if the initial idea did come from Alana being way too fucking nosy.

She’s nice when she’s not picking Connor’s brain.

So Alana and Evan talk and Connor stands and people pass them and time until the next class starts ticks down and down and down. It’s a nice moment. Weirdly calm. For once, Connor doesn’t feel entirely awful, despite where he is and everything about himself.

He still wants to hold Evan’s hand.

It’s not like Connor actively tries to think about it. The opposite, in fact. As soon as thoughts about dating Evan pop up, he shoves them to the very back of his brain. He quarantines them away in the darkest corners, because thinking about it hurts.

Evan has made himself a constant in Connor’s life. But a temporary constant. Which is weird and annoying and tiring. Sometimes Connor’s emotions bubble up inside him and threaten to spill out and then Evan will give him this look when Connor pays him and everything just vanishes. Evan looks at Connor and all Connor’s thoughts shrink back and go ‘fuck never mind’.  

That doesn’t mean that he’s actually good about not thinking it. He’s getting worse, actually. It’s turning into a mild problem.

Evan can just look at Connor and Connor’s heart will flip and his mind will be consumed with ‘holy fuck I would date the shit out of him’.

He would. Connor has absolutely zoned out staring at Evan on multiple occasions. He keeps passing it off as being tired and honestly it’s a miracle that Evan hasn’t started asking about Connor’s sleep schedule— which is a disaster but isn’t why Connor keeps staring Evan.

Connor keeps staring at Evan because his brain is a fucking traitor and likes to think about what it would be like to kiss Evan.

Of all the boys to fall in love with, Connor had to go and fall in love with Evan Hansen.

Connor checks his phone under his desk. It’s been facedown on his desk — he’s making an attempt in calculus because he’s doing a really shit job right now and he has to pass because he literally cannot spend a day longer in this hellscape than he has to — but he can see the screen lighting up repeatedly.

From: Ev To: Connor      AR eyou in clasright no w      Of cours e youre in c alss where els e wi oudl you b      Im so ryrcan you g et out ?

Connor squints at the board. There are x’s and t’s and some other bullshit that he doesn’t understand. A lot of lines and marks.

Fuck.

He opens another conversation.

From: dickbag To: assface      you any good at calc?

Jared replies surprisingly fast. Actually, not so surprisingly. Connor is actually not surprised at all that Jared uses his phone in class.

From: assface To: dickbag      ive got a mean b in calc bc      y

Connor raises his hand and asks to go to the bathroom. The teacher waves him out the door and keeps teaching.

From: assface To: dickbag      i have to do something and i need to not fail      you willing to tell me what the fuck is happening?

From: Connor To: Ev      where are you? got out of class

Connor heads to the bathroom, because he’s already on the third floor and that’s where Evan was last time. And it’s the closest bathroom. His phone buzzes in his hand as he hurries through the hall and he tries not to groan when it’s just Jared.

From: dickbag To: assface      no promises but i can try      dont know y ur coming to me lmao      also i charge $10/hr

From: assface To: dickbag      fine but youre a dick

Connor pushes the bathroom door open. The lights are on, someone’s been in here in the past ten minutes, but the bathroom is empty. He drags his hand through his hair and catches a look at himself in the mirror.

Wow. He looks like shit.

Connor rubs his face and checks his phone again. It’s been buzzing, but it’s just been Jared.

From: dickbag To: assface      not news      whats so important that ur running out of class??      o shit drugs?      420 blaze it      i dont kno weed culture

As Connor scrolls through Jared’s messages, a text from Evan pops up on the top of his screen.

From: Ev To: Connor      J aanito s clostesecond follr

Connor runs into a wide eyed freshman as he hurries out of the bathroom and swings around a corner to get to the stairs. He only vaguely knows where that closet it, because he’s never had a reason to pay attention to it. Janitor’s closets are usually locked and it’s not like Connor is observant when it comes to his surroundings.

He skips the last few steps and just jumps down to the landing, slowing to a fast walk as he searches the hallway for the janitor’s closet. He finds it tucked into a corner between two classrooms. He glances up and down the hallway before he knocks softly. He tries the handle and knocks again before he pulls the door open.

“Evan?” he asks softly into the darkened closet. Light from the hallway spills into the darkness, barely brushing Evan’s shoes. Evan is huddled into the corner furthest away from the door, squished between shelves, on the ground with his knees pulled to his chest and his arms covering his head.

Connor stares for a minute, listening to Evan’s ragged breathing, before he steps into the closet. He turns on his phone’s flashlight and covers it with his hand before pulling the door closed. He lets some light slip through his fingers and finds a bottle of Windex on one of the shelves. He puts his phone under it and the room glows blue. Maybe life hacks aren’t always as shitty as they seem.

Connor sits down on the floor next to Evan. “Ev,” he whispers. “Can I help?”

Evan doesn’t look up. After a few seconds he stops holding on to his hair so tightly and holds a shaking hand out to Connor. Connor takes it. Almost immediately, Evan’s hand clenches around Connor’s, squeezing Connor’s fingers tightly. Connor moves over so the position is less awkward and lightly squeezes Evan’s hand back. 

Connor sits and waits, because he doesn’t really know what else to do. He watches Evan’s breathing and tries not to let his mind wander too much, because it’s too early in the day for any of that shit.

Evan loosens his grip on Connor’s hand and the tension seems to run out of his body. He sags against the wall and slowly lifts his head from his knees. He pulls his hand away. “S-sor-sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Connor says. His voice sounds weirdly rough. He clears it and stretches out his fingers.

Evan stares at them. “I— i-if I hurt your…your hand I didn’t mean to I just—”

“You didn’t,” Connor interrupts quickly. “See?” He wiggles his fingers. “Work just fine.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets. “Do you…uh, want to talk about it?”

Evan makes a strangled sound. “N-nothing to… I mean there’s always—” He rubs his eyes with the back of his hand. “D-dr. Sherman always says that— that there’s something? And I just don’t u-understand what so I’m…supposed to process it. But I just…”

“I think it’s a fucking lot to ask you to process shit right after a panic attack,” Connor says flatly.

Evan shrugs helplessly. “I don’t— I-I forget. I forget what I’m— what I feel in the moment a-and what I was thinking and then when she asks what was going through my mind I can’t tell her and then I feel worse and like a failure and I think I’m supposed to be getting better because I go to therapy and I take meds and—” Evan cuts himself off to take a deep breath. “It takes time,” Evan says softly. “It takes time. It takes time and it’ll get better it just—”

“Takes time?” Connor asks.

Evan smiles at him weakly. “Y-yeah.”

The bell rings, slightly muffled. Evan goes tense.

Connor thinks about his calculus teacher. She probably won’t be thrilled that he skipped out on the rest of class, but whatever. Maybe he’ll do homework for once and try to get back on her disinterested side.

“Your mom is working right now, isn’t she?” Connor asks slowly.

Evan nods. “Yeah, she’s a-always working. Pretty much.”

“We’ve still got three classes to get through.” Connor bumps their knees together. “Can you hide out in the nurse’s office or something? I’d say just leave, but…” Evan shakes his head. “Yeah, exactly. I don’t know shit about doing things the ‘right’ way.”

“I’ll…be okay,” Evan says.

Connor stares at him.

“It’s-it’s really fine,” Evan insists.

“Ev—”

“I’ve done it before, it’s not a big… I’ll just— it’s okay, really.”

“You aren’t taking the bus home today,” Connor says. He gets to his feet and takes the Windex off of his phone. “Light warning.” Evan covers his eyes. Connor flicks the light on and winces in the brightness before shutting off his flashlight. He slides his phone into his pocket and offers Evan his hand.

Evan takes it and lets Connor haul him to his feet. “Y-you don’t have to—”

“Fuck the bus,” Connor interrupts. “Zoe has a perfectly good car.”

Evan blinks. “Doesn’t she have rehearsal today?”

“How do you know my sister’s schedule better than I do?” Connor opens the door of the closet and peers out into the hallway. They have to be careful, because high school is fucking hell. Most people won’t give a shit and don’t pay attention to shit, but all it takes is one person assuming something. When no one is looking, he steps out of the closet and pulls Evan along, walking away from the closet quickly and melting into the thinning crowd. “So what if we have to wait for her to get out, just hang around with me for a little bit.”

As soon as Connor says it, his stomach twists. “I don’t have any today but—”

Evan stops walking, yanking Connor back a bit. They’re still holding hands. Connor pulls his away and puts his hands in the pocket of his sweatshirt.

“D-don’t,” Evan says.

Connor furrows his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

“You’re already— you’re doing me a favor by…by driving me home. So you don’t have to…” Evan gestures with his hands. “Debt paid. It’s— you’re fine.” Connor stares at him. “I— okay.”

Evan takes a step back. “I have to… I have class. I’ll see you after.” He spins on his heel and walks down the hallway, dodging other students before disappearing around a corner.

—«·»—

Connor drops into his seat in the back of AP Literature and puts his head down on his desk.

He needs to think about something — anything — other than Evan. Evan is supposed to be the one who thinks himself into an anxious spiral, not Connor. And Connor can’t help but feel like something is horribly wrong.

But, fuck, he wouldn’t stop their arrangement for anything. He’ll keep paying Evan to put up with him in the halls for as long as he possibly can, just to see Evan smile.

He wants to see Evan smile today. Anything other than the empty expression he had on his face when he walked away from Connor earlier.

Alana sits down next to Connor. Sometimes Connor forgets him and Alana talk now, even if it’s only because she’s Evan’s friend and probably thinks this is a good way to keep tabs on Evan. All she’s ever wanted from Connor is information, anyway.

Connor stares out the window at the icy field hockey field spread out in front of the school as the teacher starts the lesson. Something about the essay they have due in a few days at midnight.

Alana hands over her essay, printed and typed, five pages long double spaced and stapled in the corner. “It’s just a rough draft,” she says.

Connor blinks at the paper. “Uh…were we supposed to…”

She shakes her head. “No, we just needed to have an outline today.” She adjusts her glasses and opens a notebook. “But if you didn’t—”

“I did,” Connor says quickly. He actually did for once. “Here.” He pulls out his notebook and flips through pages and pages of shitty sketches to the section where he just stuffs any loose papers he’s handed. He pulls out the outline and smooths it out a little. “Don’t expect anything.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Alana says as she takes it from him.

Connor squints at her. “I did this while high so it’s either a brilliant disaster or just a fucking mess.”

Alana grins. “I hope it’s a brilliant disaster.”

“Probably not.”

She just shrugs and pulls out a pen, tapping it on her notebook as she skims over the outline. Connor turns to Alana’s essay and starts reading. Alana likes words and complex sentences. She’s good at backing up her points with evidence from the text, and doesn’t dance around her conclusions. She has a structure and logic to her essay that Connor’s never been able to achieve. He just sort of says words until he feels like he’s done.

He reads her fourth paragraph a few times, picking at his nail polish as he does so. He glances over to Alana and then reads it again.

She’s scribbling on his outline when he looks back to her. She meets his eyes. “Something wrong?”

Connor’s eyes flick from her to her essay. “Uh…no.”

Alana rolls her eyes and hands him her pen. “Fix it. Whatever it is. That’s the entire point of peer review.”

“I could be wrong—” Connor starts, but Alana holds up a hand to stop him.

“I’ll decide what to do with your feedback. Just do it.”

Connor nods slowly and hesitates with the pen hovering over the paper. “What are you doing, by the way?”

“Translating.”

“What?”

Alana pulls another pen from her backpack and uncaps it. “Your outline is good, you have some really good ideas in here, it’s just lost in the typos and grammar.”

“I can figure it out,” Connor says. “You don’t have to do that shit.”

Alana raises an eyebrow. “Are you sure?”

Connor blinks. “…not anymore?”

She nods firmly. “Exactly. You edit mine, I’ll edit yours. You won’t hurt my feelings, please, feel free to rip it to shreds.”

Connor exhales slowly. “Okay, Beck. Whatever.” He strikes out a sentence. “Whatever you say.”    

—«·»—

Connor meets Evan by Evan’s locker. They lock eyes and for a second everything feels weird. And then Jared shows up.

Connor has never been relieved to see Jared Kleinman before.

“What’s up?” Jared asks, clapping a hand on Evan’s shoulder. “My…main bros.”

Connor rolls his eyes. “Don’t call me that.”

“Alright, crossing that off the list.” Jared gives Evan a look and Evan shrugs. Connor looks between them and shifts his weight to his other foot. “Anyway, you free on Saturday?” he asks Evan.

Evan blinks. “Y-yes?”

“My moms wanted you over for dinner. They’re going to try to harass Heidi into coming too but,” Jared shrugs, “we know how that is.”

Evan smiles and ducks his head. “I-I mean— yeah that’d be…that’d be nice. Um, I can…ask my mom?”

“Nice.” Jared holds his fist out for a fist bump. Evan rolls his eyes and knocks their knuckles together. “Okay, text me, cause if she’s working, I’ll swing by and pick you up.”

Evan nods. “O-okay, I will.”

“Sweet, got to dash or I’ll never get out of here.” Jared shoots finger guns at Connor. “See, ya Murph,” he says before sprinting down the hallway.

Connor lifts a hand to wave goodbye as jealousy twists in his stomach. It makes him feel gross. He swallows it and turns to Evan. “So, uh…we can probably hide in a practice room until Zoe’s done.”

Evan pulls on the straps of his backpack. “A-are they, um, open? Because I know, I mean I’ve heard because sometimes the band kids in my classes complain about this, that they lock? Or get locked? So…”

“We can…check?” Connor suggests.

Evan nods. “That’s…probably a good idea.”

Connor leads Evan down to the music wing. The first two practice rooms are locked, but the third that they try is unlocked. Connor raises his eyebrows at Evan and pushes the door open. The lights flicker on automatically and Evan closes the door behind them.

All four of the practice rooms are the same in Connor’s experience, a keyboard and bench, a trash, and maybe a stand or chair that someone has dragged in. Except one, that for some reason, has two pianos. They lucked out and that is exactly the room they’re in. Less room, but it doesn’t really matter.

Evan puts his bag down on one of the piano benches and then sits on the floor in the space between the end of the piano and the wall.

Connor coughs. “Uh…are you…okay?” He winces. Yikes.

“Tired,” Evan says softly.

Connor glances to the light switch before pressing the button to turn off the lights. There’s still a decent amount of light from the window in the door, but it’s darker. Connor puts down his bag and joins Evan on the floor. Evan looks up at him.

“Take a nap,” Connor suggests.

Evan blinks at him.

Connor sighs. “Scoot over.”

Evan moves so he’s as close to the piano as he can get. Connor squeezes into the space between Evan and the wall. There’s way more space in these practice rooms than it seems, the pianos make them look small.

Connor pulls on the sleeve of Evan’s sweatshirt. “Just lean on me. More comfortable than the wall, probably, though I’m basically all bone.”

“Y-you sure?”

Connor rolls his eyes because it feels right. “I wouldn’t be offering if I wasn’t. Close your eyes, Ev.”

“Okay,” Evan whispers. He rests his head on Connor’s shoulder. “Wake me up if your arm falls asleep.”

“Sure,” Connor lies.

A few minutes later, Evan’s breathing starts to even out. When Connor is sure that he’s asleep, he carefully pulls his phone out of his pocket.

From: C To: Z      waiting in practice room c      evans napping so dont come in just knock or some shit

Once he’s sent the texts, he puts his phone down and turns his attention back to Evan. Connor turns his head to look down at Evan, and when his nose brushes Evan’s hair, his heart goes into double time.

Fuck.

—«·»—

Connor thinks he’s drifted off when Zoe finally knocks on the door. He inhales sharply and sits up straighter, eyes wide. He leans forward to see Zoe standing in front of the door with her guitar on her back and her saxophone in hand.

He leans back and sighs. Okay.

Connor shakes Evan’s shoulder. “Ev, Ev wake up. Zoe’s done.”

Evan groans and blinks blearily. “Huh?”

Connor’s breath catches in his throat. He finds himself lost in Evan’s sleepy eyes for a moment too long and hopes Evan’s still too asleep to notice. “Zoe,” he says. “We can go home now.”

“Oh.” Evan pulls himself to his feet using the piano. About halfway up, he grabs Connor’s arm and pulls Connor up as well.

They grab their bags and open the door.

“Sleep well?” Zoe asks with a smirk.

Connor flips her off behind Evan.

Evan shrugs. “I-it was the floor.”

Connor takes Zoe’s saxophone from her. “Let’s go. I have an essay to write.”

Zoe blinks. “You do?”

“Unfortunately,” he grumbles.

The parking lot is blissfully empty when they step outside. The air is bitter and cold, and Connor wishes that it would just snow more than half an inch so the burning cold is worth it. He grabs Evan’s arm when Evan slips on ice and Zoe makes an offhanded comment about driving and black ice.

“You know?” she says to Evan.

Evan blinks. “N-no, I don’t— I don’t drive?”

Zoe frowns. “Do you take the bus?”

Evan turns pink, and Connor wonders if he’s redder because of the cold or not. “Yeah, it’s…yeah.”

Zoe looks to Connor.

“What?” Connor asks.

“What time does the bus pick you up?” Zoe asks.

“Uh…” Evan slows his walk. “I— around like…6:35?”

Zoe purses her lips. “Okay. Monday? We can swing by and pick you up.” She twirls her car keys around her finger. “Unless you hate my music choices as much as Connor does.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Evan says quickly.

“Too late,” Zoe sing songs. She unlocks the car and pops the trunk open. She puts her guitar in and then takes her saxophone from Connor. “We’d be happy to, right Connor?”

“Duh,” Connor says. “The bus is bullshit.”

“Good for the environment,” Evan says. “P-public transport!”

“We’re already using this car.” Zoe slams the trunk shut. “So it doesn’t actually matter. No additional cars on the road, just one less Evan the a bus.”

“Uh…”

“Sleep on it.” She rubs her arms. “Let’s go before I freeze.” She glances to Connor as she moves to the driver’s side. “How are you alive?”

Connor shrugs and pulls open the car door. He slides into the backseat next to Evan. “Can’t feel cold if you’re dead inside.”

Zoe twists around in her seat to glare at him before shutting the door. She turns on the car, blasts the heat even though it’s just air at the moment, and plugs her phone in. “Today we’re listening to Billy Joel,” she announces. “Get over it Connor.”

Connor just leans his forehead against the cold window as Uptown Girl plays from the speakers.

Zoe asks for directions a few times, but for the most part, they drive in silence aside from the Billy Joel in the slowly warming car.

Connor sits up when they arrive at Evan’s. “I’ll text you,” he says.

Evan gives him a smile. “Y-yeah. Thanks for the ride.”

“I’ll see you Monday at 6:40!” Zoe calls out before he shuts the door. She turns to look at Connor. “You moving up?”

“I guess.” Connor unbuckles and climbs over the center consul to get into the passenger seat. He buckles back in and Zoe backs out of the driveway.

“So…” she says slowly. “You and Evan.”

“What about us?” Connor asks flatly.

Zoe glances to him. “Anything…up?”

“Do you want me to say it?”

“No, but I can’t stop you from doing shit.”

“The sky.”

Zoe rolls her eyes. “Great, now that that’s out of the way—”

“Nothing,” Connor interrupts. “Can’t two people be friends?”

“Well, yeah, obviously.” Zoe taps on the steering wheel. “You just seem like more than that.”

Connor scoffs. More like barely that. “We aren’t.”

“Do you want to be?”

Connor stares at the road. “The light is green.”

Connor spends most of his Saturday writing his paper. Because Alana had written all over his outline and now he feels obligated to make something half decent out of the genius she turned his bullshit into. Also, she shared her essay with him on google docs the night before for him to edit — he does not know why the fuck she did that and hates the fact that school emails are standardized so she didn’t even have to ask for his email — and offered to edit his in return. He’s not going to give up that opportunity. He’s doing fine in english but another solid essay grade can get his parents to calm down for at least a day.

He texts Evan and draws when he’s not writing. The other weekend, Cynthia dragged him off to the store with her, so he threw a cheap set of kids’ watercolors in the cart. And a box of Capri sun. He sits on his floor and drinks a Capri sun while he waits for a painting to dry. Evan is making lunch right now, so it’ll be a few minutes before he responds. Evan doesn’t usually text Connor while he’s making food, apparently the risk of fire is higher than normal, and that’s not just Evan’s anxiety talking.

Evan had texted him the night before thanking him for the ride home. Connor had replied ‘what are friends for’ and then threw his phone across the room so he didn’t have to read Evan’s response. It didn’t end up mattering, because Evan’s next text wasn’t sent until this morning, and it was a frantic apology because he fell asleep before responding.

Connor just said it was fine and changed the subject as fast as he could.

Connor sighs and gets to his feet. As he waits for the painting to dry, he’s really fucking impatient, he takes pictures of some of his least shitty doodles from class and posts them on a randomass tumblr he made after Evan suggested posting his art online. Mostly Connor did it out of curiosity, he didn’t really use the site otherwise, just posts drawings and then vanishes for a few days, but it’s also good because it means he has somewhere where all his art was stored digitally. He might’ve accidentally spilt a mug of coffee all over a notebook the other day. And he distinctly remembers setting a few sketchbooks on fire back in middle school.

From: Ev To: Connor      Back ! ANd I didnt evne burn anything

Connor smiles to himself and leans against his bed.

From: Connor To: Ev      congrats you now have the cooking skills of a 12 year old

From: Ev To: Connor      :((

Connor hesitates before typing out his next message. He really shouldn’t ask — it’s a fucking terrible idea on so many levels — but it’s been slowly eating away at him. Which doesn’t make sense. But whatever.

From: Connor To: Ev      doesnt matter though i mean youre having dinner tonight wth jared right??

He puts his phone on his desk and goes back to painting and tries not to think about it for a few minutes. It’s not fair of him to get jealous. Because Jared is trying to get better. He’s still a dick but there’s an attempt there.

Connor hasn’t changed anything.

He sits on the floor and works on the painting. Now that he has slightly less shitty watercolors, they’re still pretty garbage but they aren’t old and mostly gone, he uses way too much purple again.

Whatever.

He doesn’t check his phone again until he has to wait for more paint to dry. He’s tempted to grab a sketchbook and keep ignoring it, but that’s not fair to Evan.

From: Ev To: Connor      Oh  y eah      We used to ha ve dinner a lot togethe r when ew wer elittle      All oru moms were friends      Kinda weird that were doing it again but… NIce?? Hopefull y ?      My mom s ocming which is nice      She hasnt been home ofr a few nights so yeah

Connor takes a slow breath before replying.

From: Connor To: Ev      thats pretty cool      i hope its fun and the food doesnt suck

Evan replies almost immediately, even though Connor took almost twenty minutes to respond.

From: Ev To: Connor      Thnk you!!!      Jareds moms are really good cook sso itll be good I think      I hope dinner goes ok for you tonight !! Good luck :)

Connor stares at the smiley face and falls on his bed with a groan.

—«·»—

“You’ve been spending a lot of time with Evan lately,” Larry says, pushing quino around his plate.

Connor resists the urge to roll his eyes. They never really talked about that. Sometimes, when Zoe goes over a friend’s house or has a friend over, Connor will give Larry a very pointed look and Larry will find something on his phone fascinating. An amazing double standard.

And, like? Of course he spends time with Evan. They’re best friends— pretending to be best friends. Connor doesn’t know how to get that through Larry’s thick skull.

Evan is Connor’s best friend.

“Well yeah,” Connor says, stabbing a piece of kale with his fork. “He’s my boyfriend.”

Wait, shit— 

Zoe chokes on her drink.

“What?!” Larry practically shouts, silverware hitting the table.

Connor opens his mouth to explain that technically, no, they aren’t boyfriends, though they are friends who are boys, even if sometimes Evan looks at him and makes Connor feel like he’s turning to putty. But they aren’t actually—

He glances to his mom with wide eyes. “Mom? Are you okay?”

Cynthia smiles, eyes watering. “I’m just so happy for you, sweetie!”

Connor slowly looks around the table. His mother crying tears of joy, his father staring at him in shock, his sister trying to bite back a smile.

Connor needs to talk to Evan immediately.

They’re fucked.

—«·»—

Connor grabs Zoe’s before she can disappear into her bedroom. She stiffens and he pulls his hand away. “Sorry.”

“You’re fine.” She crosses her arms. “I thought you told me nothing was going on between you and Evan.” She raises her eyebrows.

Connor grimaces. “I— don’t tell Evan.”

Zoe tilts her head. “Don’t tell Evan…you’re dating?”

Fuck. “No, no, fuck.” Connor frantically searches his mind. “I, uh, we weren’t going to…tell people? Yet? And I…fucked that up. So don’t— don’t mention it to him until like he says something or whatever, okay?”

Zoe mimes zipping her lips. “Secret’s safe with me. But also, I fucking knew it.”

Connor forces a laugh and runs his hand through his hair. “Yeah. You did.”

Zoe goes back into her room and Connor grabs his phone and goes down to the basement. He wonders if he can get his door back for Hanukkah, but for now, this is the only private place he’s got. He would lock himself in the bathroom, but that’s still way too close to the rest of his family members for comfort.

He flicks on the light as he heads down the stairs and grabs a blanket off the back of one of the chairs. The basement is about half finished and has been since Connor was in middle school. One of those projects that Larry never got around to finishing. Now they mostly use it for storage and hanging out when it gets too hot in the summer and even central air isn’t working well enough. Him and Zoe used to camp out for weeks in the basement on air mattresses and stay up way past their bedtimes giggling.

Now it’s December. He hasn’t been down here since he punched the far wall when everyone else was asleep. Him and Zoe haven’t spent time together in here in years. They haven’t done much together in years.

Connor wraps himself in a blanket and sits down in one of the old oversized chairs. They’re only down here because the went out of style and were deemed unworthy for the living room.

He unlocks his phone, scrolls through his contacts, and presses call. Then he listens to the phone ring and hopes that they’re done with dinner at the Kleinmans’ while he waits for the call to be answered.

“Hello?”

Connor grits his teeth. “Hi. I…might need help.”

“Is it about Evan?”

Connor frowns. “Why do you assume it’s about Evan?” It is but—

Jared laughs. “Dude, we aren’t friends. The only reason you talk to me is because of Evan. What’s up?”

Connor blinks. He’s just gotten so used to having Jared constantly around that it’s like they’re basically friends. But not. Because Connor doesn’t have any real friends.  

“I,” Connor clears his throat, “my family now thinks Evan and I are dating.”

There’s a long pause. Connor waits for Jared to start cackling, but Jared just whispers, “Holy shit.”

“Say whatever shit you want to now,” Connor mutters. “Get it out.”

“Holy shit,” Jared repeats. Connor rolls his eyes. “Murphy, what the fuck.”

“Yeah, I know, I fucked up.”

“What are you going to do?” Jared sounds almost amazed.

Connor frowns at the phone. This is not how he thought this conversation would go. “Pay Evan two hundred dollars? I know you meant that as a joke but—”

“Fucking shit, my dude. What the hell!”

Connor drags his hand through his hair. “Kleinman, my mom started crying when I said Evan was my boyfriend, okay? I can’t— fuck. I don’t know.”

Jared whistles.

Connor picks at his nailpolish. “Would Evan…go along with it? Do you think?”  

“I think that’s a question for Evan.”

“I’m asking you.”

Jared snorts. “Okay, fine. I think he’ll go along with it.” It almost feels like Jared is going to say something more, but he doesn’t. “You got two hundred bucks lying around?”

“No,” Connor admits. He has an idea. It’s a terrible idea that could backfire, but it’s an idea.

“So…how are you going to get it?” Jared gasps. “Oh shit! Are we going to rob a bank?”

Connor frowns. “No? Why is that the first thing you came up with? Why would you rob a bank for two hundred dollars? Wouldn’t fucking…normal robbery be easier?”

“Fuck off. Are we doing that?”

“No.”

“Well we both know you’re not getting a job—”

“Fuck you.”

“—and that would probably take too long. Are we going to sell weed?”

“What? No,” Connor says. “Also how long did you restrain yourself before asking that?”

“Too long for that boring answer and reaction,” Jared admits. “Give me something to work with, stoner kid. We could just steal it. I know you said no, but—”

“Jared what the fuck,” Connor interrupts.

“Dude, you aren’t offering any ideas here, I’m just trying to help out.”

Connor rubs the bridge of his nose. “Fucking— do you know how PayPal works?”

“Yeah sure,” Jared says. “Super easy, why?”

Connor sighs. “Would you be willing to help me set one up?”

“Ten bucks.”

“Fine.”

“Yeah sure, you wanted some help on calc anyway. Do you have info on your bank account, by the way?”

“I…can find it,” Connor says slowly. “Does tomorrow work? My house?”

“Yeah sure, my man. Shoot me an address and a time. I expect snacks.”

 Jared shows up on the doorstep ten minutes earlier than Connor expected with his backpack slung over one shoulder and a Starbucks drink in his left hand. “Sup.”

Connor rolls his eyes. “You’re early.”

“Fashionably.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“Whatever.”  

Zoe leans out of the dining room. “Who’s here?”

Connor steps aside to let Jared in. Jared waves at Zoe.

Zoe squints. “What are you doing here?”

“So nice to see you again too, Smaller Murphy,” Jared says. He kicks his shoes off and puts them next to Zoe’s converse.

“Calc,” Connor says. “I’m…not doing great.”

“But you aren’t failing yet,” Jared says. “So we’re just going to keep you from not doing that. What are you learning again?”

Connor shrugs. “Something implicit. I’ll show you the homework.”

Jared nods. “Chill, chill.”

“Aren’t you friends with Alana?” Zoe asks.

“I…guess?” Connor frowns. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“She’s the valedictorian, isn’t she? Why didn’t you ask her for help?”

“Uh…” Connor looks to Jared.

Jared takes a sip of his drink. “I’m genuinely offended, by the way. I’m no Alana Beck but I am passing AP Calc BC, which is more than you can say for seventy percent of our class. Don’t take it.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” Zoe assures him. “Just didn’t tutoring was your…thing.”

“Alana tutors,” Jared says.

“I know, that’s my point.”

“Ha ha very funny. She tutors a lot of people so it makes sense that I take someone off her workload.” Jared points to Connor. “As her friend, Connor understands.”

“Right.” Connor nods. “That.”

Zoe rolls her eyes. “I wasn’t judging you or anything I was just wondering. Have fun. Don’t set the house on fire, I’m going over Pippa’s to work on our history project, and Mom and Dad are out shopping or something.”

“I’ll keep Jared away from anything breakable,” Connor promises.

“I remind you I’m doing you a favor,” Jared says.

“You’re making me pay you.”

“Shit you’re right.”

—«·»—

“This is easy shit,” Jared says, looking up from Connor’s textbooks. “Really easy.”

Connor flips him off.

“I’ll explain it!” Jared promises. “This makes my job easier, probably. So back to real reason I’m here—”

“You are here to help me with math.” Connor reaches for his laptop. “I’m going to open commissions.”

Jared stares at him with a blank expression.

“Commissions,” Connor repeats slowly.

Jared blinks. “Since when do you draw?”

“Do you actually know anything about me?” Connor asks.

Jared looks away. “Valid. How can I help?”

“Mostly just need help with PayPal. And maybe wording the post? I don’t know shit about talking to people.” Connor opens his laptop and logs in. He closes a few tabs and opens up tumblr. He hesitates and then opens his blog. “Here.”

“Your theme is awful,” Jared says flatly.

“Did I ask you?”

“Didn’t have to.” Jared clicks a few times. “Dude, if you want to be selling your art, you need a theme that isn’t painful to look at.” Connor opens his mouth to protest, but Jared holds up a hand. “I’m doing you a favor here. Give me like ten minutes. I will change your world.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

Jared pushes away in the desk chair. “Too late, I’m not helping if we don’t change this ugly ass theme. Doodle or something while I do this. Make a commissions banner, I don’t fucking know.” Jared hunches over the laptop and starts typing.

Connor stares at him. Hopefully Jared isn’t going to charge him for this too.

Forty minutes later, Connor is putting aside a random drawing and Jared is looking up from the laptop.

“Bam, motherfucker,” Jared announces spinning the laptop around. “A picture heavy theme with easy navigation, readable text, and colors that don’t make me want to stab my eyes out.” Connor leans forward to see it. It actually looks pretty decent. And pretty professional. Jared has also added a few links, including one to Connor’s still nonexistent PayPal and a commissions page. “By the way, your art is pretty rad.”

Connor blinks. “Thanks. Did you want that bank account information?”

“Yeah sure.”

Connor gets up from the floor. “Let’s break into my dad’s office.”

Jared sets aside the laptop. “Sweet.”

—«·»—

Connor sits down in the chair in Larry’s office. He pulls open one of the lower drawers in the desk and flips through the the hanging folders until he finds one with his name.

“Don’t steal my identity or anything,” he says to Jared as he hands him one of the folders. “But see if anything in there is what you need.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Jared starts flipping through the papers. “Your identity is too lame to steal.”

“Thanks.”

Connor skims over various forms and papers with his name all over them. So weird that he’s attached to all of these things but doesn’t understand any of them. That might be concerning. Is he supposed to know what these mean? He squints at something that looks like it has something to do with money.

“I can’t believe you’re going through with this,” Jared mutters.

Connor looks up. “With?”

“This fake dating shit.” Jared puts a stack of papers down on the desk. “I thought this was convoluted before.”

“You helped.”

“So you two keep reminding me.” Jared flips a piece of paper over. “I think this is it.”

“Cool.” Connor puts his folder away and Jared puts Connor’s laptop on the desk. Connor fills out what he can and Jared helps with the rest.

“And you have a PayPal,” Jared announces, finishing the form. “If you click this you can transfer money to your bank account, which is how you’ll get the money off the internet and into Evan’s hands.”

Connor nods. “Makes sense.” He grabs the papers and puts them back into the folder. He puts it back in the bottom drawer and makes sure everything is just how Larry left it before he gets up from the chair.

“I genuinely didn’t think either of you would get invested in this shit,” Jared says as they stop in the kitchen to grab a bag of chips.

Connor shrugged. “I fucked up, that doesn’t mean anything.”

Jared gives him a flat look before biting into a chip. “Let’s just finish this shit so I can teach you how implicit differentiation works.”

Connor wrinkles his nose. “Fine.”

They bring the bag of chips up to Connor’s bedroom and sit on the floor with Connor’s laptop in front of them. Between handfuls of chips, Jared sentences to the post.

“We can’t call it ‘I’m Gay Give Me Money’,” Connor protests.

“Why not?” Jared asks. “It’s tumblr.”

“What’s your point?”

Jared pulls the laptop closer and starts typing. “We just say like… ‘I’m trying to meet my boyfriend’, we stay vague on the details no one wants to know the complexity of this shit and also it’s weird as fuck, ‘so I’m opening commissions’. Blah blah blah here are details…” Jared looks up at Connor. “Any suggestions for prices?”

Connor shrugs.

“You are the least helpful person,” Jared mutters. “Okay…going on what I saw on your blog…” He types rapidly for a few minutes. “And posted.”

“What?!” Connor grabs the laptop from Jared. “Why did you do that?!”

“You weren’t going to have anything to say so fuck it, it’s posted.” Jared pops another chip in his mouth. “Chill the fuck out.”

Connor reloads the page to check the post. He doesn’t have any idea if the prices are reasonable, but Jared put up Connor’s email and a link to his PayPal and tagged the post with a few tags that make sense and a few that don’t.

Connor groans. “If you fucked this up for me—”

“I didn’t,” Jared says. “I am doing you so many solids right now. And now I’m about to try to teach you calculus. I am literally a god.”  

Connor resists the urge to slam his head against the keyboard.  

[olusegundare]

Changed Tune

TOPIC: CHANGED TUNE

INTRODUCTION

The book we shall be examining for this topic is the book of Zechariah 4:10 which says,

"Does anyone dare despise this day of small beginnings? They 'll change their tune when they see Zerubbabel setting the last stone in place! Going back to the vision, the messenger-Angel said, "The seven lamps are the eyes of God probing the dark corners of the world like searchlights""-The Message Bible (Zechariah 4:10)

"For who hath despised the day of small things? For they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro through the whole earth"- KJV (Zechariah 4:10)

This is one of the common bible verses in the bible, and we do often hear the preachers speaking to us on the need for us not to despise the days of the small beginnings (or startings).

I have however given my message a different topic, which I called "changed tune".

When musicians are playing, they may either signal to those handling the instruments that they intend to change the tune of the song they are singing, the change of tune may now be to a fast one or a slow one, or in a case where they cannot send signals to their instrumentalists, they will say it out that people will hear. I hope you grasp this? This is just to introduce you to what the prophet is saying here about changed tune, that the people who have been saying something about the on-going project before would say another thing. Interestingly what the people were initially saying were deregatory, what they were saying could not be written home about. Now if these kind of people will change their tune, they will say what could be written home about as per the on-going work of the temple.

Shall we for the sake of clarity bent over backwards on this verse, briefly talking about what led the people to this stage.

Bible students know that before the countries of Israel and Judah were plundered and destroyed by the enemies, they have gone into ostentatious sins, the chief of which was idolatry. The Lord had been repeatedly warning them to desist from such act but they have refused, according to prophet Jeremy, the Lord was rising up early to talk to them through his messengers, the prophets, but they have refused to listen, even at night the Lord would send his messengers to them, but yet they rejected God's messages and continued in their sinful state and status un-abated. (Jer. 7:13, 25; 11:7; 12:7)

Jer 7:13  “And now, because ye have done all these works, saith the LORD, and I spake unto you, rising up early and speaking, but ye heard not; and I called you, but ye answered not”

Jer 7:25  “Since the day that your fathers came forth out of the land of Egypt unto this day I have even sent unto you all my servants the prophets, daily rising up early and sending them”

Jer 11:7  “For I earnestly protested unto your fathers in the day that I brought them up out of the land of Egypt, even unto this day, rising early and protesting, saying, Obey my voice.”

Jer 12:7  “I have forsaken mine house, I have left mine heritage; I have given the dearly beloved of my soul into the hand of her enemies”

Our parents know the importance of early morning talk or discussion and late at night discussion, and this is what God was emphasizing to the people through the prophets, that despite the fact that they knew the import of early morning and late at night discussions, just as he did, yet they did not change.

Their recalcitrant position grieved the Lord, moved him to anger and he removed his banner of love and protection over them, allowing the enemies to come into the land. The enemies entered in full force, destroyed their cities and they did not spare the temple from being destroyed.

When these countries were overtaken by the enemies they were led to the slavery lands.

Kind Nebuchadnezzer who was the king of Babylon and the most powerful person on their then world led them away, and there they were as slaves. After Nebuchadnezzar died, his heir assumed the throne, after his heir was his grand son and on and on like that until Darius became the king, the most powerful person in the land.

When Darius became the king he did not destroy the structure put in place by his fore parents which was having governors to rule (oversee) certain countries subject unto the Babylonian kingdom. One of the countries under the leadership of King Darius was Israel and Darius the king appointed Sheshbazzar (Zerubbabel) to govern the land of Israel.

The bible dictionary says Zerubbabel is a Babylonian name called Zerubabili which means the seed of Babylon. Sheshbazzar who alongside others had been slaves in the Babylonian seat of power was given a name in line with religion of the land, just as we shall all remember that the same happened to Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. These people were given other names in tandem with the culture, custom and religion of the land (Daniel 1:6-7). The same thing also happened to Esther (Esther 2:7).

Dan 1:6  “Now among these were of the children of Judah, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah:”

Dan 1:7  “Unto whom the prince of the eunuchs gave names: for he gave unto Daniel the name of Belteshazzar; and to Hananiah, of Shadrach; and to Mishael, of Meshach; and to Azariah, of Abednego”

Est 2:7  “And he brought up Hadassah, that is, Esther, his uncle's daughter: for she had neither father nor mother, and the maid was fair and beautiful; whom Mordecai, when her father and mother were dead, took for his own daughter.”

I thence presume after Zerubbabel had undergone the studies of the land of Babylon and had been found worthy in character and studies, the King, Darius, made him ruler (governor) who shall be overseeing the affairs of the people who had been left behind in the land of Israel and will be reporting back to him.

After being crowned governor, he was sent to the land by the king alongside other released captives into his custody. As this happened, off they left for the land of Israel.

I shall be explaining this topic under these headings:

I. Why despise?

II. Why did he start?

III. How could he complete the work?

IV. Applications

I. WHY DESPISE? Zerubbabel after he got to the land of Israel saw the position of the country and above all the deplorable state of the temple and he was moved to tears by what he saw and purpoted in his heart to do something on what he has seen. History had it that as fate would have it, King Darius at this time was battling with some enemies which prevented him from focusing on the land of Israel, vizaviz, supervising the work which he had commanded Zerubbabel to be doing then. As a governor, an officer, who is in direct contact with the king, Darius, he made use of the presenting opportunity, that is the shift in focus, shift of attention, of the king from him to start the work of rebuilding the temple.

After laying the foundation of the temple, the people who had knew that he had deviated started to despise him that he was wasting his time, he was doing what the king had neither commanded him to do nor commissioned him to do. Zerubbabel was despised by these people because according to them he was doing what was not in the constitution, what was not in the budget, what has not been approved. I hope we get it to this point?

II. WHY DID HE START THE WORK? As i have above explained that when this governor, Zerubbabel and others returned to the land of Israel, the state of the country and most importantly that of the temple had broken down, the governor and he decided to do something on what he has seen.

(a) ZEAL: The zeal to re-construct the house of God consumed him when he returned to the country. He knew that the country was a vast place and couldn’t be rebuilt within frame of months unlike the temple, he thus concentrated on the reconstruction of the temple, to get a place for God where his people would go to to commune with Yahweh their God and his God who had brought him back to the land safe and in good health. (Psalms 69:9; 119:139)

Psa 69:9  “For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up; and the reproaches of them that reproached thee are fallen upon me”.

Psa 119:139  “My zeal hath consumed me, because mine enemies have forgotten thy words.”

(b) GRASPING THE OPPORTUNITY: The zeal to reconstruct the temple that had consumed him made him grasp the opportunity when it presented itself. And what was the opportunity? The opportunity was that the king was battling with some enemies then which took all his time, energy, intelligence, workforce, military etc.

When Zerubbabel saw this he quickly and promptly grasped it, using it to build the temple. May we not miss the presenting opportunity to make it in life in Jesus name. Amen.

Some of us are as we are at the moment because our fathers or parents failed to make use of the presenting opportunity that appeared to them years, decades back. I am not talking about illegal opportunities. I am talking about genuine and legal opportunities. When those rare opportunities appear then, they do not want to try, they prefer their low estate and thence the opportunity slipped off.

(c) SUPPORT FROM PEOPLE (OR UNITY): There is nothing anyone could achieve in life if the person does not have the backing, support of the people. Zerubbabel knew that the work cannot be done alone despite being the governor thus he confided in some people and carried them along. Interestingly those he confided in share his dream with him and they wholly supported the move. This support really helped him in carrying out the work and in succeeding in the work despite the few ones who were despising him for taking that giant stride.

For a family to breakthrough, all members of the family must support the leadership of the family. For a husband to make it, he will enjoy the support of his wife so also is the wife, for her to make it, her hubby must support him, anything short of this would result in set backs.

A student who shall make it will be supported by his/her teachers, an institution that shall make it will receive support from all stakeholders of the institution.

The disciples were able to make it because of the unity amongst them. Jesus Christ could come to world because of the support he received from God and the heavenly beings.

What is it that you and I have been doing but we have not been making it? We may need to check this area, what is the level of support we are receiving from our spouses? What is the level of support we are receiving from our business partners, from our friends, from our fiance or fianceé, from our siblings, from our colleagues etc? If the level of support is nothing to write home about, that may be the source of the set back and if not addressed, we may be at that position for a long while to come.

Support or unity is very, very important in all our undertakings in the world. The God who created the heavens and the earth when he wanted to form man, knew the important of support and he thus briefed others of what he wanted to do, he could have gone ahead with our creation without telling them, but yet he told them because he wanted us to know and learn the importance of support or unity (Genesis 1:26).

Gen 1:26  “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

King Solomon, whom majority of the Theologians believed to have authored the book of Ecclesiastes was talking about the importance of unity in chapter 4 and verse 12 of the book when he said, "and if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a THREEFOLD CORD is not quickly broken". This is where unity subsists. lf a boyfriend and his girlfriend or fiance and his fianceé are in unity, you will see that even if they are not immediately succeeding, the support one receives from the second would be the fire, the enigma that would keep the other person on and on, and inevitably both of them. Now when they are in unity, they will keep their secret verily secret such that no one would know what's happening amongst them. That is the power there!

Now, looking at the word I emphasised in the book of Ecclesiastes 4:12 above, we shall see that when a family or spouses or dating partners are in unity, one will find it hard to break them because they are now like the three standed cords. A twined cord cannot be easily broken or cut as one will cut a twine that is single stranded. Is there unity in our relationship? Is there unity between you and your spouse?

In the bible’s documentation of the birth of Jesus Christ we all know that Joseph did not sell out his spouse, Mary, against all odds, against myriads of querying that may likely be coming to him then, that is unity. And I think unity also comes from understanding of one another. Which Joseph and Mary possessed while they were in courtship. Do you understand the partner you are dating?

The people gave Zerubbabel support as such he could continue the work.

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III. WHY HE COULD COMPLETE THE WORK: (a) Zerubbabel and his team were able to complete the work of rebuilding the temple because after the revolt that rose against the king was doused and the king became fully aware of what governor Zerubbabel was doing, the king supported him and infact sent a message to the effect requiring everyone to join hands with him in seeing that the work was done and done to perfection. (Zech. 4:7)

Zec 4:7  “Who art thou, O great mountain? before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain: and he shall bring forth the headstone thereof with shoutings, crying, Grace, grace unto it.”

All those who had initially been despising Zerubbabel based on the fact that he had gone out of his boundaries, based on the fact that he was executing projects which the king did not tell him to execute were put to shame when they heard that the king had supported the dream of his governor.

I perceive that some of them would not believe when they hear that the king had approved the work, they will be saying it couldnt be, they will be saying they were saying that to make the people happy, they would be saying those people were telling Top of Form

the populace what they wanted to hear just like our politicians today do tell the populace what they wanted to hear and they would not tell them the truth.

In this position and disposition were some of those people who were despising Zerubbabel were until they received an authenticated message from Babylonian seat of power, where the king resides. The king officially wrote them so that it would be clear to the doubting minds that he has indeed approved the work and not only approving, that he will equally support the work financially and in other ways to see that the work is not delayed and it is completed to time (Ezra 1:1)

Ezr 1:1  “Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying,”

The mountain of doubt was removed and there was no iota of doubt again as per whether the king would grant the continuation of the work or nay.

(b) The Spirit of God as said by the prophet Zechariah in verse 6 started to work and it was by this Spirit that the work could be continued as well as being perfected.

"Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, this is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel, saying, not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts" (Zech. 4:6)

When governor Zerubbabel started the work of the temple, the prophet had approached him by the word of the Lord that the Yahweh Lord has seen his zeal to rebuild the temple and that he should continue with the work. The work was at first approved by Yahweh God because the work was in tandem with the will of God. When our works are in consonance with the will of God, nothing could stand in its way of execution.

After the prophet had uttered this, the prophet now told the governor that he needs to caution, what should he be cautious of? He should be cautious of self, he should not rely on himself, he should not rely on the arms of flesh because the arms of flesh will fail him. This was what the prophet said by the word of God. We all know that when one wants to start something like that there is every tedency that one will say that even if it means i be desposed for starting this, I dont mind, one may say even if I lose my life for embarking on this project, I dont mind. And anyone who is nurturing such notion or thought would definitely want to prepare for war, would want to combat those who may want to come and stop him from doing that work. This God had seen, and the need for him to send his servant the prophet to the governor that he should not be afraid, that the work would be perfectly done. Albeit, in doing (executing) the work, he must not rely on his might nor the might of anyone at that, he must not rely on his human power, because by doing this the work would not be done. What would however make the work to be perfectly done is the Spirit of the Lord God Almighty, the prophet stated. May I also add that does the prophet or God by this word then means that Zerubbabel and others should go to bed and not employ their human might and power into the on going construction work? The answer to this is No, God does not mean that. What he meant was that they should not rely on human strength, wisdom and power to overcome the enemies but they should put their trust in God to see them through what they have started. When Governor Zerubbabel heard this he allowed the Spirit of God to take control although the physical preparations and arrangements were not stopped because they were by faith counting on God to crown those preparations. When God discovered the disposition of his servant, governor Zerubbabel towards this, he stirred up the spirit of the king to support the work after the king had been relieved from the troubles, enemies confronting him. (Ezra 1:1)

Ezr 1:1  “Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying,”

(c) Divine Supplies: King Darius issued out command that the work should not be stopped but that all hands should be on deck to see to the completion of the started work. When an executive order had been issued, others had no option other than supporting the project by bringing (supplying) to them all they needed for the work.

IV. APPLICATION (a) Marital: You may have been despised by family members and friends on whom you want to marry..., or may be you have even married the person people despised you on..., this is the word for you today that all who have despised you would say another thing about you and that marriage when they see what God is doing in your family.

(b) Academics: You may have been despised on the kind of course you are doing in the college of Education, Polytechnic, University, saying such course(s) is not lucrative in our land, and you have been counselled to change the course, but you yet insisted in continuing with the course, and now, they are watching to see what will happen to you after you have finished the course. Do not be afraid, trust in the Lord as did Zerubbabel and those people will start saying another thing about you in a short while.

(c) Fellowship: this Youth Fellowship may have been despised by some people, they may have been saying the fellowship will die a natural death, I want us to have it in mind that as long as we continue to allow the Spirit of the Lord to lead us, that wishful thought of theirs would not see the light of the day because the fellowship would grow from might to might in Jesus name. Amen.

(d) Business: You may be new in the business you are doing and it seems as if all is not falling into place for you, and now the enemies have started to despise you saying, a business she or he knows little or nothing about she or he has entered into it, it is true at the moment, but always know that we do not bring anything into the world, and I know if you open your eyes very well, you will sure overcome the present presenting challenges and even overtake those whom you have met in the trade. All you need is openness to learn, openness to the Spirit of God, and things will change. Do you know that we cannot learn everything about a trade from a master or tutor during training, when we get into the field we would meet different things and then our intelligence would be swung into action.

May I stop here? People will change their tune on what we are doing when we allow the Spirit of God to take control, in allowing Spirit to take control we are not saying we will stand idle, no, but we are saying the Spirit of the Lord will remove all obstacles, all barriers that may want to debar us from advancing in life....

[albinohare]

Donald Crowhurst: The fake round-the-world sailing story behind The Mercy

The mysterious and tragic disappearance of the single-handed sailor Donald Crowhurst more than 50 years ago continues to fascinate. Nic Compton explains why…

Hailed as a round the world single-handed hero, Donald Crowhurst in fact never left the Atlantic during his 243 days at sea. Photo: Alamy

It was while I was researching my book about madness at sea in 2015 that I first heard a movie about Donald Crowhurst was in the works. Several websites published reports of a high-profile British feature starring Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz, and a few surreptitious photos of the cast filming off Teignmouth had been posted online. It seemed a lucky coincidence, given that my book would inevitably feature the Crowhurst story, but I assumed the movie would come out long before my book was ready.

Over the next couple of years, however, the release date for the film was repeatedly postponed – so much so that it became a running topic among Hollywood gossipmongers, who speculated that Crowhurst’s widow Clare had delayed progress, or that it was being held back to tie with the 50th anniversary of the events, or indeed that it might never be released in cinemas and go straight to DVD instead.

Meanwhile, I carried on writing my book, Off the Deep End, which was published in 2017, and the movie, The Mercy, was released in February 2018. There was never any doubt the tragic story of Donald Crowhurst would have to be included in any book about madness at sea.

Colin Firth stars as Donald Crowhurst in the 2018 film The Mercy. Photo: Studio Canal

Of all the stories I researched, it’s the one that has caught the public imagination most. Long before the latest Hollywood offering it inspired movies, books, plays, art installations, an epic poem and even an opera. Whereas many stories of adventures at sea seem to leave the general public cold, the Crowhurst tale continues to fascinate more than 50 years after Teignmouth’s most famous sailor vanished without trace. And yet, despite the thousands of words written about him, we really know very little more about him than we did 50 years ago.

It all started when Francis Chichester made his historic single-handed circumnavigation in 1966-67 – not the first to do so, by any means, but certainly the fastest up to that point, completing the loop in 226 days with just one stop, in Sydney, to repair his self-steering. Even before he’d docked at Plymouth there was a general realisation, which spread like osmosis throughout the sailing world, that the next step would be to sail around solo without stopping.

The challenge was turned into a contest by the Sunday Times which, in March 1968, announced two prizes: a Golden Globe trophy for the first person to sail round the world via the Three Capes single-handed and non-stop, and a £5,000 cash prize for the person to do it in the fastest time. The only stipulation was that competitors had to leave from a British port between 1 June and 31 October 1968, and had to return to the same place.

Article continues below…

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Nine skippers eventually signed up for the race: the famous transatlantic rowing duo Chay Blyth and John Ridgway, who had by then fallen out but were sailing near-identical 30ft glassfibre production boats; Bernard Moitessier, already something of a legend in France for breaking the long-distance sailing record on his steel ketch Joshua; Moitessier’s friend Loïc Fougeron; Robin Knox-Johnston, an unknown British merchant navy officer sailing a heavy wooden boat called Suhaili; two former British naval officers, Bill King and Nigel Tetley; the experienced Italian single-handed sailor Alex Carozzo; and Donald Crowhurst.

Out of the group, Crowhurst was by far the least experienced, the odd one out. Born in India in 1932, he went to Loughborough College after the war, until family nances and the death of his father forced him to cut his education short. He joined the RAF in 1948 but was chucked out after six years because of some high jinks with a vehicle; the same thing happened when he joined the army and he was forced to resign after he was caught trying to hotwire a car during a drunken escapade.

Persuasive character

Crowhurst with his wife Clare and their children Rachel, Simon, Roger and James, circa October 1968. Photo: Getty Images

Next he got as job as a travelling salesman for an electrics company, but was again dismissed after crashing the company car.

Ever-persuasive, he talked himself into a job as chief design engineer for an electronics company in Somerset, and in 1962 set up his own company, Electron Utilisation, to manufacture electronic devices for yachts.

The company got off to a good start, selling a simple but well-designed radio direction finder which Crowhurst dubbed the Navicator. Pye Radio invested £8,500 in the project, before getting cold feet and pulling out.

It quickly became clear that while Crowhurst was a charismatic personality and brilliant innovator he didn’t have the business acumen to run a successful company, and Electron Utilisation was soon in financial trouble.

Crowhurst managed to persuade local businessman Stanley Best to invest £1,000 to carry the company over what he assured him was a temporary lean period.

It must have been obvious to Crowhurst that he was heading for another failure. By now 35 years old, he could see the same pattern repeating itself, of high ambition thwarted by petty practicalities. Only, by now married to Clare with four children and living in a comfortable house outside Bridgwater in Somerset, the stakes were higher than ever.

His response to failure was to reinvent himself yet again. This time he would become a record-breaking sailor, a seafaring hero in the vein of Chichester: he would sail around the world single-handed – even though he had until then only dabbled in sailing, mainly on board a 20ft sloop called Pot of Gold. First, however, he needed a boat.

After failing to persuade the Cutty Sark Committee to lend him Gipsy Moth IV for the voyage, he decided a trimaran would be the ideal craft – despite having never sailed on one. To get the funding to build his dream boat he achieved perhaps the greatest coup of his life.

With Electron Utilisation going down the pan, his backer Stanley Best wanted his loan repaid, but Crowhurst managed to persuade him the best way to get his money back would be to fund the construction of the new boat.

A replica of the 41ft Teignmouth Electron used in the filming of The Mercy. Photo: WENN Ltd/Alamy

The crux of his argument was that he would use the trimaran as a test bed for his new inventions, and the publicity gained from entering the race would catapult the company to success. The sting in the tail was that the loan was guaranteed by Electron Utilisation, which meant that, if the venture failed, the company would go bankrupt.

To understand how he managed this turnaround you have to go back in time. Photos of Crowhurst make him look geekish and uncool to the modern eye. With his sticky-out ears, high forehead, curly hair, tie and V-neck jumper, he appears the epitome of the eccentric inventor.

But all the contemporary accounts describe him as a charismatic, vibrant personality, the sort of person who lights up a room when they walk in – as well as being extremely clever. In fact, his cleverness was his problem. He had the gift of the gab and, once persuaded of something, could talk anyone into believing him.

“This is important,” said his wife Clare. “Donald had this definite talent. He would say the most amazing things, but then no matter how crazy they seemed, he’d be clever and ingenious enough to make them come true. Always. This is a most important point about his character.”

Crowhurst’s widow, Clare, holds the last photograph taken of Donald with his family. Photo: Guy Newman / Alamy

Slow off the mark

So Crowhurst got the money for Teignmouth Electron, which was built by Cox Marine in Essex and fitted out by JL Eastwood in Norfolk. It’s a measure of how far behind he was that by the time the Cox yard started building the hulls towards the end of June, Ridgway, Blyth and Knox-Johnston had already set off on their round-the-world attempts. In the event, complications meant the launch date was delayed and even when Crowhurst finally set off on 31 October – just a few hours before the Sunday Times deadline expired – his boat was barely complete.

None of the clever inventions he had devised for the boat were connected, including the all-important buoyancy bag at the top of the mast, which was supposed to inflate if the trimaran capsized. His revolutionary ‘computer’, which was supposed to monitor the performance of the boat and set off various safety devices, was no more than a bunch of unconnected wires.

Worse still, he had had to borrow yet more money from Best to finish the boat, and had mortgaged his home to guarantee the loan. Crowhurst made a desultory figure scrambling about the deck of his trimaran as he set off on his great adventure – only to turn around within a few minutes to untangle his jib and staysail halyards, which were snagged at the top of the mast.

It was just the start of his troubles. After two days at sea, while still within sight of Cornwall, the screws started falling off his self-steering and, not having any spares on board, he had to cannibalise other parts of the machine to replace them.

A leaky boat

A few days later, halfway across the Bay of Biscay, he discovered the forward compartment of one of the hulls had filled up with water from a leaking hatch.

Soon, other compartments began to leak and, as he’d been unable to get the correct piping for the bilge pumps, his only option was to bail them out with a bucket. Then, two weeks after leaving Teignmouth, his generator broke down after being soaked with water from another leaking hatch.

“This bloody boat is just falling to pieces due to lack of attention to engineering detail!!!” he wrote in his log. A few days later he made a long list of jobs that needed doing and concluded his chances of survival if he carried on were at best 50/50. He began to think about abandoning the race.

But Crowhurst was in a triple bind. If he dropped out at this stage, not only would his reputation be destroyed but his business would go bankrupt and, perhaps worse of all, he and his family would lose their home. For all these reasons, giving up was not an option.

It soon became clear his estimates for the boat’s speed had been wildly optimistic: he had estimated an average of 220 miles per day, whereas the reality was about half that, on a good day. There was no way he was going to catch up with the other competitors or win either of the prizes, unless something extraordinary happened.

And so, just five weeks after setting off from Teignmouth, Crowhurst started one of the most audacious frauds in sailing history: he began falsifying his position. From 5 December, he created a fake log book, with accurately plotted sun sights, working back from imaginary positions.

To make it look convincing, he listened to forecasts for the relevant areas and wrote a fictional commentary as if he was experiencing those conditions. It was quite a feat of seamanship, and only someone of Crowhurst’s brilliance could have carried it off convincingly.

The great deception

After a few days’ practice he felt sufficiently confident to send his first ‘fake’ press release, claiming he’d sailed 243 miles in 24 hours, a new world record for a single-handed sailor. In fact, he’d actually sailed 160 miles, a personal best perhaps, but certainly no world record.

And so the great deception began. As Crowhurst slowly worked his way down the Atlantic, his imaginary avatar was already rounding the Cape of Good Hope and heading into the Indian Ocean. Gradually, partly through misunderstandings and partly due to the spin added by his agent back in the UK, Crowhurst’s positions became ever more exaggerated, until it looked like he might win the race after all.

Meanwhile, the real Crowhurst was pottering around the Atlantic – ‘hiding’ in exactly the same area he had, only a few weeks earlier, jokingly suggested a sailor might hide to falsify a round-the-world voyage. To make sure his radio signals weren’t picked up by the wrong land stations, he maintained radio silence for nearly three months, from the middle of January until the beginning of April, which he blamed on his generator breaking down again.

Teignmouth Electron was found drifting in mid-Atlantic, 700 miles west of the Azores, on 10 July 1969

Unbelievably, he even put ashore in a remote bay near Buenos Aires in Argentina to buy materials to repair one of the hulls, which had started to fall apart. Despite being greeted and logged by local officials, this rule-breaking stop remained undetected.

On 29 March he reached his most southerly point, hovering a few miles off the Falklands, 8,000 miles from home, before starting his ascent up the Atlantic.

Finally, on 9 April, he broke radio silence and exploded back into the race with a telegram containing the infamous line: “HEADING DIGGER RAMREZ” – suggesting he was approaching Diego Ramirez, a small island southwest of Cape Horn (in reality, he was just off Buenos Aires).

By this time Moitessier had had his ‘moment of madness’ and had dropped out of the race and was sailing to Tahiti ‘to save his soul’. The only other competitors left were Knox-Johnston, who was plodding slowly up the Atlantic and on track to be the first one home, and Tetley, racing in his wake to pick up the prize for the fastest voyage.

Rachel Weisz plays Clare Crowhurst in The Mercy

It seems likely that Crowhurst was planning to finish a close second to Tetley, which would save him from financial ruin without drawing too much attention to his fraudulent log books.

But his reappearance in the race had a dramatic effect on the course of events. Already nursing a broken boat up the homeward leg of the Atlantic, Tetley worried he might lose the speed record to the resurgent Crowhurst, and started pushing his trimaran faster towards the finish line. Some 1,100 miles from home, the inevitable happened: Tetley’s boat broke up and sank, and he had to be rescued by a passing ship.

Suddenly, the spotlight shifted to Crowhurst, the unlikely amateur who’d apparently come out of nowhere to beat the professionals. The BBC had a crew on standby to record his homecoming and hundreds of thousands of people were expected to throng the seafront at Teignmouth to welcome him home.

It was everything Crowhurst dreaded. As one of the winners, his books would come under much closer scrutiny – and indeed there were already some, including race chairman Francis Chichester, who suspected something wasn’t quite right.

In the middle of June, Crowhurst reached the Sargasso Sea and, as the tradewinds died and his boat slowed down, he descended into a mental quagmire of his own. It was as if all his previous failures had caught up with him in this one grand, final failure.

Teignmouth Electron on Cayman Brac in 1991. The wreck has deteriorated considerably since. Photo: Geophotos / Alamy

And this time there was no way out, no way of reinventing himself. Instead, he gave up ‘sailorising’ and resorted to philosophising instead. Over the course of a week, he wrote a 25,000-word manifesto that described how mankind had achieved such an advanced evolutionary state that it could now merge with the cosmos. All that was needed was ‘an effort of free will’.

He ended his journal on 1 July with this desperate appeal: ‘I will only resign this game / if you agree that / the next occasion that this / game is played / it will be played / according to the / rules that are devised by / my great god who has / revealed at last to his son / not only the exact nature / of the reason for games but / has also revealed the truth of / the way of the ending of the / next game that / It is finished / It is finished / IT IS THE MERCY’

There then followed a countdown, ending at 11:20:40 precisely. It’s not known what happened next, but it’s generally assumed Crowhurst jumped over the side of the boat to his death. His empty yacht was found by a passing ship on 10 July with two sets of log books on board: the real and the fake.

It was left to Sunday Times journalists Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall to piece together what had happened and to reveal to the world Crowhurst’s elaborate hoax. With Crowhurst and Tetley both out of the race, Knox-Johnston, on his slow wooden tortoise of a boat, was the only person to finish the race and was duly award both prizes – though he subsequently donated the £5,000 cash prize to Crowhurst’s widow.

Huge public interest

The Golden Globe race generated enormous public interest at the time, and the discovery of Crowhurst’s boat was front page news. It’s a fascination that has continued almost unabated to this day. The French film Les Quarantièmes Rugissants, based on the Crowhurst story, was released in 1982, while at least five plays have picked up the theme, as well as the 1998 opera Ravenshead.

There have been several books published about Crowhurst and the race more generally, although none of them add anything substantial to the story told by Tomalin and Hall in their 1970 book The Strange Story of Donald Crowhurst.

In 2006, the acclaimed documentary Deep Water incorporated contemporary footage of the race, including some shot by Crowhurst during his voyage, and in 2017 director Simon Rumley released his own stylised take on the story, called simply Crowhurst.

The Mercy, then, is only the latest take on the Crowhurst saga – although with Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz on board, it is the most high-profile. So how does it compare to previous efforts?

As you’d expect of such a mainstream movie, the focus is firmly on the psychological drama rather than on the sailing – which is probably just as well considering how often films get the details of sailing wrong. There are some minor errors – Chichester wasn’t the first person to sail around the world single-handed, and the prize for the first competitor to finish the race was a trophy, not £5,000 – but the sailing scenes are generally quite convincing.

More importantly though, The Mercy is a captivating psychological drama, which shows how, through a series of small steps, a person can box themselves into a corner from which there is no escape. It’s this humbling of a deluded but essentially well-meaning man that gives the story such resonance and has inspired artists and writers for more than five decades. For, as anyone who has sailed out of sight of land knows, the sea has a knack of bringing out our inner demons. There is a Crowhurst in us all.

First published in the March 2018 edition of Yachting World.

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How dropping acid saved my life

When writer Ayelet Waldman fell into depression she started microdosing with LSD. She tells Rachel Cooke about her extraordinary experiment with acid

Some time ago for reasons that will become apparent I am not allowed to say when, exactly the American writer Ayelet Waldman scored some LSD. She did this, not on a street corner or via the dark web, but middle-class style, through an acquaintance of an acquaintance, for which reason the drug arrived at her home in Berkeley, California, in a stamp-encrusted brown paper package whose sender (an elderly professor, she believed) identified himself only as Lewis Carroll, a fellow resident of her town. Mr Carroll had, however, troubled to write her a brief note. Our lives may be no more than dewdrops on a summer morning, it said. But surely, it is better that we sparkle while we are here. The bottle he enclosed contained 50 drops of vintage quality LSD, of which he advised her to take two at a time. Waldman was delighted. Not to put too fine a point on it, she believed this drug might save her life.

For as long as she can remember, Waldman has been held hostage by her moods. When she is up, she is up; when she is down, she is down. These highs and lows she has managed over the years with the help of therapy and a number of drugs, with which she has had varying degrees of success. At the time of the parcels arrival, though, she had entered a new and much more scary phase.

I was so profoundly depressed, she says. It wasnt the kind of depression where you fall into bed. Ive been through that before, and while its grim, its manageable. This was more of a mixed state, a kind of activated depression, and thats a dangerous place to be. I was doing everything I could to ruin my own life. I was afraid that if I stayed on that track, I would force my husband to leave me, and that I would probably attempt suicide and being a very capable person, I dont think a failed attempt was on the cards.

It was while she was in this state of mind that she stumbled on The Psychedelic Explorers Guide, by the psychologist and writer James Fadiman, who since 2010 has been collecting reports from individuals who have experimented with regular microdosing of LSD and psilocybin, a naturally occurring chemical found in a variety of mushrooms. Fadimans book is certainly not the result of a scientific research project; there has never been an officially sanctioned study of microdosing.

Here comes happiness: Ayelet Waldman at home. Photograph: Barry J Holmes for the Observer

But the people whose accounts it gathered together spoke repeatedly of experiencing, thanks to LSD, increased focus and better mood. They reported rarely losing their tempers, and becoming more fun to be with. None, moreover, had suffered any side effects. To put it simply, they went to bed feeling they had enjoyed that most elusive of things: a really good day. As Waldman read on, she grew envious. How she needed to have one of those! Was this her glimmer of hope? She thought it might be.

Waldman contacted Fadiman, and received a memo entitled To a Potential Self-Study Psychedelic Researcher. The protocol was simple. In order to participate in his international self-study group on the effects of sub-perceptual doses of LSD, she should take a microdose of the drug every third day. The suggested dose was a minuscule 10 micrograms, one 10th or less of what a person would have to take in order to experience an altered state of consciousness (ie to trip).

Meanwhile, she should lead life as normal, pausing only to record her moods, productivity and physical symptoms. Did this sound to be blunt preposterous? It did. Waldman is a middle-aged mother of four who, in addition to writing novels, lectures on the criminal justice system (she is a Harvard-educated former lawyer). As someone who is law-abiding and swotty, nothing in the world irritates her more than hippies, slackers, free spirits. Even people who wont stay on the right hand side of escalators drive her nuts. Ken Kesey she is not. But she was suffering. She had nothing to lose. Why shouldnt she try it, just for a month?

Having found a supplier, then, she did indeed begin taking the drug, an experience she has now recorded in her own book A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life. Its publication is certain to cause controversy. In fact, the madness has already begun. When we speak via Skype, a month or so before it arrives in bookshops, she tells me that only a few days earlier an excitable reporter got in touch to inform her that his editor had given him permission to drop acid with Ayelet Waldman. (Her response to his question about when they might schedule this journalistic endeavour was: Like, never.)

Loved up: Waldman and husband Michael Chabon. Photograph: Albert L Ortega/WireImage

Attitudes to drugs in America are irrespective of those states that have legalised cannabis far from liberal. Trump has appointed to the Department of Justice a war-on-drugs advocate [the Alabama senator, Jeff Sessions] who is so retrograde in his thinking, he believes the US suffers from an under-incarceration problem, she says. Its for this reason that she wont reveal when her experiment ended: there is a three-year statute of limitations on drugs charges. Do I think a white, middle-class lady will be high on his list of targets? No. But in this crazy new world we live in, you cant be too careful.

Its reception will also doubtless be muddied by the fact that she is its author. In America, Waldman is well known as an acclaimed writer in her own right and as the wife of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, to whom she has been married since 1993. When she writes about herself, moreover and this is something she does a great deal in A Really Good Day people have a tendency to respond with unnerving fury.

Most famously, this was the case in 2005, when the New York Times published her essay Motherlove, in which she declared that she loved her husband more than her children (If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother.) In the days that followed, ABCs daytime show The View hosted an unaccountably vitriolic debate about Waldman, her neighbours could be heard tearing her to shreds in Starbucks, and her inbox filled with emails from strangers threatening to report her to social services, the better that her children might be taken away.

Waldman is clever and funny and open-hearted. But as she readily admits, even her more sympathetic readers may sometimes have cause to wonder, in the case of A Really Good Day, which aspects of her behaviour her compulsion to tell the world things that others might prefer to keep private among them are simply the result of her personality, and which can be attributed to her illness. It is hard to distinguish between them, she says, almost wonderingly.

Still, she is probably better placed, now, to cope with any onslaught. Waldman is no longer using LSD her experiment really did last for only a month but its effects have, in some ways, been lasting. I miss its anti-depressant quality, and I miss the way it made me focus. It was like Ritalin [a drug commonly prescribed in the US to children with ADHD] without the side effects, which is frankly incredible. But that month got me out of a dark place. Within the first couple of doses, it was like the computer of my brain had been restarted. I was still moody. I had some really good days, but there were also crappy days, and days when it was just the normal shit. Somehow, though, the bad days were not hellish days, and so I had the capacity to work on issues I just couldnt before. Sure, I was hoping for joy. What I got instead was enough distance from the pain I was in to work on the things that were causing it.

Expand your mind: 1960s LSD advocate Dr Timothy Leary, who advised us to turn on, tune in, drop out. Photograph: AP

That work continues. Im still not on an even keel. Im still struggling with my moods. But Im committed to that. Im doing a new kind of therapy that is working quite well, even if not quite so well as it might be if I was still microdosing. If someone sends her a mean tweet in the coming weeks, she is unlikely to respond as venomously as she might once have done, or even at all.

Given its benign effect on her, why didnt she just find herself a new supplier, and continue taking it? There were, she says, two reasons. The first was her complete inability to purchase illegal drugs: towards the end of her book, she describes how, having made contact by text with a dealer, she panics, having convinced herself that Lucy is a police informant. The second was her determination to write a book about her experience: for that to be safe, she had to no longer be using.

If I could have overcome those things, there is no doubt in my mind that I would have carried on. Of course, it might not have kept working; Ive been on medication before that seemed to be working, and then wasnt. But if it was to be made legal, Id be the first in the queue, and I periodically remind myself that, if I get desperate again, I do have the option.

Her book is well-researched and, in the matter of LSD itself, careful and no-nonsense. The drug, a variation on the ergotamine molecule (ergot is the fungus responsible for the disease known in the Middle Ages as St Anthonys Fire) which was first synthesised in Basel in 1938 by Dr Albert Hofmann, has, she argues, an undeservedly bad reputation. The scare stories it trails of young men and women whose LSD hallucinations lead them to jump off high buildings have little basis in reality. Rather, they are largely the result of conservative Americas response to the 1960s counterculture, to Timothy Learys suggestion that people turn on, tune in, drop out. Twenty million people have used it in the US, and millions more around the world, with no ill effects at all.

Its complicated, but when it comes to the drugs possible use in the treatment of mental illness, what you need to know is that LSD stimulates the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, which in turn leads to the stimulation both of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), something a pharmacologist described to her as like Miracle-Gro for the brain It stimulates growth, connections, and activity, and of glutamate, the neurotransmitter most responsible for brain functions, such as cognition, learning and memory. (Hence its supposed new-found popularity in Silicon Valley, though Waldman thinks that, in reality, there are more magazine articles about tech dudes using LSD than there are, well, tech dudes using LSD: If there were some mass secret movement, it would have been a lot easier for to get hold of my drugs.)

She believes that during her experiment her neuroplasticity was enhanced, and that this didnt only enable her to work for hours at a time, to achieve a real sense of flow at her desk, but that it also made her happier and less impulsive. What little research has been done backs her up a study at Imperial College London showed that even a single dose of LSD produced robust psychological effects though scientists still dont fully understand the relationship between what happens in the brain, and the psyche.

Why isnt more research carried out? The simple truth is that LSD still carries with it a lot of leftover political baggage. During the writing of her book, the few researchers sanctioned by the FDA (Food & Drug Administration) who are out there were reluctant to allow Waldman to quote them, fearing that to associate themselves with a personal experiment would tarnish their hard-won credibility.

So far, so good. However, when her book is on more personal territory, as it frequently is, Waldman is vastly less cautious, and for the reader especially, perhaps, the British reader this can be, well, excruciating. I know! she says, when I tell her this. Can you imagine what it would be like for me if I lived in London? Chabon, a feminist with whom she shares the childcare, has the power of veto over everything she writes. But because hes a writer, too, this seems not to be something he often invokes. In A Really Good Day, nothing is out of bounds, from their agonising couples therapy (My husbands eyes filled I collapsed in his arms, crying so hard I soaked his shirt), to their sex life (I know you love me, I said, as we made love), to their periodic use of MDMA, aka ecstasy, as a way of opening up their lines of connection. What we did was talk, she writes, of the first time they tried it, in a hotel room theyd booked specifically for the purpose. For six hours, we talked about our feelings for each other, why we love each other, how we loved each other.

Waldman reveals that her moods can be triggered by everything from her writerly insecurities, to the dog, to the sound of her husband eating nuts (she suffers from misophonia, or selective sound sensitivity syndrome): I handed him a handful of almonds, and walked out of the kitchen I heard a crunch, the smack of lips; I felt a wave of anger. She is also fed up that her husband earns more than her, and that she has to share his writing studio, which has an uncomfortable couch: Though hes welcomed me in, I feel like a girlfriend whos been given a drawer in the bachelor pad bathroom. Poor Michael Chabon. The reader begins to feel he is some kind of saint.

Well, he is somewhat saintly, Waldman says. He makes my friends crazy. He gives great gifts. He has impeccable taste in clothes and jewellery. He is a know-it-all, but then, he does sort of know everything. Hes misanthropic, in that we [the family] are all he has space for; he doesnt have any close friends, which I think he would benefit from. I was about to say that hes far better than I deserve, but thats the pathology speaking, because I am a very good wife for him.

Isnt he ever mean to her? Yeah, sure he is. He encouraged her to embark on LSD experiment because he was desperate, too.

Before we hang up, I have to ask: does she ever worry her extraordinarily intense relationship with Chabon on Twitter she has been known to post pictures of her husband, along with a line informing her 15,800 followers just how much she loves him might be another symptom of her illness? For the first time in our conversation, she is hesitant. The gale of her voice drops to a light breeze.

Yeah, I have thought about this. I have said to him: If I were to get healthy, would I still love you, and would you still love me? There is a way that Ive confused needing with loving. I dont want to sound like a Hallmark card, but love is [supposed to be] unselfish, and in my most internal, whirling dark places, I think I need him so badly because he takes care of me, protects me, makes me feel safe. One of the things that saved our marriage in that [dark] period was when I brutally tried to disentangle those things.

The upshot is that she thinks, now, perhaps its OK to need him. After the LSD, when I was having this intense new therapy, I took a drive one night in northern California, where the countryside is very beautiful. I had this thought: maybe I dont love him after all. It was terrifying, and I was crying. But then the phone rang, and it was him. How did she feel then? His voice filled me like a glass of water.

People have been curious, even excited: an extract from A Really Good Day

A fewdays ago, I began tentatively to tell people about this experiment. To my surprise, I encountered few negative reactions. Every once in a while a listener might arch an eyebrow or smile uncomfortably, as if trying to figure out whether her discomfort meant that she wasnt hip enough, or whether I really was nuts. But those have been in the decided minority. Most people have been curious, even excited.

Those with histories of mood disorders were intrigued to hear that my spirits have lifted, that though I sometimes feel the familiar clutch of anxiety in my chest, I am generally able to use mindfulness techniques to make it dissolve. When I told them that I have not gained weight and that my libido has not withered away, they got really excited. The side effects of SSRIs are so ubiquitous and unpleasant that the idea of a medication protocol with fewer of them is thrilling.

Friends who incline to the spiritual were disappointed when they heard that Ive experienced no connection to the divine, but reassured when I mention the pleasure Ive taken in the natural world, the tree outside my window, the smell of the jasmine beside the city sidewalks. Risk takers and hedonists were disappointed that I was unable to provide details of hallucinations. No kaleidoscopic colours, they asked wistfully, no feeling that the floor was shifting beneath your feet? I live in California. The last thing I want to feel is the floor shifting beneath my feet. They urged me to try a real dose. It would change my life, they said, as though my problem is that my life has been too devoid of weirdness. Besides, my life is changing.

Tonight, however, was a different story. These two writer friends are about 20 years older than my husband and me, which puts them firmly in the boomer generation. They were in their 20s in the 1960s. Theyve travelled the world, rejected a life of secure conformity in favour of the risks and rewards of art. What better people to confide in? I thought.

Well, I said, Ive been writing, but not working on a novel. Ive been writing about microdosing with LSD.

What does that mean, the woman of the pair asked? Are you writing some kind of nonfiction article on people who use LSD?

I took a breath and then explained.

Her face froze. If she had been wearing pearls, she would have clutched them. She looked horrified, even disgusted, as if Id told her that Id taken up murdering baby seals. Her husbands reaction was only slightly less disturbing. He smiled uncomfortably and changed the subject. I immediately agreed, yes, the antipasto was delicious, and, no, I didnt want any more.

Their reaction launched a series of cascading anxieties. Will I be condemned for doing this? Will people reject me as a nutcase, a crank, a deluded acid freak? Will I lose whatever credibility I have in the world? Will parents not let their children come over to our house any more, under the misapprehension that I keep drugs in my home?

As soon as dinner was over, I tried the technique for dissipating anxiety that my cognitive behavioural therapist recommends. I took a few deep breaths, exhaling for half again as long as I inhaled. My chest and throat unclenched. The anxiety ebbed. I was calm again. I was OK.

Also, I had some perspective. This couple were young in the 1960s, when Timothy Leary was spreading the gospel of psychedelic recklessness. For all I know, they had complicated histories with the drug that influenced how they responded to me. In all likelihood, their discomfort had far more to do with them than with me.

A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life by Ayelet Waldman is published by Corsair at 13.99. To order a copy, go to bookshop.theguardian.com

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Sermon

TOPIC: CHANGED TUNE

Bible: Zechariah 4:10

"Does anyone dare despise this day of small beginnings? They 'll change their tune when they see Zerubbabel setting the last stone in place! Going back to the vision, the messenger-Angel said, "The seven lamps are the eyes of God probing the dark corners of the world like searchlights""-The Message Bible

"For who hath despised the day of small things? For they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro through the whole earth"- KJV

This is one of the common bible verses in the bible, and we do often hear the preachers speaking to us on the need for us not to despise the days of the small beginnings (or start).

I have however given my message a different topic, which I called "changed tune".

When musicians are playing, they may either signal to those handling the instruments that they intend to change the tune of the song they are singing, the change of tune may now be to a fast one or a slow one, or in a case where they cannot send signals to their instrumentalists, they will say it out that people will hear. I hope you grasp this? This is just to introduce you to what the prophet is saying here about changed tune, that the people who have been saying something about the ongoing project before would say another thing. Interestingly what the people were initially saying were deregatory, what they were saying could not be written home about. Now if these kind of people will change their tune, they will say what could be written home about as per the ongoing work of the temple.

Shall we for the sake of clarity bent over backwards on this verse, briefly talking about what led the people to this stage.

Bible students know that before the countries of Israel and Judah were plundered and destroyed by the enemies, they have gobe into ostentatious sins, the chief of which was idolatry. The Lord had been repeatedly warning them to desist from such act but they have refused, according to prophet Jeremy, the Lord was rising up early to talk to them through his messengers, the prophets, but they have refused to listen, even at night the Lord would send his messengers to them, but yet they rejected God's messages and continued in their sinful state and status un-abated. (Jer. 7:13, 25; 11:7; 12:7)

Our parents know the importance of early morning talk or discussion and late at night discussion, and this is what God was emphasizing to the people through the prophets, that despite the fact that they knew the import of early morning and late at night discussions, just as he did, yet they did not change.

Their recalcitrant position grieved the Lord, moved him to anger and he removed his banner of love and protection over them, allowing the enemies to come into the land. The enemies entered in full force, destroyed their cities and they did not spare the temple from being destroyed.

When these countries were overtaken by the enemies they were led to the slavery lands.

King Nebuchadnezzer who was the king of Babylon and the most powerful person on their then world led them away, and there they were as slaves. After Nebuchadnezzar died, his heir assumed the throne, after his heir was his grand son and on and on like that until Darius became the king, the most powerful person in the land.

When Darius became the king he did not destroy the structure put in place by his fore parents which was having governors to rule (oversee) certain countries subjecy unto the Babylonian kingdom. One of the countries under the leadership of King Darius was Israel and Darius the king appointed Sheshbazzar (Zerubbabel) to govern the land of Israel.

The bible dictionary says Zerubbabel is a Babylonian name called Zerubabili which means the seed of Babylon. Sheshbazzar who alongside others had been slaves in the Babylonian seat of power was given a name in line with religion of the land, just as we shall all remember that the same happened to Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. These people were given other names in tandem with the culture, custom and religion of the land (Daniel 1:6-7). The same thing also happened to Esther (Esther 2:7).

I thence presume after Zerubbabel had undergone the studies of the land of Babylon and had been found worthy in character and studies, the King, Darius, made him ruler (governor) who shall be overseeing the affairs of the people who had been left behind in the land of Israel and will be reporting back to him.

After neing crowned governor, he was sent to the land by the king alongside other released captives into his custody. As this happened off they left for the land of Israel.

I shall be explaining this topic under these headings:

I. Why despise?

II. Why did he start?

III. How could he complete the work?

IV. Applications

 I. WHY DESPISE?

Zerubbabel after he got to the land of Israel saw the position of the country and above all the deplorable state of the temple and he was moved to tears by what he saw and purpoted in his heart to do something on what he has seen.

History had it that as fate would have it, King Darius at this time was battling with some enemies which prevented him from focusing on the land of Israel, vizaviz, supervising the work which he had commanded Zerubbabel to be doing then.

As a governor, an officer, who is in direct contact with the king, Darius, he made use of the presenting opportunity, that is the shift in focus, shift of attention of the king from him to start the work of rebuilding the temple.

After laying the foundation of the temple, the people who had knew that he had deviated started to despise him that he was wasting his time, he was doing what the king had neither commanded him to do nor commissioned him to do. Zerubbabel was despised by these people because according to them he was doing what was not in the constitution, what was not in the budget, what has not been approved. I hope we get it to this point?

 II. WHY DID HE START THE WORK?

As i have above explained that when this governor, Zerubbabel and others returned to the land of Israel, the state of the country and most importantly that of the temple had broken down, the governor and he decided to do something on what he has seen.

(a) ZEAL: The zeal to re-construct the house of God consumed him when he returned to the country. He knew that country is a vast place and couldnt be rebuilt within frame of months unlike the temple, he thus concentrated on the reconstruction of the temple, to get a place for God where his people would go to to commune with Yahweh their God and his God who had brought him back to the land safe and in good health. (Psalms 69:9; 119:139)

 (b) GRASPING THE OPPORTUNITY: The zeal to reconstruct the temple that had consumed him made him grasp the opportunity when it presented itself. And what was the opportunity? The opportunity was that the king was battling with some enemies then which took all his time, energy, intelligence, workforce, military etc.

When Zerubbabel saw this he quickly and promptly grasped it, using it to build the temple. May we not miss the presenting opportunity to make it in life in Jesus name. Amen.

Some of us are as we are at the moment because our fathers or parents failed to make use of the presenting opportunity that appeared to them years, decades back. I am not talking about illegal opportunities. I am talking about genuine and legal opportunities. When those rare opportunities appear then, they do not want to try, they prefer their low estate and thence the opportunity slipped off.

 (c) SUPPORT FROM PEOPLE (OR UNITY): There is nothing anyone could achieve in life if the person does not have the backing, support of the people. Zerubbabel knew that the work cannot be done alone despite being the governor thus he confided in some people and carried them along. Interestingly those he confided in share his dream with him and they wholly supported the move. This support really helped him in carrying out the work and in succeeding in the work despite the few ones who were despising him for taking that giant stride.

For a family to breakthrough, all members of the family must support the leadership of the family. For a husband to make it, he will enjoy the support of his wife so also is the wife, for her to make it, her hubby must support him, anything short of this would result in set backs.

 A student who shall make it will be supported by his/her teachers, an institution that shall make it will receive support from all stakeholders of the institution.

The disciples were able to make it because of the unity amongst them. Jesus Christ could come to world because of the support he received from God and the heavenly beings.

What is it that you and I have been doing but we have not been making it? We may need to check this area, what is the level of support we are receiving from our spouses? What is the level of support we are receiving from our business partners, from our friends, from our fiance or fianceé, from our siblings, from our colleagues etc? If the level of support is nothing to write home about, that may be the source of the set back and if not addressed, we may be at that position for a long while to come.

Support or unity is very, very important in all our undertakings in the world. The God who created the heavens and the earth when he wanted to form man, knew the important of support and he thus briefed others of what he wanted to do, he could have gone ahead with our creation without telling them, but yet he told them because he wanted us to know and learn the importance of support or unity (Genesis 1:26).

King Solomon, whom majority of the Theologians believed to have authored the book of Ecclesiastes was talking about the importance of unity in chapter 4 and verse 12 of the book when he said, "and if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a THREEFOLD CORD is not quickly broken". This is where a unity subsists. lf a boyfriend and his girlfriend or fiance and his fianceé are in unity, you will see that even if they are not immediately succeeding, the support one receives from the second would be the fire, the enigma

enigma that would keep the other person on and on, and inevitably both of them. Now when they are in unity, they will keep their secret verily secret such that no one would know what's happening amongst them. That is the power there.

Now, looking at the word I emphasised in the book of Ecclesiastes 4:12 above, we shall see that when a family or spouses or dating partners are in unity, one will find it hard to break them because they are now like the three standed cords. A twined cord cannot be easily broken or cut as one will cut a twine that is single stranded. Is there unity in our relationship? Is there unity between you and your spouse? If not that the bible documented the birth of Jesus Christ we all know that Joseph did not sell out his spouse, Mary, that is unity. And I think unity also comes from understanding of one another.

The people gave Zerubbabel support as such he could continue the work.

 III. WHY HE COULD COMPLETE THE WORK:

(a) Zerubbabel and his team were able to complete the work of rebuilding the temple because after the revolt that rose against the king was doused and the king became fully aware of what governor Zerubbabel was doing, the king supported him and infact sent a message to the effect requiring everyone to join hands with him in seeing that the work was done, was perfected. (Zech. 4:7)

All those who had initially been despising Zerubbabel based on the fact that he had gone out of his boundaries, based on the fact that he was executing projects which the king did not tell him to execute were put to shame when they heard that the king had supported the dream of his governor.

I perceive that some of them would not believe when they hear that the king had approved the work, they will be saying it couldnt be, they will be saying they were saying that to make the people happy, they would be saying those people were telling the populace what they wanted to hear just like our politicians today do tell the populace what they wanted to hear and they would not tell them the truth.

In this position and disposition were some of those people who were despising Zerubbabel were until they received an authenticated message from Babylonian seat of power, where the king resides. The king officially wrote them so that it would be clear to the doubting minds that he has indeed approved the work and not only approving, that he will equally support the work financially and in other ways to see that the work is not delayed and it is completed to time (Ezra 1:1)

The mountain of doubt was removed and there was no iota of doubt again as per whether the king would grant the continuation of the work or nay.

(b) The Spirit of God as said by the prophet Zechariah in verse 6 started to work and it was by this Spirit that the work could be continued as well as being perfected.

"Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, this is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel, saying, not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts" (Zech. 4:6)

When governor Zerubbabel started the work of the temple, the prophet had approached him by the word of the Lord that the Yahweh Lord has seen his zeal to rebuild the temple and that he should continue with the work. The work was at first approved by Yahweh God because the work was in tandem with the will of God. When our works are in consonance with the will of God, nothing could stand in its way of execution.

After the prophet had uttered this, the prophet now told the governor that he needs to caution, what should he be cautious of? He should be cautious of self, he should not rely on himself, he should not rely on the arms of flesh because the arms of flesh will fail him.

This was what the prophet said by the word of God. We all know that when one wants to start something like that there is every tedency that one that even if it means i be desposed for starting this, I dont mind, one may say even if I lose my life for embarking on this project, I dont mind. And anyone who is nurturing such notion or thought would definitely want to prepare for war, would want to combat those who may want to come and stop him from doing that work.

This God had seen, and the need for him to send his servant the prophet to the governor that he should not be afraid, that the work would be perfectly done. Albeit, in doing (executing) the work, he must not rely on his might nor the might of anyone at that, he must not rely on his human power, because by thses the work would not be done. What would however make the work to be perfectly done is the Spirit of the Lord God Almighty, the prophet stated.

May I also add that does the prophet or God by this word then means that Zerubbabel and others should go to bed and not employ their human might and power into the on going construction work? The answer to this is No, God does not mean that. What he meant was that they should not rely on human strength, wisdom and power to overcome the enemies but they should put their trust in God to see them through what they have started.

When Governor Zerubbabel heard this he allowed the Spirit of God to take control although the physical preparations and arrangements were not stopped because they were by faith counting on God to crown those preparations. When God discovered the disposition of his servant, governor Zerubbabel towards this, he stirred up the spirit of the king to support the work after the king had been relieved from the troubles, enemies confronting him. (Ezra 1:1)

(c) Divine Supplies: King Darius issued out command that the work should not be stopped but that all hands should be on deck to see to the completion of the started work. When an executive order had been issued, others had no option other than supporting the project by bringing (supplying) to them all they needed for the work.

 IV. APPLICATION

(a) Marital: You may have been despised by family members and friends on whom you want to marry..., or may be you have even married the person people despised you on..., this is the word for you today that all who have despised you would say another thing about you and that marriage when they see what God is doing in your family.

 (b) Academics: You may have been despised on the kind of course you are doing in the college of Education, Polytechnic, University, saying such course(s) is not lucrative in our land, and you have been counselled to change the course, but you yet insisted in continuing with the course, and now, they are watching to see what will happen to you after you have finished the course. Do not be afraid, trust in the Lord as did Zerubbabel and those people will start saying another thing about you in a short while.

 (c) Fellowship: this Youth Fellowship may have been despised by some people, they may have been saying the fellowship will die a natural death, I want us to have it in mind that as long as we continue to allow the Spirit of the Lord to lead us, that wishful thought of theirs would not see the light of the day because the fellowship would grow from might to might in Jesus name. Amen.

 (d) Business: You may be new in the business you are doing and it seems as if all is not falling into place for you, and now the enemies have started to despise you saying, a business she or he knows little or nothing about she or he has entered into it, it is true at the moment, but always know that we don not bring anything into the world, and I know if you open your eyes very well, you will sure overcome the present presenting challenges and even overtake those you have met in the trade. All you need is openness to learn, openness to the Spirit of God, and things will change. Do you know that we cannot learn everything about a trade from a master or tutor during training, when we get into the field we would meet different things and then our intelligence would be swung into action.

May i stop here? Shall we stand to our feet? People will change their tune on what we are doing when we allow the Spirit to take control, in allowing Spirit to take control we are not saying we will stand idle, no, but we are saying the Spirit of the Lord will remove all obstacles, all barriers that may want to debar us from advancing in life.... (End)