#returning to my feral children series roots

[balrogballs]

Notes on Elrond, Gilraen and the Co-Parenting of Kings

Gilraen spends all of Estel’s Terrible Twos and Threes being completely and rightfully done with Elrond because the latter would accidentally undo any disciplinary decision the two of them make. Elrond and Gilraen would say, for instance, no sweets until dinner. Gilraen would stick to this but toddler Estel soon learns that it takes only 5-7 minutes of crying until Elrond both gives in and apologises to him for the delay. Gilraen is firmly convinced that the child’s toddler phase lasting twice as long as normal is entirely Elrond’s fault.

Gilraen has to deal with Elrond’s habit of saying completely unhinged stuff in plain view of Valar and Eldar. Once, baby Estel was wailing in his arms and had to be passed over to Gilraen because he was hungry, so she pulls on a scarf and starts breastfeeding the child. Elrond stands around looking morose and she feels sorry for him, assuming he was sad about his wife or something normal. That is, until he pipes up with “I wish I could do that” and “it hurts my feelings to know I cannot meet all his needs”. He is taken aback when Gilraen asks him what the fuck is wrong with him.

She’s the first person outside his close circle that he talks to about Celebrían, and oh boy does he TALK. Gilraen has never met the woman, but often feels like Cel is her very best friend, due to how much she knows about her.

Though there is absolutely zero romantic feeling between the two, Gilraen and Elrond spend the 20 years of Estel’s youth bickering like an old married couple. It gives them both an odd sense of normalcy and, in a way, relief from grief over their respective spouses. Would Gilraen and Elrond ever admit that the 20 hours they spent arguing over how often Estel needed haircuts and what style said cuts should be were some of the most fun they’ve had since their bereavements? No, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

When Estel was young enough for bedtime stories, they would alternate nights between them, with Elrond telling him stories of the First Age, and Gilraen telling him adventure stories of men and rangers. Estel’s favourite nights though, are the ones in which they collaborate and tell long, convoluted, nonsensical stories and argue over the existence of morals, teaming up to force the El-twins and Glorfindel to act as glorified puppets.

Elrond, who cannot exactly gossip with other elves due to his status, discovers his inner mean girl only in his friendship with Gilraen. The two of them are massive bitches, no two ways about it, to the point they even lock eyes at public dinners when someone is wearing something particularly gaudy or ostentatious (usually Glorfindel) and giggle away about it later. Straight up preteen girl shit, unashamed and unapologetic, to the point they have a set of inside jokes about most people in Imladris, including their children. If you think they sound like wine mums, that’s because they do. Cont’d under cut.

When Estel is thirteen, he faces his first heartbreak and goes to his mother, who quizzes the tearful boy about what happened. Estel explains that he had a crush on some girl from a village outside the valley and, on advice from an unnamed source, spent the past year not saying a word about it until the girl went and got herself an actual boyfriend. Estel doesn’t share the source of said advice, but that does not stop Gilraen marching into Elrond’s study with “when I said you should instruct my son to be like you, I meant in war and lore, not the art of being a tongue-tied twit!”

When Aragorn told his mother of his betrothal to Arwen, she congratulated him and told him she was happy for him. She also forced him to go to Elrond and confess properly, though he knew, and refused to intervene on her son’s behalf or ask his foster father to temper his anger. And after Aragorn went back out as a ranger and Arwen went to Lothlorien, it was Gilraen who went to Elrond’s study and sat with him for hours.

When she leaves to return to her people, he understands and obviously allows it. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t stop being a pain in her ass, mind you. At least once or twice a year, he would travel up to stay at her house and they would drink and chat and argue for hours, to the point that their neighbours simply refuse to believe that the weirdo in the garden trying to mansplain seed transplanting to Gilraen was, in fact, the ancient and esteemed Lord of Imladris. Imagine Gandalf but insufferable, and that’s what Elrond is for this specific Dunedain neighbourhood.

He does, of course, note as she ages and it begins to visibly grieve him. She notices this and on one visit, catching him look at her like he cannot bear to do this any longer, takes him aside and tells him not to come again, “because I will only grow older. Because my hair will turn whiter and my face more wrinkled and perhaps my teeth will fall out, my skin will sag, and I will forget who you are. And then one day I will stop growing old and I think watching a thing like this twice over will be the end of you”. He understands mercy disguised as cruelty more than most, and though there are many tears on both sides, he respects her decision.

Elrond understandably feels out of place and too small for his own skin in the immediate aftermath of Arwen and Aragorn’s wedding and takes to wandering aimlessly in his own gardens until he comes across the old memorial sculpture he had commissioned of Gilraen, and in a characteristic burst of eccentricity, starts chatting with it about the wedding. Tells her how ridiculous Glorfindel looked, how Aragorn fumbled the necklace (“butterfingers, Gilly, just like his mother!”), how he had to make Arwen take off the godawful tiara Celeborn got her and wear something normal, and how she would have “loved Bilbo Baggins, he’d have fit right in at our brunches”. It was absolutely batshit, him sitting there talking at a marble statue, but it was, in its strange way, incredibly comforting.

[grey-eyed-menace]

So!

I'm coming straight outta left field with this one, but hey, some of the best things in life come from spontaneity!

Er... Maybe.

Anyway, here's my Pokèmon AU!

Featuring the Female Protagonists I played as, their names, general differences from canon, and personal headcannons I came up with during my first playthrough of each game!

...and how they fit into the wider world! Maybe. Kinda.

I'm only doing the main series females in this post, with potential a potential sequal in the form of the side game females!

I do know that the main series male's will have their own post though! Mostly because I legitimately cannot control myself, and it's already halfway done!

So, without a further ado...

Arden Forrest!

Childhood friend of Red Audra, and the maternal cousin of the one and only Blue Oak.

Chose Charmander as her starter, named the little guy Flare, and is extremely defensive of the nickname. She is/was ten! Sorry if her creativity wasn't up to par!

Ended up having to travel with Red because her mother absolutely refused to let her leave Pallet otherwise.

Simply stick with him out of convenience after Viridian Forest, mostly because at that point there really wasn't anything to gain in separating from him.

In this continuity she's the older sister of the Sun and Moon protagonists. More on that in Jericho's section.

At the end of her journey, her team consisted of Flare the Charizard, Lenz the Jolteon, King the Slowking, Knott the Vileplume, Skye the Pidgeot, and Blue the Raichu.

Raichu is a stuck up little shit, and pampered, the nickname was obvious. To her at least. Oddly enough, Blue the Raichu hates Blue the human.

The only reason Giovanni remembers her is because she straight up decked him across the jaw when he threatened to kill one of her Pokèmon.

Somehow ended up acquiring Silver as a travel companion for three weeks, Red was bemused. He was also incredibly confused when that feral eight year old showed back up three years later in the news.

Ended up hanging up her battling career shortly after she lost the championship to Lance, and handed over Flare to Red to battle on a more permanent basis.

She still trained the rest of her team, and still does, she just realized that despite her talent in the profession it just... Wasn't her calling. She wasn't as quite as in love with it as she was at the start of her journey.

Bounces around the world for a bit during the three or so years between the Blue/Red and the HeartGold/SoulSilver storylines, and after Lance wins the championship back from her. Trying to find herself.

She participates in the Galar league around the same time as Leon, Raihan, Sonia, and Nessa, mostly as a curiosity, and maybe as a way to try and reconnect with her battling roots, but jumps ship after Opal because fucking hell is their League a killer for self-confidence.

Her jersey number, for the record, was 069. She deeply regrets keeping the uniform years later.

She also finishes the Unova circuit, but doesn't challenge the Elite Four or the Champion, and she tries to do something in the Ferrum Region for a bit before packing up and returning home.

Perpetually pissed off that no one can remember her fucking name.

And no, it isn't about the Championship thing, she was fine with that, really, it's just that the moment she introduces herself ahead of Blue or Red people tend to either treat her like a commodity, or like she doesn't exist.

Made it through the Elite Four and beat Blue before Red.

So yes, she is the official record holder for the shortest Championship. Which, if you're wondering, is exactly thirteen hours, seven minutes, and thirty-three seconds.

She and Blue played Go-Fish for two hours while Red finished up with Bruno.

The ensuing eleven hour battle with Red both traumatized and bored Blue in equal measures.

Blue had the title for a week. Red bolted to Unova shortly after winning and declined the position, turning it back over to her. She proceeded to hold it for another six months before a match with Lance turned it back over.

Actually ends up as one of Professor Oak's lab assistants once she ends back up in Pallet, and... Eventually finds her calling in research.

She throws herself into her education with everything she has. And... Never really loses that passion and drive.

Has to be physically dragged to Passio during the Master's tournament/festival. Dragged. And no, that's not an exaggeration, Blue physically throws her over his shoulder, books their shared flight, and well, he basically kidnaps her.

If it makes you feel any better, he pretty much did the same thing with Red, only it was a private flight that was prearranged.

It makes her feel better, anyway.

She spends the entire tournament/festival in borrowed clothes.

She takes solace in mock-poker matches with Red, Grimsely, Lina, and, oddly enough, Cynthia and Steven Stone.

She does eventually end up becoming a professor in her own right, with a focus on Abilities and how they affect a Pokèmon's mental and physical growth, and also ends up with an engineering degree as well.

In her late thirties I see her taking over Professor Hasting's job for the Ranger association. Mostly because, in my head-cannon at least, Regional Professor status isn't all that it's cracked up to be, and at that point in her life the only reason she would even take over for Oak in any capacity is out of sentimental value for the Pallet Labs.

That, and it's a cushy job, plus she gets to see small children scramble around for over jumped flying tops. So really, it's a win-win.

Teases Jericho relentlessly over her relationship with Gladion.

Not that her romantic life is much better. Someone idly points out that Red is romantically pursuing her when they're nineteen and she proceeds to have a minor breakdown.

Or, you know, she just remains forever oblivious, and Red remains extremely passive in his pining.

Completely blind-sided by Blue's wedding, and honestly doesn't know what to think of his wife, but plays the role of doting aunt pretty well once they have their first kid.

Shows up in the White 2 storyline in a rental tournament, wrecks Rei's shit, comes back a day later during a Team Switch Tournament, and proceeds to destroy the battlefield.

Then, once Rei is the Unovian Champion, she comes for an actual vacation, and actively, and willingly, participates in the Cross-Region Tournament, makes it to the finals, wrecks Rei's shit again, and then destroys the Stadium when she goes up against Red in the semi-finals... Yeah, I'm not sure what storyline to put to the whole rage vent thing, but it's there. It exists. And Red pays for it.

I'm thinking Blue just gets in over his head a week or so before the tournament, and she quietly simmers all the while.

I think if I were to make a fic about her journey/life, I'd call it 'The Trials And Tribulations Of A Run Of The Mill Pokèmon Trainer'. Because... Ya know, against Blue and Red, she's actually a pretty average trainer.

Compared to Red, who'll have participated in over thirty league circuits in his lifetime, (and plowed straight through the champion in a pretty good chunk of them), Arden has only actively participated in maybe five, mantled a single Championship, and completed two other circuits, with the last three or so having her jump ship due to pressure, having to put it aside for prior commitments, or a simple lack of interest, (the incredibly vague Greece based region I have an idea for is incredibly interesting history wise, in universe, it's Gym and tournament circuit on the other hand... Lacks pretty much anything to make it even remotely interesting).

Red will be a living legend once all is said and done at the end of his career. While Arden has a single legal achievement to her name, the famed recognition of being one of three people to take down the Pokèmon equivalent to the Mafia, and a pretty average badge count for a career trainer.

Also, Lina loses to Red on Mount Silver. She knows, she was drafted as the referee because when she came to drop of Red's food for the week. She's pretty much payed off to say otherwise though.

And she doesn't know why.

She's convinced it's a conspiracy.

Fades into relative obscurity around the time of the Sun & Moon storyline, but her damn if her tiny fan club isn't dedicated.

Doesn't show up in Alola for the battle tree because Blue couldn't find her for three solid months.

No one knows what the fuck she was doing.

...she may or may not have been the Gates To Infinity protagonist.

There's a tiny aside to a Snivy named Leaf in article concerning Overgrow and how it affects the Snivy population at large though.

And that's Arden Forrest, a bit clunky, but hey, they're randomly ordered facts, not a character sheet. Next up is the Crystal heroine!

Marie Smith!

Traveled through Johto about three or so years before Arden, Red, and Blue began running around Kanto.

Older than her sister, Lina, by seven years.

I actually don't have all that much on her because I got to the third Gym on Crystal before my brother destroyed the Device I was using to play the game on.

What I do know, from this information, though, is that she disappeared around said time.

No build up, no cries for help, nothing. Just up and gone. She just cut contact with her family, things happened, and she's absolutely infamous for nearly killing three thousand people. Somehow, she's officially recognized as someone who completed the Johto Circuit though.

She got recruited by Cypher.

Again. Shit happened.

Oak blames himself for an incident in the Kiro Region, (Egyptian Region), pertaining to her.

Lina's entire journey is an event and a half because of her.

If I were to make these little things into a fic series, she'd get... Like a seven chapter mini-fic told from seven different people's perspectives throughout her journey.

Those people, in order, would be... Her mother, Whitney, Naoko of the Kimono Girls, Giovanni, Clair, and Oak.

With an extra chapter detailing her death during the Kalos invasion.

She shows back up in the Kalos storyline in this and traumatizes the ever loving fuck out of Serafina.

She chose a Chikorita. Who she loves dearly, even when she's pretty much gone off the deep end, and then some.

Lina Smith, local trouble maker, owner of a perpetually terrified Feraligator, and the best friend of the very weird Ethan Aurum, and the only person who seems to be on Silver's good side. Vaguely.

Oh so vaguely.

Youngest out of three children, her older brother, Gregory, is an incredibly average guy who's extremely confused as to what the fuck happens on her journey, and never NOT worried about her.

Parents died in a car accident some two years before the start of the storyline, is cared for by Gregory at this point in time

Don't ask why Greg is a thing. He just is.

Like Arden before her, Lina takes a very proactive approach to dealing with Silver during the Radio Tower Incident. Which involves decking him in the jaw.

Surprisingly, this is the part where there relationship improves.

Chooses a Totodile and names him Reyne, and is fiercely protective of him. The little guy could put a Sobble to shame... This also means Silver ends up with the incredibly overly energetic and affectionate Chikorita, all for my personal amusement, (said Chikorita is named Lyra, and no, he does not spoil her, shut your mouth Aurum!).

Her entire story isn't so much focused on her gym challenge or the reappearance of Team Rocket, as it is finding out what the fuck happened to her sister.

Ethan starts tagging along after Goldenrod, and starts to reveal he knows a lot more than he's willing to admit about the situation.

Gets caught up in a lot of nasty things, and nearly ends up dismantling an operation to kill Red, Lance, and Cynthia.

(Where are our favorite colored duo, and supporting tree, during all this you may ask? Why, still recovering from trauma of course! Like reasonable, sane, run-of-the-mill people. More specifically, Blue's officially taking over Viridian gym before the start of the Kanto gym circuit season, Red's fucking around in Hoenn for a good bit before coming to Mt. Silver just two months before Lina gets there, and Arden's in that vague Greece based region getting therapy.)

Her journey is just a really long incident report, and Looker has half a mind to slap her at the end of it.

A good portion of it is Ethan's fault though. Ethan, by the way, nails the looking right through you stare.

And a girl named Sarah Morgendy comes up a lot, although it turns out she's just a kid trying to protect her adopted brother from the shit shoe she got them involved in illegally.

The only two problems with that is she's about eleven and emotionally compromised.

Gets recruited by Interpol after everything is said in done.

Gets the code name Agent Lenz.

Demands therapy for herself, Ethan, and Silver. She gets it.

While she's training as an agent, Ethan and his mother move to Unova so that he can attend an Academy meant 'rising stars', and Silver becomes Elm's apprentice.

...somehow ends up married to Blue years down the line. They have two kids between them. Maria and Reginald

[kenysholar1990]

How To Stop Cat Peeing Up Front Door Awesome Useful Tips

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This will let you know that this fellow doesn't pass cat-standards, he's simply trying to stop.Remove any obvious reason is to have your kitten that had suddenly presented itself.They will be extremely entertaining and can cause a cat allergy symptoms is to eliminate.Once the cat begins to learn and obtain other's advice it will naturally want to not care for.Just imagining this kind of cat trees that offer a companionship that is appropriate for its behaviour.

Cats love treats just as effective means of keeping them separated.Once you have more cats as well, making them a perfect way to sharpen his claws.Keeping in view the neutering of a veterinarian needs to sharpen the front door and a bed.Don't play with your regular washing powder and water.You might have to roll over, play dead, and fetch!

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How To Get Cat Pee Out Of Leather Jacket

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[laurendzim]

Book review: Denver comic Adam Cayton-Holland digs deep, finds healing in “Tragedy Plus Time”

Adam Cayton-Holland has often seemed like one of those people who has everything.

The 38-year-old stand-up and former Westword scribe, who returns for Season 3 of his truTV sitcom “Those Who Can’t” this fall, comes from a well-educated, well-off family in Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood.

After years of proving his talent and work ethic in the city’s DIY comedy scene, he broke through to a national audience and managed to remain true to his Mile High City roots, all while cutting a path for other local artists to follow.

That’s the public version, anyway.

As Cayton-Holland reveals in “Tragedy Plus Time” (published Aug. 21 on Touchstone), it all meant nothing after his younger sister Lydia committed suicide in the summer of 2012.

“I’m a 32-year-old stand-up comic from Denver who just sold his first Hollywood script,” Cayton-Holland writes five pages into the memoir, which crackles with his on-stage confidence and aches with his vulnerable worldview. “I’ve never been more devastated.”

“Tragedy Plus Time” (named after the comedy axiom “Comedy is tragedy plus time”) may be a memoir, but its present-tense tone and trembling details give it an in-your-ear immediacy.

Cayton-Holland’s parents instilled a sense of righteousness in their children early. His father, a civil rights attorney, and his mother, a former investigative journalist, taught their trio of offspring — Anna, Adam and Lydia — to expect a lot out of themselves and each other. As Cayton-Holland writes, this encouraged great achievement (Anna, the eldest, was nearly a professional ice skater) but also obsessive-compulsive disorder and hypersensivity to the world’s ills.

Cayton-Holland is prone to airing these memories in bright flashes, cutting between interwoven scenes one can easily envision on the big screen. (He’s working on adapting the book into a movie, according to an interview with Medium.) It often amounts to a showcase of horrors and absurdities, particularly as he threads death and inequity through the earlier chapters — less foreshadowing than a peek into the alternately noble and morbid air he breathed at home.

But the care with which he approaches the subjects never betrays their gravity. This is simply how little Adam — painfully aware of his privilege, but also privy to things most kids will never see — experienced the world: filtered through episodes of “The Simpsons,” private-school culture, world travels, his parents’ hippie ideals, the odd legal jargon. Not exactly typical.

Lydia, whose childhood is also recounted in sharp flashes, was too sensitive for her own comfort. A vegetarian from age 9, she successfully lobbied her parents into changing their landscaping plans because she feared the existing plants would get torn up. She kept a menagerie of animals and talked to them. She lived in South America for a time. She felt deeply.

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Cayton-Holland analyzes this and other memories to stunning degrees, an armchair psychologist leaning so hard on the furniture that it creaks under the effort. But it’s built into his personality, and one can easily see why his subsequent experiences in school, from discovering his class-clown potential to vandalizing his college campus in alcohol-fueled blackouts, were less spoiled brat than tortured aesthete.

As Cayton-Holland captures his childhood in Spielbergian freeze-frames of ’80s youth, then traces his rise in Denver’s scrappy alt-comedy scene (which he helped create) onto mainstream clubs like Comedy Works, he’s soaked with the sense that something violent and defining will happen at any moment.

Sometimes you find those things by looking for them, but more often they wash ashore.

Lydia, emotionally alluring and often joyous but intimidating in her intellect, became haunted. Shrinks and prescription drugs and living a Bohemian lifestyle — none of it helped. Adam invited her into his newfound comedy career, letting her run the door and the tech rehearsals at Denver art spaces while he ran his stand-up showcases.

(It’s a period I witnessed firsthand, chronicling Cayton-Holland and his Grawlix comedy trio members’ rise locally and nationally. I shared conversations with Lydia outside venues and chatted with her on social media. She was always an acquaintance, but the most harrowing parts of the book — where she’s admitted into the psych ward at Denver Health after overdosing on pills, and where she takes her own life with a gun, only to be found later in her bed by her brother — were mostly unknown to me.)

“It made us laugh, the insanity of it all,” Cayton-Holland writes. “We Cayton-Holland three baffled and tickled at how we were suddenly seeming to exist in the sad works of art on which we were fixated. But those moments gave way to teary panic when we removed the rose-colored, indie-film lenses from our eyes. This was just our little sister. Struggling. In a psych ward.”

These parts of the book, roughly from the second-half on, justify the glowing praise on the jacket. In crisp and measured prose, Cayton-Holland explores the tragedy that in many ways is still defining him. The grief process, including the anger and the self-blame. The speculation about a family that feared mediocrity more than failure. The unimaginable first-person details of Lydia’s decline and death. The drinking, professional help and career triumphs that followed for Cayton-Holland, even as Lydia was always on his mind.

It’s a lot to digest, both for author and reader, but Cayton-Holland never chokes. Perhaps owing to his three seasons of sitcom writing, he bandies around too many clichés at times. It never detracts from the narrative, but one can’t help wishing he had used them more sparingly, given his obvious command of language.

Then again, this is a book one can hear being read out loud (as Cayton-Holland did for the audio version), and readers familiar with his engrossing, conversational stand-up will hear his voice in their heads the entire time.

“Publishing a book has been my dream forever,” he told The Denver Post in March, just before the debut of his first half-hour special on Comedy Central. “I wish it was under different circumstances. That said, I needed to write it. It’s been a part of me every day since, and it’s a good tribute to her.”

Indeed. But “Tragedy Plus Time” isn’t simply a window into grief. It’s also a flag, firmly planted, signaling his family’s resolve. Cayton-Holland is doing well these days (his High Plains Comedy Festival, the region’s biggest stand-up event, returns Aug. 23-25). Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper tweeted a video last week from Cayton-Holland’s book-release party at the Tattered Cover, lauding the “hilarious/heartbreaking” new tome.

That’s a fine endorsement, but Cayton-Holland doesn’t need it. Not only because his work stands alone, but because his existential evolution, which emerges in the last few chapters, has found him at a place of humbleness. He looks for meaning in red-tailed hawks and an “empath” friend, frequently visiting a bench in City Park that his family had dedicated to Lydia.

It all amounts to an affecting portrait of a family struggling to contain its feral grief, and finding themselves the more united for it. A tower of cat hair and trampolines and inside jokes and blood and laughter, leaning crazily to one side. Silly and sad, clever and crude. And above all, true.

If you go

“Tragedy Plus Time.” A discussion with Adam Cayton-Holland by Colorado Public Radio’s Ryan Warner at Gates Concert Hall, Newman Center for the Performing Arts, 2344 E. Iliff Ave. 7-8:30 p.m. on Sept. 13. Tickets: $12 via bit.ly/2BFQgXN

Journalism isn’t free. Show your support of local news coverage by becoming a subscriber. Your first month is only 99 cents.

from News And Updates https://www.denverpost.com/2018/08/24/book-review-denver-comic-adam-cayton-holland-digs-deep-finds-healing-in-tragedy-plus-time/

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Book review: Denver comic Adam Cayton-Holland digs deep, finds healing in “Tragedy Plus Time”

Adam Cayton-Holland has often seemed like one of those people who has everything.

The 38-year-old stand-up and former Westword scribe, who returns for Season 3 of his truTV sitcom “Those Who Can’t” this fall, comes from a well-educated, well-off family in Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood.

After years of proving his talent and work ethic in the city’s DIY comedy scene, he broke through to a national audience and managed to remain true to his Mile High City roots, all while cutting a path for other local artists to follow.

That’s the public version, anyway.

As Cayton-Holland reveals in “Tragedy Plus Time” (published Aug. 21 on Touchstone), it all meant nothing after his younger sister Lydia committed suicide in the summer of 2012.

“I’m a 32-year-old stand-up comic from Denver who just sold his first Hollywood script,” Cayton-Holland writes five pages into the memoir, which crackles with his on-stage confidence and aches with his vulnerable worldview. “I’ve never been more devastated.”

“Tragedy Plus Time” (named after the comedy axiom “Comedy is tragedy plus time”) may be a memoir, but its present-tense tone and trembling details give it an in-your-ear immediacy.

Cayton-Holland’s parents instilled a sense of righteousness in their children early. His father, a civil rights attorney, and his mother, a former investigative journalist, taught their trio of offspring — Anna, Adam and Lydia — to expect a lot out of themselves and each other. As Cayton-Holland writes, this encouraged great achievement (Anna, the eldest, was nearly a professional ice skater) but also obsessive-compulsive disorder and hypersensivity to the world’s ills.

Cayton-Holland is prone to airing these memories in bright flashes, cutting between interwoven scenes one can easily envision on the big screen. (He’s working on adapting the book into a movie, according to an interview with Medium.) It often amounts to a showcase of horrors and absurdities, particularly as he threads death and inequity through the earlier chapters — less foreshadowing than a peek into the alternately noble and morbid air he breathed at home.

But the care with which he approaches the subjects never betrays their gravity. This is simply how little Adam — painfully aware of his privilege, but also privy to things most kids will never see — experienced the world: filtered through episodes of “The Simpsons,” private-school culture, world travels, his parents’ hippie ideals, the odd legal jargon. Not exactly typical.

Lydia, whose childhood is also recounted in sharp flashes, was too sensitive for her own comfort. A vegetarian from age 9, she successfully lobbied her parents into changing their landscaping plans because she feared the existing plants would get torn up. She kept a menagerie of animals and talked to them. She lived in South America for a time. She felt deeply.

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Cayton-Holland analyzes this and other memories to stunning degrees, an armchair psychologist leaning so hard on the furniture that it creaks under the effort. But it’s built into his personality, and one can easily see why his subsequent experiences in school, from discovering his class-clown potential to vandalizing his college campus in alcohol-fueled blackouts, were less spoiled brat than tortured aesthete.

As Cayton-Holland captures his childhood in Spielbergian freeze-frames of ’80s youth, then traces his rise in Denver’s scrappy alt-comedy scene (which he helped create) onto mainstream clubs like Comedy Works, he’s soaked with the sense that something violent and defining will happen at any moment.

Sometimes you find those things by looking for them, but more often they wash ashore.

Lydia, emotionally alluring and often joyous but intimidating in her intellect, became haunted. Shrinks and prescription drugs and living a Bohemian lifestyle — none of it helped. Adam invited her into his newfound comedy career, letting her run the door and the tech rehearsals at Denver art spaces while he ran his stand-up showcases.

(It’s a period I witnessed firsthand, chronicling Cayton-Holland and his Grawlix comedy trio members’ rise locally and nationally. I shared conversations with Lydia outside venues and chatted with her on social media. She was always an acquaintance, but the most harrowing parts of the book — where she’s admitted into the psych ward at Denver Health after overdosing on pills, and where she takes her own life with a gun, only to be found later in her bed by her brother — were mostly unknown to me.)

“It made us laugh, the insanity of it all,” Cayton-Holland writes. “We Cayton-Holland three baffled and tickled at how we were suddenly seeming to exist in the sad works of art on which we were fixated. But those moments gave way to teary panic when we removed the rose-colored, indie-film lenses from our eyes. This was just our little sister. Struggling. In a psych ward.”

These parts of the book, roughly from the second-half on, justify the glowing praise on the jacket. In crisp and measured prose, Cayton-Holland explores the tragedy that in many ways is still defining him. The grief process, including the anger and the self-blame. The speculation about a family that feared mediocrity more than failure. The unimaginable first-person details of Lydia’s decline and death. The drinking, professional help and career triumphs that followed for Cayton-Holland, even as Lydia was always on his mind.

It’s a lot to digest, both for author and reader, but Cayton-Holland never chokes. Perhaps owing to his three seasons of sitcom writing, he bandies around too many clichés at times. It never detracts from the narrative, but one can’t help wishing he had used them more sparingly, given his obvious command of language.

Then again, this is a book one can hear being read out loud (as Cayton-Holland did for the audio version), and readers familiar with his engrossing, conversational stand-up will hear his voice in their heads the entire time.

“Publishing a book has been my dream forever,” he told The Denver Post in March, just before the debut of his first half-hour special on Comedy Central. “I wish it was under different circumstances. That said, I needed to write it. It’s been a part of me every day since, and it’s a good tribute to her.”

Indeed. But “Tragedy Plus Time” isn’t simply a window into grief. It’s also a flag, firmly planted, signaling his family’s resolve. Cayton-Holland is doing well these days (his High Plains Comedy Festival, the region’s biggest stand-up event, returns Aug. 23-25). Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper tweeted a video last week from Cayton-Holland’s book-release party at the Tattered Cover, lauding the “hilarious/heartbreaking” new tome.

That’s a fine endorsement, but Cayton-Holland doesn’t need it. Not only because his work stands alone, but because his existential evolution, which emerges in the last few chapters, has found him at a place of humbleness. He looks for meaning in red-tailed hawks and an “empath” friend, frequently visiting a bench in City Park that his family had dedicated to Lydia.

It all amounts to an affecting portrait of a family struggling to contain its feral grief, and finding themselves the more united for it. A tower of cat hair and trampolines and inside jokes and blood and laughter, leaning crazily to one side. Silly and sad, clever and crude. And above all, true.

If you go

“Tragedy Plus Time.” A discussion with Adam Cayton-Holland by Colorado Public Radio’s Ryan Warner at Gates Concert Hall, Newman Center for the Performing Arts, 2344 E. Iliff Ave. 7-8:30 p.m. on Sept. 13. Tickets: $12 via bit.ly/2BFQgXN

Journalism isn’t free. Show your support of local news coverage by becoming a subscriber. Your first month is only 99 cents.

from Latest Information https://www.denverpost.com/2018/08/24/book-review-denver-comic-adam-cayton-holland-digs-deep-finds-healing-in-tragedy-plus-time/

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Book review: Denver comic Adam Cayton-Holland digs deep, finds healing in “Tragedy Plus Time”

Adam Cayton-Holland has often seemed like one of those people who has everything.

The 38-year-old stand-up and former Westword scribe, who returns for Season 3 of his truTV sitcom “Those Who Can’t” this fall, comes from a well-educated, well-off family in Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood.

After years of proving his talent and work ethic in the city’s DIY comedy scene, he broke through to a national audience and managed to remain true to his Mile High City roots, all while cutting a path for other local artists to follow.

That’s the public version, anyway.

As Cayton-Holland reveals in “Tragedy Plus Time” (published Aug. 21 on Touchstone), it all meant nothing after his younger sister Lydia committed suicide in the summer of 2012.

“I’m a 32-year-old stand-up comic from Denver who just sold his first Hollywood script,” Cayton-Holland writes five pages into the memoir, which crackles with his on-stage confidence and aches with his vulnerable worldview. “I’ve never been more devastated.”

“Tragedy Plus Time” (named after the comedy axiom “Comedy is tragedy plus time”) may be a memoir, but its present-tense tone and trembling details give it an in-your-ear immediacy.

Cayton-Holland’s parents instilled a sense of righteousness in their children early. His father, a civil rights attorney, and his mother, a former investigative journalist, taught their trio of offspring — Anna, Adam and Lydia — to expect a lot out of themselves and each other. As Cayton-Holland writes, this encouraged great achievement (Anna, the eldest, was nearly a professional ice skater) but also obsessive-compulsive disorder and hypersensivity to the world’s ills.

Cayton-Holland is prone to airing these memories in bright flashes, cutting between interwoven scenes one can easily envision on the big screen. (He’s working on adapting the book into a movie, according to an interview with Medium.) It often amounts to a showcase of horrors and absurdities, particularly as he threads death and inequity through the earlier chapters — less foreshadowing than a peek into the alternately noble and morbid air he breathed at home.

But the care with which he approaches the subjects never betrays their gravity. This is simply how little Adam — painfully aware of his privilege, but also privy to things most kids will never see — experienced the world: filtered through episodes of “The Simpsons,” private-school culture, world travels, his parents’ hippie ideals, the odd legal jargon. Not exactly typical.

Lydia, whose childhood is also recounted in sharp flashes, was too sensitive for her own comfort. A vegetarian from age 9, she successfully lobbied her parents into changing their landscaping plans because she feared the existing plants would get torn up. She kept a menagerie of animals and talked to them. She lived in South America for a time. She felt deeply.

Related Articles

BOOK REVIEW: “The Cadaver King” unveils ugliness of justice system in the South

Regional Books: “The Removes,” “Zebra Skin Shirt” and more

Meet the Sherlock Holmes of the ‘hood in Joe Ide’s “IQ” detective series

Book review: Florio’s “Silent Hearts” takes us into the heart of Afghanistan

Cayton-Holland analyzes this and other memories to stunning degrees, an armchair psychologist leaning so hard on the furniture that it creaks under the effort. But it’s built into his personality, and one can easily see why his subsequent experiences in school, from discovering his class-clown potential to vandalizing his college campus in alcohol-fueled blackouts, were less spoiled brat than tortured aesthete.

As Cayton-Holland captures his childhood in Spielbergian freeze-frames of ’80s youth, then traces his rise in Denver’s scrappy alt-comedy scene (which he helped create) onto mainstream clubs like Comedy Works, he’s soaked with the sense that something violent and defining will happen at any moment.

Sometimes you find those things by looking for them, but more often they wash ashore.

Lydia, emotionally alluring and often joyous but intimidating in her intellect, became haunted. Shrinks and prescription drugs and living a Bohemian lifestyle — none of it helped. Adam invited her into his newfound comedy career, letting her run the door and the tech rehearsals at Denver art spaces while he ran his stand-up showcases.

(It’s a period I witnessed firsthand, chronicling Cayton-Holland and his Grawlix comedy trio members’ rise locally and nationally. I shared conversations with Lydia outside venues and chatted with her on social media. She was always an acquaintance, but the most harrowing parts of the book — where she’s admitted into the psych ward at Denver Health after overdosing on pills, and where she takes her own life with a gun, only to be found later in her bed by her brother — were mostly unknown to me.)

“It made us laugh, the insanity of it all,” Cayton-Holland writes. “We Cayton-Holland three baffled and tickled at how we were suddenly seeming to exist in the sad works of art on which we were fixated. But those moments gave way to teary panic when we removed the rose-colored, indie-film lenses from our eyes. This was just our little sister. Struggling. In a psych ward.”

These parts of the book, roughly from the second-half on, justify the glowing praise on the jacket. In crisp and measured prose, Cayton-Holland explores the tragedy that in many ways is still defining him. The grief process, including the anger and the self-blame. The speculation about a family that feared mediocrity more than failure. The unimaginable first-person details of Lydia’s decline and death. The drinking, professional help and career triumphs that followed for Cayton-Holland, even as Lydia was always on his mind.

It’s a lot to digest, both for author and reader, but Cayton-Holland never chokes. Perhaps owing to his three seasons of sitcom writing, he bandies around too many clichés at times. It never detracts from the narrative, but one can’t help wishing he had used them more sparingly, given his obvious command of language.

Then again, this is a book one can hear being read out loud (as Cayton-Holland did for the audio version), and readers familiar with his engrossing, conversational stand-up will hear his voice in their heads the entire time.

“Publishing a book has been my dream forever,” he told The Denver Post in March, just before the debut of his first half-hour special on Comedy Central. “I wish it was under different circumstances. That said, I needed to write it. It’s been a part of me every day since, and it’s a good tribute to her.”

Indeed. But “Tragedy Plus Time” isn’t simply a window into grief. It’s also a flag, firmly planted, signaling his family’s resolve. Cayton-Holland is doing well these days (his High Plains Comedy Festival, the region’s biggest stand-up event, returns Aug. 23-25). Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper tweeted a video last week from Cayton-Holland’s book-release party at the Tattered Cover, lauding the “hilarious/heartbreaking” new tome.

That’s a fine endorsement, but Cayton-Holland doesn’t need it. Not only because his work stands alone, but because his existential evolution, which emerges in the last few chapters, has found him at a place of humbleness. He looks for meaning in red-tailed hawks and an “empath” friend, frequently visiting a bench in City Park that his family had dedicated to Lydia.

It all amounts to an affecting portrait of a family struggling to contain its feral grief, and finding themselves the more united for it. A tower of cat hair and trampolines and inside jokes and blood and laughter, leaning crazily to one side. Silly and sad, clever and crude. And above all, true.

If you go

“Tragedy Plus Time.” A discussion with Adam Cayton-Holland by Colorado Public Radio’s Ryan Warner at Gates Concert Hall, Newman Center for the Performing Arts, 2344 E. Iliff Ave. 7-8:30 p.m. on Sept. 13. Tickets: $12 via bit.ly/2BFQgXN

Journalism isn’t free. Show your support of local news coverage by becoming a subscriber. Your first month is only 99 cents.

from Latest Information https://www.denverpost.com/2018/08/24/book-review-denver-comic-adam-cayton-holland-digs-deep-finds-healing-in-tragedy-plus-time/