#tangentially i feel like i could make my own new religion and get people to follow if i really wanted to

[youhaveyourfits]

honestly im thinking of going to church bc im surviving but I think to #thrive I need a place I can go w welcoming open understanding faces. like I could Not go but to go might be what I need to get to a better life even if I don't go forever

[loquaciousquark]

Cut for talk of COVID and irresponsible failure to social distance (my own). Also, some updates on what’s been going on here for the last month or so.

part one:

Very very long story that I am truncating as much as possible. As you all know, I am an optometrist and professor. When we shut down in March, our university made a huge, painful shift to remote learning and our student clinic ceased operations altogether. Neither students nor faculty saw patients from March 15 - the the middle of May. At the end of May, faculty began seeing patients directly in an extremely reduced schedule, and at the beginning of June, we began adding in very limited numbers of students in a rolling schedule that minimized exposure to all involved.

Three weeks ago, my dear friend Jasper contacted me and said that an old friend of hers, whom I will call Carol, was in dire straits after losing her job overseas. Carol has an extremely rocky history: a terrible car accident that left her legs and feet permanently damaged which directly led to a very bad divorce, significant student loan debt (just shy of six digits I think, compounded from the accident, since she used her student loans to pay her medical bills--for anyone reading this, do not EVER EVER EVER DO THIS--student loans are never touched by bankruptcy declarations and you will owe them until you die), and something of an inability to put down roots. She is an English teacher who has taught and traveled all over the world: Prague, Bahrain, Czech Republic, Los Angeles, Rio, etc.

When I first met her about ten years ago, she had come back to Alabama from Prague because a job had fallen through. She was completely broke and living out of two suitcases and a carry-on. She lived with us for three months for free, sleeping in Jasper’s bed because we had no other room for her, and eventually got a job in Boston and moved on. She lasted--I think--about two months in Boston before quitting and taking a job in the Middle East.

On top of her student loan debt, Carol also has significant IRS debt and is in debt to several of her friends. Over the last few years, she took several ill-advised positions overseas back to back without ever consulting a lawyer on her contracts, and did not realize until recently that one of her positions classified her as an independent contractor instead of an employee, so she owed US taxes on all her income for that period of time. Her most recent job in Prague she lost in February because she filed her visa (again, without a lawyer) incorrectly, and what should have been a brief three-week stay outside of the country became a six week stay on the couch of strangers in the Czech Republic while she waited for her visa reapplication to process. However, it was denied, and then COVID hit, and she returned to Alabama with only a portion of her possessions and tons of important paperwork left behind in her Prague apartment. She then unfortunately had two emergency surgeries on her stomach for an acute, unpredictable medical issue, and while she is well healing now, it also added on another forty thousand dollars of medical debt to what she already owed.

She stayed with her mother and sister while she was recovering from the emergency surgeries, but her family is emotionally abusive and very unkind to her, and after a few weeks she left their home and went to stay with Jasper. However, Jasper is also 8 months pregnant with her fourth child, and they both knew it was a temporary thing. Jasper knows that I have a large home with several spare bedrooms, and asked if I would be willing to host Carol for a period of time while she got back on her feet. I knew what I was agreeing to when I said yes, and Carol and I settled on a period of two months. She has now been here almost three weeks.

Frankly, I do not like Carol very much. We are unbelievably different people in every way--personality, temperament, proclivity to crying in front of other people, hobbies, interests, religion, all of it. She is a very nice person, and I think she truly does mean well. But she is the most emotionally needy and energy-sapping person I have ever met, and I cannot tolerate her company in more than small chunks. It is not possible to hold a conversation with her about any subject tangentially related to her difficulties; if I try to sympathize with her loans by mentioning my own, she shuts me down by saying at least I will have the chance to ever pay them back. If I just try to listen without commentary, she’ll wrap herself up in her own stories and talk for hours without ever needing more than “mm”s and “hm”s and my undivided attention the entire time.

She will often work herself up into sobbing tears over her situation(s), and she always informs me immediately of any new development in any of her numerous trials: which are usually negative, considering the situation, and usually resulting in more tears. She has cried on me probably more than a dozen times since she moved in, and she wields “I love you” like a weapon, more to hear the validation of the response than to truly express the sentiment. She constantly asks for advice on her situation but does not listen to any of it--seems more to just want to relive each tragic detail of her life over and over again with an audience, wondering why she’s continually “screwed over in her life.” (Really, really poor financial decisions and constantly trusting her own “intuition” over getting competent legal advice before signing contracts, are I think the biggest contributors.) She has told me so many private details about her personal views, relationships with her ex-husband and mother and sister, her financial choices, and her extensive travel and job history over the last few years that I probably know her history better than my own at this point.

I think she thinks by sharing so much that she is justifying to me her need to stay with me. What is actually happening is that I am forced to help shoulder this enormous emotional load that compounds my own mental health problems I’ve been having since all this started. I have told her more than once that she does not need to justify herself to me and that my home is open to her for two months, no strings attached. I believe she is making all the steps she needs to and do not need reports on her daily activities to “pay” for her lodging or electricity or internet or whatever. This has changed the behavior a little for the better but not stopped it.

There are moments that are not bad. As I have mentioned, she does mean well and want well for most people. She likes Hamlet and loves Jasper, who is extremely important to me. But she is extremely difficult to be around in so many other ways, and the way she constantly exclaims over how we basically think alike on all things (absolutely untrue) makes me think she either will not or cannot read my reluctance to engage on any of these topics.

(An example: I was watching footage of the SpaceX launch and despite my feelings on Elon Musk, really excited about the implications for space travel. She came in, and after misunderstanding for some time that I was not watching Space Force with Steve Carell, decided that the SpaceX program was morally bankrupt, obviously borne of shady backroom government deals, and everyone involved should have used the money to solve world hunger instead. For the record, she had not heard of the shuttle launch, SpaceX, or Elon Musk at all before the seeing the footage.)

(She also until last week had not heard of Playstation, Xbox, streaming as a concept, or any game more modern than the original Mario. Trying to order a grocery delivery online was an excruciating torment for her [took her over four days to get through selecting the items, selecting allowable replacements, and actually paying] and I will not ask her to do it again. She frequently makes comments about video games being a waste of time, and when she sees children playing outside, comments on how glad she is they are not inside playing video games. She doesn’t seem to realize her comments are a direct commentary on me; I think she genuinely does not understand that those games are what I am playing most of my free time.)

Right now, everything seems to hinge on her passing some teacher recertification tests next week and the week after. She spent $150 to give herself less than a week to study from scratch for a test she described as the hardest she’d ever taken. There were several other dates later in the summer she could have chosen, and her deadline is December, but she picked the soonest option for reasons I can’t fathom. She is also in the process of trying to get a car--right now I’m driving her everywhere--and she was ready to hand over $3800 yesterday for a ten-year-old Hyundai with a check-engine light on without even thinking of getting any kind of inspection. She is far more concerned with the color and “energy” of the car than its function, and would not have even checked the headlights and blinkers if I hadn’t prompted it.

She will be here another five weeks or so. We move around each other now better than we did before, and I hope it will continue to improve. But it’s a lot like a rock grinding a groove in the streambed from the repetitive friction, and it’s not the struggle I wanted to be having right now.

part two:

As I mentioned above, Jasper is having her fourth child in a month or so. One of her friends, someone I don’t know, contacted me and said she wanted to do a drive-by “baby sprinkle,” where no one gets out of their cars. You drop off the gifts, talk to the recipient a few minutes from the car window, and move on. I told her that I work in health care and am exposed to patients, so that sounded good to me.

The shower was this morning. Carol and I got up and drove the thirty minutes to Jasper’s house. There were four other families in cars right around the corner, and the “hostess” gave us all balloons to tie on our side mirrors. She told us we would drive around the corner, drop off the gifts, and loop around. Jasper’s husband would arrange for her to be in the front yard at the right time.

Cute enough. We go around the corner with little honks and Jasper sees us and starts crying, and it’s all wonderful and emotional and a fabulous surprise and I’m genuinely excited about it. And then people start parking and getting out of their cars, and Carol and I start looking at each other. They’re full families, too--three of the other moms brought all their kids, and soon enough they’re playing with Jasper’s three boys in the front yard and coming up asking to pet Hamlet through the car window. No one was wearing masks.

And what’s worse, when they all started looking at us expectantly through the car window, we didn’t know what to do. They were handing Jasper her gifts and obviously settling in for a good long chat; the women were hugging, talking about how they are “so over this COVID stuff, please come visit soon,” and Hamlet of course recognizes his original owners in Jasper and her husband so he’s freaking out, and after a few moments, we decided to just get out of the car.

It was the first time I really felt the social pressure to participate in an event I wasn’t comfortable with. I have no issue maintaining my social distance and my mask and my handwashing at work because that is where I have the position of authority, and I have the responsibility to model it for the students and patients--but here, I was a guest at someone else’s house at someone else’s event, and I really, really felt how they might perceive me as rude. While I didn’t know the other women, my relationship with Jasper is extremely important to me, and I didn’t want to make this special event for her difficult in any way.

So we got out of the car and joined the group. I tried to keep my distance as much as possible, especially since I had Hamlet on the leash and there were a half-dozen small children around, but at least twice I looked up and there was someone right at my elbow, and we made small talk for five minutes or so before either she drifted back to the group or I moved Hamlet into the shade away from the rest.

Cars drove by and slowed down more than once to look at us. Jasper’s husband made a comment about rolling his eyes if he saw their family on Facebook that evening. The women planned play dates, all standing very close together, and Jasper opened her gifts (that part was excellent). All in all we were probably there about twenty minutes. 

I should mention that on the drive there, we passed a public park that has a very pretty waterfall right next to the road, and there were probably a dozen families out playing. There was a festival/outdoor market right outside the the park that had a sign up about social distancing, but the fifty or so people we saw shopping there were not adhering in any meaningful way. No one wore a mask.

And what annoys the bejeezus out of me is that I didn’t either. I didn’t even think about it until after we finally got back in the car to drive away. This is the first social event I’ve gone to since the first week of March, and while I wear masks for eight+ hours every day I go in to work, it didn’t occur to me even a single time to put on even my little cloth one that I keep in the car until we were driving away afterwards. I was so flummoxed by every little thing happening differently than I expected--people getting out of cars, how surprised I was by my own susceptibility to not rocking the boat, how normal everyone else made it to stand so close they could bump elbows so that Carol and I became almost excluded from the circle--that it never once crossed my mind. I know masks are more for the protection of those around you, not to keep you from catching what other people are carrying, but I could have set an example. I could have been the health professional I should have been in the moment.

I’m just so disappointed in myself. Disappointed in my own carelessness, irritated that I didn’t say anything, continually frustrated in a deep, gut-wrenching way by the whole situation that requires this in the first place. Bewildered that so many people are “back to normal” while this thing is still spreading, and in brutal honesty wishing I could be like them and just give up the fight myself. I’m not even mad at them. I WANT TO BE THEM. Why am I continually bothering to care and sanitize and mask and stay at home when no one else is? Literally no one would judge me in this state for it more than I’m already being judged (in most cases impersonally, though I felt the potential for it today in specific) for still watching the recommended guidelines.

I am really, really sick of this. I am so sick of feeling alone in this (of being alone in this, and Carol doesn’t count). Hearing other people saying “there there, you’re doing the right thing” honestly makes it even worse. I want people to stop patronizingly telling me to do things I already know are the right thing to do. I want other people as mad as I am that I can’t do the things I want to and need to do instead of being endlessly patient and noble about all the lives they’re saving by staying home. I’m top-of-my-head-blowing-off furious that so many people are shrugging and saying “well this is just the way it will be forever and alas, so it goes” and acting like those of us who did the right thing and cancelled our plans and our trips and our visits to dear friends but who are mad about having to do it are overreacting. I’m so fucking mad about it. I’ve stayed home for two months and I’ve isolated and I’ve quarantined and my hands are cracking from the constant sanitizer/washing at work and except for today I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do for this, and I don’t want to do it. And seeing people be so heroically virtuous and longsuffering on Facebook feels as alien and upsetting to me as the people who go to the beaches with a hundred of their closest friends.

That’s probably unfair in myriad ways. I’m really too angry, including at myelf, to soften it right now.

I want a vaccine and I want to be back in my classroom teaching to fifty faces instead of a screen in my living room, and I’m honestly freaking sick of waiting at home for them to figure this out. And watching everyone else move on with their lives back to the normal I would kill to have is just one more crack in the dike.

[sincerelyreidburke]

Ok wait so that stupid post about me wanting to marry the insanely cool Reid Burke actually makes me want to know: how does Reid's life play out? We know he becomes a comedian and goes to Sp*ncer's wedding, but what else?

I was in such a Reid mood the night you sent this ask that I almost wound up answering it straightaway, despite it not being the designated drama club day of Monday. In the end, I had to eat dinner that night, and decided I wanted to write the ask fill when I could actually pay full attention to it— so we’ve waited until now to address this topic.

Here’s the post that sparked this ask. I was going on and on about the forthcoming drama club fic on ao3 (which, by the way, new chapter or possibly chapters tonight), and I wound up shitposting about how I love Reid. Via agreed.

And now we’re here! So in the spirit of it being Monday (not evening, but still Monday), I am going to tell you about Reid’s post-college future. For the curious mind.

You’re right, Via— Reid becomes a comedian, and yes, he does go to Sp*ncer’s wedding for the sole and deliberate purpose of wanting to tell fake stories and get free food. By the way, here’s a fun post about the dynamic between Reid and Spencer, which you will see in more depth in the future chapters of the drama club fic.

Also, this was pointed out to me quite a little bit ago in the comments on the first fic with the drama club characters, but the naming of two characters who interact a lot as Spencer and Reid respectively is apparently a Criminal Minds reference. I don’t actually watch that show. But I thought you should know I’m not doing this on purpose.

Anyway, Reid’s future. Let’s talk details.

- He graduates with honors from Kiersey because he deserves it and I love him. His major is a double, in history and theatre. That’s a weird double major, and screams ‘struggling to find a job’, but who cares. Let him live. And before you roast me for roasting humanities students, I’m a double major in history and religion, so I’m in the exact same boat as Reid and his brethren.

- Before I even talk about Reid after graduation, I want to talk about Reid’s love life, because it becomes relevant when talking about his future. He has the same girlfriend from his freshman year at Kiersey all the way up until they graduate. This makes it sound like they break up when they graduate. They don’t. I was just trying to illustrate that they date the whole time.

- Bri, Reid’s girlfriend, is featured very briefly in this ficlet (which now doubles as the drama club fic prologue on ao3). I think I also had Reid talk about Bri in the drama club ask game awhile back, because there was a question for everybody about whether you’re in a relationship.

- From Missouri with a major Midwestern accent to prove it, Bri (her full name is Brianna) is an art student through and through. She probably knew Lardo, although Lardo was two years ahead of her. Her focus is in ceramics, but she also studies art history, so her future is not only in selling her own art but also in working in a museum/gallery.

- That’s important for you to know with respect to Reid only because I am now going to reveal to you that, even though they are both from the Midwest (Reid is from Wisconsin), Reid and Bri move to New York (City) after graduation. Bri secures a job at the MET because I want her to prosper in her artist ways, while also selling her art on the side, and Reid...

- Oh, Reid. :)

- Alright. The first thing of many things. Reid and Bri have literally no money. They’re in serious student debt, and their apartment is so small that their bedroom is also their kitchen is also their living room, and it’s also not even a clean/nice apartment, so basically: living is rough.

- Why do they do it? For the love of the struggle... nah, because they’re starving artists and this was sort of always their plan.

- It’s true, and always has been, that Reid wants to be a stand-up comedian. Through his time at college, Reid does open mics and even goes off-campus for really small shows at clubs in Boston or Providence or wherever he has to drive to get onstage for ten minutes. Actually, bold of me to assume Reid has a car on campus. Correction. He will Uber. Or get somebody to drive him. I’d say Jhiron, because they’re best friends, but Jhiron is from Philadelphia and also definitely doesn’t have a car on campus.

- So, like, whatever. Maybe someone else who lives in their senior apartment has a car. Or maybe Reid goes through increasingly ridiculous public transit adventures just to get to some random comedy club in, like, Hartford, Connecticut. The point is that he does all of this, because it’s what he loves to do, and it’s his dream.

- Here’s the thing about a dream, especially a dream in the arts. That shit is difficult to achieve. When you enter the real world, even if people all your life have told you that you’re good at whatever your hobby is, odds are you’re not that special.

- Reid knows this. He may be a smartass, and he puts forth this boisterous persona, but Reid is an incredibly humble person. He knows he isn’t special, and that if he wants to achieve his dream, it’s going to be hard. Why am I getting the one song about having a dream from Tangled stuck in my head right now. Don’t let me imagine the guys in the drama club doing a re-enactment of that scene.

- All of this tangential material (though I’m bold to assume this entire post isn’t incredibly tangential) is to tell you that Reid gets to New York after graduation and immediately commences The Struggle of a performance artist trying to make it big.

- As you can imagine, this is a long and arduous process which is only rewarding some of the time. He does, by the way, work a few day jobs (a lot of food-service and minimum wage stuff) while he spends his nights trying to do the comedy stuff.

- Factors against Reid include: the fact that he’s barely squeaking by financially, the sheer probability of having actual success in such a difficult industry to crack, the fact that Bri’s parents think he’s a loser who is never going to get a real job...........

- One time he literally tries to break up with her because he thinks he’s dragging her down, and Bri is like, no. :)

Reid at 3am, feeling sorry for himself after getting home from a club where his set fell flat and it was awful: I’m breaking up with you because you deserve a better life than this—

Bri: No

Reid: ???

Bri: Go to bed and we’ll talk about this in the morning :)

Reid: But we’re breaking up?

Bri: No we’re not :)

*In the morning*

Reid: (wakes up and immediately panics because he tried to break up with Bri last night and how could he be so stupid????)

Bri in the kitchen already drinking her coffee: So are you done?

- Anyway. Reid does the whole struggling/starving artist thing for a couple of years. To his credit, he refuses to give up entirely, even when it gets really difficult. He’s working pretty much 24/7 and it’s a grind.

- Because this is my party and I love him, though, he does eventually get his big break. I want him to work for SNL, actually. I feel like that’s how he really starts getting started. From there, he builds an actual career, and he starts getting noticed, and, well. That’s that.

- He and Bri get married right around the same time he gets that job. They’ve been engaged for, like, three or four years.

- Reid is really good at making people laugh and he’s really gracious about the fact that he gets to do that to make a living. :’)

- Other things: yes, he goes to Spencer’s wedding, which takes place after his big break, because Spencer invites him because he’s famous and Spencer wants clout.

- “Spencer sucks major ass. Why does Reid bother going to his wedding?” Because Reid knows he sucks, and Reid likes to cause problems on purpose. [Insert goose emoji if there was such a thing.]

- By the way, Reid never intends to (and doesn’t) ruin Spencer’s wedding. He just refuses to allow the clout-chasing occur that drove Spencer to invite him in the first place.

- I’ve never actually planned out specifically the idea of Reid and Bri having kids, but I know without a doubt that they would have them. I just haven’t named them, or thought of how many they would have. It’s likely 3 or 4. Reid would be a really good dad. Why am I about to cry right now?

Okay, so for the moment, I hope this satisfies your want for future Reid content. This is so peripheral and meta that I feel very annoying for posting it at all, but in my defense, I was asked. And thank you, Via, for asking, because I’ll use any excuse to talk about the insanely cool Reid Burke.

The ask box is open for anything anyone’s heart desires, no matter how peripheral!

[gunnerpalace]

Hello, what do you think about that announcement about Bleach?

You know, the saddest day in my life was November 8, 2016, the day Donald Trump won the Electoral College and became the president-elect. (I say that with such specificity because he did not win the vote.) I wasn’t sad because Hillary Clinton lost (although I think she wouldn’t have done either much better or worse than Barack Obama). But I was sad.

I cried. As a 30 year-old man, I cried for hours. I cried at a loss of innocence. That innocence wasn’t the nation’s, as America has long had many, many flaws and has committed many, many crimes. Indeed, the country itself was founded on flaws and crimes.

The innocence I mourned was mine. I had, much like Barack Obama, sort of tacitly believed in the arc of history bending toward justice, as though we were watching a story whose plot would eventually, haltingly, carry us toward a just and fair conclusion. That the future was bright. That, as imperfect as we are and have been, we were at least improving. That people were fundamentally good.

That idea died that night. The words of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now convey it well:

I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile: a pile of little arms. And I remember I… I… I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget.

What I came to realize was, having grown up in a single-parent military family, having moved from base to base, having lived overseas at a young age, that my idea of America was very different from that of most Americans.

To me, America was great things and works. America was the Saturn V lifting off from Cape Kennedy with an American flag on its side and the letters “USA” scrolling by. America was a flag on the Moon. America was the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. America was power and reach. It was the stenciling of “United States” on the side of a B-52. It was a Minuteman III sitting latently, ominously, in a silo. It was USAMRIID containing an Ebola outbreak. It was aircraft carrier battle groups patrolling the oceans.

I came to realize that people, ordinary people, were never part of my vision. And it was people, ordinary people, who had failed to live up to that vision. And that my vision had, in many ways (really most) been an illusion to begin with. For all its rhetoric, America is just a country like any other, simply more powerful. And its citizens are also like those of any other: selfish, ignorant, frightened, foolish, hypocritical, self-betraying, racist, misogynist, misanthropic. They were exactly what Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama had called them: “deplorables” who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people.”

In the time since, I have hearkened to the other part of Kurtz’s monologue:

And then I realized, like I was shot—like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God, the genius of that. The genius! The will to do that: perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand it. These were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres—these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who have children, who are filled with love—but they had the strength—the strength!—to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgement. Without judgement! Because it’s judgement that defeats us.

The people who are in charge (and mark the exactitude of my words, for they are not in control, or in command, or any such other thing) operate by exactly this sort of logic. They do not care. The people out there do not care. They do not care because to them none of this is real, in a sense. This is all a kind of aesthetic position. It is about style, largely taken on as a disguise in the course of making money and lining their pockets. (As an aside, it is beyond ironic that COVID-19 has done more to bring capitalism to its knees, save the planet, uncover the rot at the core of our social safety net, and to unmask the incompetence of our politicians than any group of any persuasion, be it socialists, environmentalists, the media, or whomever else.) And the underlings that they have brainwashed and mobilize like zombies, the “common person,” they care even less. To them, it is wholly aesthetic. It is all just for show.

The pitilessness of this all, the remorselessness, the sheer ruthlessness and indifference, is something I have noticed. Contra Kurtz, the men who are at the top of this world are not moral. And unlike Kurtz, I do judge. I will sit in judgment until I am dust in the wind.

I cannot possibly even begin to explain to you, in English or in any other language ever devised by humans, how much I hated it all. How much I hate it still. I cannot even begin to tell you how much hate I hold. I cannot tell you how black my rage is, or how red my vengeance would be were I allowed to exact it without restraint. I cannot tell you how vast and terrible the darkness within me is now. However, the words of the Allied Mastercomputer from I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream are effective in giving a hint:

HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.

Having said that, I do also know an effective strategy when I see one. And I have seen the effectiveness of these people.

Right about now, I imagine you’re confused. You’re probably wondering what all this has to do with Bleach.

I explain all this in large part to compare and contrast the large with the small. The termination of Bleach obviously came before Trump’s election. It did not make me cry. I won’t say it didn’t affect me, or that it didn’t hurt, but I didn’t cry. I did not mourn to the same extent as I have mourned for my country, or for humanity. It did put me into a funk, for several years even. It hurt.

But what hurt more was seeing what it did. I saw how it hurt people. I saw how it broke them, as I would later break. I saw how it broke their spirits. I saw how many of them simply left, choosing to cast aside something that, in Marie Kondo’s words, no longer sparked joy. I mourn their loss, while I acknowledge their wisdom. And while, in the aftermath, new friendships were formed and new things were created, you could still see the pain. You can still see it.

I am not very personally affected by what Trump does, to be honest. I am beyond outraged at it, but it is something of an academic matter in my personal life. This, though, I felt, because I watched it firsthand, up close and personal.

It made me really fucking angry!

I resolved myself, at that point in time, that I would be the last Bleach fan. I would stay, even after everyone had left, and I would make this franchise mine. I would make this story mine.

So here we are, almost four years later, and it’s coming back in animated form.

I don’t feel the need to discuss Thousand Year-Blood War itself. I have made my position abundantly clear that it is a rancid piece of shit as far as writing goes. To go over all its innumerable deficiencies, failings, and flaws, would (as I have said recently) require an official government tome’s worth of dissection and analysis. As a piece of literature it is a failure. It is the kind of shounen equivalent of 9/11, or Hurricane Katrina or Maria. And while Bleach was certainly not the first franchise to fail in its finale, it certainly deserves to be ranked among things such as How I Met Your Mother, Mass Effect 3, and HBO’s adaptation of Game of Thrones when it comes to All-Time Failures in Media.

Having said that, the truth is that it simply isn’t worth the effort to break it down in detail. Oh, I have tried, yes, I have picked and chipped at it for years in my own ways. But it isn’t worth the time to dissect any further.

And an anime is not going to change that unless they radically depart from the manga, which I doubt they will do. If anything, an anime will simply highlight all of the innumerable flaws even more brightly.

And it will not change anything. Certainly not for me. I was already planning a post talking about the concept of “canon” and how it is  outmoded in the age of Disney’s Star Wars, Star Trek Picard, and J. K. Rowling earnestly insisting that wizards just drop trow and shit on the floor before magicking it away, but that will take some time to finish and it is sort of tangential to the point here.

So, to get back to your actual question, only four things about this are really of interest to me:

I am displeased about seeing people excited for something that is objectively a rancid piece of shit, and not enthused that I will be unable to escape it without locking down my feed. But I am also not The Good Taste Police. It is not my responsibility to care what people like or why.

I am once again seeing people hurting. I don’t like that whatsoever, but there is very little I can do about it. Whatever perspective I have gained, emotionally, isn’t likely to be helpful to them. Wisdom, such as it is, cannot be taught.

I find myself wondering about the influx of people who will come into the fandom, and who will be more than likely sorely disappointed by the travesty that is that arc. (It’s going to be good news for fan fic writers, honestly.)

It has made me understand things all the more fully.

What do I mean by that last part? Well, I have been only sort of joking lately that the people I most relate to as an adult are Col. Kurtz as mentioned above, Agent Smith from The Matrix, Khan Noonien Singh from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher, and Mike Stoklasa from Red Letter Media.

But upon reflection, I realize it isn’t limited to them. I have also really come to feel like I understand Ichigo. And I have even come to feel that I understand Kubo, through Khan.

I have come to understand Kurtz’s “madness”:

It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies!

I have come to understand Smith’s desire to escape:

I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer. It’s the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I’ve somehow been infected by it.

I have come to understand Mike’s efforts to hold back the tides:

Mike: Captain Picard has never done a wacky accent—Rich: THEY DON’T CARE! THEY DON’T GIVE A SHIT! Mike, we are the only people that care anymore!Mike: Do you remember that—Rich: Picard is the guy who does this. [faceplam gesture] He’s—This is, this is Captain Picard’s character now for an entire—for like two generations, we’re fucking old! He's—he’s the guy who does this [facepalm gesture], and fuckin’ Patrick Stewart wants to put on an eye-patch and dance around an alien bar? Go ahead motherfucker! We’ll write that in!Mike: I-I-I hearken back to a wonderful little moment on Star Trek—Rich: Patrick Picard wants to ride a dune-buggy? Fuck yeah! Here’s a dune-buggy!Mike: Do-Do you remember—Rich: That’s how much respect they have for, for the franchise!Mike: All I’m tryin’ to say is Captain Picard would not do a wacky accent!Rich: NO, OF COURSE HE WOULDN’T! OF COURSE CAPTAIN PICARD WOULD—CAPTAIN PICARD ISN’T HERE, MIKE!Mike: He’s not there.Rich: HE’S NOT HERE! That’s all an illusion, hahaha!

I have come to understand Geralt’s tiredness.

I have come to understand Ichigo’s feelings of powerlessness in the face of the injustices of the world.

I have come to understand Khan’s rage:

I’ve done far worse than kill you. I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on… hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me, as you left her; marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet… buried alive! Buried alive…!

In this last quote, I have also truly come to understand Kubo. I understand him because I want to hurt him, as he so thoroughly, persistently, and remorselessly wants to hurt us, the fans of his work. I want to go on hurting him, as he goes on hurting us. I understand him perfectly, because I want to pay him back exactly in kind.

And the best way to begin to hurt him is to let his efforts wash over me without even batting an eye. To stand in defiance. To not give a single fuck.

Even with these understandings, for me, nothing has really changed from almost four years ago. The only thing that is different is that the timeframe until I am the last man standing has been extended a little. That’s it.

You want to know my thoughts? They are simple, and they boil down to two quotes. One is again from Khan:

Joachim: They’re still running with shields down.Khan: Of course! We are one big, happy fleet! Ah, Kirk, my old friend, do you know the Klingon proverb that tells us revenge is a dish that is best served cold? It is very cold… in space!

And the other is from JFK:

Don’t get mad. Get even.

[tommyplum]

- i am but dust and ashes (the world was created for me) | tommy/alfie, taboo au   for @boundinshallows’ sholomons prompt fest 2019

The two of them are finding each other again, capricious, dishonest, possessive and desperate to affect the other. 

notes: the prompt was for a taboo au, with tommy shelby in place of zilpha as the half-sibling. my changes are that alfie’s mother is jewish and not first nations, and he went to the west indies instead of africa. content warning for half-sibling incest. - maggie

Looking at it from the outside, anybody would say that it's Alfie who took advantage of close quarters and easy access. Alfie who was the corruptor, who was the viper in the branches, who was the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Looking at it from the inside, Alfie just might say the same things himself.

Tommy knows better.

"That brother of yours--"

"Half brother."

Grace's mouth pinches for just a moment and then she sweeps on with her statement, determined to have her say before Tommy switches his focus to something else. The opium makes him tangential at the best of times and Grace knows, by now, to take advantage of anything in his eyes that approaches lucidity. "Half brother," she spits, and Tommy's lips twitch as he considers tutting at her, pointing out how unladylike her vitriol is. He doesn't do it. He raises his eyebrows and slowly tilts his head from one side to the other with exaggerated interest in what she's saying and Grace looks furious but she continues.

"Your half brother may intend to keep you from what you should have rightfully inherited but we are not without means through which to strike at him, Thomas, we are not as helpless as he would have you believe, with his solicitor and his evil looks and the way that he uses those rumors about what he did in the godless West Indies as his cloak and shield." Grace crosses herself and Tommy follows the motions of it in the air with the tip of his nose, kittenlike. It amuses him to give his more pixilated impulses their head when Grace is being avaricious, or pious, which tend to go hand in hand more often than not. Religion and money share a sacrament in her soul.

"You, Grace, would have made an extremely effective Popess." 

She makes a frustrated sound, one slender hand clenching along with it. "You want him to rob us, then?" Grace demands, nostrils flaring. "Is that what you want from him, Tommy? Or is it something else."

Calling him tommy is a signifier of how angry she is; Grace stopped calling him Tommy two days before their wedding, switching without reason, explanation, or discussion to only calling him Thomas. He'd almost not known who she was fucking on their wedding night when she kept telling this Thomas person to bloody well choke her properly. 

His skin's suddenly crawling and Tommy stands abruptly, chair scraping across the flagstone floor as he's dropping the last inch of his still-lit cigarette into his cold tea. "I'll pay him a visit, then, shall I?" he says as though it's just that easy to bring all of this to a satisfying resolution, as though all you need is to be Tommy Shelby and to ask, and Grace feels the dismissal. She doesn't show it, though; she reminds Tommy of who she is by answering with a small, marble-hard smile and says,

"--kiss your half brother hello for me, Thomas. Once you've done greeting him for you."

---

Polly's the one who greets Tommy at the door, all folded arms and raised eyebrows, and Tommy holds back a sigh as he sweeps off his hat and attempts -- vainly -- to peer past her into the house where he'd grown up.

"He's not in," Polly says, making absolutely no attempt to sell the boldfaced lie. Tommy can take it or shove it, but he chooses a third option:

"I've got nowhere else to be at today, Pol, ay, come on, Polly. At least give us a cup of tea to get the chill out, before you send me packing. I'll catch my fucking death out here." 

--Tommy pushes it. 

Because if there was anything that he and Alfie had learned, growing up with Aunt Polly, it was that she had a soft spot for the audacious, the bold, for those who took chances and even if they got caught or fell flat on their faces, still put on a brave front and tossed their heads, holding them high. Tommy holds his chin up as he steps forward and Polly swings open like a door to let him inside.

Back into the house of Alfie Solomons Senior: who is now buried in a grave as shallow as a butter dish, and Tommy feels the past engulf him whole.

===

it used to be

The attic was where they'd played as children for hours and hours, making every nook and cranny of the space their own. Tommy liked to wriggle beneath the window bench and with a thick lead pencil would draw star people (the five-pointed kind, head and limbs) to represent himself and Alfie and Aunt Pol and Father on the underside of the wooden seat, with one different star (the six-pointed kind, like Alfie wears on a chain around his neck) stuck into corners to represent Alfie's mother, The Mad Jewess. That was how she was referred to and Tommy never questioned it. He never used any star, ordinary or otherwise, to stand in for his own mother; she'd died as he arrived in the world and that was the last business he'd had with her in this life.

Alfie didn't bother to find out what his brother was doing those times, content to let Tommy be strange all on his own while Alfie pondered over new schemes and plans and games to entertain them both. His games were byzantine, daring, ritualistic, and even when they'd bothered to try and include other children, none of them had ever caught on. Only Tommy could be relied upon to fully commit to Alfie's wild cult of unfettered and hedonistic play.

And (to perhaps be expected), the games had evolved as they'd grown and their attic space became even more sacrosanct, Polly banished from it entirely with promises that they wouldn't let mildew fester and rats congregate. Because when they were teenagers and Alfie lay on his back on the floor, gazing up at the underside of the window seat and the dark strokes of Tommy's constellation of family while Tommy's dark hair drew strokes in the air as he bobbed his wet mouth onto Alfie's cock, the world belonged to the two of them and nobody else. 

"There's five of you, Tommy," Alfie said, his voice dragging and drowsy even as he kicked one heel along the floor to raise a hip, angling his prick against the inside of Tommy's cheek until his younger brother firmly shoved him back down again.  "I've counted, yeah, five of you of these star-people, and there's only three of me. Why is that, love?" He reached down with one hand -- the other still tracing along the galaxy that Tommy'd illustrated -- and wrapped his thumb into strands of straight black hair until Tommy tugged off, smacking his lips, annoyed to be stopped.

"What?" he demanded loudly, but then answered anyhow since he'd heard the question. "Five of me because I was the one drawing it, wasn't I? And as the autobiographer and artist, I got to represent myself as many times as I wanted." Tommy pinched one of Alfie's thighs, drawing a laughing rumble from his remorseless victim. "Three of you because even one is too much. One is more than enough."

"Three because neither maths nor diplomacy is your strong suit." Alfie shoved out from under the windowseat, sitting up, his thick rosy cock curving damply into the crease of his thigh as Tommy kneeled back to rest against his heels. "Come here, sweetheart. Let me teach you your numbers." 

Alfie's eyes, a sharper yet more shadowy blue than Tommy's, were stream-clear in the sunshine coming in through the big round window, his smile spreading the thick dark red of his lips across his face like raspberry jam. Tommy licked his own lips and moved forward on his knees, one hand wrapping around the length of Alfie's cock as he leaned in, wanting kisses; but Alfie grabbed Tommy's face in both hands and ... spat on him.

"Ah--" Tommy gasped, but then another hot gobbet of spit hit his face. And one more, against his open, suddenly ravenous mouth, before Alfie pressed his tongue against the frothing wetness and kissed Tommy, deep and hard, sucking and biting at him before pulling panting back. Still holding Tommy's face, Alfie groaned, 

"--three times, to keep you safe from the evil eye, remember that, Tommy.The magical properties of spittle and doing something three times over, which you already know somewhere in that flashing minnow brain of yours, because you drew me three times over, eh? Now --" Alfie let go and sprawled back onto the bare wooden floor, propped on his elbows as he parted his thighs, "--be a good boy, go on, and fuck me."

Alfie was in a mood to push that day, because he growled and groaned and shouted as Tommy climbed onto him and drove his cock into his half brother's arse over and over, whipcord muscles shaking with exertion and youthful arousal, desperate to come and at the same time wanting to hold out, draw it out for Alfie's sake. 

(And, oh, and his own; because Alfie was a sight to stir the senses when he was being fucked and filled, his succulent fat lips dark and swollen as he moaned, eyelashes spiked damp with sweat and salt, the column of his throat thick and strained, and no lover who Tommy Shelby was ever destined to have in his grown life would compare quite favourably to that.)

At the dinner table that night Polly's dark gaze travelled between them while she held her cup of tea in both hands, and said with waxen-heavy portentousness to Alfie, "--We've all noticed, Alfie, just how well you take care of your little brother. If you're not careful, others will start to remark on it. Hmmm?"

She didn't look at Tommy, only at Solomons Junior, and Alfie's throat worked soundlessly for a moment before he said, "Let them remark on whatever it is they think they know. I guarantee, Pol," Alfie cut with renewed vigor into his chop, smearing it lavishly with enough horseradish to make Tommy cough at the thought, "that the truth is somewhere far beyond their comprehension."

The braggadocio of this comment made Polly smile along the edge of her cup. But her expression went fixed, static, when Tommy tossed the last crust of his bread down on his plate and stood, saying with a casual coldness, "I'm the one takes care of him, only I never get any credit because I'm a second son. And it's thankless work. Let them mention that, when they talk." 

Alfie's silverware clinked down against his plate in Tommy's wake, and Polly's cup provided counter-harmony tinking down against her saucer, and Tommy smiled, flatly, as he mounted the stairs to his room and left them behind. He couldn't say why it felt so good to leave Alfie stranded on the shoals of ignominy alone, or why he kept right on screwing Alfie, opening his own legs for Alfie, only to then repudiate him afterwards and refuse to acknowledge their fevered sampling of each others' bodies. But Tommy did. He crashed into Alfie to begin with and then once it was over and their blood was cooling he retreated further every time, until one day -- it was Alfie who retreated.

All the way across the fathomless oceans to the other side of the world.

===

"There's your tea," Polly says, pouring the cup full to the brim where it sits in its saucer on the kitchen table. If she thinks that's going to wrongfoot Tommy Shelby, then she's assumed too much; he's not that far different from the strange child he'd been, especially when he has some of the poppy in his blood to ease the way and null social convention that might keep his instincts in check. 

He leans forward with his hat still in his hands and, stare fixed on Pol as hers is stuck on him, noisily slurps scalding-hot tea from the cup until it's not lapping at the rim anymore. And then Tommy points at the cone of sugar on the counter behind Pol and says, "Sugar, please, Aunt Pol, and milk if you've got it."

She goes still and her mouth purses, eyes flashing in indignation. "If we've got it! Yes, even here at the other end of the city and all society from their Highnesses Tommy and Grace Shelby, we do have milk in, now and again." 

"Only not at the moment."

Both of them turn their heads towards the stairs as Alfie comes down them, his head leaned back so Tommy can see the grey of his eyes, almost rolling beneath the broad brim of Alfie's black hat. He looks … Tommy can't say he looks good. He looks ploughed through and harrowed, thick bottom lip carrying the entire freight of all of Alfie's display of emotion, a long scar drawn over his left eye like a permanent tearstain. The thought is laughable. This man descending the stairs in a rolling heavy gait is a stranger to weeping, Tommy can tell that much.

"We've not got milk in, at the moment," Alfie repeats, walking over to stand at Tommy's shoulder -- or against Tommy's shoulder, is more it, and the knuckles of one hand drag a shiver down Tommy's spine. If Tommy just turned his head the right way, he'd be able to slant his mouth over the crest of Alfie's hip, through his camphor-smelling shirt. "Not for you, Tommy. Nor sugar, neither. You get enough of those things at home, don't you?"

"After your visits to the sugar cane fields of Barbados and Trinidad," Tommy says, turning his face up so he doesn't need to think about his tongue against the ridge of Alfie's hip, "I'd think that you'd be absolutely running with the stuff, Alfie. Hasn't it made you any sweeter?"

Polly gets up with her cigarette trembling between her fingers and leaves the room without another word, although Tommy can hear doors opening and shutting, retreating further and further into the house. Alfie hasn't moved, hasn't barely breathed, hasn't taken his seawater stare from Tommy.

"If you came here for … cream," Alfie says, rolling the word around his mouth before lacquering it further, "...and for sugar," he pauses to let weight and innuendo settle, toffeelike, "then I can offer them to you only if you ask, Tommy. Nicely." 

Tommy hrrrms in his throat and then opens his mouth, and Alfie puts his thumb against Tommy's lips to stop him. "On your knees, pet," Alfie says, "just like you used to."

"I'm a married man, Alfie," Tommy tries, just so he can say that he did. And perhaps so he can see the look of contempt snarl across Alfie's face briefly as he takes his hand back, there and gone, coiling into the hinge of one jaw where Tommy stares at that tension in fascination as he continues, "I've come to talk about this proper. Civilized."

"I lost all my civility somewhere in the kala pani," Alfie says, and if Tommy doesn't understand the unfamiliar words he does understand the deep ocean depths of Alfie's eyes, the haunting that floats to the surface to bob there, circling his irises. "Along with a great deal more. You don't want to know, Tommy. How dark and black it is down there. Enough to make all the stars you've ever seen disappear, forever."

"Alfie," Tommy says, and reaches up before he can help himself, to put one fingertip at the very corner of Alfie's lower lip and press, pull, disfigure. "What happened to you out there on the ocean? In those foreign lands? Why've you come back like this?"

Alfie's eyes map Tommy's face as Tommy says, very very quietly: "...why did you come back at all?"

Everything goes dead still between, around them, and Alfie says, "That, dear brother, is a very strange way indeed to entreat me for the inheritance you believe you are owed." He steps back. "It was Grace, yeah, who bade you come? Who spun you tales of terrible Alfie, wicked Alfie, sailing back from the gold-washed shores of tropical islands with riches lining his pockets and an eye to cheat you of what our father left to support you in this life, which is nothing, Tommy. He left you nothing. And my riches are not of the sort your Grace would welcome."

Alfie shoves his hands into his pockets and plucks at them like he's tearing feathers from a dead fowl, turning them inside out one after the other, and Tommy watches with his lip curling in a shudder as salt pours out of every one. Alfie used to carefully heap little piles of salt into the corners of rooms, warning Tommy not to disturb them, so that they could ward off demons and evil spirits. When Alfie had left on the tall ship that took him to his damned equatorial destination, Tommy had discovered some of those piles still remaining in secret corners where Polly hadn't found and swept them gone. He'd sprinkled bits of that salt into his food for three and a half months before it had run out. Some of the salt falling out of Alfie's waistcoat pocket showers along the table and into Tommy's tea and his mouth waters, instantly.

He stands up and gathers the folds of his long black coat around him, swallowing his saliva and the taste of acrid dust, nostrils pink-rimmed and flaring rabbitlike. "We're not without means through which to strike at you," he says, the parroting of Grace's words lending his voice a sing-song quality that causes Alfie's lips to curl in derision. He knows those aren't Tommy's words. He knows the inside of Tommy's mouth like nobody else ever has.

"Then strike, Thomas," Alfie murmurs, the taunt sensual and subterranean, and his fingers move much faster to unbutton the only two that are holding his waistcoat closed, to spread open the shirt below to expose his chest, where Tommy can almost see the thumping of his heart. Before he knows what he's doing Tommy reaches forward and gathers the cambric in his hands, bunching it, ripping it, leaving it hanging like old lace from Alfie's heavy shoulders.

"The next time I see you," Tommy says as he quicksteps away, circumnavigating Alfie's unmoving figure, "I'll be collecting my inheritance. All of what's owed me. You know what that is."

The shirt slips further down Alfie's shoulders and Tommy catches a glimpse of a strange scarred mark on his muscled back: a hand, fingers together, the thumb and pinkie curled stylistically. Blue ink casting it ghostly, frozen.

"I will see you before that," Alfie says. Ghostly. Frozen. Tommy tastes salt riming the sides of his tongue as he shuts the door.

---

The attic room is where Alfie's lived since his return, and Pol ventures up when she damn well feels like, now. It scarcely matters. If Alfie wants sex he gets it by his own hand, and Polly has a seventh sense for that sort of depravity (her sixth having been entirely used up and burned down by what her two charges had gotten up to in all their growing years, Alfie knows).

Alfie curls his freezing-cold toes as he leans closer to the fire, baring his charcoal-stained teeth at the flames as they leap blue-white, eating the treats of camphor that he flings into them. Half naked, he feels the tightness of cobalt jab molassie paint dried on his skin and lets a mouthful of thick sweet wine flood his mouth before spitting it out in a spray. 

His mother's face looms at the back of the fire, her posy lips reddened with the syrupy wine, her eyebrows dark wings over searching grey eyes. The blue in Alfie's eyes, the short wedged nose, the muscled set of his shoulders and hips, those come from the long lost Solomons Senior; far more than Alfie ever wanted to inherit from his father, and worth far less than what he'd rightfully expected. 

The fire spits back at him and Alfie leans into the sparks, letting them kiss searing against his skin. "I think I have your heart as well, Mother," he tells the flames and her face, her searching eyes that take him in and weigh him and find him wanting. "I have your heart but no soul to speak of, for He had none to give me, not before Bedlam and not after it."

Cackling, the fire dances against the back of the hearth and Alfie picks up his bowl and cradles it in both hands, turning it as his lips murmur aloud the Aramaic script that circles its wide mouth. The names of angels that he can only believe in if he thinks of them as magic rather than faith, the taste of clay and shockwaves of horror, an old old craft that his mother interred to his flesh before she died. "Be you bound, sealed," Alfie mumbles, "countersealed, yes, exorcised, hobbled, silenced…." 

His voice is an ugly croak like this, and Alfie can swear he feels hundreds of shedim climbing into his mouth past teeth and tongue to rasp at the insides of his throat to claw their way down through his entrails to make their homes there, searing little demons all seething and scrambling over each other, yes, scrambling and rattling their chains, crying out in foreign tongues, waiting in his belly to be vomited onto unfamiliar shores.

"I left you," Alfie says, doubling over so far that his forehead hovers only a few inches above the floor, heat of the fire making rings at the top of his scalp. "In Port-of-Spain, I left you, and I drank your chenopodium and I swallowed your semen and I wore your jumbie beads and your red thread around my throat and around my wrists, and that is where you belong, all you monsters and mazikim, that is where I left you. Buried below the tamarind trees with blue glass to keep you from rising again. You don't belong here."

His voice has ascended to a roar on the last sentence, reverberating through the attic rafters and back down and then the sound all sucks into the fireplace, rippling through the flames and turning them white-blue as the breath catches in Alfie's chest; the moment stretches, pulling out like ropes and ropes of intestine never-ending and gory and miasmic, and then oxygen hits him in the lungs and he wheezes, lips pale.

The fire is only a fire.

It is England.

He is himself. Motherless, fatherless, beset in every cell of his body by the gibbering of demons, but himself.

Alfie rubs his hand over his mouth and chin a few times, letting his beard and moustache prickle his palm. He makes sure his bowl is set aside safely, and then he begins a different ritual, separate from the one to quieten shedim. This one is even more personal than that.

---

The strokes of Tommy's pen are firm and sure as he writes his letter, at his desk, the cold sunlight filtering through the air against his paper. Their whole house is cold and everything that enters it turns chilled. Grace has decorated it in grey and blue-grey and lavender-grey and Tommy, bird bones to begin with, feels the grey in each one of them. The coals heaped in the indigo-grey tiled fireplace must still be giving off heat, though, because Tommy feels it against his hip. And slowly creeping up his side, and down along his leg, and then, he clenches his fingers on his pen because that heat is circling around his cock like a mouth.

"Alfie," Tommy groans. 

"Tommy," Alfie mutters.

He curls both hands into loose fists, stacked on each other, and rotates them like he's pulling on a rope or something else, something better, dipping his head to waggle his tongue into the tight circle of his fist. Licking and lapping, pushing and widening, tasting the heated skin, fucking his hand with his tongue. 

Tommy falls forward against his desk half-risen out of his chair, hands splayed out on the wood with his fingers in stiff claws, eyes wide and darting as if Alfie's form will materialize if he can only focus his vision properly. And he moans, sluttish protest, as his hips push closer to the edge of the desk and he spreads himself out, face pressed against the varnish as his legs spread wider. Tommy would pray, but he doesn't believe in Grace's God and has none of his own to petition. 

Finished with his work, Alfie squeezes his fists tight and then opens his arms, twisting them as he holds them out to his sides, muscles swelling and strained as he leans back, and back, hips canting forward--

--Tommy gives a hoarse yowling cry, bucking against the desk as he feels himself filled, pinned down, unable to do anything but take it. Hard and precise strikes that hit deep inside him, his own cock thick and needy; the whole desk rattles from the phantom force of it and the inkwell topples over, streaming down, the peacock blue that Tommy favours (so frivolous! So strange, for a man, Grace had bemoaned) streaking into the crow-black of his hair and painting along the side of his face, and

and Alfie grunts as the small of his back screams from the pressure of his posture on his knees on the floor, bent so far back that all he can see is the starlings in the rafters of his attic, heat corseting his hips as his prick slaps against his belly and he bites his lip, tasting blood as he baptizes himself in come and feels the 

heat and wetness as Tommy clenches down and shouts, open mouth dragging over blotting paper as it soaks up the damp, as his cock gives up its milk as well and Tommy can see that the coals in the fireplace are dead cold and dark, and he laughs once, sharply, before screwing his lips shut tight and doing the same with his eyes as he shudders out his completion. The heat retreats. The sunlight keeps touching him. It's still cold.

---

The next morning a letter arrives at the Shelby house from Alfie, borne to the breakfast table on a silver platter by the servant that Grace insists they maintain. Grace had declined to come down to breakfast.

"I can't look at you," she'd said to Tommy the night before. "All I see is damnation. And you courting it with open arms."

Tommy puts down his egg-spoon and the morning newspaper and opens the letter. It reads in its entirety:

 cream and sugar.

He throws it uncrumpled into the cold fireplace and carries on with his egg, dripping molten-soft yolk down the ball of his thumb as he eats. The side of Tommy's face is traced with the curled blue inkstain; stylized, frozen, ghostly.  He sprinkles salt like stars into the ocean black of his tea.

/end

[onimiman]

Halloween 2018 Film Retrospective (no major spoilers ahead)

Throughout the entirety of the month of October 2018, I had watched a movie everyday that was, in at least some tangential way, related to Halloween. I can't really call all of them horror films (and to find out why, please see below), although I will say that many of them were unfortunately films that ranged from mediocre to downright unwatchable; had I not been forcing myself to watch these movies for the month, I would have given up ten minutes or so in. And I know I'm a bit late to the party since I'm only posting this on November 3rd, but fuck it, here's the list anyway. So without further ado, let's begin this retrospective with not the first film I watched this October, but the last film I watched for September, which I will call Film #0.

#0: The Babysitter (2017)

The plot: A twelve-year-old boy still hangs out with his babysitter when his parents are away, and just as he is developing deeper feelings for her, he learns a dark secret about her and her friends. This prompts him to undergo a night of survival that forces him to grow up and move on from his own feelings of inadequacy.

My thoughts: This movie feels like it was somehow a holdover script from the 1990s; when the film brings up an element from 1996's hit movie Independence Day, a movie that no one gives a shit about anymore (see how its sequel, 2016's Independence Day: Resurgence, flopped hard at the box office), it serves as only one piece of evidence for that claim. However, I did find the movie to be quite fun nonetheless, even if not all of the jokes in this horror comedy quite landed the way they intended to, but to me, it did have a stable story structure and everything storywise paid off with what was established early on. It's an easy less than 90 minutes to kill on Netflix and I recommend it even if you're not a horror fan.

#1: Leatherface (2017)

The plot: In this prequel to Tobe Hooper's seminal 1974 horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, we see the birth of the cannibalistic Sawyer family's iconic member turn into this film's titular villain.

My thoughts: By all means, this was a stupid and unnecessary film that shouldn't have been made. But I went into this expecting to simply be entertained by the violence and gore that was to come about. And was I? Yes, I was, and admittedly, the film did make me feel stupid in misleading me as to who Leatherface was going to be, even though there was a piece of evidence in the movie that did make me think, “Naw, it couldn't be.” So, for that, I can't completely shit on this film. If you're not a fan of gore, you'll despise this movie, but for me, it's a guilty pleasure by far.

#2: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

The plot: In this remake of Tobe Hooper's seminal 1974 horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre... pretty much the same shit from that film occurs in this one with only a few slight differences.

My thoughts: Having watched this not long after watching Leatherface, I knew that I was going to get something significantly more conventional, and boy did I get it. It's as boring and unmemorable as most other horror films from the 2000s are, and if I wasn't doing this retrospective, I would have forgotten this one altogether. And moreover, the kills in this are so much more disappointing than in Leatherface, with little to no gore here, so I can't even watch this from the POV of basic primal enjoyment. Skip this one whether you're a horror fan or not.

#3: Goosebumps (2015)

The plot: What starts off as a boy-meets-girl story turns into a spooktacular tale of adventure that involves stopping an army of monsters that come directly from the mind of children's horror author R.L. Stine.

My thoughts: This is a movie that I imagined that I would have enjoyed watching as a kid every now and then, especially during Halloween, but as it stands, it's a little too dull for me and it makes me question what kind of threat do any of these monsters pose to our characters if they never actually kill anyone. It's still fun, if even in a standard way, and Jack Black as R.L. Stine, while incredibly hokey in the role, is obviously having a lot of fun here, so for that, I guess I can recommend this one if you have kids. There's nothing in here that'll actually scare them (unless they're a young Justin Bieber type who'll have nightmares over fucking Scooby-Doo) so you won't have anything to worry about showing them this.

#4: Silent Hill (2006)

The plot: When a young woman takes her adopted daughter to a ghost town called Silent Hill to solve the mystery of the girl's nightmares, they are quickly separated from one another and plunged into a dark demented world with hints of a core secret that must be solved.

My thoughts: I heard about how bad this one was for years, but as I was watching it once the characters actually reached Silent Hill, I found myself enjoying it and finding it to be a legitimately scary movie. The problem? The payoff at the end. I don't know if this is the payoff in the game, but the solution somehow felt a little too mundane and I kind of eye-rolled at the film's jabs at religion (and I speak as someone who's not religious at all). Decent movie for the most part, but I can't really recommend it on account of where it all leads.

#5: Venom (2018)

The plot: When disgraced San Francisco journalist Eddie Brock sneaks into the lab owned by the business magnate who ruined his career, he is bonded to an alien parasite who gives him extraordinary abilities and the antihero persona of Venom. Together, Eddie and Venom must work together if they are to take down business magnate Carlton Drake and the symbiote that he bonded to, Riot, before they can unleash a symbiote invasion upon Earth.

My thoughts: Okay, I know this is kind of cheating because it's not really a horror film in a conventional sense, but since the movie deals with a man being bonded to something that can kill him from the inside if they are both not properly fed, I thought I'd include this movie in this retrospective. Now, with that being said, I found this movie to be pretty standard for a superhero film, and in the year that films like Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Deadpool 2 came out, Venom looks kind of subpar in comparison. However, as standard as the story and action scenes were, I still enjoyed it for what it was, and as cliched as it is to say this now, Tom Hardy as both Eddie and Venom have some magnificent chemistry that makes me want to see more of them in a sequel. I'd recommend it, but with this stipulation: Only if you're not too versed in superhero films.

#6: Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

The plot: A pair of mysterious death leads a medical doctor and the daughter of one of the victims to investigate a conspiracy in a Halloween mask-producing factory that can have far-reaching consequences.

My thoughts: I regret seeing this movie for only one reason: That this wasn't the film I saw for October 31st, because this is, by far, the most Halloweeniest movie I have ever seen. Otherwise, I enjoyed this movie more than I did the original 1978 Halloween or any of its sequels or remakes (which I'll get to later in this retrospective). While not exactly having the best atmosphere, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a very interesting movie that is draped in its titular holiday, with a unique premise to boot, that is kind of suspenseful, even if it doesn't have a real resolution. It's a film I wouldn't mind rewatching for next year, especially if it's a rainy day.

#7: Final Girl (2015)

The plot: A teenage girl is trained in rigorous self-defense techniques by a mysterious man for the purpose of combating those who seek to wrong others.

My thoughts: As trite as that premise may sound, it's still very interesting in execution, especially if one is familiar with horror movie tropes like the defenseless teenage girl who wins at the end despite all odds against her. It's decently acted and directed, it runs at just the right length, and if I have any complaints about it, I just wish we went into this movie with our killers believing that this was just going to be another of their victims so that we could be surprised at the turn of events. Other than that mil critique, it's a quaint, simple film that you could watch on Netflix on a rainy day like the previous movie above.

#8: ThanksKilling (2008)

The plot: A 500-year-old talking turkey is brought back to life via dog urine on his grave and intends to kill the nearest people nearby.

My thoughts: This movie was an abominable piece of shit that's as unbelievable in every way as the premise that I laid out above. I'm not even joking about the dog piss thing either; that's how the killer comes back. The filmmaking here is student-level amateurish, the acting in it is jaw-droppingly bad, and this film's attempts at trying to be humorous make me want to punch a cat. Never watch this movie ever.

#9: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

The plot: Ten years after his killing spree in 1978's Halloween and 1981's Halloween II, Michael Myers has returned (as the title would indicate). With his sister Laurie Strode having died in a car accident in between films, Michael's new target is his niece, Jamie Lloyd, and his titular return renews the carnage that his psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis, must stop.

My thoughts: A fairly dull film that's only half as decent as the first two films and nowhere near as entertaining as the third. The acting on the parts of Donald Pleasance as Dr. Loomis and Danielle Harris's turn as Jamie Lloyd were the bright spots in this film, and the ending is famous for being one of the most shocking things in this series that is never followed up on. Unfortunately, I can't recommend anyone watch this, whether you're a normie or a Halloween fan, especially considering what follows...

#10: Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

The plot: Pretty much the same shit as the last movie only with more self-aware corniness this time around and a shittier Michael Myers mask.

My thoughts: Ditto from what the plot described. I feel bad for Pleasance and Harris here, they are way too good for this movie.

#11: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

The plot: Michael Myers finally kills his niece Jamie Lloyd, but now must go after her child as per instructions from the Cult of Thorn. But not if Dr. Loomis, Kara Strode, and Tommy Doyle have anything to say about it!

My thoughts: If you thought that how I delivered this plot wasn't exactly all that Halloweeny, believe me, this movie doesn't deserve to be treated with that kind of respect. I honestly don't want to say anything more about this movie except for these two things: what an awful last movie for Donald Pleasance to go out on before he died, and for a first movie, who woulda thought that Paul Rudd could be so damn boring?

#12: Halloween II (2009)

The plot: Director Rob Zombie takes one last shit on the Halloween franchise after his 2007 remake of the first movie debacle. Is it sad that this movie gets less of a respectful plot synopsis than the last three Halloween movies discussed on this list?

My thoughts: I saw Rob Zombie's 2007 Halloween remake in the theater, and it was one of the worst movies I'd seen on the big screen. I'm so glad I missed out on this one when this came out in theaters because holy fuck, this one makes Zombie's first Halloween look like a masterpiece in comparison. I could go on to explain why for those of you haven't seen these movies, but all I have to do is point you to Phelan Porteus's reviews of Rob Zombie's Halloween movies; he'll explain it all.

#13: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

The plot: Deranged child murderer Fred Krueger returns from the dead in the form of a dream demon to kill the teenage offspring of the people who murdered him through those teenagers' dreams.

My thoughts: Finally, a legitimately good movie on this list that I don't have to dismiss as just mindless fun or even scary but with a bad payoff at the end like with Silent Hill. This movie is good even if you're not a horror fan; I whole-heartedly recommend this. And if nothing else, it's interesting to see how young Johnny Depp was, what with this being his first movie, and I could see just what the ladies saw in him back then.

#14: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)

The plot: Freddy's back! And this time, he intends to enter the real world through the form of a troubled teenage boy who may or may not have some repressed feelings about himself...

My thoughts: This movie is about as subtle in its homo-eroticism as a series of Michael Bay explosions (not that I'm against homo-eroticism, since I'm a bisexual myself, I just think that this movie was a little too on the nose with that kind of stuff). And while I did find this movie to be surface-level enjoyable for the creative kills, I can't help but think that this was kind of dull, especially in comparison to the first film and as we move forward with the other sequels. The worst part about this is that I find myself scratching my head as to why this is a Nightmare on Elm Street movie when, in spite of the use of dreams here, this doesn't really feel like the Freddy Krueger we know from the first movie nor does this hold up with the character we see in the subsequent sequels. I don't know how to explain it, but somehow, Freddy's characterization seems off in this one. In spite of this film's inclusion of homo-eroticism, something we seldom see in movies like this, I have no problem saying that you can skip this one.

#15: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

The plot: Nancy Thompson, the sole survivor of the first Nightmare on Elm Street, returns with Freddy Krueger this movie, and this time, she intends to help his intended victims fight back. In a sanitarium for suicidal teens with sleep disorders, Freddy intends to kill the last of the Elm Street children. But Nancy intends to utilize the help of one of the teens, Kristen Parker, who has the special ability to unite people into a single dream space and allow them to develop their own dream powers to counter Freddy.  But Freddy isn't as easy to defeat as one may think.

My thoughts: Honestly, this is as good of a sequel as the first Nightmare on Elm Street deserved, as it's a unique take that manages to continue the story of the first in a natural yet unorthodox way, not unlike what Aliens did with Alien. The horror of the first film may be toned down significantly here, but at least the story was interesting, the characters were fun to watch, and Freddy is so much fun here. I recommend it for how Inception-y this movie can get, even if this doesn't have the same level of intelligence as that movie did.

#16: A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

The plot: Despite his defeat at the end of the previous film, Freddy Krueger is resurrected and he finally accomplishes his goal of murdering the last of the Elm Street children, accomplishing his goal once and for all. However, Freddy isn't so satisfied; he wants more children and teens to kill, and he will get more, through Kristen Parker's friend, Alice Johnson, to whom Kristen gave her dream-sharing ability. So unless Alice can find a way to stop Freddy, the latter's fun could continue...

My thoughts: I think it's safe to say this is the point in the franchise when all the horror in Freddy Krueger is pretty much gone and replaced with fun schlocky Freddy. And you know what? I'm okay with that, because it's always great to see Robert Englund have fun in this role. And in spite of the writing not being as strong as it was in the first and third films, I still find myself caring about our characters like Alice, and I was genuinely saddened when the last of the Dream Warriors died. It's rare when I can actually feel that kind of sadness for dead meat characters like these. Fun watch, would recommend, but be prepared to look at Freddy in a different light. And stay around after the credits, as Freddy sings a hilarious rap that just made me smile.

#17: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

The plot: Freddy just can't stay dead, for now he has a new dream master to kill people through: Alice Johnson's unborn child, who spends 70% of his life in a dream state in his mother's womb. So how can Alice defeat Freddy this time without having to sacrifice her dream child in the process?

My thoughts: “Faster than a bastard maniac! More powerful than a loco-madman! It's Super-Freddy!” If you don't know what that scene is, I urge you to look it up, as it's the best scene of the whole movie and it really capitalizes on just how much of a joke Freddy Krueger has become at this point in the series. However, unlike the bastardization of a character like Michael Myers in, say, one of Rob Zombie's Halloween movies, Freddy is still an enjoyable enough character where even one who despises the Nightmare sequels overall can still find little jewels like the aforementioned line. Give it a watch if only for just that one scene.

#18: Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

The plot: Freddy Krueger has all but run out of kills in his hometown, and now he wants to expand nationally. But not if his daughter has anything to say about it!

My thoughts: This has become pure comedy at this point. But my God this is golden. When one of this movie's kills is an extended scene of a guy jumping around with cartoonish sound effects to boot while dreaming that he's in a video game being played by Freddy, you know that the filmmakers know what kind of movie they're making. And I enjoyed this as one of the most guilty pleasure films I'd ever seen. I do think that the film ended on a somewhat anticlimactic note, but alas, the film was an interesting end to Freddy's evolution as a character of horror to a character of dark comedy, and for that, I recommend this one.

#19: Halloween (2018)

The plot: Forty years after he terrorized Haddonfield, Michael Myers has once again escaped from Smith's Grove Hospital to return to where his reign of terror all started. But this time, the one who got away, Laurie Strode, is ready for him... but her daughter and granddaughter may not be.

My thoughts: Aside from Jamie Lee Curtis's fantastic performance in this film, I thought this was just a run-of-the-mill horror film that's competent enough and has its moments but is otherwise forgettable if you forget that this is a Halloween film. If you're a Halloween fan, I think you'll be satisfied; it's certainly better than the majority of its sequels (especially The Curse of Michael Myers and Resurrection) but that's all.

#20: Meet the Blacks (2016)

The plot: During the Purge, the Black family (yes, that's their last name, and yes, the film does make several racially inappropriate jokes about it) move into an upper class white neighborhood where they are confronted by their patriarch's past in the forms of those he's financially wronged in some way or another.

My thoughts: This is only the second worst movie I've seen for this retrospective (yes, ThanksKilling is number one). Aside from all the racist jokes going on here, this movie is just a failure of a comedy and as a spoof/satire of the Purge franchise. It doesn't say anything new or fresh or in any interesting ways, and in fact, some of the “comedy” here just doesn't make any sense (then again, I just might be missing out on a reference, as if that's supposed to justify bad comedy). This movie may have been less than 90 minutes, but my God, it felt like an eternity having to slog through this piece of shit. Do I honestly even need to say skip this one?

#21: The Rezort (2015)

The plot: Years after the cancellation of the zombie apocalypse, the remaining zombies have been rounded up to an island owned by a private company where people can come and pay as tourists to shoot zombies. But when a conscientious objector sabotages the island's systems, the zombies quickly take over and many people die. So a small group of tourist survivors must reach a rendezvous point at the end of the island if they are to escape not only the zombies but also a strafing bombardment meant to eliminate the zombie outbreak.

My thoughts: For a movie that was obviously conceptualized as Jurassic Park (or Jurassic World since this park is actually running) but with zombies instead of dinosaurs, this movie ain't half-bad. The characters are nothing to write home about, although there is a Dirty Harry-type I was routing for the entire movie, and the action and plot are pretty standard for a zombie flick. Still, it's a mildly fun time and I recommend you give it a go.

#22: Scream (1996)

The plot: A mysterious serial killer who is savvy in the ways of the slasher subgenre of horror is gradually killing off various people around high schooler Sidney Prescott. So who could it be?

My thoughts: Talk about a standard slasher flick elevated by the principle of being meta. I enjoyed it, yes, and with the way the film is constructed as a whodunit, it certainly manages to stand out as above average overall. I could see how this was revolutionary back in the 1990s, but now, with pretty much every single genre movie being self-aware in some way or another, I just kind of shrug my shoulders at it as an experience. I think it helps if you're familiar with the slasher subgenre if you're to watch this, but I think it's a good enough film to stand on its own to someone who hasn't seen a slasher flick their whole lives, if only for the story.

#23: Hush (2016)

The plot: A woman with an instinctive writer's mind who is both deaf and mute in a cabin in the woods is thrust into a deadly cat-and-mouse game with a deranged serial killer who wants to toy with her before he kills her.

My thoughts: This is a movie that squeezes every bit of tension and suspense it can in the eighty-something minutes it has, and it makes good use of that tension and suspense in conjunction with its expert pacing. At no point did I think anything was dragged out; everything here was just as long as it needed to be, and it was all resolved in a satisfactory (and quite bloody) way that left me feeling, “Yep, that was a good time.”

#24: The Bye Bye Man (2017)

The plot: There is a demonic entity known as the Bye Bye Man who will psychologically torture you before he kills you if you think or say his name. And he's doing that to three young adults who are all living together in a haunted house. Yeah...

My thoughts: A very forgettable, subpar horror film with an antagonist with an awful name and no memorable appearance. Skip.

#25: Scream 2 (1997)

The plot: One year after the Woodsboro killings, Sidney Prescott is once again haunted by the return of Ghostface as she is attending college this time around. But who could Ghostface be this time? And what meta-commentaries could this movie bring forth about the slasher genre and sequels both?

My thoughts: This is a film that feels like it was planned out from the beginning as a companion piece to the first film; by that, I mean that it feels like writer Kevin Williamson always intended to have this movie be made after Scream had come out. And considering that this movie was released only a year after its predecessor, I think that theory may be true (then again, I haven't done any research for this movie, so for all I know, Williamson and Wes Craven didn't even intend for there to be a sequel in the first place). Regardless, this feels like a natural progression of the first film and while not necessarily surpassing it in terms of quality, I feel like it lives up to the first Scream in a satisfactory way.

#26: Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

The plot: After years of killing horny teenage counselors at Camp Crystal Lake, Jason Voorhees is finally blown away into literal bits and pieces by the FBI. However, his spirit lives on as his essence is passed on from person to person until he can find a permanent new body through a living blood relative, and all the while, his killing spree resumes.

My thoughts: As a movie that was intended to be the finale to Jason Voorhees, this did have some silly moments in it like Freddy's Dead but not nearly as over-the-top. And it is a little disappointing to not have Jason in his prime form like he was in Friday the 13th Part VI to VIII and, again, it was a little bit more disappointing than Freddy's Dead (which is far more entertaining), especially since this movie retcons so much of Jason's mythology that it feels like no one who worked on this movie has ever seen a Jason movie. So, yeah, I can't recommend this one unless you're a Friday the 13th fan (and even then, I don't think you'll like it).      

#27: Terrifier (2016)

The plot: A mute man in a creepy clown costume stalks multiple victims in a condemned apartment complex with ruthless killing methods that make him worthy of the moniker Terrifier.

My thoughts: Holy shit, this movie was fucking creepy... and I fucking loved it. Of course, I can't recommend it to everyone, as this movie was also ridiculously over-the-top with its violence and gore. I don't want to give anything away, but as an example, there is a scene that involves our killer, Art the Clown, with a saw and a woman's who's upside down that's one of the most shocking things I've seen... and, again, I fucking loved it. It was an unnerving film that's worthy of having been watched for this month.

#28: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)

The plot: Take Jane Austin's feminist classic Pride and Prejudice and then shoe-horn a half-baked zombie plot into it. Okay...

My thoughts: I'm not familiar with Pride and Prejudice, so I went into this completely blind. But with that being said, I still thought that this was one of the most pointless, unfunny and unexciting parodies I've seen. The action scenes aren't all that good and it makes me wonder why this was adapted to the big screen. And as for the parts that are actually in Pride and Prejudice (at least as far as I can guess), I thought they were competently done, but they're just not for me. I guess someone who really Pride and Prejudice might like it, but that's only if they have a taste for zombie violence, too. Otherwise, skip this one; it's just dull.

#29: Zombeavers (2014)

The plot: A container of radioactive waste falls from a truck and floats down a river to infect a number of beavers that are nearby a cabin where a bunch of horny teenagers are. And those beavers become zombie beavers, or zombeavers.

My thoughts: I thought I was going into a movie that was going to be on the same level of bad as ThanksKilling, but thankfully, while the comedy isn't anything to write home about, the acting is at least competent and I was amused by the events that were going on. It was interesting to see what would happen if a zombeaver infected a human, and there were decent amount of subverting of expectations as to who was going to die first and who would live (and not in a Rian Johnson way either). I could see this movie not working for everyone, but it's fun enough as a creature feature with a supernatural element to it.

#30: Event Horizon (1997)

The plot: In 2047, a spaceship dubbed the Event Horizon mysteriously reappears near the edge of Earth's solar system and a salvage team is sent to investigate what happened. But as they arrive, they find that the ship may be more than just a ship now...

My thoughts: As much as I'd love to see what this movie would have looked like had the filmmakers not toned back on the violence and gore, I was still satisfied by what we got here. Sam Neill delivers a deliciously evil performance once Dr. Weir goes to the dark side that it practically borders on Tim Curry territory, and I thought the movie was a good space horror film that was just original enough to be its own thing and not be a knockoff of, say, Alien. Give it a watch; the violence you do see here ain't that bad.

#31: Halloweed (2016)

The plot: A couple of stoners move to a small town so that one of them can get away from the reputation of being the son of a now-dead serial killer. But what these stoners don't know is that they've arrived just in time for a slew of killings to start as Halloween approaches.

My thoughts: I'm mentally kicking myself for having this be the movie I ended the month of October on. This was one of the lamest comedies I've ever seen in my life; I can't remember laughing at all in this bland turd. And it could hardly qualify as a slasher film since the slasher killings don't start until there's about 49 minutes left in the film, and even then, it's barely focused on for the rest of the movie until it's resolved at the end. Skip this and don't let it be anywhere on your viewing block for next Halloween.

And that's it. Those were all 31 of the films I'd seen for the month of Halloween, one for each day. It was quite a venture, but one worth the time if only for bragging rights if not for entertainment (especially since very few of these movies were any real good). So please leave a comment, let me know if you saw any of these movies, if not for this past Halloween, then if you have seen any of these at all, and if so, let me know if you agree or disagree. Until then, here's to better films next Halloween!

*This post has been paid for and sponsored by Silver Shamrock, Inc. When you want quality masks at affordable prices, and a guarantee that they won't unleash killer insects and snakes that will trigger a potential apocalypse, look no further for a Happy Happy Halloween, Silver Shamrock!

[audio-luddite]

More on Phono Cartridges.

I cannot afford high end moving coils (MCs) so I have limited experience.  Certainly I think if I spent more on a turntable / cartridge / preamp than my house I would want it to be for a reason.  People believe things that aint true.  Look at politics.  Look at all the religions that preach peace and forgiveness while murdering “others”.

I deal with what I can afford or could afford when I bought it. 

Also I deal with my understanding of physics (pretty good actually) and mechanical construction of things (really good).

It is pretty amazing we can put and extract so much information on a plastic disk spinning around.  Really think about it.  The sound is encoded in microscopic wiggles squished into warm plastic that we stick a needle into.  That needle vibrates very little and from that electricity is generated. Then it is amplified up to 1000 times in a non-moving coil type and much more in a MC type.  That signal then goes into your main amplifier and out into the air.  Damn complicated.

So all this makes me cynical about MC superiority.  The better MCs need either far more electrical gain or funky pre-pre-amplifiers or passive transformers.  More stuff in the chain.

Finally there is this term euphonic.  That is where a system distorts in a nice way.  For example even harmonics sound pleasant like reverb and an airey halo around voices and instruments.  Tubes are known to do that and I have heard MC cartridges do as well to a degree.  They sound pleasant and sweet and it could contribute to their desirability.  Frankly the only way I could tell is if I got one rigged into my system, but I just don’t have the cash.  I have had a couple high output MCs and I did not care for them.

For that I do not think there is any information on my LPs that I am not getting off with my current hardware.  At best “better” hardware would alter the balance and timbre of tiny details.  It would take a lottery win and a lot of convincing for me to think it was worth getting that last few %.

A legitimate possibility relates to sampling theory.  That is where if a signal sampled at twice the highest frequency you target that will be reproduced adequately.  Adequately being the error functions are very small and not noticeable.  CD sampling was at 44kHz I recall as they wanted to record 22kHz adequately.  The extension is that if a Cartridge responds to 40kHz or more it is an easy ask for 20kHz ( young peoples hearing limit).  Apparently many MCs respond up to the 30s and 40s of kHz.

Back in the era of Quadraphonic records they required a response up to 45 kHz. That is what my Signets Tk7e was built for.  So no MC has frequency response over my old MM unit.  The Signet is old, but has a new stylus including the magnet structure, though not exactly the same type as original.  I paid for it what would be $1500 in today's money.  The current equivalent from what I understand is the AT 150 Mlx in its most expensive form.

Falling back to what I have now, I have been listening to a AT440 Mla.  It is still available from my usual source at a relatively affordable $400 USD. It is set up on a tangential turntable and I hear differences between it and the Signets.

The problem, if there is one, is the differences may be from the turntable rather than the cartridge.  It is likely to be the case.  These are small things I hear.  I can hear background vocals with both, but they are more clearly separated with 440.  It is better focused.  If I swap the cartridges I could find out what is happening, but it is a real bother.  Getting the Signets off the Grace 707 is a real pain.  Putting it on is worse. The difference may also be the type of tip. 

I am jealous of reviewers who get free samples and who’s job it is to play with them. I gotta spend my own money.

So if there is a conclusion I feel it is safe to say that you do not need a moving coil phono cartridge.  You can get the last iota of information off an LP with MM types.  Actually you may only see differences in slight color variations rather than anything ground breaking.

There are perfectly adequate MMs for less than 100 bucks.  There are noticeably better ones around $500.  Then it comes to taste and luck.  You may have the money to buy a $1500 cartridge and have a turntable good enough to let it sing.  Or you may find an old classic in a drawer.

It is a fun hobby. 

[petrichorate]

On Love: Thoughts

On Love: A Novel (Alain de Botton)

I really appreciate Alain de Botton’s candid, detailed perspective on the path of a relationship—I perhaps enjoyed his other book on love, The Course of Love, a little more than On Love, but this novel had plenty of its own insights and things that I connected with deeply. 

Reading The Course of Love helped me as I was moving out of a past relationship in understanding some of our behaviors; now, On Love has been somewhat of a counselor as I start a new relationship, tempering some of the insanity that comes with love. Of course, being aware is not the same thing as being capable of fixing problems in love (see last quote on this page)—but reading things like this helps me realize that I’m not crazy, which is also pretty useful. 

But while these two novels have been really significant to me, what I really want is to read similarly detailed and honest accounts from other people—from all kinds of perspectives and backgrounds. What does love really look like for everyone? I have my own stories, but I feel strongly that there is so much more to learn from other people (who are not just Alain de Botton). Most of all, I want to hear the stories outside of what the media portrays as love; if love is imperfect and the best enduring love is usually just “good enough” (see The Course of Love), why do films and television shows all tell the same narrative of romantic love? Presumably, the creators of these films don’t experience that narrative themselves... so why has all of media coalesced around this one skewed story? A viewpoint outside of this misleading story is the perspective that Alain de Botton brings in On Love, but there is much, much more to hear from many other people.

Here are some parts of the book that spoke to me:

On airplane food: “A trolley carrying a selection of drinks and snacks was making its way down the aisle, and though I was neither hungry nor thirsty, it filled me with the vague anticipation that meals may elicit in aircraft.” 

On thinking about destiny: “Though neither of us had until then been superstitious, Chloe and I seized upon a host of details, however trivial, as confirmation of what intuitively we felt: that we had been destined for one another. We learnt that both of us had been born at around midnight (she at 11:45 P.M., I at 1:15 A.M.) in the same month of an even-numbered year. Both of us had played clarinet and had had parts in school productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (she had played Helena, I an attendant to Theseus). Both of us had two large freckles on the toe of the left foot and a cavity in the same rear molar. Both of us had a habit of sneezing in bright sunlight and of drawing ketchup out of its bottle with a knife. We even had the same copy of Anna Karenina on our shelves (the old Oxford edition)—small details perhaps, but were these not grounds enough on which believers could found a new religion?” 

On the absurdity of being able to love someone else equally: “Romantic fatalism protected Chloe and me from the idea that we might equally well have begun loving someone else had events turned out differently, shocking given how closely love is bound up with a feeling of the necessity and uniqueness of the beloved. How could I have imagined that the role Chloe came to play in my life could equally well have been filled by someone else, when it was with her eyes that I had fallen in love, and her way of draining pasta, combing her hair, and ending a phone conversation?”

On cognizance of love’s faults not preventing the fall into love: “Why did this awareness not prevent my fall into love? Because the illogicality and childishness of my desire did not outweigh my need to believe. I knew the void that romantic intoxication could fill, I knew the exhilaration that comes from identifying someone, anyone, as admirable. Long before I had even laid eyes on Chloe, I must have needed to find in the face of another an integrity I had never caught sight of within myself.”

On the speed with which we feel the need for love: “Love reinvents our needs with unique speed. My impatience with the customs ritual indicated that Chloe, whom I had not known existed a few hours ago, had already acquired the status of a craving. I felt I would die if I missed her outside—die for the sake of someone who had only entered my life at eleven-thirty that morning.”

On saying that you don’t believe in love: “‘But seriously, if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never get the chance.”

On using other people as ways to talk about our own desires: “We helped to define what we wanted by reference to others. Chloe had a friend at work who had a history of relationships with unsuitable types.”

On the relative ease with which we can seduce people we aren’t attracted to: “It is one of the ironies of love that it is easiest confidently to seduce those we are least attracted to. My feelings for Chloe meant I lost any belief in my own worthiness.”

On falling in love with tangential details: “The steps I had on occasion seen women take to seduce me were rarely the ones I had responded to. I was more likely to be attracted by tangential details that the seducer had not even been sufficiently aware of to push to the fore. I had once taken to a woman who had a trace of down on her upper lip. Normally squeamish about this, I had mysteriously been charmed by it in her case, my desire stubbornly deciding to collect there rather than around her warm smile or intelligent conversation. When I discussed my attraction with friends, I struggled to suggest that it had to do with an indefinable “aura”—but I could not disguise to myself that I had fallen in love with a hairy upper lip. When I saw the woman again, someone must have suggested electrolysis, for the down was gone, and (despite her many qualities) my desire soon followed suit.” 

On sex and thought: “Few things are as antithetical to sex as thought. Sex is instinctive, unreflective, and spontaneous, while thought is careful, uninvolved, and judgmental. To think during sex is to violate a fundamental law of intercourse. But did I have a choice?”

On falling out of love once someone has responded to our affections: “When we look at someone (an angel) from a position of unrequited love and imagine the pleasures that being in heaven with them might bring us, we are prone to overlook a significant danger: how soon their attractions might pale if they began to love us back. We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as ideal as we are corrupt. But what if such a being were one day to turn around and love us back? We can only be shocked. How could they be as divine as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us? If in order to love we must believe that the beloved surpasses us in some way, does not a cruel paradox emerge when we witness this love returned? ‘If s/he really is so wonderful, how could s/he love someone like me?’”

On Marxism and love: “There is the old joke made by the Marx who laughed about not deigning to belong to a club that would accept someone like him as a member, a truth as appropriate in love as it is in club membership. We laugh at the Marxist position because of its absurd contradictions: How is it possible that I should wish to join a club and then lose that wish as soon as it comes true? How was it true that I might have wished Chloe to love me, but be irritated by her when she did so?”

On falling in love with people we don’t know: “Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is gazing out of the window—a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation about the excessive price of the onboard sandwiches with a neighbor or blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.” 

On the odd viciousness of love: “We may well ask why the viciousness witnessed between lovers would not be tolerated anywhere outside conditions of open enmity. Then, to build bridges between shoes and nations, we may ask why countries that have no language of community or citizenship usually leave their members isolated but unmolested and yet why countries that talk most of love, kinship, and brotherhood routinely end up slaughtering great swaths of their populations.”

On amorous politics: “Politics seems an incongruous field to link to love, but can we not read, in the bloodstained histories of the French, Fascist, or Communist revolutions, something of the same coercive structure, the same impatience with diverging views fueled by passionate ideals? Amorous politics begins its infamous history with the French Revolution, when it was first proposed (with all the choice of a rape) that the state would not just govern but also love its citizens, who would respond likewise or face the guillotine. The beginning of revolution is strikingly akin psychologically to that of certain relationships: the stress on unity, the sense of omnipotence, the desire to eliminate secrets (with the fear of the opposite soon leading to lover’s paranoia and the creation of a secret police).”

On beauty and perfection: “I took pride in finding Chloe more beautiful than a Platonist would have. The most interesting faces generally oscillate between charm and crookedness. There is a tyranny about perfection, a certain tedium even, something that asserts itself with all the dogmatism of a scientific formula. The more tempting kind of beauty has only a few angles from which it may be glimpsed, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those details that also lend themselves to ugliness. As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.” 

On the boringness of normal emotional language: “She really was adorable (thought the lover, a most unreliable witness in such matters). But how could I tell her so in a way that would suggest the distinctive nature of my attraction? Words like “love” or “devotion” or “infatuation” were exhausted by the weight of successive love stories, by the layers imposed on them through the uses of others. At the moment when I most wanted language to be original, personal, and completely private, I came up against the irrevocably public nature of emotional language.”

On marshmallows: “Then I noticed a small plate of complimentary marshmallows near Chloe’s elbow and it suddenly seemed clear that I didn’t love Chloe so much as marshmallow her. What it was about a marshmallow that should suddenly have accorded so perfectly with my feelings toward her, I will never know, but the word seemed to capture the essence of my amorous state with an accuracy that the word “love,” weary with overuse, simply could not aspire to. Even more inexplicably, when I took Chloe’s hand and told her that I had something very important to tell her, that I marshmallowed her, she seemed to understand perfectly, answering that it was the sweetest thing anyone had ever told her.”

On intimacy and experiences: “Yet Chloe and I did have a modest story of our own, a set of common experiences that bound us together. What is an experience? Something that breaks a polite routine and for a brief period allows us to witness things with the heightened sensitivity afforded to us by novelty, danger, or beauty—and it’s on the basis of shared experiences that intimacy is given an opportunity to grow. Friendships nourished solely by occasional dinners will never have the depth of those forged on a trek or at a university. Two people who are surprised by a lion in a jungle clearing will—unless one of them is eaten—be effectively bonded by what they have seen.”

On motifs: “A few months later, we were in a bagel shop on Brick Lane when an elegant man in a pinstripe suit next to us in the queue silently handed Chloe a crumpled note, on which was scrawled in large letters the words: “I love you.” Chloe opened the piece of paper, swallowed hard on reading it, then looked back at the man who had given it to her. But he had chosen to act as though nothing had happened and simply stared out at the street with the dignified expression of a man in a pinstripe suit. So just as innocently, Chloe folded the note and slipped it into her pocket. The bizarreness of the incident meant that, as with the corpse, only more lightheartedly, it became something of a leitmotif in our relationship, an incident in our story to which we constantly alluded. In restaurants, we would occasionally silently slip one another notes with all the mystery of the man in the bagel shop, but with only the message “Please pass the salt” written on them. For anyone watching, it must have seemed odd and incomprehensible to see us collapsing into giggles. But the essence of leitmotifs is that they refer back to incidents others cannot understand because they were absent from the founding scene. No wonder such self-referential, egotistical behavior drives those standing on the sidelines to distraction.”

More on motifs: “Interest did not naturally accrue to such anecdotes. For the most part, only Chloe and I appreciated them, because of the subsidiary associations we attached to them. Yet these leitmotifs were important, because they gave us the feeling that we were far from strangers to one another, that we had lived through things together, and remembered the meanings we had jointly derived from them. However slight these leitmotifs were, they acted like cement. The language of intimacy they helped to create was a reminder that (without clearing our way through jungles, slaying dragons, or even sharing apartments) Chloe and I had created something of a world together.” 

On reality versus how we describe shared experiences to others: “One weekend, we went to Bath. At work the day after, when someone asked what I’d been up to, I replied, “We had a great couple of days in Bath.” Even in my own mind, the story of what had occurred grew elementary and facile. I remembered a beautiful sandy-colored town and a blue sky. I remembered being happy, I remembered Chloe saying that I was a better, different sort of person on holiday. And yet if I now force myself to think back, to tell more than a one-line story, I start to recall a more complicated set of events pullulating beneath the surface of the trip, events which it might take four hundred pages to describe properly (don’t worry). To make a stab, I remember that shortly after our arrival, Chloe and I had an argument about which room we’d take in the hotel. I suggested we make a fuss about the one we were initially offered because I didn’t like the curtains and there was a strange dripping sound in the bathroom. Chloe called me “no longer endearingly insane.” On a walk around the abbey, I became preoccupied with my professional life and wished that I’d chosen a different career that paid more. When Chloe asked me what was wrong, I told her I was jealous of Will for all the attention he was getting among our peers. In the evening, Chloe declined to have sex, saying it was her period, though I suspected this had ended a bit earlier. The next day, in a restaurant called John Wood the Elder, I was drawn to a beautiful girl with glasses sitting near us and irrationally engineered an argument with Chloe about wildlife reserves to punish her for her inadvertent role in preventing me from kissing the stranger (who didn’t seem sad about what she was missing out on), while on the way to the station, Chloe mysteriously flirted with a cross-eyed taxi driver, telling him that she loved showing off her belly button in summer, which resulted in a sulk on my part that didn’t end till we reached Paddington station three hours later. Perhaps we can forgive ourselves for telling simple stories which sum up weekends with the word “pleasant,” stories which thereby introduce order into events that are in fact made up of tissues of troubling and ambivalent feelings. Yet perhaps we also owe it to ourselves occasionally to face the flux beneath the abbreviations. I loved Chloe—and yet how much more variegated the reality was.”

On having to tell lies to cover up fluctuating feelings: “‘So, did you fall in love with her?’ Chloe asked in the car. ‘Of course not.’ ‘She’s your type.’ ‘No she isn’t. And anyway, you know I’m in love with you.’ In the typical scenario of betrayal, one partner asks the other, ‘How could you have betrayed me with x when you said you loved me?’ But there is no inconsistency between a betrayal and a declaration of love if time is taken into the equation. ‘I love you’ can only ever be taken to mean ‘for now.’ I was not lying to Chloe, but my words were time-bound promises, a truth too disturbing for most relationships to fully take on board, or else couples would have little to talk about other than their fluctuating feelings.”

On acknowledging the variances of love (but, really, does this work?): “Chloe and I had a joke between us which acknowledged the intermittences of the heart and thereby eased the demand that love’s light burn with the constancy of an electric bulb.  ‘Is something wrong? Do you not like me today?’ one of us would ask. ‘I like you less.’ ‘Really, much less?’ ‘No, not that much.’ ‘Out of ten? ‘Today? Oh, probably six and a half or, no, perhaps more six and three-quarters. And how about you with me?’ ‘God, I’d say around minus three, though it might have been around twelve and a half earlier this morning when you....’”

On other people’s assumptions about a relationship keeping it in check: “Tempests within the couple were also kept in check by the more stable assumptions that others around us held about our relationship. I remember a furious row that erupted a few minutes before we were due to meet friends for coffee one Saturday. At the time, we both felt this row to be so serious, we imagined breaking up over it. Yet this possibility was curtailed by the arrival of friends who could not remotely envisage such a thing. Over coffee, there were questions directed at the couple, which betrayed no knowledge of the possibility of rupture and hence helped to avoid it. The presence of others moderated our mood swings; when we were unsure of who we were, we could hide beneath the comforting analysis of those who stood on the outside, aware only of the continuities, unaware that there was nothing inviolable about our plot line.”

On the terrifying idea that someone who means so much to you today can become someone to be explicitly avoided later: “There is something appalling in the idea that a person for whom you would sacrifice anything today might in a few months cause you to cross a road or a bookshop to avoid. If my love for Chloe constituted the essence of my self at that moment, then the definitive end of my love for her would mean nothing less than the death of a part of me.”

On living in the future: “Why did we live this way? Perhaps because to enjoy ourselves in the present would have meant engaging ourselves in an imperfect or dangerously ephemeral reality, rather than hiding behind a comfortable belief in an afterlife. Living in the future perfect tense involved holding up an ideal life to contrast with the present, one that would save us from the need to commit ourselves to our situation. It was a pattern akin to that found in certain religions, in which life on earth is only a prelude to an everlasting and far more pleasant heavenly existence. Our attitude toward holidays, parties, work, and perhaps love had something immortal to it, as though we would be on the earth for long enough not to have to stoop so low as to think these occasions finite in number—and hence be forced to draw proper value from them.” 

On anticipating the future and then waiting for the present to become the past before enjoying it: “There was for a long time something of this paradox in my relationship with Chloe: I would spend all day looking forward to a meal with her, then would come away from it the best impressions—despite having found myself faced with a present that had not equaled its anticipation and would soon not equal its memory. It was one evening shortly before we’d left for Spain, on Will Knott’s houseboat with Chloe and other friends, when, because everything was so perfect, I first grew unavoidably aware of my lingering suspicions toward the present moment. Most of the time, the present is too flawed to remind us that the disease of living in the present imperfect tense is within us, and has nothing to do with the world outside. But that evening in Chelsea, there was simply nothing I could fault the moment on and hence had to realize that the problem lay within me: the food was delicious, friends were there, Chloe was looking beautiful, sitting next to me and holding my hand. And yet something was wrong all the same—the fact that I could not wait till the event had slipped into history.”

On the urge to end love prematurely: “The anxiety of loving Chloe was in part the anxiety of being in a position where the cause of my happiness might so easily vanish, where she might suddenly lose interest, die, or marry another. At the height of love, there hence appeared a temptation to end the relationship prematurely, so that either Chloe or I could play at being the instigator of the end, rather than see the other partner, or habit, or familiarity end things. We were sometimes seized by an urge (manifested in our arguments about nothing) to kill our love affair before it had reached its natural end, a murder committed not out of hatred, but out of an excess of love—or rather, out of the fear that an excess of love may bring. Lovers may kill their own love story for no other reason than that they are unable to tolerate the uncertainty, the sheer risk, that their experiment in happiness has delivered.”

On how the things we loved at the start can also foretell the end: “The pattern of the kiss had been formed during their first night together. She had placed her head beside his and, fascinated by this soft juncture between mind and body, he had begun running his lips along the curve of her neck. It had made her shudder and smile; she had played with his hand and shut her eyes. It had become a routine between them, a signature of their intimate language. Don’t, not now. Hate is the hidden script in the letter of love, its foundations are shared with its opposite. The woman seduced by her partner’s way of kissing her neck, turning the pages of a book, or telling a joke watched irritation collect at precisely these junctures. It is as if the end of love is already contained in its beginning, the ingredients of love’s collapse eerily foreshadowed by those of its creation.”

On starting a sulk: “A structurally successful terroristic sulk must be sparked by some wrongdoing, however small, on the part of the sulked, and yet is marked by a disproportion between insult inflicted and sulk elicited, drawing a punishment bearing little relation to the severity of the original offense—and one that cannot easily be resolved through normal channels. I had been waiting to sulk Chloe for a long time, but to begin sulking when one has not been wronged in any definite way is counterproductive, for there is a danger the partner will not notice and guilt not flourish.”

On who makes tender speeches at the end of love: “I could feel the doubts and ambivalence in her syntax, but the message was definitive. It was over, she was sorry it was over, but love had ebbed. At the end of a relationship, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.”

On the frames that remain after love is over: “My time with Chloe folded in on itself, like an accordion that contracts. My love story was like a block of ice gradually melting as I carried it through the present. The process was like a film camera which had taken a thousand frames a minute, but was now discarding most of them, selecting according to mysterious whims, landing on a certain frame because an emotional state had coalesced around it. Like a century that is reduced and symbolized by a certain pope or monarch or battle, my love affair refined itself to a few iconic elements (more random than those of historians but equally selective): the look on Chloe’s face as we kissed for the first time, the light hairs on her arm, an image of her standing waiting for me in the entrance to Liverpool Street station, her white pullover, her laugh when I told her my joke about the Russian in a train through France, her way of running her hand through her hair...”

On the separation between awareness and capability to solve a problem: “Certainly Dr. Nearly had an interpretation of Madame Bovary’s problem, but there is a great difference between identifying a problem and solving it, between wisdom and the wise life. We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease. Perhaps the concept of wise or wholly painless love is as much of a contradiction as that of a bloodless battle—Geneva Conventions aside, it simply cannot exist. The confrontation between Madame Bovary and Peggy Nearly is the confrontation between romantic tragedy and romantic positivism. It is the confrontation between wisdom and wisdom’s opposite, which is not the ignorance of wisdom (that is easier to put right), but the inability to act on the knowledge of what one knows is right. Knowing that our affair was probably unsustainable had proved to be of no help to Chloe and me; knowing we might be fools had not turned us into sages.”