#the past eight months have been batshit insane

[lieutenant-sarcastic]

Had an interview on Monday after turning down a different position Last monday, and i thought the interview went really well.

Apparently i was right bc I GOT THE JOB I GOT THE JOB I START IN TWO WEEKS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[dannywintr]

Full Name: Daniel Atticus Winter Nicknames: Danny Face Claim: Nick Robinson Pronouns and Gender: Cis man, he/him Birthday: February 17, 1995 Birth place: Fairford, Washington How long have they been in town?: Born in Fairford, left for New York at 19, came back about six months ago Sexuality: Heterosexual Housing: Downtown Occupation: Tattoo artist at Ink City/aspiring musician Family: Parents he's no-contact with and a younger sister, Clara (21) Personality: Small-town artsy soft boy musician obsessed with the idea of love, high-functioning stoner, chronic romanticizer, pretentious philosophizer who almost manages to be humble about it.

basic stats.

full name: daniel atticus winter nickname(s): danny birthday: february 17, 1995 age: 27 gender id: cis man pronouns: he/him sexuality: heterosexual nationality: american ethnicity: white religion: atheist birthplace: fairford, washington current neighborhood: downtown occupation: tattoo artist at ink spot/aspiring musician education: high school

physical.

hair color: brown eye color: dark hazel height: 6' tattoos: a few large pieces tba piercings: none scars: tba

nuclear family.

mother: jeanna winter, 55, sales associate at a small plant shop father: craig winter, 57, insurance adjuster sibling(s): clara (sister, 21)

personality.

outlook: optimistic pos traits: outgoing, confident, chronically chill and even-tempered, creative, artistic, empathetic, independent neg traits: judgmental, not a risk-taker, quietly holds grudges, wayyyy too comfortable cutting people out of his life, avoidant likes: drawing up tats, chatting w strangers, beer, lord of the rings, gaming, obsessed w bioshock, 90s cartoons, smoking weed, being in a relationship, animals, old black and white movies, Kurt Vonnegut dislikes: people who feel disingenuous, cheaters, top 40 music, when white people ask him to do tribal tats, reality tv, the kardashians, his parents, people who don’t like animals, politics, politicians, cops

biography.

tw for: narcissistic parenting, cancer, alcohol abuse

Danny Winter was born to two batshit crazy narcissists in Fairford, Washington, in the middle of a February snowstorm. Craig (his dad) was a moody and manipulative alcoholic who did things like snoop in his childrens' rooms, or start cooking food and then drunkenly wander off to do something else, leaving eight-year-old Danny to have to start remembering to check the stove every once in a while lest the house burn down. Jeanna (his mom) was okay except when she went into unpredictable blackout fits of rage that Danny had to learn to endure straight-faced because the wrong mouth twitch was liable to trigger another meltdown. Clara, his younger sister, was born when he was already six years old, while their dad was in the middle of a two-year-long stint of being sober (but still moody, and more controlling than ever).

Unlike Clara, who was always very submissive towards their parents, Danny spent most of his teen years fighting with them. Sometimes it was smaller things, like not giving into his mom's insane demands that he only wear the clothes she buys him, or his dad snapping at him that he does like steak when he'd make it for dinner; sometimes it was bigger things: his mom trying to take away the phone he started paying for himself in high school, or his dad locking the doors to the house if he came home one minute past curfew, which led to many nights sleeping at his aunt's house, or his friends' houses, or in his car when he finally got one, and a couple times at the park down the street from the house, when it was nice out.

A naturally gregarious person, the other side of Danny's life was always good enough to nearly make up for his atrocious home life. He made friends easily, and he was good at pulling girls. He had two long-term relationships in high school, both of which were pretty healthy and normcore but one of which ended really badly and was the reason he peaced out of Fairford to LA so fast after high school.

Besides his friends and romantic relationships and smoking inhuman amounts of weed, Danny used music and art to cope when he was at home, and he carried that with him to California. He spent most of his first year there in a shitty little apartment, working at a botanic garden cleaning the ponds and trying to jumpstart his music career. When he had shit luck with that, he decided to try and monetize his physical art instead and started a tattoo apprenticeship, which he ended up loving.

He was in LA working as a tattoo artist until about six months ago, when his sister called to tell him that his aunt's breast cancer -- which she had been battling on and off for a very long time, and who had been like a proxy parents to them when they were teens -- had come back, and that things weren't looking good. Danny dropped everything to go spend time with her before she passed, and in doing so realized how much he missed Fairford. Not his parents, but his sister, his old friends, his old stomping grounds. Finding out there was an opening for a tattoo artist at Ink Spot sealed the deal for him; LA was expensive and he'd long gotten sick of the culture there, and with the heartbreak of losing his aunt, he felt it was time to go home.

[theliterateape]

I Like to Watch | True Crime Television

by Don Hall

Traveling to Kansas for Christmas during a raging pandemic was a balancing act between stupid, reckless, and necessary.

Dana and I struggled with the decision. We spent Christmas last year at the casino I was working at and Joe came out from Chicago to play. I had to work, Dana and Kelli got a room at the West, and we FaceTimed with my family. It was weird. I had never, in my life, worked on Christmas Day. With a few notable exceptions, I had rarely spent Christmas Day apart from my family.

A couple of factors came in play when making the decision to travel to Kansas during a pandemic as the odds of contracting the virus increased by the day. 

First, my dad is in precarious health. A cancer in his marrow has been sitting quietly for years and is always a threat. In the past year, he has suffered kidney failure and is on dialysis three times a week. The idea that I would miss his last Christmas for almost any reason was horrifying.

Second, my sister's youngest son died this past April. We flew up and helped her for a week but this was the first Christmas she was to endure while still grieving. 

Yet there was this virus.

We decided that, if we were diligent about our masks and social distancing even within homes in Kansas, stay with my sister (who is a high school government teacher and has been online for months now), and make sure we were COVID-free before the trip, we were willing to take the risk.

It was worth it. As of this writing no one has the virus in my immediate family so we did our job and the trip was wonderful.

My sister, anticipating that Dana and I would be picky about what television we watched, binged on her favorite genre, True Crime. Turns out, Dana and I are just fine with True Crime, so we spent more than a normal amount of time watching salacious documentaries and dramatic recreations demonstrating the ugly face of human beings during a holiday known for its celebration of the best faces.

‌On the morning of July 13, 2011, 32-year-old Rebecca Zahau was found hanging naked and bound from her wealthy boyfriend’s Coronado mansion. Authorities were quick to rule the death a suicide, but strange clues found at the scene — including an eerie message scrawled in black paint on a nearby door — convinced her family that she had died by someone else’s hand.

When college-age men began showing up dead in bodies of water across the country, many of the deaths initially appeared to be accidental drownings. But a team of retired NYPD detectives led by veteran Detective Kevin Gannon believe there may be a more sinister explanation for the deaths after noticing in nearly all the cases smiley face graffiti has been found near the body.

In the dead of the night, eight people were shot “execution-style” in a brutal family massacre that left a small rural Ohio town reeling and questioning who could have carried out the cold-blooded murder of an entire family. For more than two years, they were no answers until a shocking series of arrests of another prominent family in Piketon suggested a possible growing feud between two families, who had once been close friends.

This stuff is grisly, man.

My mom and I used to have a disagreement about the nature of man. She believed that we are essentially good creatures who get seduced by the dark side. I believe that one afternoon spent with a two-year old tells the opposite tale. Children, when left alone, tend to be greedy, self-centered, narcissistic, violent. Adults are merely children who have learned to lie better about these innate impulses.

Spend a few hours watching true crime documentaries (and a few more hours watching public outrage videos) and its easy to see which narrative is more accurate.

One of the most erroneous concepts to follow these types of stories is that someone who murders his wife and kids, shoots up a school, kills her co-worker and stuffs pieces of the body in mason jars to be distributed through a gruesome Etsy store are insane. That these outliers are mentally ill.

I disagree. If horrifying behavior against our fellow humans is an indicator of mental illness, then we're all batshit crazy. Like the antiracism argument, if everyone white is racist regardless of actions or intent, then the term racist has no meaning (or at least no bearing on societal solutions). If everyone is nuts, then nuts is the default.

"That guy who got some trim and shot his wife in the head to get the comic book insurance is not normal" is a cop-out that lets the rest of us off the hook and creates a zone of denial surrounding our own behavior. These people aren't crazy, they simply thought they could get away with it like when you pilfered the stapler from your workplace or used your phone to take a covert photo of your sexy co-worker so you could go jack off to it in the stall of the McDonald's bathroom.

True Crime is not so much a genre of how terrible some people can be. It is a genre that acts as the mirror to society as it is rather than as we hope it is.

Traveling to Kansas during a global pandemic was insane. For all our justifications and precautions, we made the trip because we thought we could get away with it consequence-free, no more and no less.

Given that no one in my family throughout the holiday is suffering from COVID symptoms, we got away with it.

[megacircuit9universe]

IMPEACHMAS

WED DEC 18, 2019

Today was the historic day where Donald Trump became the third President in American history to be impeached.

People like to point out that no President who was impeached, was ever removed from office... a quickie fact that’s meant to pour cold water on any hopes that Trump could be removed.

But let’s take a step back today, and look at the impeachment picture with a little more perspective...

President Andrew Johnson only served one term, from 1865 to 1869.  Having been Lincoln’s vice President, Johnson was inaugurated on April 15th, 1865 in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination, to serve out a partial term of 3 years, 323 days... or 42 days shy of a full, four-year term.

He was impeached on February 24th, 1868, or... six weeks shy of the third anniversary of his inauguration.

So, don’t let anybody tell you Trump was the first President to be impeached in his first term... Johnson was too... for being a hate mongering racist.  

At any rate, while Johnson was not removed by the Senate, he also did not serve a second term, because his own party* declined to nominate him at the convention, even though he wanted to run in the general election.  Instead, they went with Ulysses S. Grant as their candidate.

So... though he was not removed by the Senate, Johnson’s own party made sure he would be a one-term President.

Now, before we get to Clinton, we need to talk about President Richard Nixon, because he was the second President in American history to have any kind of impeachment procedure underway against him, which went all the way to articles of impeachment being passed in a House committee... one step away from a full floor vote like we saw with Trump today.

Had those three articles of impeachment made it to the floor of the full House, Nixon would have been impeached.

However, Nixon resigned before that could happen... having been assured by members of his own party that if impeached in the House, he would surely be removed by the Senate.

Given that his resignation would not have happened, had there not been articles of impeachment passed in committee... we can say that both Andrew Johnson, and Richard Nixon had their political careers abruptly ended by the impeachment process.

Nixon had won his second term by a historic landslide in 1972, to be inaugurated in January 1973. Yet the three articles of his impeachment passed committee in late July of 74... only a year and a half into his second term, and he resigned in early August, well before the mid-terms.

Such is the swift, career ending power of impeachment... which is what people should be focused on when we talk about this stuff... rather than actual removal from office by the Senate.

Okay... now let’s talk about President Bill Clinton, first inaugurated in January of 1993. 

Like Nixon, Clinton won a second term in office by a comfortable margin, to be inaugurated again in January of 1997.  His impeachment by the House came at the very end of 1998... his second year in that term... being acquitted by the senate in Februrary of 1999.

It’s tempting to think that Clinton was the one President who’s political career wasn’t destroyed by impeachment, but... he was a lame duck by the time it was decided.  The 1998 mid-terms were over by then, and the GOP retained control of both houses of Congress.

People like to say that Clinton’s impeachment backfired on the Republicans because his approval ratings went up afterward, and Democrats picked up several seats in the House in those 98 mid-terms, but... they still failed to gain a majority in either chamber.

As for the career ending power of impeachment... in Clinton’s case, this took a while to play out, but I would contend that, even though he was not removed from office, the scarlet letter of his impeachment transferred over to his VP, Al Gore, who famously lost his 2000 Presidential bid... 

...and also to Clinton’s wife, Hillary, who not only lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama in 2008, but then famously lost her 2016 Presidential bid to good old Donald Trump.

So, to sum the above analysis... Impeachment, even when it doesn’t make it to a full House vote... is always radioactive.

In Johnson’s case, it cost him the nomination of his party.  In Nixon’s case, his own party forced his resignation.  And in Clinton’s case, it kept his party out of the White House for eight more years, and destroyed the political careers of his two closest allies... his VP, Gore, immediately... and his wife, who patiently waited for sixteen years... through two terms of Bush, and another two terms of Obama... only to lose to the biggest buffoon in all of American political history.

Given all this... the factoid about how neither of the first two who were officially impeached were removed, is a red herring.  It’s two data points!  And it’s meaningless.

So, what does this all mean for Donald Trump, now that he too has been branded with the big, radioactive, letter I?

Well, it means a lot of things have changed...

For one thing, we know how much he despises both the Clintons and Obama, and now he has to live with the fact that he is equal to Clinton, in terms of this impeachment stigma... and forever inferior to Obama!

Meanwhile, he was delivered to such a horrible fate by a WOMAN!  

We need to unpack this more... 

In 2016, he was striving to defeat a woman... who was also a Clinton. Okay.  And when he achieved that victory, he set about to undo everything that the black president, Obama, had gotten done.  

Defeat the social justice warriors; Democrats, women, blacks and browns... and make America great again!  That was his mandate... and is the core of his identity.

And he went on to soundly defeat that prolonged attempt to impeach him, that was the Mueller probe.  Took some doing... took firing Jeff Sessions and replacing him with William Barr as AG... but the impeachment movement was quashed.

All hail the king!

And yet somehow... here we are.

(???)

Somehow... he fucking got impeached anyway!... before 2020 could even get started!... and it was done to him by a woman!!!

What the fuck is going on?!!

This is the crazy plot twist that, without doubt, will be tormenting Trump’s heart and mind like nothing before in his life... causing him, without doubt, to go far more batshit crazy than we’ve ever seen him... which is saying something.

We got a glimpse of this new level of batshit crazy yesterday with his unhinged flame letter to Pelosi.  And we are going to see a lot more going forward.

This, in turn, is going to make it that much more difficult for Republicans to just hold fast and stay loyal... even those down in the bunker with him, like McConnell and Graham... because they can’t just steamroll this trial process the way they’re used to doing with routine legislation coming up from the House.

Tonight, Speaker Pelosi, as backed by Schiff and Nadler, after formally announcing the passage of the two articles of impeachment... basically called out McConnell for his statement earlier this week that he was working in concert with White House defense... didn’t consider himself impartial... and wouldn’t allow any witness testimony, or other evidence to be introduced.

The card here, being played by House leadership... they don’t have to send the articles over to the Senate right away... and would like to see the outlines of a fair trial taking shape before they do.

But rather than dictate what a fair trial should look like... Pelosi simply said what one does not look like... and that would be one in which the foreman of the Jury is working with the defense and... where no witnesses can be called.

Like so many other moves in the past 86 days since the Impeachment inquiry was first announced... this one was not foreseen by the public, the media, or the GOP. 

But the Speaker knows she can apply this kind of pressure, because in this case, Mitch cannot act unilaterally, and must negotiate with that handful of GOP senators who have not lost their minds.

But he’ll be going into such negotiations after having shot himself in the foot, by getting too cocky earlier in the week. The longer he tries to play tough guy, the more rational and reasonable Chuck Shumer is going to look.

And the more insane and unhinged Trump becomes in the mean time... the more the leaders of his party... outside the bunker... are gonna see this impeachment as their off-ramp back to sanity land.

The longer the debate goes on within the Senate, about the importance of being impartial, and having a trial with true legitimacy... the worse Trump, and his extremist lieutenants will look to the voting public... and the smaller the margin of his acquittal becomes... with the likelihood of his reelection dropping proportionately.

Trumps hardcore fans, tonight, are fantasizing that this impeachment will only energize the base to come out on election night in record numbers to own the SJWs, just like they did in 2016.  

Impeachment will guarantee his reelection... flip the House back to the GOP, and strengthen their hold of the Senate... to pave the way for a second term in which Trump will reign supreme... free from criticism or opposition.

But... history says his party will drop him in 2020.  Not the ones in the bunker, but... in Congress... as well as out in the streets of America... they’re more likely to drop him and move on than to quadruple down on this guy who had his ass kicked in the mid terms, got impeached despite beating the Mueller probe, and is now devolving into a flaming pile of outrage.

The candidates he rallies for get routed by Democratic nobodies.  All of his friends are either in jail, or going to jail.

He’s a loser!

The final thing to keep in mind here is... the twenty-teens are over.

I know... it’s sad... we’re all getting older, and now YouTube is being destroyed by something known as TikTok.

I have written much in this blog about what a crazy decade the twenty-teens have been... the decade best known for causing those living through it to ask; 

“what parallel reality did we slip into, and how do we get back?”

“How did we wake up in this nightmare shadow realm?”

“Why can we not agree on the color of this dress?”

“Did the world actually end in 2012 like the Mayan calendar predicted?”

But it’s December of 2019 now, and, well... Trump’s impeachment is a nice way to end all this madness, just before the odometer turns over and we roll into a new decade.

And this prospect, of leaving the twenty-teens behind... is one I believe almost everybody is looking forward to.

We’ll all laugh about it later... much much later... but right now, we need this crazy bullshit to end. 

And there is no, one American, more emblematic of the crazy twenty-teens now, than Donald Trump... from his freakish Presidential win, to his parasitic reliance on Twitter, and his fan base occupying Facebook like a cancer.  

Nobody really wants any of that to survive into the 2020s... and we have the opportunity for a nice clean break next November, so my guess is we will take it as our off ramp... even if the Senate misses their exit this January.

That’s my take tonight.

Merry Impeachmas to all! 

I’m going to bed.

*Johnson was a Democrat... back when Democrats were racist and Republicans were anti-slavery.  He was chosen as Lincoln’s new VP after the Civil War in a bid to heal the nation with a show of bipartisanship before reconstruction.