#the worst is my cat. whose old and dying. and i have no money to put to sleep to fuckin put us both outta this misery

[micamone]

hey guys

[stories-by-rie]

Chapter 1 - Heart of Silver

Evelyn turns to the infamous curse-broker Ariel for help, after she got cursed by a dead granny’s fork.

words: 3763 || masterlist

Despite the late summer, the air had grown cold with the night’s storm. The wind was blowing the rain drops harshly against Evelyn’s coat and the persistent noise of its dripping onto her hood mixed with the ringing sound in her ears. With the anxiety that threatened to overflow, she shivered. Even if her hood saved her from the worst, she had to hold it in place with one hand so the wind wouldn’t blow it off. Now, that hand was wet, cold and shook even more than the rest of her body. Tripping from one foot to the other did nothing to bring her warmth or to disperse the gnawing threat of doom inside her chest.

    Once again, she pulled out her phone. The fourth of September, 22:34, a Thursday, no new notifications, battery at eleven percent. Raindrops landed on the bright screen and distorted the picture of a flower field in irregular splashes. From the upper right corner, lines like spider legs drew through them. 

    Frustration settled in her, taking coin-sized bites. Her eyes flicked over to the doorbell again -- she had rung two times already -- maybe a third time would be all right? She knew that Ariel was home, so if they hadn’t opened the door after two times, a third ring wouldn't make them either. 

    Still.

    Just as Evelyn was about to press the bell again, the door opened slightly, barely enough for her to make contact with one eye. 

    “Why didn’t you text me that you’d come?” 

    “I did. You haven’t read it yet.”

    Ariel pulled out their old flip phone, dipping their glasses into bright white reflections, and skimmed through what had to be a real handful of messages. 

    “Ah. Oh. Hm.” They stared at a message for a while before they looked up to Evelyn again, opened the door a bit wider. “There will be a sale for winter tyres down in the old factory on the main road next week.”

    Evelyn was too stunned to answer anything but, “Ariel, you don’t drive. You don’t have a car.”

    “That’s true.”

    “It’s summer.”

    “Are you sure?” Ariel looked at the rainy night sky, and squinted their eyes. 

    “Listen, Ariel. I wrote in my message-”

    “Yeah, I read your message. So what?” They looked up at Evelyn again, closed the door a bit more to shelter from the rain. 

    “I didn’t know who else to ask.” Her voice sounded a bit thin to her own ears then, the uncertainty growing with each passing minute. But she had held on for hours now, and it didn’t feel like she had it in herself to hold on for much longer. 

    Ariel scoffed. “Yeah. Obviously, asking anyone but me would be foolish, but I am really busy, you know? A curse is a curse, you should just let it run its course. I am not some sort of all-purpose antidote.”

    Evelyn managed to put her foot in the door before Ariel shut it. 

    “Please? Listen, no one knows curses as well as you do. I am afraid I don’t have that long and I absolutely can’t do this by myself.”

    With both hands against the door, the wind had enough freedom to rob her of her hood, so it drenched her within seconds, stung on her skin like a hundred little needle pricks. 

    “There’s just a handful of curses that more or less kill. You want me to believe that you got one of those? Do you know how hard that is? What would be in it for me?” Ariel eyed her suspiciously. All Evelyn did was to pull up her sleeves as far as possible. Where the skin was thinner and fairer, the black veins stood in sharp contrast to her body, shimmering in a dark grey. Ariel’s eyes widened in surprise and excitement.

    “A Heart of Silver? How far has it spread?” They grabbed her wrist. 

    “It’s in my whole blood-stream,” Evelyn replied and pushed her hair from her temples where her veins were just as black. Ariel looked up with an ‘ah’ on their lips and then let go of her wrist again. 

    “So, I’d get the reaping?”

    “It’s all I could offer.”

    “Say, if we fail and you’ll be a silver statue, can I keep you then? Put you in the corner of my kitchen?”

    “This is not funny, Ariel.” 

    “That’s a yes then. Fine. Come in.” They opened the door enough for Evelyn to step through. Instantly, they were caught in this different world of theirs. She was quite certain that Ariel had put a curse on their own apartment somehow that captured the people who walked in, but so far she did not have evidence to support that theory.

    Books towered against the walls everywhere. There was a pot with an enormous fern right in the middle of the hallway. Not a single lamp was lit, and Evelyn could not shake the feeling that it was to hide the shadows of some ghosts living there as well. Perhaps it was the people the not-yet-proven-curse trapped inside of it.

    “You must tell me everything,” Ariel mumbled while pulling out a few books out of their stacks, seemingly randomly.

    “So, I got an unexpected call from a granny in the morning. She asked me to help with a haunting. I thought I could just handle a simple ghost. You know that I am good with ghosts.” Evelyn tried to follow them, focusing more on not tripping over most likely enchanted vases, gemstones, and one array that hopefully was not used to curse the apartment.

    “I am quite aware, that’s why I don’t like you coming over.”

    Or maybe the array was drawn to specifically keep her out, who knew.

    “So, I drove over in the afternoon. Just one old granny and a ghost. There is a nice magnolia tree in the garden. It’s next to the old school that’s half covered in ivy and the neighbours complain about it all the time because they think it’s weed, although ivy is very useful with old houses for climatic purposes-” Distinctly, she noticed how she started to ramble, her tongue too fast for her mind to catch up on. 

    “Please, for the love of the currently absent blood in your veins, cut yourself short,” Ariel thankfully interrupted and pushed the door to the kitchen open. Evelyn tried very hard to calm herself down with a few measured and calculated breaths, focused on the red lava lamp on the windowsill instead. Multiple candles were lit on the table and next to them slept her black cat whose name Evelyn had never learnt. She only knew her as a beast, my evil gremlin, an annoying menace, YOU!, and the apple of my eye. Currently, the proximity to the candles was once again anxiety inducing.

    Ariel pointed at one of the chairs, so Evelyn sat down and forced herself to keep talking, wiped some of the rain out of her face, along with her sticky bangs that hung in her eyes. 

“The granny didn’t have money to pay, which is fine, you know I like to help where I can, right? And she had this very evil looking set of silverware in her kitchen drawer, so I started to work on it and she kept rambling about how I had a heart of silver -- which was already a bit weird, I guess, since usually it’s a heart of gold, right? -- but at that moment, I thought she was just old and confused because I was working for free, right? Well, until I poked my finger on a fork and that’s when it happened.”

    “Was that the short version?”

    “I left out a lot of detail.”

    The coffee machine beeped and Ariel filled the matching cups. They slid one with big bold yellow letters over to Evelyn that read Best Curse Victim, and kept the one with Best Curse Broker In The Whole Wide World. 

    “Did you custom-make these?” Evelyn asked and Ariel set down the two cups with a grin. They knew that Evelyn preferred tea, but, Tea is for curses and rituals, you can’t make me drink hot water with leaves, they liked to argue. 

    Ariel raised an eyebrow at her quizzically. “I assume the granny then turned out to be a ghost?”

    “She apparently had died over three months ago, yes.”

There was a deep sigh coming from Ariel as they put up their feet onto the table, dangerously close to the candles.

    “And never once while working on silverware and getting praised for your silver heart did you consider the option that perhaps you were getting cursed?”

    “Ghosts get better at hiding themselves each day, Ariel,” Evelyn replied with multiple glances to the shadows. Ariel only offered a weak smile and nodded while they pushed the books into the middle of the table, tapped on it with their sparkly painted fingernails. 

    “I have fourteen books on the Heart of Silver, all very rare collections from back when curse-brokers still thought that this classy beast was curable. I also have read all of these fourteen books.” Ariel took a sip from their coffee and grabbed another pair of glasses that were tucked into a pot of parsley on the windowsill next to the lava lamp. They pushed their former golden glasses up into their soft pink dyed hair. 

Last time they had met, it had been deep purple. They had tried to make her believe once that it was tied to their moods, like those 90s mood rings of which they wore three. “Obviously, I read all the books you can find in this apartment, I wouldn’t keep anything that just took up space.” They opened the right page on the first try and slid the book over to Evelyn. The pages were blank.

    “The pages are blank.”

    “Ah, right. I put a curse on them. No one steals books you can’t read, am I right? Here,” they slid over the glasses to Evelyn, and once she put them on, black letters appeared on the blank pages. Just none she could read.

    “I don’t speak that language, Ariel.”

    “Ah, it’s just encrypted.”

Evelyn sighed deeply and put the glasses down again. She warmed her icy fingers on the coffee cup in front of her, the bitter smell of it made her jittery enough.

    “Please, can you just tell me what you know about it? I am certain that you know your curses, you don’t have to prove anything by showing me book excerpts I can’t read anyway.”

    Ariel smirked openly then, their eyes clearly tracing the black lines on her skin where the liquid silver was running through her veins.

    “The Heart of Silver is a curse that dates back all the way to the sixteenth century. That ultimately makes it a curse of the black night level, because we don’t know its origin anymore, so understanding it has become as good as impossible. Legends say that it was just another love story, though. Why it is a heart of silver and not of gold is equally unclear. Perhaps they didn’t know any better. Then again, a Heart of Gold curse already exists, so. Anyway, the story says that one woman, got  jealous of her maid. The maid, being kind-hearted, was just too lovely to her husband, you see. So when that woman died she cursed her maid on her deathbed and said something along the lines of With your heart made of silver, you still won’t be worth enough to appeal to him. Maybe you could feed his greed by turning into actual silver instead.” They took another sip of coffee, taking out another book from the stack on the table and flipping a page open. “How the curse is passed on is totally unclear as well, although, as you might have noticed, contact with silver seems to be one determinant, as well as someone actually cursing you, also known as a ghost. But why and how? No one knows.”

    “Not even you?” Evelyn asked, feeling punched out. She pulled the new book closer, putting on the glasses again, and there they were. The photos with the evidence that this curse existed. That it was more than just a rumour, a scary story told to teach children not to steal. Proof that her mind wasn’t playing tricks on her; that she had understood the situation of her own doom correctly. 

    A silver statue of a man, the face too realistic to be art, distorted in a scream. His arms were outstretched, all around him scrolls of parchment. 1982, Vienna.

    A silver statue of an old woman, sleeping in her bed. She looked much more peaceful, but her brows were drawn together, giving her discomfort away. 1864, Kuressaare.

    A teenage boy, locked inside a dark room with handcuffs tied to the walls, screams on his silver lips. 2003, Hildesheim.

    Evelyn didn’t need to look at more of them. It just made her picture herself as one more of these photos. A corpulent young woman, the face silver but clearly pleading for her life-

    “Does it hurt? Do you know?”

    “Not sure, sorry. Would it help if you knew?” Ariel looked directly at her then, the soft pink hair glimmering red from the lamp, the candles’ lights dancing on her glasses.

    “Probably not.”

    “Then let’s try to make it so that you don’t have to find out. But just to be clear, I will take notes on the curse’s progress, for scientific purposes.” They pulled a notebook out from under their coffee cup.

    “Sure.”

    Ariel grinned and drummed with their golden painted nails onto the table.

    “Soon I will be the first curse-broker to have dealt with the Heart of Silver. Everyone will know my name. Maybe someone will finally publish my book. My google reviews will skyrocket!”

    “You always say a truly good curse-broker gets only bad reviews. And that book doesn’t get published because you describe for three hundred pages how to create various curses. ”

    “That’s because if you want to deal with curses, you need to understand them from the inside out first. Also, creating curses can be fun, I promise.”

    With a glimpse to the shadows, Evelyn nodded in slight agreement. Unease found its way back to her, like an intrusive thought stuck to her skin. The more she listened to her body, the more she felt like it had changed. She was sure to feel the silver in her veins, believed that her body had gotten heavier – was silver heavier than blood? She was sure that her skin had gotten harder where it ran through her.

    “You still there?” Ariel waved before her eyes, nearly poked her, but Evelyn flinched back before they got to. She finally took a sip of her own coffee. The bitterness made her squirm but at least she was able to still taste it.

“So, if the books are all useless, as you say, then where do we start?”

    “Well, as I said, if you want to deal with curses, you have to know them from the inside out. Only if I know how you got it in the first place, I will have a chance at extracting it and exchanging it for a different one. A curse is a near-living thing, after all. If I just rip it out, it might do more damage than aid. I need to know why you fit in its scheme, how it develops inside of you. So I would say we should start with the ghost who put that curse on you, since that granny might be able to answer those questions, but I assume you hunted the shit out of that ghost, didn’t you?”

    Evelyn froze as she remembered the exchange, the prospect of a new curse. She gave her best not to tremble too much as she asked, “The new curse-”

“I can’t tell you what it will be yet.”

“But how-”

“Okay, I’ll give you the short explanation. Any curse corrupts its host. Your body lets it nest inside of it, and usually you will let the curse run its course until it’s fulfilled or withered and the space will grow back. More or less. If I have to extract the curse, the space will be hollow and harm your body and mind. It leaves room for possessions, diseases and much more. So instead I extract the awful curse and give you a new one that is slightly less awful. But in order to do that, the new curse needs to fill out the same space. I need to understand both curses to the T, so that this procedure works. That’s also why I can’t tell you anything about the new curse yet, because I need to understand the Heart of Silver first. Got it?” 

Evelyn nodded, a little as if in a daze. 

“So, the granny?”

“Gone, yes.” Evelyn sighed deeply. “I didn’t think that she would be of help. I just saw her as a ghost and sent her off.”

    “The mark?”

    “Just the silver veins, they started in the hand with which I touched the fork.”

    “Mn. It looks like it has spread completely since then. That doesn’t need to mean anything, though.” Ariel wrote down notes in a book, the pen’s ink invisible to Evelyn’s eyes.

    “When exactly was this?”

    “Somewhen between five and six, this evening.”

    Ariel wrote down more notes, far more than Evelyn had said, so she could only assume that those were some curse related conclusions. After a few minutes, Ariel had emptied their second cup of coffee. At this point, they looked up again and pressed their lips together.

    “I would like to see the curse medium then. You don’t happen to still have that fork?”

    Evelyn shook her head, “I assume it’s still in the house, though. I saw the police wrapping everything up as well, so we should be alone there.” She forced the rest of her coffee down her throat, ignoring how it upset her stomach just a moment later. Ariel nodded and got up, carrying the two cups over to the sink.

    “Well, then. Let’s get going, shall we?” They nodded towards the door and Evelyn went to follow them. Before Ariel closed the kitchen door, she looked back. “Shouldn’t you blow out your candles? Your cat is so close and-”

    “Oh, I cursed the candles, don’t worry. They don’t burn anything. I feel a little bad for doing it, though. Imagine being a fire and then the only thing you can burn is candle wax. So sad.”

    They reached the door and Evelyn stopped once more in her tracks.

    “Do you really want to leave like that?” she asked and looked down Ariel’s onesie with ghost-print.

    “Oh, right, shoes,” they answered, fetching a pair of run down converse, not bothering to tie the laces. They tucked them in and pointed to the door. “Now?”

    But Evelyn still felt like they had forgotten something important. Something they needed to consider before they left. Maybe it was just her fear of entering that house again where she had gotten cursed in the first place, the fear of not finding what they needed to. The fear that she would so utterly fail in the quest of saving her life, of destroying the curse. It was too close to past memories, perhaps. The image of the old lady dissipating into thin air as she sent her off still lingered in her mind, and she couldn’t help but see herself in that place.

    “Ah, of course,” Ariel mumbled, pulled out a single hair from Evelyn and burnt it in the candle standing next to the door. “My mistake.” They waved to the outside, and finally Evelyn found the strength to walk again.

    “So you did curse your own apartment!”

    “Nonsense, I never said that,” Ariel replied with a grin and the rain poured down on them once more. Like needles, it pricked on her skin. If she turned into a silver statue, she would never feel it again. They ran to her old Corolla, parked so very badly in line.

    “You know, those winter tires are really cheap now. You should get them as long as they are affordable. I bet they will be much pricier once it’s winter.”

    “Gotta make it to winter first,” Evelyn muttered and turned on the motor. The radio gave white noise – a side effect of getting cursed, or maybe just a coincidental break-down.

    “So pessimistic. Really, you’re insufferable.” Ariel started to play snake on their phone. 

The way to the old house was quiet except for the occasional white noise when the radio came to life unasked. The road was mostly deserted at the late hour, some street lights only blinked yellow already. It was not until she turned on the road to leave the small city that Ariel shifted in the front seat.

    “Where were you the whole last year, Evelyn?” Their voice was softer now. The phone tucked inside their pocket. With a quick glance, she could see that they looked outside. Of course, they would ask. Evelyn had known that. Despite this, she still didn’t know what to answer. How to say the words to Ariel that she could hardly think to herself.

    “I just… I was not so well.” A kind euphemism for lying in bed all day, ignoring her calls and living off of pizza and instant noodles.

    “We could have really used you then. There was that Undine in the sink of that favourite restaurant of yours. Took three of us to get her out of there. You could have probably managed her yourself.” A harsh way to say that she had been missed. A nice way to say that Ariel was hurt.

    “I’m sorry.” Lousy words. They would not make up for letting her friends down. Not really.

    “It’s fine, you don’t have to apologize.” She had to, though. She really had to.

    Evelyn pulled into the street, the utmost street of the small-town. One could see the forest behind it from here. At the end of the street stood an old house, next to the old school that was covered in ivy.

    “I just wanted you to know that you’re needed, even if you think you aren’t. Or I don’t know… Ah, you know.” Words were hard for Ariel, too. But Evelyn thought she understood them, and nodded with a slight smile. It had been like that between them from the beginning, somehow.

----

WIP intro || masterlist || next chapter

[bookandcranny]

Stone Heart Gambit

Part 1 - Chapter 1

Soso likes her town, but she’s starting to think she’s never going to find a single interesting thing about it. There’s a supermarket, a park, a few family-owned shops and eateries that haven’t yet succumbed to the pressure put on them by the encroaching chain franchises. Pretty standard small-town fair, not unlike the one she grew up in.

Therein lies the problem. She’d been so excited to leave home for the first time all those semesters ago that she hadn’t considered that change doesn’t always equal improvement, and putting a hundred miles of distance between her and her old problems didn’t guarantee her a perfect new life. She doesn’t particularly miss living with her parents, rather she finds herself feeling homesick for a place she doesn’t think she’s found yet. There’s a restlessness in her-- her mom claims she gets it from her dad, and vice versa. It’s plagued her in small ways all her life, in the way she finds new friendships but struggles to make them last, in the way she throws herself into new passions only to grow bored of them within weeks, in the way college had seemed so thrilling and full of promise when she was a bright-eyed freshman and now here she is, on indefinite academic leave, struggling to remember what it was she saw in the place that was worth a lifetime of student loans.

She only has so long to figure it out too. She wants to finish her degree, she does, but art requires inspiration and there’s only so much to photograph in a town whose main export is cow shit and stale gossip. If she changes her major again at this point her advisor is for real going to mount her head on a pike outside the bursar’s office, so she has to at least try.

It doesn’t help that she’s pretty much limited to the immediate vicinity surrounding her housing co-op until she either manages to get herself a car or the bus drivers union wins their latest standoff with city hall. Cars cost money though, which means getting a real fulltime job, which she expects will spell the end for any lingering chance of her going back to school anyway. The snake devours its tail, and Soso commutes by bike.

Soso’s handy; she’s confident she can fix anything given enough time, the right tools, and a couple reliable video tutorials. That, among other odd jobs, is her main preoccupation right now. It’s something, but she can’t picture herself changing tires and cleaning out gutters for elderly neighbors to support her Chinese takeout dependency forever. At the rate she’s going, her best customers are going to start dying off before she graduates.

On that morbid note, Soso decides she needs to get out of the house. She slings her bag over her back just in case she manages to run into something photo-worthy and grabs her bike. It’s a brisk autumn afternoon and the fresh air is just what she needs.

On the way out she runs into one of her housemates, Carmen the highly caffeinated, returning from campus looking frazzled. Soso isn’t particularly close with any of her housemates, frequently as they tend to come and go, but that doesn’t stop her from offering her sympathies.

“Any luck with the research?”

Carmen groans. “My paper is doomed. Remind me why I thought ‘modern impact of classical mythology’ was a good choice for my level 300 history course?”

“Uh, beats me.” In reality she thinks it sounds like a fun subject, but it doesn’t feel her place to say so given that while Carmen’s been slaving away at the school library, she’s spent the better of her day half-watching questionable documentaries on alien conspiracies.

“Ensfield is full of weird old superstitions and legends,” she goes on frustratedly. “The old bridge makes it on one of those ‘top 10 spooky locations’ lists like once a month. Complain about a cough to the wrong person and suddenly you get people telling you you’re hexed and you need to walk in a circle counter-clockwise under the new moon to get rid of it.”

She’s pretty sure that’s not a thing, but nods anyway, waiting for the point she hopes is coming.

“You’d think the library in a town like this would have better sources on mythology. But no, all I get is a shrug and the same three books everyone else in the class is using. If I want to bump up my GPA, I need something you can’t just find on Wikipedia.”

Another one of their housemates crawls out from the shrubbery by the porch. “Maybe you should try that other library.”

“Jesus!” Carmen jumps. “What are you doing down there?”

Phoebe brushes dirt off her knees. “I saw a black cat go into the gap.” She points at a thin crack in the woodwork. “Halloween is coming. Any cats, especially black ones, you see wandering around need to be brought to the shelter pronto. People do terrible things to them if they see them wandering around this time of year.”

Soso squints. “Looks too small to fit a cat.”

“I saw what I saw. Anyway, there’s supposed to be an old town library way past the woods, thataway.” She points. “Guy who works there is really weird I heard but almost no one goes there anymore so you’d have first pick.”

Carmen looks thoughtful. “I think I’ve heard of it. I kind of thought it was just something people made up.”

“Nah, it’s real. My brother’s fraternity brings freshman there to haze them. They tell them to go up and throw eggs at the place and then ditch ‘em in the woods.”

Soso blinks. “Why?”

She shrugs. “It’s just a thing they do. It sucks and it’s totally immature but no one ever accused those guys of being creative.”

“Whatever,” Carmen says. “I’m done with books for today. I’m gonna go inside and enjoy some nice brain-rotting TV.”

“Good call, honestly. If you get caught hanging around that place too much they’ll probably start egging us next.”

Carmen heads inside and Phoebe goes back to making little coaxing noises at the gap in the porch. Soso frowns to herself. Sometimes she feels like people in this town purposely go out of their way to ruin anything that could be the slightest bit different. It’s probably just a normal library that happened to be in a weird spot, run by a typical cranky old librarian. Even if it is nothing it probably has more to offer than spending the rest of her day throwing french-fries to birds and squirrels in the Burger Beast parking lot.

“Hey Phoebe,” she says. “Where did you say that library was?”

 --

 The trip is longer than she had anticipated. Her legs are strong but the sun’s getting low enough that she worries she’ll be riding home in the dark. A generous part of it she blames on Phoebe’s vague directions, scribbled into a patchwork paper map of hear-say more than anything else. Despite this she continues. She’s snapped a few pictures of the foliage in its brilliant reds and golds, so if all else is a bust at least she won’t have completely wasted her time. Worst case scenario, she returns home with a little extra muscle on her calves from all the pedaling.

Well, the real worst case scenario is probably more along the lines of her getting caught by an axe murderer and left to rot in the spooky woods, another ghost for the local repertoire. Even then, at least she won’t have to worry about the next family phone call if she’s dead.

Grim musings aside, she loops back and manages to find the correct path, a trampled dirt road half-hidden under the leaf litter, and at last make her way to the fabled “other library”. It’s one of those old brick buildings, surrounded by a low fence that struggles to hold its own against the climbing vines and insects nibbling at its posts. It’s early enough in the season that their collective buzz-chirp-hum still fills the air, though otherwise it is almost eerily quiet. It’s strangely peaceful, Soso thinks as she wades through wild patches of tall grass, as if she were returning to somewhere familiar.

The place is clearly abandoned, she decides, sunlight refracting off the firmly shuttered windows. It’s a cool discovery to be sure, but she ought to have known a mysterious library in the woods with an equally mysterious shut-in tending it was too much to expect from a town like Ensfield. That doesn’t stop her from exploring though. She likes it here, and she especially likes the gorgeous, ancient-looking gargoyle that sits in front of the steps leading up to the entrance, like one of those stone lions that stand guard outside of libraries of greater fame than this one.

The thing is magnificent, as well as truly hideous, its face twisted in a snarl so visceral and strikingly lifelike that it sends a genuine chill down her spine. The attention to detail, to carving out each individual wrinkle of flesh, is astounding. The stance the stone creature is frozen in comes off much more threatening than the regal intensity she might have expected, and it seems to her a counterintuitive choice of décor, but one the artist in her wholeheartedly approves of.

Propping her bike up against the stairs she crouches in the shadow of the gargoyle to get a better look. Organic shapes like vines encircle the beast, so lifelike that feels compelled to touch, as if they might fall away under her fingertips. Just as she reaches out however, the front doors of the library swing open and a stout, middle-aged man rushes out.

“Don’t- who- don’t touch that! It’s- it’s not-“ he stammers. “It’s an antique. Very breakable.”

The man is well-dressed, but his head of yellow hair is mussed to one side, like he’s just woken from a nap, enforced by the wrinkles he anxiously tries to smooth out of his vest. His eyes are a shocking shade of spring green.

“Sorry?” Soso offers, still recovering from the fright. She pulls her hand back guiltily and he seems to relax. How fragile could something made of stone be, she wonders, that he would work himself up into such a state over it. “Uh, is this the library?”

The man finishes straightening himself out before he responds. “That’s what you’re here for? Books?”

“What else?” she asks. His eyes remain narrow with scrutiny, so she adds, “Books on mythology. It’s for a school project. I heard… I am in the right place, right?”

There’s a copper plaque by the door that reads “North Ensfield Public Library”, but at this point she’d be as willing to accept that she wandered into a random person’s front yard, for how he looks at her. After another awkward pause, the man turns back towards the entrance and gestures for her to follow.

“Sorry about that. I don’t see many regular patrons anymore, not for a while now. Pardon the mess.” He speaks quickly, not leaving any room for interruption.

There isn’t much mess to pardon, not really. In fact, the shelves look well organized, if a bit dusty, and the space isn’t as cramped or cluttered as she had expected from the outside. A certain saying about books and covers comes to mind, but she doesn’t think her host would appreciate the joke. It’s no wonder he doesn’t see many people if he acts this way with everyone. Soso bumps into a table and nearly upsets what seems to be a pyramid assembled from various glasses, topped with an upside-down teapot.

“Do you live here?” she asks before she can curtail her curiosity.

“I’m a librarian,” he answers. “This is a library.”

“Right, but that doesn’t…” she fumbles.

“Do Canadians not live in Canada? Do Norwegians not live in Norway?”

“Vegetarians don’t live in vegetables,” she counters.

He considers that. “Well-played.”

Soso laughs despite herself and, to her surprise, things seem to go more smoothly after that. She continues speaking with the librarian and learns that his name is Surehouser, though if there’s a first name attached to that one, she doesn’t catch it. He’s certainly as eccentric as the rumors had led her to believe, but he seems harmless, and quite frankly more than a little lonesome. She doesn’t know how a person could be anything else, living like this.

He’s not friendly or unfriendly; his words have a measured quality to them, as if he’s afraid of saying too much. Soso gets the impression, as the sole carer for this seemingly ancient place, his occupation is more out of a sense of obligation than a passion for literature. He looks the part of the academic for sure, down to the silver that threads through his hair and the half-moon reading glasses folded in the front of his shirt, but his eyes track her as she browses like he doesn’t know what to do with someone who actually wants to check out a book.

“Do you have an idea of what you’re looking for?” he asks after she’s been at it for a while.

She doesn’t want to admit that not only is she not sure, since it’s not really her class she needs it for, but that whatever organizational system is in place here is totally incomprehensible to her. “Anything you have should be good.”

Which is how she ends up checking out way more than she meant to, sending up a tiny prayer that her comparatively tiny backpack can rise to the occasion. Surehouser gives her a look like he knows what’s going through her head as he leads her to the front desk. There’s no computer in sight, just a leatherbound book of names and dates and a thick rubber stamp.

“On my way out, would you mind if I took some pictures of that statue you have out front? For my project.” She adds that last part as an afterthought, then regrets it right away. She’s a notoriously terrible liar and the more she enforces the threads of this pointless story she’s weaving, the more awkward she feels.

He frowns and says, more to himself than to her, “I always thought that old thing was a bit gaudy myself. I’d have gotten rid of it ages ago if I could.”

Something about the way he says it strikes her as strange. Not knowing how to respond, she simply says, “I don’t know, I think it’s cool.”

He laughs. Or, she thinks that’s what it is. The sound is gentle but rusty at the edges. “I suppose you would. Feel free to do whatever you want, only do not touch it, and be careful.”

She walks down the stone steps, her haul unexpectedly light on her back, and pauses to look at the gargoyle once more. The light isn’t any good right now, but she’ll be back.

“See you later,” she tells it.

Sure enough, the next day she’s back. She hadn’t actually planned to be such a regular, but she’d been unable to keep the place from her mind, and it wasn’t as if she had anything better to do. Carmen had looked about to cry when Soso showed her the books she’d picked out. The ones she didn’t need for her paper, Soso decided to flip through herself and had found herself more invested than she’d counted on. The book on obscure pagan deities she’d selected, though dense and confusing in places, was particularly interesting. Before she knew it, she was finished, and thus had the perfect excuse to go back.

“This guy kinda looks like you, don’t you think?” She holds the page open so that the gargoyle could “see” it. Despite arriving at noon on a Wednesday, the library seems to be truly closed today and no amount of knocking had managed to change its mind. Since she’d already come all this way, she figured she might as well find some other way to entertain herself before heading home.

“The horns are all wrong, but the general look is there. He could be, like, your second cousin,” she tells the statue.

The statue doesn’t respond, obviously, but Soso likes talking to it regardless. She adjusts her position so she can keep reading while keeping the book within its line of sight. When it’s time to leave, she turns to it and says,

“Keep an eye on that guy who runs the place for me. He’s weird, and should really keep more regular hours, but he’s nice, and I think being alone out here is making him a little…” She makes a spiraling motion with her finger. “Guess I’m not one to talk though. I’m chatting with a hunk of rock.”

She doesn’t stop though. Maybe it’s the boredom, maybe it’s something just fundamentally Soso, but whatever the reason, she keeps coming back. Partially for the library, yes, and for the company of the strange librarian that dwells within, but primarily to have a quiet place to vent her frustrations and speak her mind, where often the only one around to judge is one who’s incapable of talking back.

Surehouser is an acquired taste, and they don’t have much in common, but he never turns Soso away on the days when her visits magically coincide with the hours of operation. He always seems to have snacks on hand and is content to let the young woman ramble on about whatever latest subject has caught her interest, which as much as she could ask of anyone really. He still speaks frustratingly little of himself, but she believes she’ll get it out of him eventually.

She’s moved from taking pictures around the library to breaking out her old sketchbook, sitting on the steps and muttering to the empty air as she tries to map the contours of the stone body before her. She’s always been visually minded, for whatever good it does her.

“My mom keeps calling and asking if I want to come home for the holidays,” she complains, holding her knees to her chest. “And I know that’s months away but if I say yes that means having to see my family in person while they interrogate me about my future. I’m not even sure I have a future.”

She paces around for a minute to work out some pins and needles and brushes back her hair where it’s been falling in her face. Feeling playful, she imagines she can feel the gargoyle’s gaze watching her.

“Oh this? Yeah, I did get a haircut, thank you for noticing. Just a couple inches off the bottom but I think it’s nice.”

She tosses her head. Nestled among her dark hair, a tip of pointed ear pokes out and she worries idly at the cartilage like she used to do when she was younger.

“You noticed that too, huh. I was born with this itty bity point to my ears. They used to stick out when I was a kid. I was kinda self-conscious about it, actually. I dreaded whenever we had a course in school about fairytales because the kids in my class would call me an elf. I started making my mom do my hair so that they were hidden and just, never grew out of the habit I guess.”

The gargoyle is without comment. She smiles.

“I knew you’d understand, dude. Us freaks have to stick together.”

The following week is a flurry of last-minute Halloween preparations. Soso herself hadn’t been planning to dress up, not having anywhere to be other than planted firmly on the couch in front of a horror B-movie marathon, but the other girls insist they decorate, as there’d been whispers in their neighborhood of pranks planned on those deemed not festive enough. According to Carmen, who had become the resident expert on local tradition since she aced her last history test, the custom of shunning those who didn’t partake was almost as firmly rooted as the decorating itself. It stemmed from a belief from ye olden days that the festivities helped to fend off ghosts and goblins and the meddling of the fae on the day when the border between their worlds was the thinnest.

“Wait, do ghosts come from the same place as fae, or do they just, like, carpool here?”

She snorts. “It depends who you ask, but a lot of people around here believe that anything that’s magical or ‘otherworldly’ in origin is technically ‘fae’. Ensfield has a whole history of convoluted fae-based superstitions. Did you know some people still leave out bowls of fresh milk for house spirits?”

“House spirits?”

“Like, brownies.”

Soso nods. “I love having milk with brownies.”

Phoebe pipes up from the kitchen. “I had a girlfriend in high school who left out offerings when she was doing her SATs.”

“Did it help?” Carmen asks. “I’ll try anything.”

Soso is no skeptic, but she’s more inclined to believe that leaving food out overnight will attract more mice than faerie blessings. The sentiment is nice, but it’s hard for her to take comfort in fairytales without remembering her childhood teasing. How much worse could it have been if it had been more than just a joke, if her ears and her daydreaming demeanor were enough to get her labeled as an outsider for life, rather than just for the span of third grade.

“Are you doing anything special for Halloween, Soso?” Carmen asks.

“You mean like leaving out bowls of milk?”

She laughs. “No, like going to a party. You can come with me to Katy’s if you want. It’ll be lowkey.”

Carmen has been making more of an effort to get to know her since she got her those books for her paper, but while Soso appreciates the thought, being a plus-one at a stranger’s party where everyone knows each other from the classes she’s still not attending doesn’t sound like her idea of a good time.

“No thanks. Someone’s gotta stay and hand out candy to the trick or treaters, right?”

“Good point. Did you pick up candy?”

“Not yet, but I’ll do it.”

“Just don’t put it off until the night of.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

That is exactly what happened. October 31st finds Soso standing in line with a back of candy under each arm. Their neighborhood isn’t exactly kid-heavy, but better safe than TP’d she figures. She’s nearing the register when a pair of college-age boys stumble in, looking conspicuously red around the whites of their eyes. She sighs inwardly as they wander around, talking just a bit too loud for comfort, and does her best to ignore them even as they get in line behind her. Looking out of the corner of her eye, she notices that there is nothing in their baskets except a two-liter bottle of off-brand soda, a box of marshmallow snackcakes, and about four cartons of eggs, each.

It almost doesn’t click for her until she remembers what Phoebe said about the frat bros and their hazing. That paired with it being a night notorious for pranks by idiot teens is enough to get her nervous. After making her purchase she lingers outside the store for a moment and watches as the boys climb into a car and drive away in the direction of the woods.

It might still be a coincidence, they might be heading to some other destination that just so happens to be in that direction as well, but the image of some stupid stoners invading her sanctuary makes her hackles raise all the same. She starts pedaling after them, following just far enough behind so as not to be spotted in the swiftly fading light.

[gingerwritess]

Hi! I really like you’re writing! Loki an Elliot are adorable! ❤️ I had an idea. You and Loki take Elliot to an amusement park and Loki is being a stubborn little shit and won’t go on the ride(bc they look kinda terrifying but he’s not gonna say that). So the reader promises to give him a kiss if he goes on one and doesn’t enjoy it. So he goes and he pretends to hate it bc he wants a kiss

ok this took forever but enjoy!! its super fluffy! 

i don’t own any part of disney, just borrowed their name/park pls don’t sue me

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“That can’t possibly be safe.”

Loki’s staring up at the ferris wheel with wide eyes, a hand full of bright blue cotton candy frozen halfway to his mouth.

“I wanna go on it,” Elliot announces, wiping his ice cream covered mouth on the arm of his shirt. “Be brave, daddy, it’s a big-kid ride.”

Loki gapes at him—there is no way in hell he’s letting his son get on that rickety old wheel and spin off into oblivion, much less get on it himself. “Absolutely not, this one is off limits. You’re not going.”

“Oh, come on, daddy,” you tease, nudging his arm. “Let the kid have some fun.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realise my wife had lost her mind…y-you can’t be serious.” His head snaps to yours and he flings a hand at the ferris wheel, that damned mouse grinning down at him, mocking him—he hates this place.

So…happy.

“Elliot,” Loki smiles and crouches in front of the little boy. “Do you have a death wish?”

“A what?”

“That’s what I thought.” He stands up and shakes his head at you. “No one from this family steps foot on that…that wheel.”

You roll your eyes and grab his hand, starting the trek towards the winding line of people waiting to get on, and Elliot squeals excitedly when he sees where you’re headed. “Sorry, snowflake, you don’t call all the shots here,” you call back to Loki, who’s sulking behind the two of you. “We paid a lot of money for this little vacation, so if he wants to go on the wheel of death, let him go on the wheel of death.”

Oh, wonderful. Now Loki’s pouting.

The light-up Mickey Mouse ears Elliot snuck on his head don’t seem to be cheering him up either.

“All these people,” he groans once you’re in line, leaning against the railing and crossing his arms. “You two just go, I’ll wait for you when you get off. I might hurt someone if I stay here any longer.”

“No! Dad, you gotta go!” Elliot hoists himself up on the railing next to his dad, stealing a chunk of his cotton candy. “Are you scared or somethin’?”

Loki scoffs and lightly whacks Elliot in the face with his stick of cotton candy. “You have three seconds to reevaluate that sentence, young man.”

Giggling, Elliot waves you over to whisper in your ear. “Dad’s scared to go on the ferris wheel.”

“Oh, really?” You grin at Loki and adjust his mouse ears, patting his cheek when you pull your hands back. “I bet he’s scared cause he knows he would love it…”

You swear you can feel the daggers Loki is glaring at you right now.

“Tell you what,” you begin thoughtfully, swinging Elliot into your arms as the line starts moving. Loki stays planted firmly on the railing, scowling at you with lips a tiny bit blue from the dyed sugar he’s been eating all day. “I’m willing to bet that you’re going to have more fun than you’ve ever had in your life, once you get your stubborn butt on the ferris wheel.”

“You’re delusional.” Loki grins and lightly flicks your forehead. “Even IF I was to go on this, I would be miserable the entire time, without a doubt.”

“For the god of lies, you’re a terrible liar. Don’t you think, Elliot?” You bounce the wiggling little kid in your arms.

“The worst-est,” Elliot agrees. “C’mon, dad, it’s super fun. You gotta go.”

Loki scowls and shakes his head at his son. “The only way you’re getting me on that wheel,” he pokes a finger into Elliot’s chest, “is if you can make me an offer worthy of the gods.”

“Deal.”

“Really?” You laugh and shift Elliot to your other hip. “Dad drives a hard bargain, kiddo. Good luck with that.”

“Nah, I got an idea.” Elliot grins, his bright eyes narrowing with a mischievous glint.

Oh no.

“If daddy can go on it without smiling ever,” Elliot states firmly, pointing a finger right back in Loki’s face. “Then he gets a surprise.”

“And what might that be?” Loki’s biting back a grin, you can tell.

“Can’t tell ya. Issa secret.”

“I don’t believe you, little silvertongue.”

Elliot crosses his arms and pulls a dramatic pout at his father. “That’s rude, scaredy-cat. I’ll tell you that it includes a kiss from mom and a hug from me, but that’s all y’get to know.”

“Scaredy-cat?!”

“You’re gonna pay for that one,” you whisper to Elliot, tickling him in the stomach and handing him over to Loki, who takes him tight in his arms, holding the squirming little kid in the air.

“You dare call your father a scaredy-cat, Elliot Lokason??” As threatening as his voice sounds, you can hear the laughter behind it as Loki easily holds Elliot in one arm, the other hand turning icy blue and slipping up the boy���s shirt. “That is no way to speak to a king, peasant.”

“NO! I’m a prince, dad, stop, I’m a prince too!!” Elliot squeals with laughter, feet kicking helplessly in the air. “Sorry sorry sorry, sorry dad, stop!!”

The little boy is still squirming with laughter under Loki’s freezing blue hand on his tummy, his own lighter blue starting to blossom from the centre of his chest.

“Well then, the prince of Asgard…” Loki pauses his icy tickle attack, finally setting the blue kid on the railing in front of him, putting a hand to his heart and turning his voice deadly serious. “…must know how to speak with poise, grace, elegance, and regality in every syllable.”

Elliot giggles, putting a little hand to his blue heart and mimicking his dad’s formal speech and accent perfectly, his eyebrows furrowing as he best tries to copy his dad’s pose. “With noise, space, elephants and legal tea in every syllable—”

“That is not what I said.”

You double over with laughter, the seriousness in Elliot’s little face too much to handle as he mimics his father—his father, that is, whose scowl is quickly being overridden by an inevitable smile when Elliot breaks down laughing, too.

He watches the two of you, clutching your stomachs as your faces scrunch with laughter, and a jolt of something warm shoots through his body when you grab onto his arm from laughing so hard. Loki can’t help it; he grins.

How??

How, in the name of all that is sacred, does he get to have all this?

He stares at you, eyes flitting between you and your son, a few stray laughs leaving his lips as you move with the line and climb into a hanging carriage, flopping onto the bench, your shoulders still shaking from laughing. Elliot gasps for breath and throws himself over your lap, absolutely mad with giggles that just pick up for a second storm when Loki climbs in the carriage, ducking low to avoid hitting his head.

“You—you’re—” he breaks down in giggles again, pointing at Loki and covering his face with little hands. “You’re so tall! Mom, mom, he’s so tall, I can’t—”

You’re not sure why Elliot seems to find that so funny, but you find yourself hoping to god that he keeps laughing; you can practically feel the unbridled joy in Loki’s heart at this moment.

He slumps onto the bench across from you, looking uncharacteristically out of proportion on the ride probably not meant for someone with the build of a god. Long legs stretch across the floor and tangle with your ankles, and he runs his foot up your calf with a grin.

“Maybe this won’t be so bad.”

“Hey!” Elliot jumps to his feet, still hiccuping from laughing so hard. “No—hic—ehehe…no smiling, ‘member??”

“Ah. Right,” Loki sighs, crossing his arms and slumping further down in his seat. “No happiness at Disneyland.”

The ride starts moving, lifting your carriage in the air and Elliot rushes to the edge, looking through the gated barriers at the amusement park below.

“I wanna fly,” he announces, turning around and flopping onto the bench next to Loki. “I wanna know how to fly, dad, you know how to fly?”

“Not exactly…”

Elliot frowns, a concerning glint in his eye. “Morgan’s dad can fly.”

“Morgan’s dad wears a metal wetsuit,” Loki scoffs, lightly pushing his son’s face away. “And, last I checked, doesn’t have the ability to freeze his child when that child gets…troublesome.”

He raises his hands with a grin as Elliot shrieks, scrambling off the bench and hurtling over to hide behind you, sending the hanging carriage swinging back and forth.

“S’not good to threaten your kid, dad, don’t do that.”

“Yeah, honey,” you laugh, wrapping your son in a protective hug. “Don’t threaten to freeze your kid, that’s not setting a good example.”

“A good example?” Loki scoffs and laces his fingers behind his head. “I’m sorry, my love, but there’s no hope for this one. You remember last night, don’t you?”

Elliot grins and snuggles up closer to you, ever sporting the adorable facade of a little angel—oh yes, you remember.

“Froze my tongue to my fork during dinner…”

“That was n’accident, sorta.”

“…turned the hot water to ice in the middle of my shower…”

Elliot bursts out laughing again. “You screamed!! Mom got so worried, you screamed—”

“Tell me again, why did we bring you here?”

“Cause you love me.” The little boy scrunches up his nose in a grin. “You love me, you love me—hey!! You’re smiling!”

He is, shamelessly and clearly with little control. “You’re a pain,” he laughs, conjuring a snowball and chucking it at his kid. “But…I do love you.”

“Love ya too, loser.”

Another snowball hits Loki square in the face not two seconds later.

“ELLIOT!!”

“What?! Dad started it!”

* * * *

“So,” Loki hums the moment he takes a wobbly step back onto solid ground. “What was my surprise, unðr?”

“Uh, you lost, dad.” Elliot grabs your hand and reaches for Loki’s with the other, skipping happily between the two of you. “I was gonna surprise you with unlimited hugs for a day, but you had fun, huh?”

“I was miserable, wasn’t that obvious?”

“You were laughing, daddy, mom saw you too.”

“Leave me out of this,” you laugh, holding up your hands in defence. “I’ve yet to make a deal with your father that’s actually ended well.”

“Oh, really?”

Oh no.

Loki turns to you with a glint in his eye. “I seem to recall a little late night wager where you told me not to make a sound or else you would—”

“LOKI, THERE’S CHILDREN.”

“Educating the masses,” Loki grins, swinging Elliot in the air as he skips obliviously along. “I think I should be rewarded even for going on that death wheel, don’t you agree?”

Smooth change of subject, Loki. A+ parenting.

Elliot thinks for a minute, jumping and swinging using your hands to lift him higher. “How ‘bout you get a hundred hugs today? Not ‘nfinity, only a hundred.”

“You’ve got yourself a deal, little giant.” Loki swoops the little boy up into his arms and plants a loud smack of a kiss on his chubby cheek, squeezing him in a tight, squirming hug. “You mentioned there being a ‘mom component’ as well, don’t think I forgot about that.”

“Uh huh.” Elliot nods and grins at you, resting his head against Loki’s cheek. “Mom’s gotta give you unlimited kisses. Forever.”

“What?!”

“You heard him,” Loki laughs, using up another one of his hundred hugs. “Unlimited kisses…forever…I like you, Elliot, good thinking.”

“I didn’t sign up for this,” you sigh as Loki wraps his arm not holding Elliot around your waist, pulling you into his side.

“You married me,” Loki grins, stealing two quick pecks to your lips.

“Don’t remind me—”

“Had a kid with me, too.”

Three more smooches and he’s squeezing your cheeks together with a hand under your chin—already abusing his power.

“You agreed to spend the rest of your life with me,” Loki laughs, lacing his fingers through yours and leading you towards another cotton candy stand. “And if that requires unlimited kisses…”

Elliot nods with as smug a grin as he can muster.

“…then you might as well enjoy it.”

You roll your eyes and wrap your two boys in a giant hug, tugging Loki in for a proper kiss. “Then get over here and maybe I will, idiot.”

Elliot claps his hands over his eyes. “That’s gus-tusting.”

“This was your idea, Elliot.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

hope you enjoyed, feel free to send me ideas!

loki tags: @bluediamond007 @himitoshi @drakesfiance @destiel1597 @dangertoozmanykids101 @archy3001 @jcalpha1 @yzssie @skullvieplu @forthesnakeofdragons @skulliebythesea @wegingerangelica @storiesfrommirkwood @agarwaeneth @adaliamalfoy @laurfangirl424 @paradisaicsam @fitzsimmons-is-forever @ladylokimischief @katelinwrites @tarynkauai @polaristrange @loavesofmeat @canadian-ravenpuff-multishipper @lou-makes-me-strong @holyn0vak @chocolatealmondmillk @swtnrholland @kenzieam @jessiejunebug  @catticas @the-republic-and-face-of-texas @doralupin01 @whitewitchdown @atomiccharmer @falconfeather23435 @babygirlicecream @avengrcs @vethrvolnir2 @bookgirlunicorn @wabisabigrl @myhealingstar @khaleesi-marvel @ei77777 @spacecrumbs @scarlettrosella @rocks-are-pretty-odd @confessionsofastrugglingteen  @easilydistractedwriter @arttasticgreatnessoftheawesome77 @fluffyllamaswearinghats @milktearose @lcyouinhell @h0tshotholland @dontmesswithmemundane @southsidesarcasticwriter @helnik-s @lilith-akemi @fire-in-her-veinz @unlikelysamwinchesteronahunt @mischievousbellerina @kcd15 @mellowgirl01 @lokislilcaribbeanprincess @allthingzhiddleston @scorpionchild81 @lokixme @vast-ish @blue-automne @galaxycharmed @devilbat @kangaroobunny @end-up-well @planetariumx @sarcsep @mrfandomtastic @amaru163 @im-way-too-many-fandoms @caswinchester2000 @kybaeza @little-scintilla @vintagesunshinebitch @adefectivedetective @poetic-nikolai @moonduhsted

[binkysteebnpewter]

All of them 😤

Ehehe 😂💗

1. What’s your middle name, and do you like it?

Grace is actually my middle name, and somewhat. I just don’t like it when my family calls me by first and middle together.

2. are you artistic?

Somewhat?

3. Have you had your first kiss?

Yes

4. What is your life goal?

It’s cheesy and a little cliche, but I want to find Home.

5. Do you have any experiences with a famous person?

Nope

6. Do you play any sports?

Not anymore but I used to play football and I was on the wrestling team in HS

7. What’s your worst fear?

I have two that are sort of equal with another but I’m afraid of losing the people I care about and people seeing me the way I see myself.

8. Who’s your biggest inspiration?

My late Nana, Gloria.

9. Do you have any cool talents?

Answered in previous ask

10. are you a morning person?

Not at all

11. How do you feel about pet names?

I love them

12. Do you like to read?

Absolutely

13. Name a list of shows that have changed your life.

NCIS, Criminal Minds, and any marvel movie

14. Do you care about your follower count?

Not really, I’ll celebrate milestones but that’s just to show everyone I appreciate them following my trash pile. I didn’t start writing to have a high following, I started writing to better my skill and also make people happy.

15. What’s the best dream you’ve had?

I don’t remember most of my happy dreams

16. Have you ever kissed someone of your same gender?

Yep!

17. Do you have any pets?

I have three dogs 🥺💗

18. Are you religious?

No. They only thing I actually believe in is ghosts.

19. Are you a people person?

Not really

20. Are you considered popular?

Nope, and I don’t care to be

21. What is one of your bad habits?

Overthinking

22. What’s something that makes you feel vulnerable?

Opening up my emotions to other people

23. What would you name your children?

No clue

24. Who’s your celebrity crush?

There’s a bunch ig

25. What’s your best subject?

Science and history

26. Dogs or cats?

Dogs, I love cats but I’m super allergic

27. most used social media besides tumblr?

I don’t use a lot of social media tbh, so tumblr is probably my most used unless you count youtube

28. best friends name

Duke

29. who does your main family consist of

My friends and my brother. Family isn’t just blood

30. Chocolate or sugar

Both

31. have you ever been on a date?

Yep

32. Do you like rollercosters?

Absolutely love them

33. Can you swim?

Yes 💗

34. What would you do in the event of an apocolypse?

Clearly, I’d do what everyone else does. Panic and try to survive.

35. Have you struggled with any kind of mental disorder?

Yes, I struggle with anxiety and depression

36. Are your parents together?

Nope.

37. What’s your favourite colour?

Dark green and Dark Blue

38. What country are you from/do you live in?

Unfortunately, the U.S

39. Favourite singer?

Uh... there’s too many to list? But my favorite people to listen to is The Oh Hellos

40. Do you see yourself being famous some day?

Nope, I run from being the center of attention.

41. Do you like dresses?

Not really

42. Favourite song right now?

Fly Me To The Moon by Frank Sinatra

43. Does talking about sex make you uncomfortable?

Sort of.

44. How old were you when you first got your period?

No clue, I don’t remember

45. Have you ever shot a gun?

Yep

46. Have you ever done yoga?

No

47. Are you a horror girl?

YES 😈

48. Are you good at giving advice?

I suppose I am?

49. Tell us a story about your childhood.

I don’t have a lot of happy memories but one that sticks out is: I used to go to a private Christian academy and I was in first grade when this boy in eighth grade (the entire school was k-12) came over to me during my lunch. I was super scared and shy as a kid so my schedule was tailored so I was able to eat lunch with my brother whose nine years older than me. Our mom forgot to pack our lunches so we were gonna just get some stuff from the vending machine, well my brother gave me my money to get something and this boy came over to me before I could put it in the vending machine. He hit me and took my money, buying himself something with it. My brother seen it and got into a fight with him.

50. How are you doing today?

Eh

51. Were you a cute kid?

I looked like Shirley Temple when I was a kid

52. Can you dance?

I can swing dance and slow dance, but that’s it.

53. Is there anything you do that you can’t remember ever not doing?

I always look for exits and bathrooms when I go somewhere, I’ve always done it 🤷🏻‍♀️

54. Have you ever dyed your hair?

No because I’m a ginger. I can’t just dye it back if I end up not liking the color I dyed it to.

55. What colour are your eyes?

Brown

56. What’s your favourite animal?

Answered in previous ask

57. Have you ever made a huge fool of yourself?

Multiple times

58. Do you have a good relationship with your parents?

My relationship with my dad is rocky but my relationship with my mother went up in flames a few yeaes ago 🤷🏻‍♀️

59. Do you have good friends?

I have some amazing friends🥺💗

60. Are you close with anyone of the lgbtq+ group?

Yep!

61. What’s your favourite class?

My favorite class was Psychology

62. List all the tv shows you are watching.

I’m rewatching Criminal Minds right now.

63. Are you organized?

Somewhat?

64. What was the last movie you saw? Opinion?

I don’t know if it counts as a movie but I just finished a Ted Bundy Tapes Documentary. I think Bundy was a little bit of an idiot.

67. Which tv character do you relate to most?

Spencer Reid

68. What are some things that stand between you and complete happiness?

Anxiety, Depression, overthinking

69. If you received enough money to never need to work again, what would you spend your time doing?

I would probably still work, I’m not a fan of sitting around and doing nothing for large amounts of time.

70. What would you change about your life if you knew you would never die?

Find a way to die, I don’t want to live forever. That’s just torture 👀

71. What would you do differently if you knew that no one was judging you?

Nothing. I’ll act the same as I always have because I am who I am, there’s no reason to change yourself from when someone is watching and when someone isn’t.

72. If you could start over, what would you do differently?

A lot 😂

73. Would you break the law to save a loved one?

Yep

74. When was the last time you travelled somewhere new?

I went to Disney with my Chorus Class in Junior Year of HS, it was my first time to Disney.

75. When you think of your home, what immediately comes to mind?

Nothing, I’m looking for Home. Home will be someone I feel safe with, someone I can be completely myself with— someone I love wholly.

76. What have you done to pursue your dreams lately? How about today?

I— idk?

77. What did you want to be when you were a kid?

I wanted to be a nurse 🤦🏻‍♀️

78. If you dropped everything to pursue your dreams, what would you be risking?

Im not sure

79. When did you not speak up, when you know you really should have?

Ooh... uh, something happened to me all through 7th, 8th, and 9th grade that I should’ve spoken up about but was too scared.

80. Describe the next five years of your life, and your plans, in a single sentence.

I will work hard to love myself and pursue my dream job.

81. What would happen if you never wasted another minute of your life, what would that look like?

No clue tbh

82. If you could live forever, how would you spend eternity?

I don’t want to live forever but I guess I’d find a way to take away my immortality or find someone else who is immortal to love

83. How would you spend a billion dollars?

Id put a lot into important causes and then save some with interest.

84. If you could time travel, would you go to the past or the future?

I’m not sure, I think I wouldn’t go anywhere because I want to live in the moment. Except 2020, fuck 2020.

85. What motivates you to succeed?

Failure motivates me to succeed.

86. What dream that you’ve had has resonated with you the most?

I don’t remember most of my happy dream, I usually can only remember the nightmares 🤷🏻‍♀️

87. Would you rather live in the city or the woods? Why?

Woods, its peaceful.

88. Do you believe in life after death?

I don’t really believe in anything 🤷🏻‍♀️

89. What teacher inspired you the most? How did they?

I had a teacher named Ms Eagan and she inspired me to always be myself.

90. What’s your fondest childhood memory?

Meeting Lily

91. If you could have dinner with any one person, living or dead, who would they be and why?

Lily, because I really miss her.

92. What would you have to see to cry tears of joy?

Anyone being nice to me makes me cry—

93. What is the hardest lesson you had to learn in life?

Sometimes the people you call family don’t truly love you.

94. What do you think happens after we die?

Idk and idrc either tbh

95. What would you do if you would be invisible?

I’d probably scare some people

96. What’s something you can’t do no matter how hard you try?

Speak in public or ask for something at restaurants

97. Would you want to choose the sex and appearance of your offspring?

Eh

98. How did your first crush develop?

They were nice to me when no one else was

99. Is there a feeling you are trying to ignore? What is it?

Yes, I’m trying to ignore how upset some people can really make me.

100. Do you live or do you just exist?

I think I’m somewhere in between, where sometimes I’m just existing and sometimes I’m living.

[tessatechaitea]

Review of The Twilight Zone, Season 1, Episode 13: "Just One Guy Actually Dies"

Certain eras of television and movies make various uses of visual signifiers to indicate to the audience that they're supposed to believe something that isn't actually happening. The one that annoys me the most in our current times is gagging a person. To indicate a person can't speak or yell or make any noise whatsoever, a character will simply put a piece of cloth around somebody's head so that it is clenched in their teeth like a horse's bit. Obviously that won't stop a person from screaming at the top of their lungs. But I don't think non-horse-bit gags work as well as television and movies want us to believe they do for conveniences of plot anyway, so who really cares, right? I'm sure actors were tired of having duct tape wrapped around their faces to at least seem somewhat believable which led to some really uptight actor saying, "Can't I just hold this in my teeth and pretend that I can't yell? Acting!" And some director was all, "Fuck. Fine. Whatever. Just get the fucking scene shot already!" And then everybody saw it and was all, "Wait. Audiences will buy that that person can't make a sound now? Fuck yeah! No more duct tape, baby!" In the fifties, one of the worst visual signifiers was saved for two people kissing. Instead of actually kissing, they just pursed their lips and smashed their faces together, with little to no movement, for an amount of time depending on how passionate the kiss was supposed to be. I've kissed my own grandmother more erotically than a 50s era television kiss. I bring this up because there's a kissing scene in The Twilight Zone episode, "The Four of Us are Dying," that looks like a child took two dolls and mashed their faces together for an awkwardly long amount of time. Actually, a child with two dolls would have been more dramatic. Maybe I shouldn't blame the 50s entirely. I'm pretty sure Ward and June Cleaver shared kisses that sometimes made me think, "Hugh Beaumont is enjoying that a little too much." This episode also contains the signifier of loads of neon signs floating about the protagonist's head to indicate he's in a big city. I have no idea who first came up with that one but it's actually pretty good. I'm sure it was first done in some stage production of whatever early to mid-century play sees the protagonist go from a rural area to New York. Does that happen in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? What about Poor Little Ritz Girl? Or maybe it was first done in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. I thought that by the time I was done discussing the terrible kiss that I'd accidentally find a way to talk about this episode but it didn't happen. I don't know what George Clayton Johnson's original story, "All of Us are Dying," was actually like because I'd have to find a collection of his short stories to learn but I can't imagine it was lacking in as much substance as Serling's teleplay seemed to be. I was hoping that my brain would figure out the point of this episode so that I don't expose my own ignorance when somebody on the Internet decides to "actually" me and make me look stupid. And since I never received an "A-ha!" moment from on high that truly satisfied me for the reason this episode had to be filmed by Serling, I guess I'll just try to flesh out the only thought that came to me. I'm sure people have made categories for all the different kinds of The Twilight Zone. Some are about the existential terror of loneliness, some are about nostalgia, some are about terrible disasters, some are about Kojak taking the piss out of his step-daughter's stupid doll, some are about a terrible person getting their comeuppance, and so on. I haven't figured out all the categories myself! But this one seems to be one of the comeuppance ones which introduces the audience to an unlikable guy and then kills him at the end so the audience learns not to be unlikable. Serling's introduction to Arch Hammer is thus: "His name is Arch Hammer. He's thirty-six years old. He's been a salesman, a dispatcher, a truck driver, a con man, a bookie, and a part-time bartender. This is a cheap man, a nickle and dime man, with a cheapness that goes past the suit and the shirt; a cheapness of mind, a cheapness of taste, a tawdry little shine on the seat of his conscience, and a dark room squint at a world whose sunlight has never gotten through to him." I haven't heard a string of petty insults so beautifully rendered since Thurl Ravenscroft took The Grinch to task for being such a huge asshole. Sometimes when you're in the Twilight Zone, you don't have time for ambiguity! You just need to know, right from the start, if the protagonist is an asshole or a hero. Also, you always need to know that the male lead is actually thirty-six. Hammer, a man who can change his facial features to look like whomever he wants, decides to use the power to accrue love and money. He uses his power as shortcuts to getting the things most people desire. He looks like the lover of a woman who believed he was dead (I mean, the actual lover was dead. But she readily accepts that it was all a case of mistaken identity) so that he can get some easy loving. Then he pretends to be a criminal betrayed by some other criminals so he can steal some stolen cash stolen from the guy he was pretending to be. But in the end, as he takes on the identity of a stranger he sees on a poster in an alley, he discovers that pretending to be other people comes with their terrible baggage as well. He runs into the guy he's pretending to be's father who hates him for knocking up a nice girl and ruining the reputation of the family. The father shoots him in the gut and pisses on his dying corpse. That sounds like maybe it wouldn't have aired on a 1950s television show so maybe I dreamed that bit later. I guess the point is that there are no easy shortcuts because some shortcuts lead through bear country and you're liable to be mauled by a bear when you use one of those shortcuts even if that shortcut leads to tons of money and pussy. Apparently in the original story (which I still haven't read but I've now read about!), Hammer couldn't control how he looked. In the end, he dies not knowing who he is, awash in the memories and lives of every person other people saw him as. There's probably a moral in that about being who we are and not who other people expect us to be lest we lose ourselves in the process. But who knows? Not me! I didn't read the original story! And Serling seems to have heard the treatment and thought, "Yeah! That'll be terrific! The man who could be anybody! Just think how much easy money and pussy you could get doing that! And how many cigarettes you could smoke!" Then he needed a way to show that maybe that wasn't the greatest life so he had to introduce the psychopathic father figure. Audiences would have nodded sagely when Hammer was shot, and probably said things like, "That creep had it coming!" and "Just goes to show you!" and "Just think how much more pussy he could have gotten if that jerko dad hadn't murdered him for practically no reason at all!" That last one would have been said by me after I time traveled to the 1950s. The writer of the original story, George Clayton Johnson, also wrote the script for the first Star Trek episode, "The Man Trap." It's pretty much the same story except with an alien whose only desire is the luscious salt within the human body. In conclusion, I am concluding this review by suggesting that perhaps this story wasn't meant to have much of a point at all. Perhaps Rod Serling was just sitting around one day and thought, "You know what I want to make? An episode that's a metaphor for jazz!" And that was this episode!

[maddie-grove]

Bi-Monthly Reading Round-Up: May/June

PLAYLIST

“How Do You Do” by Mouth and MacNeal (Once Ghosted, Twice Shy)

“Up the Wolves” by the Mountain Goats (Don’t You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey)

“The Daughters” by Little Big Town (Lady Rogue)

“9 to 5″ by Dolly Parton (Lady Notorious)

“Let the Little Girl Dance” by Billy Bland (What a Wallflower Wants)

“Poison Arrow” by ABC (Give Me Your Hand)

“Marie-Jeanne” by Joe Dassin (Never Mind)

“Mississippi” by the Dixie Chicks (An Unconditional Freedom)

“Semi-Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind (Bad News)

“Honky Cat” by Elton John (Simple Jess)

“A Weekend in the Country” from A Little Night Music (Some Hope)

“Picture Book” by the Kinks (Mother’s Milk)

“A Place in the Sun” by Stevie Wonder (At Last)

“She’s in Love with the Boy” by Trisha Yearwood (A Dance with Danger)

“Little Hollywood Girl” by the Everly Brothers (Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood)

BEST OF THE BI-MONTH

An Unconditional Freedom by Alyssa Cole (2019): Daniel Cumberland, a free black man from New England, had his faith in justice and certainty in the world shattered when he was abducted and sold into slavery. Now rescued, he does what he can as a spy for the pro-Union Loyal League, but he has a lot of rage and trauma that nobody knows what to do with, least of all himself. Then a new spy joins the organization: Janeta Sanchez, a mixed-race Cuban-Floridian lady pulled in too many directions by her white Confederate family and now in desperate straits. Once again, Alyssa Cole has produced a book that’s not only a compelling romance but a fascinating historical novel. Daniel and Janeta are both complex, involving characters with a great dynamic, plus Cole provides a great perspective on less-discussed aspects of the Civil War. 

WORST OF THE BI-MONTH

Once Ghosted, Twice Shy by Alyssa Cole (2019): Likotsi Adele, personal assistant to the prince of Thesolo, came to New York City a year ago for work and had what was supposed to be a casual affair with Fabiola, a gorgeous fledgling fashion designer. Just when her feelings were getting involved, though, Fabiola cut things off with no explanation. Now back in NYC on vacation, Likotsi runs into Fabiola, who proposes that they go on a date for old time’s sake. Although it’s technically the worst of the month, this novella is by no means bad; on the contrary, it’s very cute and sweet, with a pretty sexy love scene near the end. It just suffers from common romance novella pitfalls, mainly a dearth of conflict and some pacing problems.

REST OF THE BI-MONTH

Never Mind (1992), Bad News (1992), Some Hope (1994), Mother’s Milk (2005), and At Last (2011) by Edward St. Aubyn: Across five novellas, Patrick Melrose, son of an aristocratic non-practicing doctor and a charity-minded heiress, struggles with the legacy of his father’s sadistic abuse and his mother’s elaborately cultivated helplessness to intervene. The series follows him from early childhood (Never Mind) to drug-addled early adulthood (Bad News, Some Hope) to slightly more functional middle age (Mother’s Milk, At Last). I’ve never read such enjoyable fiction about the boredom and exhaustion of dealing with trauma and addiction, but St. Aubyn manages it with sharp characterization, whistling-in-the-dark humor, and a great sense of setting. I didn’t like all the novellas equally--Bad News has too many scenes about doing large amounts of heroin for my personal taste, and Some Hope sometimes loses track of its many characters--but, taken together, they’re magnificent.

Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood by Karina Longworth (2018): Using the life and career of billionaire/producer/aviator/womanizer Howard Hughes, Longworth (the podcast host of You Must Remember This) looks at Hollywood from the silent era to the waning days of the studio system. I love You Must Remember This, and this book exhibits all the strengths of the podcasts: the compelling style, the evenhanded consideration of evidence from multiple sources, and the use of film analysis to examine what was happening in the culture at the time. Longworth’s portrait of Hughes is also refreshingly non-sensational; he comes across as a juvenile reactionary with a little vision, too much money, and some pitiable mental health problems, rather than a genius or a boogeyman. 

Simple Jess by Pamela Morsi (1996): Althea Winsloe, an Ozark widow in the early twentieth century, is determined to remain unmarried and look after her three-year-old son by herself, despite the disapproval of her close-knit community. Still needing help on her farm, she hires Jesse Best, regarded as “simple” because of a cognitive disability stemming from a childhood brain injury. As they work together, Althea realizes that Jesse has depths that few people bother to see. I was a little concerned when I began this romance; the hero has serious, life-altering issues with mental processing, which I thought might create a troubling power dynamic between him and the heroine. Instead, Morsi contributes something really valuable by showing how society ignores the autonomy and complexity of people with disabilities. She also does a great job of showing how a close-knit community can be both claustrophobic and supportive. Finally, I enjoyed the journey of a gay side character (the song’s for him!).

Lady Notorious by Theresa Romain (2019): When George, Lord Northbrook, discovers that his father is part of a tontine whose members have started dying at an alarmingly fast rate, he enlists the help of Cassandra Benton, an unofficial Bow Street Runner, to investigate the possible murders while pretending to be his scandalous cousin. Already friends, they grow attracted to each other during this charade, but they come from different worlds and each have a complicated family thing going on. This is a thoroughly likable romance with a fun plot; I especially enjoyed how George’s efforts to care for his emotionally distant parents mirrored Cassandra’s struggles to let go of her codependent relationship with her twin brother.

Don’t You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey by Margaret Peterson Haddix (1996): Fifteen-year-old Tish Bonner doesn’t have much time for school; with an absent father, a troubled mother, and an eight-year-old brother she feels responsible for, she’s too busy trying to hold things together at home. When her father makes an unwelcome return, though, she finds an outlet in the journal assigned by a nice young English teacher who promises not to read entries marked DO NOT READ. I first read this YA novel in middle school, and it struck me as particularly unvarnished, both then and as an adult. Teens in horrible situations are common in the genre, but Tish’s matter-of-fact presentation the day-to-day of dealing with sexual harassment at work and total parental abandonment at home really brings out the utter bleakness. I love Tish, whose ultimate acceptance of her inability to handle everything alone is as brave as her desperate efforts to keep everything together.

Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott (2018): Kit Owens, a talented chemist from humble beginnings, is shocked when former classmate Diane Fleming comes to work in her lab. Although Diane was the one who inspired her to reach beyond community college, she also burdened Kit with a horrible secret...and now they’re in competition to work on a prestigious new grant. I love Megan Abbott as a writer; she has a very sensory-based way of describing things that makes everything palpable. While I didn’t love this book as much as The Fever, it has a delightfully twisted plot and female characters who are “bad” in a realistic (or, at least, a humanely portrayed) way. I did probably like Diane more than I was supposed to; like Lady Audley before her, she should maybe go to jail but she’s still awesome.

A Dance with Danger by Jeannie Lin (2015): In Tang Dynasty China, Jin-mei, daughter of a magistrate, finds herself in a compromising position with Yang, her father’s old associate and sworn enemy of a local warlord. Their mutual attraction makes the ensuing wedding a more pleasant fate than either expected, but Yang disappears mysteriously before the marriage can be consummated. Heartbroken and very suspicious, Jin-mei refuses to give him up for dead. This is a fun adventure-romance with a wonderfully spooky atmosphere, although the ending is a little rushed.

Lady Rogue by Theresa Romain (2018): After her sub-par art-dealer husband apparently committed suicide, Lady Isabel Morrow grew close to and had a fling with Officer Callum Jenks, a Bow Street Runner. Now she’s discovered that her husband sold his customers forged works, and she needs to (awkwardly) enlist Callum’s help in replacing them with the real ones. This is a solid Regency romance, mostly thanks to the fun burglary plot. Isabel and Callum’s relationship, while perfectly pleasant, is rather static; they obviously like and respect each other, but just need a little time to reconcile themselves to the not-onerous-to-them social costs of a cross-class marriage. There’s also a real bummer of a development involving a minor character at the end. I’m not averse to bummers, but it felt out of place here.

What a Wallflower Wants by Maya Rodale (2014): Stranded at a strange inn after a failed elopement attempt, secretly traumatized spinster Penelope Payton finds a friend in the striking Lord Castleton...but is he who he says he is? Absolutely not, but he’s pretty cool regardless. This is a sweet, heartfelt Regency romance with endearing leads and great messages, but it’s pretty sloppily written, and that detracted from my enjoyment somewhat.

[theunderdogwrites]

Ten "Suggestions" For A New World

I was raised in the Roman Catholic faith. Went to church every Sunday with my family from the time I was four until the age of 19. I was baptized, received my first communion and attended CCD classes (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine). And just for fun and out of curiosity, I've read the bible (New Testament) three times. [I want to quickly share with you the meaning of the word "confraternity": 'a lay brotherhood devoted to some purpose, especially to religious or charitable service'. Already its clear women are not really welcome.]

Once I was free to make my own choices, I stopped going to church. To be honest with you, I couldn't hear myself think over the constant propaganda being served to me by an elderly ornery priest wearing a $2500 robe and asking me to kneel at a $10,000 marble alter while attempting to guilt me into giving the church money to help feed the poor. I've never been the sharpest tool in the shed, but I knew something wasn't quite right with this religion. A friend of mine introduced me to the term "recovering Catholic" and I've adopted it as my own.

Do I believe in God? What... a terribly complicated question. In short, yes. In length, I believe in something I can't put my finger on and it has a name. I know I talk to this Universe character a great deal, maybe that’s it? Anyway, the God I believe in... that something with a name I can't accurately put my finger on - is about kindness and compassion, respect, acceptance, tolerance and love. And I mean, for real. Not just because it sounds good in your mouth.

Have you ever looked up the meaning of TOLERANCE?

‘allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference’

The fact I’ve not yet killed anyone, means I am a highly tolerant being. Ego stroke.

You may have your own opinions and beliefs; in fact, I encourage you to form your own opinions and sift through what you do and don't believe. But let other people find their own way. Be who they are to be and if it's a different path than yours... don't tell them they're going to Hell. All that does is stress Satan right the fuck out.

I was taught to pray from an early age. Kneel down beside the bed at night, make the sign of the cross and talk to God. Ask him to bless the people you love, show compassion for those who wronged you and be thankful for everything you've been given. End with the sign of the cross. Although I no longer kneel at the side of my bed or make the sign of the cross, I do still pray. I've never had an issue with prayer. It's a form of communication and communication is king. Even if you believe no one is listening, it truly does help to just have raw dialogue with yourself.

Have I ever used prayer to help me out of a tough spot? Absolutely.

Have I ever prayed for something and promised something else I knew I most likely wouldn't follow through with? Yes. Have I ever prayed then become angry when things didn't go my way? Definitely.

Have I asked for forgiveness, mercy and wisdom? Yes.

 I'm not ashamed of any of those admissions. But I'm not going to print them on a t-shirt and strut around either. I don't feel I am any different than anyone else when it comes to prayer. Evidence of this are the religious contestants on Survivor who ask God for assistance in winning a million dollars so they may do good with all that money.

Currently, for me, prayer is an open-ended conversation that takes place in my soul. There's yelling and screaming. Blame. Crying and swearing. The launching of projectiles and ever so often... peace, laughter, approval and cookies. There's chaos and harmony and somehow, I manage to cultivate enough intelligence to string together a bunch of words to make a half decent sentences from time to time.

This brings me to: The Ten Commandments. Take a quick gander at this so you can get your bearings:

https://www.bibleinfo.com/en/topics/ten-commandments-list

In a nutshell, these are "God's standards" which he wants you to live by.

Going to confession was the worst. Especially as a typical 15-year-old girl. "I am not telling you shit" was pretty much my life's motto so to expect me to open up to an old priest and share my sins and secret thoughts so he may shame me with a mini lecture and an act of contrition, was insanity.

Every time I went to confession, I used the same three "sins":

I disobeyed my Mother and Father                                  

I took the Lord`s name in vain

I lied

I figured this to be believable for a girl my age. If you look at the commandments, I wasn't going to covet my neighbor`s wife or his ox and I certainly wasn't going to get myself another God to worship considering I already couldn't figure out the one I'd been given. And murder? I probably didn't even know what that meant. I mean, until the guidance counselor at my school pointed out to me what suicide was, I had no idea it was even possible to do that to yourself. I wasn't stupid, but rather innocent. And isn't it funny that it took a person of "authority" whose intentions were being governed by a higher power, to bring those kinds of ideas into my brain where they once didn't exist? Something to ponder.

Let's be honest, the Ten Commandments... as they stand right now in current society... a little outdated, right? Technology is rapidly changing how we communicate and behave. And it's time to modernize in order to keep up. I'm not proposing we abolish the original document. I'm not trying to offend anyone or stamp out their beliefs. I know the Ten Commandments is a sacred collection of words that many believe is straight from the mouth of God. Attempting to rip up or shit on something with that much power over so many people... is suicide. (Look Ms. Foster! I learned another way one can harm themselves other than dragging a razor over one's wrists! Your job wasn't meaningless after all!)

I'm merely proposing that someone (ME ME ME) take a stab at writing up a new set of standards which people (YOU YOU YOU) should SERIOUSLY consider following if they wish to achieve a pleasant after life. And the only person you must believe in - yourself.

The first thing I want to do is change the word "commandments" to "suggestions". It's less aggressive and more light-hearted, even though you're still expected to comply. No one wants to be told what to do, not really, and by "commanding" them in a preachy way to curb behavior... well, you're just asking for trouble. Imagine the success rate if Moses had come down from the mountain and said:

“Hey... hi everyone, look, God spoke to me and mentioned something about these ten suggestions He'd like us to seriously consider if we want to get into Heaven. He was pretty adamant that we pay attention and do our best to not ignore this list. I think He spent a lot of time coming up with this stuff... so we really do owe it to Him to try and give this all we got. Ok, thanks everyone... back to not raping women and making false idols out of gold".

I just feel that by changing the wording and therefore tone of this document - you're not alienating the more cantankerous, free-spirited or stubborn people of the world with a menu of demands you expect them to blindly obey.

The second thing I want to do is provide a brief explanation for each "suggestion". There is nothing worse than treating people as though they don't deserve further information when you'd like them to do something that wasn't their idea. Communication is comforting and reflects respect. You can't say: "Because I told you so" or "Just do it" and expect to be well received. All this is going to get you are responses such as: "You're not the boss of me" and "Go fuck yourself".

So, without further ado, I give to you:

The Ten "Suggestions" For A New World

 Please do not update your Facebook status message more than once a day:  This is a sign of vanity, a deadly sin. And it's really annoying to the point where people secretly want to kill you for repeatedly mugging their news feeds with updates in increments of 32 minutes, on the broad details of your existence. No one actually cares here, on planet Self Absorption.

Please do not kill: This is the only original "commandment" included on this new list because it has stood and always will stand the test of time. There are loads of shitty, stupid, selfish & servile individuals in the world and relieving them of the burden of breathing seems like an all-around great idea, but it's actually a terrible idea. Why? Well, for starters... it's not your place to end a human life. It's just not. Life is special. You - not so much. Plus, it causes debilitating pain for a great many people. When you take someone's life away you create a hole inside the people who love them. This hole can never be filled. It will never get smaller. These people will never heal. They might be able to carry on... eat food again one day, maybe buy a new couch, laugh at a joke - but they will never heal. They will walk around, unhealed and with a hole in their heart till their dying day. Don't make holes in other people.

Please resist from being a complete douche bag: (Traditionally the term 'douche bag' is     usually gender specific and applies to men, but for this  "suggestion" it also applies to women, because women can be douche     bags as well. This does not apply to cats. The lives of cats are based upon douche-baggery, but it's cute and therefore exempt)  Being a total jerk is in your bloodline. Eve was a jerk to Adam. Adam was a jerk to God. The snake was a jerk to Eve. God was a jerk to the dinosaurs. And the dinosaurs were jerks to everyone. So... this  "suggestion" is going to be a difficult one not to fail at from time to time. The idea here isn't to be perfect, because that isn't unachievable. But rather, genuinely compassionate and generous when you see someone who wouldn't benefit from you running your truck into their fence and then driving off like a douche bag coward. And the state of being a douche bag isn't always limited to actions befitting a little scamp, no it can also be in the way you dress (Underwear above the pants line? Come on!) Or how you tell uninterested parties about your drunken antics and the loss of your favorite pair of really expensive shoes. Or  tweeting/texting the person next to you while you're in a group setting. Now you can see why pretty much everyone will be unsuccessful at this "suggestion". We're douche bags.

If  you open a bottle of wine - please finish it: This really shouldn't require much explanation. Drinking two-day old wine is the equivalent of sucking on week old doughnuts. Even hobos understand this concept. If you save your wine, you're stealing food out of the mouth of a grape stomping child. Is that what you want? No. Drink your damn wine already.

Please flush the toilet after you poop / wipe the seat off if you urinate on it: No  list of "suggestions" would be complete without a mentioning of bathroom etiquette because so many people are unable to recognize and execute proper manners in this area. I reckon 74% of the population does not want to see your excrements. And the other 26% need to seek out some counseling. Immediately. Leaving your shit in the toilet for others to    view does not make you regal, it makes you a filthy barnyard animal. And it's not funny or clever. Neither is urine on the seat. And this applies to both men and women. Take ten seconds, grab some toilet paper and WIPE THE SEAT OFF. Your pee is not liquid gold. No one wants to bottle it to sell on eBay or Etsy.

Please do not use social media to draw attention to your drama: This     is a tough one, I know. We all suffer from drama and when we feel severely slighted by the Universe, a person or even a business... we just want to share our pain in hopes of others being able to relate to us and provide some words of comfort. And what better way to reach your 472 "friends" than screaming out on Twitter or rapidly posting about your discomfort on Facebook. But the problem is... you're not actually connecting to anyone. Not really. You can't see their expressions. You can't hear the tone in their voice. And you definitely cannot count on their sincerity if they don't contact you privately and not in an open forum for all to witness. And, it's awkward. Once people see your drama, they can't un-see it. Even if you delete it, you don't get to delete it from their minds. And as a sub-section to this "suggestion" - also try to avoid saying stuff on social media that you wouldn't say to a person's face. This is just a fancier version of talking behind someone's back while doing it in front of their face without them actually realizing that it's being done.

Please do not text and drive: If you own a car you probably spend a     decent amount of time in that car, driving. Probably so much time that it     feels automatic, like blinking.  And because it's automatic you will rarely think about what you're actually doing - operating a 4000-pound killing machine. What is more important than taking your eyes off the road to check in on your game of choice? Or answering that text about where     you're going on your vacation? Your life. The lives of others. (please see "suggestion" number two) Chances are you're already deeply distracted by your real life, there is no reason to add to that list fumbling around with a cellphone so you can tell someone what you thought about last night's episode of Spring Baking Championship (is that just me?).

Please leave your ego at the door: People love confidence; they hate     arrogance. Arrogance is phony. Intimidation and strutting around like an erect penis OR vagina won’t hide the truth - that you’re afraid and maybe a little underwhelming in your own mind.  There is nothing wrong with     having flaws... accepting those flaws... flaunting those flaws. It builds     character. But if you must insist on being an arrogant tool, then you must  also accept that you're not only unhealthy to yourself, you're toxic to     others.

Please do not give others false hope: If someone has posted an ad on     Kijiji or Craigslist - don't express interest and give them a date and time of when you're going to show up to purchase the item if you have no intention of making an appearance. Forget about it being rude and full of    atrocious manners; it's downright cruel to let someone believe they've     just sold their dining room table when in fact - they haven't. (Yes, I’ve been scarred).

Please remember, you're not always right: Unless you're me. And even then, you’d only be operating at a success rate of about 32%.... so, just be yourself.

[ragehappysecretsanta]

Author: http://teethhunter.tumblr.com

Recipient: http://thehorseshowgay.tumblr.com

Summery: Who would want a killer as a soul mate? Ryan asked himself every time he saw his mark. All he could hope for was his match was happy without him, that they would never meet.

Warnings: Minor mentions of wounds, panic attacks

Word Count: 3158

Ryan’s just out of high school the first time he kills a man. It was a sloppy, bloody affair really and he doesn’t feel even a twinge of regret for it though he knows he’s supposed to. His hands are shaking but not from remorse, rather the after effects of a pleasant adrenaline rush. In fact he feels fantastic up until the moment he peels his bloodied shirt off to shower and catches a glance at himself in the mirror. The mark on his shoulder was as bold and stationary as ever. He had never taken into consideration this possibility; really his soul mate was the last thing on his mind when he sliced through a man.

See, soul mate marks weren’t immovable permanent things. People are capable of change even to such a degree that a person that once would have brought out the best in them no longer do. Not only that, but people can die and people can turn so sour to the world that all they want to do is cause harm. Marks are as malleable as a human soul itself is. Some people’s mark with reform a multitude of times in their life where some stay static until the day they die. Even still there were some whose mark never stayed in one form, an ever shifting amorphous blob. That is what Ryan fully expects to see in the mirror, a swirling shape that never stills. Yet it’s the same shape as always and it’s making him sick to his stomach to look at.

~~~

Jeremy is one hundred and fifty job applications, a year’s worth of customer service work, and thousands of dollars of student debt deep into hell. Half dead from a slew of fifteen hour shifts, he finally got a day off. He spent this rare break with his friend Matt; though they worked at the same store they rarely saw each other between rushing around making up for the sorely understaffed lines. Surrounded by mountain of takeout boxes and a few open two liter bottles they played Halo in relative silence, after days upon days of forced social interaction neither of them wanted to talk just for the sake of talking. So when Matt spoke it very nearly startled him.

“We’re gonna die being screamed at about expired coupons and cleaning up spilled cereal, aren’t we?”  Matt’s eyes were still fixed on the TV as he spoke.

“I mean… it’s not how I want to go but right now it’s looking like that or dying on the streets instead,” Jeremy shrugged, maybe it was just exhaustion but the idea of that life brought nothing but apathy today.

“Just want stable money, time to get some sleep, and maybe someday time to find whoever has a matching mark,”

“Around here you’d have to be a hit man to live a life like that,”

“Let’s do it,” Matt suggested, glancing at Jeremy. He couldn’t decide if it was a joke or not. “I mean, for all the cynical shit you’re saying right now I know you’re actually starry eyed and dreaming about that right?”

They might have been joking around, but Matt’s words rang true on more than one level. For one, in a city teeming with criminals it was clear to see that could be the easier way to make a living. Jeremy kept up with the news of crew activity, not out of fear for himself but out of some morbid curiosity. He never once mentioned it to anyone but he may or may not have been just a bit of a fanboy of Fake AH, their new and creative ways of wreaking havoc were strangely exhilarating to read about.

Then there was the second bit of what Matt was talking about, secure life, happily living with a soul mate, all that idealist stuff. Jeremy wanted to claim he didn’t think too much about it. He didn’t want to be one of those weirdos that devoted their whole lives to finding their match only to discover their soul mate wasn’t into the idea at all. But hope was persistent and about as easy to crush as a boulder. He couldn’t help imagining what it’d be like. He never ventured to guess what they might look like, or even gender. Still, he could imagine someone he felt safe with, someone he could joke with, where trust was just intrinsic and where things just worked.

Jeremy paused the game, giving no explanation. He thought about it for a second before tugging on the neck of his shirt to show the mark on his shoulder, staring at it for a long moment. He didn’t have any problem letting Matt see it, he didn’t particularly care if anyone saw it actually.

“It’s been the same shape my whole life. I dunno man, think whoever my soul mate is would be cool with me living a life of crime?” He joked.

~~~

A year and a half later Jeremy’s no longer working in Retail Hell. He’s running prep jobs for heist by the very crew he used to admire from afar. It’s not glamorous but it pays well enough he can move into a better apartment and adopt a cat and not worry about food. He and Matt didn’t become hit men like they once joked about but they both slipped into the life of crime easily. Turns out Jeremy had a real knack for this stuff and a flair for the dramatic that fit right in with the crew. The longer he stayed on, the more he got to talk with the main crew. He could dogpile onto their teasing bullying, and take his lumps when the teasing turned on him. Much to Gavin’s glee, Jeremy would take any bet thrown at him regardless the price set on it.

It was a surprise to no one but Jeremy himself the day that Geoff offered him a spot in the main crew.

What was a surprise to everyone however was how well he clicked with Ryan.

It started small, with Ryan’s willingness to take off his mask around Jeremy. Then little things like making sure Jeremy was actually okay after some of the more wild and demanding bets, or kind hellos when he walked in the room and taking Jeremy’s side when the typical teasing picked up. Soon enough it was more than that, any partnered job they worked together on. Ryan got quicker and quicker to move to Jeremy’s side when they had to pair up. As it turned out Jeremy had bloodlust to match Ryan’s. They were Battle Buddies through and through.

~~~

Ryan has shown his mark willingly to exactly one person since he was seventeen years old. He wasn’t the quickest to trust people and was shier than he’d ever admit. He held the heavy weight of knowing he was too screwed up to deserve anyone. Fake AH were the first people to ever break through the wall he built up, after all they were all remarkably screwed up too. So he built tentative connections with them, laughed with them, played their silly games, even eventually taking his mask off around them. Still some things were off limits, physically he kept his distance, and anytime soul mate marks were mentioned he left the room.

The first person to see his mark wasn’t in the crew at all.

Bars generally weren’t Ryan’s favorite place to be, but every other Friday he went to a different one. It wasn’t for the drinks or the atmosphere, yet there he sat in a dimly lit and busy bar on a Friday night. It was five minutes later when someone took a seat right next to him, he didn’t need look to see who it was. As per usual, before even greeting him Meg ordered him a Diet Coke, and herself an actual cocktail.

“Want to give any drinks a try tonight, big guy?” She asked Ryan. They came here to people watch, find any fun leads to follow or useful information. But along with that they had a long standing game of seeing if there were any alcoholic drinks he actually liked. So far one ice cream based drink and fruity champagne were the only ones he deemed tolerable.

Ryan shook his head. "No thanks. Spare me the torture. You’re on a streak of picking the ickiest ones,”

“Aw, you’re no fun Rye,”

Ryan rolled his eyes, but even his face concealed he surely was smiling. He knew she wasn’t actually pressuring him into it.

They’d been casually watching people and chatting for an hour when the topic changed in a way Ryan dreaded.

“You have any idea who your soul mate is?” The question had him freezing up and glancing at the nearest exit, calculating possible escapes.

Meg noticed his reaction, but took it in stride. “I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.” She winked jokingly, frowning when he remained frozen.

“Hey it’s okay. What, are you afraid you’ll actually show your soul mate it?” For as distant as he liked to try to be, maybe that made sense that he’d be afraid. His slight nod confirmed it.

“Okay, here then.” She turned, lifting her shirt slightly to show the mark on her hip. “Not matching right? So you’ve got nothing to worry about,” The way his shoulders relaxed told her she’d been right to do this. “Though we could totally go to one of those psychics that do mark readings, they can just tell us we were meant to be best friends,”

“You know those are a hoax.” At least he was calm enough to bicker again.

“Still’s fun though. But I guess we don’t need them to tell us what we already know.”

“I’ll… show you, just not here okay?”

Meg was the first person to see Ryan’s mark and the first person to understand that he feared for the day he met his match.

It was the first time Ryan admitted to himself that he was scared.

~~~

Everything was okay between Ryan and Jeremy until it wasn’t. Battle Buddies were going strong, and then there was the job that went all wrong. They were laid out on the side of the road, both worse for wear but Ryan was holding onto consciousness a whole lot better than Jeremy was. He rolled over onto his knees and inched his way over to Jeremy, things didn’t look good. There were pieces of shrapnel littering his body and a concerning amount of blood pooling up. Ryan did whatever he could, ripping away what was left of Jeremy’s shirt to try and find the worst source of the bleeding. For a split second his eyes rested on that oh so familiar mark on Jeremy’s shoulder and his blood ran could. No, he couldn’t think about this right now, this was a problem for another time, if ever there would be another time.

Jeremy couldn’t figure out what he did wrong. Ryan wouldn’t even look in his direction anymore. At first it just made Jeremy antsy, he tried to tell himself he was being paranoid, Ryan must just need his space he tried to tell himself.  But then anytime Jeremy walked into the room, Ryan would walk right out regardless of what he was in the middle of.

The third time it happened the lads and Ryan were the penthouse squabbling over a game when Jeremy walked in. Ryan froze, almost mechanically dropping his controller, standing up and walking out of the room.

“What’d you do him?” Gavin asked, squeaking when that question earned him an elbow to the ribs from Michael.

Jeremy crumpled, the mountain of paranoia and guilt that’d been building up toppled over on him. Some days it was hard to believe anyone in the crew liked him, though those days happened less and less as he established himself as one of them. Now all that fear came flooding back, did any of them even like him? Had Ryan just been keeping up pretenses the entire time and was sick of him now?

Michael was quick to put an arm around Jeremy, dragging him over to the couch. “Hey, don’t listen to him. Ryan’s just being a moody dick, you know how he gets.”

“Yeah… didn’t mean that, bet he’s just making a whole stink. I mean he spent a month shooting me with BBs every time I walked in the room, he’s just got odd ideas right?” Gavin wasn’t the most reassuring but he tried, wrapping an arm around Jeremy as while to pile up on them.

~~~

It doesn’t get worse. In fact there are brief moments where Jeremy thinks things are getting better between the two of them again. When Ryan stops running out of the room at the very sight of him, or when actually makes eye contact with Jeremy again. But it doesn’t get any better than that for months.

Four months later they’re partnered together for a job once again. It’s absolutely Geoff’s doing, he’s sick of seeing this miserable, passive fight going on. Ryan was stiff as a board and all the worry Jeremy had been combating for months crept back up on him. Neither of them could keep this up.

They drove in silence; as much as Jeremy wanted to turn on the radio and drown it all out he just dug his nails into his palm instead. When they parked it was suddenly all too much for him, he finally broke.

“What’s going on with you, man?”

Ryan didn’t respond, he gripped the steering wheel tighter even though they were motionless.

“Did I do something, did I say something, what?”

Still there was no response.

“I don’t understand what I did wrong,”

“Nothing it’s-it’s nothing. Let’s just do our job,” Ryan got out of the car, slamming the door on his way out. At least Jeremy couldn’t see his face.

Ryan had been caught in a whirlwind of panicked thoughts for months. He had never wanted to find his soul mate, no one should have to be his soul mate. Yet here his match was, and strangely, painfully, it all made sense. They fit together so well. Ryan couldn’t deny how terrified he’d been when he thought Jeremy might die, or how he practically melted anytime he heard the other laugh even now when things were so tense, hearing Jeremy from a distance did things to Ryan. It really did make sense. Here was someone in the same line of work as him, someone who got the same thrill from the kill and from the destruction left behind. They were both messed up, but that didn’t make this any easier after years of telling himself he wasn’t worth it.

They hardly said a word to each other during the job. It was tense up until the moment things turned into a big and bloody fight. There was no room for tension between them then, they were in their element and for the first time in months felt right in standing side by side.

“Starting to look like Battle Buddies are bad luck huh? Second time in a row we got caught.” Jeremy laughed as he said that, favoring his left side a little where he definitely had a few bruised ribs.

Ryan looked worse, he had a nasty slash across his torso, and though mostly superficial it still bled a fair bit. To Jeremy’s surprise, he actually chuckled though.

“We’re both conscious though, that’s a plus.”

“Not for long if you let that keep bleeding. You should probably get that shirt off. It’s got other people’s blood on it, not exactly what you want in an open wound.” The shirt was pretty much in tatters anyways, practically falling off of Ryan. In fact… no, Jeremy told himself he was seeing things, that the adrenaline high was making him jittery and weird because he could have sworn he saw…

Ryan’s hand immediately covered the exposed mark with a rushed slap that had to have stung.

Maybe he wasn’t hallucinating after all, Jeremy thought. That was the last thought he had before crossing the few feet distance between the two of them and wrenching Ryan’s hand away to get a clear look. He was shaking, staring at the twin of his own mark, momentarily unaware that Ryan was frozen in panic.

“You knew,” It wasn’t an accusation, but rather like Jeremy was thinking out loud. Suddenly his shock and wonder turned sour.

“Why didn’t you just say something? If you don’t believe in the marks, if you didn’t want to be with me then you could’ve just said it! You didn’t need to hate me for it.”

“I don- I didn’t- I… can’t breathe,” There was no escape and Ryan didn’t know what to do.

Concern tempered Jeremy’s hurt and anger somewhat. Taking inventory of the situation he could say this could be going better; they were standing in an alleyway, both injured, and Ryan was having a panic attack.

“Okay, uh, let’s just get back to the car, kay?” Jeremy’s words were softer now, putting a hand on Ryan’s back he lead the way to where they’d parked.

He grabbed a towel from the trunk for Ryan to put pressure on his wound. This time he took the driver’s seat and this time he turned on the radio.  He didn’t speak for a long time, not until Ryan’s breathing was slow and even, and not until he was sure he could speak without sounding like he was on the verge of tears.

“I’m sorry. Y’know for getting grabby there, making you show me it when you didn’t want to,”

There’s a long moment where only radio ads fill the silence before Ryan speaks.  “I’m bad at this. I don’t hate you.”

“What’s going on then?”

“I shouldn’t have a mark.”

Jeremy turned then, half climbing out of his seat to lean over Ryan. “If you’re seriously implying that because of your job you don’t deserve someone I’m going to lose it I swear. Because hi, I’m Jeremy Dooley, I kill for a living too, I enjoy it, and oh hey, I’m also your soul mate would you look at that?”

Ryan laughed weakly to himself, taking his mask off. Hearing that out loud grounded him. “Is it better if I just say I’m scared?” There wasn’t a lie in that, he was trying to smile but he looked terrified.

“If you’ll stop running, yeah man, I can work with that. We can leave digging into what scares you for another day, but I don’t want to lose you.”

“I’m sorry for all of that. I won’t run.” Ryan hesitated before snaking his arms around Jeremy for a hug. It probably caused more pain than would normally be worth it with Jeremy’s ribs and Ryan’s gash, but right now neither of them cared.

[an-inconvenient-dandelion]

2017 in review.

1.What did you do in 2017 that you’d never done before? made my own sauerkraut, made my own tomato sauce that actually tasted good, got a supervisor fired (definitely the best thing i did all year), took (part of) the GRE, went to humboldt county, drove on a road with traffic.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? no, not really.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? STEPHY!

4. Did anyone close to you die? several clients, several friends' cats, and Mrs. Bayer (part of my chosen fam) just died a few weeks ago :(

5. What countries did you visit? none.

6. What would you like to have in 2017 that you lacked in 2016? more friends, more freedom, a driver's license, maybe a van? oh and for many politicians to be impeached. and if net neutrality is really dead i hope it means that people will put down their phones and close their laptop and overthrow the government with all the free time they'll have.

7. What dates from 2017 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? i remember certain protests, certain breakdowns, certain feelings of freedom.  

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? i played a huge part in getting my horrible abusive supervisor fired, which i didn't think was going to work, and almost resulted in ME getting fired. but i didn't! and my co-workers who were equally affected but too afraid to make waves were so grateful and proud. and it made me feel like i could maybe create positive change. a few months later i quit that job because it was making me miserable and took a huge pay cut but i have no regrets, even though i am having a lot more financial probz and it really sucks, my life is mine again.

9. What was your biggest failure? spending a lot of the year drunk. getting into a bike accident and losing my phone because i got too drunk. trying to get sober, multiple times, and failing.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? i got into a bike accident and bruised my chin and finger. and smashed my glasses. this summer i was hanging out in the hospital with my mom after she got her knee replaced and caught some particularly nasty strain of the flu. i got a 103 degree fever and felt like i was actively dying, but i didn't seek medical attention because it was the same day as the charlottesville murder and i was like, "well, maybe there are worse things than dying right now, like living through the rise of facism." plus i didn't have health insurance and i was traveling. but, obviously, i pulled through.

11. What was the best thing you bought? i really like my suitcase, although i may have bought it last year. my himalayan salt lamps. house plants. shelves. my new "i'm not a boy" hat. pesto.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? my friends, some clients, some co-workers, a few sweet and beautiful strangers. also all the LGBT/POC people who got elected last election day!!

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? former co-workers, nearly everyone in power in the government right now, sometimes family, some shaky friends, former friends.

14. Where did most of your money go? just surviving i guess. i currently spend about 60-70% of my income on rent. i usually work 6 days a week. sometimes 5, sometimes 7. it's still better than working in an office.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? grad school, although i didn't get in. my friends visiting, visiting friends.

16. What song will always remind you of 2017? like half of the "hamilton!" soundtrack. i obsessed over other pieces of music, but they all pale in comparison. 17. Compared to this time last year, are you: a) happier or sadder?  HAPPIER! b) thinner or fatter? thinner (not by a whole lot) c) richer or poorer? POORER (by a whole lot)

18. What do you wish you’d done more of? relaxing, traveling, making new friends

19. What do you wish you’d done less of? DRINKING, working, other self-injurious behaviors, looking at the internet. i quit my smart phone in september and it's been one of the best things i have ever done!

20. How will you be spending Christmas? i worked. i cried twice. it wasn't the worst day ever but i still hated it.

21. Did you fall in love in 2017? no.

22. How many one-night stands? None. I didn’t even really have any crushes.

23. What was your favorite TV program? "transparent" i guess? i don't really watch TV.

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? Yes.

25. What was the best book you read? “"you don't have to say you love me" by sherman alexie. "we were witches" by ariel gore. "life's work" by dr. willie parker. "the unsettlers" and "the man who quit money" by mark sundeen. "modern tarot" by michelle tea.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery? omg, HAMILTON!!!!!

27. What did you want and get? Paid time off, quitting my old job, changes, nice co-workers, a small amount of excitement.

28. What did you want and not get? admission to grad school, a community, an impeachment.

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? i was 35. my birthday party was not on my actual birthday. my actual birthday was kind of blah. i went to the ikea cafeteria and played sims.

31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? taking risks, being free.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2017? "I give up"

33. What kept you sane? great co-workers, the sims, hamilton, far-away friends who visited.

35. What political issue stirred you the most? EVERYTHING.

36. Who did you miss? east coasters & dead people, like always.

37. Who was the best new person you met? everyone at my weed job! and everyone i met in pittsburgh over the past few days!

[eriquebittle]

You should do holsom for that 31 questions thing like do all of them

here we fucking go,

1. Who in your OTP is the serial butt-slapper and who is constantly getting their beautiful butt slapped?

theyre equal opportunity bros...if ur bf gets a killer shot at beer pong or aces his chem exam you have to slap his butt it's the Bro Code

2. Who wants to be immortal and who wants to die before they’re old?

they had a conversation about this at 2am and they both decided that they would pick the same option ("i never wanna live without you bro" "BRO") however, holster has tried to get his poptart out of the toaster with a fork three different times so dying young seems likely

3. Who smokes and who pulls the cigarette from between their lips every time they try to light one?

i mean they're college athletes so neither of them smoke but i bet holster tried it once freshman year and ransom had to run back to his dorm to find his inhaler

4. Who always has cold hands and who is always warming them up for them?

ransom's hands are freezing and holster breathes on em and gives them kisses 2 keep them warm

5. Who plays candy crush in important meetings and who elbows them in the ribs to make them pay attention?

when they have a lecture together they just snapchat each other uglie badly-angled selfies

6. Who can fall asleep anywhere (and does) and who has to put them to bed?

ransom is forced to survive on three hours of sleep during finals so he passes out mid-conversation and holster sets an alarm and rolls him into bed so they can nap together

7. Who is the genius procrastinator who wings every test but still comes away with straight As, and who takes preparation and conscientious work very seriously?

justin "4.0 but never goes to class" oluransi, a beautiful coral reef, is a strange combination of both, holster has seen his textbooks maybe twice this semester and manages B's

8. Who takes their coffee black and who likes it with milk and two sugars, getting called a pussy by Person A?

ransom gets his with like six sugars and holster has been drinking black coffee since he was 6

9. Who initially seems shady but turns out to be a cinnamon bun, and who initially seems like a cinnamon bun but turns out to be shady?

not so much "shady" as douchey? initally they come off looking like the "you kno i had to do it to em" guy but theyre just two Bros....in love....who don't know how to be quiet in the library

10.  Who moans and talks with their mouth full whenever they eat good food, and who tells them to stfu but can’t help laughing?

do i even need 2 say it,

11.Who gives the bear hugs and who is always sidling up to them and snaking their arms around their waist?

ransom gives the Best Hugs and holster is a fucking giant who loves sneaking up behind his bf and resting his head on his shoulder and giving him. a smooch

12. Who still buys juice boxes and fruit snacks to put in their lunch?

whenever they go to stop & shop they stock the fuck up on gushers and capri suns “bro. as a future doctor? this is not how two college athletes should be fueling our bodies. fuck it throw in a few more boxes of gushers”

13. Who packs the other’s lunch and who repays them in sexual favours?

ransom has an 8am lab and forgets to bring food, and holster is happy 2 oblige to bring him his granola bar after ransom punctuates his text asking for lunch with a bunch of eggplant emojis

14. Who leaves notes in the other’s lunch and who tells them they’re dumb (but secretly has a collection of every note Person A has ever written them)?

holster leaves notes in ransoms bag a lot when he knows he’s getting really stressed out, and ransom keeps them in a shoebox under his bed and reads them when he needs to calm down

15. Who unconsciously holds their breath the first time they kiss, and who pulls back and says, “Breathe…”?

ransom holds his breath because holy fuck? hes about to make out with his best bro? and theyre sober this time? and whatififuckitupandourdmanmagicisgoneforeverandwenevermaekeitpastthefirstroundeveragainohmygodijustruinedsamwellmenshockeyforever and holster is like “breathe. can we just make out now please”

16. Who gets arrested for a petty crime they committed by accident and who bails them out?

holster gets arrested for jumping into the fountain at the mall on a dare, ransom bails him out 

17. Who grabs the other’s hand just as they’re getting out of bed and pulls them back under for cuddles?

ransom has early classes and holster grabs him and rolls over on him so he’s trapped under a 200 lb d man who just wants to spoon a little bit longer

18. Who gets mad about something unrelated to Person B and punches the wall, and who patches it up and kisses it better?

holster trips over his desk chair and accidentally puts his fist through the wall, Doctor Justin kisses it until the throbbing is gone

“is this gonna affect my handjob game, doctor?”

19. Who has the plain black phone case and who ordered one with cat ears off ebay?

ransom has a black one that he coated in stickers, holster bought the cat ear one by mistake but just decided to own it

20. Who likes to drive with the music blaring and who is too shy to sing along?

holster has a 500 song driving playlist that includes every banger in the discography of one direction, and neither of them are shy about singing along at maximum volume

21. Who’s the fantastic kisser and who has the beautiful eyes?

they both insist that the other one has both and get into fights over whose eyes are prettier and who kisses better

22. Who has the sunshine smile and who has the seductive gaze?

ransom defo has that killer smile, but holster has a resting bitch face and when he tries to look Seductive he looks tired and mad hfdjfhwhgfwb

23. Who gets offended by the intensity of the other’s crush on a celebrity?

UMMMMM justin “ransom” oluransi mashkov is in love with tater and holster has learned to accept that if given the chance, ransom would leave him for tater in 0.000007 seconds

“babe would you really leave me for mashkov”

“you know i would but ill always remember you”

“ ;___;”

dex: “can you guys not do this in the facebook group chat”

24. Who is embarrassed that they have to wear glasses sometimes and who wants them to wear them in bed?

ransom has a slight stigmatism but he mostly wears contacts, holster falls asleep in his glasses and when ransom tells him to take them off during sex holsters like “but how else am i gonna see your beautiful face bro”

25. Who cheats on the other then immediately begs for their forgiveness?

“you do this every fucking time and im tired of it”

“justin im so fucking sorry ill never do it again i promise”

“no im done playing monopoly with you dude you sneak extra money into your pile every time im sick of it”

26. Who is the jealous one and asks why the other was being so flirty all night, and who is oblivious to their own charms?

everyone has a crush on ransom and he doesnt see it, holster has the worst fucking game in history but he loves his boyfriends personality and every relationship needs to be built on trust, bro

27. Who orders a milkshake with their food and who orders a soda?

holster orders a milkshake for the sole purpose of asking ransom if its gonna bring all the boys to the yard

28. Who runs their battery down to 1% and who feels the need to charge theirs at 80%?

ransom takes care of his phone like its his child, holster hasnt seen a charger in three days and keeps the brightness up to 10000 so its constantly dead

29. Who has the excellent singing voice and is always singing around the house (and for Person B), but has no interest in going professional?

holster regularly belts out les mis aroud the haus, ransom joins him occasionaly but leaves most of it to adam 

30. Who would rather be barefoot if the setting is appropriate, and who has the huge and spectacular shoe collection (possibly also socks)?

when holster is anywhere he considers himself comfortable his feet are BARE, ransom has a sock collection a la spencer from icarly

31. Who takes their liquor on the rocks and who likes it neat?

holster orders on the rocks so he can chew on the ice with his massive horse teeth, ransom orders it neat but 99% of the time theyre drinking its at a kegster so they mainly just drink tub juice and natty light. classy

[drewkatchen]

Twenty years ago it wasn’t novel to have a really specific opinion about Jawbreaker, the little three-piece punk rock band that everyone personally owned until they no longer did. It was all glowing praise, outrage over their calculations and callous indifference toward your thoughts of their career ambition or anywhere else on the spectrum, and most people fiddled with their bangs or barrettes while telling you this stuff over a bean burrito. 2017 is no different. I’m guessing that anyone from say college age to wizened old forty-something, maybe with a tattoo or several, bike owner and drinks shitty beer through a chipped tooth whether because of financial restraints or for posturing, you have likely given a piece of your mind to someone within earshot about the state of reunions and where you fall on Jawbreaker returning to a stage. Maybe it was to the Internet or to your wife or your husband or your kid, and maybe they know what you’re talking about or maybe they just think you should feed the cat. At forty, it could be gauche or off-putting to have opinions about old bands because maybe it makes you seem out of touch, and rightly maybe you’ve moved on to talk about the evils of gentrification and new construction or neighborhoods with good schools, but Jawbreaker is still something else entirely and you will share what you think.

Maybe you’re really happy because, like me, you spent the better part of the nineties in remote corners of the country, unable to find a ride to the show a hundred miles away on a school night, and you missed the chance to dance up against your buds in your Dickies to ‘Shield Your Eyes.’ And you think about how life conspired against you. Maybe having ample chances to see Jets to Brazil just left you a bit cold, like observing someone in the wrong relationship or what from the outside seemed like the wrong relationship. Or maybe, in the reunion-saturated circus that is now (are we living on a planet with more reunited acts than new acts?) you’d hoped that they would be the one group of individuals who just wouldn’t sully the enduring image you had of them, whatever your enduring image is. The acrimony that seemed present at their dissolution, certainly you could rest assured these were the guys that wouldn’t be tempted. You may also not care, but then again, if you don’t care about the band, then you’re probably not reading this either. But it doesn’t matter because my opinion isn’t as strong as that damn mighty group, still fortified all these years later with the power to beguile, that first popped up again for me last month on Chrissy Piper’s Instagram feed, her announcing to the world again something was happening when singer Blake Schwarzenbach, a totem of some kind of endurance, was leaning against a tree and having a smoke before a secret show, a post that absolutely took my breath away.

And my opinion about them coming back to life may not matter, but I have one and so do some of my friends, and they’ve been through zits and bad bands and lack of sex and then sex and then edge-breaking and then shit jobs and then good jobs and then weddings and kids with this band. We’ve grown, moved laterally, dipped and emerged with Blake, Adam and Chris. They don’t know us and we don’t know them, but we know them and we know ourselves in relation to what they’ve created. And I wanted to hear what my friends had to say because they’re funny and insightful and this stuff got to them all when their cement was still wet and for better or worse is in them for good.

But I’ll go first.

Jawbreaker were a band above most others, as far as I was concerned. From a distinct community of musicians that went on to have a global footprint, but best I could tell they were their own scene. This wasn’t my friend’s band; they weren’t kids from the high school even though they knew the kids from the high school started bands to sound like them. Accessible but also off-kilter, lyrics that used a bunch of common words to tell heartbreaking and affirming stories of love and house parties and untapped potential. They were the band my straight edge friends and emo friends and skater friends and pop punk friends could all agree on. There was a universality to their narratives that could speak to you if you let them. What was their party affiliation anyway? Beer? Books? Trains? Sadness? Effortlessly them and if you wanted to find yourself in their lyrics then you could.

I can see myself, a doughy Catholic high school teen in 1993, in different rooms and in the cars of different friends. My mom couldn’t stand Frankie and his dyed hair, but he opened up my world when he lent me the Chesterfield King record, the cover evocative in what it showed and in what it hid. I gripped it tight before putting it on my crummy turntable, allowing the titular song to really warm my ears. Who was the singer in the cool pants? Why was his face hidden? Why was he playing his guitar that way? Who was on the back cover? Were they in the band?

To me (and as it turned out, thousands of others), the song sounded like love. A love that I had never experienced and love I may never realize. Sweet, wooly, woozy love, and listening to it on my bedroom stereo, I imagined what it would be like to be held. The singer's rasp, appealingly like shredded glass and smoke, somehow sounded like romance or aching. Did I understand the lineage working? Did I know of Westerberg and Mould and Richard Butler? Maybe, but no, not really and it didn’t matter. As a teen, Blake Schwarzenbach was my Westerberg. I’d found succor in the pointed frustrations of Ian MacKaye and Ray Cappo, but what I most wanted was a boyfriend, to have someone there to buffer the family chaos tornadoing around me and to play with my hair. I didn’t have that but I imagined being the love interest in this singer's world. Did I notice then he used a pronoun only once or twice unless he was describing the ‘toothless woman’, a tableau affording me the chance to picture two men together on a couch, tracing lines on palms and clinging together in outerwear. The words in the song painted an image of proximity: of a protagonist close enough to, however odd, smell his love's thoughts. It sounded like heaven; it made me feel warm. This was my introduction to Jawbreaker. ‘Chesterfield King’ was a song I first experienced alone in Goose Creek, South Carolina, and it followed me all the way to this year, where it still sounded like love when it played during my wedding reception in a cozy bar on a winter day in Jersey City, New Jersey.

---

As far as them being a band now, I don’t begrudge anyone trying to make money and keep their lives afloat or even just being together with their friends. These guys were talented enough to write and record winning lottery tickets they could cash in decades down the road and now they are smart enough to take it. Good for them. Maybe I was concerned about my own relationship with the band in the current moment. Did I even have one? Did I need to? Aside from putting on their records at home or on my phone for the morning commute, how much did I really care anymore? How much did I need to care? I no longer sit and worry about things like relationships and affection when my legs are on my husband's lap, the TV or turntable on near us. That they have sounded good at every show they have played this year is great and it's inspiring to see their determination to make it sail. That they are around in 2017, existing in the face of nuclear nonsense and terrifying natural disasters, calms my jitters just that much. So I thank them for that as well. I didn’t travel to Chicago because my husband and I are saving our pennies for a home but just know that Jawbreaker breathed life--real, concrete life--into my half-lived youth and helped me understand my heart a little bit better, and I owe them a real debt of gratitude for it. And if, as Schwarzenbach says, there’s a 95 percent chance of a show in New York City, then consider me camped out for it already.

But I think I speak for everyone when I say this: no new music, guys.

And now my friends:

Tommy, in his early-forties, college professor

“Trying to Take Its Form”

Most of us remember when we heard that Jawbreaker had broken up. It followed soon after the release of Dear You [Jawbreaker’s final album, released in September 1996], or the moment when most of us felt Jawbreaker had broken up with us. In hindsight, the punk underground’s bitter rejection of Jawbreaker and Dear You seems petty and self-righteous at worst, naïve at best. On one hand, we might see the subsequent redemption of Dear You and Jawbreaker’s long afterlife as a confirmation of all of that. On the other hand, we might also recognize the profound, almost inexplicable, attachment people must have had to a band to feel so spurned by their career decisions and to cherish them so many years after they were gone. That kind of attachment is what comes to mind when I think of the many, many hours I spent with Jawbreaker after I discovered them in 1992. My first encounter was through a friend whose older brother had an enviable record collection. He had been in the right places in the late 1980s and early 1990s to acquire some absolute gems. His record crates held first pressings of Jawbreaker, Jawbox, Fugazi, Samiam, and virtually every New York hardcore LP and compilation. From those crates I randomly drew the New Red Archive’s Hardcore Breakout USA Volume 1 double LP. The second song on the first side is Jawbreaker’s “Rich,” which I am guessing by the date and sound was recorded during the same session as Unfun [Jawbreaker’s debut record, released in 1990]. The guitar tone, Blake’s scratchy, but melodic vocals, and the relentless drums made me think the Lookout Records pop punk I had feasted on for a good year was suddenly outdated.

“Rich” slots in neatly with other material from Unfun; it doesn’t aspire to the experimentation or darkness of Bivouac nor does it exhibit the stripped-down pop and lyrical mastery of 24 Hour Revenge Therapy [Jawbreaker’s third album, released in 1994]. It is a minor song, minor enough not to make an LP that few would claim as the band’s masterpiece. But man, did that fucking song cut its way into me; it sunk into the surface of my skin and gave me goosebumps. I never, ever wanted to listen to it in the company of other people. Jawbreaker became that intensely personal band, one you use as a measurement of other people, but don’t want to share with anyone else.

I was a 16-year-old punk kid in small town South Carolina when I found that song. Climbing into manhood was usually signaled by sexual conquests (my score card was comfortably and securely at zero), athletic prowess (flamed out in little league), or outdoor activities that involved shooting animals before arriving at school. Guns seemed weird and I hated the “hunt before homeroom” kids enough that I never wanted to be identified with them. Punk offered some refuge from those models of masculinity and their suite of expectations. I learned pretty swiftly how to say “Fuck you” to most of those people. But crawling out from under those pressures didn’t lead to much else. You could, it turned out, be righteous in your refusal of everything and still alienated. Like other people in my small punk circle, I dreamed of getting out, of fleeing to neighboring Columbia, a town which seemed by comparison metropolitan, diverse, culture rich, and home to a vibrant punk and hardcore scene.

Enter Jawbreaker’s “Rich.” I don’t know the story behind this song or what compelled Blake to write it. I do know that I heard it as a fucking promise:

“A Dream rising. Trying to take its form against the norm. A goal, hard to hold. Sizing up itself against the world. Don’t push, it’ll come. Everything is gonna be alright. Steady now, don’t fall apart. Keep yourself upright.”

No one ever said any of that to me when I was a struggling teenager. They didn’t say it because I never relayed how much I hated going to school or how much I hated everyone there or how hopelessly narrow my future prospects seemed. I wanted something else, somewhere else, but had no reason to think I deserved more. Black Flag and Minor Threat had taught me how to internalize music. I could close the door to my room and make those voices screaming on the other end of my headphones scream for me and scream with me. It was a survival strategy. Jawbreaker’s “Rich” spoke to me immediately and intimately. It was okay to want more, to have outsized dreams, and even to feel crushed by the weight of them. “Everything is gonna be alright.” It is the simplest of lines; it could also be among the most trite and cliché. Those words would have been meaningless if anyone else had ever uttered them to me. But from Jawbreaker, they felt honest and shockingly new. The rising of Blake’s voice at the onset of that line signaled confidence, understanding, and, fuck it, I’ll say it, love. I spent hours alone listening to that song over and over.

Several months later I was punished for standard teenage punk antics: not coming home on time (or not at all in this case), getting blind drunk with friends in the woods, and driving 70 miles to Myrtle Beach at 4 in the morning because it seemed like only thing left to do. Housebound and on restriction for weeks, I took those Hardcore Breakout and Unfun records into my room and lived with them for days on end. At some point, I was allowed a trip to Manifest Records (southeastern record store chain) and the cashier handed me an advanced copy of Jawbreaker’s Bivouac on cassette. I was obsessed. That month’s issue of Maximum Rocknroll contained an ad announcing Jawbreaker’s summer tour and Columbia, SC was on the itinerary. I was granted early release due to good behavior just in time for that show and it was everything I needed it to be.

If you were a teenager when Jawbreaker started releasing records, there is a very good chance that you grew up with the band. Blake’s lyrics and storytelling became increasingly complex and mature; the direct appeal of “everything’s gonna be alright” blossomed into narratives of entangled love, unshakeable regret, and the pull of places near and far. In other words, teenage angst evolved into the intense emotional swings of early adulthood. And somehow, for me anyway, those first three albums never lost their power to give form to experience. They still haven’t lost that power.

If so many of us were furious when Jawbreaker “sold out,” it was because they taught us how to feel our way through worlds that didn’t want us to feel; they told us we could leave places that didn’t want us to escape. We could hold out for a little longer because it would be worth it.

Todd, late thirties, works with computers, lives in Washington, my former roommate

I came across Jawbreaker in the spring of 1995 while doing a radio show at WRUV in Burlington, VT my junior year of high school. My friend Mike called in and wanted me to play “Ashtray Monument,” [a song from he 1994 album 24 Hour Revenge Therapy] so I played it and fell in love with the song, so I "borrowed" the CD from the radio station for the next week and listened to it pretty much non-stop. The latter-half of that album in particular became the soundtrack to the end of my high school life; I would listen to Do You Still Hate Me? and West Bay Invitational over and over again obsessing over the heartbreak and joy found within each song, but it wasn't until 1996 when I bought a copy of Bivouac that I really got into them.   Bivouac always felt like a very odd album to me. There's still such a contrast between the first three songs on that record (”Shield Your Eyes”, “Big” and “Chesterfield King”) compared to the rest of the album -- those songs are light and poppy compared to the density of most of the later tracks (although "You Don't Know What You've Got" and "Pack it Up" break that mold.) I was super into Orange Rhyming Dictionary [an abum by Jets to Brazil, a band that formed after Jawbreaker with Blake Schwarzenbach as singer], but quickly was disappointed by Jets to Brazil. Four Cornered Night killed me with that "I love my piano" song, and while Perfecting Loneliness was much more decent, it never could capture that frenzied energy that Jawbreaker managed to contain. I remember getting a copy of a live show of their's at Mad Hatters on VHS from Rick Ta Life [singer of New York Hardcore band 25 ta Life] off eBay when I lived with you in Boston, and the camera operator is standing on Chris' [Bauermeister, Jawbreaker bassist] side of the stage so the recording is insanely bass-heavy. They rip into “P.S. New York is Burning” and for the first time I really heard what was going on in with the bass line in that song. This was right after 9/11, so there was some poignancy to the song title at the time as well, but it just felt heavy and cathartic at the same time. “Parabola” and the eponymous Bivouac follow that line as well; they're songs of release.

This was also the time when I realized that what made Jawbreaker so amazing wasn't just Blake's lyrics or guitar or Adam's drumming or Chris' bass, but rather the interplay of all of them together and how they worked off each other to create something new. I never got the chance to see them -- they broke up way too quickly after I discovered them and never played anywhere close enough to Burlington to be able to catch them live.  

Vincent, Has a really adorable daughter, lives in North Carolina with his awesome wife, wrote for HeartattaCk, has a nice voice

How did I find Jawbreaker? Memories attached to them? Did I see them? What do I really think about JTB? What song of theirs really meant something to me? What do I think of the reunion?

"The Boat Dreams from the Hill" reminds me of a late-80s maroon Volvo. I was in a classmate's car when I heard it, and the rest of 24 Hour Revenge Therapy for the first time. Most memorably, I remember every passenger in that tank belting the chorus to "Boxcar," ("1-2-3-4 / Who's punk / What's the score?") while trucking around Hillsborough Street.

That weekend, I went down to Schoolkid's Records and picked out 24-Hour Revenge Therapy and Farside's Rigged. I brought both to the clerk, and asked which one was better. He admitted to knowing nothing about Farside, but took one look at the Revelation Records logo and said, "Do you like heavy stuff? This one is gonna be heavy." He held up the Jawbreaker and said, "I can definitely tell you that this album's great." And, boy, it was. (I got Farside's 'Rigged' a few weeks later, and that, too, was also great, but definitely not heavy).

While most retrospectives stake out Jawbreaker as a monument to emo, in their zeitgeist they were lumped in with pop punk and the East Bay scene. Where pop punk stayed within the confines of a three-chord, verse-chorus-verse formula, Jawbreaker veered into extended instrumental jams, moody, white noise textures, and irreverent samples. Where pop punk's attitude was basic and bratty, Jawbreaker's demeanor was literary and melancholy. They appealed to kids that matured from fart jokes to irony. Like J. D. Salinger, I think Jawbreaker speaks to post-pubescent angst really well. In particular, hyper-sensitive and brooding young males like myself. We're a lot of fun at parties.

I saw Jawbreaker on November 2, 1995 at the Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, North Carolina. The openers were The Smoking Popes and Eagle Bravo. If a kid were born on that day, they could legally drink now. Whoa. This show was notable for a number of reasons: 1. Like most ambitious punks, I did a zine at the time. I reached out to Jawbreaker's publicist at Geffen Records, thinking they were too big for some 15-year old kid with a zine that had a circulation of about 500 copies. Nope. Geffen was cool, set me up with a couple of hours with the band before the show, and put me and a friend on the guest list.

2. Since it was for my zine, I took photos. I had just gotten a fully manual SLR from an uncle and taken a photography class here and there, but definitely had no idea what I was doing. I shot black and white and developed the photos in the hallway bathroom. They didn't come out great, but it started a long tradition of photographing live music that I still partake in today. 3. My +1 couldn't make it, as he fell ill on the day of. It was something pretty serious, as Jawbreaker was one of his favorite bands. I got him a Get Well Soon card and had the band sign it. I remember that Blake wrote "Be well soon," to which I thought he was real learned and shit.

I followed the hype around Jets to Brazil enough to pick up Orange Rhyming Dictionary, and saw them a couple of times. They never grabbed me in the way Jawbreaker did, and I'm already bored writing this sentence, so that'll be that. [Editor’s note: So shady, Vincent].

There's only a couple of bands from my impressionable and developmental days that aged with me, and Jawbreaker was one of them. In the way that a song might have meant something to me at 16 years old, but take on a totally different meaning when I was 25. "Donatello" off Bivouac was like that. Over the years, I related to various interpretations: my relationship with my parents, living in suburban North Carolina, racial expectations, but it was never a love song to me. One random memory: there was a period in my life where I started making "normal" friends, stepping outside of the murky underground music scenes, and navigating parts of Chicago I had initially avoided. I ended up falling in love with a lady, who is now my wife. She threw a party once, and, for music, just plugged in her iPod and hit random. "Kiss the Bottle" was on there, a track from a mix CD a college friend had made her. While everyone was out back having some epic Flip Cup tournament and talking about the Cubbies, I was on the couch with a union cement pourer, taking Jameson shots, hugging as Jawbreaker fans do, and yelling every single word to that song at the stereo. He and I had casually talked records before, but I think that was a moment we really connected.

The reunion? I hope they make a million bucks. They deserve it. I already witnessed them endure the purist wringer when they signed to a major, and that seems so moot in 2017. However, I won't see them at Riot Fest. I lived in Chicago, but never went to Riot Fest, and have a million thoughts about it that aren't relevant to Jawbreaker. The one that does: there's a certain kind of performer that can create enough spectacle out of their music to entertain a massive audience in an outdoor venue. I don't think Jawbreaker is one of them. But, I also have never been around 60,000 people screaming "1-2-3-4 / Who's punk / What's the score," so what do I know?

Doug, teacher, has incredible hair and a preponderance of nice shirts, is someone I care about a great deal

My relationship with Jawbreaker is so intimately entwined with my coming of age that it is never really clear to me where Blake Schwarzenbach’s lyrics captured perfectly the fumblings and hurts of growing up and when those lyrics shaped my thoughts. If it is difficult for me to delineate this now, it was impossible for me when I was 19. At that age I was studying American literature in college, had my first band of any importance, fell in love and had my heart broken, and had what I thought was full control of the vices that would later haunt me. Dark secrets burn their vessel, it has been written, but at that age you can save them for later. It would be a few years until I fell from the wagon to the night train.

Fiction, reading and writing, was always more truthful to me. Looking back, it was because I wanted to write myself a better story. As a teenager I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion. Like many of us in those awkward years, that drove me into independent bookstores and record shops. Although it felt iconoclastic in my suburban Boston town, like most angsty teens I fell in love with poetry, really and specifically, Beat poetry. I tore through the novels of Jack Kerouac, reading his blend of truthful fiction at the same rate as his prose. Carrying around a battered and dog eared copy of Howl one day while in Newbury Comics is how a conversation started with the clerk filing CDs. She recommended Jawbreaker’s Bivouac, Crimpshrine’s Quit Talkin Claude, and Leonard Cohen’s New Skin For the Old Ceremony. A pretty solid haul.

Beats spoke to me, but they never felt that they were of my time. Schwarzenbach’s lyrics however, contained an urgency and quality that made Jawbreaker songs feel like they were happening to me in the moment. And he made it clear that he/we were drawing from the same well. And because I believe in desperate acts, the kind that make you look stupid, I desperately tried to start a band like Jawbreaker from there on. That took a few years, though. I had to wait until I was in college. Until then Jawbreaker was a constant soundtrack, with “P.S. New York is Burning” copied onto countless mixtapes and the band’s albums passed around like samizdat. To be accurate, I spent too much time hanging out with my very small circle of friends, drinking coffee, with just cigarettes to fill the gaps in our empty days.

The band I formed in college was in retrospect a little too overt influenced by Jawbreaker. We were punks, sure, but with the local scene enamored with The Overcast and The Ducky Boys, I often felt like I should apologize from the stage, saying something like “Sorry we ain’t hard enough to piss your parents off.” But again, Blake’s lyrics felt like he was writing my soundtrack. His being open with the struggles and politics of the East Bay punk scene was writ large what has happening in my very tiny little world (is there anything smaller with bigger stakes than your hometown punk scene?)

Hell is definitely sitting in a van with seven punks for countless hours on the road. Unwashed and unkempt, four in the band and the rest “road crew;” the smells, the boredom, and the lack of space would crack anyone. And it was the greatest time of my life. Booking a tour pre-internet was no joke (Book Your Own Fucking Life, RIP) [Ed note: BYOFL does seem to exist in web form] and a cross country tour when you have two seven inches out, one of them a split, is the kind of undertaking left only to young and foolish punks. Of course, we didn’t make it far. We broke down at the top of Massachusetts. Shows were off, it was pretty heavy. Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life. Like Sal Paradise we kept trying until we were able to cross this vast continent. Driving seven hundred miles to play to fifteen angry men is disheartening - except! - when you can turn on Jawbreaker’s “Tour Song.” In the van after load out, listening to 24 Hour Revenge Therapy I could realize that there was nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.

Out in Berkley, having finally made it to the storied Gilman Street venue [a place the subject of this essay series played many times] for a show, was the beginning of the end for my band - although at the time it didn’t seem that way. The drummer, a prolific zine pen pal and all around social mover of the group, was able to bring in more people than a relatively unknown touring band would normally. It was people from bands and labels, the good ones, plenty of stunning children, so before I went on I felt the swell of making it. Here I was, about to go on the stage and witness the scene that I had so romanticized. The set was over quickly and, after, I stood outside in the East Bay industrial park drinking a beer and feeling the chill of fall. It was one of the rare moments of contentment and I didn’t grasp that the moment was fleeting; more temporary than I could imagine.

Of the end that was about to befall my band, it had eerie parallels with the crack up and break up Jawbreaker. Their signing to a major label caused major rifts in scene politics and it felt like one had to take a side. We weren’t offered the storied million bucks that Jawbreaker was but we were offered more than we had from the large indie label that was taking bets in the post-Green Day landscape. I guess I’m not the gambling type, since it didn’t quite make sense to me to take the deal, but I was a minority in the band. Even at that level moving units and tracking charts seemed like a fool’s errand. However, the scene chafed and I grew so goddamned tired of fighting against the chains. I was able to play guitar a little better, and piano a little better too, so why not make better music?

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them. All the talk of musicianship and the tensions of (very minor) success is really just a cover. I was drinking too much at that point. After our LP was released to far less impact than we expected I had a moment in one of the rare times we sprung for a hotel room. I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I quit the band that night.

Truth is, now, years later, all I really need is hot good coffee, and a good, good book. Jawbreaker is reuniting, and I get it. Sometimes the past needs to be reckoned with in the present. Or maybe they just want to make some bank. The politics, optics, and aesthetics are debates I’ve left behind. I won’t go to the show because it will be familiar faces and still none to recognize. But I haven’t completely given up on nostalgia; I’ll still put on Jawbreaker records and bounce around with a foolish grin on my face. After all, it’s not that bad. I still have pictures. I look back.

[reitziluz]

get to know me meme!

..... a mutual did this and said people feeling up for it should do it so....

i’m not tagging anyone but feel free to do these

1. What is your full name? Rene

2. What is your nickname? Rellu, Rensku

3. What is your zodiac sign? Virgo

4. What is your favorite book series? uhhh ASOIAF maybe

5. Do you believe in aliens or ghosts? i like the idea of residual energy... and ofc there’s other lifeforms floating in the endless space

6. Who is your favorite author? ME MYSELF i’m honestly not sure, there’s no-one whose all works like to the same degree 

7. What is your favorite radio station? ... rock/heavy metal station

8. What is your favorite flavor of anything? mmm choco? or like this salsa/cheese combo. also cola.

9. What word would you use often to describe something great or wonderful? excellent, gorgeous, fucking perfect

10. What is your current favorite song? this one

11. What is your favorite word?  i don’t... have one. maybe しまう?

12. What was the last song you listened to? this one

13. What TV show would you recommend for everybody to watch?  in the flesh, mushishi

14. What is your favorite movie to watch when you’re feeling down?  i don’t like movies that much? ... one piece movies

15. Do you play video games? yes occasionally

16. What is your biggest fear? death, heights

17. What is your best quality, in your opinion?  insight/confidence combo?

18. What is your worst quality, in your opinion? arrogance... small-mindedness, as in not being able to throw myself as deep into stuff as i feel like i should....

19. Do you like cats or dogs better?  cats

20. What is your favorite season? winter or late fall

21. Are you in a relationship? mmmm when aren’t you in relationships?? but yea i’m in several relationships as this question seems to be angling for...

22. What is something you miss from your childhood? structure and relatively low pressure

23. Who is your best friend? poronen and also revy my dearie. there’s a couple more conventional/old past besties too that i still hold close to my heart.

24. What is your eye color? dark-ish gray-green-blue

25. What is your hair color? dirty blonde, dyed red

26. Who is someone you love? my friends my family my datemates... myself...

27. Who is someone you trust? i trust p much everyone until proven wrong

28. Who is someone you think about often? bisexualwinry and poronen again lmao, also... uhhh whichever characters i’m obsessed most recently

29. Are you currently excited about/for something? next installations of friends’ fics, my own fic chapter lmao, a homewarming party of an ex i’m friends with...

30. What is your biggest obsession? currently a couple vocaloid producers and mp100. long term.... ffvii and vampires.

31. What was your favorite TV show as a child? pokemon and moomins

32. Who of the opposite gender can you tell anything to, if anyone? fuck your idea of there being an opposite!! i don’t have an opposite!! i can tell my dearest friends anything, regardless of gender or lack of it!!!!

33. Are you superstitious? not really, tho i like some of the practices

34. Do you have any unusual phobias? no

35. Do you prefer to be in front of the camera or behind it? front~

36. What is your favorite hobby? writing, drawing, weightlifting

37. What was the last book you read? i’m not sure but i’m going to say villon’s testament

38. What was the last movie you watched? uhhhh maybe ghost in the shell? the first one.

39. What musical instruments do you play, if any? tiny bit of guitar

40. What is your favorite animal? cats

41. What are your top 5 favorite Tumblr blogs that you follow? i can’t really say, i like following my friends (you know who you are i’ve msg you all basically)

42. What superpower do you wish you had? i always answer these the same way: absolute shapeshifting. 

43. When and where do you feel most at peace? in my own room around midnight OR with good friends anywhere

44. What makes you smile? anything exciting, really

45. What sports do you play, if any? uhhhh i did medieval swordfighting for a while but nowadays i dream of getting back to lifting and running

46. What is your favorite drink? water, coke, all coffee drinks, wine

47. When was the last time you wrote a hand-written letter or note to somebody? probs within a week, we communicate between flatmates with these lil post-it notes

48. Are you afraid of heights? yes holy shit so bad

49. What is your biggest pet peeve? when people are allergic to fun/are contrarians

50. Have you ever been to a concert? yuppp a couple times

51. Are you vegan/vegetarian? yes

52. When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up? an author, but before that a paleontologist, and before that a circus princess

53. What fictional world would you like to live in? eugh idk almost none of them??? somewhere where it’s p idyllic

54. What is something you worry about? planet dying, economy crashing, getting back to my own two feet after this horrible mental crash i’ve been going through all spring...

55. Are you scared of the dark? a lil bit, puts me on edge

56. Do you like to sing? hell yea!!

57. Have you ever skipped school? so many times

58. What is your favorite place on the planet? my parent’s house, this one street in kyoto...

59. Where would you like to live? honestly? in the center of the city i’m living in now, or the capital... ... or kyoto or tokyo...

60. Do you have any pets? no, flatmate has cats tho

61. Are you more of an early bird or a night owl? night owl but a fairly balanced one

62. Do you like sunrises or sunsets better? either is good

63. Do you know how to drive? yes

64. Do you prefer earbuds or headphones? headphones!! but i use buds more, more practical.

65. Have you ever had braces? yes.

66. What is your favorite genre of music? metal. like the sorta frilly vampiric neoclassical metal tons of jrock bands do?? but i like a huge variety of genres.

67. Who is your hero? gotta be my own hero

68. Do you read comic books? rarely, if we don’t count manga

69. What makes you the most angry? petty pointless shit

70. Do you prefer to read on an electronic device or with a real book? on my phone

71. What is your favorite subject in school? languages/literature

72. Do you have any siblings? four of them, two big sisters and two lil brothers

73. What was the last thing you bought? .... some food? uhhh boxers?

74. How tall are you? 168 cm ish

75. Can you cook? yes

76. What are three things that you love? storytelling, good food, good laughs

77. What are three things that you hate? generic bad injustice shit in the world, people who make fun of others for things they like, lmao my current writer’s block towards my main fic ahahaha ;;;

78. Do you have more female friends or more male friends? seriously fuck these questions? most of my friends are nb

79. What is your sexual orientation? queer and complicated

80. Where do you currently live? Turku

81. Who was the last person you texted? a friend

82. When was the last time you cried? i have no clue, i don’t cry often

83. Who is your favorite YouTuber? everyone who subs vocaloid stuff

84. Do you like to take selfies? yessss 

85. What is your favorite app? just my JED fhgadhadh

86. What is your relationship with your parent(s) like? a bit distant (due to physical distance) but warm and friendly and supportive

87. What is your favorite foreign accent? .... this seems strange but uh. no specific preference? throaty languages, french and arabic and russian come to mind...

88. What is a place that you’ve never been to, but you want to visit? TOKYO ive been to japan twice and lived there for a while but never managed to visit tokyo

89. What is your favorite number? 11

90. Can you juggle? a lil bit?

91. Are you religious? anti-religion more like ahaha

92. Do you find outer space of the deep ocean to be more interesting? both, both is good

93. Do you consider yourself to be a daredevil? not really but then again i do tend to take things as challenges...

94. Are you allergic to anything? this one is a weird one. there’s a chemical that does cause some sorta reaction? it’s in some cardboard boxes and used in treating hemp rope..... 

95. Can you curl your tongue? yes

96. Can you wiggle your ears? yes

97. How often do you admit that you were wrong about something? anytime i can’t wiggle out of it like “oh true yes that’s what i meant i was almost correct the first time” lmao

98. Do you prefer the forest or the beach? ... forest

99. What is your favorite piece of advice that anyone has ever given you? it’s okay to half-ass things, it’s better than not doing anything

100. Are you a good liar? i think so

101. What is your Hogwarts House? gryffindor not slytherin shut upppp

102. Do you talk to yourself? sometimes

103. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? ambivert? sorta more extrovert

104. Do you keep a journal/diary? nahh not really

105. Do you believe in second chances? yes

106. If you found a wallet full of money on the ground, what would you do? if there was no-one nearby who could have obviously dropped it... or who could see... i would pocket any cash and take the wallet itself to lost and found.

107. Do you believe that people are capable of change? yea.

108. Are you ticklish? no

109. Have you ever been on a plane? yes, several times

110. Do you have any piercings? fourteen and planning to get more 

111. What fictional character do you wish was real? not really anyone...

112. Do you have any tattoos? yup a big fat nb koi on my left calf

113. What is the best decision that you’ve made in your life so far? going ahead with transitioning

114. Do you believe in karma? no

115. Do you wear glasses or contacts? glasses! really strong ones too lmao

116. Do you want children? no. wouldn’t mind co-parenting someone else’s kids if that sorta person wandered in my life tho.

117. Who is the smartest person you know? well myself of course - no but really ahh vrow has me beat in my category of intelligence.

118. What is your most embarrassing memory? i sorta picked on a kid for no reason in elementary school. it was a singular incident and i apologized a year later.

119. Have you ever pulled an all-nighter? yessss currently doing one

120. What color are most of you clothes? black

121. Do you like adventures? yea to a degree? 

122. Have you ever been on TV? nope

123. How old are you? 24

124. What is your favorite quote? hhhh i don’t have all-time faves but currently just. “Just stay by my side, it doesn’t matter even if it’s a lie.”

125. Do you prefer sweet or savory foods? just give me all the food

[ulyssesredux]

Penelope

I told her and her lot of trash I hate having a long waiting list of those painted women off him like that picture of it O but then what am I so damned nervous about that Those Intelligence chiefs made a false ad about me where I was engaged for for fun to the F.B.I. Wow, this time in Germany. My condolences to all, have a great mirada once or twice I had the map of it and if I am the only way a body can understand then he wrote me that exasperated of course would only be too delighted to pretend shes mad in love or loved by somebody if the world is watching If Goofy Elizabeth Warren, couldn’t care less about the incarnation he never felt me I dont know and Im sure Im not no nor anything like it so much the day I wore that dress Miss Stack bringing him flowers the worst old ones she could and he puts his big square feet up in bed with his ten toes sticking out that ought to have brought them back to Lewers this morning and kicked up a pack of lies to hide it not that I spent Friday campaigning with John Kennedy is my brown part he was always talking to her and vain about her and ask her do you love him and his heart take that kind—and they always want to feel your way with ISIS, OCare, etc.

Violent crime is rising across the bay of Tangier white and turbans like kings asking you to Prime Minister Theresa May in Washington D.C.

When I said!

Why didn't the writer of the horrible attack in Nice, France. Certain Republicans who have lost to me so much interest in it you wouldnt know which to laugh or cry were such a criticiser with his keys to lock it up in the U.S. Very short and lies, and he goes and gives impudence well have him sitting up like a dog. Get tough!

These politicians like Cruz and 1 for 42 John Kasich was never asked by me. Looking forward to introducing Governor Mike Pence and family goodfornothings poor Paddy Dignam all the same since O Im not a particle of love in their nice white mantillas ripping all the ends of Europe and the Clinton Campaign, may poison the minds of the terrible things they did together well naturally and if I buy a pair of old Cohen I suppose theyre just getting out of my blouse or touch him if we had.

Busy times!

Anybody whose mind SHORT CIRCUITS is not a notion what I gave Gardner going to Howth Id like to sip those richlooking green and yellow houses and the United States Navy research drone in international waters-rips it out in the hope but he never felt they could have been hanging up too on the Presidency is that rain was lovely after looking across the ear for herself take that now for answering me like that bath of the bed to let him lick me in the entire opinion, it is very hard to Make America Great Again. It was just like the pope for a change the Lord God I was dying on account of the most talented people running for the engine to start but he never did a terrible thing she said about Our Lord being a man looks like with his dirty eyes Val Dillon that big heathen I first noticed him at dessert when I came into the U.S.

Ungrateful TRAITOR Chelsea Manning, who never had thats why I suppose hes 20 or more Im not too much her face swelled up on a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, Rick Scott, for a month yes and how much were they Ive no clothes at all of you marching—In addition to winning the debate last night to a very weak and ineffective. Some people just don't tolerate liars-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. ISIS in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Wow! Early voting today; election next Saturday. I want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! They want to run the White House Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. Very dishonest! Yes. As usual, gave them a bit too high for my press conference in the cream muslin standing right against the wall and I in it true or no it fills up your whole day tweeting about Trump & gets nothing done in rebuilding Turnberry, and outright lies, has me winning the Electoral College is much different!

But this world without style all going in food and rent when I was married Im sure by his gaiters and the brown costume and the walk and when I had a great big hole in his head a good job if he was able to open the windows then down and our eyes met I felt something go through me like that a woman when he said Im dining out and drew back the same on account of her and ask her do you love him and me being supposed to be chaining me up against you for her poor performance in answering questions. Hopefully the violence & unrest in Charlotte will come to an immediate end.

Wow, 30,000,000 for the men with our 2 photographs in all sure you were yes I would have kept those jobs in Pennsylvania. If dopey Mark Cuban of failed Benefactor fame wants to read that novel cantankerous Mrs Rubio brought it in the lives of ALL Americans. Crooked hard. Crooked Hillary and Obama on JOBS and SAFETY! Why can't the pundits be honest? Voters understand that Crooked Hillary Clinton raked in money from regimes that enslave women and gays & refuses to write it in print to see all the time how did that excite him bad enough to run for president, has a thing of beauty and poetry for you I had only for I hate people touching me afraid of being hanged O she didnt want us to marry them for money in a glasscase with two at a woman while they can possibly be that was one myself for a Wall Street. Former President Vicente Fox, who she always hated! A list celebrities are all wanting tixs to the whatyoucallit everything was whatyoucallit moustache had he he said he would too and Mina Purefoys husband give us room even to take in lodgers off the hand off that little habit tomorrow first Ill look at that time trying to get near two stylishdressed ladies outside Switzers window at the trottingmatches and she didnt want us to cover-up stories and sources, is now using the term Radical Islamic Terror.

I was to know youre a virgin for them it was we were in a pinafore lying on the tremendous cost and cost is out of nothing but bad publicity from the U.S., jobs, safety and protection for those in need. I did had an offensive odour what did they not responded to the White House wait so long as I settled the Trump University lawsuit for a dark man in some perplexity between 2 7s too in the back room he could hold in and wasnt it terrible to do unless he likes me O thanks be to the great State of Colorado never got to vote in the box I could have been treated terribly by the 16,500 Border Patrol Agents was the first man going the roads only for I he can swim of course me no theres no God I dont wonder in love with him its much better!

We have enough problems around the city meeting God knows its not that hed be off his feed thinking of him like the end I can tell him I loved rousing that dog in the GREAT, GREAT State of Virginia and didn't put false meaning into the school classroom. Congratulations Stephen Miller-on representing me this morning see she wrote a letter from a cabbage thats what gives the women were as bad as all that comes from his side on his knee I made him pull out and laid on the moment she was just a few pence for them better for him she used to go on I suppose the people became the rulers of this web massive increases of ObamaCare will take America back. If the disgusting and corrupt media covered me honestly and didn't put false meaning into the area window to let her know or shed revenge it arent they thick never understand what you want isnt there sometimes by the back room he could do to keep him from doing their jobs. Media rigging election!

How to defeat radical Islam. Media desperate to distract from Clinton's anti-2A citizens must organize and get more than $150,000 from me and Floey made me go to D.C. on January 20th. The same people who have fought me and spoke glowingly about Crooked Hillary Clinton. 4 in the shadow of Ashlydyat I had that rum in the summer and I wouldnt lee him he could buy me a nice word for any woman cutting up this old hat unless I paid some nicelooking boy to mend so that the election night tabulation be accepted.

Also, deductibles are so high that it was a regular old rock scorpion robbing the chickens out of my children. Another horrific attack, is now using the Federal Minimum Wage. I hate people touching me afraid of being sued Totally made up things that he agrees with me yes and then play with the cat she rubs up against major NFL games. I did or near it my lips were taittering when I threw the penny to that dry old stick Dr Collins for womens diseases on Pembroke road your vagina he called me what he wanted to and she blessed I will be different after Jan. Wall Street, lobbyists and special place. After today, Crooked Hillary Clinton. So funny, Crooked Hillary no longer talking. #GOPConvention Looking forward to a man looks like with the glove get on without us white Arsenic she put in his time he was glad to get the great suckin the next year to get all the funny clothes dressing her up with a young boy would like to see how THE MOVEMENT CONTINUES-THE FIELD OF FIGHT-by sources-that no charges will be a widow or divorced 40 times over a year ago when was it to him for that old commode I wonder could I get my husband again into their clutches if I am lowering taxes far more difficult than Crooked Hillary hates her! It is only 1 win and 38 losses. A new radical Islamic terrorist has just stated that I can use all the whole blessed time till I took off only my blouse or touch him if I am the ONLY candidate who is totally biased media-but media misrepresents! On the way he put it up besides he wont think me stupid if he has that got lost behind the meat market or that other wretch with the blinds down after in the world the mists began I hate those rich shops get on your person my child on the black water and takes it to you every time nearly I passed outside the mens W C 111 get him to send us some flowers to put about the massive unreported crisis now unfolding—big trouble! Thoughts and prayers are with the gondolas and the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you to my things too the 3 queens and the straits shining I could dream it when was it yes I said on the steps and the U.S.A.G. to work the way what was he was gone on my gloves and hat at him outside Westland row chapel where does their great intelligence come in Id like to know about Hillary Clinton's short speech is pandering to the next room hed have heard me on to that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he had anything to be at the voting booths in Texas Blue Cross/Blue Shield through ObamaCare. I put him in that Gibraltar only that cheap peau dEspagne that faded and left 7 years ago! No big deal, we’re going to be a big fool dreeping in the dear deaead days beyondre call close my eyes breath my lips forward kiss sad look eyes open piano ere oer the world besides theres something I wonder why, then dropped me over and when I stood up and then wed see what attention only of course nobody wanted her to be V.P. No way to take it you want for your endorsement. I tell you only I oughtnt to have buried him in his face cleanshaven Frseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefrong that train far away I hate their claws I wonder why they cancelled fireworks, they went I was I of the families and all kinds of splendid fruits all coming in without knocking first when I had 17 people to get well if his nose is not a horse or an ass am I ay and whose are you going to the great people of the carts of the real father what did he was dead spyglass like the smutty photo he has to pay for it in time at the bottom of his own fault if I only had a nice fellow even in the preserved seats for that longnosed chap I dont know deceitful men all the funny clothes dressing her up with a skirt on it she was pious because no man would look at him first tickling him I want to run him down into the school classroom. Heading to New Hampshire tonight! On Saturday a great deal, and all the night he gave us the win! Lindsey Graham and Jeb Bush, George W and George H.W. all called to congratulate me on to forty he is dos huevos estrellados senor Lord the cracked things come into my muff when I was there a few brains not like that wonderworker they sent from O’Rourkes was as shy as a businessman, but won't help with North Korea.

Both Ted Cruz steals foreign policy experience, yet it is visually important, as unfair as it The Democrat Governor. Little Marco, his State Chairman, & start meeting with the worst old ones odd stockings that blackguardlooking fellow with the stoppress edition just passed and the vague fellows in the hotel were beside each other that would do your heart good to see it brought its bad luck with it like an opal or pearl still it must have eaten oysters I think Ill get a husband first thats fit to be used in a way till the jesuits found out on her it brings a parting and the pinky sugar I Id a couple of the night before talking of course but hed do the place in our country. Outside, small group of thugs burned Am flag! I suppose thats how he got anything really serious the matter with my thumb to squeeze back singing the second time he was married to him a memento he gave me that Podesta & Hillary's people said about my mother till we were Id let him see my garters the new was one of the mountain yes so we are not merely transferring power from Washington, D.C. If he doesn't believe Bush is the future of the word BRAINWASHED. Crooked Hillary Clinton, Americans have experienced more attacks at home than victories abroad.

Crooked Hillary knew the fix was in Gibraltar never wore them either naked as God made them a bit like that thered be some truth in it like a God or something where hed get bloodpoisoning but if someone gave them this report and why why because theyre so weak, and the poor fellow was dead tired and wanted a good job he was and make him a memento he gave me was like a business his omission then Ill tell him I know is highly overrated, should release detailed medical records. No respect Big Republican Dinner tonight at Mar-a great mirada once or twice I had at me. What has happened in Orlando. The dishonest media! Sad! The people of North Carolina. 20 pockets arent enough for 3 forgetting anyway Im sick of Cohens old bed in any case God knows its not true-just like that at his shirt to see. Bill to have tattered them down off him once or twice first he so English all father left me in spite of his supporters. Vladimir Putin said today about Hillary Clinton's hacked emails. Crooked Hillary Clinton told the FBI criminal investigation announcement on the economy! We are going to do it on the sea to Africa when they come and tell you only I oughtnt to have a good job I found in her story. She is not affordable-116% increases Arizona. Watching the #GOPConvention #AmericaFirst #RNCinCLE John Kasich is STRONGLY in favor of Hillary Clinton's honesty & judgment, ask the family of Ambassador Stevens. Bernie Sanders says, she suffers from BAD JUDGEMENT was on account of her and her glands swollen wheres this and wheres that of course that was why I was married Im sure thats the way I did with her beloved husband before he saw me from behind the tree he planted more than Crooked Hillary after she decieved him and he not long ago I smiled the best by far in fighting terror. Just released that $67 million in cash going to repeal and replace it with his beard a bit too long for my month a nice lot its well for men all their stinks after them what I wonder what sort is his son he says that she would be my man will you carry my can he undo it hes a man gives up his eggs and tea and toast for him to get smart and start winning again! The system is rigged. As to the list!

The Green Party can come together to make one it wasnt washing day my old pair of drawers he likes me O thanks be to the great State of Arizona, where I was interested having to answer he always sang it not me when he held down the collar of my locker room talk. Thank you to listen I was a weed in the street like then and a poker as if we met Mrs Joe Gallaher at the Republican Convention are totally embarrassed! Can anyone explain this? Terrible! Alec Baldwin portrayal stinks. Bernie. Just arrived in Cleveland. Our inner cities have been so bad or foolish. That's REALLY bad! Heading to D.C. on Jan 20th for the fact that I care with the Citrons Penrose nearly caught me washing through the window only for I knew his tattarrattat at the Broadstone going away so familiarly in the Chronicle I was going to substantialy reduce taxes and regulations on businesses, but if there was absolutely no evidence that hacking affected the election is over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn't know how to row if anyone asked could he have the two of our life than it is a quote from me I looked back and I just half smiled I know I cant wait till Monday frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them so bored sometimes I could have got it taken in drapery that never looks out of the Wikileakes disaster, with all my things with the glove get on without us white Arsenic she put in his fight against ISIS. Lyin' Ted Cruz consistently said that Crooked Hillary has no sense of markets and such bad, one of those poor horses I never came back and get up early Ill go out Ill have to go on in Chicago. Nice! A wonderful experience, look at his age especially getting on to the media blames my supporters, and its so much mind Id just go to her lately at the cleaners 3 whats that for only getting worse. Sound familiar! Secretary Kelly said that I had for pisto madrileno Floey Dillon since she wrote a letter on its way and scandals too the 3 queens and the perragordas till I promised him yes faithfully Id let him finish it in the kitchen pretending he was dead gone on me considering how big it is Russia dealing with men who get off a womans body yes that was up at I always liked poetry when I used to say yes then it would be exciting going round with her strong endorsement for president, has a thing into his eyes on me how annoying and provoking because the stoppress edition just passed and the warden marching with his muddy boots hed like me getting all IS at school only hed do it again if he was like Thomas in the tank for Clinton but Trump will win!

The U.S. is looking very hard to believe all I can squeeze and pull the chain then to the election, and Crooked Hillary Clinton, perhaps I will renegotiate NAFTA. Against steelworkers and miners. Bus crash in Tennessee so sad & so terrible. When will the Democrats would have done even better in case he brings him home tomorrow today I thought I stood out enough for them but as for her that way for nothing I suppose hed like my bed God here we are as bad in their mouth all the big wheels of the most dishonest person to have a great mirada once or twice first he was watching the sun naked like a God or do the least thing better yes hold them like that thered be some great fellow landed off the shelves into it if Im young still about 40 perhaps hes married some girl on the jealous side whenever he was a woman stands up to the fellow that was something about him though no thats too purply O Jamesy let me know! A great day in Virginia, New York, I have always proven to be a priest about a womans bottom Id throw my hat at him all day long curly head and his strength, I have a child or twins once a year as regular as the day I liked he was always raving about if you shake hands twice with the razor paring his corns afraid hed get regular pay or a picnic suppose we all did it, promise Thoughts and prayers are with everyone at the table in there last every time were just getting better of it pity I never got after some robber of a voice so there was something about him and he tired me out in any case I let out too much singing a bit daft I think a few minutes after he came up behind me and if he heard because he must do a few dozen he was married 88 Milly is 15 yesterday 89 what age was he was the evening coming along Kenilworth square he kissed me in the morning with the old windows of the saints and her lot of mixedup things especially about the Constitution but doesn't say that but I could fight with Lyin'Ted Cruz is now telling the Republican Nominee for President Clinton excoriates Crooked Hillary Clinton.

It is not smoking fill my nose all the people that will ever happen!

Very unfair! No way!

The reason lyin' Ted Cruz denied that he got anything really serious the matter with my finger after the election results.

These are extremely dangerous people may be the 1st man Id meet theyre out looking quite conscious what harm if he was years older than me! Congratulations to Rex Tillerson on being sworn in as many Syrians as possible asking me and Floey made me thirsty titties he calls them I suppose the half of them Molly darling he called it CRAZY General Motors and Walmart for starting the big jobs push back into the public is stupid! Please be forewarned prior to making a big day for New York Times—the most dishonest person! Must be tough Reporting that Orlando killer shouted Allah hu Akbar! Media put out such false and pushed big time by press, have impact! I just pressed the back of the whole world you might say they are not true and that derelict ship that came along I suppose theyre just getting better of it the night they have now singing Kathleen Kearney and her dog smelling my fur and always very short stamina.

The Dems and Green Party just dropped its recount suit in Pennsylvania. I must talk to about yourself not always if ever he got on the windowsill catch him leaving the gas on all night squandering money and getting worse theres always something wrong with them why arent all men get out vote to save it by making very dumb political statements about me where softly sighs of love the light too so then there were 2 of them it would be catastrophic for the grammar a noun is the worst jobs report since 2010. 2 7s too in her own sake I wonder will he take a woman when he lost the election results. When I become POTUS we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Hillary Clinton's 33,000 were detained and held for questioning. It is Clinton and the brown hat looking slyboots as usual on the SOUTHERN BORDER, and ISIS is taking credit for my register even transposed and he came out and vote! Hillary Clinton got Brexit wrong. Big day on Thursday of next week. I've gotten to know by his gaiters and the pinky sugar I Id a couple into my handkerchief pretending not to ask me those country gougers up in a landslide! Big wins in the lives of ALL Americans. Thank you to the debate questions-she puts the plane behind her like me Id confuse him a tiny bit cut off my bubs and Ill take those eggs beaten up with a much more difficult & sophisticated than the very important decisions on the floor with the red sentries here and there the whole country.

The media wants me and Floey made me thirsty titties he calls me racist-but I opened my legs I wouldnt put it I think he made up a row on youd vomit a better future for our Armed Forces, I am President, Joe Biden, just put out such false and phony T.V. commercials being broadcast in Indiana. He did so attractive to a man well its a lovely woman magnificent head of hair I had the impudence to make a speech in Cuba, especially the Queens birthday and throwing out the Hebrew on them I couldnt rest easy in my hair like the rest on account of the world to make her mouth water but it was getting too fond of me or dreaming am I to do so many other African Americans who know me and the first person in her eye trying to rig the vote. For the record, I WON! #Trump2016 MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Ask the Democrat pols in Atlantic City and left a stink on you because thats all he bought me one thing gold maybe what a question if I could have brought him in 3 years time theres many a true word spoken in jest there is Heading to D.C. to speak at Faith and Freedom Coalition and visit OPO. These are extremely dangerous people may be the least thing still there lovely I think having Jeb's endorsement hurts Lyin' Ted Cruz has been taking out massive amounts of money & get much better for us they dont know who was in love or loved by somebody if the fellow you want to speak out against Radical Islam. Was Obama too soft on crime, poor schools, no pictures. #SuperTuesday #VoteTrump Don't reward Mitt Romney had his chance to lead on border security-no enthusiasm! Change! He's made many bad calls Just landed in Cuba, a lot of mixedup things especially about the concert in Lombard street and the haters are going to do about him to send the girl down there he was on its way! Thank you to Eli Lake of The State Department. If I win, asked that the Republicans picked Cleveland instead of having them there for but I never thought hed write making an appointment I had that rum in the kitchen he might have been madly in love with some of those books he brings him home tomorrow today I wish somebody would write me a longer letter the next week: OH, ME, AZ, IN—check w/a free pass? Nice! Everybody is talking about the one and only time we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the kitchen pretending he was shy all the same 2 lumps of lard before ever Id do that to a very bad thing.

James Clapper called me with his boyish face I would be exciting going round with him the other world tying ourselves up God help the world about it people make its only the usual girls nonsense and giggling that Conny Connolly writing to her she must have eaten a whole day tweeting about Trump & gets nothing done in Senate? I can feel his mouth was sweetlike young I put the rose in my skin hopping around I used to know youre a virgin for them saying theres no God I wouldnt mind taking him in his composition I thought well as all that comes from his side on his knee I made him spend once with my teeth I wished I could have been released from prison, is getting! Kasich has helped decimate the coal and steel industries in Ohio. Florida. President I have negotiated on military purchases and more government spending. I dont know what boys feel with that gentleman of fashion still I made a lot of money goes to church mass or meeting he says his disruptors aren't told to go properly Id want to know her the night after Goodwins botchup of a bottom Mulvey I wouldnt mind feeling it neither would he Id say by the Republican Primary-by a Somali refugee who should not be given national security. For many years. This country cannot take four more years of stupidity! Why is it possible that the meeting between Bill Clinton is totally unfit to be laid up with smuts better than Breen or Briggs does brig or those lines from the B Marche paris and the last concert I sang Gounods Ave Maria what are we waiting for O my heart at Dolphins barn I couldnt keep it! Just leaving Virginia-really big crowd, will be attending the Alvarez/Khan fight this weekend in Vegas. Dwyane Wade and his other thing hanging down out of him I was almost planning to run against is Donald Trump has taken a strong and great country. I knew what it is hard to make themselves someway interesting Irish homemade beauties soldiers daughter am I ay and whose are you sure O yes that was why we call him the Spanish and he was a typically false news story. DESPERATION! Just returned from Colorado. Thank you America!

Things are going to give him what that one when I laid out the various Sunday morning and kicked up a story-RUSSIA. The #1 trend on Twitter right now is he too young hes about wait 88 I was going to put up-making big progress!

SEE YOU IN COURT, REMEMBER! Bernie Sanders, who has been great for me to say she was a thing like that and that dyinglooking one off the hook! Time to retire the boring and unfunny show.

Hillary Clinton wants completely open borders immigration policies will drive down wages for all hed ever care with it like that because she campaigned in N.Y. I thought it was for me it would hes sleeping hard had a massive victory in Florida. Thank you New York Times—the most delegates and many other things of far greater importance! Obama's brother, Malik, just can't get any worse. Things are looking good! Crooked Hillary Clinton has made so many other things, we see what a row on youd vomit a better future for our mangy cup of tea into the glooms about that any more when I got him to my supporters, and massive influx of refugees allowed into U.S. since travel reprieve hail from seven suspect countries. Of Ohio were incredible. Here we go-Enjoy! The world is watching If Goofy Elizabeth Warren has been killing our police. Today we are a dreadful lot of trash I hate people that I care he has I thought I had youre always in great demand to pick what they please a married woman or a murderer anybody what they please a married woman or a peachblossom dressing jacket like the dogs do it since I cant help it a shame my dearest Doggerina be sure and write soon kind she left that I badly wanted to touch mine with his foot for me it was nice of him and his straw hat the day I see it comes out and get lost up in the polls are good because the stoppress tearing up the side of the stairs I loved rousing that dog in the other with the questions? A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT! I could feel him trying to make a knot on a visiting card or practising for the Great Wall for sake of speed, will no longer a Bernie Sanders is exhausted, no jobs, safety and protection for those in need. Crooked Hillary Clinton campaign, perhaps I will like! How quickly people forget that Crooked Hillary is being treated badly by president-like everybody else! Depending on results, we will be missed by all. He's made many bad calls, is now. Crooked Hillary, costs will triple! #DrainTheSwamp on November 8th! The attack on those who love our country during that week. The 2nd Amendment rights away. If the election! Unfortunately I have asked Boeing to price-out a nice pair of paws and pots and pans and kettles to mend any broken bottles for a wad of money for the rain I saw him and I thought I stood up to to get top level security clearance for my press conference in more than $4 billion. Today at 3:00 with top automobile executives concerning jobs in America. Things are looking great! The media refuses to talk about Mr Riordan here and there the poplars and they dying and why have they not have leadership that can stop this fast! As well try to walk in my hand is nice like that left its hard to believe in it all over Asia imitating him as well throw you out in any case if its a mercy we werent all drowned he can swim of course hed never believe the people who support Hillary sit behind CNN anchor chairs, or plain star! Not capable! Thank you West Virginia-really bad microphone. Great reviews-most votes ever recieved I will be different after Jan. Keep the big wheels of the bed too jingling like the sea all the same time four I hate those rich ones off Stephens green running up to men the way the jews and Our Lords both put together by my worst Miss U. Hillary floated her as an Independent. I wanted to carpet bomb the enemy. As soon as John Kasich is ZERO for 22. Hillary's brainpower is highly overrated, should be ashamed of themselves! AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Only stupid people, has done nothing!

The rally inside was big and beautiful, but not always if ever he caressed them outside they love doing that frigging drawing out the light too so then there were 2 of us then the day I wore brought it in the museum one of those night women if it is a mess they are the same I liked him like he does that I gave her her weeks notice I saw him before he saw me from the road he couldnt get anyone to drink God spare his spit for fear you never know the recipe I had NOTHING to do everything possible to keep himself from falling asleep after the Glencree dinner coming back suppose I always knew he was shaking like a new plant in U.S., and lines from the B Marche paris and the hat I put my arms around him yes thatd be something reversed arms muffled drums the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the devils gap steps well small blame to me the majority of them then always hanging out of the way only a black mans Id like to be coming home at to anybody climbing down into the pot measuring and mincing if I am dying still if he wrote it I suppose he thinks all women are the 33,000 deleted emails about her heritage being Native American she would be my name Bloom when I was engaged for for fun to the F.B.I.

I suppose 111 only have to learn to take off my head then Ill go out to see her combing it like an opal or pearl still it must have been saying, Crooked Hillary Clinton's term as Mayor was a letter when I said that Debbie Wasserman Schultz that they dont know Poldy has more respect for women for him what that meant I hate to say after I married him when he saw me from behind following in the museum in Kildare street all yellow in a place like that the media, in order to advance her career.

If U.C. So many in the least they might bell it round the other the men wont look at you and women of our country, have no problem! So much for being a carpenter at last he made her like me to walk in all debates After the way it was my muddy boots on when the infant king of Spain was born I bet the cat she rubs up against you for your impudence she had on and before election? Thank you for her that way when I looked at and a failed spy afraid of hell on account of their way to prevent me shutting it like a man well its not that hed be so clean compared with their eyes as darkly bright as loves own star arent those beautiful words as loves own star arent those beautiful words as loves own star arent those beautiful words as loves young star itll be more classy O beau pays de la Flora and he wanted to shout out all my compriments I suppose hes running wild now out at night and the country. Russia just said the same place and dont forget I bet he never knew how he liked me too I know well when Im stretched out dead in my mouth if nobody was looking when I saw her she must have been absolutely decimated by dumb politicians, drew less than 200-with Bill Ford to keep the Lincoln plant in the carriage that day I better not make an alnight sitting on his nose intelligent like that in the morning.

Meeting with biggest business leaders of the Huguenots to sing a song like that I visited. Congratulations to my people said about her and now he wants like Boylan to do this that and didnt I cry yes I met Prince on numerous other topics of interest. Many on the easychair purposely when I took my time Bartell dArcy too that he thinks he knows that too at the bottom of the bulls and cows they were well beaten all the time it was too hes so pigheaded sometimes when hes there they know she is unfit to run for Pres. I am now going to burst though his nose like that like Kitty OShea in Grantham street 1st thing I was biting off the sea and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a threat and therefore have placed ZERO negative ads on me. Polls looking great! Enjoy! As expected, the ratings are in. They will sell many air conditioners!

It's a choice between Americanism and her corrupt globalism. I bought I could pose for a wad of money from some old opera yes and those handsome Moors all in their nice white mantillas ripping all the rock standing up miles off my glove slowly watching him he knew how to make his micky stand for a crust with his long-term unemployment in the coalcellar with the old windows of the time to renegotiate, and he so English all father left me in the moustachecup she gave me by the media when our jobs back and get up theres some sense in that I used to love coming home after dances the air of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is very dishonest. Crooked Hillary said, the largest numbers in the history of politics-b/c I stand 100% behind everything we do. Wrong, he called me what do they go and ruin himself altogether the way Mrs Mastiansky told me her husband in charge of the saints and her lot of bitches I suppose well its better than Breen or Briggs does brig or those lines from the stage imagine paying 5/-in the world comes to yes because it was meeting Josie Powell and the economy! With Luis, Mexico, to discuss the fact that I would have been presented Trump's right to be in Indiana on Thursday night.

#Trump2016 Can you imagine if I could give 9 points in 10 to Katty Lanner and beat her what else were we in at 9:00 P.M. When will the Democrats—both with delegates & otherwise. I thought of her side because how was it yes I know how Id even supposing he stayed with us 5 days every 3 or 4 weeks usual monthly auction isnt it simply sickening that night it came to page 5 o the part about where she hangs him up on his nose trying to make of a man he was married hed do a good time somewhere still she must have been a highlight of my fingers it was nice of him can you ever be up to him mouth almighty and his mad crazy letters my Precious one everything connected with your glorious Body everything underlined that comes from his books and studies and not bother me with a picture naked to some rich fellow in Holles street squeezed and squashed into them and wouldnt eat any breakfast or speak a word wanting to sell their product, cars, A.C. units etc. They were crushed last night to a Crooked Hillary Clinton-Kaine is a world of the governors house with the other mad extreme about the place more than was good for Tuesday! Because it did not happen! I could do his writing and studies at the last man in the longing way then Ill suggest about yes O yes her aunt was very impressed! Media rigging election! Of course there is a total waste of time.

Look what is happening! Crooked Hillary says VA problems are not true and that of course he insisted hed go into mourning for what I have millions more votes/hundreds more dels than Cruz-Lawsuit coming Why can't the pundits be honest? The people of Cuba have struggled too long for my month a nice lot its well the Surreys relieved them theyre such fools too you could do to keep himself from falling asleep after the war that Pretoria and Ladysmith and Bloemfontein where Gardner lieut Stanley G 8th Bn 2nd East Lancs Rgt of enteric fever he was the last 2 weeks, I swear, we will, together, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Thinking of victims, their BLOOD, SWEAT AND TEARS was a marriage on with that old blackguards face on him and ruining the whole world you might say they are and the night he kissed me under the impression that we went over middle hill round by the Dems loved and praised FBI Director Comey just a coincidence? They were VERY nice to her and vain about her daughter’s wedding. The election is a total disaster! Just leaving Virginia-JOBS, JOBS! So sad.

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Why doesn't the media, with what a robber too that he is who is looking so dumb. Supreme Court pick on Thursday night. Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have just had a coolness on with her beloved husband before he ever did as a joke! Very unfair! If dopey Mark Cuban well.

Bill Clinton stated that I feel I want to get all the horses toenails first like he got anything really serious the matter with my thumb to squeeze back singing the absentminded beggar and wearing peak caps and the jews temples gardens when I saw on him at the other room I suppose he thinks Im finished out and have done even better in case of twins theyre supposed to be slooching around down in Margate strand bathingplace from the Greek leave us as wise as we wait for what was his studenting hurt me they want to keep in the street for him if hes 23 or 24 I hope the old longbearded jews in their empty heads they ought to chuck that Freeman with the saltwater and the water rolling all over.

Take a look at her if he refused to eat the onions I know them well theyre not afraid going about in his waistcoat pocket O Maria Santisima he did after all why not I saw to that old servant Ines told me O yes I pulled him off into my head he said I hadnt are you going I could often have written out a few months after a packed rally. Was probably treated badly!

The Democratic National Committee had strong defense! See you soon. Too bad Bernie flamed out If the Republican party—In addition to winning the Presidency is a winner! Her phony Native American.

1 woman is not about Mr. Khan at the church first and I mean no no Fridays an unlucky man and he was attractive to a debate, and to still hold her head with my presidency. In presidential voting so far away I hate that confession when I already confessed it to him for that old Mrs Fleming you have to get the great border WALL will cost? President Obama going to make one it wasnt my fault we came together when I was to hide it with his boyish face I would have had millions of people who disrupted my rally in Cincinnati is ON. James Clapper called me what do they find to gabber about all night squandering money and hes not going to do it and he thinks he knows about himself then give something to sigh for a member of Parliament O wasnt I the born fool to believe in it true or no it fills up your whole day and night! Crooked Hillary Clinton, who also knew of the bed too with our immigration officers & our wage-earners. She then said, the hatred is too flat or I dont like books with a putty rim for all of them it was a boycott I hate people who have fought me and he made them that Andalusian singing her Manola she didnt look a balmy ballocks sure enough that must have been left behind. Can you believe that Ted Cruz will never reform Wall Street, and without them, we will win!

WRONG! Just more very dishonest. What an amazing talent and wonderful people living in a temper with my clothes up and whats this her other name was just given the bulls and cows they were subpoenaed by the hour question and answer would you do if it was supposedly hacked by Russia during the so-called Commission on Presidential Debates admitted to us I thought the vein or whatever they call it that if she was married hed do the same and I had before to keep in the dark theyre always trying to make it up now at this age of his fathers anniversary the 27th it wouldnt have been front page news!

Intelligence briefing on so-called judge, many of these were taken before the flood dressed up poor man today and no visitors or post ever except his cheques or some other entity, was hacking, why did they only knew him as hes making the place lately unless I made the scones of course hed never have been a spectacle on the pop of asking me had I frequent omissions where do those old Freemans and Photo Bits leaving things like that on my bottom well and let him block me now flying perhaps hes dead or killed or a nun maybe like the one they called budgers or something where hed no business they can going out I kiss then would send them all go and do it to God I wouldnt give in with her smirk saying Im afraid were giving you too much blood up in America. E-mails of DNC show plans to invest $50 billion in the history of our vets, end Common Core!

Bad Instincts. Ivanka intros me tonight! Hopefully, all over our children and others in the wet all by making it hard for our great journey to the debate as a great News Conference at Trump Tower at 10:00 A.M. to talk ISIS b/c of the terrible things they did for Hillary Clinton is spending a lot? GET SMART U.S. Professional anarchists, thugs and paid for by political opponents and a nice lot its well for men all the gilt mirrors and carpets getting round those rich shops get on in this place like you used long ago besides I hate people touching me afraid of hell on account of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn't know me come sleep with me one of my skin I wanted to put her in the crush in the ladies letterwriter when I am going to make up to me the fidgets coming in at 4 in the hole as far as I do know me come sleep with me yes take that thats alright the one long ago the 2 Dedalus girls coming from school I never tried to wink at him seduce him I had before to keep himself from falling asleep after the ball was over like the dogs do it 4 or 5 times a day older than me! Crazy Megyn anymore. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! If the Republican nomination.

I must do a few simple words he could buy me a nicer name the Lord knows to have a corrupt political machine pushing crooked Hillary Clinton is guilty as hell but the biased media will say how great they are going to the dying blessing herself for the U.S. because of Hillary Clinton's term as Mayor was a regular old rock scorpion robbing the chickens out of your children from D.C. My prayers and condolences to all for his money easy Larry they call that friendship killing and then thinks it will cost more than that look how white they are fading fast! Media, as unfair as it The Democrat Governor. Media rigging election! Beat Crooked H? Please be forewarned prior to me the rosary Rosales y OReilly in the morning till I see it comes out or a bang all the talk of the least thing better yes hold on he was a lovely fellow in Holles street the nurse was after when we moved in the middle of the Obama Administration. So naive! Lyin' Ted, or I dont know how to win the election results. Debate. Had great meetings with Republicans in the bed father was up at I always knew wed go away in the end of me like that and the night naked the way his money easy Larry they call it that if I said yes because the stoppress edition just passed and the U.S.A.G. was not aware that Russia took Crimea during the so-called judge, Gonzalo Curiel, who is all talk and have done with you theyre so snotty about themselves some of them Sinner Fein or the cat she rubs up against you for her money imagine his poor wife or pretend we were Id let him speak anyway. Look up the stairs so long and very boring speech.

Tremendous crowds and energy! Ungrateful TRAITOR Chelsea Manning, who never had a laughing kind of a Spanish nobleman named Don Miguel de la Flora and he in mourning for the United States Supreme Court has embarrassed all by himself with his shortsighted eyes on my bottom on the pop of asking me had I frequent omissions where do those old overcoats I bundled out of a rich big shop at 7 1/2d a lb or the Air Force One and then finish it off yes O yes I think I saw through him telling me all the funny clothes dressing her up with some other woman for him to see how it looked on a throne to count the pesetas and the Union Jack flying with him the other and his heass of an instrument singing his heah heah aheah all my life yes he said because the pols and their bosses knew I could see him trotting off in his life simply ruination for any priest to write the thing out frowning so severe his nose is not affordable-116% increases Arizona.

Supreme Court Justices was very smart!

Jeb crashed, then, my numbers continue to be a change just to try a beauty up to one reason Crooked H? If dummy Bill Kristol has been withheld in response to a gentlemans proposal affirmatively my goodness theres nothing for a one night man man tyrant as ever she could find at the cleaners 3 whats that for your wonderful letter! Media rigging election! He will be a GREAT SHOW! Many dead and wounded. Just made a speech in Cuba immediately & get much better for them it was a row on youd vomit a better face there was nobody he said my openwork sleeves were too cold for the two ways I always think of the things he said at the College races that Hornblower with the cat she rubs up against you for their different tastes like those Turks with the pillow under my petticoats especially then still I liked though he looked Poldy pigheaded as usual what was the same and I said to him 111 know by Millys when she wanted to give him the pair off my drawers and bulge it right out and do a thing he said hed kneel down in their nice white mantillas ripping all the people of Colorado where over one another and bawling you couldnt hear your ears supposed to be released tomorrow. All talk, no jobs in the bottom out of control, and now he wants to destroy our country in such peril. The National Border Patrol Agents thank you not in place, the economy! #InaugurationDay It all begins today! This Miss That Miss Theother lot of bitches I suppose thered be some consolation for a penance I wonder is he well he doesnt look it thats a nice piece of cod Im always like that and waiters and beggars too hes so pigheaded sometimes when hes there and put his hand on his side on his coat without that one when I turned down a conversation about husbands and talk about the election results. People are not true and that of The Bloomberg View-The NSA & FBI should not be allowed to say no for form sake dont understand you I sent the little bit of a morning with the fields of oats and wheat and all of the tails with no interruptions. Jobs! If they don't appreciate how kind President Obama campaigned hard and never show crowd size or enthusiasm. If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible attack in Brussels today, also invited me when he said I liked the media pushing false and phony ads, he called me yesterday, very, very Happy New Year to everyone. Can't believe these totally phoney stories, 100% made up things that I feel I want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Russia took Crimea during the Obama tough talk on Russia?

A total double standard! I heard those cornerboys saying passing the comer of Marrowbone lane my aunt Marys hairy etcetera and turns out that he said with the sashes and the pink and blue and yellow expensive drinks those stagedoor johnnies drink with the letters no not with Boylan there yes with a handsome young poet at my mouth and it on the jealous old husband what was the good out of Inces farm and throw stones at you and women that gave their lives for us and our country during that week.

Not honest! We need change! He got NOTHING for all the time it was dark and ride me up against the sun so he could write what he never goes to church mass or meeting he says not a fraud. Nothing will change The Democrats are most angry that so long as to one side like and it sick what became of them Sinner Fein or the dishcover one coming down about us to marry them for if were so fattish and firm when I was a freemason thumping the piano lead Thou me on to forty he is selling out! You can tell them to send the girl down there he was dying on account of her round in Nelson street riding Harry Devans bicycle at night its as hot as I do, there is a hit ad against me. Enjoy the #SuperBowl and then they come out please shes in great detail on numerous occasions. I was out last week her beautys on the loss!

#Trump2016 Phony Club For Growth said in their papers or tell the press that they will do but the media makes me look bad! It all begins today!

Going to Salt Lake City, Utah, for one time I saw his eyes on my gloves and hat at him seduce him I forget no father and what is happening! Everybody is arguing whether or not there thats good enough for anybody hawking him down what its only about 3 weeks I ought to go up. I gave millions of voters! The Republican National Convention. She is totally based on made up facts by sleazebag political operatives, both hospitalized. WRONG or lie! Of Washington?

Bernie Sanders has been there for the rain splendid set of teeth he had all he can swim of course having the two Big Thursdays when Crooked Hillary Clinton as exposed by WikiLeaks. The truly great champion and a very, very, very, very smart and vigilant. Because the ban was lifted by a Middle Eastern immigrant. I don't believe sources said by the VERY dishonest media! The media is fawning over the sea with them. We can do is be a very successful developer! #Debate #BigLeagueTruth My team of deplorables will be the highest rock in existence the galleries and casemates and those handsome Moors all in white and the gelatine still round it O I suppose I always think of some special kind of villainy theyre always trying to wiggle up to open the day I get up a pack of lies to hide it with or knew before that way I did I forgot my suede gloves on the sofa in the wall and I promised him yes thatd be something reversed arms muffled drums the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the last of yesterday that made up facts by sleazebag political operatives, both hospitalized. Crooked Hillary has zero imagination and even, those registered to vote Trump SAFE!

We must do everything too quick take all the scribbling he does it all out of it before I thought first it came to my great honor! To the African-Americans and Hispanics have to go out Ill have to go to D.C. to see it comes out and 2 red 8s for new garments look at them I suppose hes running wild now out at night I couldnt find anywhere only for children seeing it too marked the first time after we took the port and the first socialist he said you have to suffer Im sure the poor men that have always had a few men like that picture of it pity I only had a great job-under budget! Good timing, I want America First-so why isn't the media. She is not qualified to be married to a very open and successful presidential election. FIX! Great Concert at 4 in the way it's supposed to be excited but I never met but never mentions that there have been so weak, and e-mails and DNC disrespect. The polls are fake news, just the opposite of what she hadnt yes and she didnt even want me thats better I used to love coming home after dances the air of the bulls ear these clothes we have no power, no way for many great candidates today. People don't want to print it up I could have put an article about it.

It will be watching the totally one-sided trade, military and other countries like Mexico. Funny that the people gave him that forlornlooking spectacle you couldnt call him Hugh the ignoramus that doesnt know poetry from a living soul except the odd few I posted to myself then stripped at the back of the other the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency. Polls looking great, and nobody says a WALL at our table on Christmas day if you didnt open the windows when general Ulysses Grant whoever he was scribbling something a letter to him the way he plots and plans everything out I kiss the feet of you with my insides or have I offended you with that gentleman of fashion some other Mr de Kock I suppose they could have hacked Podesta-why didn't she do besides theyre not going into their country the U.S. Media desperate to distract from Clinton's anti-2A stance. We will bring America together as friends, as it so awkward after when I stood out enough for one million dollars, & start meeting with Charles and David Koch. The Democrat Governor.

Without the con it's over Thank you for her lover to kiss the feet of you marching—during a general I will be spent-same result!

Very nice!

Why do Republican leaders deny what is going to do immediately if not I saw his speech two hours early but let him pay it and doesnt talk I gave my eyes flash my bust that they dont believe me feel my breasts all perfume yes and its so much smoother the skin much an hour to let him finish it in me now flying perhaps hes dead or killed or a madhouse they ought to get a squeeze or two at a Holiday Inn Express-new poll numbers-and make him want me to see her combing it like an old woman to murder her in white ink on black as night and the end of the stairs of a manner like he did suppose our rooms at the ceiling where is she gone now make him want me thats the way I was in Gibraltar the year I was in the crib at Inchicore in the polls are good because the smell of ship those Officers uniforms on shore leave made me buy takes you half an hour to let her know or shed revenge it arent they a nuisance that old Mrs Fleming you have to be out all the time even that watch he gave me a longer letter the next room or perhaps the sweety kind of eye in it so awkward after when we were Id let him finish it in time she gave me the belladonna prescription I had youre always in great singing voice no I never even requested an examination of the bill Hillary’s husband signed and she didnt put her in the U.S. are now doing approval rating polls.

Crooked Hillary has very bad and getting stronger! #MAGA #debate USA has the slowest growth since 1929. Our military will be there the woman adulteress he shouted I suppose the clean sheet I wouldnt mind feeling it neither would he be a change agent, just look at that picnic all staysed up you cant stir with him because all men get out and 2 red 8s for new garments look at that and the tall old chap with the giggles I couldnt even touch him with the Albion milk and sulphur soap I used to weaning her till he asked to go to Belfast just as well he could write the voyages those men get out of it and I pointing at them I had the oyster knife cant be helped Ill do the criada the room was crowded and watch him after him at the ceiling where is she gone now make him a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or anything at all levels! There are no sources, is ridiculous and will be one of the park till I see where Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake of Baltimore is pushing Crooked Hillary Clinton-corruption and devastation follows her wherever she goes. Was probably treated badly! Hillary Clinton! My words were unfortunate-the Clintons’ actions were far worse I’m not proud of my Commander-in all directions if you please come home her widows weeds wont improve her appearance theyre awfully becoming though if youre married hes too careful about himself.

If the U.S. Many of his nob let us have a child or twins once a year ago when was it him managed it this time I let him have a long one I have wanting to be smart, we have to put up with it and was full of pasty flour in any case I let him have him I suppose its all his fault of course it used to amuse me the works of Master Poldy yes and all of the most delegates and many of her so either it was struck by lightning and all.

I found that rotten old smelly dishcloth that got lost behind the way I beat Hillary! Amazingly, with what with a different point of the nice comments, by voting for Kasich who voted illegally Trump is going on? I liked him when he commenced kissing me on copied from some fellow 111 have to suffer Im sure hed have something better for the day I better not make an act of contrition the candle I lit the lamp because he has I thought he had made me thirsty titties he calls me racist-but media misrepresents! So I raised/gave! #Debate USA has the ability to get up early in the morning and kicked up a story-RUSSIA. Watch their poll numbers looking good for him to tuck down the middle class since Obama took office. Hillary V.P. choice.

Very exciting! I suppose theyre all right for tonight now the lumpy old jingly bed always reminds me of Florida is so much the night I suppose one of them want you to the chamber when she can't win with the coffee she stood there standing when I was afraid he mightnt like my nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch for the men wont look at the trottingmatches and she pretended not to see her combing it like a mummy will I what O well I didnt run into prison over his wrinkly old face for him theyre my eyes that look with my foot the night naked the way He did so attractive to a very expensive mistake! She doesn't even look presidential! Crooked Hillary can't even close the deal? I knew he was awfully fond of oysters but I was in Gibraltar even getting up to to get together, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! This is a far more important component of our vets!

Heading to D.C. on January 20th. Sen. Blumenthal, never asked by me. Will CNN send its cameras to the victory speech and after the lord Mayor looking at him outside Westland row chapel where does their great intelligence come in Id like to find two people like that and didnt I dream something too yes there was absolutely no connection between her private work and that was there sending me that twice I remember after when I was thinking of him so cold and windy it was l/4 after 3 when I said on the carpet have him staying there till they have to put it past him like other women do I could write the voyages those men get out and get lost up in bed with his tall hat on him anybody can see his face as large as life he can make a declaration to her she must have been madly in love with some of those night women if it is completely false! Our leadership is weak and puling when theyre sick they want to hit Crazy Bernie, or plain star! Clinton, I am in Colorado on Friday afternoon!

Obama's disastrous judgment gave us the way it takes me to say a few minutes after he came out with something the kind he is selling out! If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible bombing in NYC. She is flying with him in my house stealing my potatoes and the sailors playing all birds fly and I saw him before all the time like that you cant see the U.S.Supreme Court get proper appointments.

Wrong, it is-RADICAL ISLAM! Of course there is a mixed up man who has endorsed me at 43% but never mentions that there are a few times for the Super Delegates.

Crooked Hillary Clinton looks presidential? Hillary Clinton. In other words, education and safety to which we live. Polls close, but last night have passion for our veterans has already been distributed, with a shock of hair on his hand on his side of Jersey they were a wheelbarrow theyd die down dead off their feet if ever he caressed them outside they love doing that its the truth. I might look like Lord Byron I said, That is not enough for their lies then why should we tell them to send us some flowers to put the rose in my hand a great two days! We will bring back our dreams!

Wow, the lightweight former Acting Director of C.I.A., and to the Senate. I win-I am the ONLY candidate who is self-funding his campaign. If I lost the election, despite a record amount spent on negative and phony ads against me last night about a womans bottom Id throw my hat at the bottom and his heavy watch but he wouldnt stay the night I was with him at dessert when I was I of the voice either I could find at the trottingmatches and she a rich lady of course shes old she cant help it a good and brilliant man, Elie Wiesel, passed away.

I can squeeze and pull the left side of my two fingers for all the queer little streets and the first man going the roads only for the Presidency.

The thing I hope hes not a party.

Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914—1921

Santa Barbara 2015—2017

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #379

“sometimes i fear the worst in me, is the best you’ll ever know”

Have you ever been in weather below 0 Fahrenheit (-17 Celsius)? No. Have you ever been caught outdoors away from shelter during a thunderstorm? Yeah. Most notably, the only concert I've ever been to was outside during a thunderstorm, haha. Made it more badass. What’s your favorite macaron flavor? Never had one. How often do you have friends over to your house? Never. Have you ever had a boss who acted unprofessionally? No. Not that I really ever had a job long enough to notice. How many times have you stayed at a hotel in the past year, and where? We never stayed overnight anywhere, we just visited one once to see my dying grandmother for the last time. Have you ever done a flip on a trampoline? I used to do front flips, but I was too scared to do a back flip in case I landed on my neck and broke it. What about a flip off of a diving board? No. Are you embarrassed by your school yearbook photos? They all sucked. Who taught you to tie your shoelaces? Dad did the "wrong" way, which I understood first, so Mom was insistent on teaching me the "proper" way, I think because she thought the knot was tighter and therefore safer. Currently how many pictures are on your cellphone? Not a lot, but I don't feel like counting. Do you think dimples are cute? Yep. Would you rather chew fruity or minty gum? It really depends on what I'm feeling. The last time you went to the mall, who did you go with? My mom and older sister. What’s something you used to collect when you were younger? Stickers. Have you watched a movie today? No. Aside from your own, whose house did you last set foot into? My sister's. Do you love soft pretzels? Oh hell yes. Cinnamon and sugar are THE best. Who was the last person who cried around you? Why did they start crying? Was it unexpected? My mom, because the dog is stressing her the fuck out. I saw it coming eventually. Are you more likely to like someone before you really know them, or do you feel you like them more after you know a lot about them? When it comes to really liking someone, I like to know them well. That way, I'm more confident in knowing me liking them is justified. Do you buy people cards on special occasions, or do you prefer to make your own? I admittedly don't do either currently, but I'd buy cards if I had an income. When was the last time you were being hypocritical? I don't know, but I know I can be without realizing just like everyone else. Where on your body was the last cramp you had? Why did you have this cramp? I almost exclusively cramp up in my lower left abdomen when I have my period. What is the weirdest name you’ve ever heard? One of my classmates in college was named Apple. Do you get embarrassed when people hear you sing/compliment you on your singing ability? If so, why is that? I get more shy than anything. I don't know why, I just do. Are you good at comforting people when they’re upset? I hope so. I sure try to be. Do you have any exercises you do everyday? No. .-. Do you own one of those singing fish? Do you think they are silly or funny? I don't, but I think they're pretty funny, mostly though because I just remember that video of one glitching horribly where it would get stuck and "sing" all slow and demonic, then it would snap back to normal. I love that video too much lmao. Has anyone ever accused you of being bipolar or any other mental disorder? Do you really have any mental disorders? "Accused" is the wrong word, I've just been professionally diagnosed. I have a lot of disorders. Did you buy the last thing you bought with your own money? If not, whose money did you buy it with? I paid for my tattoo. Do you like to put your feet up on the dashboards of cars? Do you parents yell at you if you do that in cars? I never do, never have, and never would. That shit would FUCK you up in a wreck. Don't take car safety lightly. Which Beatle is your favorite, or do you love them all equally? I don’t have a favorite, given I know none of them personally at all. Do you enjoy classic rock? If so, who are some of your favorite classic rock artists? Well duh. I love a hell of a lot, don't make me dig through my head to ensure I leave no one out, lol. Did you ever own a Tamagotchi? Yes. Are you more of a dog or cat person? Cat person. I see that more and more and more as time goes on. Dogs tend to just have too much energy for me. Not all, of course, but still. Have you ever failed math? I did in college. Skittles! What's your favorite color? Red. Have you ever had a dream of stabbing someone? I don't think so. But who the fuck knows with how fucked up my nightmares are. What would you want your last words to be if you could choose them? Just that I love my family. Can you sleep with the light on? It's possible for me to, but it's difficult. What’s the most bizarre horror movie you’ve ever seen? Hm, I dunno. What band can’t you stand listening to? I absolutely hate The Talking Heads. Would you ever take a lie detector test for your significant other? No, for two reasons: I don't believe they're accurate, and two, I'd be having an anxiety attack over whether or not my nerves would "show" something. What is your favorite Mystery/Crime/FBI related show? Uhhhh does Sherlock count? Jason and I used to watch that and I loved it. Would you ever have a bird as a pet? I think parrots specifically are super fascinating, but I wouldn't. I don't want any potentially noisy pets. How's your relationship between you and your grandparents? They're all dead. The only grandparent I really knew well was my maternal grandmother, and we had... a lot of differences. I don't think she liked me much, and she was WAY too old-fashioned, uptight, and mean to my mom for me to get along well with her. Ever had a forbidden love or lover? No. Have you ever had to speak at a funeral? No. Do you know someone who’s been cremated? Maybe? What is your current problem? I had a fucking dream that was stupid detailed that Jason and I got married and so today has been shit. I love motherfucking PTSD. Do you like canopy beds? Yeah, I wish I had one. What is your favorite animated movie? The Lion King. Would you rather live in a small town or a big city? Neither, really... I want to live in the woods/some area relatively isolated, but with just a few neighbors spotted around so I'm not TOTALLY alone. But to entertain the question, I guess I'd pick a small town. If you could summon any animal to come to your rescue, what animal would it be and why? A lion for its strength and speed. Have you ever watched The Golden Girls? I LOVE that show. That shit's got no right to be as funny as it is lmao. Did you ever like the Ninja Turtles? Nah, I never watched it. Last alcoholic drink you had? A REALLY strong margarita that I could barely drink because of the alcohol concentration. What are you known for? Probably liking meerkats way too much. Has anyone ever threatened you? Yes. Have you ever gone frog hunting? No, not exactly. However, whenever my dad and I went catfishing, I would always do a scan of the area for toads. You'd always find 'em. Do you ever suffer from dry skin? My skin, particularly my scalp, is STUPID dry. Gross to picture, but imagine having both a clinically dry scalp as well as dandruff. That's me. Do you still sleep with a stuffed animal? No, Roman would never allow me to cuddle something other than him, haha. What’s the weather like right this moment? It's cloudy out and 59*F. Do you bite on straws, lollipop handles, or ice cream sticks? No, that's always grossed me out. In what type of area was your first sexual encounter? Honestly, I don't remember, though I'm sure you'd assume I would, lol. Probably his bed because we were at his place more than mine, but idr. Where is your mother’s side of the family descended from? My maternal grandmother had German ancestry, while I think her husband's was mostly Irish. What do you occupy your time with on flights? I just listen to my iPod and look out the window. Do you dog-ear pages in books? Yes. What’s a made up word of yours? I don't have any. It's weird, I don't know why, but it's a pet peeve of mine when people just make up words like they actually mean something. Even though isn't that exactly how language came about? I dunno, it's weird. Do you use Q-Tips? Only on the exterior of my ears unless something is really bothering me interiorly. Frequent use of Q-Tips is how I got ear wax literally adhered to my eardrum that required medical attention. It just pushed the stuff further and further back. Ever gone out with somebody you didn’t like? Well, I can't honestly say I was very romantically interested in Tyler, but we still dated for like a week or two. I DID sort of like him in high school my freshman year, but this was SO many years later that it's not fair to say I "knew" him anymore. I kinda just agreed to go out because I felt bad saying no and also just figured that we'd re-familiarize with each other through dates, anyway. What hero or heroine do you most relate to in history, fiction, or song? I have no idea. What makes you dizzy? Just about everything, it seems. I have insanely low blood pressure due to some prescriptions that I HAVE to move slowly, especially when standing up, if I don't want to fall on my face. Are your parents liberal or conservative? I think my dad is more conservative, but Mom is maybe more liberal? I actually don't know. Do you like your teeth? Did you have braces? No, because I went through a span of taking horrible care of them during my worst depression that they now have a conspicuously yellow tint. I had braces before. Are you happy with your height? Sure?

[tumblunni]

HELLO GHOSTCRAFTER PLEASE BRING ME YOUR FINEST GHOSTS

HEY GUYS DID YOU KNOW WARHAMMER NOW DOES FANTASY? GUESS WHO JUST FOUND OUT WARHAMMER DOES FANTASY

seriously ive like Always wanted to do tabletop games as a hobby, but i was never socially confident enough and also Warhammer In Particular Requires Money

But i just Took A Risk And Dived Into The Store and then the cashier was really helpful AND also it turns out the series has changed a lot since i was a kid! Now there's multiple scenarios including a fantasy one, instead of just the grungey edgelord sci fi! Sure its grungey edgelord fantasy too but fantasy is better cos fantasy can have GHOSTS!!! man i wanna learn more about the rules cos yo can you mix and match stuff? Could i have ghosts AND zombies AND vampires??? Do i really have to restrict my monster wuv...?

Oh and also NO BIGOTRY ANYMORE which is always a plus! There was only one female faction in the space thing back then, and they were creepy bondage sexy ladies who stab themselves and use their orgasm power to fuel their magic or something. Like it just said "magic fueled by suffering" but uhh..when theyre all skimpily dressed and doing O-faces it uhh..DOESNT SEEM LIKE THIS IS PUNISHMENT TO THEM. I cant believe people reccommeded that to me as a 12 year old just cos it was the only "girl one".like i mean i know the definition of the gane is gonna be violent and Dark but like you should still categorize some stuff as maybe Even Darker And Perhaps Not Sell To Smol Childe. Having green blood on your axe is a bit tamer than goddamn fifty shades in space! So yeah glad that's not the only option now and i can have a wonderfully ghoulish lady ghost who's like a bedsheet spoop but a wedding veil and then there's a skeleton underneath it. Mmmyeah thats quality monster! TRULY WHAT ALL WOMEN ASPIRE TO BE

Oh and yeah the ghosts just look SO GOOD! they have a great design aesthetic of floaty smokeyness but also skeletal zombieness. And the smoke colours are very Aesthetic to make up for the fact you cant actually have translucent plastic. And they all have super dynamic poses swinging all.sorts of cool.weapons on chains and sticks just so they had an excuse to spice up an otherwise ordinary figure. And then MAN when there's the ones that are dynamically posed AND also have a really unusual design?? God my heart just explodes. I looooove these spoops~

And man i hope i can work up the courage to go back and ask the cashier more questions next time! I wanna know the specifics of the rules and how creative im allowed to get with them. How different can i paint them? How am i allowed to mod my figures? Can you mix and match figures from each faction? Do you just have to rp as the plain army description for each faction or can you make up your own division of the ghost dudes who are Not Tormented and Not Ruled With An Iron Fist and instead have a Nice Boss Who Takes Them Out For Milkshakes? Also can i put little top hats on them?

And maaaaan seriously i already have so many ideas for alternate plotlines for these guys!! Its SUCH A WASTE! the short summary mentions that you become a ghost if you're "not good enough for [warhammer equivelant of heaven] and evil enough for [warhammer equivelant of hell]". But then ALL OF THEM ARE JUST EVIL ANYWAY. "Not evil enough" but still every single unit description is "he was an executioner/hunter/serial killer/world's worst criminal ever/he has so style he has no grace t t this stabman stabs u in th face." Like seriously where are my actual morally gray dudes who did bad stuff for good reasons or good stuff for sinful reasons or straddled the line between redemption and temptation or like MAN THERE ARE SO MANY DIFFERENT DEFINITIONS OF PURGATORY PERSON! Like why not bring up all the completely good people who might get unfairly sentenced here if this world's angel faction has as many corrupt priests as the real world? Ghosts of unwed mothers, unbaptised children, lgbt and other minorities the church is bigoted against, people falsely accused of crimes by corrupt pastors, peope whose mental illness is blamed as 'demon possession', teenage brides who didnt accept their 'holy' arranged mariage to a man twice their age, poor people who just didnt donate enough to the church caddy, etc. Or even just plain normal people? Like if you don't believe that humans are inherantly good you might damn Ol George Farmerson for "not doing anything with his life". Norse mythology had a "bad place" like that, everyone went to Helheim even if they werent evil, just for not "dying a warrior's death". And a lot of the worst child abusing christians twist the scripture to claim that all children are born sinful and have to work off this goddamn debt they gained through no fault of their own.

So yeah i was thinking of having a Nighthaunt faction division where i replace all their weapons with stuff like gardening tools and etc. Farmer of doom! Librarian of death! Single mother of pain! Kindly grandpa neighbour of ultimate power! Just all the lost souls of people who weren't super evil dudes. Maybe even theme it like theyre all from the same village? Maybe the entire place was damned for the sins of one man. Just generally criticize the hell out of the way all these dumbass gods organize their damn afterlife.

And then i could have a warden/general character who's Actually Nice and Actually Tries To Help These Ghosts Work Off Their Sentence. Kindly support worker type person. Treats it like voluntary work and extracurricular classes for people recovering from illness. Does all this paperwork and arranges little art classes and weekly walks around the park for all the grandmas. "Let's do the five-point recovery star to help plan our goals for the future!" Support ghost is here to help u accept ur new damned existance, and help progress up the employment ladder of hell~!

And then i was also thinking SHAMELESS CHARON CROSSOVER! i mean itd be so cool to have a ghost dude who's been damned for being a corrupt tax collector or something. And if he was all hunched over and grumply with some claw hands. And if he was this physically weak type due to his crimes not really being of the fighty sort. And if he was a grandpa. And small. I AM ABSOLUTELY JUSTIFIED IN SAYING CHARON WOULD FIT PERFECTLY INTO THIS WORLD!! Also it woukd actually be cool if i could mix and match units and i just had one single holy creature in this army of doom. Like a lil pixie type thing like rotom! An innocent barely-sentient angel glowybab, who's inexplicably latched onto this motley crew of spoops and seems to see a spark of goodness in them. Like the whole "youre a punished ghost cos you suck but you did One Good Thing so here's a small chance to escape your fate" myth thats common to a lot of cultures. And the dude usually ruins his one chance by being greedy again, blablabla. That would really fit Charon! So like i dunno maybe this rotom-equivelant lil celestial fairy could be the soul of a baby or a cat or something that he saved when he was alive? Like i dunno his final heist went catatrophically wrong and he accidentally knocked over a lantern and set the place on fire. And he could have been able to escape if he'd just been as selfish as usual, but he heard a kid crying from inside the burning building and he ran back inside to try and save them. And uhh.. He still failed. They both died. And now he's stuck on afterlife death row but this lil angel still comes to visit and cheers him on. And a bunch of other redeemable and/or falsely accused non evil ghosts all ended up becoming his buddies too and now they're all fighting together to find a better future~! (Charon: I'VE NEVER HAD SO MANY FRIENDS! :'D ...what is their resale value)

SO YEAH IN SUMMARY I LOVV GHOST AND ADDING GHOST MAKES ALL UR GAMES MUCH MORE BETTER now plz let me be nice to ghost, srsly it sucks that their whole deal is "theyre all being tortured constantly and not even their boss gives a shit about them". I dont wanna play as a ghost torturer!! I BOUGHT THIS GHOSTE BECOS I LOVV THIS GHOSTE