#they can’t go to therapy because it fucking costs money after a certain number of sessions

[spaghetti-n00dles]

how the fuck can this college hold any kind of pride when it’s students are borderline (or fully) suicidal and the counseling here costs money. decent mental health shouldn’t be privilege fuck you

[kettlequills]

Tough It Out - Rise of the Guardians/Guardians of Childhood - Apollo and Koz (or Pitch)

sorry for the wait, this was oddly personal to write? ah, apollo my love. all the money in the world couldnt help you. tw: suicidal ideation, references to past child abuse, homophobia, and substance abuse. this is part one!

The skyscraper that housed Lunar Industries had a hundred and eight floors. Apollo stood on the hundredth-and-ninth – that being the roof, har-har, look how clever he was – looked down at the lights of the city blazing far below his boots, and contemplated taking the quick way down to the ground.

His phone jangled in his pocket. He flicked it open without looking at the caller ID and was still unsurprised to hear Selena on the other end. Who else would be calling Apollo, except his ex-wife? He didn’t have friends. He had even fewer no-friends after this morning. Redundant.

Fired from his own company. Suspected tax fraud. Excuses, really, to cover their asses. The words floated around him like clouds.

Like the actual clouds. Red tinted smog, nice and foul on the lungs, blazed through with gassy city lights blaring on down there in the dusk. Even the cars that chugged and coughed along between the flaring traffic lights, the gum-spitting and leather-pursed pedestrians that wove their way round them to be swallowed into huffing buses and sleek trains. Apollo's people, one and stinky pollutants all. He could make a nice big mess of himself down there among them, wet splat on the ashy pavement, just more trash to sucker up the clogged drains and heaving sewers. It'd be like coming home, maybe.

“Apollo,” said Selena, like exchanging words with him was like swallowing a pill and she had to spit through each one as quickly as possible to avoid the taste lingering on her tongue, “Are you busy?”

“Not really,” said Apollo, wondering how long, mathematically speaking, it would take to walk off the edge of the building he didn’t own any more instead of taking the elevator.

He'd never really paid attention in class. There was Koz, golden and glorious, to stare at back then. The way his dark hair curled at the nape of his neck was infinitely more transfixing than applied mathematics. Before today, Apollo could always pay someone for that.

“Can you take Mim this weekend, then?” she asked. “I’ve got this – thing on Saturday-“

“Can’t he stay at home on his own?” said Apollo. “He’s old enough now.”

“He’s a baby, Apollo,” Selena snapped. Ah, two weeks divorced and he could still make her sound as pissed off as if they’d said their marriage vows yesterday. There had to be some Hallmark card for that. “Deal with your son.”

“Fine,” said Apollo, since he really didn’t have anything to do that weekend other than, possibly, googling how much drugs he could take before he obliterated his brain and whether watching one’s father do that as a baby was the sort of foundational experience that required very costly therapy later in life. “How are you, anyway?”

Selena hung up on him.

Apollo sighed and walked away from the roof’s edge. God knew Selena was a nightmare if he was ever late to pickup.

Elevator it was.

---

“… my wife’s leaving me, I’ve lost my company, and I’m pretty sure my baby hates me,” Apollo told his therapist a day later, idly spinning the cord of the telephone around his finger.

He liked the creaking of its coil, and when he’d outfitted this office in his sleek downtown flat he’d had all the money to afford to go retro. This, like everything else, needed to go soon or else Apollo would run out of money to be able to convincingly fake that his life wasn’t completely shredded to shit to his ex-wife. Buyer lined up already.

Devil worked fast but Apollo worked faster.

“That sounds difficult,” the therapist said, because he was paid to sympathise with Apollo.

“Not really,” said Apollo, because he wasn’t.

“Have you been reaching out to your extended support networks?” said the therapist, who cost more than he was possibly worth.

Apollo wanted to laugh. “Sure,” he said.

“Mr Lunanoff,” the therapist began, but Apollo had already tuned him out. Extended support network. What a joke.

There’d only be one man who could ever qualify for that role, and they’d not spoken in years. Apollo was decently certain that Koz didn’t even remember they were friends on Facebook – probably had him muted – because every so often Koz’d post shitty memes about eating the rich that Apollo would reply to with winks and flirts that he never reacted to back. He hadn’t pushed it too much, though. Koz’s posts were the best parts of his week.

Get up, annoy his wife, stare puzzlingly at his gurgling son, read the newspaper, check the feed of his best friend that liked to pretend he didn’t exist. Perfect morning routine that’d spawned a multi-million dollar company and a therapy bill to match.

Still, his life was going to shit. Why not add this to the pile? Koz’s voicemail was vaguely hot, anyway. He always sounded kind of mad that someone would dare to ring him. It was familiar. People'd been sounding disappointed that Apollo remembered their numbers since he'd got his first phone at five. Soothing, in that way.

Unceremoniously, Apollo hung up on the therapist and typed a name into his phone that sprung to the top of his paltry contacts list, starred and favourited. He swiped. The dial tone made him more nervous than last week’s fistful of stimulants. It jangled into his ears, made him doubt himself. This was a stupid idea. He was going to push Koz away – further away, how much fucking further can he get?

Well, Apollo could get blocked. Still, there was always the hundred and ninth floor and the short way down.

“Pitch speaking,” the man’s voice was gruff and deep on the other end, sent shivers down Apollo’s spine. God. He was so hot. “Who’s this?”

“Kozmotis darling,” said Apollo, trying for upbeat and ending up gaudy and gay, “It’s me.”

“Who?”

“Apollo Lunanoff of course! Don’t tell me you didn’t save my number again.”

There was a beat of silence, then Koz cleared his throat and said, “Ah, new phone. Must have forgot.”

Bless his heart for lying. Koz's lies were thorny things, but they, blind belief and wilful misuse of drugs, were the way they'd stayed friends for so long after all, years after they'd left Apollo's father's estate and Koz's family's little house on the grounds far, far behind. Koz had, anyway. Some part of Apollo was still back there, according to his therapist. Apparently, violent repression was considered not therapeutic gold standard. Apollo reckoned it was fine. It was drugs, wasn't it, not men. That was what his father and he had agreed.

“Don’t worry,” said Apollo, “You can make it up to me. Do you know anything about taking care of babies?”

[bigskydreaming]

You’re a disgusting, abuse-survivor-shaming cunt. I hope you choke, I truly do.

So I get way more of these kinds of messages than I could possibly ever count. Have been for years. I don’t generally reply to them the way I mock some other hate messages I can at least have fun with, because like, what’s there to say about this kinda thing, y’know?

I don’t know how to get people to understand that there is NOTHING hypothetical about my anger about the things in fandom I get angry about. My rants about dark fic are PERSONAL, they have NOTHING to do with some arbitrary moral superiority stance. I don’t make assumptions as to others’ survivor status or motivations for writing various things because I don’t HAVE to, my anger and frustration are with the OUTPUT, not the inciting reasons. 

My hostility towards fandom comes directly from the hostility fandom shows me every time people try to convince me that I have no reason to have the reactions I do to the way they interact with the extremely combustible topics that define my own trauma and that of others. And the fact that fandom at large has decided that the ONLY acceptable reactions from survivors upon seeing others engaging with these sensitive topics in any way they choose, is either to be silent, or to take part in it. 

I don’t have to know which writers of which fics are or aren’t actually survivors attempting coping mechanisms of their own to be fucking furious at the way fandom has literally commodified these traumas, made them exploitable by making the catchphrase “some people write dark fic to cope” all-inclusive, utilized by anyone. With no shame or self-scrutiny as to the fact that YOU at least know if you are or aren’t a survivor, and if you aren’t one, you have ZERO business offering this particular line up as a defense to any survivor taking issue with the ways you embrace particular topics in particular ways.

The only things I have any interest in shaming people for is their choices, the fucking CHOICE to turn on any survivor who dares say “I have issues with this take” and this goes for abuse as much as it does rape. I’ve lost count of the number of authors over the years who HAVE spoken of being rape survivors specifically but then turn around and treat childhood physical abuse as their personal playground, with none of the care they put into crafting rape storylines on display when they casually have male abuse survivors punching each other in every other argument and just citing ‘boys will be boys.’ I can have sympathy for their status and experiences as rape survivors while still being upset at how they simultaneously perpetuate so many of the untruths that make it so hard for abuse survivors to affirm that they have actually been abused rather than call it something that its not, something that they’ve seen writers call it because the writers simply don’t want to inspect the fact that they’ve casually and without awareness written their characters abusing another.

It’s not a zero sum game.

I get angry not because I feel powerless in my own life (I don’t, actually, thanks, I’ve taken actionable steps every single day to fix what’s wrong in my own life and lol that’s power baby), and not because I’m fixated on my own trauma and unwilling to move past it (lol yeah I have no money to spend on anything BUT therapy because I’m committing to the highly specialized and expensive therapy I only arrived at after years of trial and error with other forms because I just don’t want to move past any of this, okay sure).

Nah, I get angry because of the galaxy brain intellects who smarmingly just decide on this view of me for themselves, condescension dripping from every ‘well-meaning’ expression of contempt sympathy, with zero examination of the fact that like.....idk guys, its a little hard to move past my trauma when everyone ELSE seems more fixated on it than I do! LOL, so we’re just gonna skip merrily on by the fact that the only reason its an ISSUE for me in fandom is because its EVERYWHERE in fandom, huh? ‘Mind the tags’ people parrot mindlessly, as though its not like tags HAVE to be created with self-awareness for what people are supposed to mind, or like I haven’t had people literally try to trigger me with tags aimed specifically at getting under my skin as ‘payback’ for something I wrote (out of moral superiority, naturally, not a visceral display of emotion, never that). As though the tags have anything to do with the fact that even outside of Ao3, there are incest-themed shipping weeks every single month of the year, that every major discord server and fic exchange and other fandom wide event demands participants be ‘ship-friendly’ which might as well be code for ‘not friendly to anyone who doesn’t prioritize ships over survivors,’ like fandom hasn’t created a culture in which people are more inclined to be defensive over how people make writers FEEL about stuff they’ve written than they are to be defensive over how certain writing makes various survivors feel.

I’ll never get over how a fandom that universally expressed disdain for Devin Grayson’s disrespectful handling of the sensitive topic of rape has obliviously embraced every form of euphemism under the sun for their own content, and just flat out REFUSES to concede that there is ANY room for criticism in ANY handling of even the most sensitive of topics. Because there’s no sensitivity allowed when it comes to any topic in fandom....unless its the writer’s sensitivity, that must be respected at all costs.

Does that not really strike you as....odd? Aren’t there lines out there about how no society or culture or environment that truly embraces free speech can simultaneously embrace freedom from criticism? And yet time and time again, its anyone who dares criticize - in ANY fashion - the HOW of what someone wrote, not even the WHY, they’re the ones termed authoritarian, censor, the one attempting to SHUT DOWN conversation rather than expand upon it. Tell me, what conversation was THIS anon and similar ilk attempting to invite? Every criticism I write of fandom invites people to engage with it. I fucking BEG people to engage with it. You’re the ones who choose not to. At least not in good faith. Because its only when I refuse to let you move the goalposts from anything other than this being about me reacting to what you wrote, no aim at doing anything other than being a reaction to an action, not an attempt to tell you what to do, just an attempt to get you to tell me WHY, if it really is as defensible as you loftily claim it is - then why is it you just can’t tell me, straight to my face, that it doesn’t matter what negative reaction your writing evokes, you don’t actually have to care? Cuz you don’t, of course. But if you’re that content with your own motivations, your own impact, why so uncomfortable just saying that?

The funny thing is, I truly don’t make any assumptions as to the why of anyone writing dark fic. I have a lot to say about the fact that we all know damn well that at least some of the people offering up the ‘some survivors use dark fic to cope’ aren’t speaking of themselves when they do so, but I have ZERO interest in imagining who that is and why. I’ve spoken of the fact that its willful naivete to assume that even if your own motivations for writing certain content are innocent in your own mind, you can’t assume the same of EVERYONE. That its nothing but willfulness to pretend that actual predators don’t peruse the same content. That the very same factors that make Dick Grayson so appealing to survivors, for example, as a strong heroic character who neverthless has been victimized and violated more than once - the flip side of this coin is this of course makes him EQUALLY appealing to people on the other end of things....a strong heroic character who nevertheless can be victimized and violated more than once.

And yet I honestly, truly have no interest in figuring out who might be whom, when it comes to writers, and I don’t assume everyone who writes or reads certain content in certain ways is in the latter camp. IT DOES ME NO GOOD, to go through life assuming that many people are all potential rapists or inclined to side with my own rapists’ or abusers’ side of things. I CHOOSE to give people the benefit of the doubt there, I assume perhaps they ARE survivors trying in good faith to cope with their own trauma and defensive about hearing that butts up against with other survivors trying to move on in other ways, or that they’re simply people who grew up in fandom being told there is nothing they can write that can be termed wrong, and have trouble with such a deeply held conviction being contested. Or perhaps only got into shipping incest because the ‘fandom elders’ of various fandoms like SPN deliberately and with full intent once upon a time pitched incest as being the same kind of taboo relationship that the same kind of people who forced gay men into secretive relationships were against....that incest ships and closeted gay ships were basically the same, and so as the latter became less of a thing as media showed more open gay relationships, incest ships became more of a thing among fans who were really compelled by the secretive/’society’s against them’ aspect of forbidden love.

I don’t assume any of that on a ONE TO ONE basis with any single writer or reader because I don’t KNOW their personal story and I’m not TRYING to. It makes no difference when I’m not talking about or arguing against the WHY of someone doing a thing, but the HOW. The end result, and the interactions it creates in the environment in which their output is published, shared, celebrated.

All at the expense of any survivor who doesn’t enjoy seeing things they’ve struggled with getting taken seriously about, maybe all their lives....not taken seriously, and offered up as just a themed week on the latest fantasy porn prompt generator. The problem with incest shippers isn’t even just ‘you ship incest, why do you do that,’ its that you can’t seem to manage to do it without assuming anyone who objects is only doing so out of a place of moral superiority. You try and make it a hypothetical argument “well what about when you do this” as opposed to something rooted in the here and now of the personal. We’re not talking about what ifs, we’re talking about what is. Deal with that before you try raising something else, instead of always raising something else so you never have to deal with that. 

The problem is people condescendingly assuming we have ZERO basis for any objection, or any negative reaction at all. Its our own fault, you see, for being too stupid to get that fiction doesn’t affect reality (even though we’ve debunked that time and time again). Its our own fault, you see, for not getting that its not really incest BECAUSE (a claim that is never actually as universal as it tries to pretend to be, and thus is never more than a distraction for the specific argument that prompted it). Its our own fault, you see, for not getting that this isn’t really a big deal, there are bigger problems, and its awfully sad if we’re so fragile and delicate we can’t handle someone enjoying something that has nothing to do with us (even though its never your call whether or not it has anything to do with us, just as its never our call what your specific motivations for writing specific content might be).

The problem is the same thing I’ve been dealing with all my life, and all the more exhausting for it being front and center in fandoms that claim to be escapism and catharsis for survivors....as long as those survivors perform in the manner fandom is comfortable with....aka the manner fandom has exploited and commodified in order to make certain manners of enjoying certain topics possible and defensible for ALL fans, regardless of their own connection to such topics, or motivations surrounding them.

Denial, avoidance, and abdication of responsibility. There’s no problem if YOU don’t see a problem, after all. There can’t be a problem if you just refuse to acknowledge a problem. A problem has nothing to do with you if you simply have nothing to do with it.

And all the while, you continue engaging in the same behaviors that provoke the same reactions that you refuse to ever actually engage with or address, relying on gaslighting to try and sell people and everyone around them that THEY’RE the real problem....its us that have no respect for freedom of speech, creativity or the creative process, other peoples’ traumas, the difference between fantasy and reality, etc etc ad nauseam.

We see people waving away instances of physical abuse with textbook abuse apologism, and we’re told we don’t know what we’re talking about. We see people offering up wording and phrasing in the comment sections of fics that are literally textbook grooming techniques we recognize from our own experiences and we’re told we’re imagining things. We see characters raping others without it being described as rape and we’re told we didn’t mind the tags, even though oddly enough, none of the tags actually said ‘rape’ but rather other euphemisms and if they aren’t in place to tell readers not to expect actual rape in the actual fic, then, what purpose is it they actually serve, again?

But sure.

Talk to me some more about survivor-shaming. 

[eternaleve]

I’ve spent the course of COVID lockdown cycling through hyperfixations while also trying to engage in some much needed therapy (lolsob), and I’ve been essentially encouraging myself to try and do more things I can enjoy without feeling shame. Anyway, that’s a short way of saying I decided to blog about all the music videos of Depeche Mode for reasons of science.

The science is that my basic premise is that most of the videos are pretty bad in ways that I find to be pretty strange. Full disclosure is that I spent my teen years being a huge Cure fan and there’s an overlap there? Of songs with very niche high-concept ideas that don’t necessarily map onto a model of popular music but found mainstream success in the rise of new wave music in the wake of the collapse of first wave punk and amplified by the creation of music videos and music video TV. And I owned all the Cure music videos and played them on my iPod Nano because I was a very strange child. But to get back to my central thesis, many of The Cure’s videos are very stylised and fun and memorable in ways that are good. And yet, despite existing in the same sphere and having an overlap of fans, the music videos for Depeche Mode mostly stay bad until the end of the eighties, a fact I will prove by watching them all.

Can you tell that I am bored because i have lost my job and my mental health is making me fixate on strange shit currently because that is absolutely the case right now

Speak & Spell

Dreaming of Me (Feb 1981)

The single art is really lovely - the red/yellow contrast is very striking against the white, and I really love the design. Hey remember when people used to go out and buy singles and you would appreciate them and the work that went into them? I don’t think I’ve bought a physical single since I was about sixteen. I used to buy them from the Woolworths music department because it was cheap and all my friends worked there, so they had a pretty lenient attitude about what exactly constituted paying for things. Woolworths policy of only hiring teenagers is probably what destroyed their business.

Anyway, Dreaming of Me did not chart super well, getting to number 57 and having no official music video - or actually getting onto the album. It wasn’t included on Speak & Spell in the UK until the 2006 re-release. So, there was no music video for me to look at…

Apart from this video I found from local TV in 1981 to promote the song. It’s a maybe-music video. Because music videos had only been around for about six years and MTV didn’t exist until later in the same year, my guess is that Mute Records were pretty cautious about putting money into a medium that might cost more than they would get in publicity. That’s only a guess. I don’t have a crystal ball for forty years ago. 

Anyway, here are some children recording music.

If i was 19 and someone offered me a recording contract I would have taken it without thinking (like i took on all those student loans without thinking through any consequences wompwomp) but now I am nearly thirty I watch this and think, ‘These children shouldn’t be outside unaccompanied’. The passage of time has made a fool of me.

They go bowling and play Space Invaders which, hey, still sounds like a great night out to me, but I’m guessing that because this is very clearly aimed at teenagers the TV producers didn’t want to encourage teen drinking by showing them performing a gig at a club night.

I call it high fashion. The all-grey really sells it.

This reminds me so much of a advice column in teen magazines - when they’d have problems set out in a little faux-comic strip of still photos? ‘My best friend stole and read my diary’ ‘My crush found out about how I feel and now he’s going out with my best friend’, that sort of thing. That is also a classic carpet pattern. I think my grandma’s living room had that carpet. 

The video is very naive! It’s the sort of thing we would all see now on Youtube from bands just starting out and it is wild to me that this went out on TV. It’s very un-glossy and normal, the stuff that bands put out on YouTube now because of DIYness.

New Life (June 1981)

This is also a really great piece of single art. It’s very bold and striking - it would definitely be the standout record in a sea of other 7’’ released the same week. It also doesn’t particularly match the tone of the single but eh, it looks pretty cool. New Life did much better than Dreaming of Me and got up to number 11 in the UK singles chart. Still no official music video, but the charting meant that the band got onto Top of The Pops! ToTP was cancelled when I was a wee baby teen, because the BBC decided to stop caring about yoof viewership and promoting music was circling the drain everywhere as streaming hit, but it was the place to promote music so was definitely a sign that You Had Made It.

So, last video was silly and made by children, but now they’re wearing see-through mesh shirts, leather trousers, and leather hats with a design that I am a little bit dubious about. I grew up on the oi/punk scene and let me tell you about how many first wave punks wear iconography of bad regimes for faux edginess reasons because I met a LOT of them in my time.

Oh boy do i have thoughts about that hat. It also looks like a Leather Daddy hat which, well, let’s leave that thought to one side. Most ToTP performances were lipsynced. Playing things live would sound weird in the studio, be picked up strangely by the audio equipment and the cameras, so 99% of performances were mimed to the single. Now, some acts would deliberately play up to the pretence and refuse to act like they were doing anything that corresponded to the song - The Jam, The Communards, and The Cure are literally the first examples that come to mind who would just… not do anything close to pretending it was real. 

This is not that. It is very earnest and awkward and serious, which sort of makes it very sweet.

Just Can’t Get Enough (September 1981)

Right, that is shibari, isn’t it? I’m not blind, am I? It’s a very striking image that 99.9% of people would not recognise other than being a striking black and white image. 

I don’t think I can overstate how… innocent, in a way, this point of time was? As in the general level of knowledge about non-conventional stuff in the wider public at large. As in my mother, an almost teen at this point, saw George Michael walking with his boyfriend in central London and had no idea he was gay until he came out. It’s actually the widest cultural gulf I can think of between her teen years and my teen years because I was very aware of queer people from a young age.

Anyway, moving on, I feel like it bears repeating that this song fucking slaps. It’s the last single to be written by Vince Clarke and the last single until 2006 to be written by someone other than Martin Gore. This is one of those songs that just works on every level. Can you imagine coming up with this for the first album of your band? That blows my mind. It’s so overpoweringly good that it was probably for the best that it was saved for last - coming out the gate with a guaranteed fucking banger was been the nail in the coffin for a lot of other eighties synth/electronica bands. They scored a huge hit and then nothing after that managed to be as good or meet the hype. Depeche Mode had built up a far bit of radio play and interest before dropping this which turned out to be very good in the long run!

This got to number 8 on the UK charts and the first to get a music video! It is the only one with Vince Clarke. Full disclosure in that I had this song on my iPod through downloading the video to my computer (that’s how we got songs without using stuff that would give us viruses because i got a ton using bearshare for rare cure demos) and I remember watching the video, all of sixteen years old, and thinking, ‘Man, all these people look so grown up, compared to me, I can’t wait to be an adult!’.

Twelve years have changed my view, somewhat.

Look at this little baby man. Were you in one of my A Level classes - as in, ones that I have taught, not ones that I have been in.

Vince Clarke, however, has had a significant glow up in the six months and now looks like he is the bouncer in a leather bar. This is the One Adult in the room.

Ahh, I see it’s Open Mic Night at the local leather bar. You know what I was saying about how teens in the eighties tended to be significantly more naive about what we might call certain signifiers? Because what this outfit says to me, a queer woman in 2020, is susbstanitally different than to my mum and her friends watching this when it first came out. She would read this as ‘This is totally rebellious and cool!’ while I go ‘Someone just joined the university kink club and spent all their bursary’.

I don’t remember the member of Blazin’ Squad that wore a slave harness. (Now, there’s a reference that shows my age. A Blazin’ Squad reference in the year of Our Lord 2020. Hoooo boy.)

I read somewhere (that I can’t find now because, of course I can’t) that these are the band’s girlfriends and I always remembered that because it made me think, lol, same. One of my closest friends is the Head of London, so she’s in every band in London and if she’s not in yours yet give her time, and my partner was in a locally successful metal/hardcore band for about a decade and being connected with any sort of band means you will be helping out hugely behind the scene constantly. I have held lights, moved speakers, picked up instruments, been in music videos, and have bought tearaway trousers and glowsticks for gigs. You get called in to help all the time which is a lot of fun, so that fact always just stuck with me. It also makes sense financially because then you don’t have to hire any professional backing dancers, you can rely on people who will happily do it for free (while looking pretty rad while doing it!).

Anyway, the band look like those generic raiders that you run into when randomly walking across the map in a Fallout game.

I love awkward choreography in music videos. It feeds me.

Filming a night out provides A) Great footage and B) Can be done for limited overheads, leaving more money to be put into promotion. 

I always like seeing this sort of footage in music videos. I tend to see a lot of it, given the DIY punk scene, and it always charms me. I am easy to please. And all those women have the most amazing eye makeup that makes me super jealous because it all looks so good.

That hat is on point. This looks like a still image for some sort of cyberpunk big band style swing revival that, sadly, lives only in my dreams.

It took me so goddamn long to screenshot this shot probably because i was also blasting dream nails whoops

Anyway those are my reactions to Speak & Spell’s one solitary music video with some other things thrown in and this took me way too long. I make myself laugh though, that’s the main thing. I will do A Broken Frame… at some point. I think I have a bunch of vinyl for A Broken Frame? My mum actually bought all the singles for that album and I stole most of her collection years ago. I will have to search and see what I can find.

[waltdisneyscokeaddiction]

Beer Labels and Universal Constants

Beer Labels and Universal Constants

“Why do you do that?” he asks.

“Do what?” 

“Peel the labels off your beer bottles.”

There is a bottle of half-drunk Voodoo Ranger sitting on the coffee table in front of the two of us. The logo has been picked at and pulled at until the only parts that are left on the bottle are the few streaks of white shit that are impossible to get off without completely destroying your nails. Sometimes when I go to the beach and we put all of the beer in a giant cooler full of slush, the labels get so wet that they just peel off in one perfect strip. Then, there aren’t any little streaks of white shit, and I get an indescribably good feeling. It feels like I’m watching one of those “oddly satisfying” compilations on instagram.

“I don’t know.”  I shrug and start picking at the little white streaks of paper and glue in between sips. My nails are going to be fucked, but they’re fucked anyways. I bite them until I can’t see that little white line at the end where the dirt settles in. I think that part is called the quick. Or I’m remembering that wrong and that the quick is the white spot at the base of the nail next to your cuticles. Why do I know what a cuticle is and not which part of my nail is the quick?

“Did you always do it?” he asks. He is also drinking a beer. This beer also has a label, but I feel absolutely no compulsion to peel off the label, and it isn’t just because it’s one of those plasticy labels that are harder to get off. Sometimes I like to peel those off too. In some cases it’s even more satisfying because the plasticy labels come off in one clean pull: always. No, the reason I don’t want to tear apart his label is because it’s his and not mine. 

“I started…” I pause to think “...in the first grade.”

“You were drinking in the first grade?”

“No,” I say and now it’s becoming a whole conversation, so he reaches out for the remote to pause the show. We’re watching some stand-up special on netflix. ‘Have you noticed that every single one of these new stand up specials has at least one joke in it about netflix?’ he asked me a while ago, and now we both look at each other whenever we catch the self-referencial ‘netflix joke’. 

Haha. Much funny. 

“I started peeling the labels off of my water bottles in first grade,” I explain. 

“Why?”

I shrug even though I have an answer. “So that I could tell which water bottle was mine.”

“Okay but...we’re drinking different beers...” he says, and now he is turning full towards me. The netflix special is waiting patiently in the background. Like usual, it will take us at least two and a half hours to finish this seventy five minute special because we keep pausing every five minutes to talk. 

I respond but also kind of don’t answer his question at the same time. “How can you tell when something you started doing consciously has become a habit?” I ask, “Like I know that I don’t do it consciously anymore. It’s just a habit, but like...I didn’t just decide one day that I was going to start doing this. It just sort of…” I shrug.

“Hmmm...weird” He hits play. We listen to three more seconds of material. Then he pauses again. “But is it like...all bottles? All the time? Or just some bottles some of the time? Or is it all bottles some of the time, or some bottles all the time?”

“What?”

“Don’t make me say it again.”

I take another gulp. This Voodoo Ranger is getting warm and the hops and the pineyness are getting harder and harder to handle the warmer it gets. So I do that thing where you stomach the last few sips in one big gulp even though it definitely wasn’t meant to be gulped so that I can open another bottle. It’s like ripping off a bandaid. Sometimes you have to get through the shit at the bottom as quickly as possible so that you can get to the next one. Either that or you can be one of those barbarians that leaves the last few sips. I had a girlfriend before who would always make me drink her last few sips because she refused to, but she knew I would get mad if she wasted it, especially at a show or a concert where the beers all cost like seven dollars each.

“It’s not all the time,” I pull the bottle cap off with this bottle opener he has that’s shaped like a little soldier and put the bottle cap onto the empty, label-less bottle like a helmet on a fallen soldier. This is another strange habit that I picked up somewhere but can’t remember where. “...Or every bottle.”

“Okay. Vague.”

“If I’m sitting down.” I collapse onto the futon next to him. “And like...sipping, like this? Then it’s more likely because I’m not really paying attention.”

“Sitting is the enemy of labels everywhere,” he laughs.

“But if I’m drinking them quick, I usually don’t get to that point.”

“Are there any you don’t?”

“With Modelo,” I explain ,“I just consider it a win if I can get most of that fucking foil off the top.”

“Yeah what is up with that?”

I shrug again, “Who knows?” and take a few sips. Now I want to pull the label off my beer bottle, but I can’t tell if I actually do or if I just think I do because we’re talking about it.

“What about cans?”

“What about cans?” I repeat.

He nods like this is all very important and fascinating. “I see. Makes sense.”

“You wanna?” I point at the screen. The comic tells a few jokes about not being able to say offensive things anymore. Then he goes on to say five minutes of offensive material while everyone in the audience laughs and he gets paid lots of money to do it. I wonder why it seems like only the male comedians complain about this shit? Maybe the women do too and I just don’t watch enough female comedians to recognize it. Am I part of the solution? Or am I part of the problem for assuming that women can’t be as problematic as men?

While I’m thinking about this, I peel off half the label, roll it up like a joint, pull the cap off the empty bottle, and slip the rolled up label inside. Then I put the bottle cap back on like a trashcan lid. 

“Are you doing it now because you want to? Or because you feel like you have to because we were talking about it?”

“Well fuck.” I set my beer down “I don’t really know now!” I stomp off to toss the empty bottle into the recycling bin. I wonder if the label inside makes it harder to recycle the bottle or not. How do they recycle these things anyways? Do they throw them all in a big burner or something? In that case, does that mean they have to pull all of my labels out everytime I do this? How many bottles have I thrown away over the years that had little rolled up labels inside of them like the worlds shittiest message in a bottle that has to be pulled out before the bottle can be recycled.

He laughs. He thinks I’m being pretend mad for a joke which, when I think about it, I’m pretty sure I am, but when did we get so close that he just assumes that? When did we get so close that he just assumes all of my outbursts are just for comedic purposes instead of asking me if i’m actually upset?

He plays the special, and the comedian tells a joke that is problematic but also funny because we both know that we’re not not supposed to laugh at it. We both look at each other, and I can tell that we’re both kind of relieved that his wife isn’t back yet. She would hate that joke. 

“Do you ever wonder why?” he asks.

“Why what?”

“Why you do it.” He points at my half-naked beer bottle still covered in those white streaks of paper and glue. 

I think about it for a few minutes while the comedy plays in the background. This is a long joke, the big one, the funny one that anchors the entire special, and you remember it the most after the special is over. I wait for it to finish and wait for us to finish laughing. His laugh is higher and more giggly than mine even though his voice is half an octave lower than mine. Like he’s Ron Swanson. 

Then I tell him, “When I started going to therapy I wondered how I got this way.”

“Yeah?” he pauses. At this point we have another twenty minutes left and his wife isn’t supposed to be home for another hour, but we’ll be lucky if we finish the special before she gets home. 

“Like why was I normal one year and then crazy the next.”

“Okay.”

“What I realized was that I was always kind of like this. I just didn’t notice it until it started making problems.”

“So what? You were always a bottle ripper? A label peeler?”

I take another long slug and wipe the extra off on my forearm. 

“More like...I was always going to be the kind of guy who would peel off his labels in the same way that water always boils when you get it hot enough. Say you had this bucket of water. Even If you never boil it, that doesn’t mean it suddenly stops boiling at a certain temperature just because you never did it.”

“So what? Your anxiety is just some permanently fixed constant about you as a person? Like the number of protons in a hydrogen atom? Or...gravity?” “Exactly!” I grin. I’m happy for a few moments that he finally gets it, but suddenly upset when I realize what he just insinuated. 

I thought we were just talking about beer labels. 

He nods “huh” and hits play on the stand up special. At some point the comic says something that reminds my friend of his dad and he pauses the special. We spend an unknowable amount of time talking about our dads, and somehow when his wife comes in the door, we still have five minutes left of the special. 

[meepface]

these questions seem very therapeutic and i have been havin a week so im gonna do em, please ignore me

1. What can you do today that you were not capable of a year ago?

say no to people!! post selfies and not feel ashamed of myself for doing so!! stand up for myself without immediately crying!! 

2. What has been on your mind most lately?

well this week i’ve been in kind of a negative headspace so i have sorta thought about how much easier dying would be than dealing with any of my problems, but i have also thought about how much i don’t actually wanna kill myself also so i’ve been feelin sorta trapped between ‘mannnn if i would just fucking do it’ vs ‘but i don’t wanna my mom would be sad’, so that’s a real fun time!

3. Right now at this moment; What do you want right now?

i wanna feel myself again honestly. i’ve felt super weird n distant from who i used to be and who i wanna be and i feel like im just floatin. i feel super dissociative and i don’t feel genuine in how i behave anymore like idek myself. another super fun time!

4. In order of importance, How would you rank: Money, Happiness, Love, Health and Fame?

love (not strictly the romantic kind), happiness, health, money, fame

5. What would best describe the way you have spent your time in the last month?

feel like i’ve been wastin a lot of time bein super unhappy. buuuuut i spent a lot of time with people i love last month so that was good. kinda mixed, neutral feelings about it

6. What is the #1 motive in your life now?

to learn how to live for myself more

7. In one sentence, who are you?

i would say i am an extreeeeemely sensitive and compassionate person who’s always tryin to do the right thing and make a few people laugh when i can

8. What do you want to be known for?

being good and kind and gentle and positive

9. If you had to move 3000 miles away, what would you miss most?

my family, my dogs, my girlfriend, my friends, my grandma, this local restaurant that has amazing pancakes, my university bc i really like it there, the general atmosphere of downtown Austin, my therapist, my bedroom. in no particular order

10. In one year from today, how do you think your life will be different?

hopefully i’m taking care of myself well, am happy in my current situation and if i’m not i am actively working to do what i need to do to fix that, maybe i’ll have finally gotten another job and have moved out possibly. who knows. just hope im doin well

11. Who makes you feel good about yourself?

my friend Stein, my mom, my girlfriend, my therapist, a few of my internet friends

12. What are the top 3 qualities you look for in a friend?

someone who makes me laugh, someone who is a good listener, someone extremely supportive and non-judgmental

13. What has fear of failure stopped you from doing?

joining a club and being more social in college, getting another job, moving out, making videos, volunteering at this abuse center i’d really love to volunteer at

14. What is something you have always wanted since you were a kid?

a golden retriever

15. What stands between you and something you want?

fear of change

16. What do you do when nothing else seems to make you happy?

i find something to calm me down and distract me, like a game or something i can play so i stop thinking too much. also talking to someone helps but whenever i’m not in the mood to talk i try to do something to distract myself, or go to sleep if it’s a good time to

17. What do you need to spend more time doing?

being with friends and family, writing

18. When did you first realize that life was short?

i mean i had a few near-death experiences as a kid but none of em i was like “wow i could’ve died and that would’ve been the end” bc i didn’t really process them like that when i was that young. one of first times that i can remember feeling really deeply anxious about how short life really is is when i saw a bad car wreck just last year that had just happened and (TW ahead) i saw a person dead on the road with his head smashed. that was so scarring for me and now wrecks make me uncomfortable and i used to drive kinda recklessly as a dumb suicidal thing but now i would never ever drive the way i used to. another time i can think of is when a girl in my grade who i had actually been close friends with all throughout middle school up until freshman year died in a car wreck and our whole school was devastated

19. What issues do you continually refuse to confront?

honestly i want to confront and fix or work on all of my issues lmao so

20. What is something a lot of people do that you disagree with?

there’s a lot of homophobic and transphobic people in the small Texas town that i work in and a lot of em say super offensive things really casually and i hate it so much. also a lot of people enjoy jolly ranchers which i will never understand

21. What is a common misconception people have about you?

i’m shy, i’m straight, i’m lazy, i don’t work hard

22. What is something no one can take away from you?

no one could pull me away from my mom tbh that bitch knows everything and no one can tell me not to tell her what they tell me bc she’s gonna know in the next hour

23. What is something you would hate to go without for a day?

ummm chicken probably. it’s all i eat

24. When you look into the past what do you miss the most?

how cheerful and happy i was in 2015 and some of 2016!!!!!! the fuck happened!!!!

25. What memory from the past year makes you smile the most?

hmmm probably the times my gf and i spent hours making out n stuff in parking lots bc we finally got over our fear of havin our first kiss w each other and went all out

26. What is the number one change you need to make in your life within the next twelve months?

hmmm don’t wanna share it but i know in my head the answer to this

27. If not now, then when?

when i’m ready and when i know for sure that it’s what i want. because right now i don’t know what i want with my life but i just know that right now i am not happy. baby steps

28. What have you done that you are truly proud of?

i gained soooooo much confidence after graduating high school. came out to everyone, told my mom i wanted to finally try to go to therapy which has been a blessing for me

29. What is something new you have recently learned about yourself?

i’ve learned where my dependency issue that i used to have super bad stemmed from. i’m kinda growin from that though. i still have residual anxieties that were caused by it but nothin i can’t work through

30. What do you want to remember forever?

hmm. probably that one quote that’s like “anything that costs your peace is too expensive”. either that orrrrr that one scene in the office where Jim gets drunk and crashes his bike into the bushes

31. What could society do without?

religion (yikes yikes yikes) (don’t hate me, just hear me out) - this doesn’t mean the spirituality of it but like..... the whole rules and order part of it. the ancient outdated books and everything being taken so literally in today’s world. everyone could have their own takes and believe in their own things and they can just be without feeling like they either have to go to church or celebrate a religious holiday or be a certain way bc ‘god’, whoever they may be, wants them to. idk i like to believe there’s a higher power that just represents love, in its purest form, and that’s it. that’s all you gotta know about them. there’s no rules to that, you just do with that what you will, learn from that what you can. does this make sense at all 

32. What is the one thing right now, that you are totally sure of?

right now i am totally sure that i shouldn’t have started doing this survey bc i am exhausted and i have work in the morning but i’m definitely gonna finish it

33. If you had the opportunity to get a message across to a large group of people, what would you say?

be kinder and gentler, thank you

34. What is something that you said you would never do, but have since done?

this is uhhh super emo but i didn’t think i’d live this long and here the fuck i am

35. What is something you changed your mind about when you grew older?

my feelings about The Gays, since i grew up to be one and when i was little i was terrrrified of that idea. i didn’t care if other people were but when it came to me i was like noooo way jose. also? the concept of marriage? i’ve become super apathetic towards it. i don’t care if i end up married or not anymore, i will commit to someone for life regardless and i don’t need a ceremony and anything official to prove that. buuuuut that being said, if my future partner wants to be married, i’m 200% there and i’m already starting to think about our wedding color scheme. man. idk if i’d rather wear a suit or a dress at my wedding

36. What didn't last forever, but was still worth your while?

hmmm maybe my current therapy stuff?? i know one day i’m gonna stop going to therapy but man have i learned a lot and man have i grown. i truly think everyone needs to go to therapy at least once in their life, you learn things that are valuable in every aspect of life

37. If you could go back and time and tell the younger version of yourself something, what would you tell?

you’re not stupid, you’re allowed to make mistakes, maaaybe ask for the braces that aren’t clear bc those just made your teeth look massive and you hated yourself while they were on and you can’t look at pictures with them even years later. aaaand they made you super insecure about your mouth and smile even years down the line so, please dodge that bullet if ya can. also you’re super gay!

38. If you knew you were dying in the next 60 seconds, what would your last words be?

finally

39. When it is all said and done, would you have said more then you've done or vice versa?

hmm i’ve probably said a lot more than i’ve done, which i wanna change. if i’m understanding this question right

40. What question do you often ask yourself?

what do you want? what do you need? which of the two is more important?

[amongushq]

Welcome to Among Us, MICAH! PERCY JACKSON ( with the faceclaim of TYLER POSEY ) has found shelter in NEW ATHENS AND CAMP HALF-BLOOD, where we hope HE will fit in nicely. Please make sure to check the “after applying” section of our navigation here!

It was probably a good thing that Percy’s ethnicity was never specified in the books, because all the admins were very keen on having a POC!Percy. We all agreed that Percy had this certain troublemaker-in-hiding, mischievous look that he shares with Tyler Posey, so you did good on the faceclaim choice. On the subject of the application itself, we all loved it. It felt like this Percy was more in-character than the Heroes of Olympus series (compared to the original ones), and we got to see all the parts of him that we loved: Percy completely done with fighting, Percy still completely in love with Annabeth ( but not so intensely mentioned that it overshadows important points in this audition), Percy as a good friend: we got it all. The little headcanons you’ve put in are also very IC, and we’re overall just very excited to have you around. 

AND YOU ARE…?

What is your full name, and when were you born?

My full name is Perseus Jackson. But no one calls me Perseus, like, not even my mom. You can just call me Percy. As for my birthday? I was born on August the 18th, 1993.

Have you been claimed, or do you belong to a legacy? If yes, state your godly parent / heritage.

I’m a son of Poseidon.

Where are you currently based? Are you attending a Camp (Half-Blood / Jupiter), or are you living full-time in New Athens / New Rome? Is it a combination of both?

It is a combination of both. I live in Camp Half Blood and New Athens, Especially in the summer because I’m a cabin counsellor so I’ve got to be around during the summer. But when everything gets quiet during the rest of the year – or at least when it used to get quiet during the rest of the year – I go back to New Athens to study. But I guess with the recall it is gonna have to be a balancing act.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? ( If you’re applying for a canon character, are you diverging from book-canon? If so, how?)

I’m Mexican American, third generation. My mom’s parents moved to Texas when she was a kid and then they moved to New York. Apparently I’ve still got a whole other side of the family down south, but I’ve never met any of them.

I speak fluent Spanish, it is pretty much my mother tongue. Gabe hated it when we talked Spanish around him, but when it was just me and mom it was our preferred method of communication and now that he is gone we talk in it all the time. Hell Paul has even learned Spanish so that he can join in.

After the Titan wars and the war with the Giants and then that whole period where Apollo became human, well somehow I managed to get through to college at New Rome.

I majored in Biology and I joined their swim team because it gave me a scholarship and let’s be honest, I kinda had a pretty unfair advantage.

Other than that the other big thing is that I’ve been diagnosed with PTSD. I guess that fighting in two wars before you turn 18 really fucks you up. I’m working through it as best I can right now, Dad and Rachel both hooked me up with a great therapist who has really helped me out. Or at least I think she helps.

I’m not doing great with the recall thing, I really miss my family, but I don’t get to see mom or Paul or anyone because of the recall. I skype them a lot, but it just isn’t the same y’know?

(So I’m not gonna actively diverge from any of the book canon, I’m just going to build on it a bit, for example Percy’s ethnicity is never extensively discussed, so I develop that a lot more)

What were you doing prior to The Recall?

Surviving? I guess?

I mean, not really, I was surviving, but that is just a regular demigod sort of thing. I was studying. I graduated from New Rome University last year, so now I’m trying to do a masters that would allow me to do some work with marine life, but the recall kind of ruined that.

Other than college, I was looking into what I’d do after college, I’d even gotten a few jobs that I was interested in.

SHOWTIME!

If there was one thing that you had to give a therapist, it was that they definitely had the money to buy nice sofas. You could literally feel how much it had cost, just from running your fingers over the leather. He could feel the expensive leather as he nervously ran his fingers up and down the arms of the chair he was sat in.

It was funny, normally he wouldn’t be nervous. He had fought people who were literally twice his size. He could leap off of a hundred-foot-high cliff into a pool of water without his heart skipping a beat. Yet usually the only thing that made him nervous was Annabeth. When he had done something to piss her off, she would give him one of her trademarked glares that made you think she could see right into your soul, with those stormy grey eyes of hers. Well it was enough to make anyone’s stomach turn. But for Percy it was enough to send him running for the hills.

The key to avoiding the glare was to avoid fucking up too royally. Usually he could manage it. But sometimes he had to hide at the bottom of the lake.

Yet today, he wasn’t nervous about the stare of Annabeth, it was the stare of his therapist. She was an incredibly thin lady. Percy couldn’t help but notice every single bone in her face. Prominent cheek bones, a jawline that supermodels would envy and slightly sunken eyes. She seemed to be a stern individual, however the way she looked at him, staring at him over the rim of her golden wire glasses, he couldn’t help but wonder if she was reading him like a book.

Dr. Arkwright had been suggested to him by Rachel Dare, a good friend of his, apparently she had helped her through a number of issues and was uniquely talented at her job in her own special way. If Rachel swore by her then that was enough for Percy.

“Percy,” she said in a quiet voice, “I know this is our first session, so there is on no pressure for you to open up right away…” she trailed off, her eyes never wavering from him.

He had been to other therapists before, but they had been mortal, unable to see through the mist or understand what it was that he had been through. They had tried to help him, but with everything he had been through, he hadn’t been able to be helped. Not until now, at least, that was what he hoped. The trick to this was that his therapist was a demigod. A daughter of Apollo, cabin counsellor in her day, though that was a long while ago.

She had started out working in New York, but after the recall she’d moved her office to New Athens. Percy guessed that Demigods seemed to need therapy too.

“… but this will only work if we can develop a relationship of trust, I can’t help you if you don’t let me help you.”

He took a deep shuddering breath and looked away from his hand, meeting people was an easy task, he could deal with that, but it was different when it came to this woman.

Meeting her eyes wasn’t easy, but he forced himself to do so.

“I don’t even really know where to start,” he admitted, biting his lip gently as his sentence ended.

“Just from the beginning perhaps,” she replied.

“The beginning of what?” he replied, perhaps a little too sharply, “My life? Or just specifically falling into Tartarus, or the fact that I’ve been all but a child soldier since I was twelve, gods that is ten years…” he said, more to himself than to her.

“Wherever you feel comfortable,” she said quietly, she didn’t seem startled by his revelation or his little outburst.

Falling silent again he sat there and shifted in his seat, that was a problem with his ADHD, sitting still drove him insane. He had never been good at it, maybe that was one of the reason he’d always done so badly in class. He couldn’t sit still. So he stood up, and walked to the window. Staring out into the city of New York he thought about what it would be like to be stood out there, rather than in here. He stared at the cabs and the pedestrians on the streets.

Sighing he ran his fingers over the curtains that were at the edge of the window, even this material felt expensive.

“I guess,” he sighed and tapped his fingers against the glass, leaving little finger marks on it, “I guess the best place to start would be with my childhood…”

There was a sudden binging that interrupted his line of thought, reaching into his pocket he pulled out his phone and stared at it.

“Monster attack, need ur help, Annabeth.”

“I’m really sorry,” he said, turning to the therapist, “but I’ve got to go, duty calls.” He said wiggling his phone and grabbing Riptide from his pocket.

He turned and strode from the room, his heart thumping in his chest. This therapy thing was hard.