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snow-shelter · 2 years ago

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holy shit

since i have officially been enable (hehe thanks @thefactsofthematter and @daveysjackie)

i think. jack and davey have been friends since the day they met. it was the kind of instant connection that only being in the same class as young kids can generate, the solidarity of having names close enough together in the alphabet that you end up sitting next to each other in every class on the first day of school, and the very fast realization that jack's sense of humor was perfectly matched to davey's ability to convince a teacher he'd done nothing wrong. they're friends all through middle school and high school, even when jack is the popular baseball player class clown and davey is the kid who sits in the front row and answers every question. people outside their immediate friend group kind of wonder why they're so close, but jack and davey and their immediate friends get it.

davey is good at keeping his rebellious streak hidden, and jack is good at acting unbothered, but davey has always been itching to get into trouble and shake that "pleasure to have in class" vibe he's had since he was five and jack cares so much about everything that it's hard not to shut down. so they balance, just like they always have. jack supplies davey with the cigarettes and weed most people would never guess he smokes, and davey gives jack the space to drop the facade and let himself care so much it hurts.

they're the kind of friends that are so intertwined it's hard to imagine one without the other. davey gets out of ap english and jack is already at the classroom door handing him a pack of fruit snacks and laughing at something that happened in the forty minutes since they last saw each other. jack stays late to finish an art project and davey is sitting at the table across from him doing calc homework and making sure jack doesn't get so wrapped up in his work that he doesn't eat.

and then davey goes away to college. and he hates it. he should have known he would hate it because he's hated school and the pressure it put on him since he was old enough to feel the expectations from his teachers. it's not even that college is hard. he earned his spot here, he's smart, he's capable, he even got a really good scholarship. but he hates it. he hates his classes, he hates his major, he changes his major and hates that one too, he misses his family and he misses jack, who facetimes him from the kitchen of the diner he's worked at since he was sixteen excited to announce he's finally starting to work in the kitchen instead of as a server-slash-host.

he first floats the idea of dropping out to jack when they're on facetime at 3am while davey frantically writes an essay that was due at midnight that he forgot about because he just doesn't care anymore. his grades aren't great because he doesn't want to be here, he's miserable, he's only made like two friends, and he hates it here.

he expects jack to react the way he knows his family would, his advisor would, everyone else in his life seems like they would. no, davey, don't drop out, you worked so hard to get here, that would be a waste, you're so smart, don't you want to do something with yourself?

but jack doesn't even look up from his sketchbook when he asks, would that make you happy again?

and yes, it would, davey realizes the more he thinks about it. he would rather go home and work a shitty job for a while than stay here and stay miserable. he would be happier to be home with the people he knows and loves.

so davey drops out. he barely tells his parents he's doing it, but he never registers for classes for his second year and he officially withdraws from the university in july when he's sitting on a fire escape with jack like they used to when they were kids and jack celebrates out loud that he's making his own choices.

so jack gets davey a job in the same diner he works at. they work together and hang out together and are friends like they always have been, but there's something else now because davey, as miserable as he was away at college, has this weird little itch to get out and do something exciting. he starts talking about wanting to get out and see the world, and jack, who has always talked about getting out of the city to see what else is out there, is all for it.

it's impulsive and stupid, even more so than dropping out of college, but they decide to just...go for it. they save up together to buy a van and a few months' worth of spending money and then, when the paperwork is signed and it's too late to stop them, they just leave.

esther and mayer are disappointed maybe. worried, definitely. what happened to their middle child who never got in trouble and got straight As and was quiet and well-behaved his whole life? where did this, this impulsivity and recklessness and sideways ambition, where did it come from? and sarah is less surprised, davey has always confided in her, but didn't expect him to actually go through with it. and les thinks it's very cool that davey is running away as an adult, but sad and a little confused that he barely took the time to say goodbye.

but davey...davey loves it. he and jack leave the city and decide on the spot that they're not using maps, they're headed west and they don't care where they end up. the van used to belong to a plumber, there's no backseat, so they mostly park at truck stops or Walmart parking lots to spend the night. they both have a little money saved up, and jack has been doing commissions online for long enough that he's still got a little income coming in, and they don't know how long this can possibly last but it's fun. it's freedom. they drive until they're sick of driving and then they stop to see what they can get up to until they want to drive some more. they put a mattress in the back of the van and collect pillows and blankets and slowly, strangely, it starts to feel like home.

jack finds an old video camera at one of the thrift stores they stop at and starts recording videos. davey starts pulling them off the camera and putting them on his laptop so he can send updates to his family that show how good this is for both of them. they stop at weird landmarks and tourist attractions, jack fills sketchbook after sketchbook with drawings of the weird places they find, davey starts keeping a journal full of the things that make him laugh and fun facts he's learning.

the van breaks down four months in. they're somewhere in the middle of nowhere, colorado, and jack cracks some joke about it being a miracle they made it this long, and thank god they're actually in a town and not on a highway fifty miles from anywhere. the local mechanic is nice enough to tow it to his shop free of charge, and jack and davey settle in to spend a few days in this tiny town without much to do. they end up sitting in a coffee shop while davey edits together another highlight reel of the last week to send home. jack says he should put it on youtube and see what happens, and davey laughs the idea off but the next morning he's still kind of thinking about it because. why not? maybe nobody will ever watch and it'll just be an easier way to share the videos with his family, or maybe people will watch it and it'll go viral and they'll be famous and making money from it. neither extreme seems that bad, really. so that day, still waiting for the van to be fixed, davey starts editing all of the videos they have so far into one big video. he adds jack's art in there, drawings of the world's biggest ball of string and the world's largest beetle and all the other places they've visited, and he posts it.

and after that, once they get the van back and they're driving north, determined to make it to where Canada meets washington on the coast because it just sounds cool. jack gets it on video when they stop at a campground for the night and davey falls face-first into a river. davey it it on camera when jack has to play tug of war for his phone charger with a crow at a rest stop. they make it up to cape flattery and there's videos of them goofing off on the hike and videos of the view.

davey edits it all together and posts it on youtube. he sends the link to his parents and forgets about it. and that's how it goes for the next month and a half. every week, a forty-minute long vlog of highlights from that week's adventures goes up. every week, they name a random new thing they want to do and start driving in the general direction they think it'll be in. they blow a tire on a windy mountain backroad and the camera, set on the ground, records both of them bickering over the best way to change a tire. they leave the camera, crooked and sliding around, on the dashboard and record the two-man performance of queen's entire discography.

six months into their roadtrip which is starting to feel more like a lifestyle, and two months after davey started uploading videos to youtube, he checks his junk email and sees that he apparently has a comment on one of the videos. he hasn't been paying much attention to what was going on with the old ones once they were up, so he's beyond surprised to see a few thousand views a video, a couple hundred comments on the ones with particularly funny moments. a few hundred subscribers.

jack thinks it's hilarious. davey is not so sure. he keeps uploading though, especially when jack points out that if they get enough subscribers they can monetize it and have some more money. so they keep doing it.

they hit national parks. the spend the winter down south, and davey gets hours of footage of jack wide-eyed and wonderous in santa fe, a city he's wanted to visit for years.

he gets a comment that says something like "I can see them falling in love in real time" and it takes a few days to be able to film the way he has been because now he's self-conscious about how much he records jack just existing. he knows he's had a lingering crush on jack since they were twelve but he doesn't need a random stranger on the internet calling him out on it. he also knows jack is straight. so.

it doesn't take long for the channel to have enough subscribers to monetize it, and it doesn't take long for them to appreciate making a handful of extra cash every month. it's not a lot of money, especially at first, but fifty bucks is a good couple meals with how they've learned to shop, or a full tank of gas. it means they have more time, now that they're starting to run out of savings. and the longer it goes on, the more they're making. they break 10k subscribers on a video that heavily features clips of them rolling down a random hill they found and decided to have fun on and jack rescuing a cat from a dumpster that they brought to a local shelter. davey stops paying attention to the numbers because he and jack both agree if they start doing it for youtube instead of themselves, it'll stop being so much fun.

they got to new orleans for mardi gras, a bucket list item that davey thought of a few months ago when they were stargazing and thinking of more things to do. it's been almost a year since they left new york, and it seems like their list is only growing. they get covered in beads and get a hotel room so they can get as drunk as they want, jack wears the camera around his neck so it doesn't get lost, and it's there that davey has the crashing, terrifying realization that it's a lot more than a little crush.

jack is bright and energetic and even in this crowd full of people dancing and laughing and singing and shouting, jack stands out. davey steals the camera away from him and gets video after video of jack just being jack, being bright and fun and taking davey by the hand and pulling him along to the next thing. jack takes it back and records davey laughing while he tries to dance along to a song he doesn't know. it's wild and crazy and fun.

they got a hotel room with only one bed because they didn't even think about it. they've been sharing the back of the van for a year, but maybe because it's a real bed or maybe because suddenly davey is aware of how much he's actually in love with jack for the first time, but it's different. and they wake up collapsed together, wrapped around each other, and davey has a moment of being so, so grateful for what this year has been.

there's a comment under that video that davey has a hard time ignoring because it says "you just know they kissed when the camera was off lol" and he can't stop thinking about what if. what if they had? what if they did? what then?

when davey is editing the next video he can't help but notice that there are just as many random shots of him doing nothing as there are of jack. like jack is also finding himself recording davey at random moments when nothing is happening. it's hard not to get his hopes up. and the best part of this whole thing has always been the small moments, the quiet and calm conversations at night with rain falling on the roof of the van, being stuck in traffic laughing at each other trying to learn lyrics to a new song, eating at a greasy truck stop diner and trying to figure out what tastes so weird in these pancakes. it's the little things, the inside jokes they've had since middle school spread throughout the brand new adventures every day, the way jack still snorts when he laughs and still teases davey for how he can't help but mess up his hair when he gets excited about something. it's the way they finish each other's sentences without thinking and barely have to talk about things to know what to do next because they can practically read each other's minds.

knowing jack is easy. this whole this has been easy, even when it really wasn't. when they got really lost an a snowstorm rolled in in September for no reason. even when they've been stressed about something going wrong, or being lost someplace scary, or not knowing if they'd make it to the next gas station, even when they've bickered for real and not for fun and even when they've gotten in actual fights a couple of time, it's always been easy. easy to come back to jack, easy to love jack, wholly and simply and completely because isn't that all he's ever done?

davey doesn't think jack is paying much attention to the youtube videos. he's never said anything about the comments or brought up anything from them.

so when they find another quiet moment, way up in the mountains in the southwest listening to the first snowmelt of the spring start to trickle down the slope, wrapped in a big blanket together on the roof of the van so they can see the stars without freezing to death, it takes davey by complete surprise. when jack, who's cuddled into his side and silently taking in the stars he's yet to get sick of being able to see so clearly, says, sometimes I wonder if they're right.

if who are right, davey asks, genuinely confused. the people on youtube who say they're watching us fall in love, jack says, like it's nothing. like it's not a sentence with the potential to upset everything about who they are and what they're doing and who they've always been.

oh? davey says, barely breathing and very, very aware of how pressed close together they are right now.

i guess i just know i could never do better than you, jack says, and davey has a moment of thinking oh he's just kidding until jack rolls to look at him instead of the sky. i don't want to try, I guess, he says. i know I'd never be able to find somebody as perfect for me as you are. I've always known, I've known since we met, and I know it's stupid and crazy especially when we're out here on our own and nowhere to go if things go wrong, but I want to kiss you, I think.

and when davey kisses jack, out here on a van roof wrapped in a blanket, listening to melting snow under a sky full of more stars than either of them could have imagined when they met, that's easy, too. and when they fall asleep, together like they have been sleeping for more than a year, it's easy to forget that anything changed at all because, davey realizes, they've been loving each other this whole time.

it was in the ways jack would pull over on a random farm road in Iowa to pick a pretty wildflower growing in a ditch, and davey would find the flower pressed between the pages of one of his books weeks later, carefully labelled with the date it had been picked. that was jack loving davey. and so was jack's sketchbook, brand new when they left and now so full he'd been adding pages for weeks, and half the drawings included davey's face. and so was jack's easy memorization of davey's order at every fast food place they'd stopped at, his diner go-tos and the drinks he liked when they stopped at an actual restaurant and it wasn't his turn to drive to wherever they were spending the night.

and davey had memorized the same facts about jack, and wasn't that also love? and the way davey would buy a stack of new books and donate the old ones every time they found a good used book store, and he'd sit in the passenger seat and read out loud to pass the time on long stretches of boring road. and when he was driving, wasn't it davey loving jack every time he took a left turn on the hunch there would be cows or horses instead of a right that would get them to where they thought they were going? and when davey found an excuse to stay at the top of a hiking trail lookout for long enough for jack to draw everything he wanted, even when jack kept looking up and saying they should go even when he wanted to keep drawing, wasn't that love, too?

they'd been loving each other this whole time, so maybe those youtube comments weren't the same after all. because maybe this had always been there, and it just took somebody else, somebody with no reason to lie, to point it out before either of them could see the other side.

when they finally, after almost a year and a half, decide it's time to go home to the city they've finally started to miss, they drive all the way out west again first. jack wants to take route 66 as far as it will go, so they drive from santa monica to Chicago and take pictures at every landmark along the way. it takes a month to be satisfied, and a few more days to make it home after that.

it's the last video davey uploads, he doesn't want to keep vlogging now that he's happily settled into his own skin and found a job he doesn't hate. maybe he'll freelance write on the side, eventually write a memoir about the time he and jack spent driving around just to do it.

in the last video, there are the usual clips. jack goofing off and getting himself in some kind of silly trouble, davey being accident prone and only avoiding getting seriously injured by some stroke of minor luck. there's also a shot of the two of them, the camera left a few feet away, standing at the edge of the grand canyon with jack's head on davey's shoulder. a drawing jack did of the two of them sharing breakfast at a little cafe. a video of jack adding his mark to the Cadillac ranch in texas. the two of them looking out from the top of the gateway arch. the kind of casually loving moments that maybe don't mean anything to some people, but that davey knows are exactly the kind of sign others had been picking up on this whole time. only this time, jack and davey know it too.

#i am crying so hard /pos #this whole time i read i thought of her.#this is exactly what i want with her #she means the world to me and seeing such love and- the things i feel written down in a situation so close to mind #i just #god. i cant stop crying haha #this is all very positive #i will die for them

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reasonsforhope · 7 months ago

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People ask me sometimes how I'm so confident that we can beat climate change.

There are a lot of reasons, but here's a major one: it would take a really, really long time for Earth to genuinely become uninhabitable for humans.

Humans have, throughout history, carved out a living for themselves in some of the most harsh, uninhabitable corners of the world. The Arctic Circle. The Sahara. The peaks of the Himalayas. The densest, most tropical regions of the Amazon Rainforest. The Australian Outback. etc. etc.

Frankly, if there had been a land bridge to Antarctica, I'm pretty sure we would have been living there for thousands of years, too. And in fact, there are humans living in Antarctica now, albeit not permanently.

And now, we're not even facing down apocalypse, anymore. Here's a 2022 quote from the author of The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells, a leader on climate change and the furthest thing from a climate optimist:

"The most terrifying predictions [have been] made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay. The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse. Over the last several months, I’ve had dozens of conversations — with climate scientists and economists and policymakers, advocates and activists and novelists and philosophers — about that new world and the ways we might conceptualize it. Perhaps the most capacious and galvanizing account is one I heard from Kate Marvel of NASA, a lead chapter author on the fifth National Climate Assessment: “The world will be what we make it.”" -David Wallace-Wells for the New York Times, October 26, 2022

If we can adapt to some of the harshest climates on the planet - if we could adapt to them thousands of years ago, without any hint of modern technology - then I have every faith that we can adjust to the world that is coming.

What matters now is how fast we can change, because there is a wide, wide gap between "climate apocalypse" and "no harm done." We've already passed no harm done; the climate disasters are here, and they've been here. People have died from climate disasters already, especially in the Global South, and that will keep happening.

But as long as we stay alive - as long as we keep each other alive - we will have centuries to fix the effects of climate change, as much as we possibly can.

And looking at how far we've come in the past two decades alone - in the past five years alone - I genuinely think it is inevitable that we will overcome climate change.

So, we're going to survive climate change, as a species.

What matters now is making sure that every possible individual human survives climate change as well.

What matters now is cutting emissions and reinventing the world as quickly as we possibly can.

What matters now is saving every life and livelihood and way of life that we possibly can.

#hope my reasoning here makes sense #idk I'm just a person who does a lot of research and posting talking about my take on things #I'm not any kind of Real Authority #but still #and for what it's worth the climate and climate transition data I've been following DOES make me confident in this conclusion #I struggled with the line between recognizing the very real damages of climate change #especially on the global south and especially in the last few years #and focusing on the positive instead of regaling you all with depressing situations #especially when there is so much amazing work being done throughout marginalized countries and marginalized groups #literally if rich countries just paid climate reparations and did actual decolonization/landback #a lot of communities could sort out the shit they need to sort out themselves #and/or in alliance and solidarity with each other #or at least most of the things they need to sort out!!#cough anyway #climate change #climate action #climate emergency #climate crisis #global warming #climate solutions #hope #hope posting #not news #me

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