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gayenerd · 4 years

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The Band You Love To Hate By Tom Lanham of RIP (There’s no date on this but I would say 1995 or 1996?)

Eyes wide as a barn owl's. Spines stiff with anticipation, like a hungry scorpion. The two teenage girls sit stock-still in their booth at a posh Berkeley diner, practically bursting with excitement, but without the faintest clue how to handles it. Clueless, you might call them. A few feet across the linoleum aisle--with his back to them, oblivious to all the oh-my-gawd facial expressions--sits the object of their adulation, dressed in unassuming black jeans, black T-shirt, shredded black Converse, and a beat-up black baseball jacket. But even with his once-green dreadlocks tamed to a short black business cut, Billie Joe Armstrong--yes, the snaggle-toothed MTV ragamuffin from megaplatinum neo-punkers, Green Day--is as easy to spot as Michael Bolton at a Rogaine convention. Although the kids want to leap up from their seats and race over for an autograph or a jittery hello, they don't dare. Instead, they're forced to deal with their seething emotions as if they were eating post-tonsillectomy ice cream: a lot of numb gulping and a quick pain chaser. This is the blessing of being Billie Joe Armstrong. Alas, it's also his curse. By the time you read this, the irascible little rocker will have turned 24. And exactly two years ago, he and his wacky bandmates--drummer Tré Cool and bassist Mike Dirnt--lolled around the trashy basement flat they shared, getting stoned and sneering at the idea that Dookie--their just-released "sellout" on big-time Reprise--would ever amount to more than a nice drink coaster. Fame? They were more preoccupied with their bong collection, stacks of rock 'n' roll bubblegum cards, and a thriving sea monkey tank displayed prominently on a window-sill. Most of their furniture had springs poking through--they didn't care. Armstrong regularly picked boogers from his gold-ringed nostril and then flick them onto the scary shag carpet--what did he have to worry about? Too bad he couldn't have foreseen the all-too-near future. Green Day happened to be in the right place at the right time. The three-chord slam-a-rama Dookie--a pop-edged return to decade-old punk ethics--became the surprise hit of '94, going on to sell over 11 million copies. Armstrong, accustomed to frenetic club performances, began translating the group's infectious energy to larger and larger venues. Demand continued to grow at a staggering pace; Green Day fought back. They turned a satellite MTV Video Awards performance into a "spit-cam" fest by urging the crowd to gob any camera lens it could ("[The cameramen] tried to make it look like it was cool, but it wasn't"). Last October, Armstrong and company issued their 32-minute follow up, Insomniac, almost as an afterthought, with little promotion, a visually offensive video (for "Geek Stink Breath") and--at least initially--a strict no-interview policy. Simultaneously, they ditched their high-powered Cahn-Man management team and are now virtually managing themselves. Along the way, Armstrong married his long-time sweetheart Adrienne and last March fathered a son, Joey. In typical down-to-earth fashion, the couple spent their honeymoon a few blocks from home at Berkeley's prestigious Claremont Hotel, not on some exotic island. Beginning to see the problem here? How does a street-smart kid from humble beginnings skyrocket to world-class notoriety and yet--with his music in millions of homes and his privacy suddenly a right that needs defending--still adhere to the simple ideals, the simple lifestyle that spawned him? Is "successful punk" an oxymoron? Insomniac provided few clues--it was more of the same slacker-ennui sentiment, more defeated, disenfranchised grousing set to speedy, memorable hooks. Or, as Armstrong barks in the aptly-dubbed "Walking Contradiction," "My wallet's fat and so is my head...I'm a victim of a Catch-22." And that, in essence, was the topic this tortured artist wanted to discuss at the diner. The old "be careful what you wish for" adage. The classic "problem with success is finding someone to enjoy it with you" truism. Armstrong, who takes occasional sips from a vanilla milkshake, but mostly stares morosely at the floor, seems to be dealing with superstardom in a relatively normal way. Don't be fooled by the steady stream of negative vitriol that follows; he's analyzing it, breaking it down, figuring out ways to disconnect his kinetic career. Or at least turn down the volume for awhile.

RIP: We know what's going right. But what's going wrong?

BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG: Lots of things, really. Actually, when I came here today, I said I didn't wanna talk about anything good, because I don't really have anything good to talk about. Goin' on tour pretty soon--don't really wanna go. Just because I've been kinda torn. I wanna stick around at home. I don't like playing arenas, and I realized I didn't know what I was getting myself into on the last tour, but I went into it being positive and getting excited about it. But I didn't realize that I was the kind of person to whom it's too much of an event and not really a personal thing anymore. And I started to realize how much I liked being the background music to this scene at the club. And now it's.... I dunno. People expect so much. It's cool and stuff, and it can be a lot of fun, a really good experience. But when you play that many arenas.... The first time we ever played those big kinds of shows at the Shoreline (Amphitheater in Mountain View, California), there was weirdness--we were playing for a lot of f?!kin' people. And I hate to say it, but sometimes it just feels like another gig. We played every day, 50 gigs this last leg, and it just wears on ya. There's all these people, and they think "Alright. I paid my $15--you better impress the f?!kin' shit outta me right now!" And I realized that for Joey, the rock and roll touring life is not a good atmosphere for a kid. I tried to make it to where it would be, bringing lots of his toys out. But there are no familiar surroundings for him. And he likes all the attention--people come up and say hello to him every day, people who are on tour with us. But he doesn't have his own room or a home to go to every day. So, no more touring for Joey.

RIP: Turned on Regis and Kathie Lee this morning to find their gossip columnist dishing dirt on Green Day. How Insomniac didn't do nearly as well as predicted, how it was a disappointment to the label. A failure, supposedly.

BJA: Well, it's like, we didn't set up this record. We didn't. We didn't do any promotion beforehand, we completely quit doing interviews, and basically we just wanted to go on into it. We weren't even sure if we wanted to do a video. And then when we did a video, it got yanked from daytime rotation because people were getting grossed-out by it. So I think we did alienate a lot of people. So that was expected, that it wasn't going to sell a lot of records.

RIP: NOFX have taken it one step further. They refuse to talk to press, make videos, pander potential singles to radio. They don't want to get any bigger.

BJA: I dunno, maybe I'm just getting jaded or something. But I just got cable again and I can't stand anything. Six years ago you could hear something that was different and know that it was different. So it'd be "alternative" or whatever. But now it's like you get this Joan...Osborne? With the ring in her nose, waving the alternative rock flag, when she's just...not, ya know? And I'm thinking, I hate all this music that's coming out now--the past year was just hell for music. But people are buying it, so then I'm thinking, Maybe they're the ones that are good and I'm the one who sucks? I just don't know if I really wanna be involved in the rock world anymore at all. Period. I don't necessarily have anything against a big record company or people who what to join up with a big record company. It really is right for some people, but more and more, I don't think that I'm really meant to. And I hate to sound like that, because I don't like taking things for granted. I don't like to talk about my problems when there's some kid struggling in his garage somewhere saying "F?!k him! He's just taking it for granted. Shit, I wish I could do something like that, but I'm just stuck here in Biloxi, Mississippi, and I can't even get a gig." I'm so confused right now.

RIP: It must be odd to know that, with all those millions of albums sold, drunken frat boys are probably staggering around to your music right now. Your audience grew far beyond your control.

BJA: Oh, totally! We became what we hated. Which is, the people I despised in high school--and now--are buying our records. We initially became a trend, so there was no way I expected to sell as many records with Insomniac as with Dookie. That's one of the biggest-selling records of the decade. We get slagged by the punk rockers, and it's like, I don't blame them. If you draw that much attention to yourself, that's what you're gonna get--attention--and it's not personal anymore.

RIP: Ever think about giving it all up?

BJA: There isn't a day goes by in the past year and a half that I haven't thought about quitting. I went to this party on New Year's Eve, and this band Juke, and another band, the Tantrums, played in a friend of mine's backyard. And a lot of my old friends showed up, and everybody was just dancing. And I was dancing, and getting really muddy, and I was having a great time. I can't remember the last time I sat down and listened to a record from beginning to end and felt this incredible spine-chilling music. And it's because I haven't been able to go out and watch bands play at my free will. I'm not gonna live in a closet, I'm not gonna vegetate myself.

RIP: But it has to be difficult, when tons of kids know your face. You're on your way to Michael Jackson-dom, where you have to wear a disguise in public.

BJA: If you think about the Beatles, at that time all people had to go by were the photographs on the records and every now and then a television appearance. So when they'd come to town, people would just flip out--it became this huge public event every single time. Whereas now, everything is so saturated kids don't even have to leave their home to go to a show anymore. They can sit in the comfort of their living room, and your favorite rock star is gonna be entertaining you while you sit down and have your microwave burrito.

RIP: The Milwaukee cops weren't pleased with aspects of Green Day's Milwaukee show last November. Why were you arrested?

BJA: I dropped the pick and--actually, I even forgot about it--I just mooned the crowd, which is pretty harmless compared to what I've done before. And I wasn't even thinking about it--I just went out and started playing again. Then I went backstage and was hanging out with Adrienne, and this guy Jimmy who does security for us goes "Come on--there's a car waiting for you outside right now. You've gotta get out of here!" I said "What's wrong?" and he said he didn't even know. So we get in the car and all of a sudden about ten cops come walking over, fully surrounding the car. So the guy puts the cuffs on me, throws me in the car, and I get tossed in the holding tank for two, three hours. I wasn't in the bullpen--I was in with the other ones, the not-so-bad ones. They made me take all my jewelry out. And my shoestrings, so I wouldn't hang myself or something. I dunno. I just don't know how to fit into rock music anymore. I don't know what I like about it anymore. I don't like anything about it anymore, to tell you the truth. To tell you the real truth, I'm a pretty miserable person right now. I'm totally depressed, and my wife can vouch for that because she's around me. In fact, she's the only person who's really around me. I dunno, the whole thing with the mainstreaming of punk rock. I just feel lost in the whole thing...I don't really know...I don't wanna...I dunno...It's miserable, it really is. It's f?!ked up.

RIP: For every original voice that comes along, there will be countless mad signing dashes for any and all sound-alike artists, with no thought given to the artist's longevity. Just throw the record out quickly and hope it sticks.

BJA: The thing is, a lot of musicians have gotten so comfortable with this big so-called "Revolution in Rock Music" over the past decade. First it was like, "F?!k the corporations! F?!k the corporations!" And then people just sorta got cozy with that, and forgot that these bands are getting lost in the shuffle. And I'm talking about the ones that never get noticed at all and just get kinda bitter. The 15 minutes of fame is getting shorter and shorter. And now music is totally going backwards--the first half of this decade, there were a few things going on that were interesting. It wasn't my favorite kind of music, but it had a sensibility about it. If you think about Nirvana and Pearl Jam and that whole Seattle scene, and even the Offspring--there was this thing going on that was more honest, in a lot of ways. It wasn't like, beer, drugs and pussy, like what went on through the '80s with all the hair bands. But now what we've got is Hootie & the Blowfish....

RIP: Who are probably a lot like you. They seem like nice, regular guys who--through no real fault of their own--are suddenly assimilated into pop culture.

BJA: Yeah, but that's the problem, is that they are nice regular guys. And they're totally comfortable with that, and they sort of put that out, to where they don't really have...I dunno, there's a certain amount of attitude that, say, someone like Cobain or Vedder has that they don't have. But it's becoming way not...real anymore or something. Maybe not real to me. It's just turning back into what it was in the '80s. It's like, "Hey, everyone! We're Huey Lewis and the News!" I dunno. Maybe nobody knows what the f?!k I'm talking about anymore.

BJA: I get so irritated by people. I think I'm more bitter than I've ever been in my whole life, to tell you the honest truth. I think Insomniac is much more of a bitter record than Dookie. And I think the older people get, the more they kinda get angry. I think a lot of people feel like they get cheated by lief somehow--no-one is ever completely satisfied. There's maybe a few. But I mean, I'm in a place where I don't really wanna be. It's like, sometimes I feel like we're losing our passion for playing music. And that's the f?!ked-up thing, when you lose passion for what you love, then it's like, Is this marriage headed for divorce or what?

RIP: Theoretically, you can fight back a couple of ways. Like Cobain, you could make a record almost calculated to offend all the bandwagon-jumpers. Or take as much time off as you'd like. Who says you can't go live on a desert island for two years?

BJA: That'd be nice. I'm just not enjoying life right now. I'm really not. I'm so cluttered, I can't even speak. Yeah, I do feel like I'm getting old, and I'm kinda bitter about that. I'm not excited about being onstage anymore, and I was really trying to convince myself that I was. Really. Before we did this last U.S. tour, every time I did an interview--I don't know if you read the last Rolling Stone piece--I was like "Yeah! I'm excited! I wanna play these arenas!" and stuff. And then just every night, it started sucking, it felt like a routine or something. It felt almost choreographed in a lot of ways. And I was yelling "f?!k you!" to people, but I didn't know who I was yelling "f?!k you" to anymore.

RIP: Last time we spoke, you said you went out of your way to change every single show, make each one different.

BJA: Well, I think it's just the stress of getting up in front of all those people all the time, every day. It's like, "Do I really feel like downing another f?!cking pot of coffee and a bottle of wine before I walk onstage to do this again? Just to get myself ready to go?" You know, for all those people. And every night I always do something different and stupid. But at the same time, it'd be really cool to just say "F?!k you!" to people and like, walk off. And then they'd get it. It's like, "I'm really telling you to f?!k off this time! Time to pack up and go home." It'd just be so nice to start from scratch again.

RIP: In many ways you can. That's the music-making system trying to program your behavior. And obviously you've broken quite a few rules already--you don't even have to be talking to me right now, actually....

BJA: Oh no. I really wanted to do this interview, just because the last interviews that I've done, I've been miserable, and I was pretending not to be. I really was, I was lying. Not to the reader, not to the person I was doing the interview. But I was lying to myself, convincing myself that I was really happy with how everything is going.

RIP: So you always knew what you wanted, and now you've got it, in spades. You're having trouble figuring out what's next?

BJA: I didn't even know what I wanted back then. I really didn't. I didn't know if I wanted to be huge, totally successful. I never knew that. I was struggling so hard even to sign that f?!king contract--when I was sitting there, I was contemplating, "Should I just run outta here right now? Am I making the biggest mistake of my life?" A lot of people say, "You're totally disillusioned with what money can do for people," but money never meant shit to me. There's something very passionate to me, very romantic, about living on the street in a lot of ways. Just because I really like my lifestyle back then. I was totally content, in retrospect. A lot of it has to do with the fame. I dunno, I'm trying to talk right now and just totally stuttering.

RIP: It's not like you chose music--it chose you, and you can't help it.

BJA: Yeah, it's cool when people really get it. But what a lot of people don't understand is that we're a band that's been around a lot longer than people know. And that's the thing. The difference between this and what happened between Kerplunk and Dookie--in a year, I got married, I had a kid, and I sold 11 million records worldwide. That can do something to ya, ya know?

BJA: Sometimes I think it'd be cool to just hang out with my friends, drink beer, smoke cigarettes. The more I think about it, the more I'd be really happy with that. I don't think that we're feeling quite like a band anymore--that's one problem we have. There was this certain rock 'n' roll underdog think that we always had--we always drove for something, always drove from town to town in a small van. And you know, I f?!kin' like touring like that--it's like culture shock, really, driving around in a van, setting up my amp when I get there, and playing. That's rock 'n' roll, that's what it started out as. A bunch of sweaty pigs in some tiny f?!kin' bar having a hootenanny, that's what punk rock was to me, that's what drove me to it. I love rock music in its simples, rawest form. And I think we're the only band, really, that plays rock 'n' roll.

RIP: Has all this put a strain on your old friendships? Do your pals treat you a little differently now?

BJA: When I come up to friends I haven't talked to in a while, there's a weirdness. And the ones who are really close to me don't really bring up anything, but that thing is still there; it's still in the air. And sometimes I'll just not say anything the whole time we're hanging out. I'll be totally quiet, because the only thing I'll have to talk about is my band, and I get so sick of talking about my band and myself. So I'll just be quiet, since that's the only thing there is to me, except for my son and my wife.

RIP: Pretty soon, you'll be boring everyone with slide shows--"There we are at Yosemite!"

BJA: Ha! Adrienne was telling me the other day, "When you were in there dancing with all your friends, while the band was playing, you were so happy because you were so in your element." And I've even gone as far as saying we're not a punk band anymore. But no matter what, that's still gonna stick with me forever, because I love the music, I love the energy of a new band coming out that creates this sense of urgency about 'em. I'll never be able to kick that habit. I love hangin' out with my friends who have small fanzines--kids just writing their guts out about whatever the hell's bothering 'em, and putting it on a Xerox machine and then handing it out for a quarter apiece at shows or at a party. All I wanna do is just try and work it out. I was sitting there the other day, counting all the records that the Replacements put out, stuff like that, Dan thinking how [Paul] Westerberg totally came across to his audience and did everything, everything that the wanted to do in music. He wasn't extremely successful for it, but the guy has influenced people, and a lot of 'em don't even know that they are influenced by him. All I wanna do is just write good songs and stick to it. I wanna develop--not being experimental--but go into different styles, go across my boundaries of the two-and-a-half minute punk song with a three-and-a-half minute jazz song, or maybe get into a little bit of swing or rockabilly.

RIP: With such staggering success, you could walk into Reprise and tell 'em you're doing an album of saxophone solos and they'd allow you that creative luxury.

BJA: Well, I never wanna be that experimental. I don't wanna get into synthesizers and shit like that. The thing that was cool for me with Insomniac was that I think we definitely set a foundation for ourselves, because we put out our hardest record to date, totally in-your-face all the way through, and now we're able to go anywhere we want. We can do that now--we do have that going for us. That is, if people are still interested. Which is kinda weird for me to say....

RIP: Your craft will always remain the most important thing of all, even if you're just writing for your own amusement.

BJA: Yeah. No matter what, I'm gonna be writing songs for the rest of my life. I mean, I already have a shitload of new songs right now. But I just wanna do some other things with it. We've sold a million of Insomniac so far. But I definitely want to be respected as a musician. Well, more as a songwriter than as a musician. I wanna be f?!kin' normal, is what I wanna be. The thing is, I've seen so many freaks and so many weirdos and crazy punk rockers and drunks and junkies. But for a lot of those people being weird is easy. It's so easy to be strange--the hard thing is to try to be normal. There's no such thing as normal, ya know.

RIP: How's your mom feel about all this?

BJA: She's kinda worried about me. She doesn't know what to think of everything. We have a hard time communicating with each other, just because I don't like to talk about it that much. So she feels like she has to walk on eggshells around me all the time.

RIP: You buy her anything cool once the money started rolling in?

BJA: Nah--she doesn't want anything. I've asked her. She's been living in the same house for over 20 years, and she's content living there. But I did give her a trip--she went to Hawaii, her and her boyfriend. And I think travelling is really good--if you paid for someone to travel, so they can go and explore and see some things they've never seen before. But I think that's probably where I get it from. I get so content with not having much. And then you get all this stuff, all this attention, and you don't really know what to do with it. You don't know how to channel it.

RIP: Most outrageous thing you've bought for yourself?

BJA: I got my car primered! And one thing I did do was build a home studio. So I've been recording all my friends' bands for free. I produced this band called Dead and Gone, and Social Unrest, Fetish and the Criminals. And I have this side-project called Pinhead Gunpowder--nothing's up with it right now, but we played at the beginning of '94 a few times. RIP: Sounds like you've got more than enough pressure valves to let off the steam. Still, do you worry about death?

BJA: Yeah, I do. But I have too many reasons to stick around. One is my son and my wife. And I don't feel like I'm finished yet. I'm not done, ya know? And the beauty of it is that death is forever and your problems aren't. And that's why I'm talking about my bad shit, because you vent that, you get it off your chest and you can move on to something else. There's gotta be a positive side to all this--so you just sort of try and dig it out. Get rid of all the bad--out with the bad air, in with the good air.

RIP: You said about Green Day that you think your "bandwagon is coming to a close and all that's gonna be left is just a band. Hopefully." So then will you start writing happy songs?

BJA: I thought about writing a totally sarcastic song called "I'm So Goddamn Happy," just talking about how happy I am. Actually, I'd like to put out a double record--I'd like to put out tons of music. But I never wanna become an egomaniac. I just wanna keep things down to earth, so I think it's really important for us to take a long break after all this stuff. We just put out two records back to back, one year after another, and now we can sit back and work on ourselves as people again. So we don't parody ourselves. And it's so hard to be a father and a musician at the same time. If I get into one thing and I pay close attention to it, like if I'm with Joey and I start neglecting my music, then I feel like I should play more often. So I start playing my music, and then I'm going, "Am I neglecting Joey?" So it becomes hard to do everything at the same time.

BJA: I wanna create a very mellow and sound atmosphere for him, because I don't wanna make any mistakes for him--I want him to be able to make his own mistakes. And even when it comes to swearing--I don't cuss in front of my kid. I'd rather him get it from some dirty-mouthed kid at school. Then at least I'd know, I could go "Thank God--my kid is in a real world and he's learning these things from his surroundings." That'd be a good thing. Because the best things you ever learn are the things you learn in kindergarten.

Finally, after more than an hour worth of gut-spilling, Armstrong suddenly observes four brace-faced girls, each no more than 12 years old, idling over by the cash register. They're there on the pretext of getting change. In reality, they just want to ogle punk icon and pin-up darling Billie Joe, stare at those caterpillar eyebrows and chiselled cheekbones up close. Another oh-my-gawd event. "I gotta go--it's gettin' weird," the reluctant rocker whispers, literally leaping up from the booth. "I can feel eyeballs all over me already...." And as fast as that, he's gone. "Was that...was that...B-B-B-B-Billie Joe?" stammers one swooner. "No," says the waitress, with a subtle smile. "That was just some guy who usually eats here alone, nobody famous at all. You know, just an average guy." A little white lie to herd the young 'uns out. But nevertheless the truth.

#i know it wasn't healthy for him #but i miss when he would use interviews as free therapy #the discussion about how he hates playing bigger shows is interesting #obviously he figured it out because i think he genuinely likes playing arenas/stadiums now #i wonder how he did that #like did he get tips from other rock stars #or did he just work thru his emotional baggage about selling out #article #interview #articles

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elliotfm · 4 years

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hey guys ! i’m jules and i’m super excited to open; i have two super clingy cats in case any of you ever need a visual pick-me-up, i’m a uni student in canada and a Big skincare and dark chocolate junkie, more than likely gonna be typing replies while indulging in either jsyk ! i tried to keep it short since i’m a rambly bitch, but links to elliot’s basic stats and her wc page will be up soon — though i have some under the read more — as well as a playlist whenever i find the energy to set it up here FLDKSJGSD also pardon the lack of theme, i forgot the url for the preview and code link for the one i wanted to use but i’ll have it figured out shortly ! anyways, without further ado:

◤ * kim doyeon ; twenty-one ; cis female ; she/her — is that who i think it is over there ? outer banks very own kook , elliot hong . makes sense ‘cause i can practically hear into it by chase atlantic blasting through their headphones . plus who else would you find out at the boneyard right now ? some say they're pretty astute , but it's the imperious reputation i'd watch out for . i wonder if they're still a student / heiress and obsessing about keeping up with their bongs, random shoes and empty bottles of dom on the living room floor & a bite as big as her bark vibe . [ ooc ; jules/21+/nt/she/her ]

tw: drug and alcohol mention

the middle child of her parents, elliot is the fourth of her father’s five children

her mother is his second ( now ex — ) wife, though they remain cordial and have since moved on

grew up with a silver spoon, her dad being a wall street giant who would split his time between nyc and, once upon a time, connecticut — though it ultimately became a back-and-forth from nyc and the outer banks when elle was about four

her mother was adopted into an old money family ( on the lower end of that group ) in charlotte when she was a baby and had become something of a socialite when young, but shifted to becoming an entrepreneur. of what ?? i still haven’t figured that out LFJDGS

has a half-sister and half-brother from her dad’s first marriage, tallulah ( aka tally, a pain in my ass over on my indie fdlkjgs ) and bennett, and is basically a mini tally as all she really had were brothers and was Attached to her big sis whenever she’d visit

and as for her older and younger brother..... they might be wcs soon enough so we’ll leave that be for now DFLSGKJ

now onto ELLE ! she was the princess of the younger three hong kids, like the apple of her mother’s eye and her father’s Biggest tormentor

aka would hog the phone whenever he couldn’t come home for the night to tell him good night, hounded him to read her bedtime stories, pretty much always got her way in the most wholesome way when she was a kid

like i said before, moved to the obx when she was four because her mom used to visit when she was a kid and loved it; it was also due to its convenience in seeing her maternal grandparents regularly, its quieter nature in comparison to the affluent hubs for businessmen outside of manhattan and just in general

her dad just went along because it’s what his wife wanted and fuck it, at least the kids wouldn’t hound them to take them to places beyond their urban surroundings as often DLSFJDS

growing up, she wasn’t Too much of a brat but liked having the spotlight on her — she’d accredit it to tally’s influence AND her parents caving to her whims more often than not — and was very sociable and respectful even back in primary school

LOVED to explore, and, while not a tomboy per se, would take part in some activities her brothers or other boys in her grade participated in; be it to bond, trail along her siblings’ every move because she didn’t wanna stray far from action, or to prove that she can hold her own, she’d do it

uhhh overall a cute, if not high-maintenance, kid, but her teen years ?? yikes, people would be in for a ride bc this is when she REALLY started to emulate tally and shift her boldness towards riskier shit

basically could’ve been a main character on outer banks itself with her reckless antics and partying as a teenager…. and now, even SGDLKF

could’ve been considered a typical kook, save for her wild streak; she could hang with the pogues and wouldn’t let her slight superiority complex come into play unless she was challenged or something, otherwise she’d chase the party and the fun wherever she could find it

loves fashion and being the hottest in the room, didn’t need to step on toes to get further but would do so at times Solely to make a point/to call someone out on their shit

is now attending columbia u, rather she’s taking a Break as she makes sure she’s content with the path she’s taking ( aka being the trashy 21 year old she wants to be, chilling at the family home with just her siblings and daddy’s money with no Major worries involving the near future )

isn’t the most studious person, but she’d gotten far enough to begin wrapping up her major whenever she decides to head back

though.. the entire time has been mostly spent sleeping with some of her rich friends, drinking and smoking pot, with the occasional hit of whatever clean enough drug that one of her friends had on them

also spent a lot of her time meeting up with her socialite big sis as a plus one to some cooler events, so while she’s not famous, her name has made the rounds where it matters given her surname’s already established relevance in nyc

when she’s not getting an education and is homebound instead, she’s pissing off her neighbours with her house parties at the family home on the beach, doing dumb shit the second she’s inside of a gala or club — albeit with partial discretion that’s completely ignored whenever around other young adults — and just chilling poolside and staying hydrated fgkldjsg

personality and shit

if i were to use a label to describe her, she'd be a mix between the princess/baby doll, the hedonist and the reveller i think ?? i don’t even know where to place her LKSDFGJLK

self-confidence is through the roof, KNOWS she’s pretty and doesn’t really let rumours or negativity get her down — aside from wanting to unleash hell if someone keeps irritating her for whatever reason

she’s messy as hell, but around the uptight, live-through-your-kids parents of kooklandia she puts on the façade of a poised young woman who has Some fun because she knows it bodes well.. only even then, she doesn’t maintain it bc honestly, who cares —

she’s not a complete dick per se, but she can be snide and boastful when provoked

has something of a superiority complex, independent and lives lavishly with reckless abandon

non-committal yet sensible when it comes to who she sleeps with; typically has a couple of stable fuck buddies but has had some one night stands if she’s feeling it

keeps her true inner circle small, but gets off on attention and likes to stay cordial with some people, so she’s got quite a few friends all the same

like i said earlier, will hang with the pogues and thinks the whole class rivalry thing is kind of stupid when it means sticking with her own would mean dealing with parent pleasers, polo shirt enthusiasts and either being too straight-laced or too destructive for her liking

.. so she’s a far cry from her sister in that regard, otherwise rip GLSKJ

though that doesn’t stop her from unleashing her pompous attitude onto a pogue when it seems appropriate, aka doing anything to piss her off

there really isn’t much to expand on tbh, though i will say that her emboldened nature and need for a good time however she can get it comes out more than her uglier side ( except her vanity. that’ll never go away KSFDG )

some quick plot ideas

a childhood friend or two, pretty standard idea there

could carry over into a trio type of thing depending on where she stands with either of them, or they’re a different couple of pals she’s made over the years

family friends, aka nyc kids or people who’ve rubbed elbows with either of elle’s parents, though they don’t Actually have to be friends of course JGDSFKL

her best friend and confidante, someone she can have cute moments with between the chaos and one of the few people that elle would probably accost someone for if they hurt the other in any way

enemies are always fun ! probably rooted in a competitive streak more than anything else but i’m all ears for a more complex reason

ex-hookup(s), current hookup(s), throw it all at me klgfjd

a hateship/ewb would be fun with her too, oh my god sfdgklj

FAKE FRIENDS !! either in the past or currently, probably stayed friends for the sake of their appearances but have a lot of quiet disdain for each other — though elliot wouldn’t be too bothered by that situation beyond being around someone she deems soul-sucking, face value hype and knowing they probably need her more than she needs them gives her too much satisfaction fkskgls

an ex-something, open to anyone. either someone her parents forced on her to straighten her out a tad that she wound up liking…. after a good period of her telling them to fuck off sdglk or someone she’d been seeing for a while at her own accord, likely someone her parents wouldn’t approve of so readily. would’ve ended the same way: with her calling it off because she didn’t want to settle down, not even for a relationship ( and perhaps bc she’s scared of commitment with her cracked family dynamic that’s been a thing since birth, but that’s another story jsdfkg )

or we can just as easily do high school exes who only really stayed together until graduation bc their parents were being Some level of overbearing with how they’d be such a good couple — not that there was nothing there, just nothing beyond sex and being some kind of status symbol to each other, idk lfkgsd

her designated event pals would be super fun ?? sdgkflj like they go to all of these big parties and galas with their families, break off to do their own thing bc those events are boring as fuck, and head back to her place before she throws an after-party of sorts. they’d be decent friends beyond this though, them being someone she trusts a good bit compared to others in her circle

#╰ 💎 . ❪ 𝐖𝐄 𝐏𝐀𝐂𝐊𝐈𝐍' 𝐃𝐈𝐀𝐌𝐎𝐍𝐃 𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐋𝐒 ↝ jules talks ｡#outertmintro #tw drugs #tw alcohol #now that that's done i can get some water bc i'm Parched FGDSJKL

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foreveratlas · 4 years

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Eulogy For My Grandfather

On June 13th, my grandfather passed away. It has been an emotional nightmare to process. Two days after he passed, it was requested that I write eulogy. These are my thoughts and words for the man who raised and supported me better than I could probably understand. Be aware this is written for my family in attendance at his funeral.

Many people knew him as Charles. His closest friends called him Dean. Dad to his daughters; Uncle Dean to his nieces. But I was given the honor of bestowing his most important name of all time, and that was Poppy. But it wasn't just an endearing nickname replacement for "grandpa." It stood more as a title or a badge of honor. He was Poppy. And to all my friends, he introduced himself as Poppy. Though he may not have been blood to them, I really do think that when he encouraged people to call him Poppy, he was infact adopting them to be his surrogate grandchildren. I'm only slightly jealous because he was my Poppy, no one else's. Whenever I brought a new friend home, he would introduce himself as Poppy. If he came to school to visit, he was Poppy, not Nick's Grandpa. The name Poppy was as much a part of his personality as was his enjoyment of wine or gin and tonics.

The name Poppy has a backstory. A long time ago, when we lived in Texas, he had a favorite restaurant he enjoyed taking me to, Papa Tio's. It was just like any other Tex-Mex grill, complete with a mariachi band. We'd go and dance and laugh and carry on. And at first, he was Papa Tio, but eventually that just shortened to Poppy, which he wore proudly. If you asked him how he came to be called Poppy, he would recall the story of how the name became his, and even recite the song that he got the mariachi band to play, which started "A rappe papa Tio." He twirled his R's and would dance in his seat to the memory. He found such joy in those little memories even with the end approaching as it did.

That was his best trait, his ability to recall these elaborate, excruciatingly detailed accounts of his life, reaching all the way back to his youth. Everyone in the family has heard at least one story: Whether it was the infamous bicycle rally where his mother wouldn't buy him an actual bicycle, so he removed the wheel off the one side of his trike and came riding around the neighborhood with the other kids, just so all the neighbors would laugh and carry on. His father made sure he got a real bicycle. Or of the time he had earned an ice cream, but when his father had stopped to get the sweet treat, he didn't realize the back passenger door was still open, and drove right into a light pole, ripping the door right off its hinges. Or one of my favorites from when he was a bit older, how one Christmas his mother-in-law complained so much about the Christmas tree's needles falling that he picked up the whole tree and threw it right out the front window. His stories live on in us, especially if we were paying attention. And he had a lot of stories. He didn't like how I used a bit of creative license to compact some of thosr stories together when I started writing the fictional adaptation of his life, but the stories are all still here. And going forward, I'd like to invite people let me know their favorite story of his so I can chronicle it and finish the book he wanted to see written.

We all know of how he rose through JCPenney and eventually retired among the upper echelons of the company. I always aspired to find a job like that, a job that didn't feel like work. He always said, "If you love what you do, you won't work a day in your life." Finding that today is difficult, but he did something I don't believe many people really consider. He worked from the ground floor up, literally started by sweeping the stock room, and eventually retired as Vice President. That's nothing to scoff at, and it proves his tenacity and work ethic. That's one job he held for almost 50 years. I'm thirty one, and my position now is my longest held job at three years. So I can't really wrap my mind around doing one thing for so long. But he didn't really do just one thing. He was all over the country, opening stores and providing for his family the best way he knew how. It wasn't always perfect, but it was what he felt was best.

Poppy loved his family more than anything, and some of his fondest memories came from his daughters. He used to tell me of how during New Years, he, my mother, and my aunt would go around the house banging pots and pans to welcome in the New Year, and then they would go into a dark room, and Poppy and Aunt Dena would go hide, leaving my mother alone, before they would jump out and scare her. He found so much joy in those moments, and did everything he could to bring as much joy as possible to every moment. He always made sure we were taken care of and supported, even when we screwed up in life and had to ask for help. Having that safety net was so important and I never realized how much I was taking advantage of those kindnesses.

I was five years old when Poppy married Andrea, and the inclusion of the DiBrienza family into the Saddler family was nothing short of exciting, fun, and very, very loud. I walked right up to Andrea, put my hand on her belly and asked, "Is there a baby in there?" Which, understandably, freaked her right out. But, Poppy's love and adoration that he received from his connection to the DiBrienza's was so profound and so important. He wasted no time indoctrinating his new nieces into the fun. He used to make up stories that the Middle Branch Reservoir was the site of an old mining community called Middle Branch. He told the stories to my cousins that they had to flood the old town, and late at night you could still hear the old church bell ring. He'd then give a loud, "Bong!" And my cousins, who were wiser than their years at such young ages would unanimously proclaim, "Oh Uncle Dean!"

When I got the call late Saturday night, I honestly couldn't process what was happening. I had just spoken to him the day prior. I tried to call every day. He would always answer, "Hello my dear lad, what's new?" To which I would immediately respond, "Not a whole lot, just thought I would call and say hello." I had no idea that that conversation, which felt so innocent, and so normal would be the last time. And maybe that's how he wanted it to be, not something full of despair, not something full of long winded goodbyes. No lengthy moments of "Is this it? Is this the moment?" It was just normal. He asked me if I needed anything, like he always did, and then told me to have a tasty dinner and a good weekend. And that stuck with me, especially after the news arrived late Saturday. I have felt a myriad of emotions based on that last conversation but at that moment, my focus was on how could I have a good weekend? The biggest part of my life had departed. In therapy, I have been told that it's ok to be upset at that, to feel like all my weekends won't be good. It's ok for me to grieve that way. But I know someday, the weekends won't hurt anymore, and I'll be able to wake up Saturday morning, and Poppy's words, "Have a good weekend," will give me peace. Just right now, I don't think I'll be fond of Saturdays for a while.

I have to believe that this was a part of his plan, in a way. As most of you know, he was bed ridden, unable to see, losing his hearing rapidly. He was very adamant in his faith, and I believe that that faith is what guided him in the end. The Bible says that heaven is a paradise, where the crippled may walk and the blind may see. I can only hope that he is able to walk again, able to see again, able to be every bit the amazing potential he remembered himself to be from his youth. And I hope his loud scream-sneezes are scaring the crap out of everyone with him. But most importantly, I have to trust that this was the right time, and that his faith and adoration of his family will guide us, make us stronger, and help us live and love better. He wouldn't have left us knowing we couldn't stand tall and keep moving forward.

There are so many things I wish I had said to him and so many moments I realize now that I have taken for granted. I always believed I had more time, when really, he was trying prepare me for the inevitable. It was easier to believe that he would always be here as a central piece of everything. If immortality was possible, it was my belief that my Poppy could accomplish it. Every time he said that he wouldn't be here forever was a moment I'd respond with, "You'll outlive us all." He would remind me every day that I was the last of the Saddler line, and I honestly didn't want to give that thought any weight because he was still here. Still very much the powerhouse that his name commanded. And now that I am here to carry his legacy forward, I feel like I am hardly worthy of the weight that has been gently handed to me. I'm not ready to live each day without him, and it will be a long time before I wake up and say that I am ok. This past week has been difficult. Every day going forward will be the equivalent of wading through slowly drying cement. But, I imagine, if he didn't think we would be ok without him then he would have held on a little longer. So maybe, I need to trust that belief in us that we will be ok.

Grief is the living honoring the departed. It hurts, it hurts more than words can adequately describe. But it's proof that that person is one who held so much love and adoration. And Poppy was loved dearly by all. His light will fill us every hour and encourage us to be better than ourselves, to enjoy the moments, take stock of the memories, and live every day with love. He loved us, and he still loves us. Our family is strong, and despite the fact that he is not physically here, so long as we remain connected, his love stays with us. It will be like he never left. I am looking forward to all the memories and all the love his light will bring.

We will get through this together as a family.

One day at a time.

One step at a time.

And he will be with us, in our hearts, on our minds; never lost, and never forgotten.

#prose #eulogy #death #grandfather #love #family #writers on Tumblr #spilled ink

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johnnydoe69 · 5 years

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Shedding the Old Skin

Timothy sat on his boyfriend’s couch exhausted. His head throbbed, his pits stank, and sweat continued to pour down his face and neck. Timothy had spent the last four hours handing out Kevin Thompson re-election flyers in the sticky New York City heat. A pile of untaken flyers mocked him from the coffee table with the profile of Kevin Thompson seeming to glare at him.

Meanwhile, Timothy’s boyfriend, Freddie, strolled around his kitchen in nothing but a pair of stained underwear, grabbing bags of chips and a bong. Timothy wasn’t the biggest fan of smoking pot, but he was afraid that Freddie already saw him as a pussy and he didn’t want Freddie’s opinion of him to sink any lower than it already was.

Not that it seemed to matter. Timothy figured it was only a matter of time before Freddie left him for someone more confident and more open about their queerness. Freddie had come out as a trans guy at 16 and gay at 24, while at 28 Timothy was still in the closet. He didn’t even want to hold hands with Freddie in public, let alone do any of the reckless shit Freddie wanted to do like fuck on a park bench or giving each other hickies on the subway.

Timothy was constantly aware of straight people’s opinions of him as he went about his life and he did everything in his power to hide from them. He made sure his voice was low and masculine whenever he spoke in public. He only wore button-up shirts and khaki pants, he kept his blonde hair short and trim, and he made himself as quiet and small as humanly possible to avoid attention.

Freddie plopped himself on the couch next to Timothy, spilling the bags of chips on the coffee table, and once he got comfortable, lighting his bong with a rainbow lighter. Once he had smoked enough for a good buzz, Freddie passed the bong over to Timothy who took a quick whiff and coughed out most of it. Freddie laughed, his voice deep and melodious, “I can’t believe you're in your twenties and you smoke like you’re 15.”

Timothy shook his head sheepishly and said, “I only started smoking when I met you. You can’t expect me to be an expert at this already.”

He handed the bong back to Freddie, the both of them knowing he wouldn’t take a second whiff until it was almost empty. Freddie took another inhale when he noticed the huge stack of flyers underneath the bags of chips on the coffee table. He put the bong down and picked up one of the flyers. Plastered across its design was a smiling man in a suit and tie, surrounded in a semi-circle by a group of working-class people looking to him with awe.

“Please tell me you didn’t spend 4 hours handing out flyers for this choad,” Freddie said, turning to Timothy with a crumpled expression.

“It really wasn’t that bad. I grew up in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I’m used to standing in the hot sun trying to save people from themselves.” Timothy said, suddenly deciding he needed to take another hit from. Taking Freddie’s lighter, he lit the bong and inhaled as much weed as he could, desperately trying to ignore the worried expression on his boyfriend’s face. Freddie crumpled up the flyer and dropped it to the floor.

“Timmy, I’m fucking worried about you. You let people walk all over you and you end up working yourself to death. Did they even give you water to drink? Or breaks? Or Hell, a motherfucking chair to sit in?”

Timothy kept silent, knowing the answers to Freddie’s questions would make him more upset. Freddie shook his head and looked away, his fists clenched and his head-turning red. With his sharp yellow mohawk, he looked like a phoenix ready to tear into Kevin Thompson’s perfectly manicured face.

“Change requires sacrifices. If we want our political machine to change we have to be willing to put up with some unpleasantness.” He didn’t want to add the next part, but he was too exhausted and annoyed at Freddie to hold it in, “You don’t want real change. You dress like a thug and think the masses will come flocking to you. It’s pathetic.”

Timothy gazed at his boyfriend’s strong muscular back as it clenched up like a fist. He realized that he might have said the wrong thing, but at that point, he was exhausted and unwilling to put up with whatever huff Freddie got himself into.

“At least I’m honest with who I am and what I want,” Freddie said in a quiet voice. He spun around and stared directly into Timothy’s eyes, making Timothy reflexively move away from him on the couch.

“When I go outside with my dyed hair and leather jacket and I say and do whatever the fuck I want, I get to know that I do that on my terms. If people want to stare, call me a faggot, fine, fuck them I can take it. What I can’t do is hide in thirty different layers of respectability and delude myself into thinking that makes me better than everyone else.”

Freddie got up from the couch and paced around the cramped living room, kicking furniture and clothes out of the way to make room.

Freddie couldn’t make sense of his boyfriend. When they had first met, Timmy had practically shoved his hand down his pants. It was at one of those seedy gay bars where the lighting was so bad it was hard to see even in the middle of the day. He didn’t remember what he had first said to Timmy, but soon they were making out in his van. Timmy’s warm, thick tongue sliding down the back of Freddie’s throat.

By the time he was able to peel himself away from Timmy’s mouth to drive them to his apartment, Timmy was half-naked, having shed most of his clothes in the car. Timmy tore off Freddie’s clothes as they struggled into the apartment, Timmy ripping them to shreds to get at him. When they collapsed on his bed, Timmy let out an ear-piercing roar as he let Freddie enter him.

“You like that baby,” Timmy cooed as he ground himself on Freddie’s dick and all Freddie could do was nod in awe at this sexy and intimidating presence that had ended up in his life. Timmy howled with an intensity Freddie had never heard in another man before. His kisses sucked the life from Freddie’s throat, leaving him gasping for air and begging for more. Timmy clawed at Freddie’s skin like a wild animal, the trickle of blood going down Freddie’s back and arms turning him on even more. During sex, Freddie swore that Timmy’s eyes blazed red as they deeply stared into his, making him think that he was high, dead, or fucking a demon.

When they finally finished it was the best orgasm Freddie had ever experienced in his life. Both Timmy and Freddie collapsed together in a heap on the bed, snuggling until Freddie lost consciousness. When he woke up, his blankets on the floor, bed torn apart, bong smashed to pieces, he found Timmy fidgeting with the broken stove in the kitchen.

Freddie just wanted Timmy to be happy and he never saw him as carefree and as willing to enjoy himself than that first night they had sex. He knew that wild beast that lurked in Timothy’s heart was there, he just had no idea how to release it from the bedroom.

He stopped pacing and looked at Timmy, almost passed out on the couch at this point. His dazed eyes staring at the ceiling with a sleepy smile on his face. Freddie knew that like most of their fights, they would end up snuggling on the couch before Timothy went to the bathroom and cried his heart out in the bathroom sink.

Freddie sighed, he knew of one way Timmy could be happy, but it came at a cost.

Timmy noticed Freddie had started to stare at him and whimpered, “Babe, you’re right. I’m sorry. I’m only trying to help people in my own way. I wish I could be like you, dressed in leather and punching cops in the face, but I just can’t.”

Freddie shook his head and took Timmy’s hands in his. “Okay, I know of a guy who can help you. His name is Johnny Cocksucker. He’s a prophet of sorts in the queer punk scene.”

“Do I have to let him blow me or something?” Timothy asked.

“Just buy him a pack of cigarettes and he’ll help you find what you need.”

Later that day, after Timothy had sobered up and had a good cry he walked over to the 7/11 parking lot Johnny Cocksucker hung around. In the lot, Timothy saw around three people sitting on the hood of someone’s truck. Two men and one woman dressed in leather with wild colored hair shared a bottle of liquor someone stored in a brown paper bag.

Timothy wasn’t sure what to expect. Was Johnny going to give him some kinda pep talk or was this some weird initiation thing where Timmy would get beat up in an alley somewhere? Would Freddie do something like that to him?

He came to the three punks and waited until one of them noticed him. At first, they ignored him making Timothy stand there awkwardly with his hands in his pockets. Eventually, the girl noticed him and asked, “The fuck do you want?”

“Hi, I’m looking for a guy named Johnny Cocksucker. I was told he could help me.`` Timothy stammered. The three punks glaring at him made him feel like he was going to shit himself.

Then one of the men smiled, “My name’s Johnny Cocksucker. You want a tarot reading or something more?”

Timothy hesitated, he wasn’t sure what Freddie meant by Johnny helping him find himself, but Timothy trusted Freddie and he did want to know himself whatever that meant. So Timothy said, “I want something more. My boyfriend, Freddie, said you could help me find myself.”

“You got me a pack of smokes?” Johnny asked, leaning back on the truck hood.

Timothy nodded, supplying a box of cigarettes from his sweatshirt pocket, “Marlboro, right?”

Johnny nodded, got off the truck, and swaggered over to Timothy.

“Alright, sweetie. Let’s do this.” He took Timothy by the hand and him across the street into a dark alley. It was narrow and cold, but Timothy found himself getting turned on by Johnny. His dick got a little hard and if he wasn’t with Freddie he would have gladly given or received head from this man.

Once they were out of earshot, Timothy started talking. “I got into a fight with Freddie and I know I’m not super great at communicating my feelings and I was kinda condescending to him, but I’m just not comfortable-”

Johnny put a finger to Timothy’s lips. “Honey, I’m not your fucking therapist. Do you want to know what you want or not?”

Timothy nodded eagerly.

Johnny lit a cigarette and blew some smoke in Timothy’s face. Timothy wheezed, but noticing Johnny’s eyes he suddenly stopped. Timothy felt rooted to the spot, Johnny’s brown eyes drawing all his attention.

Johnny smiled, “you love him don’t you?” “Yes.” Timothy replied, “I love him a lot.” Timothy felt a strange heat coming from his dick, it prickled and burned. “And you want to help people, instead of pussyfooting around with shitheads who don’t give a flying fuck about you?” Johnny Cocksucker asked, dangling the cigarette from his mouth as he pressed his hands on Timothy’s shoulders. “I wouldn’t call it pussyfooting rather attempting to engage the electorate-” “Do you want to help people or not?” “Yes.” Timothy agreed again. Timothy’s erection pressed up against his pants, making it too painful to keep on. He undid his belt and dropped his pants to the floor with a deep moan.

“That’s it, bitch. That’s it.” Johnny Cocksucker said, nodding at Timothy’s progress. Cocksucker continued, “And you want to live as yourself and not what everybody wants you to be?”

“Yes, please,” Timothy moaned, his dick was so hard he had to take his boxer briefs off, leaving his hard six-inch dick out in the breeze.

Cocksucker spit into his hands and rubbed them viciously before putting his hands on Timmy’s cock. His hands were calloused and hard but in a satisfying way. The odd bumps and dry skin against his dick only made Timothy harder.

Cocksucker got on his knees and placed Timothy’s dick in his mouth, his soft lips massaging Timothy’s throbbing cock. With every thrust of Johnny's head on his cock, Timothy felt layers of himself getting peeled away.

No more working with politicians, no more canvassing, stickers, and plastic straw boycotts. He would fight and do shit that helped people now, not maybe four years down the road. He would organize with Freddie and fight against police oppression. The rage that had been building inside of him his entire life was forcing its way through. He would no longer be held back by fear.

Timothy growled and moaned as Johnny worked his magic on Timothy’s dick. Timothy’s fear and layers of respectability heading into his dick. As Timothy’s mind changed, so did his appearance. His lanky frame that served him well in avoiding public scrutiny was filling up with muscle. His button-up shirt was replaced with a ripped t-shirt and a leather jacket, his khaki pants and boxer briefs replaced with stained jeans and filthy red boxer shorts. Two solid black boots replaced his polished brown oxfords.

His short blonde hair grew and became spiked, turning a dark shade of green. Black nail polish appeared on his fingernails and silver rings materialized on his two middle fingers. Then sharp pinpricks of pain stabbed through his ears, mouth, and nose making him let out a small scream. Piercings were ripping through Timothy’s flesh until his entire face was coated with them. With his new look and personality came a new name, Viper. It was a name that intimidated the right people, but for Freddie, it would always mean his thick now nine-inch dick.

He cummed in Cocksucker’s mouth. His old life and insecurities disappearing down Johnny Cocksucker’s throat.

Needing to take a breath, Viper leaned his head against a brick wall. Johnny Cocksucker stood up and wiped his mouth.

“You good?” Johnny asked, taking out a cigarette.

Viper nodded in a daze, “I have to find my boyfriend.”

Johnny smiled and patted him on the shoulder. Viper stumbled a few steps forward when Johnny said, “Hey, pull your pants up. You got your dick hanging out.”

Viper looked down at his thick nine-inch dick hanging in the air and he chuckled.

“Still a little fucked up, I guess,” Viper said, pulling up his pants and underwear. Then he staggered out of the alleyway, his dick still hard, as Johnny Cocksucker took out a cigarette and watched. “Freddie owes me big time for that shit,” Johnny said, lighting his cigarette. The taste of cum and Timmy’s fear still hanging in the back of his throat.

Viper struggled to make his way to Freddie. He had an insatiable desire to fuck Freddie just the way he wanted. Rough and intense, like the time they first fucked, only this time Viper wasn’t going to freeze up every time after they had sex. It was going to be crazy and uninhibited the whole way. the way that he had never been fucked before. It felt like miles before Viper ended up outside an old theatre. In the haze of Viper’s mind, he knew that Freddie had a gig there tonight.

That’s when he realized it was dark out. Had six hours passed that quickly? Then Viper watched as a bunch of roadies with band equipment were leaving the venue, including Freddie.

Freddie looked over and saw a man waiting for him. He didn’t know why, but he had the sudden feeling that the green-haired punk was his boyfriend.

He dropped what he was doing and ran over to him. Viper jumped up and wrapped his legs around Freddie’s waist kissing him on the mouth.

“I know Johnny did a number on you, but holy shit you’re hot,” Freddie said in-between kisses.

“Can you faggots get off the sidewalk?” an old man screeched at them.

Viper flipped the old fucker off and lost himself in Freddie’s passionate embrace. He would never take a straight person’s bullshit ever again.

#dick growth #reality change #punk transformation

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spookyspaghettisundae · 4 years

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Things Below

Voices. Voices, everywhere. Emily peered out the window from the backseat of the patrol car. Locked in, but free to hear all these confusing voices. She could hear the thoughts of the people the car drove past, picking up fallout from the minds of people on the sidewalk.

“He gave me too much change. Tough shit, sucker. I’m not telling and I’m keeping it. Those stores are insured against this kind of—”

“I’m late, I’m late, I’m late; oh my god, I’m gonna lose my job. What about—”

“I forgot to lock the front door. To hell with whatever he’s saying, I’m sure as hell that I forgot—”

“Stop staring, dumbass. Jeeze, I think I need to jack off in a bathroom stall, otherwise she'll—”

Emily didn’t even care about reading the thoughts themselves. She used to figure people to be thinking drivel like this just by looking at them. No, the reporter wanted to see how well she could focus this ability—how well she could control it. As far as she was concerned, she had developed a superpower. With it, she could change the world.

Only one thing gave her reason for pause; gave her a reason to worry. If she wasn’t dreaming—if this all was real—then it meant the demon she had met at the delicate age of 21 had been real, too.

The edges of her vision turned into streaks, stretching into infinity, blending together in a wild blur of colors and shapes. She only caught glimpse of their faces, all unimportant and forgotten within seconds, but their thoughts reached her mind in fragments, like a rain of glass shards falling into a bottomless pit. Clipped, ripped out of context—like switching rapidly through radio stations and never hearing anything out.

Officer Stanton glanced back at Emily through the rearview mirror. Judging by his furrowed brow, he was concerned about her mental well-being. That was when she realized that her head kept bobbing erratically, moving on a constant swivel. She must have looked like a crazy person to this cop.

“Your nose,” he said after clearing his throat and training his eyes on the road again.

Confounded, Emily dabbed her nose, only to find blood on her fingers.

The splitting headache set in. Or it had been there all along, except that it now cranked the dial to eleven in the very second she stopped tuning in to the thoughts of all the passers-by. She muttered a short curse and a emitted a soft, nervous chuckle.

Looked like the superpower came with a little price tag.

But it had already paid off. Under other circumstances, she would have had to go out on a limb in trusting this “Officer Stanton.” Letting him lock her into the backseat like a common suspect or criminal. But what choice did she have? A bomb turned her apartment block into a blazing inferno, she woke up naked in a dumpster, and she had no phone, no money, and was now wearing the borrowed clothes of her friend Maria—who probably had her pegged as crazy and she should never talk to again.

Scanning Stanton’s thoughts had revealed a certain level of surprising purity. Blue-eyed, this shmuck hadn’t seen anywhere near the amount of horrid things Emily had seen in her time as an investigative reporter, looking into human trafficking and pedophile rings. He was as concerned as she was about Detective Tanner, her single only trustworthy contact in the police—who had gone missing.

Reading Stanton’s mind, Emily knew that this cop had his heart in the right place and was going out on a limb himself. She looked and sounded like a crazy person, had no identification, and lied to him first thing upon their meeting. He had a lot to lose himself.

And she couldn’t tell him everything she had witnessed.

“I was drugged and abducted,” she had admitted to him in that first encounter. Only part of the truth she could speak without sounding like she had lost every last marble.

The other part involved what she could only describe as a trip into hell, where she was hounded by an antagonistic demon she dubbed “Stinky Jim.”

Eight years ago, Emily met Stinky Jim for the first time, though she did not have such a name for the demon yet. Had she known it was real, she would have lost her mind. She would have been the Other Emily, the Lost Emily—the one sitting in a padded cell, rocking back and forth, gibbering, and disconnected from reality.

If her recent awakening—the event since when she could read minds and bend space itself—had taught her anything, then it was that reality itself was a strained, malleable concept.

Even human identity crumbled in the face of enlightened scrutiny.

Back when she was 21, working the sixth McJob in a row before she got smart, got her GED, and got into studying to become a reporter; she still hung out in a basement with the rest of the “gang.”

She remembered that night with stunning clarity. The edges on everything remained sharp. The dive in the basement of the home of Rodney’s parents had burned itself into the pages of her memory.

Her birthday—the night Emily turned 21.

Both on the surface and in all things below, she was a different person. Dyed her hair pink, piercings in her ears and on her brow, royal blue lipstick, torn heavy metal T-shirts. Loved ranting about politics, economy, and social justice; but never lifted a finger to do a damned thing about it.

Just like then. They were sitting in Rodney’s parents’ basement, sprawled out over ratty old couches and chairs with the TV set and old video game consoles, smoking weed, and the four boys listening to one of her many unnumbered tirades on LGBTQ+ rights.

“Shut the fuck up if you ain’t gonna do anything ‘bout it,” Chris told her. “Gay Chris,” as he was nicknamed, which didn’t bother him at all once they grew older—he wore the name like a badge of pride.

His voice cracked as he kept the smoke from the bong in his lungs and passed it on to Carlos, and Chris added, “The fuck do you know about any of that, straightie?”

That stunned Emily. That’s when everything clicked for her. When it all changed. Speechless, she silently agreed with him. Everything she knew about the gay experience was theoretical or secondhand, drawing from Chris’ experiences.

But that’s when she found her true calling.

She wouldn’t “shut the fuck up about it.” She refused to, because it would have been against her nature. She would do the legwork, and tell the world. She would relay the truth, even when it hurt, or when it got her and others into hot water. That would be her strength. Her destiny.

It would take till the end of that week and some feverish reading until she figured out that journalism was the way for her to go, but that was the same night when Emily really took the reins of her life into her own hands, and forged the path she now followed with furious determination.

Carlos chortled, then took a long toke from the bong before passing it on to Rodney. Emily remained silent.

With her most recent rant dead in the water, and the only active water being the one making the bubbling and churning sounds whenever anybody inhaled another hit from the bong, her thoughts drifted. The night of her birthday dragged on like many others in this very place, the matter of her birthday only standing out by the amount of weed they would have burned through by the end of the night.

She loved these boys like her brothers. Loved the countless nights they spent together, shooting the shit about their work, their messes of what could barely be described as love lives, playing video games together on the couch in this same basement and getting into swearing matches more heated than the actual gameplay, going to metal concerts together, or talking about philosophy and spirituality into the ungodliest hours of the morning.

Some time around 2 AM, Carlos had already passed out. He snored in the corner with a pile of empty potato chip bags and plastic bottles piled onto him like a work of art. Chris had gone home to get some sleep because of an early shift the next day. Only Jimmy, Rodney, and Emily remained. Stabbing Westward’s Ungod was playing back from the old iPod in a soft volume.

Rodney climbed back onto the couch and slid onto the cushions between Jimmy and Emily. His eyes were bloodshot from all the beer and weed they had been kicking back and he gave her a stupid grin.

“Got something special for this special occasion,” he said in a conspiratorial tone.

He unfolded his fingers and presented three little things. To Emily, they looked like stamps or pieces of perforated cardboard just resting on his palm, each of them marked with a pastel yellow smiley face.

Before either Emily or Jimmy could ask, Rodney said, “LSD, hoes. Lucy seeing diamonds—in the sky—or something. So, uh, anyway, how about we go on a real trip?”

Jimmy’s brow furrowed and Emily snickered at him. Buff Jimmy over there, the racing car enthusiast who loved tuning cars and speeding in them, accustomed to acting like the biggest badass of their little gang, was now all skeptical and intimidated by this harmless-looking drug resting in Rodney’s hand.

“Fuck it, why not?” Emily asked.

“Nah, I’ll pass,” Jimmy predictably said. “Y'know what, you should too. Also, I should get back home and get some sleep.”

Jimmy scrambled to leave, looking half asleep already, and muttered a goodbye to Carlos who continued to snore away, oblivious to everything going on now.

“Pussy,” Emily called out after Jimmy just before he flipped her off and closed the basement door behind himself.

Rodney and Emily got a good laugh out of Jimmy’s departure. Then Rodney turned his head and waggled his eyebrows at her, holding out the three slips of LSD still.

“I could put one back, or one of us takes two of ‘em,” he said, letting his voice rise sharply towards the end in challenge.

Emily squinted and then snatched two of them out of his palm.

“Happy fuckin’ birthday to me, I guess,” she said, grinning with him in challenge, wondering if he wasn’t going to chicken out himself.

She stuck her tongue out at him like she was about to lick Rodney’s face, then placed the two pieces of LSD on her tongue and retracted it. Swallowed.

“How long?” she asked.

“My dick?”

“Fuck you.”

Rodney cackled and told her it would take two hours. They settled on re-watching Scream—one of Emily’s favorite horror movies. They talked over the flick, as usual. Laughed as Carlos turned over in his sleep at one point, knocking over the pyramid of junk piled onto him without even waking up, and they both wondered loudly if they weren’t going to have a horror trip if they watched a horror movie while tripping on LSD, like the idiots they were.

The movie ended and Emily still couldn’t tell if the drug was having any effect on her system.

“Get me another beer, beer bitch,” she told Rodney, softly kicking him in his thigh while she drooped lazily over the other half of the couch.

He got up and went to the small fridge in the corner of the room. She blinked and wondered why he did that without giving her any lip. Even on her birthday, Rodney wasn’t wont to do what she told him to. Returning to her, he uncapped the bottle of beer and held it out to her.

She took it and looked at him in disbelief. Rodney himself looked befuddled. He blinked and looked around. Was the LSD finally kicking in for him? If so, why was it taking so long for her?

If him tripping balls meant he was a compliant little sheep, she was going to have some fun with this. She pulled out her flip phone and started recording a grainy video on the device.

“Hey, Rodney, why don’t you stand on one foot and spin around in a circle for the audience,” she told him, biting her lip and sensing that he would do exactly as told.

And he did. Almost stumbling over the coffee table and falling onto his ass in the process, he did exactly that. Emily covered her mouth to stifle a giggle. She stared at him through the display of her phone, making sure to capture his dumbfounded facial expressions.

“Rodney, tell the world how much of a little skanky whore you are,” she said, mouth agape with a grin so wide that it almost hurt her cheeks.

“I’m such a little skanky whore that I’d eat Paris Hilton’s ass with whipped cream and a cherry on top,” he said, slurring it out as if his consciousness slipped farther away into a trance or delirium with each additional word.

Emily burst out laughing, “You will never live this one down when the others see the video, dipshit.”

Yet something crept up behind Emily. A dark, foreboding sense of something alien and sinister. It only reached the back of her mind with a delay: she heard Rodney’s thoughts before he did or said anything that she told him to. Or rather, she projected her self into him and he complied, pliable like a piece of wet cardboard.

These thoughts made more sense now, in the present, when she knew she could read minds. But back then, she had chalked it up to the acid trip. The day after, she would go back to her normal life, letting the details fade away into oblivion, dismissing them as nightmarish nonsense.

Except for the knock on the door.

Not the door leading in and out of the basement, but the door to the boiler room. A room where nobody should have been inside.

The hairs on the back of her neck stood up and she stared at it, wide-eyed and terrified. Rodney followed her gaze because she willed him to pay just as much attention to it.

Knock knock. Again.

Or rather: THUMP THUMP. Deep, bass. Menacing.

“Rodney, go check on the clown hiding in there,” Emily told Rodney, not even thinking things through. She couldn’t even chalk it up to the booze and drugs.

All she knew was that she feared whatever awaited behind that door.

Like sleepwalking, Rodney approached the boiler room door. Twisted the knob. Opened it.

A soft red light glowed, engulfing him. A light out of this world. It flickered, danced—like flames. But no heat or fire awaited beyond the door. Only madness.

Emily walked there herself, intrigued by the mysterious light. Her whole body tingled with dread, yet she could not help but approach. She knew deep down, lurking beneath the surface of her thoughts, that something evil awaited there. Something that would drive her insane. She didn’t need to approach, should have turned and fled from Rodney’s basement. But curiosity won out over common sense.

She stood next to him and peered into the place beyond the door.

There was no boiler room there. Instead of the dingy little room with the big cylindrical something, some old plastic crates, and a bunch of pipes and valves—a flight of stairs stretched down, winding around a curve. The fiery red light flickered from the depths, beckoning her.

“Rodney, go lie down and sleep.”

He acknowledged her order, not speaking the affirmation out loud but just thinking it. Emily, however, didn’t even register how the thought had reached her like a spoken word. She could taste his dread riding on the back of those thoughts—salty, smooth, bitter, clamping his throat shut and cutting his breath short.

But her eyes fixated on these stairs. Made of obsidian, covered in strange, indecipherable symbols, bearing names on each step. Names of the lost and the damned. The forgotten and the famous. She could not read them, but she knew the names were important. She would read them again one day, but that was not this day.

Rodney laid down onto the couch and fell asleep within an instant. His thoughts turned into a soup of drugged dreaming and Emily shut them out, probing for any presence at the bottom of those stairs. To see if anything dwelt there, any things below.

“Come on down and find out,” something replied. Not in words, but thoughts. Smoky, crackling like wood in a fireplace, with embers rising into a dark and starry night.

Emily took her first step down those stairs in this other-space. Then another. And another. She tread down this path, and the stairwell narrowed as it twisted and turned on her way downward. She burned with curiosity to find what things lay hidden in the depths.

The door slammed shut behind her and something laughed. Something in a deep, bellowing baritone, like a monster straight out of some horror movie. The laughter died down into a chortle, egging her on to turn around and see for herself.

Fear overtook her and prevented her from turning to behold this demon. This madness. She knew it was there, right behind her. Fetid breath rhythmically struck the exposed skin of the back of her neck. The thing was huge, like a man two heads taller than her.

“If you don’t have the balls to look at me, then you better keep movin’, little girl,” the demon spoke to her, cackling some more. The words carried the air of a threat. “What are you afraid of finding down here, anyway?”

More laughter. Sinister. Knowing. Knowing her deepest, darkest desires, and secrets she would learn in the future

Her heart thumped against her chest, pounding so hard that it threatened to explode out of her rib cage any minute now. And whether she was tripping on the LSD, having an overly vivid nightmare, or this was indeed real, she dreaded turning around and instead continued on her descent.

“Welcome to the maze, Emily,” the thing’s voice crackled. Flames licked from its voice and the biting smells of charcoal smoke and sulfur filled her nostrils, stuck to her tongue. Way too real to be imagined, yet even now, she struggled to explain how this experience or even this memory could be real.

Because right now, she sat on the backseat of Officer Stanton’s car. But the vivid recollection of this memory sliced through time and space, reaching her in the now. The demonic presence still lingered, lurking behind her, occupying the space in her mind.

The unwanted guest renting one of the rooms in the mindscape of Motel Emily. The neon sign of vacancy flickered unsteadily.

Where the stairs wound down further, she reached a door branching out to the side. Or rather, the word “door” didn’t really cut it. It was a stone portal, covered in more symbols or otherworldly runes.

Without thinking, she pushed it open, hoping to find escape from this place, praying to reach Rodney’s basement again, or appear back in Stanton’s patrol car. The past and the present started bleeding together. Had she really experienced all this, back then? Was this the madness, overtaking her mind, surfacing now, tainting the present and overwriting reality?

“This is as real as it gets, bitch,” the demon said, cackling yet more.

The pink-haired Emily celebrating her 21st birthday and tripping on LSD didn’t understand what she saw beyond the portal once she strained herself, putting her legs and back into pushing it open, her nerves fraying with each inch accompanied by the sounds of stone grinding against stone.

Beyond that portal, she saw another Emily, stripped half-naked, handcuffed to a curtain rack, with some man with a painted face sliding a knife into her exposed back. Bodies of the dead and the dying littered the dark and ruined room of some derelict house in that place and Helpless Emily screamed in agony.

Younger Emily gasped and backed away from this scene of carnage and despair, recalling a memory of something yet to come, which Present Emily knew already and remembered as the time the Grinning Man came close to killing her.

The man with the knife, with the face painted to display a horrid grin over a face of cold and sociopathic indifference, turned to look at Younger Emily. She pulled, tugged at the portal with all her might, desperate to close it before something worse happened.

The Grinning Man, that serial killer, turned from Tortured Emily. He tilted his head, staring into the stone portal in disbelief, studying its frame. Before Younger Emily succeeded in fully shutting the portal, he approached with swift steps, ready to pass from one place into another.

But she slammed it shut just in time, just before she could decipher shouts from beyond the portal.

Worse, the demon remained. Right behind her.

She dared not turn around completely to look upon its horrid visage, but glimpsed it from the corner of her eye. Red like a devil, covered in spikes and horns and smiling at her with a maw lined with rows and rows of jagged, shark-like teeth. Blackened, knife-shaped claws opening and closing in anticipation, ready to rip her to shreds if she looked at it for too long.

It cackled again and Emily continued down the stairs.

“That was you,” it said. “That’ll be you, in the future. You fuck-up. Nobody’s proud of you, Emily. Accomplishing nothing of value. Only watching people die in squalor and misery. You are nothing but a worthless witness. A voyeur in a voyeuristic world.”

Hearing the demon speak in such a modern vernacular and imagining to be such a clichéd presence clashed in her mind, and she almost turned to confront the creature. But she read its thoughts and they mirrored her own.

The first time she realized that turning only meant embracing the madness, and ending up in that padded little room, all alone, locked inside her head with drugs—and not the sort that Younger Emily found fun.

Picking up the pace, she continued down the winding, hellish stairs. The walls drew closer together with each step, never moving, but converging in angles that made her descent more claustrophobic with each passing moment.

Present Emily knew she had to break free of this memory, because it was bleeding into reality. The demon was taking hold. She dabbed more blood from her nose and barely perceived the world outside the patrol car, rolling by. This memory was real, made even more real through recent realizations, and recalling it now was rendering it even more visceral than ever before. The knowledge of Present Emily collided with the memories of Younger Emily and they coalesced. They coagulated.

She passed by another stone portal, almost screaming at what she felt from behind it. Younger Emily did not know what awaited there, but Present Emily did not want to see it, and the two of them refused to push it open and look inside.

“Yeah, you keep walkin’, you hypocritical asshole. Eager to discover the truth, but just another chickenshit,” the demon said.

Instead of the inevitable laughter she expected to ensue, the demon growled with anger, reflecting a rage welling in her bowels, only overshadowed by the terror and fear now gripping her heart and driving her down the stairs, faster and faster.

“He’s dead, Emily. Julian’s dead, and it’s all your fault,” the thing snarled.

Its hoofed feet thundered down the steps behind her, keeping pace with ease, the hulking presence chasing her down deeper into this pit of insanity.

“No,” she finally dared to reply, but the demon mimicked her word, mocking her. Then she repeated herself, “No, that’s not my fault. Not like with the others. Not everything is my fault.”

“Maybe not directly, but what if you never entered his life? What if he hadn’t been on that parking lot, that day? He might not have had some crazy stalker cave his skull in with a two-by-four. So maybe it’s still your fault,” the demon growled.

“Shut up,” she said. Then screamed it. “Shut the fuck up!”

“Yeah, shut the fuck up if you’re not going to do anything about it, right, Emily?”

The demon’s voice reached a fever pitch and now chased her. She ran, taking multiple steps down the well in strides, pushing through the narrow pathways, wasting no time to wonder how the demon’s sheer mass could fit through here behind her. The stink of fear erupted from her pores in a sheen of sweat, the heat of this hell engulfing her, and the stench of burning flesh rising from the depths.

The stone walls wriggled. They were not made of obsidian anymore, but worms. Millions and millions of pitch-black worms, things that did not belong in reality but were all too real. Slippery, alive. Writhing, as the mass reached out to her like walls of tiny fingers covered in myriads of chomping little mouths, provoking a shriek of terror to escape Emily’s throat, and the demon to laugh its sadistic laugh at her.

“Run, Emily! Run away, you disgusting fucking coward!” The demon spoke in many voices, those of Chris, her father when he slapped her cheek, the monster on her heels, and even herself. They all blended together. One of many, many in one.

There it was again: rocking back and forth, drool dripping from the corner of her mouth. White, padded walls all around.

Was she truly there? Was this even real? Was her entire life just a lie? Figments of her imagination, trying to make sense where none was to be made?

The stairs split into different pathways and Emily knew what to do. Present Emily wiped more blood from her nose and stared at her bloodied fingers in disbelief. Younger Emily had discovered her destiny, was glimpsing horrors from her future. Of the three possible ways to go, she squeezed into the narrowest one, screaming silently as she felt the wriggling mass of worms engulf her with the heat of a thousand fires, causing her skin to blister and painfully peel back. She clenched her teeth shut and feared the things entering through any orifices but pushed forward.

She had to live. She had to fulfill her destiny. She remembered all the people who died, or rather, those who would die.

She could change the world, but only if she didn’t give in now.

“Shit, I’ll give you a tissue once we reach the precinct,” Stanton said. His offer; his words helped, centering her in the now. The words he spoke bled through into that dark place where Younger Emily found herself, an unknown voice from a stranger from another world, or another time, piercing the veils of different realities, and guiding her through this horrid darkness.

The demon grunted and cackled and choked on the worms entering its maw as it squeezed itself through the narrow, suffocating passageway, following Emily without fail. It clawed its way forth, causing a cacophony of disgusting squelching noises, and sensations that reminded her of bones snapping to the point of sharp edges bursting through skin and protruding from human flesh, and teeth gnashing on exposed innards with blood spurting out, gushing, and the reek of feces in the air.

Her eyes long clamped shut, she dared not breathe but had to, and felt first worms trying to wriggle their way into her mouth. She sputtered and spat them out with an angry scream, controlling the rage that drove her, clawing her own way forth, mimicking the demon’s motions. Or it mimicked hers.

The stairs went upwards and she ascended, pulling her way through the narrowest spot of these walls of worms, fleeing up the stairs. The demon tumbled, but then continued giving chase on all fours, like the beast that it truly was. Like the beast in the back of her head, the madness always just a few steps behind her.

“You can’t get away from me,” Stinky Jim cackled, only to abruptly choke on his words, gagging and coughing up more worms. Through rows of bloodied, gritted teeth, he said, “I am always with you, Emily.”

She tripped, fell, scraped her hands on the jagged edges of the obsidian steps, right in front of one of the names inscribed upon the stairs: Xerxes. Younger Emily blinked, did not quite register what it meant until years later, first dismissing this memory and experience as a bad trip, induced by popping too much acid and being tired out of her mind.

Screams echoed through the infinite, infernal stairwell, bouncing off the walls and curdling her blood until she realized: the screams were her own. The demon’s growling matched them, blended in with them, and she screamed in pain as claws dug into her back, lifting her onto her feet and pushing her up a few steps until she ran on yet farther, stumbling forth and upwards, ever away from the madness that followed her wherever she went, ever away from the things below.

The things below the surface of her mind. The horrid things she pushed deep down to still her mind; the darkness she drowned in whiskey and cigarettes even as she grew older.

This could have been her awakening but she skidded right past it. It wouldn’t be for years until she had her world turned upside down. Never realizing the power she held. The demon followed closely, keeping her blood pumping and the adrenaline flowing like fire in her veins.

She reached a stone portal at the top of the stairs and pushed it open. Instead of meeting resistance and stone grinding upon stone once more, it swung open with ease. She burst right through it and stumbled again.

Catching her breath, wheezing, lungs screaming but only pained sounds emerging from her lips, she looked around. There was no demon behind her. Younger Emily, with her pink hair, and her piercings, and completely stoned, stood in Rodney’s basement. Behind her was only the door to the boiler room.

Rodney slept on the couch, curled up into a fetal position. Carlos slept on the chair, sprawled out, still blanketed by some empty plastic wrappers. Static on the TV screen.

Emily ripped the door to the boiler room open, needing to know if that had been real, but there was no hellish stairwell behind it. Just the regular old boiler room that it should have been, reeking of oil.

The demon’s laughter echoed in her mind. She checked the time, noting how many hours had passed and chalking this whole experience up to a bad acid trip after all. She didn’t go home, afraid to be followed or stalked out there in the dark and cold and wet autumn streets, all alone.

Even though she found blood when she wiped her nose, Younger Emily figured it fit. Demons and hell weren’t real. She didn’t have the power to control minds or enter strange otherworlds.

She curled up on the end of the couch, wrapping herself in a smelly old blanket that Rodney should have washed weeks ago. Although she thought the nightmarish imagery and things she had just witnessed would keep her up until the other two boys woke up, exhaustion dragged her into the realm of sleep within minutes.

Emily sat in the back of Stanton’s car, finally escaping from this memory. She looked out the window, at the people in the streets of New Haven. Instead of reading their minds, scanning their thoughts, and testing the limitations of her newfound powers, she decided against any of that.

“I’m still here,” the demon said—Stinky Jim. He sat right next to her, just out of sight.

The fear welled up again, churning in her guts as if the monster gripped her stomach with a claw and twisted.

“I’ll always be with you, Emily. Just one step behind. You ever want the security of that little padded room—to surrender all responsibility, let the world sort itself out and sink into darkness while you drool in the corner—you just turn back. Let me take the wheel,” Stinky Jim said. He cackled again, showing no hint of mercy.

“Or you keep going deeper down, scratchin’ at those wriggling walls, and dive into those lakes of blood and shit and fire. Find out what’s beneath the surface. Drown in the secrets of those things below, or spit ‘em out and curse the world with your wretched knowledge.”

More cackling.

Emily clamped her eyes shut. She willed Stinky Jim to shut up.

She centered herself. Pushed away every thought. Blocked it all out—she had gained that much control over it now. Focused.

Breathed.

Pushed the demon deep down, where it would lurk. And wait.

With the things below.

—Submitted by Wratts

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littlejedii · 7 years

Text

I’ll Be Fine By The Morning

did i procrastinate studying for 2 exams to write this shitty halloween story? yes! did i also not even get it done in time for halloween? also yes. title from permission slip by mainland. this is a bit rushed but happy halloweed!! story under the break! :)

Fall is usually bright, crisp days with a chilly wind that smells like decaying leaves and bonfires. Brilliant shades of red and gold and orange. The cool nights of wide open skies, the ones where you can just almost-not-quite see your breath on the wind.

But not in fucking Sellwood.

What a shitty place to be in the fall. The trees don’t change to any magnificent colors, but instead turn a muddy brown then drop their leaves unceremoniously into the wet, dirty streets. It rains almost constantly in the fall, not the light patter on your window which helps you sleep, but the thunderous, dark sky, drenching, gray, freezing downpour. The weather does a number on all the residents, of course, and the upcoming threat of hooligans making Halloween mischief really puts everyone in a shitty state.

People are so shitty, and the weather’s so shitty, and God why is everything just so shitty?

Probably because it’s around the holidays, probably because they’re always hyper-aware of what- but really who- is missing. Halloween might actually be the worst for Mitch. Freddie loved Halloween.

And then he died. Leaving Mitch in this podunk, bland, gray-ass town all alone.

What a shitty thing to do.

There aren’t enough houses to egg to forget that Freddie was a half-assed Jason Voorhees every single year. No amount of pumpkin smashing will make him forget that Freddie would sit on him and fart until Mitch handed over all his Kit-Kats. He can’t even begin to think about toilet-papering, because who else would have taught him the perfect toss? When Scratch had forced them all to watch Pet Sematary last year, Mitch spent the weeks after walking around the woods to find a haunted burial ground to shove his dead brother in just so he’d come back.

It’s been even harder lately with his Mom locked up, too. At least when he was a kid, she’d try and lighten the mood. She’d save and save for supplies to make him any costume he wanted, buy him any candy bar he desired in the biggest king-size bar she could find.

He always asked for Kit-Kats.

The fairly decent thing about Halloween is that now that they’re older everyone throws parties. Getting plastered by yourself to drown your pain is just pathetic, but getting plastered in someone’s basement where everybody is wearing plastic fangs is apparently just fine.

So this is where he finds himself. He barely knows the kid who’s house they’re trashing. Cory, from his Spanish class that one year the school tried to make him take a language, is just as shitty as everyone else in this town and throws a shitty party. But they stay anyway, downing lukewarm beers on his ratty couch as the basement fills with thrumming music and smoke. Mitch doesn’t wear a costume, obviously, because that’s fucking lame. His friends have taken to their usual masks, and everyone else is pretty decked out. The thumping of the bass vibrates in his chest, which hitches when he catches sight of a curly black head weaving through the crowd.

“Spots,” he yells over the music, springing up form the couch so quickly Javier startles. Jonas turns, blinking in surprise behind a sloppily-cut orange cloth mask. He pushes it up his forehead, causing his hair to stick out wildly in all directions, and Mitch could cry.

To his absolute fucking delight, Jonas grins wide as he makes his way over.

“Hey! I didn’t expect you to be here,” the smaller boy yells up over the music, “what’re you supposed to be?”

“I’m a werewolf,” he shouts back, and Jonas looks at him skeptically.

“You’re wearing exactly what you usually wear,” he gestures to Mitch’s torn t-shirt and jeans.

“Yeah well I guess it ain’t a full moon tonight then, huh?” His grin grows as Jonas tosses his head back in laughter, his shoulders shaking as a bit of beer spills from the can in his hand.

“That’s actually pretty clever,” he’s still giggling, but stops as he sees Mitch curiously eyeing the booze and quickly shakes his head. “I haven’t taken a sip. It’s yours.” He pushes the can against Mitch’s chest. It’s warm from Jonas’ fingers, and Mitch shrugs as he knocks a sip back.

“And what’re you, Joey? A frog?” Jonas frowns and looks down at his green t-shirt.

“No, I was supposed to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, but Sid and I waited too long to make our costumes so it’s pretty bad. I don’t even have nunchucks.”

Mitch has no idea what those are or why this alien frog guy would have them, but Jonas’ nerd shit is so goddamn cute he can’t help but chuckle.

“Aren’t there s’posed to be like 6 of you? Which one’s your clone?”

“4,” Jonas corrects quickly. “And she wanted to be Casey Jones.” Behind Jonas’ shoulder, he sees Sid fumbling a hockey stick under arm, trying and failing to rip bong through the slats of a white mask as she laughs hysterically. He nods as if it means anything to him.

“You ain’t drinkin’ tonight Joey?” The lukewarm beer in his fist is halfway gone now. It’s certainly not his first of the night and he could use at least two more to start feeling a buzz.

“No... I mean, I’d rather smoke, but only if you wanted to,” his soft eyes are downcast, his voice coy under the pounding music. Mitch grins, because Jonas could ask to smoke his entire stash and he’d hand it over without question.

“Yeah. This place is fuckin’ lame anyway, let’s get outta here.” He wraps a wiry arm around Jonas’ shoulder and pulls him up the stairs, away from the smoky basement and sweaty bodies, out into the cool night air. They smoke a bowl as they wander back to the trailer park. Well, Mitch smokes a bowl while Jonas taps out after 2 hits, but they’re both pleasantly buzzed when they push into the trailer, Jonas’ side pressed into Mitch’s, freckled fingers wrapped around a thin wrist, big hands threading through tangled curls. Jonas is laughing, uneven and high, and only goes redder as he snorts. Mitch is teary-eyed too, his loud cackles pressed into Jonas’ temple as Jonas stumbles onto his knees over the carpet divide between the kitchen and living room.

Their laughter seems to echo through the trailer, amplified by the cold dark air in the empty room. The only sound which hums on when they finally break into soft, breathy giggles is the radiator, clicking rhythmically before shuddering on. Jonas rubs at his bare arms, shivering only slightly on the ground as Mitch fumbles with the dials on the ancient TV. Mitch eyes Jonas and goes off to his room, retrieving his filthy blanket and big plaid sweatshirt, throwing both around Jonas shoulders and guffawing at the muffled laughter.

Jonas clambers onto the couch and tosses the sweatshirt back, starting to untangle the blanket at pull his mask away from his forehead. He gives Mitch a look when the garment is thrown back into his lap.

“It’s for you,” Mitch chuckles in response, leaning back against the armrest and tossing his legs into Jonas’ lap. As the smaller boy worms his way into the sweatshirt, pink lights drifting over to the drafty window, Mitch sinks into the plush cushions, letting the sensation of the static hum drifting through his extremities warm him. Jonas unfurls the blanket over them, but pouts the moment Mitch tugs it up over his shoulders to his chin.

“No fair,” Jonas starts, “You look so cozy.” Mitch hisses out a laugh through his teeth, pulling the covers away and extending his arm with a teasing grin.

“C’mere then, don’t ya wanna be warmed up Spots?” he’s half-joking, fully assuming Jonas will shove him softly like always.

But he doesn’t. Holy shit, he most certainly doesn’t. The smaller boy lowers into his invitation, curling underneath his arm and pressing his face into Mitch’s ribcage with a long sigh. Mitch freezes, cold sober the immediate moment that Jonas nestles into his side. His arm stays up for a moment as he watches Jonas turn and rub at his red eyes as he squints to see what’s on the TV. Jonas’ ass is pressed right up against his side now, and his breathing has stopped.

How gone is Jonas right now, to want to do this? Yeah, Jonas is one cuddly motherfucker when he’s high, but it’s usually just those soft moments of him leaning into his shoulder. Is he taking advantage of the smaller boy, who now is examining a spot on his hand where two freckles touch? Is this too far? Will Jonas regret this when he’d sober? Shit, fuck, will he be angry when he’s sober? Oh god, will he be hurt? Or worse, embarrassed?

Fuck, he totally will, won’t he? Fuck, he totally will. Fuck. Fuck.

“Woah, no way, I am not watching this,” Jonas blurts out, wide-eyed staring at the television, pulling Mitch from an imminent self-destructive panic attack.

“What the fuck is it?” Mitch says, turning to press into Jonas and narrowing his eyes at the TV, trying to sound calm. “Oh, Joey c’mon, this ain’t even scar-”

It’s ‘Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives.’

Freddie’s favorite.

He bolts upright abruptly, jostling Jonas as he clambers off the couch towards the TV in two long strides. In his cloudy mind, he can’t think of anything more than to turn it off, slamming his finger into the button and watching the screen flash then go dark.

“...Mit-”

“Yeah, fuck that movie. We don’t have to watch it,” he says curtly, cringing at the way his voice wavers. When he turns back, he doesn’t want to look at Jonas. But he’s so small on the couch, looking soft and warm in Mitch’s sweatshirt, eyes half lidded and one eyebrow cocked, that Mitch can’t help but stare.

“I thought you loved scary movies.”

“That one sucks.”

“You only like the ones that suck,” Jonas snorts and breaks down into giggles as Mitch looks out the window into the moonlight, willing himself to laugh too. But he doesn’t, he can’t, and Jonas trails off. He says something, but Mitch is zoned out.

“What?” Mitch shakes his head, trying to clear the fuzziness.

“Why does that one suck? Does it scare you?” Mitch actually snorts harshly, and Jonas frowns. “Hey, you know I won’t judge, everything scares me. So if it scares you...”

“It doesn’t scare me,” Mitch says firmly, crossing his arms over his chest. Jonas’ head lulls to the side, eyebrow still arched and questioning. “It... it makes me... it was Freddie’s- Freddie liked it. H-he loved it. He fucking loved Halloween,” he’s loud at first, brave, but by the end he’s mumbling just above a whisper and digging his nails into his skin.

“Oh... Mitch, I-” Jonas sounds so broken, so sad for him and he’s so not worth it.

“No, Joey, we’re not talkin’ about this, seriously. I can’t always bum you out like this when we’re high,” he laughs humorlessly, itching the back of his neck with discomfort as Jonas shifts upward. There’s a long, strained pause before Jonas pats the couch cushion.

“C’mere,” he says, and Mitch robotically does as he’s told. “What was his favorite candy?”

“Why do you wanna know?” Mitch spits, but Jonas just leans into his shoulder.

“I know his favorite movie, so why not?” More silence, filled by the sound of Mitch’s uneven breathing.

“Kit Kats.”

“Good choice,” Jonas hums into Mitch’s skin. They both turn toward the hallway as the sound of Buddy’s scratching drifts down from his room, but his eyes dart down to Jonas as he feels a hand wrap around his bicep.

“I bet he was Jason,” Jonas muses.

“...What?”

“Freddie. I bet he was Jason for Halloween, at least one year. Seems like something he’d do, at least from what you’ve told me.”

“Every year,” Mitch swallows thickly. Jonas laughs, genuine and real but soft. He lays his head into Mitch’s arm again with a sigh.

“I’m sorry this Halloween’s so lame, then,” he hums, sounding apologetic. Mitch pulls back, and Jonas jumps.

“Shit, what’re you talking about?” he blurts out. ‘This is exactly how I’d wanna spend it’ sits on his tongue, and out of his mouth comes, “I’m usually alone, so this is way better.”

Jonas raises his eyebrows, and Mitch coughs, “No, that’s not what I meant, I meant like actually this is what I’d wanna do, not just have you here ‘cus I didn’t wanna be alone, I didn’t mean it that-”

Jonas throws his head back again in laughter, curling his hands around his stomach and flinging himself back into the couch. It echoes against the cold walls of the trailer as tears start to form at the corner of his eyes. Mitch covers his red face, laying his head in his hands and mumbling for Jonas to stop and relax and seriously shut up before he’s laughing too, ugly and rough into his hands.

“W-well,” Jonas starts breathlessly, his chest still shaking with giggles before he clears his throat, “if it makes any difference, this is probably the best Halloween I’ve had, too.”

“We haven’t done shit, Spots,” Mitch runs his fingers through his hair, shaking his head and looking down into Jonas hazel eyes which seem to glow in the darkness.

“Yeah, but I’m having fun... and you’re not alone,” he teases, before adding softly, “and I’m the one who gets to keep you company.”

Holy shit. How the hell did he get so lucky?

“What?”

Oh fuck, that actually just exited his mouth.

“I-” he starts, looking everywhere but Jonas’ eyes, “I- I- uh, I didn’t mean-”

“Oh... oh, no, it’s fine. We all say stuff we don’t mean. When we’re high. I guess,”

“Fuck, c’mon, you know I meant it.”

“You just said you didn’t, Mitch, it’s really fine.”

“I did,” he says firmly, leaning towards Jonas, tongue feeling heavy in his mouth as he desperately tries to explain away his stupid mistake. “I do, I am lucky. To have you here. I am.”

There’s a silence after he makes the affirmation. Their thighs are touching and Mitch gulps as he realizes how close he’s leaned in, fingers curled around Jonas’ shoulder. He’s staring at Jonas, not into his eyes but at his nose, at the freckles there, and he can’t help his gaze from wandering down, further, to his lips. Subconsciously he runs his tongue over his own lip, lost in his high and the color of Jonas’ skin.

Jonas leans back, and Mitch stupidly leans with him until Jonas is pressed into the cushions, curls spread out like a halo around his head.

“You don’t mean that,” Jonas whispers, and Mitch can feel his warm breath.

“I do,” his voice comes out softer than he’d meant it as he feels Jonas’ hands on his chest, curling into the fabric of his t-shirt and not pushing away like he’d expected them to. He’s waiting for Jonas to shove him, curl away from him, anything, but he doesn’t. So Mitch lowers just slightly, coming down on his elbow and using his other arm to cage Jonas in and curl around his head.

“You d-don’t” Jonas whispers again, and Mitch lets himself fall further until their bodies are so close, close enough that he can feel the heat radiating off Jonas, but not yet touching. After it feels like they’ve been leaning back for a century, Mitch’s nose meets Jonas’.

“C’mon Joey, you gotta know I do,” he mumbles. Their breath is fast, and he can feel the warmth of Jonas’ lower lip just almost against him. Their noses are pressed together, their foreheads touching, but neither of them move. Mitch wills his body to shift, to do it, God just fucking do it already, kiss him like he’s always wanted to, but he’s frozen.

“Will- will you still want th-this, like want me, when you’re not high?” Jonas squeaks softly, and Mitch crumbles.

“I- fuck, of course... always. You want this, though? Jonas, if you wake up tomorrow and you hate stupid ugly dumb Mitch Mueller for kissing you, I will hate myself so much more-”

He’s silenced as Jonas pulls them together, their lips colliding awkwardly as their teeth cut into their skin.

Jonas just kissed him. Jonas just kissed him. And he’s still doing it, holy shit. Jonas slides his trembling, inexperienced hands up from Mitch’s chest to his neck, into his hair, and Mitch shudders as the smaller boy whimpers only slightly. He wastes no time deepening the kiss, prodding Jonas with his tongue, tasting his teeth, gnawing on his lip, pulling back to breathe heavily for a moment before pulling him in even more tightly than before. In a moment when he pulls back, to peek his eyes open to just confirm that this is actually really happening, his chest twists at the way Jonas glows under the pink light illuminating the space around them.

Jonas opens his eyes too, face flushed and lips swollen and Mitch melts.

“So lucky.”

They kiss until their high wears off, until it feels so real and visceral that Mitch has to pull away and fall onto his side, gather Jonas into his chest and nuzzle into his hair.

“Why’d you stop?” Jonas whispers, tugging at the wet collar of his t-shirt, pulling it over the marks starting to bloom on his neck.

“I didn’t wanna take things too far,” he hums, kissing Jonas’ curls and trying to angle his hips away from Jonas’ side. His plan backfires, and he ends up pressing himself straight into Jonas’ plush hip, causing them both to jump. “I also gotta cool down a little,” he mumbles, looking away. Jonas giggles breathlessly.

“Yeah... me too... because I should be getting home soon,” he looks up but Mitch doesn’t look back, just lets his eyes slip shut and pretends to not feel his heart pull.

“Not yet, please” he whispers into the side of Jonas’ freckled face.

“I don’t want to, but it’s past 2 and I know Sid’s probably-”

“It’s past 2?” He interrupts, eyes widening. Jonas nods underneath him, inching his chin up for another kiss. Mitch feels like the king of the universe when he ducks down to press their lips together softly, almost getting lost in the feeling of Jonas surrounding him before he raises up.

“So I guess it’s not Halloween anymore....”

“Mm, I guess not,” Jonas murmurs against his chin, kissing the underside of his jaw.

“I haven’t liked Halloween since- for a while,” Mitch says, muffled by Jonas’ lips as he pulls face down again.

“You like Halloween again?”

“If I get to spend it like this, yeah.” Mitch wraps Jonas tighter, presses his face into the crook of his neck and inhales as he squeezes Jonas’ middle, savoring him.

“That could be arranged,” Jonas says softly before their kissing again, forgetting the talk of leaving or stopping or cooling down as they wrap up into each other again, and for the first time in a long time Mitch isn’t lonely. The room glows pink and the moon glows silver in the fall air, and it’s not shitty, it’s not empty, and nothing’s missing.

#long exposure #mitjo #halloweiners #mitch mueller #jonas wagner

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supernoondles · 4 years

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2020

A lot happens in a year, even when nothing seems to happen at all.

There's nothing new my commentary about a global pandemic (and the particularly frustrating experience of living in America during it, even with all my privileges of continued employment, owning a car, rent stability, and living in the bay area) will bring to the reader, but I will underscore this: my feelings aren't that 2020 is any kind of exceptional year, but the point where, hopefully, we finally realize that economic/climate/racial injustice has been a terrible problem for a long time, and will continue to be unless we enact massive collective change. A vaccine is not going to make any of those issues disappear, and I worry the people in power (including myself) will return to their comfortable life styles as if the next decade won't be even worse.

Anyway, general DOOM aside (RIP man), here's my year in specific!

From looking through my photos: January was off to a great start. I celebrated the new year with dim sum with J/M/M, as per tradition, and went on a foggy hike through SF with my family that involved my dad and J getting hilariously lost. Soon after I went to Sonoma with J/M -- for all my years in the bay, I had never explored north of the Golden Gate that much -- which was a wonderful trip seeing J's hometown. I helped my lab demo research at the Exploratorium, started growing my own microgreens, and went on more (to become semi-regular and my only source of cardio through the pandemic) bike rides with my lab mates. I finally saw Hamilton (though feel a need to justify here how "cringey" I think LMM is). I went to Genesis, my first gaming-related convention, and it was a lot of fun despite seeing no women. I did so many things, was making progress on research (I think? I don't recall any breakdowns) and my mental health was generally good.

The doing of things continued in February. After not going last year, I went to the Tet Festival in SJ (which was kind of sad). I joined a Chinese learning club and a crafts club and had a delicious omakase. N visited again, I went ice skating and tried to rescue a giant rat from string lights, and saw the Sonic movie in theaters (which would have been my last movie in theaters, sigh). After having a drink at Wursthall with T, I felt terrible (to the unaccustomed reader, not only do I Asian glow, my hands/feet itch whenever I drink and I feel like I want to die), and decided that was the last drink I'd ever have -- thanks to the pandemic that's stayed true. I went on a ski retreat with the lab that felt particularly special (and not just because I didn't have to pay). We (I, in convincing my mostly Asian office) wanted to make 元宵 on the eve of E's birthday, but it turns out that a bunch of CS PhD students really love singing karaoke for like 4 hours straight into the night, and at some point I was like, okay y'all, time to go to bed. So I hosted 元宵 making at my apartment the next weekend, and we watched another Bong Joon-Ho movie (The Host) to celebrate his Oscar win. Typing this out, it seems wild that this was even in this year. I also did sh*** for the first time, hallucinated white woman in the edges of my vision like a GAN, ate a lot of shaved parmesan from TJ, and let go of any stress I had about the UIST deadline to the abundance of nature and the world.

I break from the month-per-paragraph format now because we all know what happens next. M and I biked around campus to film a virtual tour for the newly virtual admit weekend. Being in Gates that Friday (three days before the bay area wide shelter-in-place order) was the last time I'd be on campus for a while. The next day I adopted 3 wonderful baby rats (my biggest brain move this whole year) and the day after that I moved home. I was counting down the days until Animal Crossing and then J and I were duplicating royal crowns in ACNH. At some point my hair got really bad. The months blurred together. Adjusting to WFH was extremely challenging for me, someone who had structured their whole life around the "I only do work in the office and I leave the office when I get hungry for dinner" logic. I would stop working at 6pm but spent the entire afternoon mentally prepping myself to do maybe 30 menial minutes of it. I binged AtLA. I gave up submitting to UIST. In May I hung out in the park with J, who came home from Seattle, which was the first time I saw anyone outside my family. Sometime in there I decided to become a Twitch streamer and had a brief revival as DJ Noon before I felt bad for roping my friends into listening to my music and ran out of interesting songs I wanted to play. In June I, like many others, took to the streets. For two weeks I donated $50 a day to a different organization. I couldn't get any work done at all and spent an entire advisor meeting sobbing so intensely that they felt bad and canceled it after 10 minutes. I emailed the university and got my housing back for the summer and I moved back to start my internship.

The internship was the break I needed -- working with W was a godsend compared to the struggle of my advisors. After reaching new lows at the start of the summer, my mental health was sloping positively again -- working on a new research project helped clear the emotional baggage of the last one. I was also getting more outdoor social interaction -- I went to Ocean Beach with M/D, Half Moon Bay with my family, and going on weekly bike rides with M. At the end of June, M, my roommate, her boyfriend M the clown (there are now 3 different Ms) and I waited for negative COVID results before going on a 2 day camping trip to Mt. Lassen, which felt completely surreal, and, at that time, completely necessary.

The summer dragged on and my mental health, at some point, began to slip. If I were to graph it it would probably look like the inverse of COVID cases in the US -- gradually decreasing, but with high variance from the day to day. I got an embroidery machine, I attended a workshop on docu-poetics with CPH that was so ripe with information my brain physically ached, I saw my lab mates again for the first time as we sat in a very, very wide circle to say goodbye to a post-doc who got a faculty job in Israel. Most weekends I drove to my parents' house and would take J on various hikes around East Bay so he could better appreciate his roots before he went off to Boston for college. He was taking the Switch with him, so in August I bought myself a new one and planned out my entire second ACNH town, which kept me busy for a while -- but surprisingly not as long as I thought, as with planning (and money from my old account) the whole project took I think less than 50 hours. The camping itch came back and the day before my birthday, which was also the day before J would leave for Boston, we went camping at a small state park in San Jose where he got heat stroke and we slept on top of fire ants. The entire experience reminded me how much I disliked camping -- but what else was there to do? I had a wonderful (and long, bless the folks who stayed) Zoom birthday party where I wore a mesh shirt I made and covered with worms on a string. The day after my birthday someone backed into my car, which, following the demands of a racist letter from the HOA, was parked in guest parking. (Ultimately this would be a blessing of insurance money, as the damage was mainly cosmetic and the person kindly left their contact information.) At this time I was also unironically watching ASMR videos to fall asleep, so I painted a two Bob Ross style paintings, one in my virtual art club, to pay homage.

Fire season this year was worse than it's ever been. Being trapped inside the house combined with my roommate moving out at the start of fall quarter and now living alone marked the second downward spiral of my mental health. The bad days were more frequent. I TA'd a game design course, my first time teaching at this university, where many students messaged me to complain that their 95s were not 100s. In the end the lowest grade in the class was an A- and 20% of the class got an A+. At some point I submitted a summer-long project I did with J and S to CHI; it is so much easier to produce work when I do not have to wrangle with M. (This paper gets accepted, but my silly grad student excitement is tampered both by general "why are we still trying to publish when society is crumbling" pandemic feelings and the fact that CHI will not be physically in Japan next year.) Maybe once a month I go birding. I feel increasingly as if there is nothing novel in my life; I am tired of it all and my body feels fatigued even though I don't do anything with my days. Some days it feels like if I don't touch someone I will explode. My use of recreational marijuana skyrockets. I start doing exercise videos semi-regularly with A. I briefly consider moving to Seattle with E, who is about to defend, before it's clear we have, as always, different boundaries and expectations. I look for places in Sunset/Richmond with M to little success.

In October I somehow pull it together and organize student volunteers for a 3 day conference that requires waking up before 5am every day. I do nothing the rest of the week. After we get flu shots and I let someone into my apartment for the first time since the pandemic started, I help E move up to Seattle. The trip is comfortable and we get to take care of each other; this fulfills a need in me. On Halloween J and I dance in a soccer field next to a combination anarchist recruitment center and homeless encampment -- now cleared by the cops -- and eat a mud pie that is too sweet. On my last day in WA I ask E if he would like to have sex, as friends, and he politely declines. I am pleased with how easily I emotionally accept this answer, how through time and therapy I've finally come to cherish our friendship without always looking for what could have been. I am extremely nervous on the flight home, and it's the first and only flight I will take during the pandemic, and the N-95 squishes my face so my head looks like a balloon, but I have the privilege of free 5 minute weekly tests through the university and I collect another negative result.

In November I fully embrace the hyperfixation lifestyle. My brain, always looking for novel stimuli, has given up on doing work entirely and instead thinks of Thanzag constantly. There is one day where I play Hades for 8 hours and I feel gross, as if I've completed my regression to my high school self. It takes 90 hours until I achieve all my goals, and with no more runs necessary to roll for RNG-based conversational triggers, I finally feel a sense of freedom. (My Switch tells me I have used it for 580+ hours this year, which is more than double last year.) The second SwSh DLC is a struggle for me to complete as I do not find catching legendaries enticing. J comes back early from university at my urging to avoid the travel surge, a week before Thanksgiving, and starts living with me. This helps a lot. My next hyperfixations come overlapping and staggered: I write 25k words of a second iteration of my 2015 NaNoWriMo with the protagonist I had developed in high school before I get bored with the story and realize I need yet another iteration; I buy a combination air fryer pressure cooker and ask my parents for a functional vacuum and bidet as early Christmas gifts and become obsessed with immaculate inside living spaces. This carries on to re-decorating my room at my parents' house, after installing a shelf in the closet and a curtain to close it off from the living room, and spending roughly 30 hours over December break organizing and cleaning their entire garage--they have not thrown out a single piece of paper or article of clothing since they set foot in this country over 20 years ago. My therapist quits the practice and my relationship with my advisors improve. I watch a few housewife vlogs and make my own. I have the revelation that doing research in a pandemic is basically just like any other creative project -- no one really cares that much if I get it done, it's just harder to do than, say, putting together a vlog in a few hours. This shift in mindset feels life changing to me, having before thought of research more as work, a taboo thing to pursue in a pandemic, and when W compliments me for the progress I've made in both the system and managing our meeting with M I do not know how to respond because no one has ever done that before. In the last two weeks of the year I start tracking my time. In our last session (that I almost sleep through), my therapist tells me that I seem stable to her and she is not worried about me. I believe her.

In 2020 I made a marked point to let everyone know that I didn't have goals. It felt lofty to have personal ambitions in the face of everything at a global scale. With this said I will now revisit the 2020 resolutions I wrote last year: (1) Intentionally seek out love: absolutely not, (2) Do enough work such that I don't feel guilty: also no, (3) sew one thing a month: no, but in the end I sewed 11 things total this year so I was close, (4) improve my Chinese: this was actually the only thing that did happen, and now my mom and I have better conversations because of it and I'm so thankful.

In 2021, however, I feel like I finally have it in me to have goals again. They are simple. (1) Get laid. (2) Submit the two research projects I've been doing forever. (3) Commit to writing down my thoughts that make me think, "Oh, that's interesting, I should write it down." Ideas are unfortunately such currency in what I do.

Last year I wrapped up this post with some candid, but embarrassing, optimism. I will offer no such high hopes for 2021, but I do ask the reader if they have noticed that I switched tenses from past to present halfway through this post. And that's 2021: an incidentally unintentional, but then consciously controllable, shift to the present.

#noon's shitty end of the year summary posts #my last post on this blog was my 2019 post lmao

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fakehappytv-blog · 7 years

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John O’Callaghan of The Maine (@dontaskaboutdaisy) interviews Mat Uychich of The Front Bottoms (@matshitposts) below the cut...

John: [sits down next to Mat, offering a hand shake and a smile] Hi buddy, shall we do this?

Mat: Yes, yes. How are we gonna go about it?

J: I thought we should dive right into it. So, first question is what solidified your decision to participate in the Fake Happy Tour and Show?

M: Well! My band, The Front Bottoms, is releasing a new record in about a month. We figured it’d be a good way to promote that. We’ve always loved attending this tour in particular so when we were offered a slot… we jumped at the opportunity!

J: We’ll have to talk about that album again later!

M: For sure!

J: What has been the most pleasant surprise of this experience thus far and what are some ill side effects that you weren’t expecting?

M: If I’m being honest, I haven’t really been here long. I will say though that the coolest thing so far has been the turnout. We’re not the most easiest band to listen to so it’s a pretty huge thing to see all of the people that are coming out just to dance with us. I don’t think I was expecting to feel so off though. With the timing of when we hopped on the tour, I’ve slept in two different hotels in the past few days. I like routine so that’s been a difficult way to start. I’m hopeful for when things really pick up though, and we’re back on the bus consistently.

J: [nods while he speaks] There’s a really bittersweet feeling to the beginning of a tour, huh? Cause you really wanna play but you also miss the comfort of your home. What do you miss most about home?

M: Definitely. I mean… I thought that I’d have lots to distract me with, but it’s slow goings so far. Hopefully once things pick up, I won’t have time to think about home and stuff. Really just mainly my routine. I’m a creature of habit so being thrown into a new environment, especially when that’s always changing… it’s difficult. And also, even though I was able to bring my dog, Wafflenugget… I miss my other pets.

J: Who are your biggest influences both personally and in your career?

M: Honestly, I have no kind of training really… I didn’t even know how to tune drums until a couple of years ago. So all that I know has just been what feels right, and from watching and emulating other drummers. I really love Steve Lamos. The stuff he did with American Football has really shaped me as a drummer, at least I try to make it seem like that. In my personal life, I’d probably have to save my best friend, Brian Sella. I’ve known him since I was five so he’s kind of been there for everything, guiding me and offering a bong rip or a supportive smile. Haha.

J: What has been the highlight of your career so far?

M: Hands down, I’d say opening up for Blink 182 this summer. We’ve been able to share the stage with a lot of cool musicians, but getting drumming tips from Travis Barker, and gushing over Alkaline Trio with Matt Skiba has definitely been the coolest thing so far.

J: Since you talked about Matt Skiba, who are some of your idols that you’ve been able to meet through the band and did they live up to the expectation?

M: Uhm… Jesse Lacey is way, way less cryptic outside of his lyrics. He says man and dude almost as much as I do - I guess I was picturing him to be much more serious and less approachable. We’ve also gotten to tour with Say Anything, and Max Bemis is exactly how you’d imagine him. Haha.

J: About that new album of yours, can you tell us anything about it yet? [smiles coyly at the camera, raising his eyebrows]

M: It’s kind of a culmination of everything that we’ve done so far. With our last album, Back On Top… it was our first time writing stuff under Fueled By Ramen so we weren’t used to things being such a big production. With Going Grey, it feels like we’ve found our footing. It’s a bit more like our first two albums while still progressing forward. It’s all about getting older, wishing that we weren’t, and wondering if we’re too old to be smoking so much pot. It feels good, we’re excited to let everyone hear more than just the first two singles.

J: [gestures with his hands for him to slow down] You mentioned at least four albums there. For people that might not be familiar with your band, can you give me a little bit of a rundown of your band? How many years you’ve been doing this, how many albums you have…

M: Oh God, we’ve put out a lot music. Including EPs, we’ve got 10 that we’ve released, be 11 come October 13th. This’ll be our 5th record put out on a label… the rest is stuff that we recorded and pressed ourselves. For the first handful of years, we stuck to our DIY way of doing things; from booking our own tours, paying for everything ourselves… recording the music in our friend’s attic. We just liked it all; playing shows was only the tip of it. We started The Front Bottoms when I was 17 so ten years we’ve been doing the thing, which is crazy to think about. Brian’s lyrics really speak to people though so I think we’ll keep going until we’re too decrepit to tour. He has a way of talking about specific experiences, but in such simple words that they resonate with a lot of people listening to our music. He has this really cool ability to use only 11/16ths of the dictionary to come up with some really interesting perspectives. Don’t make me try to define our genre, because I don’t think we really fit anywhere. Haha.

J: [laughing] We’ve taken the inverse path. We started with a label and became independent about six to seven years ago.

M: Maybe we’ll take a play out of The Maine’s book, and follow suit. Haha.

J: I mean, it works for us. [shrugs] If someone were to start listening to your band right now, what are the five top songs you’d recommend? And are there any that you absolutely hate?

M: That’s such a tough one. I guess the most quintessential TFB songs would probably be Lipstick Covered Magnet off of Rose, Maps off of our self-titled album, Twin Size Mattress off of Talon of the Hawk is probably the song we’re most known for, uhmmmm… West Virginia off of Back On Top always gets people hype, and I guess our latest single Vacation Town. Some of those aren’t necessarily my favorites or like… the undisputed best songs of ours, but they definitely paint a clear picture of who we are as a band; if you like those ones… you’ll probably like our stuff.

J: What’s your favorite place that you’ve been with the band?

M: I’m gonna have to say Germany. Lots of good, tall pints of beer, and I have family ties there. I got to go see the house that my grandma grew up in before the second world war. She was always my favorite relative so it was neat to kind of get a sense of her life before she came over to America. As far as my favorite place to play a show… nothing beats the atmosphere at home state shows in Jersey.

J: Have you been to South America yet? It’s absolutely crazy there. [smiles, eyes widening as he talks about the place] M: We haven’t, actually! Hopefully we’ll get there at some point! We’ve only done North America, Europe, and Australia so far but we’ve been to each place loads.

J: [laughs] I always feel like a true celebrity when we go to Brazil or the Philippines. [more laughter, throws his head back] They follow us everywhere.

M: Thats really cool though! Do you guys have a big following over there?

J: I guess it’s about the same in the other countries. Like, you hardly hear us on the radio and we’re not reaaaally famous but since we go there once every two years or so, people really follow us when we do go. Okay so now it’s just a curiosity of mine. If you weren’t a musician, what job do you think you’d be doing?

M: I’d definitely be a carpenter. I have a shop back home, woodworking was really my first love even before drumming. I have an Associates in Sustainable Architecture and Design… maybe make use of that.

J: Last question. [leans in to seem like an important question] Does miss Wafflenugget want to be friends with Poppy?

M: This is my favorite question of all time! I think she really, really would! I can tell that she’s been missing her other animal friends so I think that would be really great for her. She plays super well with other dogs… she’s like a little mom!

J: I’m afraid that’s all that we have time for. But thank you so much for your time dude, this has been awesome!

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quiddy-writes · 7 years

Text

Fuck Me - Dean

@saxxxology is such a fucking enabler. Happy birthday, bitch. Enjoy your series. This chapter’s for me and my fellow Dean whores.

Fun fact: both boys are their season 3 ages.

Another fun fact: I fucking hate titles so much. All the credit to Saxxy for helping me pick a title.

Fandom: Supernatural & Harry Potter Pairing: DADA Teacher!Dean x Student!Reader Words: 3,671 Summary: A seventh year Hufflepuff finally decides to confess to her crush. He just happens to be her Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. Warnings: Unprotected sex, oral (male and female receiving), a teacher and student fucking (please don’t actually fuck your teachers/students, guys. Let me have my problematic kink, but don’t actually do it) Other Parts: Sam - Dickchat

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Y/N was beyond nervous.

Ellie squeezed her friend’s hand tightly, looking up at her with a reassuring smile. “Breathe, stupid.”

Y/N rolled her eyes. “Don’t act like you’re not freaking out.”

“Of course I am. I, however, am breathing.”

Y/N ripped her hand from her friend’s and shoved her playfully. “Dick.”

They walked down the grand hallways of Hogwarts, a place that had been their home away from home for seven years now. And this walk down the grand halls would be one of their last.

Exams had ended the day prior, and this was one of their last days as students.

Soon, the girls would be off to St. Mungo’s to train as healers. Both had decided years prior to do so, especially after Ellie was outed as an aurologist. Plus, they worked well together, so their path was set.

They had one other pact still to honor, though.

The start of this year had brought a few staffing changes to the school. Amongst those new changes were two new teachers for both Divination and Defense Against the Dark Arts.

The two men were brothers and both must’ve been part Veela or something for how unfairly gorgeous they were.

Dean Winchester, the elder of the two and the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, was tall and gorgeous. His short, sandy brown hair was always sticking up from him running his thick fingers through it. His green eyes were framed by crinkles when his plush lips pulled back to reveal perfect teeth in a wide smile. He worked his unflattering robes like he was a runway model, and Y/N had spent more classes than she cared to admit imagining what he looked like without the robes. What Y/N loved most about him, however, were his silly jokes that often made her snort in laughter in class and bring out that beautiful smile she dreamed about. They could often be found giggling together after class, talking about anything and everything.

Sam, the other brother and Divination professor, was tall enough to look Hagrid in the eye. With long brown hair that looked like it had walked out of a shampoo advertisement. His hazel eyes were kind and, unlike his brother, he always had a kind word and a simple answer to any questions. He could often be found with Hagrid when he wasn't in his tower, helping with the care of magical creatures. In fact, the first time the girls had seen him, he was caring for the thestrals to lead them to the castle. Ellie would make her way to the grounds outside often to check in her plants in the tents, then wander over to the hut that housed Hagrid in search of the younger Professor Winchester. It was there where he’d shared his secret: he was a legilimens and had been training for years to control it, yet he still sometimes found himself reading other’s minds, even when he didn’t mean to. She’d shared the secret of her own aurology, and a bong was quickly formed that needed no words.

The girls had quickly learned of the other’s crushes and, by the winter holidays, they made a pact: at the end of the year, they'd confess to their professors when they were no longer students. Neither expected anything to come from it, though they were equally convinced that the other would live happily ever after with the professor of their choosing, and so they swore.

Finally, six months later, the time had come.

So they walked to the Divination tower, one much more visibly shaken than the other.

They stood at the bottom and hugged before Ellie went off. Y/N wished her good luck just before her friend went out of sight, and Ellie shouted the same platitude back down the stairs.

Thus, Y/N was left alone to walk, on jelly legs, towards the Defense Against the Dark Arts. She wrung her fingers, feeling increasingly nauseous with every step. It felt like eternity before she finally came to the dark wooden door. She took one last deep breath, trying to stop her shaking as she knocked.

She heard his deep voice answer her with an invitation to come in. She closed her eyes, sent up a prayer to whatever deity she could think of, and pushed open the heavy door.

Dean was sat on top of his desk, thumbing through an old book she didn’t recognize. His eyes darted up and, once he recognized her, he smiled. “Hey, Y/N,” he greeted.

“Good morning, Professor,” she was so proud her voice only wavered a little.

He waved her off, closing his notebook and placing it on his desk behind him. “Please, Y/N, I’m no longer your professor. Just Dean is fine.”

“Oh,” she flushed, not expecting that.

“So, what can I do for you?”

“Ah,” she started, suddenly unable to swallow. “I simply wished to…to say goodbye.”

Dean’s smile faltered. “Yeah, that’s right. You’re off to St. Mungo’s, aren’t you?”

She cocked her head to the side. “How did you know that?”

“You told me,” his brow furrowed. “Remember?”

She vaguely remembered it, but, honestly, she could barely remember anything from before her final exams at this point. “That must’ve been months ago.”

He laughed. “You remember who wants to be a healer when everyone else wants to play professional Quidditch.”

That simple statement made her feel better and worse at the same time. “Aw, and here I thought I was special,” she joked.

Dean shrugged. “Sorry to disappoint.”

She waved him off. “I’m only joking.”

“Well,” he laughed. “This is an awkward goodbye.”

She swallowed thickly. “I…” she breathed deep. “I think I’m about to make it more awkward.”

His brow raised. “Sorry?”

She closed her eyes and took one final, deep breath.

“Y/N?”

She opened her eyes and answered with an awkward smile. “I’m in love with you.”

“O-Oh…” Dean stuttered, his eyes wide enough to nearly roll out of his skull. “I, uh…you…what?”

“Look, I don’t expect anything,” she said. “I’m not an idiot. I just…I’d rather get it out there than hold it in and that’s crazy selfish of me, I know, but…”

Dean hadn’t moved, hadn’t breathed since her confession, something she finally noticed. She waved her hand in front of his face. “Hello?”

When he still didn’t respond, she ran a hand through her hair. “Please,” she huffed. “Can you say something so we can be done with this?”

“Wh-What the hell am I supposed to say?!”

“I don’t know,” she said. “How about ‘I’m flattered, but obviously I don’t return your feelings?’”

Dean’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “I, uh…” he tried before falling silent again.

Finally, she’d had enough. Her face was on fire, her knees were shaking, and her heart was aching enough to take her to Madame Pomfrey’s at this rate. “Look, you know what? It’s fine. Have a good day, Professor.”

She turned on her heel, more than ready to go back to her friend’s room in the Hufflepuff dorm and maybe indulge in some of Ellie’s more medicinal plants, when she was suddenly stopped.

Her fingers twitched for her wand on instinct, but she managed to look before she acted. Dean was off of his desk, his large hand gripping her hard enough to turn his knuckles white.

“You’re hurting me,” she grumbled, trying to wrench her arm away from him.

He immediately dropped her like she was on fire. “Sorry,” he flushed.

“Next time you want me to stay, use your words,” she joked, trying to ease some of the tension.

“Come on,” Dean twined his fingers with Y/N’s, pulling her towards the back of the room.

She frowned. “Wha—Where are we going?”

“Someone could come in,” he muttered, the tips of his ears turning pink.

She followed in silence, up the steps to the small office that she’d never actually been in before.

It was mostly clean now, with one or two half open trunks mostly filled. A few pictures still hung on the wall, mostly ones of the two brothers as they looked now or slightly younger. One, however, caught her eye: a small boy, a baby in the arms of a beautiful blonde, and an older raven-haired man, all standing together, laughing.

She smiled when she recognized the bright green eyes of her professor in the little boy.

Y/N’s head whipped around at the sound of the door shutting quietly, Dean leaning back against it like he couldn’t stand on his own.

She leaned back against his desk, her nerves growing with every passing moment.

After a short eternity of silence, she finally had to ask. “Why didn’t you just let me leave?”

He frowned, his brow furrowing. “I couldn’t.”

“Why?”

A large hand ran down over his face, a heavy sigh of frustration leaving him as he did so. “I couldn’t, not like that.”

Hope swelled in her chest and her breathing started coming out short, like there wasn’t enough air in the room. “Why not?”

He finally looked at her. “Because…I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about you that way.”

The biggest smile she’d ever had cracked her face. “Yeah?”

“But, I mean…I’m twelve years older than you.”

“So?”

He rolled his eyes. “You really don’t think it’ll be an issue?”

She pushed herself off of his desk, which made Dean tense slightly. “Do you love me?”

It took a long time for him to answer, and, when he did, it was with a simple nod; a simple nod that looked like it almost pained him, like he was unsure it was the right move.

With that, she began walking slowly toward him, afraid of spooking him. “Then, I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly care about what assholes might say.”

He smirked, even though a hint of doubt still obviously plagued him. “You sure?”

She answered by slowly running her hands from his elbows upwards, before encircling them around his neck. He watched her the entire time. Moving at the same pace, she pushed herself up on her tiptoes and kissed him.

His lips were even softer than she’d imagined, late at night when she was alone in her dorm. His calloused hands came up to hold her face in place, like he was afraid she’d pull away.

She had no intention of doing any such thing.

Her arms grabbed the labels of his robe, pulling herself up on her tiptoes to press her body against his.

His hands trailed down to the clasp of her Hufflepuff robes and quickly undid it. He then helped her shrug it off and onto the floor. Her fingers found his loosened tie and practically ripped it off of him. It snapped from the velocity, and Dean pulled away in shock.

She offered a sheepish smile, to which Dean simply shrugged and began kissing her once again. He pulled her tie apart, then it joined his on the floor. Dean then rolled his shoulders, letting his robes pool around his feet, before returning his hands to her waist. Giving her plenty of time to pull away, his hands pulled her dress shirt from her skirt. Then, they trailed up underneath it, his rough fingers scratching a bit at her skin.

Her own shaky fingers began unbuttoning his shirt. After a minute or so of fumbling, his bare chest was revealed to her, and she began exploring.

Her shirt was unbuttoned without her notice and it fell to the floor, leaving her only in her bra and skirt.

Shoes were kicked off as Dean’s lips trailed down her jaw, neck, and to her collar bone. His light stubble scratched at her soft skin, bordering on ticklish. She shoved his shirt off his shoulders, whining quietly when he didn’t immediately move his hands from her back.

He chuckled and pulled the shirt off before immediately resuming his old position, mouthing along the cups of her bra.

She laughed breathlessly, her fingers tangling in his short hair.

“What?” he mumbled, leaning up to suckle on her collarbone.

“Can’t believe this is happening, that’s all.”

He pulled away, looking worried. “I don’t…I’ve never been with a student before. You’re special, alright?”

She pushed herself up on her tiptoes, pressing a soft kiss to his lips. “I know.”

“And this isn’t a one time thing. I’m taking you out after graduation.”

“Can’t wait.”

“I’m serious.”

She gave him a soft smile, and answered by pulling his lips back to hers. “I know,” she mumbled.

The last articles of their clothing hit the floor until they were only in their undergarments.

Dean pulled away again, which made Y/N pout and try to reel him back in. He chuckled, disentangling himself from her. “Gimme me a sec.”

She stood and watched as Dean took his own robe and laid it out gently on the ground. He then turned to her and held his hand out. “Is this okay?”

“It’s perfect,” she took his hand and squeezed it.

With a giant grin gracing his features, Dean climbed down onto the robe and pulled her along with him. She settled herself in his lap, straddling him. She leaned down, not letting an inch of space between them, and kissed him. One of his hands rested on her hip, whilst the other hand rested between her shoulderblades, holding her close.

She pulled away when she couldn’t breathe, bringing Dean into a sitting position with her.

Dean took that as his cue. His hand on her back ran down to her bra clasp and undid it in one try. She threw it behind them and Dean palmed her breasts. He massaged them with his fingers and tongue, finding every place that made her moan and marking her as his. His teeth worried her nipples, turning them red and swollen. Dark, purple marks were beginning to mar her skin.

Her own fingers carded in his hair, tugging lightly on the sandy brown locks. She fell forward, only being held up by Dean. Her hips began grinding down onto his growing erection, looking for some sort of relief.

He bucked up into her, his hands grabbing her hips to guide her a little better.

She yanked back Dean’s head a little too roughly and looked into his glazed green eyes. Her lips crashed against his, soft moans muffled by the connection as they continued to grind against each other.

“Stop,” she finally pulled away, trying to catch her breath.

“Are you okay?” Dean spoke between pants, still managing to sound concerned.

She nodded. “More than.” With that, she stood up and began pulling down her panties.

Dean watched, unable to look away as she, rather ungracefully, disentangled herself from the ruined piece of clothing.

She stood before him, completely naked and with an audience thoroughly entranced. Dean’s hands trailed up her thighs to her hips, pulling her close.

“What’re you doing?”

He smirked up at her, pressing kisses up her inner thigh.

“O-Oh…you, uh…really?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Mind?!” she coughed. “No, by all means!”

He gave her that smirk that made her melt, then pressed a soft kiss to her folds. He nudged her legs open enough to give him space to work his magic.

His finger disappeared into his mouth before reappearing at her entrance, nudging at her.

She worried her bottom lip between her teeth, trying to keep in the sounds Dean was eliciting.

He sucked at her clit and puffy outer lips in turn, finding the parts that made her shake and pull at his hair.

Finally, when he was two fingers deep inside her, she had to push him away. He pouted, but that stopped when she resumed straddling him and pulled him into another passionate kiss. Then her lips left him and continued down a trail similar to the one Dean had traveled down her body.

He knew what was coming without needing to hear her say it. “Baby—”

“It’s my turn,” she spoke evenly, confidently.

With that, he pushed himself up onto his elbows, but made no other move to stop her.

She acquainted herself with every inch of his chest, her taut nipples brushing lightly against his hips and thighs as she moved further down.

Finally, she was met with Dean’s dick, hard, weeping, and pressed against his stomach. Her eyes flicked up to meet his as she pressed a soft kiss to the large vein that ran on the underside.

He hissed, fisting the robe underneath him.

She took that as a good sign and began pressing soft kisses from the base up and, when she got to the tip, her tongue slipped out and lapped at the slit. That brought another sound she’d never heard from her professor’s lips, so she did it again.

Then she took one last deep breath and took the head into her mouth.

One of his hands grabbed her hair, not pulling or guiding her in any way, but more for purchase.

She took as much as she could into her mouth, her hand wrapping around what she couldn’t fit. She found a rhythm as best she could, twisting her wrist as she bobbed up and down. One of her hands rested on his hip, putting a token effort into holding him in place. His hips still thrust into her mouth of their own accord, but he tried to hold himself back for her after she gagged the first time.

Finally, he sat up and pulled her lips back to his.

With that, she sat back in his lap, still kissing Dean like she needed him more than oxygen.

“You sure you wanna do this?”

She laughed, pulling him in for a quick kiss. Then her hand reached down and grabbed him, lining him up. “If you’re in, so am I.”

He chuckled. “I’m about to be in.”

That pulled a snort from her, and she buried her head in the crook of his neck. “That was awful.”

“It’s why you love me.”

She pulled back with a small smile. “Yeah, it is,” she murmured, her fingers trailing along his hairline.

He looked at her like she was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. His hands brushed up her thighs to her hip and pulled lightly downwards, and she obliged.

She had to take a minute once he was fully seated inside her. Dean laid fully back, breathing deep. Y/N took his hands from her hips and interlaced their fingers together, smiling breathlessly. He answered her by squeezing her hands lightly.

With that, she began moving slowly. She rubbed herself back and forth, watching his face for any and all reactions. He never took his eyes off of her. His look of complete adoration made her feel even hotter, and she was sure that she was blushing more than ever before. Instead she started lifting her hips and dropping back down slowly, and she forgot all about her own nerves.

Suddenly, Dean separated their hands, instead wrapping them around her to pull her onto him. She gripped Dean at the base of his skull, pulling him in for a kiss as her movement became limited. Dean’s began moving his hips up into her in sharp bursts, unable to help himself anymore.

She pulled away, letting her forehead fall against his as she tried to remember how her limbs worked.

The world shifted suddenly as Dean sat up, letting her put some more weight onto her knees. One of his hands still rested on her upper back, but the other fell to her hips, guiding her movements.

They moved together, Dean kissing at any patch of skin he could reach when he could breathe, and Y/N wrapped herself around him tightly.

She felt the pressure building up inside her and she was nearly over the top. She was trying to speak, tried to tell him what was going on, but speech was beyond her. Dean knew anyway. He pulled her into a kiss, and the hand on her back pushed her closer.

Nothing in particular triggered her orgasm, but more of the entire situation, more the fact that every fiber of her was being held together by Dean. He followed her immediately after, unable to hold himself back any longer with her walls fluttering around him.

When they could each breathe again, Dean slowly laid himself back down on the floor, pulling her with him to lay on his chest, being careful not to dislodge himself from her.

A moment passed before either could speak, and Dean was first, “Son of a bitch.”

She giggled, burying her head in the crook of his neck. “I don’t know if my legs are working right now.”

“Sweetheart, you aren’t the only one.”

The pulled more giddy laughter from her.

They were silent a minute more before Dean spoke again. “I meant it, you know. That this isn’t a one time thing.”

“I know,” she said. “It might be a little hard with me over at St. Mungo’s, but…”

“We at least have the summer. And we’ll only be a Floo trip away once school starts.”

She began to shiver, reaching over for her robe and wand. She sat up fully, finally letting Dean slip out of her. With a swish of her wand, both parties (along with Dean’s robe) were clean. She then laid down beside him and pulled her cloak over the both of them.

Dean pulled her into a hug, settling her in. “You don’t have to go anywhere, right?”

“I promised I’d meet Ellie in her dorm when I was done,” she said. “Why, you wanna cuddle?”

“Shut up,” he grumbled, holding her closer. Then a sly grin came over his face, and he turned to her. “You’re meeting Ellie when you’re done here, right?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Yes…why?”

With that he rolled over on top of her and, right before he crashed his lips to hers, he said, “Because I’m not done with you yet.”

Everything Tags: @carrollmomx3 @raylin19 @spnhybrid @wayward-marvel-and-more @writingbeautifulmen @xfanqirlinq

Dean Tags: @akshi8278

Pond Tags: @aprofoundbondwithdean @manawhaat @thing-you-do-with-that-thing @nichelle-my-belle @leatherwhiskeycoffeeplaid @notnaturalanahi @bkwrm523 @salvachester @whispersandwhiskerburn @roxy-davenport @impala-dreamer @deathtonormalcy56 @samsgoddess @wildfirewinchester @frenchybell @scorpiongirl1 @for-the-love-of-dean @mysupernaturalfics @spn-fan-girl-173 @deandoesthingstome @jelly-beans-and-gstrings @fiveleaf @deansleather @curliesallovertheplace @whywhydoyouwantmetosaymyname @waywardjoy @imadeangirl-butimsamcurious @kayteonline @supernatural-jackles @wevegotworktodo @ilovedean-spn2 @babypieandwhiskey @wi-deangirl77 @deantbh @supermoonpanda @sinceriouslyamellpadalecki @deanwinchesterforpromqueen @chaos-and-the-calm67 @memariana91 @plaidstiel-wormstache @teamfreewill-imagine @chelsea-winchester @fandommaniacx @revwinchester @lucibae-is-dancing-in-hell @castieltrash1 @supernaturalyobessed @ohwritever @ruined-by-destiel @inmysparetime0 @winchester-writes @deals-with-demons @maraisabellegrey @faith-in-dean @winchestersmolder @bennyyh @clueless-gold @deanwinchesterxreader @melbelle45 @winchester-family-business

@mrswhozeewhatsis Tags: @theficlibrarium @blushingsamgirl @sis-tafics@meganwinchester1999 @ferferelli @myfand0msandm0re @fangirling-instead-of-working @chrisatplay @zanthiasplace @skybinx-blog @feelmyroarrrr @tia58 @sams-little-toy @sunriserose1023 @dr-dean @jotink78 @lucifer-in-leather @i-dont-know-how-to-write @everyday-supernatural-af @howmanytuesdaysdidyouhave @babypieandwhiskey @mysaintsasinner @chelsea-winchester @besslincoln-bruh @shelovesallthethings @supernaturalismalife @hexparker @alangel1895

#supernatural #spn #dean winchester #dean x reader #reader x dean #dean winchester x reader #reader x dean winchester #dean fanfiction #dean winchester fanfiction #dean fanfic #dean winchester fanfic #dean winchester reader insert #dean reader insert #my words #harry potter #hp #crossover #au

189 notes · View notes

roserecaps · 8 years

Text

Finale: Country vs. Canadian

In everyone’s favorite finale, where two people (who have known each other for less time than it takes me to decide whether I like you enough to eat off my plate) will decide whether they want to spend the rest of their lives next year of their life together.

The episode starts with another place I cannot pronounce and don’t wish to ever visit (but apparently “Santa” is from there). And Nick and his family are ready to interrogate.

Nick’s Dad: “We are worried that Nick will embarrass the name of this family on national TV... again We ... I mean he has had trouble recovering from the last two times.”

Nick’s family is nervous that ABC threw as many women as possible in front of him and he still may come out the same rejected nerd he went into it as.

Bella: “So far I really like you (Raven), I haven’t seen the other girl...” Raven: “You will hate her, she’s a foreigner and kind of a whore.”

Nick’s family really likes to rehash the past break ups over and over again, like lay the fuck off mom and let your son shit the bed again on his own.

Nick’s Brother (I Think): “They can still say no, and given his track record....” - DAYYYYYUM.

Vanessa’s turn to tell the family how much she “loves” their son. She explains that she is from Canada and Italian. Bella looks as confused as Corinne reading a “Do it yourself” book and the rest of the squad can’t help but roll their eyes on repeat.

Tonight’s drinking game: Bottom’s up every time Vanessa let’s us know how ready she is to get engaged. Chug.

Vanessa: “I really want to find out, if Nick is ready to get engaged...” Nick’s Mom: “I hope you figure it out.” Nick’s Sister: “Ask him.”

These conversations seem really productive.

Nick’s Dad: *Cries* Vanessa: *Cries* Nick’s Dad: “Vanessa really convinced me that she is ready and in love with my son.”

America and the Viall’s are so ready for Nick to get the fuck out of our living rooms, it looks like his siblings are taking bong rips between conversations and his parents took down some lines of Xanax in the bathroom. A family should never have to talk this long about where you will put your dick for the next 5 years.

Chris H.: “Who thinks Nick will end this alone and depressed....?” Live Studio Audience: “YESSSSS! Woooooooo!”

Nick, we’re all behind you!

Yay, another date for each of the women before he makes his decision... -_-

VANESSA

Vanessa’s date starts in the middle of the woods, looking like a scene from Fargo, right before they find the guy cramming a human leg in a wood chipper.

Vanessa: “I just want to enjoy where we are... The snow on the ground, the snow on the trees, the snow, ahhh snow.” - How about the rapist Santa hiding behind the tree?

The couple meets Santa and he starts speaking crazy right out the gate, ABC definitely bullshitted those subtitles, cause that was a made up language. Is this why Nick didn’t pick a jew?

Santa: “What is at the top of your wish list?” Vanessa: “Finding love” Santa: “What about chocolate?”

When the fuck is Chris Hansen coming out... This is getting creepy, and we still haven’t seen an elf.

Vanessa is stoked that “Santa” sees her and Nick together, you mean the homeless Norwegian that the producers paid to feed you bullshit (and chocolate)?

Could Vanessa be coming off any more desperate? Four weeks in and every convo starts with “Are you ready to marry me? Do you love me? Did your parents like me?” these are usually the chicks you ghost after the third date.

Vanessa: “It’s scary that I don’t have all my questions answered. All your answers seem super general.” “Are you ready to propose?” Nick: “I can’t tell you that right now” Vanessa: “TELL ME YOU LOVE ME!!!!!!!!!”

Nick one piece of advice:

This girl is going to get her way one way or the other. Either a ring or Nick’s head on a stake in front of Santa’s cottage.

QUOTE OF THE NIGHT

“If you want to find a million different scenarios to de-rom, de-rom, un-rom, make it less romantic than you probably can.” aka shut up bitch, you’re being so annoying I forgot how to speak English.

-------

RAVEN

Raven is putting a serious smile on right now, she is like a new employee working at Chick-Fil-A “My pleasure”. Nick is probably just thrilled that he doesn’t have a girl ripping his small intestine out of his asshole with obnoxious questions.

The two go ice skating, not sure why they are alway putting Raven on skates and will someone get them helmets? If a blade flies up and catches Nick in the jugular, would anyone be upset?

Nick: “My family really likes you. What was your favorite convo?” Raven: “The one with the lady that looks like the poor people’s Ellen.” Nick: “My mom is a special person.”

HUSKY PUPPIES!

If the level of surprises is any indication of who Nick likes better, Vanessa’s heading back to the boarder.

Raven: “I have no hesitations and I love you.” Nick: “That’s it? Oh thank god.”

The end of this date was night and day from Vanessa’s, I thought Canadians were supposed to be the friendly ones...?

FINAL DAY

Another surprise guest at Nick’s door, it’s Neil Lane! This guy has made serious commission off Nick.

Neil: “This is the biggest one I’ve made.” Me: “I’ll take it.”

Vanessa is still crying, if she doesn’t leave this country with a ring... Lord save the crew. You have made these girls sleep in these 42 degree cabins with no electricity or wi-fi, if you were going to send one home, at this point, I’m sure they will be fine with it.

Hey Nick, how many times have you had your heart broken? America really wants to know.

Raven is up first... and Nick will not make eye contact, his social awkwardness is telling me Rave will head back to the farm single.

Nick: “I’m not IN love with you.”

BYE

The classic cut back to the live audience crying, get a fucking life people.

Alright, let’s get this over with. I am ready for this to end already.

Nick: “I feel like I have been fighting it, and I’m not ready to fight it anymore.” Ummm these maybe the literal words that you shouldn’t say before proposing, but what do I know...

I blacked out when Nick started crying... What happened? She said yes, big ring, they cried. Great now Canada take him and we can move on with our week. That’s the season. Rachel we will see you in a couple months even though it will feel like only two weeks.

#The Bachelor #nick viall #canada #abc #tv recaps #the bachelor finale

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fairymoved · 8 years

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a short synopsis of my ocs

evelyn: cute but naive blogger. lonely lesbian in her twenties who shops at thrift stores. la vie en rose. macaroons for breakfast. has a thing for weird shit, especially goth witches.

yumi: a goth witch. will fuck you then fuck you over for money. kind of a hoarder. winged eyeliner. smokes for the aesthetic. a bitch but not really. will cut you.

lea mari: trans muslim vegan witch. likes plants more than people. took over a desert just to get away from society. a hermit but also everyone’s mom.

cyrus: handicap occult hunter. trailer trash but the good kind. likes dogs and beer. nice dude who just wants to eat meat again. bff is mari. probably a mccree main.

caroline: hates you but hates cyrus more. plague doctor aesthetic. probably satan or at least knows the guy. hello darkness her old friend. kills you in spanish.

beatrice: korean harpy secretary. fucking weirdo puts lemon in her coffee. me, an intellectual. turtlenecks in summer. what is humor? fuck you, pay me.

calypso: fake bitch with a god complex. local angel ruins everything. tilda-swinton-in-constanine.jpg. white nikes with a white suit. minimalism aesthetic.

anna: a hoe. fruit and champagne are the two basic food groups. also almond milk. what’s your skin routine? +5,000 instagram followers. chaotic good angel.

lauren: a(rt) hoe. she doesn’t get drunk, she has fun. pretty when you cry.mp3. it’s not kidnapping if it’s for art. only reads french vogue. wants a sugar daddy or a husband.

adrian: the biggest fucking art hoe. hipster. thinks they’re the only person who appreciates radiohead. poor college student. owns a skate or die t-shirt. *bong rip*

demetri: vaporware. you cannot give him any advice. will fucking vape on the pizza. buy my mix tape. #90′skid. リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー *even louder bong rip*

valerie: bleach blonde indian love witch. smells like a strawberry poptart. a lush employee in a past life. a feather boa and undies is a complete outfit. her pussy tastes like pepsi cola.

lizabelle: let’s go to the beach, beach. doesn’t like shoes. glitter eye shadow. probs dead but probs not. pink lemonade is best lemonade. knows every song by passion pit.

naomi: blanket cape. every daughter song ever made.mp3. softball lesbian. overalls and snapback. chapstick. eats tic tacs like they’re real candy. blue da ba de da ba da.

allison: young catholic nun eats out local angel. milk protection squad. i sweat to god. bangs. take me to church. probably a bastion main. has one of those pocket bibles.

elijah: a good church boy. is doing his best. exorcises demon in spanish. imagine an older marco diaz. a songbird with a brand new track. thought sword art online was okay.

#original character #oc #ask me about my children #prima writes #prima ponders

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austinpanda · 4 years

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Dad Letter 032920

29 March, 2020

Dear Dad--

Another week of pandemic, come and gone. I spent the week attempting to go nowhere and interact with no one, and failed. Social distancing is one thing, and I recognize its importance, but it hasn’t seemed to put a dent in our need for the occasional cheeseburger. So we stay indoors and do the responsible thing, and that lasts about 48 hours, and then someone says, “Okay, fuggit, I want some Wendy’s,” and off we go! I think if the worst-case pandemic scenario plays out, it’s going to be because of intelligent, well-informed people, like Zach and me, who couldn’t resist the smell of french fries. Then again, the news says you don’t have to be afraid to order takeout or go to the store, you just have to be careful about contact and distance and try not to touch your face.

I saw in your email that you’re applying for an Oklahoma marijuana card, is that right? Huzzah! If that’s the case, isn’t it fortunate that you have a relative who’s knowledgeable on the subject! As usual, I have to preface this by saying: Turns out I like the stuff, but everyone experiences it differently, and there’s a lot of pot-related hype and bullshit and snake oil (not to mention a lot of plain ol’ bad feelings about it) out there. I don’t think I mentioned this to you specifically, but not long after we moved here, since Maine has legal medical marijuana, I checked to see if I qualified to get a Maine marijuana card myself. And while I think the primary qualification is the one where they say, “That’ll be $60, please,” you do have to speak with a medical professional at some point and let them know what you think the stuff is going to help you with, medically.

I looked into it. My thinking was simply, I like the stuff, and Maine seems to think it qualifies as medicine, so if Maine thinks I might benefit from it, I can actually do it in a way that’s entirely within the law. And, HELLO, that’s always been the biggest drawback: knowing that, any time I buy some, I’m risking a traffic stop, and having my life irrevocably fucked up by the law. Doing it legally means that you can do it without fear of jail, or that you’ll get something that isn’t what the dealer says it is, or that you’ll get ripped off and have no recourse. Now it’s just...like buying alcohol.

Anyway, I checked to see if I qualified for a Maine marijuana card, and--prepare yourself for an enormous surprise--I do! I applied, and actually got a video call from a nurse practitioner on my cell phone. She asked about what kind of medical stuff I’m dealing with, and I mentioned depression, and pain I experience every day from my excitingly dysfunctional ankles, and that I sometimes can’t fall asleep. She asked what I was doing to treat those things, and I told her all the stuff I’ve done to address those problems, some of which persist, regardless. She granted my request for a marijuana card!

So now, whenever I want, I can drive to Green Alien Cannabis, which is right next to the Best Buy in Bangor, and used to be a Pizza Hut, and get a half ounce of “Afghani Thin Mint Purple Nurple Tooty Frooty Kush” variety, or whatever, and they’ll have suggestions on what different strain is best for what kind of symptoms. On that note, and I beg your pardon if you already knew this, but a brief primer: Marijuana has two “flavors,” if you will, and they act a bit differently. There’s sativa, which gives you energy and creativity and makes you want to paint paintings, and there’s indica, which makes you so relaxed that you melt into the sofa, and helps fall asleep. That second one, indica, is what I’d recommend. It’s gentler and more relaxing. And the places that sell the stuff will be able to tell you if you’re getting a sleepy indica or an energetic sativa, or a hybrid with both, and in what percentages. Another disclaimer: pot is bad for you! Anything you set on fire and inhale is bad for you. It’s not a magical panacea, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

I don’t remember much about your experience with pot, except Mom saying it made you paranoid and y’all had to walk around the block to calm you down. Also Stacy and I found a black bong one time (this would have been in the late 70s, I’m thinking?) only we had no idea what it was. For what it’s worth, when it’s legal, your brain tends not to spend too much time worrying about the police showing up and spoiling your evening.

I suppose I have at least a few non-weed-related things I could update you on! My job is supposed to start a week from Monday, but that seems unlikely with the coronavirus still making life interesting. I’ll call them; we’ll figure it out.

In anticipation of adopting the neighbor’s black stray cat, we’re trying to convince the cat that we’re friendly, and that human touch is a good thing, but she’s very flighty. At this rate, it’s going to take 600 years. I think we need a new strategy.

Our local grocery store has installed clear plastic shields in front of the checkers! It’s just a single big flat piece of clear plastic right in front of each checker, like a sneeze guard at a salad bar.

You’ll be getting $2,400 from the government in the next few weeks. I suggest you blow it all on weed and porn and MAGA hats! I’ll probably throw most of my corona-bucks onto my credit card, to help get that balance down.

I took an online test to find what kind of alcohol I am! According to the test, I’m tequila: wild, unpredictable, loud, and energetic. Truly, the wisdom of the internet is not to be scoffed at.

Someone left most of a pizza on the ground near the front of our trailer, and I took many photographs of seagulls eating it, including one pic of a crow showing up and stealing some pizza.

I’ll be happy when the quarantine is no longer necessary, but for now, we have everything we need, and plenty of stuff to keep us busy. Hope things are looking up for you two. All my love to you both, and wash those hands! :)

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ionlywanna-talktoyou · 7 years

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Interview with Mat Uychich

John: [sits down next to Mat, offering a hand shake and a smile] Hi buddy, shall we do this?

Mat: Yes, yes. How are we gonna go about it?

J: I thought we should dive right into it. So, first question is what solidified your decision to participate in the Fake Happy Tour and Show?

M: Well! My band, The Front Bottoms, is releasing a new record in about a month. We figured it'd be a good way to promote that. We've always loved attending this tour in particular so when we were offered a slot... we jumped at the opportunity!

J: We'll have to talk about that album again later!

M: For sure!

J: What has been the most pleasant surprise of this experience thus far and what are some ill side effects that you weren’t expecting?

M: If I'm being honest, I haven't really been here long. I will say though that the coolest thing so far has been the turnout. We're not the most easiest band to listen to so it's a pretty huge thing to see all of the people that are coming out just to dance with us. I don't think I was expecting to feel so off though. With the timing of when we hopped on the tour, I've slept in two different hotels in the past few days. I like routine so that's been a difficult way to start. I'm hopeful for when things really pick up though, and we're back on the bus consistently.

J: [nods while he speaks] There's a really bittersweet feeling to the beginning of a tour, huh? Cause you really wanna play but you also miss the comfort of your home. What do you miss most about home?

M: Definitely. I mean... I thought that I'd have lots to distract me with, but it's slow goings so far. Hopefully once things pick up, I won't have time to think about home and stuff. Really just mainly my routine. I'm a creature of habit so being thrown into a new environment, especially when that's always changing... it's difficult. And also, even though I was able to bring my dog, Wafflenugget... I miss my other pets.

J: Who are your biggest influences both personally and in your career?

M: Honestly, I have no kind of training really... I didn't even know how to tune drums until a couple of years ago. So all that I know has just been what feels right, and from watching and emulating other drummers. I really love Steve Lamos. The stuff he did with American Football has really shaped me as a drummer, at least I try to make it seem like that. In my personal life, I'd probably have to save my best friend, Brian Sella. I've known him since I was five so he's kind of been there for everything, guiding me and offering a bong rip or a supportive smile. Haha.

J: What has been the highlight of your career so far?

M: Hands down, I'd say opening up for Blink 182 this summer. We've been able to share the stage with a lot of cool musicians, but getting drumming tips from Travis Barker, and gushing over Alkaline Trio with Matt Skiba has definitely been the coolest thing so far.

J: Since you talked about Matt Skiba, who are some of your idols that you've been able to meet through the band and did they live up to the expectation?

M: Uhm... Jesse Lacey is way, way less cryptic outside of his lyrics. He says man and dude almost as much as I do - I guess I was picturing him to be much more serious and less approachable. We've also gotten to tour with Say Anything, and Max Bemis is exactly how you'd imagine him. Haha.

J: About that new album of yours, can you tell us anything about it yet? [smiles coyly at the camera, raising his eyebrows]

M: It's kind of a culmination of everything that we've done so far. With our last album, Back On Top... it was our first time writing stuff under Fueled By Ramen so we weren't used to things being such a big production. With Going Grey, it feels like we've found our footing. It's a bit more like our first two albums while still progressing forward. It's all about getting older, wishing that we weren't, and wondering if we're too old to be smoking so much pot. It feels good, we're excited to let everyone hear more than just the first two singles.

M: Oh God, we've put out a lot music. Including EPs, we've got 10 that we've released, be 11 come October 13th. This'll be our 5th record put out on a label... the rest is stuff that we recorded and pressed ourselves. For the first handful of years, we stuck to our DIY way of doing things; from booking our own tours, paying for everything ourselves... recording the music in our friend's attic. We just liked it all; playing shows was only the tip of it. We started The Front Bottoms when I was 17 so ten years we've been doing the thing, which is crazy to think about. Brian's lyrics really speak to people though so I think we'll keep going until we're too decrepit to tour. He has a way of talking about specific experiences, but in such simple words that they resonate with a lot of people listening to our music. He has this really cool ability to use only 11/16ths of the dictionary to come up with some really interesting perspectives. Don't make me try to define our genre, because I don't think we really fit anywhere. Haha.

J: [laughing] We've taken the inverse path. We started with a label and became independent about six to seven years ago.

M: Maybe we'll take a play out of The Maine's book, and follow suit. Haha.

J: I mean, it works for us. [shrugs] If someone were to start listening to your band right now, what are the five top songs you'd recommend? And are there any that you absolutely hate?

M: That's such a tough one. I guess the most quintessential TFB songs would probably be Lipstick Covered Magnet off of Rose, Maps off of our self-titled album, Twin Size Mattress off of Talon of the Hawk is probably the song we're most known for, uhmmmm... West Virginia off of Back On Top always gets people hype, and I guess our latest single Vacation Town. Some of those aren't necessarily my favorites or like... the undisputed best songs of ours, but they definitely paint a clear picture of who we are as a band; if you like those ones... you'll probably like our stuff.

J: What's your favorite place that you've been with the band?

M: I'm gonna have to say Germany. Lots of good, tall pints of beer, and I have family ties there. I got to go see the house that my grandma grew up in before the second world war. She was always my favorite relative so it was neat to kind of get a sense of her life before she came over to America. As far as my favorite place to play a show... nothing beats the atmosphere at home state shows in Jersey.

J: Have you been to South America yet? It's absolutely crazy there. [smiles, eyes widening as he talks about the place] M: We haven't, actually! Hopefully we'll get there at some point! We've only done North America, Europe, and Australia so far but we've been to each place loads.

J: [laughs] I always feel like a true celebrity when we go to Brazil or the Philippines. [more laughter, throws his head back] They follow us everywhere.

M: Thats really cool though! Do you guys have a big following over there?

J: I guess it's about the same in the other countries. Like, you hardly hear us on the radio and we're not reaaaally famous but since we go there once every two years or so, people really follow us when we do go. Okay so now it's just a curiosity of mine. If you weren't a musician, what job do you think you'd be doing?

M: I'd definitely be a carpenter. I have a shop back home, woodworking was really my first love even before drumming. I have an Associates in Sustainable Architecture and Design... maybe make use of that.

J: Last question. [leans in to seem like an important question] Does miss Wafflenugget want to be friends with Poppy?

M: This is my favorite question of all time! I think she really, really would! I can tell that she's been missing her other animal friends so I think that would be really great for her. She plays super well with other dogs... she's like a little mom!

J: I’m afraid that’s all that we have time for. But thank you so much for your time dude, this has been awesome!

#im just posting here to show mat's writer #I'll submit it once we decide this is a+

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