#transitional living room idas

[dapper-cat]

Portland Living Room Open Remodel ideas for a medium-sized transitional living room with a stone fireplace, gray walls, and a media wall. The room has a dark wood floor and brown carpet.

[jawnwutson]

Family Room in Portland Family room - mid-sized transitional open concept dark wood floor and brown floor family room idea with gray walls, a standard fireplace, a stone fireplace and a media wall

[saltyvsparrow]

I have a very similar story to trickster.

When I was 20, I almost simultaneously lost both my job and my rental house. At the same time, my sister was about to start nursing school. This required her to go to school full time and essentially work full time doing clinicals to get real world experience. The school wouldn't give her her clinical schedule until classes started. She had two children, an 8 year old and a 2 year old, and her husband did farm work, which was 6 days a week except for winter, when he was unemployed. She had no idea how she was going to manage child care and offered me free room and board so long as I arranged my school/work schedule so I could provide child care for my nieces.

I registered for classes at the local community college and began job hunting. To this day I consider Ontario, Oregon, the butthole of Oregon and Idaho. At the time I moved there, there was no public transit. The biggest employers in the area were the hospital, WalMart, and Ore-Ida. I had worked as retail management, and done administrative office work, but wasn't getting any responses to my job applications. If I wanted to have money to move once my sister finished nursing school, I needed a job.

I was desperate when I filled out the application to be a security guard at the Ore-Ida potato factory, and never thought I would get an interview, much less be hired. I was barely 20, had restrictions on my availability, and am a 5'3" female. But I was and worked there the entire time I lived in Ontario, almost 2 years. I spent most of my time in the guard shack at the entrance to the plant's parking lot. Once or twice a shift I would "do rounds" which consisted of driving the security truck and walking a predefined route around the plant. We had a stick like device that we had to run over device strips at various locations through the route, that recorded the date and time we were at each spot to prove we were completing the circuit as required.

The primary responsibilities of the job, besides completing the observational circuit, were the following: - One wall in the guard shack had photos of problem people that were not allowed on site. Sometimes they were not allowed on site at all, sometimes they were not allowed on site during specific shifts. These were almost 100% due to domestic violence issues. If the person wasn't allowed on site during 2 out of the 3 shifts, it was because the person they had the domestic violence situation with also worked at the plant, but was assigned a different shift. Security was not supposed to take any action to actually prevent the person from accessing the property, other than politely asking the person to leave when they first came towards the entrance, and not to let them through the gate if driving. If the person proceeded anyway, or would not leave, we were supposed to call the police. - If there was a medical emergency, we were required to either drive the injured person to the hospital if an ambulance couldn't be waited for and there wasn't a safety auditor on site, or drive the safety auditor and the injured person to the hospital. If an ambulance was called and arrived, we need to lead them to the location in the factory of the person having the medical emergency. - The factory has an onsite waste water treatment plant, and there are enough hazardous materials for serious risks and potential for dangerous environmental situations to occur. Enough so that any incident at the plant that required response from the fire department was a priority over any other location in the city. The fire department would get redirected to the plant even if they were responding to something else first. If a hazmat situation occurred, security had the list of all the employees that were hazmat certified, kept some hazmat suits (I assumed the safety auditors had some as well), and would lead the fire department and other government officials to the area where the hazmat emergency was occurring. - When completing the circuit I mentioned before, we had a couple of responsibilities. We needed to keep an eye out for spools of wire or other salvageable materials being thrown over the fence so they could be recovered and report the employee if we saw them in the act. We also were warned to watch out in certain locations, because we might run into employees having sex in certain stairwells. Because that had happened to other security guards before.

When I left Ontario and gave notice, my boss offered me a junior supervisor position to get me to stay. He hadn't had anyone in that position for years, because he felt it wasn't needed. But it would have given me a raise. I said no. I didn't want to stay in Ontario, and while that was more than reason enough, a few months earlier my boss had kissed me. I did not want him to kiss me, I did nothing to prompt it, and he was married with children. I couldn't get out of that town fast enough.

Ever since I got a job as a security guard I can’t take heist movies seriously anymore.

[sidewalkstamps]

Galer & Beckner Contractors (Photo taken by Rachel Hughes in Atwater Village neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA in November of 2023).

They were listed at 447 W San Fernando Rd, Burbank under "Cement Contractors" in the 1922 Southwest Builder and Contractor (Volume 59, F. W. Dodge Company). In the same volume, we see that they were the builder of four 4-room dwellings at 4211-13 W Cumberland Ave for Mrs. Mary F Howe of 5311 Sunset Blvd. They also had a lien against Ida M. Randolph for a lot in the subdivision of Rancho Providencia and Scott Tract.

The best resource for this contracting firm is the "Burbank City Directory 1922" section of the San Fernando Valley City Directory 1922, with a very large number of classified listings in different related categories, including:

Contractors--Buildings

Contractors--Cement

Contractors--Concrete

Contractors--General

Contractors--Grading

Contractors--Road

Engineers--Civil

Engineers--Consulting

Engineers--Municipal (this one was listed twice for some reason)

Engineers--Structural

Surveyors

In the same directory were non-classified listings and included many people who worked for Galer & Beckner (the company itself was listed as Contractors and Engineers):

Fred G Beckner, married to Olive, lived at 629 Angeleno

John Booza, "lab" (maybe just 'laborer'?), lived in Glendale

L Ray Crum, cement worker

Arthur Esterbrook, foreman

John W Galer, married to Mabel, lived in Glendale

Emerson D Jones, "lab," lived in Los Angeles

Theo C Krigbaum, foreman, lived at Elizabeth Hotel

Jack C Truitt, truck driver, lived at Elizabeth Hotel

(Los Angeles Directory Company, 1922, accessed via the Los Angeles Public Library).

You'll see some say 447 W 2d and some say San Fernando Blvd. The illustrated ad above does "447 W. 2d (San Fernando Blvd.)" so I'm guessing we were in a transitional period here.

A fun section in the directory is the not very secret listing of "Secret Societies."

It seems like Beckner had also done surveying work on his own. Here are three examples from "US Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management Field Notes of the Dependent Resurvey of a Portion of the West Boundary and a Portion of the Subdivisional Lines, the Subdivision of Sections 17 and 18, and the Metes-and-Bonds Survey of Certain National Park Service Tracts in Sections 17 and 18, Being a Portion of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area Boundary, in Township 1 South, Range 18 West, of the San Bernardino Meridian in the State of California" <-- Wow that was a long title, the survey was 'executed by' Robert B. Fink and Richard S. Kaiser, cadastral surveyors, from January 24 - September 21, 1989.

In 1909, Beckner wrote an about about himself in the alumni magazine of the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity (Shield and Diamond, Volume 19).

(Turns out I did an early post on this firm also. Although it's much shorter, it includes some different information.)

[idabuildsus]

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Every element of your bathroom renovation is given top priority by Seattle interior design companies, who emphasize combining functionality and beauty. Every aspect of the makeover, from optimizing space use to choosing the ideal fixtures and finishes, is painstakingly prepared to guarantee a smooth and magnificent transition.

Why Choose Seattle Interior Design Firms?

1. Expertise in Pacific Northwest Style: Interior design companies in Seattle are aware of the distinct charm and personality of the Pacific Northwest style. They know how to capture the essence of Seattle style in your bathroom, whether it’s through the application of minimalist design concepts or the integration of natural components like wood and stone.

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Transform Your Bathroom Today

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Conclusion

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Contact Us: IDA Builds  Website: — https://idabuilds.com/ Email: — hello@idabuilds.com Call: — +1 425–598–9820 Address: — 4235 147th Ave SE, Bellevue, WA, United States, Washington

[7r0773r]

Time Without Keys by Ida Vitale, translated by Sarah Pollack

Iceland, 2000

Ceibos, ceibas, only one letter marks their clear distinction. Red ceibos and green ceibas reign, also elderberries, willows, and cypresses, in the blessed incandescence common in the south awash with songs and colors. In Iceland, the blue and white island, there are no songbirds, only seabirds, no music, except that of hands, hands moving stones, but not every stone, so moss can grow and the green can begin singing, ever softly.

*Author's note: "Not every stone," because those that could be a home to an elf, which many believe in, are respected.

***

Nostalgia for the Dodo

I'm nostalgic for the dodo. What I miss isn't fictional, almost a myth, even if dictionaries do forget it. It appeared as real as old age and death, in a display case at the Victoria and Albert, astonishing me with its existence beyond my childhood readings, the immense and innocent companion of the waistcoated rabbit and his haste.

Akin to a goose, its aggressive beak was of no use to save its sympathetic race from extinction during a time of savagery, maybe worse, when I wouldn't have wished to live. I imagined its feathers swan white, now the yellowed ivory of abandoned pianos or lace from a venerable wedding. I imagined its strange tarsal gait, the deserted guardian of a truth transformed into dim fantasy.

Yes, I'm nostalgic for the dodo, and more, for the countless extinctions it condenses, for the time of crossing the looking-glass to discover that evil could be vanquished, being nothing but an absurd figure escaped from a deck of cards.

***

Between Yeses and Noes

In the beginning I was sweet, obedient. I later discovered a surfeit of motives for No. Then later, much, much later, Yes was possible, when harnessed to love, to trust earned within faithful walls. But, unhappy arc, alone now, Yes decays. Outside the windows and from a distance, No bares its sharpened teeth at the world's obtuseness and its conspiracies.

***

Fortune

For years, to relish errors and their amends, to be able to speak, walk freely, not endure mutilation, to not enter churches, or enter, to read, listen to beloved music, by night be a being as well as by day.

To not be married off in a transaction, valued in goats, to not suffer the dominion of relatives or legal lapidation. To not parade ever again or allow words that inject iron filings in your blood.

To discover for yourself another unforeseen being on the bridge formed by a gaze.

To be human and woman, no more no less.

***

To Translate

Someone overflows at the center of the night. Facing the order of another's words, subjugated rebel, she offers the song of her whole memory, she sheathes them in new skin and lovingly puts them to sleep in a new tongue.

Lights off, the wind trumpets in the trees and there's a chill close to the window and the certainty that every landscape is disrupted within like a sentence that reaches the lair of formidable meaning. There is no benevolent guide waiting in the wasteland.

Steps are taken blindly, starless the sky. And thought anticipates wild beasts.

***

Starling

As if the starling left nothing to wonder but his name. For in whom but him is the auric at work? First it's his beak, in proximity to everything. And those flecks of gold in his feathers? Even dressed this way he bustles about the grasses of the earth. Like a medieval knight, he's ready for a tournament or a siege or the dust from the road in his clothes of a noble vagabond. Experienced and aloof, with him there's no room for dialogue or oblation. Perhaps the eye of Ahura Mazda contemplating in Persepolis the dark satin of his regalia left him spangled with brilliance and of that he is not unaware.

***

Snail

The snail moves with expedition though people don't believe it and think he only transits the wall in search of warm sun.

On the contrary, if you happen on his chalky bubbles in the umbra, know: he neither mates nor slumbers. Desiring better days to come,

he's resolved to swap his home. It's not a skyscraper he eyes with iron and mortar overblown

but the nest where the ovenbird abides. Soon you'll find him crossing ice in search of an igloo just his size.

***

Tiny Kingdom

1 Words: vacant palaces, city half-asleep. Before what knife will the thunder arrive —the flood follows— that awakens them?

2 Vocabularies, errant vocations, stars that irradiate light before their birth, or debris from distant marvels. Their eternal dust floats. How to become their mother liquor, even a wound on which to pause, how to go from arid to arable field  with their celestial mulch?

3 Sometimes words form a chord, the waterfalls ascend, break the law of gravity. Poetry, a powerful moon, gathers desolate tides and lifts them up where they can hazard the skies.

4 Field of fault lines, halo without a center: words, promises, portion, prize.

The past dissolved, no support for the present, crumbled the inconceivable future.

5 Prose under pressure used as deadwood prose without live coals, face down on the page,  no longer wind, barely breeze. Fear its turbulence like one who can't swim fears a reckless boat.

***

Dark

Like this bird that waits until the light dies to begin singing, I write in darkness, when nothing shines and calls out from the earth. I commence in the dark, l observe, I burrow within myself, as I am the darkness, toward  what's darkest of all, down the well of time of being-almost-nonbeing, after the seed, gem, origin, birth of myself, of mother, grandmothers, unattainable ocean of time and lost, swallowed-up creatures.

Patinir, magical and depraved, his otherworldly cave. The rower in the background thinks he's making headway.

***

From Tiger the Leap

From tiger the leap, from tiger, the ambushed hideout. Life lightning fast leaves, after claws swipe, the gash from which perseverance drips.

Then come the reasons to forget; tamed, we lick the new, dark scar when it aches and oblivious to the forest, we cross it again for our daily minimum.

***

The Word

Expectant words, fabulous in themselves, promises of possible meanings, artful, aerial, irate, Ariadnes.

A slight error makes them ornamental. Their indescribable exactitude erases us.

***

Step by Step

All at once wind will come and it will be autumn. Summer leaves and a memory falls and life descends another rung without being noticed, from one yellow to another. Farewell, behind, the step I haven't taken, friendship uncertain, barely a dream. All at once it will be autumn. There is no more time. I lost a magic double of my name, a passing sign that could render a more exact world. I lost the peace, the war. Perhaps I lost my life and haven't yet earned my own death.

In the empty space someone plucks a string, little by little. It is autumn already, so soon. There is no more time.

[kammartinez]

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

The eleven-minute black and white documentary, James Baldwin: From Another Place, directed by Sedat Pakay and filmed in Istanbul in May 1970, opens with a shot of Baldwin lying supine in a large bed in a sparsely decorated room. The curtains are closed. Baldwin throws back the covers and gets up; he is wearing nothing but a pair of white briefs. He turns his back to the cam­era and opens the curtains. A sharp Mediterranean light floods in. Baldwin scratches the small of his back, and we hear him say in voiceover: “I suppose that many people do blame me for being out of the States as often as I am, but one can’t afford to worry about that because one does, you know, you do what you have to do the way you have to do it. And as someone who is outside of the States you realize that it’s impossible to get out, the American powers are everywhere.” The camera pans over the glittering Bosphorus Strait as American ships glide silently through the passage connecting Asia and Europe.

Pakay’s film has long been almost impossible to see in the United States, aside from a short clip on YouTube. But in February, it began streaming on the Criterion Channel, and its reappearance is a useful occasion to re-examine one of the most important, and yet relatively unknown, aspects of Baldwin’s career: his time in Turkey. At the time Pakay made his film, Baldwin had been living in Istanbul intermittently for almost a decade. He first arrived there in 1961, broke, emotionally spent, and struggling to complete his third novel, Another Country. The Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, who had met Baldwin in New York in 1957 when he was cast as Giovanni in the Actors Studio adaptation of Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin’s sec­ond novel), had given him an open invitation to visit, and follow­ing a demoralizing trip to Israel, Baldwin showed up on Cezzar’s doorstep. He quickly made himself at home, and over the next ten years lived irregularly in Istanbul, Erdek, and Bodrum, socializing with the Turkish intelligentsia and a small circle of Black artists and activists who were living in Turkey or passing through.

Istanbul offered Baldwin a refuge during the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. In a 1970 conversation with Ida Lewis for Essence mag­azine, Baldwin said of his decision to move to the city, “It was very useful for me to go to a place like Istanbul at that point in my life, because it was so far out of the way from what I called home and the pressures.” As the scholar Magdalena Zaborowska shows in her book James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile, which is the essential text about Baldwin’s Turkish sojourn, Baldwin was a pioneer of intersectional thinking and aesthetics, and his survival during the height of the civil rights era depended upon becoming a transatlantic or supranational writer living in transit among differ­ent cultures and languages. Baldwin had first left the United States, for Paris, in 1948, and had lived out of the United States for years prior to his arrival in Istanbul. But the clarity and safety afforded by his time there allowed him to more sharply articulate America’s assaultive realities and to give expression to the connections between his personal wounds and the scars of racialized political history.

What does the warm, vul­nerable, and playful Baldwin captured on film by Pakay tell us about his need to leave America time and again in search of safety?

The works Baldwin generated during the ten years he spent off and on in Istanbul, including seminal texts like Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and No Name In the Street, center place and dis­location, and offer an integrated vision of himself: a queer, Black intellectual who was raised in the church but who became criti­cal of Christianity, a man who respected but did not identify with Black Muslim ideology, and whose identity was baffling to both white liberals and Black radical intellectuals. Istanbul’s architec­tural palimpsest, together with its historical and cultural richness and contradictions, must have only strengthened Baldwin’s resolve to create work that was complex and kaleidoscopic in both form and content. His lability of mood and layered inner landscape mir­ror the city’s multifaceted character, with its refusal of neat distinc­tions between tradition and modernity, East and West, Christianity and Islam.

Istanbul was a liminal space of healing for Baldwin, a writing haven that he saw as having saved his life. As Zaborowska notes, this may explain why the Baldwin we see in Pakay’s documentary is far more relaxed and at ease than the Baldwin we are accustomed to seeing in American media from that era. And yet, Baldwin’s decade in Turkey remains an enigma and a lacuna in our collective imagi­nation. Zaborowska’s is the only book-length treatment of Baldwin’s time there, and even people familiar with Baldwin’s writing are often unaware he ever lived in Istanbul. What can we learn from explor­ing his time there? How does his self-imposed exile speak to our reluctance to relocate American literature within a transnational and internationalist context and to acknowledge the role of Black writers and artists in shaping that literature? And what does the warm, vul­nerable, and playful Baldwin captured on film by Pakay tell us about his need to leave America time and again in search of safety?

the respite turkey offered Baldwin, combined with Istanbul’s vibrancy and the warmth with which he was received, sparked one of the most prolific periods of his artistic life. In 1961, when he first arrived, he was haggard and exhausted. His trip to Israel had deep­ened his disillusionment with Christianity, and he was still mourn­ing Eugene Worth, a Black socialist and dear friend, who, in 1946, had killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. In addition, Baldwin had been trying without success to complete Another Country, his courageous and groundbreaking exploration of bisexuality and interracial love.

Worth’s death, which Baldwin memorializes in Another Country, had devastated Baldwin for years, and he had tried and failed again and again to finish the novel until he was delivered from the strain of severe writer’s block in Istanbul. Baldwin wrote the book’s final sentence while at a party at Cezzar’s house in what he described as “the city which the people from heaven had made their home.” When he set his pen down and looked up, his eyes met those of David Leeming, an English professor who was in Istanbul on a teaching gig. That encounter remapped the course of both their lives. That night, they left the party and walked across the Galata Bridge to a bar in the neighborhood of Beyoğlu. In Leeming’s essay “James Baldwin, Turkey, and Sedat Pakay,” written in celebration of the Northwest African American Museum’s exhibition of photo­graphs by Pakay, he recalls that the two spent the evening talking about “being black, being gay, being American, and about a mutu­ally favorite author, Henry James—who [Baldwin said] under­stood the failure of America to see through its myths to reality.”

Over the next couple of years, in between trips to Paris and New York City, Baldwin often went back to Istanbul. He and Leeming continued to spend time together there until Leeming started his Ph.D. at New York University in 1963 and Baldwin hired him as his assistant. In 1966, they returned together to Istanbul, where Baldwin hoped to finish his new novel, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, just as he had completed Another Country there. With the help of Cezzar, Leeming writes, he and Baldwin found an apartment first in “Ayaz Paşa and, after a time in the little village of Erdek on the Sea of Marmara.” In the summer, they left Erdek and rented a house along the Bosphorus where Baldwin hosted legendary parties. In the fall, they moved to Paa’s Library, “a beau­tiful old house…on a cliff above the Bosphorus in the village of Rumeli Hisari.”

The years Baldwin spent off and on in Turkey coincided with one of the country’s most vibrant and expansive periods. The 1950s in Turkey had been a period of economic decline, ruthless author­itarianism, and iron-fisted censorship, a confluence of negative forces that gave rise to mass mobilization and to student-led pop­ular protests. In 1960, the atmosphere of repression and unrest led the pro-Western Turkish Armed Forces to organize a military coup; they swiftly tried and executed former heads of state. By 1965, free elections had been restored, and liberal constitutional reform had significantly expanded freedom of speech. The nation’s position as a strategic U.S. ally had been salvaged, but its cultural flowering continued, along with anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist move­ments similar to those that were emerging elsewhere around the world. Baldwin’s work and lived experience spoke directly to the political and aesthetic debates of the time. In Turkey, in a context of cultural ferment, Baldwin was revered as a major American and transnational writer, rather than being put in a position of having to prove his legitimacy over and over.

Still, even in Turkey, Baldwin could not fully escape America. During the Cold War, relations between the United States and Turkey were founded on military collaboration and cooperation; the United States sent ships to Turkish waters to counter the threat of Soviet expansion, making Turkey a source of anti-Soviet mil­itary aid. As Baldwin said to Sedat Pakay, “American powers are everywhere.” His feelings fluctuated between entrapment, the sense that no matter how far he traveled from the violence in the United States he could not, existentially speaking, “get out,” and the feelings of transcendence and revival that Cezzar’s warm hos­pitality and Turkey itself afforded him.

These fertile exchanges, which were in stark contrast with the silencing Baldwin had faced in Hollywood, led him to create more aesthetically innovative and politically bold work.

If anything, as Zaborowska writes, “Baldwin’s awareness of the imperial presence of the United States and of global racism increased and sharpened while he was living in Turkey,” and he became even more conscious of America’s moral bankruptcy in the international arena. That led him to increase his efforts to address the gap between the myth of America’s benevolence and its violent reality. He dubbed the mental condition that allowed and perpet­uated this gap “irreality,” argued that the very notion of nation­alism and its associated narratives constituted a global pathology, and denounced the methods by which each of us is socialized to embrace its madness. In the 1970 Essence magazine conversation, Baldwin told Lewis,

During my Istanbul stay I learned a lot about dealing with peo­ple that are neither Western nor Eastern. In a way, Turkey is a satellite on the Russian border. That’s something to watch. You learn about the brutality and the power of the Western world. You’re living with people whom nobody cares about, who are bounced like a tennis ball between the great powers. Not that I wasn’t previously aware of the cynicism of power politics and foreign aid, but it was a revelation to see it functioning every day in that sort of theater.

Lewis pressed him further, asking if the injustices suffered by Turks at the hands of the United States were similar to those that affected Black men in America. No, Baldwin replied, adding that “the peoples of Turkey, Greece, even the peoples in Jamaica have not gone through the fire. They don’t know that the dream which was America is over.” At several points in the interview, Baldwin insisted that he left America in order to write, and that as long as he was writing it did not matter where he was. In any case, he said, he no longer believed in nations.

Sedat Pakay, James Baldwin with Water Carrier, Istanbul, 1966. Courtesy Hudson Film Works II.

Baldwin was in Hollywood on April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered. In the face of the assassination, which came after the earlier murders of Medgar Evers and Malcolm, Baldwin struggled with despair. Tellingly, his thoughts turned to Istanbul, and he wrote Cezzar, saying that there was nothing left to do but to “pray to those gods that are non-western, non-Christian.” His work on the script took on renewed urgency, and he began to view completing the script as, in Leeming’s words, an “act of love and an act of faith.” But the struggle with Columbia Pictures went from bad to worse. At one point, Baldwin received a memo that said he had to “‘avoid giving any political implications to Malcolm’s trip to Mecca.’” Baldwin was enraged.

Even worse, Columbia attempted to whitewash and neutral­ize Malcolm’s image by hiring Arnold Perl to drastically rework Baldwin’s script; the studio, Leeming writes, objected to Baldwin’s fluid and loosely structured writing. During the weeks of anguish that followed, Pakay flew to Los Angeles from Istanbul to offer support to his exhausted and progressively less stable friend. But Baldwin’s relationship with the studio continued to deterio­rate, and he ended up overdosing on sleeping pills. He survived, promptly quit the film project, and left Hollywood for Turkey, by way of New York and Paris.

In Paris, Baldwin picked up his mentor, the artist Beauford Delaney, who, Baldwin wrote, had first taught him “how to see” and who had, along with Richard Wright, inspired him to leave Greenwich Village to live in exile in Paris. Baldwin and Delaney traveled to Istanbul where Baldwin recovered, as he had done when he first arrived at Cezzar’s house years before.

During this stretch in Istanbul, Baldwin became more deeply engaged in Turkish life. He began to collaborate with local artists and theaters. These fertile exchanges, which were in stark contrast with the silencing he had faced in Hollywood, led him to create more aesthetically innovative and politically bold work. His confi­dence restored, Baldwin returned to his own vision of Malcolm X and completed One Day When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” which would be pub­lished in 1972. But perhaps his more important accomplishment during this time was directing a play for the theater company run by Cezzar and his wife, the actress Gülriz Sururi. The play was John Herbert’s 1967 Fortune and Men’s Eyes, a radical work that explores prison homosexuality. The production left an indelible mark on Turkish theater, while doubling, at least for Baldwin, as a denunciation of the American film and theater industries’ refusal to address systemic homophobia and racism.

According to Zaborowska, Baldwin’s staging of Herbert’s play was a “bravura production [that] took the Turkish theater world by storm.” The play toured rural and urban Turkey, from Istanbul to Ankara and Izmir to a small working-class town on the coast of the Black Sea. Zaborowska points out that Baldwin’s message that the “prison could be anywhere,” together with his background as a “black American activist resonated with the revolutionary cultural moment in Turkey at the end of the 1960s.”

Though the play’s success was in part due to Turkey’s left-leaning political climate and expanding constitutional freedoms in the aftermath of the coup, its explicit exploration of violence, erot­icism, and homosexuality eventually led to a scandal that resulted in a brief ban and an investigation by officially appointed experts. But citing the twenty-first article of the Turkish Republic’s new constitution, the experts’ report ultimately “defended the obliga­tions of artists to critically expose false and immoral perceptions by exhibiting them.” The Turkish defense of the artist’s obliga­tions aligned with Baldwin’s view of the artist as a “disturber of the peace,” morally bound to speak the truth and expose those social ills which, left unseen, would remain unaddressed.

The work Baldwin pro­duced during his Turkish decade reminds us to view the notion of a national literature with critical distance, and to grapple with the boundary-crossing power and potential of novels.

“At home in exile in Turkey,” Zaborowska writes, “he was working with friends who were in the avant-garde of the local experimental art world, who were ready to try new things on their audience and trusted his vision and instinct.” As a result, working on the play provided Baldwin with the space he needed to deepen his reflec­tions on individual freedom and the intersections of racial, gen­dered, and sexual violence that had preoccupied him in Giovanni’s Room and Another Country. And the hybrid, unguarded, and polit­ically radical production he came up with in collaboration with his friends in Istanbul was in direct contrast to the dismal experience of having his work watered down in Hollywood. In that sense, the play, and its explosive reception, serve as prime examples of how contact between local and migrant artists and intellectuals can reframe the national and global dynamics of cultural production.

The Baldwin who emerged in Turkey was inclusive and inte­grated. He eschewed the binaries along which he was repeatedly asked to draw the lines of his identity in America, where he could not be Black and queer, or Black and an intellectual, or queer and Christian. In his life, Baldwin defied the reductive dichotomies of American social life, with its fixations on race and sexuality, just as his work rejected singular or easily essentialized views of the self. It could be said that he wrote in order to understand the American problem beyond national terms, recognizing that the American polity and policies have always been global; his time in Istanbul helped him articulate this with greater clarity. The work he pro­duced during his Turkish decade reminds us to view the notion of a national literature with critical distance, and to grapple with the boundary-crossing power and potential of novels. Doing so, as Zaborowska suggests, “helps us to embrace more fully the transnational dimension of mid-twentieth-century black literary culture.”

Toward the end of Pakay’s documentary, Baldwin speaks of the way many of his American critics and readers ascribed his pres­ence in Turkey to the “Orient’s” reputation as mysterious, infe­rior, unpredictable, and sexually promiscuous. This patronizing and simplistic construction, promulgated by the American media, served to obscure the complexities of Baldwin’s life and work in Turkey, his influence on Turkish artistic expression, and Turkey’s generative effect on him. This valorization of simplified represen­tations over complex ones is symptomatic of the “irreality” that prevents us from understanding America as a layered, hybrid, plu­ral, and global space, and from seeing beyond its myths. Perhaps what is most painfully lost in this misunderstanding—though evi­dent in the warmth and vulnerability of Baldwin’s face as captured by Pakay—is that Baldwin’s exile from America began before he left Harlem.

In the film, we see a close-up of Baldwin’s hands, holding a tespih, the string of beads used in Muslim prayer. We watch him walk, finely dressed, through Istanbul. Passersby turn to look at him as he makes his way through the crowds to Eminonu, Taksim Square, and the antique booksellers in Beyazit, where he plucks from a display the Turkish translations of Another Country and Herbert’s play Fortune and Men’s Eyes. He holds a book titled The FBI Story up to the camera, signaling the pervasive presence of American power and its entrapments. Conversing with Pakay, he says, “One sees [America] better from a distance and you can make comparisons to another place, another country.” While seated at his desk later in the film, his papers and books strewn across the table, he speaks at some length about his sexuality and his love of men and women and says, turning his head away from the camera so that he is in profile, “American men are paranoiac on the sub­ject of homosexuality.” “Love,” he says, “comes in strange packages.” Next, the film moves outdoors. Two stern-faced, tuxedoed waiters stand on either side of Baldwin as he sits drinking tea. He winks at the camera. The final shot is of his face breaking into a warm smile.

Baldwin left Istanbul for Paris not long after. He departed at the height of his fame, sought after by the international press and the Turkish cultural establishment. But he tended to grow restless in any place he stayed for long. And Zaborowska notes that in Paris, Baldwin could more easily “stay in close contact with his American publishers and editors at a time when Turkish telecommunications and postal services did not work very well.” Baldwin returned to Turkey for the last time in the autumn of 1981, twenty years after his first visit. He vacationed at a farmhouse in Bodrum with Cezzar and Sururi. It was, Leeming writes, “an interlude of almost idyllic calm.” Turkey restored him. More than that, as he said over and over, Turkey “saved my life.”

[kamreadsandrecs]

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

The eleven-minute black and white documentary, James Baldwin: From Another Place, directed by Sedat Pakay and filmed in Istanbul in May 1970, opens with a shot of Baldwin lying supine in a large bed in a sparsely decorated room. The curtains are closed. Baldwin throws back the covers and gets up; he is wearing nothing but a pair of white briefs. He turns his back to the cam­era and opens the curtains. A sharp Mediterranean light floods in. Baldwin scratches the small of his back, and we hear him say in voiceover: “I suppose that many people do blame me for being out of the States as often as I am, but one can’t afford to worry about that because one does, you know, you do what you have to do the way you have to do it. And as someone who is outside of the States you realize that it’s impossible to get out, the American powers are everywhere.” The camera pans over the glittering Bosphorus Strait as American ships glide silently through the passage connecting Asia and Europe.

Pakay’s film has long been almost impossible to see in the United States, aside from a short clip on YouTube. But in February, it began streaming on the Criterion Channel, and its reappearance is a useful occasion to re-examine one of the most important, and yet relatively unknown, aspects of Baldwin’s career: his time in Turkey. At the time Pakay made his film, Baldwin had been living in Istanbul intermittently for almost a decade. He first arrived there in 1961, broke, emotionally spent, and struggling to complete his third novel, Another Country. The Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, who had met Baldwin in New York in 1957 when he was cast as Giovanni in the Actors Studio adaptation of Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin’s sec­ond novel), had given him an open invitation to visit, and follow­ing a demoralizing trip to Israel, Baldwin showed up on Cezzar’s doorstep. He quickly made himself at home, and over the next ten years lived irregularly in Istanbul, Erdek, and Bodrum, socializing with the Turkish intelligentsia and a small circle of Black artists and activists who were living in Turkey or passing through.

Istanbul offered Baldwin a refuge during the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. In a 1970 conversation with Ida Lewis for Essence mag­azine, Baldwin said of his decision to move to the city, “It was very useful for me to go to a place like Istanbul at that point in my life, because it was so far out of the way from what I called home and the pressures.” As the scholar Magdalena Zaborowska shows in her book James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile, which is the essential text about Baldwin’s Turkish sojourn, Baldwin was a pioneer of intersectional thinking and aesthetics, and his survival during the height of the civil rights era depended upon becoming a transatlantic or supranational writer living in transit among differ­ent cultures and languages. Baldwin had first left the United States, for Paris, in 1948, and had lived out of the United States for years prior to his arrival in Istanbul. But the clarity and safety afforded by his time there allowed him to more sharply articulate America’s assaultive realities and to give expression to the connections between his personal wounds and the scars of racialized political history.

What does the warm, vul­nerable, and playful Baldwin captured on film by Pakay tell us about his need to leave America time and again in search of safety?

The works Baldwin generated during the ten years he spent off and on in Istanbul, including seminal texts like Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and No Name In the Street, center place and dis­location, and offer an integrated vision of himself: a queer, Black intellectual who was raised in the church but who became criti­cal of Christianity, a man who respected but did not identify with Black Muslim ideology, and whose identity was baffling to both white liberals and Black radical intellectuals. Istanbul’s architec­tural palimpsest, together with its historical and cultural richness and contradictions, must have only strengthened Baldwin’s resolve to create work that was complex and kaleidoscopic in both form and content. His lability of mood and layered inner landscape mir­ror the city’s multifaceted character, with its refusal of neat distinc­tions between tradition and modernity, East and West, Christianity and Islam.

Istanbul was a liminal space of healing for Baldwin, a writing haven that he saw as having saved his life. As Zaborowska notes, this may explain why the Baldwin we see in Pakay’s documentary is far more relaxed and at ease than the Baldwin we are accustomed to seeing in American media from that era. And yet, Baldwin’s decade in Turkey remains an enigma and a lacuna in our collective imagi­nation. Zaborowska’s is the only book-length treatment of Baldwin’s time there, and even people familiar with Baldwin’s writing are often unaware he ever lived in Istanbul. What can we learn from explor­ing his time there? How does his self-imposed exile speak to our reluctance to relocate American literature within a transnational and internationalist context and to acknowledge the role of Black writers and artists in shaping that literature? And what does the warm, vul­nerable, and playful Baldwin captured on film by Pakay tell us about his need to leave America time and again in search of safety?

the respite turkey offered Baldwin, combined with Istanbul’s vibrancy and the warmth with which he was received, sparked one of the most prolific periods of his artistic life. In 1961, when he first arrived, he was haggard and exhausted. His trip to Israel had deep­ened his disillusionment with Christianity, and he was still mourn­ing Eugene Worth, a Black socialist and dear friend, who, in 1946, had killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. In addition, Baldwin had been trying without success to complete Another Country, his courageous and groundbreaking exploration of bisexuality and interracial love.

Worth’s death, which Baldwin memorializes in Another Country, had devastated Baldwin for years, and he had tried and failed again and again to finish the novel until he was delivered from the strain of severe writer’s block in Istanbul. Baldwin wrote the book’s final sentence while at a party at Cezzar’s house in what he described as “the city which the people from heaven had made their home.” When he set his pen down and looked up, his eyes met those of David Leeming, an English professor who was in Istanbul on a teaching gig. That encounter remapped the course of both their lives. That night, they left the party and walked across the Galata Bridge to a bar in the neighborhood of Beyoğlu. In Leeming’s essay “James Baldwin, Turkey, and Sedat Pakay,” written in celebration of the Northwest African American Museum’s exhibition of photo­graphs by Pakay, he recalls that the two spent the evening talking about “being black, being gay, being American, and about a mutu­ally favorite author, Henry James—who [Baldwin said] under­stood the failure of America to see through its myths to reality.”

Over the next couple of years, in between trips to Paris and New York City, Baldwin often went back to Istanbul. He and Leeming continued to spend time together there until Leeming started his Ph.D. at New York University in 1963 and Baldwin hired him as his assistant. In 1966, they returned together to Istanbul, where Baldwin hoped to finish his new novel, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, just as he had completed Another Country there. With the help of Cezzar, Leeming writes, he and Baldwin found an apartment first in “Ayaz Paşa and, after a time in the little village of Erdek on the Sea of Marmara.” In the summer, they left Erdek and rented a house along the Bosphorus where Baldwin hosted legendary parties. In the fall, they moved to Paa’s Library, “a beau­tiful old house…on a cliff above the Bosphorus in the village of Rumeli Hisari.”

The years Baldwin spent off and on in Turkey coincided with one of the country’s most vibrant and expansive periods. The 1950s in Turkey had been a period of economic decline, ruthless author­itarianism, and iron-fisted censorship, a confluence of negative forces that gave rise to mass mobilization and to student-led pop­ular protests. In 1960, the atmosphere of repression and unrest led the pro-Western Turkish Armed Forces to organize a military coup; they swiftly tried and executed former heads of state. By 1965, free elections had been restored, and liberal constitutional reform had significantly expanded freedom of speech. The nation’s position as a strategic U.S. ally had been salvaged, but its cultural flowering continued, along with anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist move­ments similar to those that were emerging elsewhere around the world. Baldwin’s work and lived experience spoke directly to the political and aesthetic debates of the time. In Turkey, in a context of cultural ferment, Baldwin was revered as a major American and transnational writer, rather than being put in a position of having to prove his legitimacy over and over.

Still, even in Turkey, Baldwin could not fully escape America. During the Cold War, relations between the United States and Turkey were founded on military collaboration and cooperation; the United States sent ships to Turkish waters to counter the threat of Soviet expansion, making Turkey a source of anti-Soviet mil­itary aid. As Baldwin said to Sedat Pakay, “American powers are everywhere.” His feelings fluctuated between entrapment, the sense that no matter how far he traveled from the violence in the United States he could not, existentially speaking, “get out,” and the feelings of transcendence and revival that Cezzar’s warm hos­pitality and Turkey itself afforded him.

These fertile exchanges, which were in stark contrast with the silencing Baldwin had faced in Hollywood, led him to create more aesthetically innovative and politically bold work.

If anything, as Zaborowska writes, “Baldwin’s awareness of the imperial presence of the United States and of global racism increased and sharpened while he was living in Turkey,” and he became even more conscious of America’s moral bankruptcy in the international arena. That led him to increase his efforts to address the gap between the myth of America’s benevolence and its violent reality. He dubbed the mental condition that allowed and perpet­uated this gap “irreality,” argued that the very notion of nation­alism and its associated narratives constituted a global pathology, and denounced the methods by which each of us is socialized to embrace its madness. In the 1970 Essence magazine conversation, Baldwin told Lewis,

During my Istanbul stay I learned a lot about dealing with peo­ple that are neither Western nor Eastern. In a way, Turkey is a satellite on the Russian border. That’s something to watch. You learn about the brutality and the power of the Western world. You’re living with people whom nobody cares about, who are bounced like a tennis ball between the great powers. Not that I wasn’t previously aware of the cynicism of power politics and foreign aid, but it was a revelation to see it functioning every day in that sort of theater.

Lewis pressed him further, asking if the injustices suffered by Turks at the hands of the United States were similar to those that affected Black men in America. No, Baldwin replied, adding that “the peoples of Turkey, Greece, even the peoples in Jamaica have not gone through the fire. They don’t know that the dream which was America is over.” At several points in the interview, Baldwin insisted that he left America in order to write, and that as long as he was writing it did not matter where he was. In any case, he said, he no longer believed in nations.

Sedat Pakay, James Baldwin with Water Carrier, Istanbul, 1966. Courtesy Hudson Film Works II.

Baldwin was in Hollywood on April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered. In the face of the assassination, which came after the earlier murders of Medgar Evers and Malcolm, Baldwin struggled with despair. Tellingly, his thoughts turned to Istanbul, and he wrote Cezzar, saying that there was nothing left to do but to “pray to those gods that are non-western, non-Christian.” His work on the script took on renewed urgency, and he began to view completing the script as, in Leeming’s words, an “act of love and an act of faith.” But the struggle with Columbia Pictures went from bad to worse. At one point, Baldwin received a memo that said he had to “‘avoid giving any political implications to Malcolm’s trip to Mecca.’” Baldwin was enraged.

Even worse, Columbia attempted to whitewash and neutral­ize Malcolm’s image by hiring Arnold Perl to drastically rework Baldwin’s script; the studio, Leeming writes, objected to Baldwin’s fluid and loosely structured writing. During the weeks of anguish that followed, Pakay flew to Los Angeles from Istanbul to offer support to his exhausted and progressively less stable friend. But Baldwin’s relationship with the studio continued to deterio­rate, and he ended up overdosing on sleeping pills. He survived, promptly quit the film project, and left Hollywood for Turkey, by way of New York and Paris.

In Paris, Baldwin picked up his mentor, the artist Beauford Delaney, who, Baldwin wrote, had first taught him “how to see” and who had, along with Richard Wright, inspired him to leave Greenwich Village to live in exile in Paris. Baldwin and Delaney traveled to Istanbul where Baldwin recovered, as he had done when he first arrived at Cezzar’s house years before.

During this stretch in Istanbul, Baldwin became more deeply engaged in Turkish life. He began to collaborate with local artists and theaters. These fertile exchanges, which were in stark contrast with the silencing he had faced in Hollywood, led him to create more aesthetically innovative and politically bold work. His confi­dence restored, Baldwin returned to his own vision of Malcolm X and completed One Day When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” which would be pub­lished in 1972. But perhaps his more important accomplishment during this time was directing a play for the theater company run by Cezzar and his wife, the actress Gülriz Sururi. The play was John Herbert’s 1967 Fortune and Men’s Eyes, a radical work that explores prison homosexuality. The production left an indelible mark on Turkish theater, while doubling, at least for Baldwin, as a denunciation of the American film and theater industries’ refusal to address systemic homophobia and racism.

According to Zaborowska, Baldwin’s staging of Herbert’s play was a “bravura production [that] took the Turkish theater world by storm.” The play toured rural and urban Turkey, from Istanbul to Ankara and Izmir to a small working-class town on the coast of the Black Sea. Zaborowska points out that Baldwin’s message that the “prison could be anywhere,” together with his background as a “black American activist resonated with the revolutionary cultural moment in Turkey at the end of the 1960s.”

Though the play’s success was in part due to Turkey’s left-leaning political climate and expanding constitutional freedoms in the aftermath of the coup, its explicit exploration of violence, erot­icism, and homosexuality eventually led to a scandal that resulted in a brief ban and an investigation by officially appointed experts. But citing the twenty-first article of the Turkish Republic’s new constitution, the experts’ report ultimately “defended the obliga­tions of artists to critically expose false and immoral perceptions by exhibiting them.” The Turkish defense of the artist’s obliga­tions aligned with Baldwin’s view of the artist as a “disturber of the peace,” morally bound to speak the truth and expose those social ills which, left unseen, would remain unaddressed.

The work Baldwin pro­duced during his Turkish decade reminds us to view the notion of a national literature with critical distance, and to grapple with the boundary-crossing power and potential of novels.

“At home in exile in Turkey,” Zaborowska writes, “he was working with friends who were in the avant-garde of the local experimental art world, who were ready to try new things on their audience and trusted his vision and instinct.” As a result, working on the play provided Baldwin with the space he needed to deepen his reflec­tions on individual freedom and the intersections of racial, gen­dered, and sexual violence that had preoccupied him in Giovanni’s Room and Another Country. And the hybrid, unguarded, and polit­ically radical production he came up with in collaboration with his friends in Istanbul was in direct contrast to the dismal experience of having his work watered down in Hollywood. In that sense, the play, and its explosive reception, serve as prime examples of how contact between local and migrant artists and intellectuals can reframe the national and global dynamics of cultural production.

The Baldwin who emerged in Turkey was inclusive and inte­grated. He eschewed the binaries along which he was repeatedly asked to draw the lines of his identity in America, where he could not be Black and queer, or Black and an intellectual, or queer and Christian. In his life, Baldwin defied the reductive dichotomies of American social life, with its fixations on race and sexuality, just as his work rejected singular or easily essentialized views of the self. It could be said that he wrote in order to understand the American problem beyond national terms, recognizing that the American polity and policies have always been global; his time in Istanbul helped him articulate this with greater clarity. The work he pro­duced during his Turkish decade reminds us to view the notion of a national literature with critical distance, and to grapple with the boundary-crossing power and potential of novels. Doing so, as Zaborowska suggests, “helps us to embrace more fully the transnational dimension of mid-twentieth-century black literary culture.”

Toward the end of Pakay’s documentary, Baldwin speaks of the way many of his American critics and readers ascribed his pres­ence in Turkey to the “Orient’s” reputation as mysterious, infe­rior, unpredictable, and sexually promiscuous. This patronizing and simplistic construction, promulgated by the American media, served to obscure the complexities of Baldwin’s life and work in Turkey, his influence on Turkish artistic expression, and Turkey’s generative effect on him. This valorization of simplified represen­tations over complex ones is symptomatic of the “irreality” that prevents us from understanding America as a layered, hybrid, plu­ral, and global space, and from seeing beyond its myths. Perhaps what is most painfully lost in this misunderstanding—though evi­dent in the warmth and vulnerability of Baldwin’s face as captured by Pakay—is that Baldwin’s exile from America began before he left Harlem.

In the film, we see a close-up of Baldwin’s hands, holding a tespih, the string of beads used in Muslim prayer. We watch him walk, finely dressed, through Istanbul. Passersby turn to look at him as he makes his way through the crowds to Eminonu, Taksim Square, and the antique booksellers in Beyazit, where he plucks from a display the Turkish translations of Another Country and Herbert’s play Fortune and Men’s Eyes. He holds a book titled The FBI Story up to the camera, signaling the pervasive presence of American power and its entrapments. Conversing with Pakay, he says, “One sees [America] better from a distance and you can make comparisons to another place, another country.” While seated at his desk later in the film, his papers and books strewn across the table, he speaks at some length about his sexuality and his love of men and women and says, turning his head away from the camera so that he is in profile, “American men are paranoiac on the sub­ject of homosexuality.” “Love,” he says, “comes in strange packages.” Next, the film moves outdoors. Two stern-faced, tuxedoed waiters stand on either side of Baldwin as he sits drinking tea. He winks at the camera. The final shot is of his face breaking into a warm smile.

Baldwin left Istanbul for Paris not long after. He departed at the height of his fame, sought after by the international press and the Turkish cultural establishment. But he tended to grow restless in any place he stayed for long. And Zaborowska notes that in Paris, Baldwin could more easily “stay in close contact with his American publishers and editors at a time when Turkish telecommunications and postal services did not work very well.” Baldwin returned to Turkey for the last time in the autumn of 1981, twenty years after his first visit. He vacationed at a farmhouse in Bodrum with Cezzar and Sururi. It was, Leeming writes, “an interlude of almost idyllic calm.” Turkey restored him. More than that, as he said over and over, Turkey “saved my life.”



[twinmagics]

Portland Living Room

[vlvttt]

The Glorious Days Have Gone

Eddie Munson x Fem!Reader

Part one

WC: 2,099

Cecilia Ida Harrington had always known who she was. Self-assured and confident- nothing could possibly drag her down. However, moving to a small town from the city that never sleeps can be quite a rough transition. 

—----------

1985

Staring out the window had never been more interesting. Stacked boxes filled the room to the brim- stripping the room bare and rendering it lifeless. I felt as though I had no right to feel this way; I mean anybody would be upset if they were told they were leaving their friends, their school, and their entire life behind- right? 

I’ll admit; I’m bitter. Not exactly at my parents, that would be unfair, though- I can’t help but feel a little bit of resentment. The cloud of dread that floated above me was starting to become more and more unbearable as the seconds went by. I decided to stand up and finally finish packing so I wouldn’t sink through the floor and fall into an overwhelming depression.

I thanked the gods that I’d been gradually putting all my things away throughout the week; lord knows I definitely wouldn’t have gotten anything done today. There was a small spark of excitement deep inside of me despite the awful feelings that rippled through me. I guess a change of environment would be nice, although the chaos of the city was oddly comforting a change of pace would do me good. Moving to Hawkins also meant that I would be closer to family- well not really. From what I’ve been told my cousin spent most of his time at home alone, his parents were never really around much and I couldn’t help but feel bad for him. In my head, my parents are the complete opposite, they’re incredibly kind and compassionate and I wish he had the same pillars of support I did. I think being practically ostracized by most of your family for becoming a parent at the age of 15 has debilitating effects on your psyche.

My father and uncle never lost touch, and even helped my mom and dad out a little when they were really desperate. I didn’t really hold the rest of my family to high standards, however. They were repulsive, self-centered, money-hungry people who came flocking back to my father's feet when success came. I don’t communicate much with them, except for Steve. 

Time went by quickly and suddenly I was sitting in the backseat of the car and we were on our way to Indiana. 

----

The trip was long and I desperately wanted to smash my head against the concrete. After nearly half a day, we finally arrived in the quaint town. 

“Alright, shouldn’t be too long now.” I somehow managed to catch my dad saying through my headphones. 

We finally arrived at our new home, it felt a little odd since I was used to apartment complexes and tightly packed buildings but it did feel more welcoming in a way. The promise of a garden is what kept me going since my parents broke the news that we were leaving the city for some small town in the midwest. 

“I’m gonna go look around.” Without waiting for a response I walked off and went past the front gate and into the backyard. At that moment, I decided I wouldn’t allow myself to be miserable, the sight before me was wonderful and I could immediately feel my mood rising much higher than ever before. 

“Cecilia!” I heard my mom shout, over and over since once was not enough I guess. I made my way back toward the front of the house to where she was standing. “Ceci- Oh hey, can you help your father unload the boxes? I need to get this moving shit figured out.” 

I nodded with a slight chuckle and began to help the ancient man in dire need of assistance. “So whadya think so far? Pretty nice right?” he said with a grunt as he lifted the heavier of the boxes. “Yup, not as terrible as I thought it would be honestly.” We made our way past the front door and into the living room. “At least there won’t be a lingering scent of shit and piss everywhere you go- this town seems to be less primitive in that aspect.” 

–

Later in the day, we made our way to my uncle’s house and I was buzzing with excitement since that meant I got to see Steve. This would be the highlight of my day- my week even. It felt like I was receiving bad news after bad news and I really needed a moment to be able to sit back and do nothing.

“Steve!”

“Cecilia!” I catapulted myself into his arms and he spun me around, setting me down with a kiss on the cheek. “Geez- you almost knocked me down there. I could’ve died.” I rolled my eyes as I took a step back, “Well I would’ve been the last thing you saw before your untimely death, but I digress, I haven’t seen you in the flesh in so long-” taking a step back I took a good look at him, “how have you been dingus?” With a grin, he lead me into the house and into the living room, but not before I greeted my aunt and uncle. He plopped himself on the couch and I followed suit. 

“Well, I got a job- and I’m miserable, but what can you do.” Steve let out a heavy sigh, I remembered our past phone calls and I pitied him, he definitely didn’t deserve to feel the way he did.

“God I can’t believe your dad’s really punishing you like this.” I glanced at him, “you don’t deserve that.”

“It builds character though! But it’s so dehumanizing, you could say I’m a changed man.” 

A giggle left my mouth and I was about to reply but was rudely interrupted by my aunt announcing that dinner was ready, “We’ll talk later.” 

–--

A couple of days after moving to town was the day I would begin school. At the only high school in a 15 mile radius. God take me now. 

Steve had offered to drop me off and of course, I took him up on that offer- I’ll be damned if I took the bus to school. Sometimes I missed that you could walk anywhere and everywhere and it was normal, but you could walk along the street here and people would look at you like you had three heads.

Stepping out of the car and into the building I couldn’t ignore the number of stares I was receiving, I was suddenly hyper-aware of myself and everything surrounding me. 

Arriving at the front office, I stepped into the dull room to retrieve my schedule. I stood awkwardly for a few moments, “Can I help you?” the seemingly kind middle-aged woman questioned. “Uh, I’m new here. I need my schedule.” She looked at me expectantly, “Sorry, um- Cecilia Harrington.” With a nod, she stood from where she was sitting and went to the filing cabinet at her right. 

“Here you go, do you need someone to help you find your way around?”

“No thank you I think I’ll manage.” I left the office and studied the piece of paper in my hands, ‘English for first period? Great.’ The first warning bell rang loud and produced the first headache of my day, I decided I might as well find that class now so I wouldn’t get lost like a dumbass in this tiny school. When I finally managed to find the class I found a seat in the back of the room that was right by the window, just in time as the final bell rang. 

The teacher, whose name I learned was Mrs.O’Donnell, began to make some sort of announcement that I couldn’t really care less for. “Before I forget! We have a new student! Why don’t you introduce yourself?” She motioned for me to make my way to the front of the class and I felt targeted, but what can you do? “I’m Cecilia Harrington, just moved from New York City. I hope to become friends with you all!” I have never been more fake in my life, I thought. I’ve learned that the only way to survive in the grueling environment of public schools was to pretend to be someone you’re not, and hopefully, I could play the part. I definitely wouldn’t become friends with half of the people in this room, not to be judgy or whatever but they seemed like assholes at a glance.

Just as I sat back down, someone burst into the room, “Late again Mr.Munson” the teacher said pointedly, “take a seat.” Without a word the brooding teenager (although he looked a little too old to be here- so that’s up for question) sat down in the only empty seat, which just so happened to be the one beside me. I couldn’t help but glance at his outfit, it was pretty cool honestly. Distressed jeans embellished with chains, a band t-shirt, and a leather jacket. Pretty fucking sick if you ask me. As my eyes made my way up, I realized he was staring at me as well. I gave him a slight smile and diverted my attention to the teacher.

—-

The time for lunch finally came around. Fortunately, I met a sweet girl, Clarissa? Christine? Chrissy! I felt a little guilty that I couldn’t really remember her name but I did have quite a lot on my mind. For example: where am I going to get my weed from now? New York was huge, there was always someone who knew someone, who knew someone else, and so on and so forth. But I was currently in the middle of butt fuck nowhere, and I was genuinely stressing.

Anyway, Chrissy had invited me to sit with her and her friends at their table. I’d be stupid to not accept that offer unless I wanted to be a loser with no friends, so I went and sat with them. 

They honestly weren’t bad, I try not to have any biases, but a table full of cheerleaders and jocks is quite intimidating and I thought they would all be mindless jackasses but they, unfortunately, proved me wrong. I couldn’t help but feel like I had some sort of advantage, however. I mean I’m completely aware of the fact that I'm a Harrington, and I’m sure people know a lot more than they should about my family. 

I turned to face Chrissy to hopefully find some answers for my needs, “Hey, I know we literally just met today and this may be a bit forward but- do you know anyone who sells weed?” She let out a little giggle, which I thought was quite endearing honestly, and turned to whisper in my ear. 

“You see that guy over there?” she pointed towards a table, “the guy with long hair, his names eddie, he’s who you’re looking for.”

With a dramatic gasp, I looked her in the eyes and grabbed her hands, “I owe you my life.”

—-

I may or may not have asked around on where I could find Eddie on this fine friday afternoon. To my luck, I didn’t need to ask much and I tried to formulate a plan on how to approach him.

I stalked outside the drama room like a weirdo attempting to conjure any possible path for me to take into the drama room. I mean, I had no business here. I didn’t have theater, I wasn’t a drama kid, so what could I possibly be doing here? I didn’t hear the sound of the door opening, and I definitely didn’t hear the sounds of the steps coming my way as I paced back and forth in the hallway. 

I practically slammed myself into this person’s chest, “Holy shit, my bad,” they said as they grabbed me by the arms to balance me. “Oh my god I’m so sorry, that was totally my fault- Actually,” I paused, “you’re just who I was looking for.”

He raised his eyebrow in confusion.

“You’re eddie, right? I’ve heard about your- uh- business endeavors.” I looked up at him, hoping that he got what I was saying. “Huh? Oh! Yeah, yeah that’d be me. Uh, you looking to buy?” I nodded. He was cute. Hot even. I couldn’t help but stare a little, “Okay, well uh- meet me by the bleachers later today, 5:30?” I almost didn’t reply but I caught myself before I looked like a fucking fool, “yeah that’s cool,” I made my way past him, looking over my shoulder with a smile painting my face, “see ya around, eddie.”

I knew then I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about him.

—-

A/N:

yassssss my very first fanfic omgggggg. 😜

This first part may be a lil short but think of it as an introductory chapter

Also, I fucking suck at dialogue so bear with me please.

Feedback is always appreciated!!!

I’ll be on my knees kissing ur feet if u comment or reblog <3

[grimmbrookhq]

MULAN ▶ MAGGIE YAO ( GOLDEN GOOSE TRAINER ● 36 ●  GEMMA CHAN ● TAKEN )

Thomas Yao grew up first generation in Chicago with his brother Christopher. He knew early on that he wanted to help people and serve his country, so he went to the Naval Academy and later became a Corpsman in the Marines. Several years into it, he met Jacquelyn Zhang on leave, promptly fell in love and was married a year later. Once he completed his service at forty, he and Jacquelyn moved to Grimmbrook where Christopher lived and they opened Yao Family Practice, having their first and only child: Margaret. 

Maggie grew up an only child with hard working parents. Her mother went back to school to become a physician’s assistant once Maggie started elementary school, so she was always surrounded by a strong work ethic and a keen sense of right and wrong. She idolized her father and his military career, thinking of him as a hero, often trying on his uniform as a little girl. Childhood flew by and college came faster than expected, as she’d graduated high school at 16. She followed in her father’s footsteps, going to Annapolis and graduating four years later as part of the Health Professions Scholarship Program which paid for all of medical school. Finishing her residency by 26, she was deployed six months later.

In January 2018, her unit was ambushed by hostile forces who took her and two other doctors hostage because a leader’s child needed urgent medical attention. Maggie’s sense of honor to the oath she took as a doctor compelled her and the others to help. As hostages, they were fed and given clothes, no one allowed to look, touch or talk to them as they were moved from their cell to the makeshift hospital room. They were only valued because of the skills they possessed. Two months into their kidnapping, one of her fellow marines was killed trying to escape, despite Maggie warning him against it. They let her keep his dog tags and, a day later, help arrived. Hostile forces were taken prisoners and Maggie was brought back to the states in March 2018, to be honorably discharged in June. 

Moving back to Grimmbrook wasn’t a hard decision. She’s helping care for her parents now: her dad is still working but her mom has a series of health issues. Maggie makes sure not to worry her parents with what she’s still dealing with. There’s always a place for her at the family’s practice and even the hospital, but Maggie’s not sure she can go back to that setting. So, working at the gym is good for now, letting her interact with others in a positive way that helps her feel assimilated. By all accounts, she’s well-transitioned back into civilian life and even sleeps through most nights. But the nights she doesn’t? Those are when the nightmares come – she can’t outrun them. Duty is pulling her in one direction: to use her skills, to honor her fallen comrades who no longer have the choice. But uncertainty is pulling her in another direction: can she ever truly go back to who she was?

CONNECTIONS ▶

ALEXANDER YAO: Her younger cousin and best friend: her closest and most trusted confidant and the only one who really knows what’s going on in her head. She spent many nights at her aunt and uncle’s house and a big part of her childhood memories revolve around time spent with Alex. Upon his parent’s passing, he inherited their vast wealth and has been generous enough to pay off her mother’s hospital bills. Her parents are comfortable with her father’s practice but the bills piling up could overwhelm anyone. She appreciates his generosity towards them but draws a line at him helping her out too much, though she has relented to him helping her out with a new apartment. He doesn’t pry but she knows he’s always there for her. 

ALICE SUMMER: Word travels in a small town and though she doesn’t talk about it much, rumors of Maggie’s military career and kidnapping have reached Alice’s ears. Maggie has remained professional and polite, but she can tell that the young woman isn’t coming to yoga just to relax. She’s itching for a story and it makes Maggie uncomfortable to be the potential subject. 

NOEL ENRIQUEZ: Maggie read about what happened to Noel in the paper, but when he came to the gym, looking to get back into pre-hospitalization form, she couldn’t help but feel a kinship with the man. Like her, he was trying to collect the pieces life gave him and make something out of it. It’s a relief not to have to explain why she can’t talk about what she's been through with him. He understands not wanting to relieve a trauma and they’ve become friends because of it, along with the healthy competition they have going at the gym. 

IDA LAWSON: She’s one of the kindest people Maggie’s met and whenever she frequents The Midnight Pub, Ida manages to get her out of her comfort zone. She’s developed a little crush on the manager but hasn’t done much about it. She’d rather keep Ida as a good friend than risk messing it up. Besides, she imagines half the town has a crush on Ida by virtue of her being so damn likeable. 

CHAD REDDING: Maggie’s seen the younger man around the gym with EMT buddies and he seemed like a pretty chill guy. But in the months since his sister’s death, he’s shown up on his own frequently, going at everything he does with an explosive force that reminds her of being back in the military: of seeing fellow soldiers take out their anger on a punching bag because they can’t break rank and punch the person closest to them.

[fionabliss-blog]

Hello, I am Fiona Bliss Massage and Healing Arts, a professional massage therapist in Los Angeles, CA providing clients with pain relief, relaxation, and the restoration of balance. My center features a warm and welcoming environment, with soft lighting and comfortable massage beds. As a licensed practitioner, I will take the time to find out what has been bothering you and determine the best modality for your needs so that you experience optimal health and relief.

In my Esalen Massage sessions, I integrate a variety of modalities including deep tissue, Thai massage, craniosacral and energy work.  I also enjoy working in the side-lying position, particularly with people who are challenged in lying on their belly or back. My intention is to meet you where you are at the moment.

I love to work with people with aches and pains who are looking for specific work and help in releasing tension and discomfort, as well as with people who simply want to connect more deeply with their bodies and enjoy a more nurturing, less focused session. I love working with pregnant women. As a doula and bodyworker, I love to support and nurture women through touch during this time of change and transition to parenthood. "my Massage is loving, nurturing and deep. I work from my heart. My intention is to create a safe space in which change can happen through awareness.

Each session is unique and tailored to what is needed at the moment. A wave-like dance of listening and responding, breath and movement, creating a sense of wholeness and well being. I combine Esalen® Massage with deep bodywork, Thai Massage, energy work and my practice of presence. " One of my preferred ways of working is in the side-lying position which is ideal for people who are unable to lie in the prone (on the belly) or supine (on the back) position, as well as for pregnant women.

Esalen® Massage is a holistic approach to bodywork in which the whole person is considered, contacted and worked with. Esalen Massage is best known for its long flowing strokes and quality of touch/contact. It integrates many techniques, including soft rocking, passive movement, and joint mobilization, stretching and deeper work on specific parts of the body. It encourages a greater awareness of one's body, stimulates the skin, circulatory and lymphatic systems and relaxes the muscular and nervous systems. It invites a fuller sense of fluidity, spaciousness, and vitality.

During a session we work with long, flowing strokes over the entire body, creating a sense of wholeness and deep connection to one's body. It is as if the practitioner sees the body as a canvas: the beginning strokes prime the canvas and give our client a sense of his/her whole body, then slowly fill in the colors by giving attention to specific areas, exploring the range of motion of joints and density and malleability of tissue, to then return our attention back to the whole. The receiver learns to sense and experience his body as a whole while also becoming intimately familiar with its parts.

Esalen massage was developed at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA in the mid-'60s. It grew out of the exploration of the human potential movement and was influenced by the developing Gestalt Therapy at Esalen as well as some of the world's great masters of bodywork: Charlotte Silver - Sensory Awareness, Ida Rolf, Moshe Feldenkrais, and Milton Traeger, to name just a few. With the hot springs and massage rooms located right at the edge of the ocean, Esalen Massage was also very influenced by the sound and rhythm of the ocean. Many times I have heard clients say:".... this was the best massage I have ever had" and have seen practitioners regain enthusiasm for their massage practice by learning Esalen Massage. I think what sets Esalen Massage apart from other practices is not so much the technique but the approach.

During the Esalen Massage training, much focus is placed on the practitioner's relationship to him/herself: on connecting with a deeper sense of self, quieting the mind, developing good body mechanics and boundaries. The well-being of the practitioner and client is equally important and attended to. While working the practitioner places his attention and awareness on his client as well as himself/herself. He takes care not to overextend himself, knowing that every discomfort in his own body will consciously or subconsciously be felt by the receiver. The practitioner tunes deeply into his/her senses and experience and contacts the client from this deeper sense of self. The Esalen Massage practice allows each practitioner to integrate the tools and practices he/she brings to the table and allows for a creative response to the clients' needs at the moment. In this way, each session becomes unique and tailored to what is needed at the moment.

I believe that when touch is connected to our sensing and feeling nature and responds to what is here in the present moment, massage moves beyond technique into the art of healing.

You don’t have to live with the burden of your pain and stress—let me provide you with the massage therapy services you deserve. To schedule an appointment with me, please give me a call at Fiona Bliss Massage and Healing Arts today!

https://www.losangelesmobilemassage.com

[atlanticcanada]

Prince Edward Island unveils latest mental health facility

A new mental health program facility has been unveiled for Prince Edward Island residents aged 18 and over.

The province announced a new $4.5 million Mental Health Structured Programming and Day Treatment facility on Thursday in conjunction with Health PEI.

“Many Islanders living with mental health challenges are vulnerable to stress and can experience difficulties with everyday life stressors. This can be overwhelming and further impact their mental well-being,” says Dr. Ida Pienaar, a clinical psychologist with Health PEI.

“What they are feeling is normal and the new programs and supports we are now able to offer them in this beautiful, therapeutic facility are safe places they can turn to for help as we can help them regain life skills while supporting their mental health care needs so they can live independently in the community with greater confidence.”

The residential program will support eight people at a time and the day program which will assist of 20.

Both programs are four weeks long.

The residential program will include private bedrooms, two common living rooms, and a shared kitchen.

The day program will be offered Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The programs will be staffed by health-care workers and will offer clients help reintegrating into the community, referrals, pharmacological education, and mental health group programming.

“From the outset, we sought to design this program based on such real, lived experiences of individual Islanders, based on hearing from many individuals and their families about their own unique journeys,” said Thane MacEwen, the director of Mental Health and Addictions Transitions with Health PEI, in a release Thursday.

“I am confident that we have developed an innovative program that elevates the dignity of our clients, and facilitates greater levels of hope, purpose, and belonging.”

The facility is the second of six infrastructure projects set to take place under the Mental Health and Addictions Capital Redevelopment Project, according to the province.

“I am pleased to officially open this beautiful, state-of-the-art, supportive Structured Mental Health Programming facility – a first of its kind here in PEI which will offer life-changing care to Islanders," said P.E.I. Minister of Health and Wellness Ernie Hudson.

"By focusing our efforts on supporting the mental health and addiction needs of Islanders within our community, we can keep people closer to their support systems while providing appropriate treatment and services."

The first group of clients for the Day Treatment Program will begin Monday.

The Structured Residential Program will welcome clients in the coming weeks. 

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/8Fj1xwc

[spoonie-living]

[Image: a digitally-created “ink brush” painting featuring a tree bowed by the wind, petals flowing from its branches, on a beige backdrop with a bright red moon.]

5 Games to Inspire Calm Chiara Scotellaro, The Millennial Patient

Are you looking for an activity to help you achieve calmness in your day? Something that you can incorporate into your self-care routine which is always within reach?

One of my favourite methods of bringing calmness into my day is through games and apps, which are a readily accessible solution as I always have my phone within arms reach. I regularly use games and apps as part of my self care and mindfulness routine. Below the cut are 5 games that help me relax and bring me tranquility if I’ve been feeling stressed or restless.

[Image: a modern stylized landscape of blue mountains against a starry sky. “Monument Valley” is displayed across the top of the image, and a white figure in pointed hat and dress stands atop a pedestal.]

Monument Valley

Monument Valley is a beautifully designed atmospheric puzzle game developed by Ustwo Games. The gameplay consists of helping princess Ida through an Escheresque maze which shifts and morphs around her. And thanks to its beautiful artwork, playing Monument is like walking through my favourite drawings.

Puzzle games normally chew up my spoons, so the best part of this game is that the less I try to think of a solution, the more likely I am to solve the puzzle. Playing Monument Valley is more about clearing my mind and exploring. It’s perfect for when I’m tired but want to do something a bit more engaging than watch tv.

This is a great puzzle game if you have cognitive fatigue and a fun approach to mindfulness.

Monument Valley on iTunes Monument Valley on Google Play

[Image: a silhouette of a small, thin tree on uneven terrain, all black against a beige sky with a bright red moon peeking down from the top. “prune” is written between tree and moon.]

Prune

Prune is a pretty and wonderfully minimalistic game by Joel McDonald where you cultivate a tree to grow in certain directions so it can reach the light. You do this by pruning branches with a swipe of your finger; then you watch it grow in hopes it will flourish in the light of the sun.

I love this game because I love bonsai, but the real thing never lasts long in my care. This game is my pocket bonsai and my alternative to pottering in the garden for relaxation. Just like Monument Valley, it promotes exploration and helps clear my mind. There is no need for overthinking—if I just play and vary my approaches, the solution will come.

This game is perfect for when you just want a few minutes of quiet, and it’s ideal for waiting rooms at the doctor's office!

Prune on  iTunes Prune on Google Play

[Image: an undersea scape with schools of fish in the background. A diver is swimming downward and touching a reflection of themself in what appears to be the top of a (second) body of water. “Abzû” is displayed in thin letters at the top.]

Abzû

Abzû is described as an adventure art video game developed by Giant Squid Studios. However, for me, Abzû is more of an experience than a game.

In Abzû, you are a diver exploring the ocean and restoring life through the use of magical springs. I get to explore various underwater environments, swim with whales, ride a turtle, or just meditate on a rocky outcrop and watch the aquatic life swim around me. It’s quite short, and the puzzles may seem simple, but it just feels amazing to play. I only wish I could play the VR version next time.

This game really fills my need for new experiences when I’ve been housebound for too long. It’s the next best thing to visiting the aquarium and the closest thing to going diving as I can get at the moment. I just love love love this game!

Abzû on Steam

[Image: on a background of mountains and a night sky, a logo with a band of yellow at the top and four icons: a cross, a sword, a person, and a dollar sign. “Reigns” is displayed below this in gray, angular block letters.]

Reigns

Reigns is a text-based game developed by Devolver Digital in which you play the role of a medieval monarch. Gameplay is super simple and consists of storyline cards which ask you to decide between two choices. You make your decision by either swiping left or right (sound familiar? 😉). The choices you make will determine the fate of your monarchy as well as those you rule. You play through many reigns—some spanning decades, others barely lasting a day.

Unlike the other games in this list, the theme of this game isn't the calming element here, in fact, this game has a lot of dark humour in it. For me, the calming aspect here is the gameplay, it brings me calm through distraction. What I like most about Reigns is that gameplay is very short, your monarch's reign can often last only a minute or two. It also doesn't require much concentration or logic because there's no way of predicting the outcomes of your choices.

For me, Reigns is a brain fog friendly alternative to puzzle games and another great game to play in waiting rooms. I just swipe left or right and await the next twist in the story.

Reigns on  iTunes Reigns on Google Play Reigns on Steam

[Image: “Magic Piano” written in sky blue and black bubble letters against a background of a keyboard, clouds, and abstract green lights.]

Magic Piano

Magic Piano by Smule allows you to play your favourite piano music on your phone or tablet. Music is one of the most effective ways for me to find calmness and joy. And playing the music yourself, just like dancing or singing, elevates the whole experience. Magic Piano makes playing music accessible by showing me the notes to play.

Despite having no musical ability and limited dexterity in my fingers, I can still play along with my favourite songs on my tablet. I can also change the difficulty depending on the stiffness of my hands. Much like Guitar Hero, it allows me to live out my rockstar fantasies despite my complete lack of skill. My favourite thing to do at the end of the day is play Moonlight Sonata to slow things right down.

Word of warning with this game: I started experiencing vertigo a while ago, and the scrolling colours began to trigger headaches. I’ve had to stop playing it as a result. If you have similar problems, you might want to give this one a pass.

Magic Piano on  iTunes Magic Piano on Google Play

These games are a regular part of my wind-down time and have provided me with varied options to creating calm in my day. Just like music, a cup of tea, or a warm bath they help me transition from busyness to stillness. They provide me with just enough escapism to help me let go of the day's problems and get into a different mindscape, but are not so utterly engrossing that I lose hours to gameplay.  

If you have games or apps that help you achieve calmness, then please feel welcome to share your recommendations in the comments or via a reblog!

Chiara Scotellaro was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2011 and has dedicated her time to helping others learn how to manage life with a chronic illness ever since. An experienced Mental Health peer worker, she has helped others in their recovery journeys by sharing her knowledge and experience on navigating life’s challenges with a chronic illness.

You can check out more of her work at her blog, The Millennial Patient, or follow her on Twitter @PatientGenY.

[th3magicstore]

Best 10 Apps Android Brain Games 2020

While you might think that staring at your phone would numb your brain, a number of apps can actually help to keep your mind fighting fit. The brain training apps include various forms of mini-games that put a range of mental skills to the test, including long and short term memory, maths skills, and focus. Best 10 Apps Android Brain Games

10. Alphabear

best 10 apps android brain games There’s nothing more adorable than a vocabulary game mixed with bears, No, we’re not talking about their other game that involves cute ninjas slicing evil demons, we’re talking about a puzzle game that involves a smart way to learn simple syntax. Developer Spry Fox and their love for bears resents this puzzle game that requires no complicated feature, Just try to come up with the best word you could find in its tile-based gameplay and score the highest points to take over the leaderboards, Utilize the presence of their bears and amass the biggest multiplier with the biggest bear. Earn power-ups, extend the game’s timer, and come up with the best word without opening a dictionary! It’s bear-y fun and it’s free on the PlayStore. Heh. It has a PlayScore of 8.71.  

9. You Must Build A Boat

best 10 apps android brain games Why would you build a boat? What’s the point? These are but the few questions asked when you play EightyEight Games’ sequel to the popular 1,000,000, It’s a ridiculous way of blending a match-three gameplay with dungeon crawling mechanics, It’s both an RPG and a Puzzle Game, And as the title implies, the main setting of the game is mostly on a boat. You’re gonna need a bigger one as you start off slow. Travel to creepy dungeons and bully-off monsters during a silly match-three combat Attack, stave off, and eliminate your threat by matching the correct tiles, Pretty odd, huh? Well that’s what makes the game amazing in the process. The goal is simple, build a boat large enough to survive your journey. Expand from various rooms and meet new people as it grows bigger and bigger. So sail away with your ship and you must build a boat! Just recently, EigthyEight Games has teased its upcoming game. So keep yourself updated! You Must Build A Boat has a PlayScore of 8.72.  

Best Free Movie Apps For iPhone 2020

  8.Blendoku 2

  best 10 apps android brain games Android hasn't seen a lot of original ideas for a while, but the developers at Lonely Few sought to change that, With Blendoku they created a game that marries two of the most unlikely concepts: Sudoku and Colors, Use your wits to arrange the colors into a seamless gradient of tint hues and shade, While a little daunting for the neophyte colorist, the game's intuitive controls make it a little less so giving you the confidence to conquer the game's 500 levels, It's a simple game that challenges the mind, and becomes an addicting diversion As a sequel, it improves on the original with a collection of brand new features Zoom in and out unlock new stages and play on two different modes to play with friends and paint like famous artists. It has a PlayScore of 8.84.

7.LIMBO

best 10 apps android brain games PlayDead’s critically acclaimed puzzle-platformer makes a debut to the Android This multi-award winning game transcends the boundaries of the conventional platformer with a deep and engaging story coupled with complex physics-based puzzles, Play as a young boy as he tries to escape in a bleak and gloomy world of LIMBO This monochromatic side-scrolling platformer doesn’t dazzle you much with its dark colors, but it captures you with an eerie atmosphere with huge spiders, gory deaths and anti-gravity levels. As somber as the game develops itself, it’s one of the most intriguing games of its time. Their follow-up game, INSIDE, has also dominated the Gaming Charts but it’s only a matter of time before it hits Mobile soon! This game has a PlayScore of 8.86  

Top 10 Mobile Games With High Graphics

  6. Cut the Rope: Magic

best 10 apps android brain games One of the pioneers of Android puzzle gaming returns with a magical twist on their tested formula In Cut the Rope: Magic, ZeptoLab takes the adorable Om Nom on a quest against an evil wizard taking all the precious candy Thankfully Om nom has the power of transformation on his side, 6 of them to be exact Use them to solve the puzzles that lie before you in every stage, Turn into a bird and fly over traps and obstacles, or into baby form to squeeze into tight spaces, Despite the daunting tasks that await, the game remains as cute and addicting as ever. Refined, polished, and challenging. With 960 million downloads overall, it's one of Cut the Rope's most successful games yet. It has a PlayScore of 8.87.  

5. Lara Croft GO

best 10 apps android brain games Square Enix’s GO titles are a minimalistic surprise that usually deviates from their original gameplays Hitman and Deus EX GO’s gameplay, revolves around turn-based Diorama-looking set pieces in a playing field Players must maneuver their character and complete a set of objectives Just like most GO Games, Lara Croft GO shares the same style Control Lara in her pre-Reboot look and, finds the mysterious Queen of Venom treasure, Avoid deadly traps, find hidden treasures, and discover a long-lost history relic. The game is a success It’s awarded for being the best mobile game in its time due to its lush visuals and clever puzzle designs, It has over 101 puzzles and 6 chapters for the adventure-seekers, If the game gets too monotonous, enjoy the game’s soundtrack and unlock Lara’s popular skins From the days of old to the modern times It has a PlayScore of 8.90.    

5 Best Kiss Avatar Maker Apps in Android & IOS

4. Mini Metro

best 10 apps android brain games Easy to manipulate, difficult to master Dinosaur Polo Club’s minimalistic game tends to eliminate the perils of mass transit while injecting fluid and simplistic polygons for ease of access, But this kind of gameplay revolves around building the most efficient transportation system in the world, Connect subway routes from all over the world and make people’s lives easier, Subway Lines come in multiple shapes and colors for easier User Interaction Adapt to the situation quickly as the whole system is constantly growing, How long can you last before the lines halt? It’s an award-winning game due to its minimalist themes and unique gameplay, It’s available on Steam, PC, and Ubuntu. It has a PlayScore of 8.93

3.Threes! Free

best 10 apps android brain games If you’re familiar with 2048, then this is the game it drew inspiration from Instead of multiples of 2 you’ll have to pair off multiples of...you guessed it, threes! And, in lieu of 2048’s minimalist brown and oranges, you get a surprisingly adorable design, complete with bright colors and wacky faces the higher you go In addition to its cute visuals, it also comes with an enchanting soundtrack that makes your mathematical adventure an endlessly delightful, one It’s no wonder that the game won an award for Excellence in Design Match numbers to combine them and create higher numbers, and grow, grow, grow. You’re gonna need that strategic mind to stop yourself from getting stuck in a claustrophobic mess of numbers It’s incredibly simple and sneakily complex While it’s not a free game, you’ll be safe from dreadful in-app purchases once you buy it It has a PlayScore of 8.93.  

2.Monument Valley

best 10 apps android brain games If you wanna talk about beautiful and mesmerizing games, we have to talk about Monument Valley, It’s one of Android’s critically acclaimed puzzle games with a mix of beauty, elegance and minimalist architecture, Take on a surreal adventure with the game’s silent protagonist, Ida as she travels between complex architectures with mind-boggling geometry, Guide her through monuments and dispel the game’s illusion of movement Outsmart the game’s enemies by just twisting and dragging the world around you, Critics have praised the game’s brilliant world design and smart audio cues for that immersive experience The game just released its new addition called Ida’s ream which adds new chapters for a longer dream-like experience, Of course, it’s not free This game has a PlayScore of 9.05  

10 Best Avatar Maker Apps

1.The Sequence

best 10 apps android brain games A unique puzzle game that tangles you in a digital world filled with binary cells and special modules. Try to solve the puzzles in its over 70 levels. It has a PlayScore of 8.6612. Read the full article

[hanny-writes-spn]

Same As It Always Is

Pairing: Dean x Reader (ish)

Word Count: 2300ish

Warnings: Possibly some cursing. Grumpy Dean.

Read Part 2 by @melonshino here! (Coming June 14th)

Read Part 3 by @like-a-bag-of-potatoes here! (Coming June 15th)

A/N: Written for @spnbuddywriters Annoying Characters Writing Challenge! Our prompt was to use “Someone’s taking up two seats on public transit, so she has to stand” somewhere in our story. Tierra and Ida’s parts will be posted in the next couple of days, so stay tuned for more annoying fun!!

---------------------------

The mood in the bunker was as light as it had ever been before. After your last hunt, Sam had insisted that you all take a few days to regroup and just relax for once in your lives.

Of course, the way the boys relaxed wasn’t exactly… relaxing. They were relaxing the only way they knew how.

Sam spent his time taking notes and reading books of lore. You honestly weren’t sure if he was sleeping or not - when you woke up in the morning he was reading, and by the time you went to bed he was still reading.

Dean spent his time off working on his Baby. It baffled you that someone could do so much work on one car, but Dean insisted that she was always a work in progress.

Your way to relax was to actually relax. Television shows and junk food consumed your life for the first two days of your break, but by day three, you were getting a little stir crazy. To entertain yourself, you decided to explore around the bunker.

Hallway after hallway, you weaved in and out of rooms that you didn’t even know existed despite living in the bunker for a year now. Right when you were about to head back to your room, you felt your phone vibrate in your pocket. When you pulled out your phone and saw the notification, you headed straight to Sam.

“Sammy, did you get the same notification that I did?” You asked him as soon as you walked into the library.

“I was actually just about ready to go find you. You think there’s a case here?” Sam questioned.

“Maybe… Why don’t we go talk to Dean about it?”

...

“Hey Dean,” You said with a smirk when you saw him buried under the hood of the Impala. You couldn’t help but admire the way his sweat soaked shirt clung to every muscle on his back.

He paused for a moment and looked up at the two of you as he wiped his hands with a rag. “What’s up?”

Sam sat down on a nearby bar stool and started to summarize what the article on his phone said. “Well, Y/N and I got a notification on our phones about this clerk at an antique shop in Council Bluffs, Iowa that had just died.”

Dean scrunched up his eyebrows. “And I care about this, why?”

“His obituary says that he died while in the store - I guess his tie got stuck in the cash register and when he tried to free himself, he got decapitated…” Sam trailed off as he read the article.

“Well, that’s certainly not a normal way to die… but still, I don’t feel like that alone is enough to drive out there,“ Dean said, still skeptical.

You handed Dean your phone to look for himself. “This isn’t the only weird occurrence in this area. It looks like others who have purchased items from there have had mysterious things happen to them, too. But this one is the first death…”

Dean let the information absorb for a moment as he read. “Wait a minute how did the two of you get notifications on your phones about this case? This article looks like it’s from some local newspaper.”

“Oh I forgot to tell you! Charlie helped us program an algorithm into our phones that searches out certain key words from newspapers and police scanners all over the country that could lead us to a case. So now, instead of having to search through the internet all the time, the cases are going to just come to us! I’m sure she could program your phone-”

“No no, I’m good. I’ll keep searching for cases old school,” Dean said, cutting off Sam. “So break is over, I assume?”

You grinned. “I mean, it’s only a three hour drive… it couldn’t hurt to check it out...”

Dean winked at you and shut the hood of Baby. “Well then, let’s get a move on.”

...

Once you were settled in the car, you got your phone out to look into the case a little more. “So this guy’s name was Robert Craig. He was 54 and he worked at this antique shop called Same As It Never Was. Actually, sounds like he was the one that ran the place. He worked there for nearly 30 years.”

“Any family we should talk to?” Sam asked.

You shook your head. “No, he didn’t have any family, but we should  talk to the only other employee of the shop as well as the owner. It looks like it was the owner that found him.”

“So what, we think there’s a ghost haunting the place? There’s a lot of old stuff in there, maybe there’s a ghost attached to one of the objects?” Sam asked.

Dean scrunched his eyebrows together and shrugged. “I guess we’ll have to see if there’s anyone other than the latest victim that died recently.”

You and Sam only got the chance to nod in agreement before Dean started blasting his music. You leaned back in your seat and just enjoyed the scenery (or lack thereof).

When you arrived at the antique store in your FBI getup, you walked underneath the yellow caution tape as you flashed your badges. Upon looking around the place, it looked like any normal antique shop. There were old dolls, picture frames, instruments, chairs, and jewelry all hung out in the open making it look like a cluttered mess.

You were all immediately drawn to a man that was watching the chaos around the shop that you assumed was the owner. He was small in every sense of the word: short in stature, underweight, and even the glasses he wore on the end of his nose were small.

Once you walked over to him, you flashed your badges again.

“Hi there, we’re from the FBI. This is Agent Joplin and Agent Hendrix, and I’m Agent Zeppelin,” Dean introduced the three of you. The man squinted as he leaned in closer to take a look at your credentials. You quickly snapped yours shut and put it back into your pocket as you started to question him.

“Are you the owner of this shop, sir?” you asked, glancing around once again. Your sight landed on a particularly creepy porcelain doll, making you shiver.

The man nodded as he rubbed his hands together nervously. “I’m Frankie… Frankie Saxton. Well, my first name is Franklin. Yes, I’m… I’m the owner of this shop.”

“Do you mind if I take a look around?” Dean asked. You could tell just by the twinkle in his eye that he was more excited to look around at all of the old toys than to actually look for clues for the case.

“I… sure. That would be fine. Just please… please don’t touch anything!” He said with a waver in his voice. Everything this man said sounded nervous.

“Do you mind if we ask you a few questions, sir?” Sam asked. Mr. Saxton kept his eyes on Dean, making sure he didn’t touch anything.

“Sure… I suppose I could answer a few.”

“Were you close with Mr. Craig?” Sam asked.

Frankie was momentarily distraught as he watched Dean disappear into a different room, but that left him with nothing but to focus on you and Sam.

“Er… not really. Not on a personal level, at least. This was my father’s old store - when he died, he passed it down to me but I didn’t have time to run it. He died almost 15 years ago, so it’s pretty much been Robert running the place ever since.”

Content with his answer, you and Sam kept questioning him. “And when you found him…”

“It was awful!” He interrupted you abruptly. “To see him… without… it brought back such horrifying memories for me!”

“Memories? What do you mean, memories?” You asked him, curious about his answer.

“My father… he was the one who started this store. What an ornery man he was… he died by decapitation, too. Except when he died, he was cleaning out this absolutely stunning cannon he bought from an auction - that thing was from the early 1800s! It was going to be a top seller when it accidentally blew his head clean off his shoulders… poor guy didn’t realize that there was still a cannon ball in there…”

Mr. Saxton stopped his story when you all heard a loud crash in the back. “Oh, what did I tell him about not touching anything!” he wailed as he stormed off to find what Dean did.

You were right on his heels when you saw the mess that Dean made. It appeared that he found the shelves with all of the instruments on it, and then proceeded to knock every single one of them all into a pile on the floor. You couldn’t help but giggle when you saw Dean’s face; it was one full of regret, with a little hint of mischief in his eyes.

“I’m so sorry! I just wanted to pull one out to look at it but then I didn’t realize that they were all leaning on one another-”

“Do you have any idea how much all of this costs?!” Mr. Saxton nearly squealed. “Now I’m going to have to go through and make sure nothing is broken and then reset it all on there… You know what? I think it would be best if you all just left. If you need to know anything else, just ask the police. I already answered all of their questions!”

“Of course…” you said, grabbing Dean by the arm and leading him towards the door. “I’m so sorry for all of the trouble…”

As you walked out, Sam gave Dean his best bitch face. “Way to go, man.”

“Yeah, yeah… did you get anything out of the guy?”

“He told us that his dad died a very similar way to Robert. And he said he was always an ornery guy… think it could be him haunting the place?” You asked aloud.

Before either of the boys got a chance to answer you, Dean cried out, “Oh, damn birds! Look at my poor Baby!”

His car had big blotches of white goo all over, from windshield to tail light. You were unphased by the mess, but you did see Sam giggling a little off to the side.

“I just cleaned her, too…” he said, a disappointed look on his face. You all hopped into the car and headed back to the motel to regroup and look up some theories on what could be the issue.

You and Sam typed away on your laptops while Dean decided to take a shower. When he came out 15 minutes later, he looked very unhappy.

“Hey Dean, we’re just looking up… My god, what happened to your face?!”

He had little pieces of toilet paper covering all over his jaw, each with a little dot of blood on it.

“I… I don’t know what’s wrong with my razor! It knicked me every time… so annoying. I look like a 16 year old that just learned how to shave!” He roared as he went to the fridge to get himself a can of beer.

As he sat down next to you, he cracked it open only to have it explode all over him. The suds sprayed all over his face and onto his fresh clothes he had just washed from your break.

You and Sam looked at each other and stifled some laughs, but Dean on the other hand was not having it.

“Damnit!” He yelled again, grabbing a towel to clean himself up. Clearly annoyed, he just set down the beer and grabbed the keys to his car. “I’m gonna go get us some food,” He grumbled as he slipped on his boots.

“I’ll come with you,” you offered, hoping that you could help brighten up his mood. He graciously accepted and the two of you left.

On the way to the local burger joint, there was a car in front of him going at least 10 MPH under the speed limit. Dean wasn’t saying anything, but you could tell that he was getting irritated with the driver when he would try to pass him and then they’d speed up. That went on for the entirety of the drive, up until you got into the parking lot of the fast-food restaurant.

Dean’s grip on the steering wheel loosened when he finally parked and unbuckled his seatbelt.

“Today just isn’t your day, is it?” You asked him. Right when he was about to answer, you felt the car jolt and heard a sickening crunch of metal. Knowing how Dean’s reaction would be, you reached out a comforting hand onto his bicep.

“Dean…” you said in a soothing voice, but he was out of the car before you could say any more.

“Hey, you idiot! You need to watch where you’re going!” He yelled as he jumped out of the car, slamming the door and going to the other car’s driver’s side window. “I know she doesn’t look like much since she’s covered in bird crap right now, but she’s a real beauty underneath! I-”

When you heard him stop, you hopped out to see what was happening.

“Dean? What’s going on?” You asked when you saw him with the other car’s door open and Dean sticking his head in.

“C’mere…”

When you saw what Dean saw, you understood why he stopped yelling. “Oh my god, is he dead?!”

Dean nodded. “But look at his shirt…”

You leaned in closer to read the “Same as it Never Was” logo on the chest. “Wait, is this the other employee that worked there?” you asked.

“Something weird is going on at that place and we need to figure out what,” Dean said as he whipped his phone out and started dialing.

Dean Tags: @like-a-bag-of-potatoes @applepie-and-angelwings @raylin19 @angel-blazing

Forever Tags: @mogaruke @melonberri @holding-on-to-francis @dyingwhaleseatpizza @impalaobsession @feelmyroarrrr @pureawesomeness001 @raylin19 @sammynughh @angel-blazing @boho-chic-123