#which A) sucks for me who has a shitty immune system

[quidfree]

can you Please write the scene with bakugou's piercing SGDHEFEH the concept is too funny to me !!!

anon you’re lucky 報復性熬夜 is a concept i am firmly attached to so here i am at 1 am rattling this off instead of getting my beauty sleep. please excuse the standard of writing as a result

by the second day, katsuki is seriously considering agreeing to todoroki’s earlier and ambiguously sincere proposal that they play i spy.

he doesn’t know what it is about this particular job that’s so unbearable. no, scratch that- of course he knows what’s unbearable; it’s sat right next to him on a too-small chair in their too-small room staring impassively out of a too-small window. but he’s been thrown into so much shit with icyhot you’d think he’d developed some kind of immunity by now, the way vaccines microdose you on viruses so you can resist the real thing. call katsuki an antivaxxer, he guesses, because he has overdosed on todoroki ever since he met the asshole and he’s still not ready for how far up the wall he’s driving him when they’re stuck together for two straight days without a breather or any contact with the outside world.

cards on the table: stake-outs aren’t his thing. he does them just fine, fuck you very much, but he doesn’t like ‘em. why would he? they’re some ungodly blend of extremely boring and extremely tense, where nothing happens right up until way too long into it and then everything goes to shit unprompted. it’s rare he ever gets called in on jobs like this- people tend to assume he lacks the temperament for it, for one, and for another he’s too useful to lock away for days on end. it’s only because their suspected target is so insanely volatile and dangerous that it’s the two of them waiting for her to show her ugly face- no one else is even allowed in the perimeter. which is fucking fine, but he just wishes the cops would get their shit together for once and actually have the proof ready by the time they call the pros in so he doesn’t have to wait before he goes in guns blazing. instead they talked some bullshit about how critical of a stage this was and blah blah fifteen years of (obviously mediocre) work had gone into setting this trap, etc etc. the point is that it’s led to katsuki stuck in the world’s most disgusting little apartment, staring out of a splintered window for two-going-on-three days with no one but the world’s most annoying prodigy to keep him company. the place is such a dump they’re sleeping on mats in sleeping bags. it’s like fucking UA summer camp, and at this point he’d take the kidnapping over the waiting.

day one wasn’t so bad, right up until he realized there would be a day two. day two is bad from start to finish. they’re supposed to take turns on watch but there’s fuck all else to do except sit on their phones, and katsuki can only quote tweet so much dumb shit before he gets bored. he can’t talk to anyone outside because of confidentiality bullshit, and there’s no point checking work shit when he can’t do anything from where they are. so it’s either silently watching the warehouse or talking to todoroki, and todoroki is a fucking terrible conversationalist.

the thing with icyhot is this: katsuki doesn’t hate him, okay. like, he hates him, but also not really. they’re, at a push, maybe, sort of, friends. verging on close ones. not that he’d say so, but after the amount of dramatic self-sacrifices and final stands against a joint enemy they’ve endured he can’t really muster the energy to argue otherwise. todoroki’s tolerable, sort of maybe. usually katsuki borderline likes working with him, because if nothing else he’s good at what he does, and they know each other too well to be anything but in sync in the field. if they were doing almost anything else he’d be relieved at the choice of pairing.

they are not, however, doing anything else, and todoroki still fucking sucks at talking like a normal person. when he’d woken katsuki up for his shift of night-watch he’d loomed over him ominously like a fucking ghoul and said, voice belying no humor: “do you think plants can feel pain?”

there’s fucking nothing to talk about. anything interesting is essentially vetoed because it’d inevitably distract them from the whole intent observation thing, and katsuki hates small talk on a normal day but especially when todoroki’s doing his ‘alien attempting earth dialect’ bit and asking him about weather or the tokyo transportation system or whatever. so they just sit in semi-silence and occasionally go on very stupid tangents katsuki is glad no one can witness and remain overall bored out of their fucking skulls.

by day three they’ve already exhausted i spy and also the alphabet game and hangman, and katsuki draws the line at tic-tac-toe. todoroki looks implacable as always but his eye has started twitching a little. katsuki tries to think of literally anything that could plausibly take up their time and not take their eyes off the window, comes up short. twister is not a good idea even ignoring their lack of a board. shop talk is so very tempting, but he’s not losing this villain and wasting two days’ suffering because they get carried away on some long-winded discussion, so that’s not an option either.

“how’s your ear?” todoroki says, and at first katsuki thinks he’s really fucking lost it if he’s started asking after the wellbeing of his individual body parts, but then he remembers the last time they saw each other katsuki was throwing himself into the path of some jackass with a trumpeting quirk who nearly blew out his eardrum, so he guesses half ‘n half’s not entirely insane yet. he shrugs, shifts in his chair.

“fine. couldn’t hear shit from it for like three straight days, though. and my balance was fucked.”

“it hasn’t scarred at all.”

“yeah. lame place for a scar,” katsuki says, flexing his fingers absently. they’re all of them more roughed up than they were at UA, but talent and good healers have kept him mostly intact, give or take a few big nasties like the time he got gutted in first year or his near loss of an eye around graduation. privately he suspects genetics have dealt him a good hand, what with his gene donor’s perfect skin, but then todoroki doesn’t have that excuse and he’s not scarred anywhere ugly except the obvious, though katsuki could point blind to most of the nasties he’s accumulated under his suit.

not that he thinks about what’s under todoroki’s suit. god, he needs to get out of here.

“i don’t know,” todoroki is saying now, thoughtful. “a lot of people have ear-scars, no? from piercings.”

“that’s different,” katsuki says, immediately contrarian, even as he thinks about it. by the warehouse a truck stalls, but then moves on, lessening his momentary excitement. “most people don’t let that shit heal. unless you’re a moron there’s no point getting a hole jabbed through your ear if you’re not sure you want it.”

“would you?” todoroki asks, mildly curious, and taps his ear where katsuki can see him in the window’s reflection. “get a piercing, i mean.”

“what’s it to you?”

todoroki rolls his eyes at him like he’s being pointlessly difficult, which he maybe is a little. “i don’t know. i think it would suit you.”

“yeah?” katsuki sniffs, mollified and trying not to show it. it’s always a mistake to let icyhot know when his obvious ploys are working. “been thinking about it?”

“i can hardly sleep at night for thinking about it,” todoroki deadpans, which makes katsuki scowl and stomp down on the extremely unwarranted flush crawling up his neck in response.

“fuck off. i guess i’d do like one or two.”

“really? you always say no to tattoos.”

“that’s different. i don’t trust some asshole to draw a fucking infinity sign on my knee or whatever. sticking a hole through an ear is hard to fuck up, and you barely register it after. if you get a shitty tattoo you have to think about it all the time.”

“if it’s easy then why don’t you have any?” todoroki asks, but he sounds genuinely curious more than like he’s trying to catch him out, so katsuki thinks about it honestly.

“don’t have the time. ‘s not like i can really afford to pencil in an afternoon to the nearest parlor or whatever just for that.”

“i read you can pierce your ears with a needle.”

“i guess i haven’t fucking thought about it that much, then,” katsuki grumbles, forever irked by todoroki’s smart mouth. problem solver his ass. the guy goes around making problems for everyone.

they sit in silence for a beat, watching the breeze rattle the wooden planks barricading a window opposite them, and then he thinks needle, and does some very quick mental arithmetics to reach the conclusion that todoroki is probably also landing on, judging by the way he blinks when katsuki briefly glances his way. 

he thinks about the job, and how close he’d come to throttling todoroki during i spy, and the great dawning nothingness ahead of them for fuck knows how long still. at the very worst, they have to start moving with a needle in his ear. 

“pass me your medikit.”

todoroki does, but when katsuki unzips the pack he shifts. “it’d be easier if i did it.”

“it’s not rocket science,” katsuki mutters, considering the needle critically before glancing back out of the window. “'s not like i give a shit about precise location.”

“i’m just saying i wouldn’t have to go in blind. and you can keep watch while i do it.”

“or you can keep watch while i do. same shit.”

todoroki only shakes his head, because unlike some people who shall not be named he is not so incredibly psychosexually attached to offering help where it isn’t wanted. “fine.”

katsuki eyes the window, squints at his ear. tissue’s the best bet- he thinks he could probably manage cartilage fine, but on the off chance they have to drop everything and run he doesn’t want to accidentally snap a bone and start the fight inconvenienced. lobe it is.

“wait,” todoroki says, just when he’s focused, and then reaches over without removing his gaze from the window to press two fingers to the needle, tip going blisteringly red-hot before he releases it. cauterised. their kit’s sterilised anyway, but katsuki grunts his begrudging thanks, repositions himself. 

“wait,” todoroki says again, and this time katsuki can’t help but turn to glare at him where he’s still watchfully staring outside.

“fucking what, icyhot?”

“two seconds,” todoroki promises, gaze flickering his way for half a second with something like self-effacing amusement before he turns his eyes dutifully away and reaches his other arm around to pinch his ear, which flares cold so quickly katsuki hisses even as his cheeks heat. fucking weirdo.

“could’ve just said,” he mutters, ignoring his not at all jumpy pulse to refocus on the task at hand as todoroki does that obnoxious lip-twitch thing that means he’s smiling internally. 

physics dictates that he keep his wrist at an angle if he wants the needle to come out right, so he does, braces and jabs. it goes so easy he almost doubts his own success, not even the slightest twinge of pain ensuing. he twists for good measure, removes the needle, watches tiny beads of blood emerge from the piercing. 

well, that was anticlimactic, katsuki thinks, retrieving an anti-bacterial wipe for the needle, and then pauses, staring at the window.

“motherfucker.”

“what?”

“what the fuck am i supposed to put through this?”

todoroki’s mismatched eyes go gratifyingly wide in the window, and for one spectacularly braindead moment two of the world’s most outstanding pro-heroes stare at one another in a shitty broken window with equal amounts of retroactive dismay. 

“um,” todoroki says, or as close to ‘um’ as todoroki will ever say. katsuki wishes dearly he was still of an age where he could throw him through a wall. then his eyes focus elsewhere, sharpening with what could pass as professional focus but is mostly naked relief. “um.”

um in-fucking-deed. by the warehouse, a door has just opened a sliver.

“you owe me a fucking earring,” katsuki declares, but so fast it lacks any aggression, already halfway out the window by the time he finishes speaking, atrophied limbs reviving with an ecstatic chemical burn as fresh air hits their faces. 

god. if he ever gets stuck on stake-out duty again he’s sleeping by himself under a parked car or some shit. 

they make disgustingly quick work of the fight, in the end, days of pent-up frustration and skull-numbing boredom leaving them so bursting with power that it’s almost embarrassing for the villain, but when the first kow-towing police officer reaches them full of praise and suggestion that they handle another job he has queued up they chorus a ‘no’ so violent the guy actually jumps. 

todoroki’s not so bad, katsuki thinks fondly, watching his face slide into frigid blankness with absolutely no idea of how shitless he’s scaring the officers around them. it’s almost enough to make him forget to kick his ass for the enormously shitty banter he’d had to endure vis-a-vis his still-bleeding ear throughout the entire tragically short fight.

almost. not quite. who even knew there was a ‘gay ear’?

[iwritesickfic]

boy who cried flu

(yes I am aware of how stupid this title is leave me alone)

Peter rarely - if ever - got sick. Nobody who didn’t know him well would believe it though - he had a long track record of absences and missed assignments, despite being a 3.9 GPA student. He’s flaked from social events and parties countless times, always citing he’s not “feeling well.” It’s not technically a lie, though he does lie sometimes. 

People understand physical illness - they know what it feels like to be stuck in bed with a bad cold - but mental illness? Not so much. So...he bends the truth. A professor won’t be very forgiving if you say you spent all weekend in bed because you couldn’t find the motivation to move, but say you had a bad cough? No one bats an eye.

So most people assume Peter has an awful immune system. That or he’s just a pussy who won’t leave the house with so much as a sore throat. Everyone except a select few - Simon, Ashlynn, and Alex. 

Simon’d been his friend since undergrad, and they’d been roommates for a time, so he knows exactly what Peter means when he says he “doesn’t feel well.” Ashlynn is the type to show up unannounced with a quart of homemade soup. And Alex...Alex was there when things had gotten out of hand. 

But just because they knew he was lying when he said he was sick didn’t mean he stopped using it as an excuse. Ashlynn, despite herself, would usually not question it. Simon wouldn’t think twice about the lie, almost taking it as a direct confession. Alex would usually get pissed off and demand some kind of proof.

They were supposed to go to the beach tomorrow - get up early and take the train together to rockaway. But somehow, for the first time in years, Peter has something more than some congestion. Something way more.

It started a few days ago, a runny nose and swollen sinuses. He slept like shit, and the next morning his throat was raw and he absolutely could not breathe through his nose. But he had class, so he took the train in and sat in his lecture and tried to keep his sniffling to a minimum. By the time he was headed home, he’d long since run out of clean tissues, so he tends to his nose with a damp scrap of napkin he found buried in his bag, his nostrils red and irritated from the abuse. 

By the time he gets home, his congestion has gone from a clogged, static brick in his head to leaky, runny mess, but he’s well aware he can’t take a day off from work on his thesis, so he sits in bed working until 2 AM, one hand wiping the mess from his upper lip, the other scribbling notes in his worn out pad. 

He wakes the next morning not sure when he fell asleep, his head pounding heavily behind his eyes, sinuses throbbing and inflamed. His throat feels swollen and hot, and the relentless sneezing that started the night before isn’t helping any. The two days prior, everything seemed to be concentrated in his head, but now it’s clear it’s migrating into his chest as well. Halfway through his day at work in the library, he starts to cough, wet and harsh. 

It doesn’t help that his body aches like he ran a marathon, and chills are coursing through him like ice water in his veins. By the end of the day he can’t wait to finally sit down and rest. His body’s been screaming for it since the moment he got out of bed, and all day shelving books has really taken its toll.

Unfortunately, he’s got an hour long commute and lucky for him, it’s standing room only. He grips the subway pole like a lifeline, his head spins every time the train rocks. He catches a glimpse of his reflection in the darkened window - he looks awful. Bags like bruises under his eyes that are rimmed in pink and half lidded, his nose irritated and red. A coughing fit tears through him, and he tries his best to catch it in his sleeve. His knees start to tremble as he tries to take deep breaths, and he’s startled when someone taps him on the shoulder.

“You wanna sit?” the woman asks, and it takes him a minute to realize she’s offering her seat. Normally, he’d suck it up, but he’s too miserable to refuse. He mumbles a thanks, and sinks down.

It takes all his self control not to fall asleep then and there.

By the time he’s back at his building, he’s seriously doubting he can climb four flights to get to the apartment. Part of him would rather just lay down in the lobby but he knows this is the final stretch before he can climb into bed and sleep.

He’s interrupted by several fits of coughs, and by the time he’s reached the fourth floor he’s practically gasping for air, and soaked in sweat. The chills he had all day have swapped with an oppressive heat that makes him feel almost lightheaded. 

Somehow, he’s quite sure, he manages to stumble to bed, stripping off his damp clothes, the cool air on his slick skin throwing him back into shaking chills. Just as he’s about to let himself be sucked into sleep, his eyes fly open. Tomorrow. 6 AM. He’s supposed to go to the beach. There is no fucking way he is going to the beach.

He texts their group chat with trembling fingers.

hey im real sick i cant go tomorrow

There’s an immediate reply from Alex.

don’t fuckin do this man. we’re going.

A text from Simon.

you’ll feel better if you leave the house, you always do.

He sighs, cursing himself for using this shitty excuse so much now no one will take him seriously.

im serious i feel like trash

Alex answers immediately.

PETER. youre not sick youre being a pussy. we’re going to the fucking beach and we’re having a good time.

Simon responds.

chill alex.

if youre depressed thats fine but maybe consider coming still it might help.

i mean i’d feel better if you came

Peter groans.

im sick. like sick sick. like flu sick.

Alex shoots back quickly.

ok then what are your symptoms?

Peter rubs his eyes, trying to relieve some of the throbbing. 

fever, chills, aches, cough, runny nose, headache, tired.

There’s a moment of silence and he places his phone on his bedside table with a sigh. He’s about to go under when his phone starts to buzz. Once. Twice. Three times. He swears, grabbing it. Three texts from Alex. The first is a screenshot of the symptom list that appears when you google “flu” which just happens to be in identical order.

you need to be more creative

seriously man im not letting you miss this. we planned this months ago. dont be a dick.

Finally, Ashlynn chimes in.

you dont need to lie p, its ok if you dont wanna come.

While Peter would like to further argue that he’s not in fact lying, he just doesn’t have the energy. At this point, it doesn’t matter what they think. He’s not going - who gives a shit why? He’s able to fall asleep almost immediately, but unfortunately, he doesn’t really stay asleep.

He wakes up about every 45 minutes, coughing or shivering or burning or all three. After his fourth or fifth jolt awake he can’t for the life of him seem to get any rest. Every time he’s about to drift off, another coughing fit explodes from his chest and leaves him trembling. He’s hot, but he’s not sweating, which he realizes vaguely must mean he’s dehydrated. As the night wears on and his condition continues to worsen, he wonders if he should call an uber to take him to the ER. He can’t afford it, not in the slightest, but he’s not sure he’s ever felt this terrible before. Somehow, he remembers there’s an old thermometer in the kitchen. An old roommate had bought it thinking it would work for deep frying but didn’t realize the range only spanned from 95 to 107.

He needs to take his temperature. See how serious this actually is. He can’t remember the last time he actually ran a fever, so he’s not sure if this is just par for the course or whether this level of misery is cause for alarm.

He stumbles into the kitchen, and for once he’s glad to live in such a god-awfully tiny studio. He lands heavily against the counter, and rummages through the drawer to find the small device. After what feels like an eternity, he manages to grab it with shaking hands, fumbling with the buttons for a moment before flipping on the small kitchen light. 

He sticks it under his tongue, it feels like ice. He tries to coach himself on what he’s going to do. If it’s over 100, he’ll go to the hospital. No, that’s too low. 102?Still maybe too ambitious of a goal. It’s then he realizes he’s really just trying to justify what he’s going to do anyway - save himself an ER bill and stay in bed. He’s jerked out of his thoughts when the small device beeps and he removes it carefully from under his tongue. 

The display flashes 103.2. He doesn’t really know what that means but after a quick google search it’s not exactly any clearer. It’s bad, but not bad enough to cause brain damage, supposedly. Fuck it, that’s good enough for him. He climbs shakily back into bed, the small excursion has left him absolutely exhausted. 

He needs medicine. He knows that. Some tylenol at the very least, but if he can barely walk to the kitchen he doesn’t know how in hell he’s getting out the door, down the stairs, to the pharmacy, and back again. So, he’ll just have to live with it. 

He spends the rest of the night in and out of half-sleep, each coughing fit seeming to drive the illness deeper into his lungs. His nose has started to run again, and each rub with the already-used tissue makes his poor sensitive nostrils burn in protest.

The next morning he wakes to the harsh, deafening drone of his apartment’s buzzer system. He cracks his eyes and checks the time. 6:42 AM. Whoever the fuck it is can wait, he’d like to suffer in peace. Still, as he tries to slip back into the sleep the buzzer continues to go off and after about five minutes, he sits up in bed, fighting the wave of dizziness that washes over him. He stumbles to the keypad and presses the button that opens the lobby door, and the buzzing finally - mercifully - ceases. 

He grabs a t shirt from a pile on the floor and pulls on a pair of boxers - he doesn’t know if he’d be able to stand anything more with the way his fever is raging. He sits on the edge of his bed, trying to catch his breath, quickly breaking down into another awful fit of coughs. Just as he’s finished, he hears a heavy knock on the door. Sighing, he forces himself up, padding slowly over to the door, trying not to aggravate the dizziness any further. He pulls open the door and is confused to see not an overzealous delivery person, but his three friends. 

He stares dumbly for a moment before a breath catches in his throat and he breaks into thick, wet coughs. He sniffles, wiping his nose with his wrist, before looking back up at them.

“What?” he mumbles, and there’s an awkward silence. 

“Shit,” Alex finally says and Peter sniffles.

“What do you want?” he repeats, surprised at the hoarse, broken quality of his voice. Does he really sound that bad? Ashlynn pushes forward, wrapping him in a tight hug. She’s short, so her face is pressed into his chest, and he stumbles back slightly.

“Oh Peter,” she whispers, and he swallows, closing his eyes. She pulls away, and he has to force them open again. She she presses a hand to his forehead. Her palm feels cool but uncomfortable against his oversensitive skin. “You’re burning up.”

“I know,” he murmurs, wishing the conversation could be over so he can go lie down and not have to explain himself to his friends. He sighs, and narrowly avoids another coughing fit. “Are you gonna come in or you just all gonna stand there?” They exchange looks. “Well?”

Ashlynn pushes past him, followed by Simon and finally Alex. Peter shuts the door and tries his best not to look as fucked up as he feels walking to sit in one of his kitchen chairs. 

“What do ya’ll want?” he asks Simon and Alex, Ashlynn already digging through the medicine cabinet.

“We don’t want anything we were just concerned,” Simon says.

“Then why do you look so fucking shocked?” Peter snaps, even though he knows Simon is only telling the truth.

“Because I was 100% sure you were bullshitting,” Alex says. Peter is far too tired to get into a verbal sparring match with Alex, but he tries halfheartedly anyway.

“Still sure?” before Alex can reply Ashlynn is back with a damp washcloth and the thermometer he’d used the night before. She lays the cloth on the back of his neck, and he can’t help the small whine that escapes. 

“Open,” she says, and he does. She places the thermometer under his tongue gingerly, and strokes some of his hair off his forehead. “You don’t have anything? For this?” Peter shakes his head. She presses her lips into a line. “Simon and me are gonna go out and grab some stuff, ok?”

“That’s not necessary.” His voice is almost slurred with the fever, and as if on cue the thermometer beeps. Ashlynn frowns at the reading. She shakes her head.

“Christ, Peter.” She touches his forehead again, this time with the back of her hand. “103.6 and it’s not necessary?”

“I don’wanna be lectured.”

“I’m not lecturing.” She spends another moment fussing with his hair before getting up, grabbing Simon. “We’re going to get some stuff, we’ll be back. Alex, make sure he doesn’t die, ok?” It’s clear Alex is about to protest, but Ashlynn levels him with a glare. They leave, and then it’s just Peter and Alex.

Alex stands by the door, hands in his pockets. It’s a while before either of them speaks.

“What was I supposed to think?” he finally says, and Peter tries to swallow his anger.

“I don’t know, man.” He runs a hand through his greasy, sweat damp hair. He starts to shiver again, wrapping his arms around his torso. Alex takes a careful step forward.

“You get why I wouldn’t believe you, right?”

“Yes, Alex.” The chills are now back in full force, he’s sure he must be shaking like a leaf. He wants nothing more than this conversation to be over, but Alex doesn’t seem to be getting to message.

“You never get sick. Ever. So what am I-”

“I get it. It’s fine. Just...stop talking. Please.” He’s shaking so bad he can feel his teeth chattering. He pulls his knees to his chest. He closes his eyes, praying something - anything - will warm him up. He hears footsteps and fumbling, then feels a dry, warm blanket being tucked around his shoulders. He looks up, and Alex is standing there, eyebrows furrowed. 

“Do you wanna lay down or something?” The thought of climbing back into his sweat damp sheets makes him cringe, so he shakes his head. “Why not?”

“S’gross, I sweat a ton.” 

Alex nods.

“Right. What about the couch? You can lay on the couch and I can do your laundry.” 

Getting horizontal sounds heavenly, so he nods, and Alex touches his shoulder, quickly pulling his hand back.

“What the fuck - dude, you’re like...on fire. Shit.” He tests the side of his neck and winces. “Fuck.”

“Can you just help me?” Peter is embarrassed at how small and sick his voice sounds, and the fact he’s asking Alex of all people for help, but he knows if he tries to do it on his own he’s going to fall and crack his skull.

“Yeah, yeah, of course.” He wraps an arm around Peter’s waist, and supports him the few feet to the couch. It’s not very far but his knees go weak about halfway there and he’s glad Alex is holding him. As soon as he gets onto the couch, he curls on his side and closes his eyes. “You’re ok?” Peter nods, and Alex pats his shoulder awkwardly. “Ok. Cool. Just...stay there, I guess.” Peter can hear him starting to strip the bed.

“I was maybe gonna go for a run,” he mumbles, and Alex laughs softly. 

“Definitely. Then I’ll enroll at NYU for my bachelor’s.”

“You’re just jealous you don’t have all my debt.”

“You’re right. I’ve been trying to rack up some credit card bills but so far no luck.”

Peter opens his eyes to see Alex with the bundle of sheets in his arms and the bottle of detergent. He pauses for a second, shifting from foot to foot.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and Peter swallows hard.

“I know man, it’s ok.” Alex smirks.

“Alright. Don’t die while I’m gone.”

[bow-woahh]

Heal me after hurting (1/3)

Summary:

A million feelings she’s been fighting off for months threaten to overwhelm her: feelings of deep and utter care; of complete adoration; feelings of hot and harsh hatred; of absolute disdain; and abandonment, definitely abandonment; to confusion, anxiety, all bubbling as she tries to calm herself down; eyes closed, chanting the mantra:

you are in control, you are stronger now.   ___

Catra gets sick and someone unexpected turns up to help.

Relationship: Adora/Catra

Words: 10, 962 Notes: 

Hey, been working on this for a lil while, this was supposed to be a one shot but I’m incapable of writing things which are short so enjoy the first chapter! I would of posted it on here too, but it’s 10k words and I can’t even format it right on here, so apologies (Tbh it’s tumblr what did I expect?) TW - Drug use, depictions of mental illness, some violence (it’s not very graphic)

Preview below, Read on Ao3

Next>>>

Chapter 1 Preview: Sick of seeing your face

Catra knows she didn't sleep much last night. Most of it was spent coughing out her guts. She remembers that. She remembers messaging Scorpia. She remembers Scorpia saying she'd send some stuff over. She remembers music playing in the background, soft, peaceful, a stark contrast to her hacking her intestines alongside that thick phlegm up.

That's about all.

Mouth, throat and lips dry, she takes a sip from the water bottle on her nightstand and cringes so hard her eyes squeeze shut as the water feels like it's going down her throat the same way nails drag across a chalkboard — it shouldn't. And it hurts.

Internally groaning, because she figures it would hurt to do that aloud, she curses her immune system for not allowing this to fade overnight. Instead, it's gotten worse. College students don't have time to be sick, but here she is: dark circles under her eyes, a second or so away from what might as well be death, because she hates, hates being sick with all her heart. Not even all the shitty Netflix shows in the world are enough to make this better. Catra can't afford to miss school, so she checks the time, hopeful.

Only seven. She can make it. Then, she realises that's a terrible idea, because she doesn't need to bring the plague with her to class, nor does she want to. Being ill in school sucks. So the decision is already fated by the stars. Bed ridden.

However, the last thing she wants is to be stuck in her room all day. It feels too claustrophobic when she’s like this, like solitary confinement. And it doesn't have a TV with Netflix therefore, living room it is.

As she trudges over to the sofa, phone, book (which she’s never going to read), and box of tissue in hand, she finally realises...she isn't the only one home.

What?

Scorpia is away, with Entrapta and...no one else comes to her house. The only person with the house pin is—

"Catra? Are you awake?"

When Scorpia said that she'd deliver a few things over, she didn't think—

It's her. Standing in her kitchen, holding a carton of eggs, is Adora.

A million feelings she’s been fighting off for months threaten to overwhelm her: feelings of deep and utter care; of complete adoration; feelings of hot and harsh hatred; of absolute disdain; and abandonment, definitely abandonment; to confusion, anxiety, all bubbling as she tries to calm herself down; eyes closed, chanting the mantra:

you are in control, you are stronger now.

Adora, who broke up with her. Adora, who she has barely spoken to in months. Adora, who back then had looked at her with so much hate— no, disappointment that it was all Catra needed to be shattered in two. Adora, who did all these things and was everything, is now standing in her apartment.

Just like before, but only entirely different.

***

End Authors Note:

Hello! Long time no see! Not really, but this past month has been really busy because schools been a bitch and it’s not gonna stop being one anytime soon. After this fic, I really want to work on a multichapter which is on a larger scale, though with the pressure of school not stopping anytime soon, it’ll be a bit difficult. Nevertheless, alongside that I’ll still be answering the occasional tumblr prompts I get.

I hope you enjoyed the first chapter of my fic! Originally, I started writing this when I got sick because,, #relatable I guess and I didn’t have much of a plot for it until I thought of the whole “omg they are exes” thing. Me being me however, couldn’t leave it there, as I didn’t want them to just be awkward exes or something fairly cliche like that, I wanted to play with the idea of this odd dynamic where the breakup they went through was not entirely one persons fault, but how they failed to work as a unit to the point they reached an *extreme* breaking point. If you can’t tell, there’s a lot a little details I’ve put into this too, I suppose to further enhance things lol.

Plus, despite not knowing what actually happened between them until the end of the chapter (which still leaves out a lot of the build up to that point but otherwise we’d be her all day) I wanted them to have this dynamic where you could tell that what happened was more than meets the eye. Additionally, this fic deals with quite heavy themes, one being mental illness which I did my best to portray with Catra. Hopefully I depicted it right and the implications I made made it clear that this is something she has and still does struggle with. And having Adora back around her could very easily pull her back into a place similar to where she was before, but throughout this chapter she wrestles with that fact and the fact they’ve both changed and therefore things have changed. And I hope I didn’t in anyway romanticise that last part, because Catra’s actions (while explainable) aren’t right and she realises this (hence why she pushed down thinking about it all) and it will be addressed. Also...guess who her therapist is and I’ll post the next chapter early (actually –)

Okay I could rant about my own fic for a very long time, but I’ll stop there. Hopefully I’ll have the next chapter out in a week or since it’s already written so it’s a possibility, and if that’s the case I’ll see you then!

(Also talk to me on Twitter @ BowWoahh)

[mychemicalficrecs]

I really loved The Rise and Fall of the Black Parade and I was wondering if you could reccomend anything similar? Thanx!

Hi Nonny!

Whelp, you kind of caught a thing I don't read - Major Character Death.

I found a couple fics that seem to deal with similar topics though!

The Black Parade

The Fall and Rise of The Black Parade by wordslinging, Frank/Gerard, 53k, Mature. “I used to think this was Hell. I mean, I always figured that’s where I was headed, if there was any afterlife. And then when I got here…there were no lakes of fire, or anything, but I was stuck on my own in a place where nothing grows or changes, so I figured, okay, Hell’s just a little different than I always thought it would be. But then, after a while…it wasn’t so bad. I found a place where I could kind of belong, and I met Toro and Brian and Bob and Mikey…and you. And I figure…if I was in Hell, falling in love shouldn’t really be in the cards, should it?So after that, I started thinking—okay, maybe this place isn’t anything I ever heard about in school or church. But then again, maybe it is. Maybe this is Purgatory. And I always had the idea that Purgatory was kind of like prison, y’know, you gotta serve your sentence and the only thing that’s gonna get you out quicker is good behavior or having friends in high places. But maybe—maybe you don’t have to just sit around waiting for someone to tell you your sentence is up. Maybe Purgatory ends when you get yourself out of it.”

You'll Never Take Me Alive by Natileroxs, Frank/Gerard, 53k [WIP], Teen And Up Audiences. On Halloween, Mikey's brother died at a funeral. How fucking convenient. Far in the distance, The Black Parade begins to march.

The Famous Living Dead by conventionalweapons (aconventionalweapon), 17k [WIP], Not Rated. Frank is trying, really he is. He's trying to move on after the murder of his parents, he's trying to get past the mutilated right arm, and he's definitely just trying to get through high school. Unfortunately though, he has nightmares that haunt him, a friend that seems to just get stranger as the days pass, and a teacher that is convinced Frank's somehow going to be involved in opening a door to the other side, breaking a curse put upon four families hundreds of years ago, and bringing about the end of the world. No big deal right? Things are only made worse when his friend's brother, who looks scarily like a figure from his nightmares, shows up out of the blue and he realizes, maybe his teacher isn't so crazy after all.

Made For Death by orphan_account, Frank/Gerard, 4k [WIP], Teen And Up Audiences. Gerard had always known he would've gone to Hell when he died. He didn't really believe in God, but he did believe in an afterlife. In Hell. He never thought Hell would make him clean, would make him into someone who deserved the family he had. Of course, he'd also never thought it would be quite like this...

Alive! by feverbeats, 10k, General Audiences. She could have handled mad hatters. The Parade is something else entirely.

Me Against the Devil by TealrootsG, Frank/Gerard, 19k [WIP], Teen And Up Audiences. Mikey dies, and Gerard sells his soul to the devil to get him back. He has to sacrifice a small part of his soul each year without fail, though one year he misses the deadline and their contract is broken. This is when Gerard meets a demon called Frank, who helps him find loopholes in order to bring back Mikey. Of course, everything keeps going wrong.

Disenchanted by Lotion_the_Mitch, 3k [WIP], Teen And Up Audiences. I was floating, I was falling, I was losing my mind. I was safe, I was scared. I was lost, I was found. I felt everywhere and nowhere, muffled sounds off in the distance, flashes of bright lights and masked faces were all that I knew. There was a jolt, then maybe two more that rocked my whole body. It ricocheted down to the tips of my fingers and the ends of my toes. Then it was quiet, silent, and I was finally at peace.

I Am Not Afraid To Keep On Living by KilltheDJ, 923 words, General Audiences. And through it all, the rise and fall, the bodies in the streets... We'll carry on!

The Five of Us are Dying by Arowen12, Gerard & Mikey, 8k, Teen And Up Audiences. Some would gasp, some would cry as they wheeled us in by gurney.Gerard blinks and with a swallow answers, “Cancer.” His voice is rough like he’s been smoking cigarettes all his life, which he basically has however short it is. The man nods with a grimace and replies, “That’s rough. Tuberculosis and one shitty weak immune system. I’m Frank, that’s Bob to the left and Ray to the right, and- “ “Mikey.” Gerard interrupts with a nod at his brother. Frank grins, a grin too bright for the already washed-out room and asks, “You know him?” “My little brother, I’m Gerard.” “Man, that sucks, really.”

Welcome to the Black Parade by bluebomb, 1k, General Audiences. The Patient is dead and it’s time for him to join the Black Parade.

My Chemical Romance and the Black Parade by AlexYverr, 1k [WIP], Teen And Up Audiences. Mikey is killed during the siege of Normandy Bay, his brother is forced to watch as his brother's life is ripped away. He then wakes up in a strange place filled with raining ash and ruled by a mysterious figure only known as Mother War. What will happen when the rest of the band joins him and Gerard makes a deal with the devil?

Welcome To The Black Parade. by XoTheTragicianXo, Frank/Gerard, 1k, Not Rated. What happens when we die. in a shattering of glass and loud screeches of metal Frank Iero finds out.

Dead! by alienjack, 3k, Teen And Up Audiences. At first, they were all kinda pissed that Gerard just took all their souls without notice. I mean, who wouldn’t be? No more living, but at the same time, no death. Just eternal… whatever this place was. Until he explained what he wanted to do, the visions he’d had, the lost souls that were stolen before they could make their own way. His idea to save people. So that’s what they did.

Half-Dead by daltonandes, Frank/Gerard, 8k [WIP], Mature. After a reckless accident, 19-year old Frank is half-dead, ending up in a waiting place between death and life where he meets a group of undead people who call themselves the Black Parade, including their cocky leader, Gerard.

[prettysoldierprojectarchive]

1:3 – Mysterious Sleeping Illness, Protect the Girls’ Hearts in Love

[Original Post made 13/08/2013]

Alternative Title: If You’re Going To Run An Evil Radio Show, Learn How To Mute The Goddamn Mic

First aired: 21st March 1992

“OK Jadeite, what fresh turd have you pulled out of your ass today then?”

Jadeite continues his slow descent into ineptitude by starring in his own radio show, Midnight Zero (that’s a cool name), and calls himself J-Dite (…oh Jadeite, you need help bro.). Lovelorn ladies of Juubangai are encouraged to send in love letters to be read on air, and in return they receive a nasty-looking purple turd flower. This sucks the energy (what else) out of those who touch it, sending them into a deep sleep. It’s time for Sailor Moon to suit up, but this time she’ll be facing the malevolent DJ J-Dite himself.

This episode opens in the Dark Kingdom, with Queen Beryl giving Jadeite shit for being so incompetent. She sounds more playful than reproachful over his last two crappy plots, and Jadeite seems to take it as an opportunity to once-again flaunt his hubris. Personally, if I were Queen Beryl (and I think of little else in my daily life), I’d think of employing the 3-strikes-and-you’re-out-system to improve employee motivation.

Jadeite’s latest plan is a radio show. Let’s consider this ‘scheme’ for a second. Rather than his previous two attempts, the Midnight Zero plan appears to target far fewer people. It also takes quite a bit more effort; getting people to write in, delivering the evil flowers, learning how to use the rather complex broadcasting equipment, having to put up with the inane prattlings of teenagers. It’s unwieldy to say the least, not to mention that the entire energy-farming plot can be foiled by the victims simply refusing to wear the garish flowers.

“What’s a cool DJ name? This is going to take a while…”

Usagi seems quite keen on the show, and why shouldn’t she be? Stupid as Jadeite may be, he certainly has a smooth radio voice. When Usagi arrives at school, it’s to discover that her teacher, Miss Sakurada, is suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome or something. She falls asleep on the desk and refuses to wake up – sounds like a regular day at the office for me.

Usagi isn’t particularly sympathetic to the victims of the “mysterious sleeping illness��, she is of the opinion that sleeping forever is awesome. I couldn’t agree more. Here is a girl who’s got her priorities straight.

Classmate Naru (we’re going to be seeing a lot more of her, in more ways than one) reveals to Usagi that she’s been sending dozens of love letters to Midnight Zero, despite the fact that she has no object of affection. It’s a little sad, by Usagi is rather taken by the idea. Unfortunately, Usagi and poetic prose go together like apples and toilet water, and she gives up on the idea.

See, she can’t even use a pen correctly

That night, Naru’s letter is read on Midnight Zero by J-Dite! ZOMG! The next day, she’s wearing the giant shitty flower that J Dite sent her. Naru, too, succumbs to the sleeping illness almost immediately after putting the flower broach on (no one seems to associate the two events for reasons I cannot provide). Usagi brushes the flower, and she is also rendered unconscious! AND THEY STILL DON’T TAKE THE FUCKING FLOWER OFF. Jesus, these kids are thick. 

“Let ’em sleep. They’re noisy as shit anyway”

Now realising that J-Dite must be EVIL (and yet still not removing the flower from Naru-chan) Usagi and Luna plan to break into the radio station. Usagi gets a new toy, the Luna Pen, which gives her whatever disguise she can think of. Can you think of a more powerful and inappropriate magical device to give a 14-year-old with the IQ of a grape? 

“Moon Power! Make me Harry Styles!”

Now a stylish and confident radio producer, Usagi marches RIGHT into the broadcasting booth, straight past the monster, and sits down right across from Jadeite, who sits there looking like the vacuous cretin he is as Usagi casually announces over the radio that the flowers are dangerous. Come ON Jadeite, DO SOMETHING. She’s ruining all your stupid plans and you’re just LETTING her! Good LORD, Jadeite, put some effort into it! 

“Guys I licked the flower and now I’m totally tripping balls.”

This is the first time we’ve ever seen Sailor Moon face-to-face with Jadeite, Although Sailor Moon dispatches the monster with relative ease (it does dodge her first attempt at jewelry-based murder), a pissed-off Jadeite is a different matter altogether. Her Moon Tiara Action is useless against him, and he appears immune to her attempts to kick him stoutly in the groin, but Sailor Moon is spared certain death by Tuxedo Kamen, whose only action is to throw a rose at the floor. Jadeite seems utterly terrified of this completely ineffectual move and runs away crying. 

“Wait wait wait wait WAIT. Let’s set some ground rules. Number 1: No roses. I seriously HATE roses.”

We get the most obnoxious exit by Tuxedo Kamen yet, who bids Sailor Moon farewell before laughing hysterically as he leaps off a building to his death.

There was a lot of stupid in the episode, mainly because of Jadeite, but I found it enjoyable nevertheless. Usagi has some great lines, and we see Sailor Moon trying to beat Jadeite to death with her bare hands, which is worth a gold star right there.

Episode Score: 3/5

Monster Freakishness Level: 1/5 (She sucked balls)

Naru-chan Attack Count: 2

[handweavers]

i dont mean this in a im glad youre struggling way but im glad to see you say art school is stressing you out too because art school has been making me hate art and think i’m completely talentless and like i know neither of those things are true. but it’s so fucking hard to be motivated to do this v specific and intensive stuff i don’t care about. and like i feel like i’m not able to talk about it w my classmates because they’ve got it under control because they’re Real Artists and i’m just not

literally same, taking this program has made me realise how much i actually hate drawing 95% of the time because for me i use it as a means to an end rather than something on its own - i draw to be able to see what i'm visualizing and have something to go off of before i stitch or weave, and beyond that i've discovered that i really don't like it, it feels like a chore and something i dread and don't care much to improve upon, which is difficult when my program is almost entirely drawing based.

so between that and my awful immune system (ive been really sick twice since september) and the 2 hour commute each way i dread school and i've fallen behind and i do the bare minimum and try to stave off panic attacks constantly etc and despite knowing my situation and that i'm a textile artist and have little experience in anything else my teachers are quite harsh and critical which is really demoralizing and it's just made me feel like everything i do is shit and i can't compare to my peers who are making incredible art bc they're in their element. the thing is i'm really happy with what i make when i'm in my element doing what i like, but i'm not, and everyone at school has only seen me doing shit i don't know or care much about.

compounded with the fact that everyone in my classes ignores me and doesn't talk to me despite my efforts to reach out it's just such a shitty environment and i don't see myself going back next semester bc i'm incredibly unhappy there. i'm only there so i can qualify for a bachelors degree program in textiles which i will once this semester is over in december so there's no point in paying money to make myself unhappy when it's literally not necessary.

that's all just a long winded way of saying that i understand, i sympathize, and i'm sorry we're in a similar boat rn bc it sucks a lot. art school can be a very good thing for people but it's intense and draining on an emotional and creative level and especially if you aren't making the art that you want to make it's just miserable.

[quietnocturne-blog]

sorry in advance for the length of this post I tried to be brief but this fucked me up

so I read someone’s whump prompt today about munchausens by proxy and it made me recall like...several times in my childhood where my mom coaxed me to drink bleach so she could take me to the hospital, diagnosing me with several mental and physical health issues and taking me to tens of doctors until she could find someone who agreed with her that yes, I CLEARLY was half-blind - GET HER BIFOCALS EVEN THOUGH SHES 9!!!! that I had skin cancer, cut out that mole STAT!! or that I had bipolar because I had yelled on her and needed to be put on ADHD medication and anti-psychotics !!! or that I CLEARLY have PMDD AND PCOS!!! GET THAT UTERUS AN ULTRASOUND!!! or that I need to be on anti-androgen birth control 24/7 to stop my hair from all falling out because I have testosterone influenced alopecia

(I have NONE of this, I have professionally diagnosed anxiety and depression. THATS it. maybe PTSD but honestly I’m not vying for that diagnosis and I really DONT want to have it so I haven’t talked to my therapist about any of that shit)

anyway the point was that my entire family has come to know this is just who she is and it’s why my sister now has “dyspraxia” and autism which she doesn’t (even tho it’s a valid issue) and why my mom was thrilled when she broke her arm and got to baby her, why my sister got her adenoids and tonsils taken out without a real reason

I haven’t thought about this in literal months but maybe that’s why I’m fucking sick all the time, because her shitty dousing me with antibiotics and all sorts of miracle pills just to get attention and be called a saint fucked Up my immune system ? I get such bad anxiety just going to a doctors office now, it’s ridiculous. And seeing it used as a prompt was both SHOCKING bc......wow...I never expected someone to kink off of something so deranged and painful to victims of that - but I guess I’m glad they’re at least doing their research??

anyway it’s something that rly sucked for me that I’ve never talked about with anyone but family or my old therapist and seeing it on here as someone’s kink was just like...hm !

[zoemurph]

to have a friend, chapter four: $80

on ao3 1 | 2 | 3

fun fact i actually finished this like.....tuesday at 4 am cause i died for a bit between like 10-1 and then couldnt sleep. i have edited it since then tho so i promise its not too much of a disaster!

warnings: implied past self harm, discussions of mental health, depression/depressive episodes, some suicidal thoughts. let me know if anything else needs to be tagged

enjoy!

From: Evan To: Connor      Just go t home      Hope things ar eok with yoru family

Connor stares at the texts for a few moments before he falls back onto his bed.

Who knows how his family is.

Actually, he knows. A fucking mess. That’s what his family is.

He can hear Zoe practicing in the room next to him, forgoing headphones and using her amp because she wants to piss him off more. Larry had slunk back to his office, and Connor was sure he did as soon as the opportunity presented itself. His mom is in the kitchen, probably aggressively cleaning dishes like a sparkling plate will fix her shattered family.

Connor stares at the ceiling.

Why did he think he could do any of this?

He lifts his phone and looks at the screen again. Evan is trying. Which is just ridiculous. Evan is trying with this family. What the fuck.

From: Connor To: Evan      cool      they never are but thanks i guess

He tosses his phone to the side and debates doing homework. There’s not really much of a debate — he’s not going to do it — but the fact that he considered it is probably worth something.

It’s not that late yet, which is frustrating. He wants to go to bed, but he’s also too high strung for that. Usually he’d be exhausted but—

Connor studies his ceiling.

He’d been angry. So angry. Burning and explosive. He had been on the edge of his rope and about to break— and then he’d been doused in a shock of cold water. He’d been standing outside the bathroom, insides blistering and turning to ash, and then he’d heard Evan’s unnatural breathing and all of that had just stopped. The fire was gone and he was left with only mild panic that made his mouth taste like metal and an icy chill of not knowing what to do or how to help.

Somehow, sitting on the floor of him and Zoe’s painfully childish bathroom with Evan had been the most real part of the night. It felt the most solid, most tangible. Handing Evan one of those silly cups his mom kept buying, their fingers brushing as Evan took it with shaking hands, that was the most grounded he had felt in days.

Fucking weird.

There’s a knock on his doorframe.

Connor sits up to see Cynthia standing there. “Oh. Hi.”

She smiles, sadly because that’s the only way she smiles nowadays, and takes a step into his room. “Did Evan leave?”

“Uh…yeah. It’s not like he could hide in my closet or anything.” They both look toward the disaster that is Connor’s closet. The doors won’t shut and clothes are piled up on the floor. There was a time where Connor liked things to be neat and orderly. Now he doesn’t have the energy. “He wasn’t feeling great.”

She makes a concerned noise.

“He, uh, gets sick really easily. He’ll probably be fine tomorrow.” Connor curses in his head. Better jot that down so he can tell Evan that Cynthia now thinks that his immune system is shitty. Because she’s probably going to shove all sorts of vitamins and health drinks at him the next time she sees him. If there’s a next time.

God there better not be a next time.

Cynthia sighs. “I’m sorry about tonight, sweetie.”

Connor shrugs and swings his legs off the side of the bed. “It’s not like it was going to be any different than usual.”

The expression on her face is so pained that Connor has to look away. He can’t even be mad at her. He’s pissed at Zoe for her snippy comments. He’s mad at Larry because he’s always mad at Larry. He’s upset with his mom— the most he can be upset with her for is for not trying harder to stop things from getting out of hand. But when has she ever been able to stop it once it started?

Mostly Connor is just mad at himself.

The only reason Evan was here was because he gets paid twenty dollars a week. It’s not like he has any other obligation to be here. Or to hang around Connor. If there was ever a chance that Evan would actually like Connor, that just went out the fucking window.

“Are you hungry?” Cynthia asks, softly. Not as forced as usual. Not as pressing. “You didn’t eat much.”

“I’m fine,” Connor mutters. He tugs off his sweatshirt and throws it on his desk chair. He tries not to notice her eyes going to his arms and then flicking away. “I’ll grab something if I can’t sleep.”

She sighs again. She does that a lot. Sighing. “Okay. Okay, just…” She steps forward and brushes hair away from Connor’s eyes. “Apologize to Evan for us, okay?”

“Why?” Connor asks bitterly. “Because we can be better?”

Cynthia doesn’t say anything. She just stands on her toes and presses a kiss to Connor’s cheek. “Sleep well, honey.”

Connor stands in the center of his room after she leaves. He hates not having a door. It’s like his entire life is out in the open for his entire family to see and judge. Which is some bullshit.

He looks around his room, open and exposed, and thinks that he should clean. Or something. He’s living in a dump.

Connor picks up a sweatshirt and stuffs a few books onto an overflowing bookshelf. Under papers from junior year that he just needs to throw out when he gets the chance, he finds a watercolor sketchbook.

He pauses with four old plastic water bottles in arm to flip through the sketchbook. It’s old as hell, he doesn’t even remember the last time he used watercolors. Or did any art that wasn’t just shitty sketches in his notebook when he didn’t feel like paying attention.

He looks over his shoulder at the light in the hallway.

Connor isn’t entirely sure where his watercolors are. Probably somewhere under the trash and clothing covering his floor. He looks from the watercolor sketchbook to his bed.

He dumps the water bottles in the space between his wall and his bed and starts digging. It takes him almost twenty five minutes to find his watercolor palette. It’s old and dusty, the red is cracked and the purple is almost gone because he always really liked using purple for some reason, but it’s usable.

It takes him a little longer to find brushes. He’s definitely missing some, but fuck it, he never actually knew what the different brushes were for. He just used whatever ones he felt like.

He washes out an old mug that was on his desk from god knows when in the bathroom and fills it with clean water, grabbing a roll of paper towels from the hallway closet. Then he pushes the clothes on his floor into a pile against the wall so he can sit on the floor, because there is no way in hell that he’s cleaning off his desk for this. He fishes his earbuds out of his backpack and plugs them into his phone, turning on some random music that he’ll let fade to into background noise and pulls his hair up into a really messy ponytail.  

Connor can’t remember the last time he actually paid attention to art. He doodles a sketch that’s kind of messy but fine enough because it’s not like anyone is going to see this and then just goes for it. He doesn’t exactly remember how to do this, but he’s never been one for doing things the right way. There’s a reason he stopped taking art classes after freshman year. There’s something weirdly calming about the way the water spreads on the page and something familiar in the brushstrokes. Even when he fucks up and uses way too much water and he knows that the paper is going to be wavy and warped.

He puts down the paintbrush to skip a song on his phone. He has another text from Evan.

From: Evan To: Connor      Im sorr y      YOu should nt feel that way abou tyour family

Connor rolls his eyes. Evan really does try.

From: Connor To: Evan      its whatever, im used to it      mom says sorry about tonight. shes embarrassed      but seriously dont worry about it

He skips through the songs until he finds one that feels right, slower and almost more gentle, he really needs to pick up better watercolors because he’s going to need that purple, before putting his phone back down on the floor next to him.

All things considered, this isn’t the worst piece Connor’s ever done. He studies it as he takes a sip from his mug.

He yanks the mug away from his mouth, gagging. He rubs his mouth with a grimace.

That was paint water.

Connor doesn’t really leave his room much over the next two days. He eats because his mom wants him to, he doesn’t talk to Zoe, and he argues with Larry and wishes he had a door to slam.

Then he sits on his floor and fills pages and pages of his sketchbook with shitty watercolor paintings.

He splashes colors across the pages, sometimes not even trying to create a coherent image. He just needs something to do.

He’s almost out of purple.

Connor waits by Evan’s locker Monday morning, folding and unfolding the twenty dollar bill in his pocket. Zoe needed to be early today for some band thing, so that means Connor is early which just sucks.

This school seriously needs a color palette that isn’t drab and depressing. Connor wears almost exclusively black, but fuck, tone down the gray.

“Oh! Hey, you’re…already here.”

Connor looks up from his phone. “Zoe,” he says. “Band shit. Fuck if I know.”

Evan nods slowly and then reaches for his lock.

“Wait.” Connor grabs Evan’s wrist.

Evan freezes, wide eyes darting to Connor. “W-what?”

Connor leans a little closer. “We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” he whispers. Evan furrows his eyebrows. “My family is the fucking worst, you shouldn’t have to deal with that shit.”

“I-it’s fine!” Evan stutters. “I don’t— no this is. This is okay.” He slowly pulls his arm out of Connor’s grip.

Connor clenches his jaw and leans against the next locker. Evan doesn’t say anything as he opens his locker and starts taking out books. An unfairly loud part of Connor’s brain wonders if Evan is only doing this because he’s scared.

It’s not that far fetched.

“B-besides,” Evan adds, “Jared is— he’s already asking too many questions and if we just stopped now—”

Connor frowns. “He is?”

Evan gives him an exasperated look. “He hasn’t texted me about non homework things in forever and he’s just been sending me ‘is it a sex thing’ for a week.”

“Wow I hate him,” Connor says before he can stop himself.

Evan laughs in surprise.

“He’s a douche!”

Evan ducks his head. “He’s not the worst person ever, b-but he can be…himself.”

“And that’s pretty bad,” Connor mutters.  

Evan pauses and then closes his locker. “Do— are you still okay with…with telling him?”

Connor shrugs. “Sounds like we have no choice.”

Evan tugs on the hem of his shirt. “Are you…free today?”

“I literally have no life or friends, Hansen,” Connor reminds him. “I’m always free.”

“Okay, right, okay.” Evan takes a short breath. “Can we— today?”

Connor stuffs his hands in his pockets. He hasn’t gotten harassed by Kleinman about this yet, but if they wait, the chances of that happening increase significantly. And if it’ll get Jared off Evan’s back— “Yeah sure. Where?”

“My place?” Evan asks. Connor pulls open the door to the stairwell. “I-if that works?”

“Sure thing.” Connor’s voice echoes uncomfortably loud for this conversation. “Better than being at home anyway.”

Evan glances back over his shoulder at Connor. “Are things…bad?” He says it slowly, like he’s not sure what word to choose.

“They’ve been worse,” Connor admits. “But it’s not a party.”

Evan stops at the stairs where Connor has to keep going down to get to chorus. “I’ll— I’ll text you? About the time?”

Connor nods. “Sounds good, Hansen. See you then.” He steps forward and hands Evan the twenty that has been floating around in his pocket for too long. “Forgot to pay you back for food last week,” he says when Evan’s eyes dart toward people walking past.

Evan gives him a half smile and takes the bill. “I-I told you it was fine. I can pay sometimes.”

Connor shrugs and turns toward the stairs. “Too late.”

—«·»—

From: Evan To: Connor      Im s o s rry just ignore him or block him he grabbed my phon e      Serious ly blockign him mihgt be the best opti n

From: Connor To: Evan      ??????

Connor probably shouldn’t be texting in class, but the class is astronomy and also when has Connor ever given a fuck. He stares at Evan’s messages, trying to decode them while he waits for the lunch bell.

It turns out he doesn’t have to wait that long to figure out what they mean.

From: (522) 101-5414 To: nerd, emo      sup fuckers

Connor doesn’t even have to ask who it is, he just tries not to groan and texts Evan.

From: Connor To: Evan      seriously??

From: Evan To: Connor      Im sorry !!!      Hes being a  d ick      Also does like 3 work?

Connor huffs and glances to the clock. That’ll give him about an hour to kill after school before he can show up at Evan’s. Whatever, he’ll figure something out.

From: Connor To: Evan      thats fine      tell kleinman if hes being a dick i will hurt him

Evan’s response is almost immediate.

From: Evan To: Connor      I wouldnt blame you but ma y be dotn hurt the one pe rson whos gonna knw about us

Connor snorts and puts away his phone. He’ll do his best, but only because Evan asked.

—«·»—

Connor texts Evan as he walks up to the house. The door is open before he can even knock. Evan looks slightly panicked, but also somewhat relieved. Connor lowers his hand from where he was about to knock.

“He here?”

Evan nods and grabs Connor’s sleeve, tugging him inside.

Connor takes off his boots while Evan rambles on about Jared being in his room and talking about something, summer camp? Maybe? And then there’s a tangent about cars? Connor isn’t sure but he puts down his boots, straightens, and puts a hand on Evan’s shoulder. “Breathe,” he interrupts. “You’re going to pass out and you really don’t want to leave Kleinman and I alone together.”

Evan takes a slow breath. “Right. Right. He’s… Come on.”

He shows Connor up the stairs, gesturing vaguely to a bathroom as he moves toward his room. Connor didn’t really notice how small Evan’s house is the last time he was here, but now he feels too large in it, like he’s taking up too much space. But it’s also comforting in a weird way, less empty space for thoughts to echo.

Jared spins around in Evan’s desk chair when Evan opens the door. “Man of the hour!” Jared announces, opening his arms in Connor’s direction.

Connor flips him off.

“Okay, rude. I can work with rude.”

“Jared,” Evan says warningly.

“I know, I know.” Jared spins back and forth a little in the chair. For some reason, Connor thinks giving him a chair that turns may have been a bad idea. “If I’m an ass you won’t give me pizza.”

Connor scoffs. “You bribed him?”

Evan shrugs helplessly. “I just— can we not talk about this?”

“Yeah,” Jared agrees. “I was promised juicy deets on whatever the fuck this is.” He motions between Connor and Evan. “Cause uh,” he laughs, “guys, what the shit?”

“We aren’t friends,” Connor says flatly.

Evan twists the hem of his shirt in his hands.

“Yeah no shit, Sherlock.” Jared grabs the arms of the chair and leans forward. “Wait this is a sex thing, isn’t it! Evan you said—”

“It’s not a sex thing!” Evan shouts. “It’s a—” He looks to Connor with wide eyes. “A…fake friend…thing?”

“Excuse me?”

Connor explains before Evan can flounder any more. “I give Evan twenty bucks a week to pretend to be my friend.”

Jared stares at them.

Evan shifts uncomfortably next to Connor. Connor kind of wants to leave, but Evan wants to do this, so…

Jared snorts. “Are you fucking serious?”

Evan cringes. “Y-yes?”

“This is—”

“We know, Kleinman,” Connor snaps. “But we need your help.”

Evan looks at Connor in surprise. ‘We do?’ he mouths to Connor. Connor nods. Spur of the moment thought, but he literally can’t keep dealing with Zoe bugging him about Evan. Who gives a shit if they never hung out together around school, even if that is a lie. He needs some sort of proof so she shuts up.

Jared spins slowly in his chair. “How so?”

“Evan said we emailed each other,” Connor says. “But my dad checks my email. So this email account would have to be ‘secret’.”

Jared raises his eyebrows. “That’s—”

“We know, Jared!” Evan interrupts. “C-can you just—” He glances toward Connor. “We need…emails from over the summer?” Connor nods. “Can you just, like, show me how to fake the timestamps o-or something?”

“Oh yeah, that’s super easy,” Jared says. He leans down and unzips the backpack leaning against the desk and pulls out a laptop. He opens the laptop and types something out. “Secret email account is very—”

Connor grits his teeth. “Just do it, Kleinman.”

“Yeah, yeah. Watch the monkey dance,” Jared mutters to himself. “That’s super fun.” He pauses. “If Evan gets twenty bucks a week for this, what do I get?”

“The gift of life.”

Evan shoots Connor a look.

“Awesome.” Jared types for another moment. “You know,” he says, “twenty bucks seems pretty cheap.”

“Are you trying to be difficult?” Connor grumbles.

“Always.”

“I-it’s fine,” Evan stutters. “Re-really, Jared?”

“I’m just saying,” Jared says with a shrug. “You should totally charge more for more complicated stuff. Twenty for faking friendship, forty for hanging out, sixty for being around the family.”

“What?!”

Connor glances to Evan out of the corner of his eye. Evan is protesting, but it’s not the worst idea. Especially after the dinner that Evan suffered through. Connor is going to have to ‘borrow’ more money from his parents’ wallets, but hey, at least it’s not for weed.

“I really fucking hate that I’m saying this,” Jared and Evan look over to Connor, “but that’s not a terrible plan.”

Jared smirks. “Nice.”

Evan gapes. “W-what?”

“If you spend a few hours dealing with my shitty family, that probably is worth more than saying hi to me in the hallway.” Connor crosses his arms. “I should probably pay you more when you have to deal with more bullshit.”

“N-no, that isn’t— you don’t have to—”

“Let him give you money, Evan.” Jared types rapidly on his laptop. “I’m making you two up a fucking price chart for reference.”

“Jared—”

“One condition,” Connor says. “If we’re doing this it’s only ten dollars a week, if that’s okay,” he directs the last part to Evan. “I’m not a goddamn millionaire.”

“Annoying but valid,” Jared says. “The weekly flat rate is ten dollars then, nonnegotiable.”

Evan sinks down into the other chair that someone had pulled up to the desk.

“I think the first step up is hanging out outside of school.” Jared glances to Connor.

Connor nods. “Three for outside, five for my house.”

“Do I get a say in this?” Evan asks weakly.

“Nope,” Jared says, popping the ‘p’. “If hanging out involves the fam, I say it’s an instant five more.”

“How about two added on to the location fee,” Connor argues.

Jared scoffs. “That’s three dollars, man.”

“Try to remember we’re high schoolers,” Connor says flatly.

Evan wimpers.

Jared pats Evan’s arm. “Okay. Extended family is another three. No arguing that one, extended family is bullshit. Twenty bucks flat for a sleepover. Like on top of the weekly ten.”

Evan’s eyes go wide. “What?! No!”

Jared looks to Connor.

Connor shrugs. “Fine.” He doesn’t think that will be relevant but whatever. If it gets written down it’s not the end of the world.

Jared smiles to himself and starts to type quickly.

“W-what are you doing?” Evan asks, leaning closer to try and get a look at the screen.

Jared elbows Evan away. “Shh I’m working.”

Connor raises his eyebrows.

“Aaaaaand…done.” Jared spins his laptop to show Connor.

Connor squints at the list Jared has made on the document.

 This is the Worst Plan I’ve Ever Heard But Have Fun You Friendless Losers created by Jared Kleinman

$10 — weekly flat rate no matter what

—

Casual Shit:

$3 — hanging out outside of school $5 — hanging out at the Murphys’ (+$2 to location fee if it involves other Murphys) (+$3 more if it involves any extended family) $20 — sleepover

—

Romance Shit:

$25 — date $5 — hug $15 — kiss $200 — Full Boyfriend Package™

(FFBP™ decreases all things in this section by $10, except for dates, which drop to $20. No, you do not get paid for hugs, hugs are just free now. Congrats, you just paid two hundred fucking dollars for a free hug)

 Connor rolls his eyes. “You’re fucking hilarious,” he deadpans.

Evan pales as he reads it once Jared has turned the screen toward him. “Uh…”

Jared snorts. “It’s called a joke, dude. Learn to take it.”

“J-just delete it,” Evan stammers. “That’s not— we were supposed to make emails.”

“Okay.” Jared highlights the romance section and deletes it. “It���s gone.”

Evan sighs. “Thank you.”

Jared does a keyboard shortcut. “And it’s back!”

“Jared!”

“Gone! And back!”

Evan’s ears turn pink. “S-seriously?”

Jared just wiggles his eyebrows and deletes it again. When he starts to hit undo, Connor leans forward and grabs the laptop out of his hands.

“Dude!”

“We aren’t fucking five,” Connor says. “Can you help us with these emails before my sister tries to call a fucking private detective on me or are you just going to be a dickhead?”

“That’s no way to talk to someone who’s helping you out,” Jared says. But he holds out his hand for the laptop, and when Connor gives it back, he spins around, puts the laptop on the desk, and opens a new tab.

Him and Connor set up a new email account and then Jared has Evan open up his own email. As Jared sets up faked emails that Evan and Connor will fill with mindless shit, Connor looks around Evan’s room.

There’s a window with two small succulents sitting on its windowsill. There are pictures scattered around the room in mismatched frames, a lot of Evan and a woman he assumes is his mother, more than a few of Evan and Jared when they were younger but less and less as they get older until there’s none, and one small picture of Evan with a man that looks vaguely like him that sits on the corner of Evan’s desk, a stack of books obscuring it slightly.

Connor remembers Evan saying something about his dad and looks away.

Evan’s room is much smaller than Connor’s. It’s cozier and cleaner, but still untidy. The books in Evan’s shelves are piled up and tipping over, there are a few sweatshirts draped around the room, and there’s a terrifying looking pile of papers on his nightstand.

“Yo,” Jared says, holding out his laptop to Connor. “Work out what you want these to say with Evan so I can finish this. While you do that I’m going to find some snacks.”

“We’re out,” Evan answers almost immediately from where he’s bent over his laptop.

“I’m going out to buy snacks,” Jared corrects. “See you in a bit, losers.”

Connor stares at the blank form that Jared has pulled up on the screen. How many of these things is he going to have to do and is this going to turn into a school assignment?

“It’s probably easier if one of us starts,” Evan murmurs. “And then we just go back and forth and respond to whatever the other says.”

“Like actual emails.”

Evan rolls his eyes. “Yeah, just faster.”

“Sure. Let’s keep the things that can mark when this shit got sent to a minimum, okay?” Connor’s summer is a blur. He spent probably too much of it high and another big majority of it just doing nothing. Looking back at it, it all just blends together into a mess of shitty and shittier.

Evan nods. “Mhm. I’ll start if you want.”

“Go wild.”

As Evan types, Connor clicks through the other tabs Jared has open. One for the email account, a few google searches, a coding thing Connor doesn’t understand, and the price list. Jared put the romance section back.

Connor makes a note on the document that just says ‘youre a dick’ and clicks back to the dauntingly blank form.

An hour later, Evan has finished his sixth email, Connor is typing out a shitty response, and Jared has shown up with enough chips to feed a small nation. They figure out how to space the emails they’ve already written and Jared gets to work on finishing up the ones they’ve got written.

“Should we do the whole summer?” Evan asks.

Connor shrugs. “I don’t care, Zoe will probably buy it with one or two.”

Jared spins back and forth as he adds all the timestamps. “Someone order a pizza, I’m dying.”

Evan checks the time. “Jared it’s only—”

“Yeah? And?”

“You just ate like an entire bag of chips.”

Jared looks up at Evan. “When has that ever stopped me from eating an entire pizza?”

Evan shakes his head. “W-whatever. The usual?”

Jared shoots him a finger gun as he types with one hand.

“I’ll go with,” Connor says. He follows Evan down to the kitchen to see another twenty dollar bill in the center of the table. “Want me to call it in?” he asks.

Evan nods. “Jared always gets a supreme. If he doesn’t finish he just brings it home.”

Fair, Connor would do the same if he cared more about eating. He can only handle so much of his mom’s cooking. Connor places the call and then waits with Evan at the table. “Does your mom have you get takeout a lot?” he asks, looking at the bill.

Evan follows his gaze. “Uh… I-I mean…yeah. She works all day at the hospital, she’s a nurse, a-and then takes night classes at the college,” he gestures vaguely toward the street and Connor assumes he means the community college that people who are ambitious like Alana Beck go to to take summer classes so they look more impressive to admissions, “so…she doesn’t really have ti-time to cook and I’m— I’m not very good at it,” Evan mumbles. “I can do…ramen? Um…mac n cheese. Instant stuff. Other than that I can make like…pasta and grilled cheese and that’s…sort of it. But she doesn’t have a lot of time to go to the grocery store and I, uh, don’t like going so. Takeout is…easier.”

Connor nods. “I get that. You can’t go wrong with ramen noodles. One day we’ll both be living off them,” he jokes.

Evan looks to him in surprise. He smiles a little. “Y-yeah, I guess that’s true.”

Connor suddenly realizes that he talked about the future casually. About college casually, because he can remember one time when he was little and sick and Larry made ramen noodles for him and Connor had decided that they were the best thing ever and Larry had ruffled his hair and said that he’d get sick of them when they were all he ate in college. It’s uncomfortable. It settles wrong inside him. Because outside of the context of that one quip, the future doesn’t feel real. It feels like some untouchable abstract concept.

Thinking about it makes his stomach turn and makes dark thoughts creep in from the corners of his mind.

He shakes them away and listens to Evan talk about how he’s ruined soup before. It’s better than thinking about a future that hardly exists, one that he’s ready to cut the string on at almost any given moment in time.

Evan buries his face in his hands as he tells Connor about the time Jared tried to make eggs in the microwave and almost set fire to the house. Connor laughs and pretends he’s okay.

When the pizza arrives, Connor pays the delivery person while Evan goes and gets Jared. It’s too early for dinner, but Jared doesn’t care and eats two slices before going upstairs to grab his laptop and then eats another. Evan eats breadsticks and lets Jared carry most of the conversation, about half of which is about how weird Connor eats his pizza.

Evan makes Connor take a slice of pizza back, because he ends up missing dinner at home, and Connor just rolls his eyes and takes the plastic tupperware and promises to give it back at some point. Evan shakes his head and tells him not to, because they have too much and they can never find lids that match. Connor figures he’ll just slip it back into a cabinet the next time he comes over.

Next time. Connor doesn’t think in next times. Weird.

[mymurderbooks]

5 Anime Recommendations for Your Stay Home Time

So you’re on lockdown, more or less. You’ve watched the most popular anime recommendations: Sailor Moon, Naruto, Death Note, etc. etc. Here’s some anime I love that you might not have come across yet. Yes, you could be productive, you could (rather unproductively) worry about the future of mankind, but it’s also important to not stress out too much (it weakens your immune system!) and watch some shows.

These are some of my favourite animes. I rate them all five stars and I’ve listed them in no particular order, but I’ve chosen them for different reasons. A couple I think are better than others, notably, Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju and Planetes, which are two of the best shows I’ve seen in any format. I won’t give too many spoilers, but briefly summarise the theme of the anime and my impressions, and why I recommend it.

1. Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju English title: Showa and Genroku Era Lover’s Suicide Through Rakugo Studio: Studio Deen First premiered: Winter 2016 Where to watch? You can stream this on Crunchyroll.

Rakugo is a traditional Japanese form of comedic storytelling theatre, and this anime narrates the lives of a line of rakugo performers. This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen on TV. It’s slow but not draggy, it’s very well paced and nothing feels like filler. It tells the story of the rakugo performers with respect and sensitivity, and above all, subtlety. Everything about this show is elegant, from the artwork to the portrayal of the characters.

Since it’s a show about rakugo, you will see the characters performing rakugo in it, and this is done so realistically and so well that you feel you’re in the theatre with them, which is one reason I think this is a good pick for being in lockdown. I was completely unfamiliar with rakugo before this, but as I watched I became interested enough that I really really wanted to see a show. I was lucky enough that I was able to see an English-language rakugo artist, Katsura Sunshine, perform in London. He travels and does rakugo around the world, so if you get a hankering to see a rakugo performance after watching this anime, that’s something to maybe put on your post-Covid-19 list to look forward to when theatres reopen.

The classic ‘Shinigami’ rakugo performed by Kikuhiko in the anime:

Even if you don’t like anime and don’t normally watch it, I highly recommend you watch this. It’s so good. I promise it’s better than anything on Netflix.

—

2. Planetes Studio: Sunrise Premiered: Fall 2003  Where to watch? It’s streaming on Netflix Japan, but not Netflix anywhere else at the moment, but maybe it will be? The boxset is on sale on Amazon for a lot of money. Sorry, I don’t know where you can watch this at the moment, but if you find a way, I recomend you do.

Planetes is a hard sci-fi anime that follows a team who are, essentially, trash collectors in space (’Debris Section’ of a large corporation). I recommend this as one of the best space shows I’ve seen, and because I find the latest Star Trek series super disappointing. I’m gonna be real, I’m a fan of Next Generation and Captain Picard himself, but Picard (the show) sucks. If you compare it to Planetes, it’s like Picard was written by 14 year olds.

Planetes is very adult, although it may not seem so at first. Stick with the first few episodes, and you’ll find that this show really delivers. It’s dark, but not dark in the way that many Hollywood shows are ‘dark’. Hollywood seems to interpret this to mean violent death murder torture, and there’ll be at least one scene in the season of someone plunging their bare hands into the core of another person’s body, or eye poking torture, but Planetes is dark in that it’s probably one of the more plausible/realistic representations of mankind’s future in space.

In Planetes there’s no alien friends, no federation of planets, no post-money world, no intergalactic battles. There’s just us humans, being shitty, but now we’ve infected space too. Capitalism is worse. Life is harder. There’s crap floating around the universe, and this show follows the underpaid people doing the dangerous job of retrieving it. If you like sci-fi, this is some of the best sci-fi TV, ever.

—

3. Shirokuma Cafe English title: Polar Bear Cafe Studio: Studio Pierrot Premiered: Spring 2012 Where to watch? Streaming on Crunchyroll

This anime revolves around a cafe run by a Polar Bear. It’s a slice of life genre anime. It’s very lighthearted, but also, to me, feels more adult than many adult-oriented shows. In Japan it falls under the category of ‘josei’ anime, ie. anime for adult women.

It’s so lovely. I guess kinda like Cheers, but in a cafe, and far lovelier. The cafe regulars are Panda and Penguin, and Llama sometimes comes in. Grizzly runs a bar (that’s also lovely! You want to go to his bar!) and there’s a human called Sasako who works there. There’s an adorable Red Panda! A bunch of squirrels who sort through coffee! Everything is lovely and cute!

What do they do? Random adorable everyday things. One of my favourite episodes, and a great one to watch in the spring, is the cherry-blossom viewing episode. Some episodes we learn about coffee from the tree squirrels. Sometimes they just sit around the coffee. At some point Panda gets a job at the zoo. They go to a baseball range, etc.

If what you’re looking for is a cute, light-hearted, relaxing show for adults where everybody knows your name and nothing dark happens, I recommend this highly. Particularly if your hobbies are chilling out, going to cafes, drinking coffee, taking walks, flowers - you’ll love this.

There’s a real Shirokuma Cafe (anime-themed cafe) in Tokyo, in Takadanobaba. I visited last year and loved it there! If you end up watching and loving Shirokuma Cafe too, add it to your post-Covid-19 travel cafe bucket list! 

—

4. Sakamachi no Apollon (Apollo on the Slope) English title: Kids on the Slope Studios: Tezuka Productions, Mappa Premiered: Spring 2012 Where can I watch it? Streaming on Crunchyroll

Kids on the Slope is, essentially, a jazz anime. It celebrates jazz. The actual storyline is a coming of age story of some kids who jam together, and they experience adolescence together and grow up and all that, and there’s some romance, some adolescence angst. The art is beautiful. The story is told well. That’s all fine. But really the draw here is jazz.

Jam session:

The unofficial theme song is Moanin’ by Art Blakey. The song features throughout the series, the organ version is particularly good (and I think it only exists in/for this anime). I chose this anime for the list because the characters’ love for jazz is infectious and sparks the fire for jazz within you. It makes you want to play jazz, or at least listen to jazz, or read about jazz, or maybe learn an instrument, and that’s something you can do at home on lockdown. Be inspired by the jazz children!

—

5. Shinsekai Yori English title: From the New World Premiered: Fall 2012 Studio: A-1 Pictures Where can I watch it? Streaming on Crunchyroll

This is a show set in the future. The art is beautiful and moody, the soundtrack is excellent. It’s sci-fi/fantasy, and has a classic setting: a portion of humanity develops psychic powers. This show follows Saki and her friends into their adulthood in an authoritarian dystopia, masquerading as a utopia.

It’s not a coming of age story. This show is dark. It’s also deceptive. The world built in the anime is layered, complex, and it feels like a full, complete, rounded tale, despite being only 25 episodes. It’s ultimately really a story about inequality, power, and the cost of 'civilisation' - I don’t want to say too much because I don’t want to spoil it for you, we the viewers begin to understand the full nature of the society the children are growing up in as they do, as it unwraps slowly in each episode.

[mmoxie]

couldn’t get any sleep tonight

kept swallowing in my sleep, which set off my sore throat, which woke me up in pain every five minutes

got out of bed super disoriented and frustrated and upset, managed to get down some naproxen and sudafed after checking they were safe to take together, would not have sorted my shit out in the least without the help of my gf, who kept me from just sitting here and crying about it

took an extra-hot shower and i’ve been keeping water on hand to drink instead of just swallowing nothing and hurting myself

i’m so congested everything hurts

there has never been a better time to skip out on this shitty body and upload into a robot, why does my immune system suck so fucking bad

[sienna27]

I need to rant for a bit here.  This was triggered by a comment I received on a review, but the remark itself genuinely bothered me because I had a really stressful, crappy, afternoon and I just didn’t need to get the comment I got from the random reader.

So, my day.  Work earlier, then because I live in the south, this weird, unfortunate saga involving a sick raccoon which ended up being put down like ten feet away from me because he was having seizures and it was awful and Animal Control was pretty sure it was distemper and there’s obviously no treatment for that in a wild animal.  The whole thing sucked.  Seeing an animal in pain and having seizures is categorically upsetting.  Worse still having it get killed when you’re right in the vicinity.  And at first they were going to shoot it so there was like ten minutes waiting for a frigging gunshot!  Eventually they went with a different method but still, imagine WAITING for a gunshot!   This was two hours of my life from raccoon discovery to his poor little corpse removal.  Then from there I finally get home and all of a sudden I’m thinking, ‘fuck, distemper is supposed to be incredibly contagious!  My cats!’  And there’s no way of knowing which distemper this raccoon had (canine or feline, I researched and raccoons can catch both) so I’m freaking out because all this stuff I’m reading says humans can carry it into their pets on their shoes and clothes and my cats are inside cats so they only get rabies boosters   My sister’s pointing out that when they were kittens odds are good they did get a distemper vaccine and I just don’t remember, and that they just haven’t been getting the boosters, but either way the odds are good that they should be fine because MY exposure was mostly incidental.  I for sure didn’t have direct contact with the raccoon, it’s more that I was walking through the same area and I don’t know if I walked anywhere that he exactly walked and could have spread his germs.  Also, some people that I was around, DID walk over to him and then THEY were walking where I was walking inside the house.  Yes, that would be like two degrees of separation of ‘tracked’ germs, and I am clearly getting super paranoid but seeing the phrase ‘incredibly contagious’ over and over will make a person incredibly paranoid. Plus you know Stevo has his health issues anyway so he can’t be exposed to ANYTHING!  So I came in my house, threw my sneakers into the wash machine by themselves with a crapload of soap and bleach, then I mopped and Lysol’ed the front hall where I’d taken off my shoes.  I also found some L Lysine to booster the cats immune system but beyond that, there’s not much more I can do but hope for the best that I didn’t bring anything home that’s going to kill my fur children.  But obviously I’m still stressed because I can’t control the situation or know if there was any legitimate exposure and so it will be a few days until I’m feeling like we’re totally out of the woods here.  

Jump ahead, me post anxiety pill, trying to put this shitty depressing afternoon behind me and now I’m in my email.  I have a review on This Is Now.  I don’t think the person who wrote it follows me here, but if they do, you’ll know who you are.  And if they don’t follow me here, that’s fine, because I purposely didn’t write back to them on the review because they would have received this novella of ranting right now and they would have thought, ‘holy shit, this bitch is crazy!’  Again though, this bitch really just had a lousy day. But to the comment on the review, basically love the story, BUT quote, it’s very ‘frustrating’ that I’m only updating every six months so I really should consider moving the plot forward more than a few hours if I’m going to be making people wait so long to read the next chapter.  Then they also folded in the old, passive aggressive, ‘but it’s your story.’ 

Was there anyway that I’m going to read those words and not get pissed off?  Even taking the shit day out of it, I have said over and over how difficult my personal life has been this last year, and how hard it has been to find the time, and motivation (plus working laptops) to actually allow me to write.  And 99.99% of you have been so incredibly nice and supportive about everything because yes OF COURSE I know it’s frustrating to read a story that only gets updated every six months!  Clearly I feel badly about that point!  I’ve said that too.  But I also know that my chapters are (on average) probably 3x longer than most other authors.  So I put up a 13,000 word chapter telling the next portion of the story that I am telling, and then I’m told that was my option to do so (it being my story and all, thanks) but if I’m going to post so infrequently (keeping in mind this is the only extensive posting gap this story has had) I really should have jumped ahead in time too.  Um, no!  This day in their life is a huge day, I have said that previously in my author notes that lots of stuff is happening on this day and it’s going to take as long as it takes to tell it.  The scenes are in MY head.  I know what parts of the story need to be TOLD and what can be shuffled through in narrative, so how the fuck am I supposed to respond to ‘just jump ahead in time’ through crucial plot points, when that’s just a shit way to write?  Or the other interpretation is, ‘that’s great you posted but you made me wait this long, so you really should have snapped your fingers and magically come up with another 40k words to carry the plot along another two days.’

I mean, Christ, what difference does it make to anyone if my 13k word chapter covered two hours or two days?  It’s not like we’re on the verge of wrapping things up.  If you’re sticking with the story to chapter 22 and we just got our first walkers in town, you had to have figured by now (and by me explicitly SAYING it) there are a crapload more chapters to come.  I just don’t understand people.  And again if this person is out there, I know we’ve had perfectly amiable interactions before this, so I just wish you had thought your remarks through before you decided to share them with me.  Because you can maybe see now how there was just no way that you sharing your “frustration” and suggestions on how I should be writing my story that I have said (again repeatedly), that I haven’t been able to update for personal life reasons, were going to be well received.  I honestly wanted to scream.  It comes back to the base visceral response that all authors I’ve spoken to before have, which is, “if you have such great ideas on how things should be done, then you should go write your own story.  This, is my story.  I decide how things are done here.”

And let me add here, I don’t mind (and I don’t take offense) when people jokingly make a remark about gaps in updates or getting me to focus on one story or another.  I can tell if something is meant kindly and in good humor.   But I also hope people can see why readers telling me that they’re annoyed with me, and telling me how to write my PLOT(??), in turn, pisses me off.  I mean, I’m doing this for free first of all, and for like every hundred people that read a chapter, one or two will review, sometimes less than that, so often the author is out there posting into a void.  If you’re posting into a void and then somebody comes back with essentially a dramatic sigh and, ‘yeah, this is fine, but . . . ‘ it just sucks the fun completely out of this whole thing.  Especially when I was just SO happy to get that chapter up because the posting gap there had been so long.  And for the response back to not be a, “oh good you updated, but instead, a, “this is all you wrote?” is basically a HUGE fuck you, to me.  And the bad day might have made the remark dig in more sharply than it could have otherwise, but I stand by the inappropriateness of the remark to start.  Please just stop and think before you say shit to people.   This isn’t fucking Twitter.  I put so much of myself into my writing, and I feel like with all of my A/Ns I put with my chapters, that I should at least (by now) be a real person to the reader and not just a pen name on the email notification.  So if someone sees me as a person, and was still like yeah, fuck it, I’m going to say this anyway because what matters are MY feelings here, then I don’t understand that at all.

And yes, I will be fine tomorrow :)  Just needed to get that out of my head.  So off and away now.  Thanks all for listening, and those of you who say nice things about my writing and somehow refrain from also saying crappy things to me personally, I thank you all especially for that!  :)

[asleepinawell]

Destinations

A Story About Root

(AN: I’ve always been strangely fascinated by liminal spaces even before I had a word for what they were…transitional places that are visited only on the way from one point to another, like airports, bus stops, waiting rooms, train stations, hotels. Places where people aren’t supposed to stay for any length of time. I started thinking about Root in conjuncture with liminal spaces which led to this post which led to this fic).

The bus rolls out of the station, engine rumbling and smoke billowing from the tailpipe. Root doesn’t even look out the window as she gets carried away from Bishop for forever. She doesn’t know where she’s heading, but that’s okay. She doesn’t need a destination.

It’s two in the afternoon and the sun overhead is unrelenting. It’s hot out (even for summer in Nevada), the air is dry, and she’d kill for a bottle of water (she’s killed for way less).

She licks her cracked lips and swings her feet back and forth in space. She’s taken up residence on a wooden fence at the side of the empty dirt road. It’s a crossroads; two dirt tracks meeting at a harsh right angle, both stretching away into the endless expanse of nothing.

Her car broke down a few hours ago and she’d tried to walk to somewhere she could hitch a ride, but there is nothing and no one out here except her. It’s almost peaceful.

She can’t go back to her car (which has an unfortunate case of being full of bullet holes from a job almost-gone-wrong), and she won’t make it out if she tries to walk the whole way. That’s okay though. For right now she’s content to sit here, waiting.

Maybe, she thinks, when she gets out of here she’ll take that job in New York she’d thought about passing on. It isn’t a very interesting job (some political assassination) and she hasn’t been planning to take it at all, but being in a city sounds nice right about now. Much less chance of dying of dehydration and exposure, for starters. And she always meets the most interesting people in cities….

Airports are the closest thing she’s ever had to a home. They’re all different, and yet all have the same underlying energy to them. It’s three in the morning and her flight has been delayed for the third time due to a winter storm somewhere in the mid-west. It’s over air-conditioned here despite the weather and she’d bought an overpriced ‘I heart San Francisco’ sweatshirt from a kiosk to use as a blanket.

There aren’t a lot of people around: a few other passengers waiting for the same flight (all asleep), some random travelers wandering about, and an old janitor vacuuming the floor. She enjoys the relative solitude here. Airports are usually so crowded, noisy, easy to fade into. It’s nice to have a quiet moment.

Sometimes she feels like nothing can really happen in places like this. They’re stuck in time and space, not completely real. Somewhere down the hall she sees a man in a business suit slowly kicking a vending machine. A woman comes out of one of the bathrooms and lies down on the floor next to the wall. No one looks at her. A man wearing a baseball cap has his luggage open and his clothes spread out on the terminal floor. The speaker system is playing Gloria by Laura Branigan for the third time since she’d checked in. She’s not sure any of these things are real. Some days it’s hard to sort out reality, and places like this allow for blurring that line, encourage it.

It’s why she’s still annoyed that Harold’s muscle-brained watchdog had found them in the train station. Train stations are supposed to be safe. Reality isn’t allowed there. How had he gotten in?

It doesn’t matter now though. She has a new lead on the marvel that Harold is attempting to keep from her. She’s heading back to New York again to track down a lead on Daniel Aquino and she has this unshakable feeling that this time she’s going to find something solid.

The hospital is strangely familiar to her in a way that makes her skin crawl (though she supposes that may be the drugs as well). It’s removed from time, dreamy like a nightmare, intangible. But, unlike other places she’s been that feel this way, there’s no way forward.

In some ways there’s never an escape from any of these hazy in-between places she flits among, but she’s never so clearly felt trapped, stalled.

When the phone on the wall rings it’s like a door creaking open at the end of a long, dark hallway. And when, after a short time enjoying her freedom, she finds herself in another cage, she wonders if this is just another part of the same pattern. Always waiting, never being.

With the Machine calling the shots she still travels a lot, still sleeps in airports, train stations, bus stops. She eats shitty fast food at highway rest stops, overpriced bags of snack food in airports. There’s an endless string of cheap motels, each as forgettable as the last.

But her familiarity with these places is important now, useful. It’s as if she spent her whole life training for this. She thrives in these places, can exist in them effortlessly, and now she has a real purpose for being in them. 

The Machine offers to find her a place to come back to, an apartment somewhere (maybe in New York?), but she wouldn’t know what to do with a place like that so she always says no.

Staying in one place, creating ties, it would only leave her exposed. If she never has anything, she can’t lose anything. If she never has a place to go back to, then she can’t miss it.

“Do you have a favorite airport?” she asks Shaw as they wander through Miami.

Shaw looks at her blankly, waiting for the punchline.

“Okay, how about a least favorite one? In the U.S., to make it simpler.”

“Why?” Shaw asks, suspicious.

“I think La Guardia is generally considered the worst airport in the country,” she continues as if Shaw had answered. “It smells wrong and looks filthy. I’ve heard it described as ‘soul-sucking’. Though, personally, I dislike LAX even more.”

Shaw frowns a bit but doesn’t reply.

“I am somewhat perversely fond of the one in Las Vegas, though. So tacky and loud, like the whole strip there. They took somewhere already barely real and made it even more fake. It’s refreshingly honest in that way.”

“What’s with you and airports?” Shaw looks annoyed. “They’re just an inescapable annoyance. Like you.”

She smiles at that, leaning a little too far into Shaw’s space. Shaw moves further away from her on the sidewalk, grumbling.

She knows Shaw isn’t like her; it’s one of the reasons she finds her so compelling. Shaw is immune to the strange call of unreality in those places that Root practically lives in. Root’s always only been loosely connected to the rest of the world, moving from one waypoint to the next. Shaw is a fixed point in time and, when she’s with her, Root finds herself wishing for the first time ever that she could stand still.

Shaw’s apartment is orderly, minimalistic. Nothing is out of place because there’s nothing to be out of place. She wonders why Shaw chose this specific apartment. Had she chosen at random?

She watches Shaw pull her shoes off, drop her keys on the table. She looks like she belongs here, in this space. Or rather, the space looks like it belongs to her. As if she isn’t defined by her surroundings but instead defines them. She doesn’t need to decorate or personalize a physical location because everything she wants or needs is already part of her.

She’s immune to the things that twist and shape others. That twist and shape Root.

“Don’t bleed on my stuff.” Shaw pulls a medical kit out of the one cabinet she owns.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

The only notable feature of this space is Shaw herself. Root decides she likes it.

The third time she crashes at Shaw’s marks the last time the Machine ever offers to find her an apartment of her own. It takes her awhile to juxtapose the two events, and when she does she’s not sure how to feel. She makes herself stay away for the next month, but it’s already too late by then. There’s a compass inside her now and the needle points to wherever Sameen Shaw is.

Every day she’s a different person, a new person. It’s always been easy for her, slipping into someone else’s skin. She’s good at it; too good at it. Some days she forgets who Root actually is.

Some day she wonders if Root actually is anyone.

But Shaw seems to know who she is, even when she’s not sure herself.

JFK is shockingly empty, even for Christmas day. It’s one of the better airports she frequents and usually she enjoys her time here, but the Machine has fallen silent with Samaritan on the loose and she’s let herself get used to having Her with her in places like this. She feels alone again, and now it’s unpleasant.

A man spills coffee all over his luggage and stands there staring at it for the longest time. A couple children race each other up and down the hallway, playing some game only they know the rules of. A dog is howling somewhere nearby, low and mournful. D’Yer Ma’ker by Led Zeppelin is playing softly in the background and she wonders how many times she’s heard that play in an airport. Were there songs that lent themselves to places like these?

An hour rolls by before she gives in and calls her.

“Root?” Shaw sounds like she’s half-asleep.

“Hey, sweetie. Did I wake you up?”

A pause and then: “What do you want?”

“Can’t a girl just call to say hello?”

There’s a small child screaming a few terminals away; his mother looks exasperated and exhausted. Two men in expensive suits laugh together as they walk away from her area. These things are jarring in a way they’ve never been before.

“You need my help or something? The Machine got a job for me?”

“No. I just called to….” She feels awkward, unsure what to say for once.

Shaw is silent on the other end of the line.

“Where are you?” she asks at last.

“Airport. JFK.”

“Coming or going?”

“Going.” She hadn’t had time to see any of the others on this trip.

“Where to this time?”

“L.A. first, but I think I’m catching a connecting flight to somewhere else. She’ll find a way to let me know.” With the Machine silent, even the little signs She leaves feel like a panacea for the emptiness.

“Thought you hated LAX.”

She’s genuinely surprised that Shaw remembers that. “I do, but…. It’s important, what I’m doing. What we’re all doing.”

Shaw grunts in a way that could mean anything. “When’re you back?”

“Back….” Back is a new concept. Coming back somewhere implies having somewhere to come back to, a fixed point. She wonders when Shaw became a destination for her.

“Not really sure. Whenever I finish the task She has for me.”

“Try not to die.”

“Why, Sameen, that’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

Shaw groans and she laughs softly at her.

She won’t tell Shaw that she was serious.

With Shaw gone and the Machine silent, she feels untethered in a way she never has before. The compass inside her spins endlessly, unable to point in a single direction. Before she had the Machine to guide her she was fine living in an undefined blur of places and hours, and now she’s remembering all the reasons she was so careful to never stop, never settle. She remembers what it feels like to lose everything and still be stuck.

With the Machine living in the subway, Root feels less uncomfortable decorating the little room in the back. If she’s going to be trapped anywhere, being here with Her is the best option.

There is, she acknowledges, a certain irony to being trapped in what used to be a subway station (even if it is a repair line). A place that used to be a waypoint, a hub, and is now a stationary location. It’s now a place to go, rather than pass through.

She’s almost gleeful about getting to decorate. From time to time she’s allowed herself to imagine what her own space might look like, but it’s always been a pipe dream until now. She can’t help but indulge herself in every idea she’s ever had, cramming the small space with odds and ends.

She looks at her room here and thinks about Shaw’s old apartment, how different it was in every way from the garishness she’s created. She likes her new space, and she can’t help but wonder what Shaw would make of it. Because even though she finally has a room to call her own, she still feels like she’s in flux, that she hasn’t arrived at her stop yet.

Shaw won’t go back to the subway station, afraid Samaritan will track her there, use her to get to the rest of them, to the Machine. They stay in hotels, empty apartments, in one of Harry’s safe-houses. Shaw doesn’t like staying in the same place two nights in a row.

“You finally settle down somewhere and I drag you away,” Shaw says. They’re in a hotel that Root has already forgotten the name of and Shaw’s staring out the window. She does that a lot now; Root wonders how long she went without having a window.

“I don’t mind.” She doesn’t, though Shaw looks unconvinced. “But wait til you see my setup in the subway. I think the shag rug and lava lamp were a bit too much for the boys. Harry was appalled.”

Shaw almost smiles, a small victory for the night. “Sounds like you. Must be a nice change, having somewhere to go back to.”

Root comes over to sit next to her on the edge of the bed, leaves just enough space so Shaw won’t feel crowded.

“You know, I didn’t have anything to go back to for a long time, most of my life, really. It never bothered me until I found something and then lost it.”

Shaw turns her head towards her, confused. “The subway? You guys get evicted at some point?”

“I didn’t mean the subway.”

“Oh.” Shaw looks back out the window. “Oh.”

Shaw finally falls asleep that night, the first time she’s able to without taking something. She’s lying so close to her, almost touching, and her breath is warm against Root’s arm.

The compass in her mind has settled, come to rest. The bus she got on all those years ago has finally rolled into the last stop and she’s reached her destination.

(Big thanks to @heyjenocide for graciously beta-ing this for me).

[illknight]

i used to hate white noise

it was something i read for a book report at some point early in high school, off a huge list of potential books to read. im sure most of my classmates picked names they heard before, or based their choice off of some amount of research or asking around. i just picked white noise off of the name

sometimes i think about things that must have shaped who i am. was it homestuck? was it my extracirriculars? my teachers? all these things i liked

but i think that most of what shaped me was things i didnt like

at some point my assignment with white noise seemed to drag on, and it became something that i needed to joke about to continue to put up with it. i didnt have any friends who were also reading it, though, and i didnt even wonder whether it had a fandom, let alone look for one

some aspects of it have stuck with me in a way thats turned out to be unshakeable. ive read a lot of books for school, but i think of few of them as much as i think of white noise.

i suppose most books i have read are somewhat rarefied in concept. the ones i think of most are usually ones that had some kind of political commentary, or some kind of aspect that reminded me of myself. the things that seem ever-present and inescapable.

but as i get older and as the specificity of ad targetting and marketing becomes more invasive and granular, the themes of white noise become more and more relevant. everything becomes a generic object in a shopping cart, or a looming threat that everyone is responding to with simultaneous hysteria and apathy, or a television in the background of a conversation-- interrupting thoughts with irrelevant but flow-altering noise. a constant butterfly effect of unacknowledged but unavoidable signal, deviating us further from what we were thinking to intend before we lost our train of though

i guess as i get older i also realize that people, as a rule, are frustrating and bizarre and objectionable and idiosyncratic. the constructs of society reinforce and amplify that.

white noise just feels a lot less stupid every day and all my ungotten jokes about it are perpetually coming back to haunt me

also while i tend to claim internally that my pointlessly pseudoanalytical tirades are a side effect of strilondian stridings, just attempting to Become some characters i enjoyed in a comic once

but i think that, being frank with myself:

my tendency to think in unnecessarily complicated symbolism and rely on a variety of systems of thought and philosophies to justify vast conclusion-jumping all for the sake of intrigue or mild “things that make u go hmm” moments probably derives from my youthful exposure to sermons written by pastors desperate to extrapolate their cultural observations and personal pet peeves into full sermons that will permanently integrate into the views and thought processes of their congregation, all on a weekly basis

however, my tendency to direct that symbolic extrapolation at social and economic constructs and then spout off about that shit for several consecutive minutes with no prompting and no expectation for a response ?

thats all white noise babey

theres something hilariously immature about me fixating on the notable fictional, capitalism-obsessed pedants which comprise the new york professors of the college-on-the-hill, deciding somehow that they were cool despite hating their fictional context, and then carrying their patterns of behavior into adulthood despite the fact that this course of action has never served me well.

at this point it would probably be too difficult to shed this tendency, but while rereading white noise it seems sort of clear that even though they are detachedly analyzing the colorful trappings of a superficial, capitalist world, they are just the same as every other person who is subject to the background radiation of the marketing and culture they so curiously dissect

rereading the early words of siskind about the barn was both like a mirror and a grim reminder. he rants and raves about how nobody sees the barn, only the signs about the barn and the photos take of the barn. it is easy to think at first that his concern is that the barn is lost, but then jack amends his narration, saying that siskind “seems immensely pleased by this”

is there a joy that is derived from criticism of the culture that sucks away the actual critical nature of the analysis? does our investment in describing, cataloguing, and naysaying this society’s workings cause us to become subconsciously invested in its persistence?

there is something clearly off-putting about jack’s hitler studies. it seems clear that, while it is assumed that jack is aware that hitler was an atrocious figure, the meticulous cataloguing of hitler’s life and the lives of those around hitler, as well as the enthusiasm for that life necessitated for jack to name his kid fucking Heinrich, seem like they must derive from some kind of inappropriate affection for these figures. it like critical obsession is only the acceptable cousin of admiring obsession. like the person who studies a subject is not immune to the psychological contagion which eminates from that subject

the american cultural studies are housed in the same building as hitler studies and with this sort of retrospective glance at the subject, it seems like the new york professors have an almost inappropriate attachment to their field of expertise. but how else do you become an expert, but through fascination and some level of sincere admiration? do the new york professors see beauty in marketing rather than treachery?

for some reason, (maybe it was my raised-jaded, “it was recently the 00s” brain) i read their discussions as inherently critical when i was younger. this was likely just because they were pointing out the oddities and details of something i had already accepted as ubiquitous. however, pointing at something that is ignored isn’t the same thing as taking a stance on that thing. being aware that there is a trick is no better if you’re still being tricked

all this is sort of to say that rereading this book makes me wonder about how my behavior may be patterned, if not after, at least the same as these characters. my awareness of certain issues is only based on my prior enthusiastic involvement in those issues. some of my awareness in certain issues is based on my current involvement in those issues. does my close examination of these latter issues draw me nearer towards them, like a moth to flame? do i complain about the punishment only to repeat the punished behavior to receive the associated punishment as a sort of backwards reward?

do i go to starbucks just so that i can more effectively gripe about their poor working conditions and their shitty playlists and the alarming late capitalism of their company structure? or do i just go because my friends go there? should i stop spending money there? or would that be a pointless gesture?

i complain about the school system, about workaholicism, about corporatism, about cultish religion, about pedantry, and so on, but i don’t take any meaningful action to distance my own functioning from these things. is it for research’s sake? no. i dont even try to justify it like that. and i don’t think that my willingness to discuss the details of these things distances me from them. i know that i am in the barn photo’s aura. i know that i can’t unsee the signs. but i’m still standing here, eagerly talking down about the people snapping their cameras at the barn

i kind of love white noise

[illimitablespaces]

It’s about to get a little too personal.

What a week. It flew by but I’ve done nothing useful except glance at a couple jobs which might be good for me (both work with animals). The rest of the time has been wasted on social media (mind-numbing), reading (mind-enhancing, I hope), and pointless drives to town to the grocery store and library because I feel cut off from reality. Of course fb, tumblr, and texting are ways to stay connected but something about those is forced and not as fulfilling as real life, in-person contact. And of course I could work on neglected projects with all the newfound free time but I’m so far removed from composition at this point I hardly know what to do, as though my skills and knowledge have desiccated. To top it all off I can’t deny any longer I am becoming ill, with who-only-knows what. The accumulating and unacknowledged stress surely has been working a number on my immune system.

This has been yet another post of a whining, self-sorry tone and for that I apologize. I’m not sure whether to scream or laugh or cry most days and as I mentioned, the inner roiling of my mind has been ignored for the past few weeks till now, and I am worried. No. Scared, yes scared and anxious. I see life crumbling at the periphery and have settled to say “c’est la vie” while I stopped up my ears, closed my eyes, and whistled a careless tune but confronting my problems more directly has only made clear the shitty facade and cracked foundation I have built up the past months.

I have thought of going back to counselling but after my first limited experience I’m hesitant because it seemed only to be a band-aid on a gaping wound. It didn’t help I wasn’t comfortable with my counselor and tip-toed over every subject we talked about but how does one become vulnerable in such a setting to finally find and allow the help one needs? I don’t know, and I don’t expect answer. Instead of trying again with someone else who could be a better fit, I sought refuge elsewhere:  reading, household activities, my pets, the temporarily-satisfying-yet-ultimately-estranging concert-going, and the worst, eating and drinking. None has ever gotten out of hand, but these escapes and vices are not solutions. Why do I write any of this? Of what use is it to you, dear Reader, or me, or anyone else? Maybe writing it all down is a sort of therapy in itself, and if that is true, maybe I should invest in keeping a diary. But I fear people close to me would read something terribly honest and exposing and either use it against me or see me as something to be pitied. I don’t want pity. I want to be my old self again. And being honest with family has proven a dead end; I am either told to suck it up or am brushed aside (one time I was told I was going to be “admitted” and we all know what that euphemism means). So no, I don’t see help coming from them.

I have no idea what I thought I would gain by setting this down but it hasn’t helped. I think it made it worse.

[thepiecesofj]

Reality.

At 12am this morning, I went to B’s place. It was my usual routine. Have a delightful time with my family during the day, drive 20 mins feeling anxious and uncomfortable, and then plaster on a smile as I walk up the Ontario driveway to see the boyfriend. He looked pissed off last night. My initial thoughts were, he was in a bad mood because of his roommate but I think he was just really high. It was the same routine. Get into the house and head straight to his room. I expected him to leave me alone for the rest of the evening. I mean, it was only 12 but I didn’t see his roommate in the living room which meant he has been alone for a while which meant he was going to spend time with me. Which meant I was going to be listening to hours of nonstop talking about conspiracy theories. If I showed one sign of disinterest, even a yawn, I may get attitude from him or make his mood worse. I would need to be on my best behavior. Listen to him. Agree. Don’t argue.

He asked about my grandma’s well-being. She has been diagnosed with Covid-19 recently and had been one of the few people who have been asymptomatic. It’s been well over 2 weeks since it was determined that she had tested positive. Initially, I thought he cared about her wellbeing but the more he talked, the more he used her case for his argument that Covid-19 is bullshit. How can a virus be declared a pandemic if it’s asymtomatic. How can a virus be asymtomatic. If you have a virus, your body needs to react. I then said, well, she was tested and it showed up in her fluids and he said it was horseshit. How do we know they even tested her? Did we see that she got tested? Results are just words printed on a piece of paper and it doesn’t mean shit. They just want money. How can she be asymtomatic? It doesn’t make sense to have a virus and be asymtomatic. I wanted to tell him about HPV and how there’s so many different strains. Some ppl get warts from it, some ppl get cancer and some ppl get nothing. The virus comes and goes like the flu. It is believed that it becomes dormant and immune system just eats it up but I didn’t even want to start going down that path because then he would say...and do we have a pandemic? Is it a pandemic? And then I started thinking while he was talking that I just wish I got a bad case of Covid just to prove him wrong. It got to that point...I hoped to get Covid-19 just to prove a point to him.

I made the biggest mistake by telling him of an interview I watched of Pink (the singer) talking about her and her son’s experience with Covid-19. He started talking about how celebrities like that are just trying to cover up for “them”. The pedophiles. Celebrities are the problems. They shouldn’t be using their platforms to talk about politics or their experiences with covid it’s fucking horseshit. 3 hours later we covered everything that was wrong with the world. How he didn’t want to get tested for covid 19 just because he has symptoms because then they would know what drugs he’s using. He didn’t want to wear a mask because that’s how they control people. Masks are only mandated and not the law so he has every right not to wear it. Then he said, I don’t want to get the vaccine. Fuck that shit.

I feel like if I was actually telling someone this, they would probably be thinking...so? What’s the problem? Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. Until I tell you that last week he said, “I will not be going back to the office. Fuck that shit. Not gonna risk getting Covid and possibly die. Not going back until they find a vaccine.” Or the other times when he would freak out about not having a mask on. And not feeling comfortable about restaurants opened for dine-in or the fact that employees were no longer wearing masks. It’s always two extremes. It seems like if it didn’t fit with his views, it ain’t right. He is the ultimate determinator on what is right. Communism sucks but I want universal healthcare. I fucking hate people on welfare but hey, I’ll just work here at my shitty job til they lay me off so I can collect that unemployment check and not work for a bit. I can’t afford food or gas but look at this toy I just bought. It was limited edition and I got it for $300.

The night ended with me looking up some of the things he was talking about. Anthony Bourdain being murdered and it was just staged to look like a suicide. That the episode of him in Vietnam revealed some Vietnamese website that directs you to childporn. I looked up a picture. I looked up the words on google translate and it said “No Smoking” and I said the words out and yes, it did mean no smoking...after all, my parents speak Vietnamese so if you say “khong hut tuoc” it actually means no smoking. His accusations are becoming more and more extreme. He was reading into things and claiming that he has been fact checking it. It’s weird. I’m not even sure how I feel about it right now. I want to talk to someone but I don’t know who to even talk to at this point.

I fell asleep afterwards and kept dreaming that we had broken up. I’m sure I had 3 separate dreams that we broke up last night. My biggest fear is me talking in my sleep one is these nights during those dreams. They have become more frequent as of late. In one of the dreams, he wouldn’t give me back some of my stuff because he remembered that he paid for them so they actually belonged to him...and in my dream I had to defend myself. Saying he hasn’t paid for shit in the past 5 years. I woke up feeling weird that my reality was a nightmare and my dreams felt more pleasant because I was free. I think I actually said that in one of the dream sequences. I’m free.

There’s a lot of i don’t knows lately. A lot confusion. A lot of wtfs. A lot of, “if I just see him for x-amount of hours, I can have the whole week off”

That’s it for tonight...time to watch some asian dramas and numb the feelings away.

-J

12 July 2020

[lifeonashelf]

CINDERELLA

It is one a.m. A massive explosion has just ignited mere yards from my apartment. Thunderous, powerful, disturbing. The sonic shockwave of the blast pierces my ears, rattles my windows, makes my balcony physically shudder beneath my feet. Off in the distance, I hear a cannonade, seemingly endless sonorous reports at various sites on the horizon. Mingling with these, there is also an inharmonious descant of smaller discharges, sustained staccato pops that ring out in the night like the deadly buzzing of machine guns. The sky is full of shrapnel that has been launched into the air, and my rudimentary understanding of physics tells me that what goes up must surely come down somewhere. I am not a praying man, but I nevertheless conjure a silent thought in my head and do my best to beam it into the universe, hoping that none of this fiery flak touches down on my roof to trigger a conflagration. Long moments pass and the discordant, jarring cacophony does not abate—more explosions, more gunfire salvos. Another hugely loud boom rings out, this one the closest yet, so close that I can see the light of its discharge dancing on the side of the building across from mine. It sounds as if I am sitting in the epicenter of a warzone. It sounds like a nightmare. It sounds like the end of the fucking world.

It’s not the end of the world, though. It is the 4th Of July. Which naturally means that all throughout my neighborhood, packs of heavily-intoxicated alpha males are “celebrating” how awesome our country is, in the most traditionally American way possible: by detonating a shitload of cheap and dangerous explosives made in Mexico.

And that’s not even the ironic part. The really ironic part is that these discourteous douchebags are commemorating the day our ancestors declared independence from a tyrannical king and the imposition of Christian doctrine, in 2018—a year in which we are presently ruled by a tyrant who is actively striving to expunge every safeguard that will prohibit him from occupying his dominion for life, and a cadre of puritanical legislators who are actively rewriting our laws in accordance with their selective interpretations of Christian doctrine.

Of course, like our forefathers, we are taking bold and decisive action against despotism. We’re posting memes on Facebook like crazy, for one, a strategy which I imagine will eventually get a whole lot of stuff accomplished. We’re also rising up and marching, showing solidarity, letting our fascist-in-chief know we won’t stand idle while women and people of color are being treated as marginal citizens and children who come to this country seeking asylum are being detained in concentration camps. And since July 4 is the linchpin of our freedom, the one day which all of us have agreed upon as an occasion to unite as a nation and show the world, and each other, what America really stands for… Well, it stands to reason that in this critical annum of 2018, while our noble democratic experiment is enmeshed in the most dire jeopardy it has ever faced, we are presented with a golden opportunity to make our grandest statement yet, to stand in defiance of the current status quo and announce to those who seek to subjugate us that we are not credulous automatons who will simply lay down and allow ourselves to be crushed under the wheels of the machine. This year, truly—as Bill Pullman said in that movie where Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum beat up a bunch of aliens—we celebrate our Independence Day…

Nah, not so much. We were too busy attending barbecues and having parades and drinking beer and blowing shit up today. But in our defense—from the sound of things outside my apartment—we bought waaaaaaaaay more Mexican-made explosives than ever this year.  

This is ‘Murica. And right now, America sucks.

Given the statements I made in my introductory paragraphs, it probably won’t surprise you that I’m not particularly fond of fireworks. And given the statement that comprised the last paragraph, it probably won’t surprise you that I’m not particularly fond of America these days, either. (I do love that the principles of this land still allow me the freedom to type the words “America sucks”—although, if the bridge-troll in charge at the moment has anything to say about it, that probably won’t be the case for long). There are those who will read my proclamation and issue some sort of gut-check response like, “if you don’t love America, then git the hell out.” To which I say: 1) fuck you, because that brand of idiotic nationalistic rhetoric is precisely why we’re in this mess to begin with, and 2) if you honestly can’t comprehend how someone who has lived in this country for the past forty years could find so much to loathe about its contemporary state of affairs that they would profess to loathe the nation’s prevailing identity as a whole, then I would strongly recommend opening your eyes to what’s crashing down around you because your willful ignorance of just how fucked this place is right now is a far bigger concern than anything I could possibly write.

Then I would ask you a question: Why are you still so stoked about America? Okay, two questions: Is your ardor based on any measured assessment of what this country stands for now, or are you simply rah-rah-ing the home-team? Most of my educated acquaintances would likely answer with some variation of the standard “it may not be perfect, but it’s still the best nation in the world” reply. Which is a perfectly acceptable response… Except it’s simply not fucking true. Because America is not the best at anything anymore. We lead the globe in mass shootings and shitty hip-hop artists with face tattoos, and that’s about it.

So under what criteria is America “the best”? I’m not posing that question in the spirit of communism, I’m posing it in the spirit of pragmatism. Because, lord knows, I DON’T WANT TO FEEL THIS WAY. But it’s goddamn difficult not to when every single day I see more and more increasingly abhorrent events unfolding on the news, I see a vile cackling shithead mocking all of us from his ivory throne while he assaults every trace of common decency we had left just like he has assaulted women his entire life, and I don’t see a single ray of light on the horizon. My heart isn’t broken, it hasn’t stopped beating, it has simply filled to the brim with disgust—viscous, black, oozing, poisonous disgust. And I am drowning in it. I am disgusted by Donald Trump. I am disgusted by every single person who voted for Donald Trump. I am disgusted by every single corrupt sycophant in his party who facilitates his evil machinations. I am disgusted by every single person I see wearing t-shirts with images of AR-15’s emblazoned on them. I am disgusted by every single asshole who is still exploding M-100’s in my neighborhood even though it is now 3 a.m. And while there is plenty of overlap in each of those categories, if you added up all of those people, they comprise about half the voting population of The United States. We’ve already discussed how much I despise math, but even with my limited grasp of arithmetic, this seems to suggest that roughly 50% of Americans are abominable, racist, ignorant, and/or fundamentally stupid. So, I return to an expanded version of the question at the top of this paragraph: How can any country where this is the case possibly be “the best”?

Make no mistake, Donald Trump did not create our present debacle. Sure, he’s the pus-dribbling herpe at the tip of this diseased penis, so it’s easy to erroneously label him the culprit. But no matter what medicine you apply to that sore, the virus remains. People voted for him. LOTS of people. Lots of Americans. If any evidence was required to demonstrate that our democratic structure has massive systemic problems, there you have it. I understand that we as a nation aren’t necessarily defined by our President, who merely serves as a temporary figurehead—even if this particular figurehead embodies the most horrific symbol imaginable of our national paradigm: an uneducated jingoistic criminal buffoon with no respect for anybody; Donald Trump represents the espoused virtues of America about as well as Jaws represents the gentleness of marine life. However, let me repeat: he is the President because millions of Americans voted for him. And they did so despite the fact that his being an uneducated jingoistic criminal buffoon with no respect for anybody was not only common knowledge but something he openly boasted about. So, not to belabor a point, but this alleged “greatest country in the world” is comprised of millions and millions of individuals who think these are desirable qualities for the person who controls the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons on the planet to have. This alleged “greatest country in world” is also home to multitudes of people who have indicated they would vote for Kanye West if that megalomaniacal psychopath ran for President. Clearly, the masses who ultimately chart the course of this nation are not intelligent enough to make any decision with such weighty consequences. And this is why we can’t have nice things.

Yet so many among us still cling to time-honored fallacies about our superiority. To them, America is like The Beatles—unassailable, immune to criticism. To them, it’s just blindly accepted that America is the world’s zenith. So pass the fireworks and don’t tread on me, motherfucker.

And maybe that’s a big part of the problem. Maybe too many of us have been impetuously clinging to this tarnished ideal, clutching our flags to our proud red-white-and-blue bleeding hearts, oblivious to the feces smeared all over the fabric. We still think we’re Let It Be, even though the music we’re making these days sounds a lot more like Ringo Starr’s solo albums. So maybe, just maybe, it’s time to accept the sad reality that our magic moment has passed, that Yoko has sapped the soul of our foundation and torn us apart from within. Then maybe we’ll start caring enough to actually fucking do something about it.

Hey, the dudes up the street are. Two more roaring explosions just resounded across the blue-black firmament. It is 4:14 a.m. It’s never too late to celebrate America, apparently.

But this isn’t what you want to read about right now, is it? I suppose you saw the header of this piece and assumed I was going to write some eloquent, reflective treatise about the band Cinderella. Well, I cannot. And it’s not just because despite my overly generous appreciation for the hairspray hard-rock of my youth, Cinderella’s limited charms place them in the bottom tier of those outfits. Even their very best song, “Nobody’s Fool”, exists squarely in the middle of the road—it’s neither great nor awful, it’s just sort of… there. Tom Keifer does a decent impression of AC/DC’s Brian Johnson, and the Night Songs disc I’m listening to right now is enjoyable enough for me to accede that Cinderella was probably a better band than Bang Tango, but those merits are woefully inadequate to justify my writing anything of substance about them.

And even worse: I can’t write anything of substance about our country’s dismal state of affairs, either.  I have no solutions to offer, no wisdom to impart. I am merely a broken man sitting at his laptop trying to make sense of the madness suffusing the world around him. And here’s the worst part of the even worse part: all of it, every insane and malevolent thing that is happening to us right now, makes absolute sense to me. I told everyone close to me that Donald Trump was going to win this past election as soon as he announced his candidacy, a prediction which was roundly scoffed at by the smartest people I know. Being right doesn’t make me a soothsayer or a political genius, it simply makes me an overanxious pessimist who has been gauging the very worst in humanity long enough to assume that the very worst thing which can happen in any situation where humanity is involved is more likely than not the thing that is going to happen. Therefore, it was only natural for me to assume that Trump was going to happen.

Whether we like it or not—and this is the thing we’re going to have to accept about the modern American identity if we ever want to make the situation any better—the ethos of Donald Trump’s reality-show sensationalism epitomizes more Americans than the ethos of an arrogant professional shrew in a pant-suit does. The reasons I voted for Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with her dogma speaking to me and touching my soul and igniting a spark of patriotism in my heart—no, those were the reasons I voted for Barack Obama twice. I actively revile Hillary Clinton; I just revile her a whole lot less than I revile Donald Trump. I wasn’t With Her, I was merely Against Him. And I was not alone in this perspective. And I think this is rather emblematic of the broad-spectrum mediocrity and complacency which is inherent in present-day America: legions of the best among us were willing to embrace a patently unexceptional figurehead simply because she wasn’t as bad as the alternative. We didn’t demand the best possible representative of our values, we were prepared to settle for someone who obfuscated her shadiest tenets instead of flaunting them as selling points like her opponent did. “Good enough” was good enough for us. But being a better candidate than some of the truly abhorrent alternatives did not make Hillary Clinton the best candidate. Any more than being a better republic than some of the truly abhorrent alternatives makes America the best country.

No, I am not especially proud to be an American. Especially not at the moment. Why should I be? My nationality is not a product of any extraordinary accomplishment on my part, it is a product of my being lucky enough to be sired by parents whose ancestors managed to slip across the border before ICE existed. I’m certainly not saying I hate America—it’s where I live, it’s where my friends and family live, and it’s where my record collection lives; it has some appealing qualities. Yet espousing our nation’s superiority while disregarding its numerous and glaring failings is a lot like rooting for the New England Patriots despite their legacy of cheating and dishonor because they win more games than they lose. Donald Trump didn’t invent corruption and atrocity; America has a long history of both, one which we conveniently discount while championing its greatness. But here’s the thing there: we treat those unpleasant facets of our bygone chronicle as if they are challenges we have overcome, as if we have somehow evolved past them. Yet, if there’s any salient wisdom to be gleaned from the events of the past two years, it is that we as a society have not actually progressed as much as we claim. How dare we assert our enlightenment when we still live in a land where a man can rape an unconscious woman with a foreign object in an alleyway and be virtually immune to punishment because his white scholar-athlete eminence is hoisted as an exemplar of the American ideal. How dare we claim to be the best at anything when first-world nations around the globe continue eclipsing our finest accomplishments while we’re busy playing Democrats vs. Republicans, battling each other like boorish Neanderthal contestants on the same sort of trash television programs which launched our current President to notoriety.

Trump’s ascendency has legitimized his most repugnant traits and demonstrated that there is a vast and ravenous fan-base for cruelty among our populace. It has proven this country is laden with people devoid of empathy, callous budding sociopaths who were just waiting for someone to come along and tell them that their deep-seeded bigotries and intolerances are venerable assets. Which is why simply removing one fiend from office will not be enough to pull us out of our extant quagmire. That resolution will be like remedying our slit throats with kisses from our mamas—it may feel good for a moment, but it will not suture our wounds. Because America has been hemorrhaging for a very long time and we have chosen to ignore that. Donald Trump merely rubbed that blood over all of our faces for the world to see.  

If you’re proud to be an American, that’s just fine. But what are you so proud of right now? It seems to me that anyone who truly loves this country should want it to be the very best it can be. And it seems to me that the first step toward achieving that is acknowledging that the American essence needed drastic and sweeping improvements well before Der Fuhrer took office. It’s time for us to admit that we are not the greatest country in the world; such a contention only rings as superciliousness at this juncture, in light of the all the evidence to the contrary. Because as long as a maestro with absolutely zero redeeming qualities is orchestrating our symphony, we need to account for the pandemic narrowness among the citizenry who handed him the baton. The time has come to concede that a body riddled with cancerous cells cannot possibly be the healthiest. And to ask ourselves what redeeming qualities we have left—what can we possibly stand for—when enough of us decided that an unprincipled monster represented our nation’s spirit to put one at the helm. Then, and only then, can we begin to cure our sickness.

Okay, here’s how we fix everything…

Nope. I told you, I have no answers for you. Because a large and terrified part of me suspects we may have already cued the band to play our funeral march the moment that diminutive orange hand touched a Bible and sealed the oath that made him the global symbol of what America represents in 2018. And this absolutely fucking devastates me. I may not adore this country at present, but of course I want to it to survive. Because if it does, maybe there’s a chance we can eventually make it the greatest country in the world for real.

For now, everyone I know is resolving to hold on tightly to the masts until the storm passes and the great vessel stops listing. Regrettably, I think there’s a very strong chance our ship will sink before that happens. Regrettably, perhaps it already has. I’m not sure there’s any coming back from the path we’re on now, if this much damage can ever be undone. I’d love to say I’m hopeful, but most of my “Hope” went away when the singularly kind and inspiring man who delivered that slogan did.

That’s why I wasn’t out watching others wave sulphuric pom-poms in the sky to rejoice in the majesty of America tonight. I was huddled inside my apartment, seeking shelter from the onslaught, listening to the terrible sounds of the world exploding around me and knowing I was utterly powerless to stop it, desperately wishing the trauma would end and hoping that when the new dawn finally came my home would not lie in ruins.

After all, it’s 2018. That was the most appropriate American experience I could think of.  

 July 4, 2018