#you need to understand my parents have been divorced for two decades and he paid like... two months of alimony total

[gattmammon]

my dad has asked me if i need money for anything for the first time in... since i know him im pretty sure

has anybody heard of a septuagenarian with a titanium hip robbing a bank

[roobylavender]

i mean most abusers do love the people they abuse. abuse isn’t something done with intention or malice half the time, it’s done by people thinking they’re doing the right thing. bruce’s love and need for control are constantly in conflict with each other and that’s why the robins are stuck waging a war against him. i feel like a big part of a dysfunctional parent-child dynamic is feeling trapped by your parent’s love. Even if you hate it, it’s still canon that Bruce has been historically bad with dealing with his kids. Half of them don’t even feel comfortable calling him dad cuz the relationship seems so undefined or shaky. In Dick’s case i feel like he has no grounds to oppose robin and his vigilantism because Bruce (deep down) loved having someone like dick around to fight crime with. They both refer that time as “the good old days” so it’s not like Bruce was truly opposed. It’s only when the actual reality of that negligent and naive behaviour materialises that he realises he fucked up (robin year one eg). Then he treats Dick in such a cold manner that Dick believes if he’s not robin, he’s not wanted. This has been a pattern since the golden days so no it’s not ooc for Bruce. Yes the natural conclusion to all the modern day tension should be for both parties to meet and resolve their issues but Bruce is still the abuser at the end of the day, and even though Dick’s self sacrificing nature might easily forgive him, on a textual level it should be clear that a true resolution between the two would need Dick to dig deeper, and for Bruce to be ready for rejection from his son.

i don’t disagree with that assessment of abuse like it’s absolutely true, but my problem is i don’t think the cold or controlling behavior is really a consistent enough pattern until we move into post-crisis canon. for several decades dick and bruce have a great rapport with each other bc that’s what everyone knows they’re supposed to have. like i don’t think most writers from the golden or silver age if asked that they intended to write bruce as an abuser would agree and say yes, and that distinction to me is impt, bc sure, we can take what we’re reading on a surface level and project our own experience or modern understanding of relationships onto it, but i don’t think that should happen to the extent authorial intent is superseded bc then you start to enter territory where you’re divorcing narrative from genre conventions. if we go by the assumption that bruce is an enabler and abuser for allowing dick to be a hero for so long without purported attention paid to his safety then that establishes practically every hero within the universe possessive of a sidekick as an abuser. and i do get that some people are interested in following that thread like esp in post-crisis we see that exploration a lot but ig for me personally it’s kinda like the thing that breaks the camel’s back and withholds the entire genre from actually allowing itself to explore more pertinent issues. not to say abuse isn’t a pertinent issue, it absolutely is and i do think there’s ways it can still be explored, but the primary reason the genre was established in the first place was in response to fascism. obv the engagement with that wasn’t necessarily complex early on but it’s incredibly impt to the development of the genre and as we can see in a modern context how that response to fascism or lack thereof is conveyed can be incredibly influential in terms of facilitating support or not for fascist government. so my issue is like, yes, it’s impt for bruce’s faults in these relationships to be addressed to a constructive and worthwhile extent, but i also think writers have gone so drastically far in curating those faults in the post crisis era that it’s effectively restricted the scope of the stories they’re allowed to tell, bc they’re more focused on individual instances and relationships within this world than they are on any form of commentary that reflects the operations of the world at large in relation to regulation of crime

[carllisle]

The Second Mrs Cullano 

As we all know, Esme Platt is not Carlisle Cullano’s first wife, nor is she his second - she is actually his third. But she is the love of his life, the reason for his breathing, and so when he marries for the second time, it’s clear that wives are nothing to soulmates. 

Esme Platt enjoys the wedding of Carlisle Cullano and the Second Mrs Cullano. 

Dedicated to my literal partner in this crime, @notquitetwilight, and to our collective projection onto cringe New Jersey mob show stereotypes. Special shoutout to @stregoni-benefici and @carlislesscarf.

Esme felt a soft kiss on her shoulder and smiled. Sun was pouring through the open windows of her bedroom and there was a soft breeze that lifted her hair. He was still here. He shouldn’t have been. 

“Good morning,” he whispered against her skin. “You smell so good.” 

Esme rolled onto her stomach and curled around her pillow with her smile broadening. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” 

“You kicking me out?” 

“No. But I’ve got things to do, too, you know?” 

Carlisle lay next to her and stroked her caramel hair, his face close to hers on her pillow. She cracked open an eye and watched him watch her. “Can I stay with you?” he whispered. 

She shook her head. “Not for long. For breakfast, though, if you make it.”

“I don’t wanna leave this bed.” 

“You’re gonna have to at some point, baby. You’ve got responsibilities today.” 

“Tell me to stay, Esme. Tell me not to do it.” He ran a strong hand over her neck and gently wrapped it around her throat, fingers tilting her jaw to the side. 

She laughed quietly, sleep making her mind hazy. “No. I want you to have a wife and a family. You’ve always wanted that, but I haven’t. I still want to be me for a while yet.” 

“You wouldn’t stop being you just for being my wife.” 

Esme took the hand around her throat and brought it up to kiss. Carlisle closed her eyes at the touch of her lips. “We’ve talked about this, for years. Decades. I can be your person, but I can’t be your wife. I won’t be anyone’s wife again.” 

“I’m not anyone. Please, Esme. Marry me.” 

She stretched her arms up and laughed. “Not today!” But she rolled over and wrapped her legs around him and pulled him against her, loving him as best she could in the soft sunrise. 

After, they followed their usual routine of showering together and dressing. Since their days of teenage love they enjoyed the quiet of domesticity. Outside the walls of their homes wars raged on their streets but in her old house, in his sprawling estates, it was just them, and today was no different. He zipped her skirt and she buttoned his shirt and they walked arm in arm down the street for coffee and bagels. They took a booth at the back of the cafe, although it didn’t matter if anyone saw them - they had never been a secret. Besides, they both kept guns strapped to them and knives hidden in their jackets and coats. 

Esme leaned back in her chair, blowing steam off the top of her coffee. “You’re sure about this one?” 

Carlisle regarded her over his phone and considered the question. “Yeah. It’s gotta be someone, why not her?” 

“It doesn’t have to be someone,” she reminded him gently. “You could go it alone. Well, as alone as you will ever be. You’ve always got me.” 

“Yeah. But I want someone. I want a wife. And the wife I want doesn’t want me, so I gotta choose the next best thing. Besides, you know her family’s reputation, that’s nothing to turn my nose up at.” 

“Ever the pragmatist.” 

He gave her one of the smiles he saved just for her. “Aw, you hurt me, Es. I do like her. She’s got spirit, and she’s smart as hell. She likes the high life and she wants kids sooner rather than later, and… and she makes me laugh. She makes me feel wanted.” 

“I think most of the east coast wants you,” Esme said quietly, avoiding his gaze. It wasn’t that she was jealous - how could she be, when he made her feel so adored all the time? - but it irritated her that this woman was able to give him what he wanted, and she couldn’t. One marriage to the wrong man had ruined the institution for her and now not even Carlisle could heal that wound. Yes, her first husband had died violently at her hand for his transgression, but that wasn’t the point. The transgression had occured in the first place. That was frightening. 

“Don’t be angry, darling. You know it’s still you.” Carlisle reached over the table and stroked her hand and Esme felt safe again. She held his gaze and nodded slightly. “It’ll always be you. You’re mine, before anyone and everyone else.” 

She smiled, her mood improved. He had always been happy to declare his feelings with her, and even now, on the morning of his wedding to another woman, in a nondescript coffee shop, he made her feel like the most adored woman. On the middle finger of her right hand she still wore the first expensive ring he had ever bought her, and it cost as much as her parents’ house. It was a gaudy thing, a thick diamond set on a band of smaller cut gems that they had chosen together the day after she killed Charles. It was Carlisle’s promise to her - that no matter who else came along, no matter what the world threw at them, they would love each other before anyone and anything else. He wore a similar ring she bought him on his little finger of his right hand. They never took their rings off. His first wife had hated it - understandably - but she had got her share in the divorce when Carlisle had refused to forsake Esme. She looked down at the ring and it sparkled. She’d had it cleaned for the wedding today especially. 

“Are you sure me coming today is a good idea?” she asked after a long moment. 

He squeezed the hand he held. “Yeah. I need you there.”

“She’ll be mad.” 

“She’s always got something to be mad about. Besides, she knows the deal and you’re non-negotiable.”

“I don’t want to upset anyone on their wedding day, Carlisle.” 

He shifted his chair around the table and leaned closer to her. “What about me? You wanna upset me on my wedding day?” 

She bit her lip and grinned. “I never want to upset you.”

“Then be a good girl. Come for me.” He rested his hand on her thigh under the table and Esme glanced around the cafe. No one paid them any mind. “Look at me.”

She met her lover’s piercing gaze and bit her lip. 

“You gonna come for me?” 

She nodded and gasped quietly when he rewarded her with a kiss. Esme could taste the coffee on Carlisle’s lips. He wanted her, he needed her, and she would never let him down. 

Esme’s cousin begrudgingly helped her get ready for the wedding. She said it was indecent for the mistress to turn up, let alone in a red silk dress barely held together by strands of diamonds across the back, but Esme smugly told her the groom had bought it for her especially, and who was she to refuse him? As a precaution she strapped her Colt Python to her thigh - it was an old machine, temperamental, but it made her feel powerful and she had a more reliable weapon in her clutch, as well as blades hidden in her shoes - and touched up her hair. Curls pinned to her head, diamonds dripping from her ears, and Carlisle’s dress draped across her, Esme felt more sensual than ever. When she sat in the pew at the wedding mass and thought of how the groom had sighed between her thighs mere hours before, she felt holy. She sat with his cousins a few rows back and even when the blushing bride strutted down the aisle, he couldn’t keep his eyes from Esme for long. 

They were lucky to be able to have a Roman Catholic service as everyone knew that Carlisle’s first marriage had been valid, but enough money had been slipped to the dioceses to push through an annulment, and so in the eyes of the Church this was his first marriage. There was some humour in that. The familiar words were spoken, hymns and prayers recited, and after what felt like a lifetime, and no time at all, Carlisle was walking down the aisle with the new Mrs Cullano on his arm. Sadness twinged at Esme’s stomach. That could have been me. It should have been. He’s mine. 

The reception was tolerable, enjoyable in its tackiness and extravagance. Everything was white and puffy and the hundreds of guests stuffed into the grand ballroom of the coastal hotel were drunk within the first course. It was how a Jersey wedding should have been, though, and Esme appreciated it for what it was. By the time the first dance came, she was lightly buzzed and enjoying catching up with the biggest names in east coast crime, many of whom were old family friends. Business people and politicians, state senators and property moguls joined them too, tying together the legitimate and illegitimate powers that kept the region affluent and fun, and most didn’t know where the legality ended and illegality started. By the time Esme snorted a line of cocaine from the chest of a mayor’s daughter she didn’t much care and the pair fell about laughing in the bathroom. As if called by the sound of Esme’s happiness, the moment was cut short by the sound of the bride herself outside. 

“Lisa, can you fucking help me? This dress is a fucking nightmare, you gotta hold it up, okay?” 

“You better go,” Esme advised the girl, no older than twenty-two by the looks of it, “before you meet Bridezilla up close and personal.” 

The girl giggled and darted from the bathroom just as the bride scrambled her way through the door. The dress she had chosen was appropriately enormous, tight on top and blooming into an extravagant ball gown from the waist down, and Esme wasn’t surprised that she needed three bridesmaids to help her through the door. 

“God, I’m dying to sit down properly-” she moaned over her shoulder before her eyes fell on Esme. Esme patted around her nose, watching her own pretty reflection in the mirror. “Oh. I didn’t know you were here.” 

“I responded to your invitation,” Esme replied mildly. “Lovely dress.” She turned her attention to her lipstick and dotted a fresh coat on, pointedly ignoring the bride. 

The second Mrs Cullano turned back to her bridesmaids and then looked at Esme, dithering between the two. There was a long pause before she turned to her entourage. “Stay outside. Make sure no one comes in, alright?” The bridesmaids made noises of agreement and the door swung shut, and then it was just Esme and Carlisle’s new wife. 

After Mrs Cullano said nothing, Esme broke the silence. “You’ve organised a wonderful day. Are you enjoying yourself?”

Mrs Cullano’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not happy you’re here.” 

“Oh?” 

“I know why you’re here.” 

“To see one of my dearest friends marry the woman he loves, of course.”

“Don’t play cute.” 

Esme smiled sweetly. “You think I’m cute?” 

“Cut the shit.” 

She sighed and looked at the bride. “What’s on your mind, Mrs Cullano?” 

“It’s real tacky you’re here, you know?”

“He wants me here. I came because he asked me to be here. I wouldn’t be here without an invitation.” 

“I didn’t invite you.” 

Esme pulled her invitation from her clutch and handed it to her. “Yes, you did.” 

The bride threw it aside, angry. “Give up! I won! He doesn’t want you!” 

Esme smiled at her sadly. There was nothing to say that could bring the bride any comfort. The truth was, Carlisle did want her. He wanted her more than anyone and anything, but that didn��t matter to this woman. This woman knew she had just pledged her life to a man who couldn’t love her completely. She was angry for it. “He’s my friend,” was all she could say. 

“Get new friends.” 

“I won’t stand in the way of your happiness, Mrs Cullano, or his. Above anything else, I love him and I want him to have the most wonderful life. I can’t give him the life he wants, but you can. Why would I jeopardize that?” 

It was the wrong thing to say in hindsight. Esme knew that the moment the bride launched at her with murder in her eyes. Her clawing fingers reached out and she managed to get in one good scratch before Esme had her arms locked behind her and ready to pop from their joints. “Easy,” she whispered against Mrs Cullano’s ear. The acrylics on her fingers made her face sting, but the skin hadn’t been broken. “Calm down. Like you said, you won, you’re his wife. Don’t fight me for anything more, because you will lose, do you understand me?” 

“Are you threatening me?” Mrs Cullano gasped. 

Esme tightened her grip and the bride hissed. “Yes. Raise a hand to me again and Carlisle’s love for you will not save you. You want to see who he will really choose if it comes down to it? Because I do not have my doubts. Do you?” 

Just as the bride’s whines rose in volume along with her pain, Esme let her go. She gripped under her elbow and held her upright to stop her from falling. “You got in a good scratch, I’ll give you that. But work on your attack and maybe you’ll take out an eye next time, alright? You’ll need protection if you’re going to love him.” 

“Are you threatening me?” Mrs Cullano asked again. 

There was no kindness left in Esme’s eyes. “Yes.” 

The two women stared at each other for a long moment. The new bride broke first. Esme sniffed and checked her reflection before stalking out of the bathroom, not a hair out of place. She pulled on the diamond strap of her dress and was close to the ballroom door when Carlisle stepped out. His smile was so bright when he saw her and he reached for her hands. When he noticed the scratches across her face his forehead creased. 

“What happened?” he asked, tender fingers touching the marks. Across the corridor there was a set of glass doors open to the terrace, and it was dark out there. There were a few wedding guests milling around but quick steps had the pair hidden in the gloom. Overhead, stars popped across the inky sky. With her arm in Carlisle’s, they found their way down garden paths and to the beach. No one saw them. 

“Your wife doesn’t like me,” Esme told him, smiling. His face was barely visible in the darkness but his bright hair caught the light of the stars. Their walk eventually slowed as their shoes crunched on the sand. 

“She did this?” 

Esme nodded. “It’s alright, she deserved to get in a good swipe. It won’t happen again, though.” 

“No, it won’t,” Carlisle replied angrily. “Who does she think she is?” 

“The new Mrs Cullano, protecting the honour of her marriage,” Esme pointed out with a light laugh. “I’d do the same. I don’t mind, really. I understand her anger.” 

“Esme,” he said, his voice softening. “How can I love someone who hurt you?” 

“You’re the only one who can hurt me, Carlisle.” She wound an arm around the back of his shoulders and closed her eyes when he rested his forehead against hers. 

“I’ll never hurt you.” 

“I know.” And he never had. Not with a hand, not with a word. No one had ever loved anyone like Carlisle loved Esme, and she knew it. “You’re so good to me. What did I do to deserve you?” 

Carlisle rested one hand at the small of her back and ran the fingers of his other hand up her spine. “Thank you for wearing this dress. You look beautiful.” 

She smiled in the night. “Thank you for choosing it for me.” 

“Gotta let the whole world see how wonderful my girl is.” 

“Call me that again.” 

“My girl?” 

She hummed and began gently swaying, moving him to dance with her to the sound of the ocean. “You’re my person, you know?” 

“Yeah, I know. And you’re my person. Always have been. Always will be.” 

Carlisle’s soft kiss touched Esme’s cheek and she sighed in bliss. “I love you, Carlisle.”

“I love you, too, Esme. More than anything. Always.”

[popculturebuffet]

The Critic Valentine’s Day Double Feature (Pilot/Sherman, Woman and Child)

Vivia Jay Sherman! Viva Quebec! Viva Valentine’s Day! And Viva WeirdKev who as happens for a good chunk of my content payed for this wonderful double feature for one of my favorite shows.  The Critic was created by Al Jean and Mike Reis of The Simpsons fame, a comedy team supreme. While I knew the two wrote for the simpsons, more on that iin a minute, I had no idea just how many classics the two churned out: There’s No Disgrace Like Home, Moaning LIsa, The Telltale Head, The Way We Was, Stark Raving Dad (Sadly tainted by it’s guest star being a horirble monster but that’s not their fault), Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington, the treehouse of horror segments The Bart Zone and Clown Without Pity (The second of which may be my favorite treehouse of horror segment), and later coming back to write the story for one of my all time favorites Round Springfield and to outright write the classic “SupercalfragalisticexpalliDOHcious”.  And to his credit Jean would later go on to write some classic post-golden age simpsons episodes during his tenure as producer: Lisa’s Sax, Mom and Pop Art, and Children of a Lesser Clod, which is notable if nothing else for this gag. 

So yeah the guys are legends and were right to start their own show under Simpsons producer James L Brooks over at ABC. The show followed the adventures of film Critic, Jay Sherman, a parody of film critics with high brow tastes, impossibly high standards, and a huge opinon of himself, having won the pultizer at least once.  Despite this he was also constnatly spat and shat on by society, divorced, lonely, depressed and eats like a thousand pigs combined in some horrific science accident. And given the last three parts describe me, as well as my profession of b eing a critic, naturally I love the guy and this show. I’ll get into his cast as we go as the first episode does an excellent job of introducing the entire cast so there’s no sense repeating myself.  But the show’s style I can and will talk about: It’s basically Golden Age, i.e. season’s 1-10, simpsons, but with more pop culture refrences and movie parodies, since the show would often feature multiple on Jay’s show coming Attractions and took place in the celebrity hot spot of new york and was a love letter to the city.. and sometimes a hate letter but only when those digs at the city would be funny, which to be fair depsite never having been to or lived in new york most really are. That’s the series key asset: while a LOT of the jokes haven’t aged well as a lot of the celbreity refrences are dated as are some of the movie parodies, most are hilarious wether you get what their making fun of or not and to me tha’ts a good parody: where knowing what their making fun of HELPS, but you can laugh regardless. The show had the charm and pace of the Simpsons while having it’s own unique style and cast that was just as charming and I love it dearly.  The show sadly only lasted two seasons, with ABC canceling it after one, and Brooks having it moved over to FOX, which was a good idea and lead to what’s probably my faviorite simpsons episode, a Star is Burns. Ironically despite you know, the show being created by two simpsons writers, backed by one of their producers and perfectly in line, creator Matt Groening was against the idea, publicly ranted about it to the press, and generally was an ass about it. Look I love the guy and even Brooks, Jean and Reiss were all nice enough in thier criticsim of the guy, but sitll very much understandably pissed off. .and i’m with them. 

It gave what’s again, my faviorite episode and what is not a “30 minute add” but an episode that easily stands on it’s own and also you know, pokes fun at itself for being a crossover a few times. You don’t need to see the critic to enjoy it, and episodes most iconic gags, Boo-Urns, Man Getting HIt by a Football, Senior Speilbergo, all don’t involve jay. And again the shows were not at all dismilar: While the critic was it’s own thing it still had the simpsons sense of humor and pacing so I saw it more as a petty rant against having a crossover in general more than a legit critcisim. Especially since Groening had no such complaints decades later with the family guy crossover after both shows had all tehir talent surgically removed and had the gall to NOT remove a cheap shot at Bob’s Burgers. And yes i’m still bitter about seeing that in a promo for the special, Bob’s Burgers is fantastic, to the point that now, in a fabulous case of history repeating itself, it’s got it’s OWN show like the critic made by talented former crew members using a similar but sitll throughly unique comedy style , The Great North. My point is that controversy pisses me off, and The Great North is spectacular go watch it while you read this. 

So yeah the Critic is awesome, me and Kev are both fans, and there are plenty of romantic episodes abound as the show digs into Jay’s love life quite a few times and has episodes about his son’s first love, his boss finding a wife towards the end of the series, his parents rekindling their spark and in what’s easily my faviorite episode, his sister dating a grunge rocker. So there was no shortage of choices but the choice made was brilliant.. and i’m not saying that because i’m being paid to, as my review of splatter phoenix’s first episode in darkwing duck and woops should show, paying me does not guarantee that I have to LIKE what your paying me to review. But here I did and he pointed out the first episode of each season, with season two being a soft reboot that while keeping the premise and supporting cast changed a few things around and added two new main characters, and both involve jay finding a new love intrest and intorduce a lot of the cast. I found him to be right, so where we are and after the cut i’ll dive into the good and bad of both episodes and see what changed inbetween seasons. 

That gag will make sense.. later. Right now it’s time for our very first episode, the show’s very first episode as you could probably tell by the title. 

Pilot:  The pilot starts with Jay getting touched up by his Makeup Person Doris. Jay is played by legendary comedian John Lovitz, who this show gave me a deep and lasting appreciation for. Lovitz was at the time best known for his 5 year long stint on SNL, and film wise is best known for Three Amigos, the Brave Little Toaster, The Wedding Singer and Rat Race. Sadly while I do geninely love the guy.. he has been in enough crap to destroy the New York Sewer system, as everyone needs money and sadly not everyone appricates the talents of John Lovitz like I do. 

So naturally he’s also been in The Stepford Wives remake, Grown Ups 2, The Ridiculous 6, Eight Crazy Nights, North, Benchwarmers and Benchwarmers 2: Breaking Balls. Yes that’s an actual movie, though it’s already better than the first one for virtue of not having Rob Schnider and David Spade starring in it despite.. that title. The irony is not lost on me that Lovitz has essentially made his money starring in the kinds of films Jay was forced to see for his job.  Still a VERY talented, very lovely man.

Before we get to our next voice actor up, no profile of Jon would be complete without mentioning that time he slammed Andy Dick’s face into a bar. To make a very long story short, Lovitz was friends with the late great Phil Hartman, who even did some voice work for this very show, whose wife who had severe drug and mental ilness killed them both. Phil had told Lovitz he saw Dick give his wife cocaine, so after Phil’s tragic murder when Lovitz and Dick ended up on the same show, Lovitz ended up exploding at the guy out of grief and blamed him for her death, but later apologized like a gentleman.  Living up to his name though Dick later went up to Lovitz at a restraunt Lovitz owned and said “I’m giving you the Phil Hartman curse, you die next”. Granted he was drunk but still...

Naturally Lovitz banned the guy and Lovitz later demanded an apology when the two ran into each other when they ran into each other at Lovitz regular gig at the comed store. Dick not only refused to apologize even when Lovitz put him against a wall, but said it was because “you blamed me for her death”... which was a decade ago with change by this point, the actions of a man GREIVING for his best friend whose wife’s relapse you caused which inadveradntly lead to her and her husband’s death, and something HE APOLOGIZED FOR. Naturally Lovitz took this how you would and did what we’d all like to do in general and broke the shit out of his face and only didn’t do more because they were seperated. IN short this man is a hero and I wil lbring up this story at every opportunity.  Doris was played by the late voice actress Doris Grau, a script supervisor who worked on a LOT of films as one , the most notable I could find on wikipedia being Clue. This is a fact I just learned today but boy if it isn’t neat. Grau mostly did aditional voices for shows, most notably Ducktales and the Simpsons, where she played Lunchlady Doris, and of course this show. Still she seemed like a very funny and talented woman and it’s sad she’s gone.  The two start the series mostly sniping at each other and while that never ENTIRELY goes away, Doris gets more supportive after a spotlight episode where she and Jay bond and Jay thinks she might be his mom. And while she’s not this surprisingly sticks and for the rest of the series while still not above making potshots at him on occasion, she’s far more supportive. She also informs him she’s out of spray on hair “I’m bald and ugly, get more!”. This show is naturally comedy gold and a lot of it relies on Lovitz sense of timing, though the rest of the cast aren’t slouches but we’ll get to them as we go.  She ends up putting a hat over him and we get our first film parody, Rabbi PI starring Anuld, which is alright. Not one of the series best but passable and gets the gimmick of having film parodies on jay’s show across, which was a nice way to set it apart from the Simpsons. Jay reviews it on the Shermometor, a gimmick jay hates and that disappeared by season 2, giving it a bellow zero to the ire of his boss Duke Phillips.  Duke is one of the best parts of the show, an unhinged southren billlonare who was a modeled after Ted Turner, down to the mustache, who built up his fried chicken franchise into a multimedia congrlomorate and is also mildly nuts, though that part would be more of a thing in season 2. In season 1, he’s mostly there to make Jay’s life hell, with about half of the seasons episodes having him either fire jay or put his job in jeapordy versus 2 the next season. He’s still not unfunny, but most of his best stuff is in season 2 when Charles Napier’s allowed to cut loose a little more and the character wasn’t shoehorned into just being a clueless executive.  Charles Napier is a longtime character actor who showed up in TONS of films and tv shows too many to list.. and trust me with some of the lists of credits before and after this that’s saying something, his biggest voice rolls being in this series and Men and Black the Series as Zed. But needless to say he was ALWAYS this awesome and sadly passed in 2011.  Jay’s guest for the day is Valerie Fox, an up and coming actress whose first film kiss of death is coming out soon.. and whose age is an engima and it’s only a problem because if she’s 20, like the episode mildly suggests giving her starting career and her voice actress being that age, then this gets really gross as jay is 17 years older than her then. But given she looks older than that and sounds certainly older than that, i’m going more with 30, since she looks more like it, and sharon stone, who she’s mildly based on given she stars in a basic instinct knockoff and does the leg thing, was 32 at the time of basic instinct.  Valerie is voiced by Jennifer Lien, aka Kes from star trek voyager who I only know about because of reviews done by SF Debris and Allison Pregler. She was the childlike love intrest of Nelix, the ship’s resident pain in the audience asses who made them BEG for early seasons wesley crusher and who once, and I saw footage this wasn’t SF Debris exagreated, lunged at a crewmate in a jealous rage, unfounded by the way since Tom was AVOIDING kes depsite being attracted to her as he just wnated her to be happy and to not mess up her relationshpi, and screamed “i’ll kill you!”. Point is she hasn’t had a huge career, but was still worth noting and does a fantastic job here. Again I did not realize she was that young at the time by her voice, and that means she did a great job. 

So Jay’s smitten with her, finds her super attractive and she asks him out.. but to the show’s credit, and Jay’s he does try to rebuff her because he knows ther’es a conflict of intrest there.. but ends up giving in. However at least the show not only is upfront that there’s an issue here but that ends up being the thrust of the last act. Granted there’s still some.. questionable stuff like when she does the basic instinct leg cross and he says “can we get a shot of that”, which no.. Jay.. no you can’t. Ewwww. Seen far worse, like It’s Pat, which was a VERY real SNL sketch about people trying to guess the titular pat’s gender because that’s not creepy or invasive even for the time. And they made a movie out of it because Wayne’s World was popular forgetting that Wayne’s World, one of my faviorite movies by the way and one I need to cover here sometime this year now the thought’s occured to me, was a labor of love, with a talented director and actual ideas from it’s two leads who actually fleshed out the character versus a concept that was NEVER funny to begin with and has gotten down right horrifying with age. And wasn’t I talking about the Critic? Not the abusive jackass mind you, Jay Sherman. 

Ah yes so Jay takes Valerie to a date at Lane Riche, the rich jackass where we meet Vlada, a vaugely european man whose your typical hollywood suckup. As Jay puts it in a later episode  Vlada: I love you too Jay: You only love my money Vlada: That’s true but it is a love that will never die.  He also naturally scoots Jay to a less nice table in the Critic’s section once Conan O’Brian shows up... which WAS supposed to be a different kind of joke, as at the time Conan was just a writer on the simpsons and SNL, but now given he has a decades long career in late night and famously said fuck you to NBC during that whole Tonight Show debacle, which netted him his own show on TBS, it comes off more as the kind of self deprciating gag Conan makes about himself. So in other words it’s actually funnier now? 

As for the critic’s section that’s a part of the series I’ve neglected to talk about so let’s do that: The kind of critic Jay is, one who plays clips of the movie and reviews them.. on television. And were usually academics who looked down on popular film, the kind Siskel and Ebert popularized, and both suprisingly had a huge guest apperance in season 2 and even reviewed the show on their show. This kind of film criticism just dosen’t exist on tv that i’m aware of anymore, and mostly lives on with internet reviewers , many of whom were inspiried by critics like this, and who range from acadmeics to average joes to some mixture of both. It never went away just simply went to a younger generation. Some of which squandred it and somehow still have a career like certain abusuive jackasses i’ve mentioned enough with that one gag a few paragraphs ago. Point is it’s a much more varied and different game now so the critic ended up as one of those shows or movies where the main characters very job feels like an artifact of it’s time, like our heroes in Wayne’s World hosting a public acess show, when nowadays they’d just put it up on youtube or the entire idea of a UHF station in well.. UHF. It’s not a BAD thing, just something to note. 

But the date goes well as Valerie shows she’s really into jay and even takes him oggling her in stride, though we do get an utter classic of a gag when Jay says something about women being drawn to him.. and cue an old woman asking to rub his nonexistant hump for luck “You hunchbacks are all alike”. She does so anyway to his understandable annoyance. 

But the two go back to Jay’s place, talk about his acomplishments including a pulitzer and then well.. the obvious happens they go to bed together and the next day after Valerie is horrified at his just woke up fac,e he gives her an easy out but she’s fine with it. It honestly shows just how low the poor guy’s self esteem is that he just.. assumes a woman will regret having slept with hima nd walk out and while played for laughs it really gives a clear look into Jay’s mental state: He’s so full of self loathing, not helped by the world being out to get him, that it’s really oddly endearing. And VERY releatable.  The two are interupted by Jay’s son Marty. Marty is played by the very recognizable and very wonderful Christine Cavanagh, who sadly passed away in 2014. She voiced Chuckie Finster, Gosalyn Mallard, Oblina, Dexter from Dexter’s Lab and the titular pig from Babe. She decided to retire in 2001, so while her career was only about a decade she made quite the impact and is sorely missed. Unsuprisingly her usual voice is perfect for the very awkward Marty, who Jay asks to tell eveyrone about the beautiful woman in his bed especially his unfaithful and utterly loathsome ex wife ardith. 

This scene demonstrates two problems. The first is just the pilot as Jay’s kind of sleazy. While Jay being thirsty wouldn’t go away, especially in the episode Lady Hawke, it’d be made more awkwardly endearing. Here there are moments of him just plain being creepy like the aformentioned oggling, which while not bad in itself, if a bit awkawrd, also has him creepily muttering to himself while doing so which removes any charm or relatability and just sends it straight into needing 10 showers just to wash this scene off. The rest of the series would just turn him into a bit desperate at worst.  It also explains why the only other romantic story the guy has in the season is a pastiche of misery. Thanfully this would be GREATLY adjusted next season but we’ll get to that. 

The other problem is just the tone... we get a good half a minute of Marty talking about how he calls Ardith’s boyfriend “Uncle Al” because he likes him a lot.. to his dad’s face. And granted his dad is being creeptastic this episode but the early episodes just pile on the Jay hatred by the world a bit thick, to the point one episode puts him as “worse than hitler”. Granted the audience is full of idiot teens who have no idea who hitler is, and the gag is kinda funny, but it makes my point: Jay is just utterly shat on by the world, and while he does get a few wins, most are undercut by something awful and it gets taxing sometimes. The guy is just too loveably pathetic to hate, too relatable even as a teen and not snobish enough to be really loathsome or WANT to see him knocked down by the world. It’s not overwhelming enough to ruin the first season, it still has good episodes but this episode does highlight a LOT of these problems.  He does get to spend the day with val though, dancing outside the trump buliding, seriously even back then he was a joke and his lack of money half the time was well known.. how did the last four years happen, and they tell each other they love each other. I’d aww if I didn’t know how this ended.  So jay relates the good news of how he feels to his best friend, Jeremy Hawke, played by Maurice LaMarche. LaMarche is one of the most talented voice actors alive, a master of impersonations paticuarlly orson welles, who was naturally brought on board because they knew they were going to need a lot of celebrity voices for the film parodies and needed one or two guys to do them to keep it cheap. The guy is like most of this cast a legend in the industry, having voiced the Brain, Squit, Dizzy Devil, the Human Ton, Big Bob Pataki, Egon Spengler, Sleet,  Kiff Kroker, Headless Body of Agnew, Morbo, Various other Futurama characters because that list is long, Mortimer Mouse, Blue Falcone, Father, Yosemite Sam, Vincent Van Ghoul, Doctor Doom, Abradolf Lincler, and Odval. Point is the guy has been engranged in my childhood and adulthood and will probably even after he’s gone come back from the grave to do some voices. He even got the part of Jeremy Hawke here because he happened to do a REALLY good australian accent depsite not being australian. Jeremey was a combination of paul hogan, the star of the Crocodile Dundee movies and at the time sex symbol and at this time known anti semite Mel Gibson. Obviously neither of those refrences has aged paticuarlly well, but since hollywood ALWAYS has room for a super hunk from australia, just ask Chris Hemsworth or before him Hugh Jackman, the character still works and his breakout role, Crocodile Ghandi is so ludcrious it works. I.e. a white australian man playing the mahtma and saying before he brings peace “First a tasteful shot of my bum for the ladies. Jeremy, while sometimes increidbly oblvious, is still a fairly nice easygoing guy and an extremley loveable character. And whie Jay worries about Valrie meeting him because he’s sex on a cracker she ignores him and jay gloats for a bit, paticuarlly with the great bit “take your genatalia right back to australia”. And while Jeremy’s happy for him he tries to reign Jay in when Jay talks asking her to marry him.  As Jeremy later relates on Jay’s fire escape “Bubala, i’ve learned there’s two things you should never do: Marry an actress and wear blackface to the naacp image awards. Two things I found out the hard way. “

So Jay takes her to meet his parents and finds out he’s adopted.. and their also rich. Jay’s waspy parents are his cold and overly honest mother Elanor, played by  Judith Ivey, his kooky dad and THE best part of the series Franklin played by Gerrit Grahm and his loving and free spirited teenager sister Margo played by Nancy Cartwright.  Okay (cracks knuckles) here. we. go. Judith Ivey is a tony wining stage actress and has also directed numerous plays and is mostly known for her stage work but I know her from Designing Women where she played BJ in the last season. Garret Grahm apparently shows up in a lot of brian depalma movies, including Beef in phantom of the paradise, a lot of tv work and to my shock the asshole dad from Child’s Play 2. Another thing I genuinely love I wasn’t aware an actor or actress from this series had a part in.  Finally there’s Nancy Cartwright, who you DEFINTELY know from the Simpsons, where she plays Bart, along with Nelson, Ralph, Kearny, Database, and Maggie, and Kearny. Other credits include Pistol Pete, Mindy from Animaniacs, Chuckie Finster picking up for Christine Cavanagh ironically enough, Lu and Rufus from Kim Possible. She’s a talented lady and i’m glad sh’es still around. Whew. 

Okay so yeah I do love the shermans and fraknlin is again easily the best part of an already excellent series and unlike Duke that’s in full display here, with him saying, when his wife mentions they were going to give jay back at one time, “Son if I’ve said it once I said it a thousand times.. who are all you people. “ and he’d only get better. Sadly he’s NOT in sherman woman and child. Our loss really. But he’s in pretty much every other episode of season 2 thankfully and most of this season so eh, fair trade off. Also we get the classic line, after Jay says he’ll love valrie even when he’s decaying in the ground, his mom quips “Cna’t we go one meal without talking about your rotting corpse?” Though Eleanor understandably thinks Valarie is using jay for a good review. Margo suspects her of the same and takes her on a horse ride, though all she can gleam is that Val genuielly loves jay and welcomes her to the family.  Jay however does decide to duck out of the inteview by faking sick, which leads to a really sweet moment where Valerie visits him and they dance, in a hilaroius but oddly sweet parody of Beauty and the Beast, Beauty and King Dork. Despite the title and the song insluting him a LOT it’s still just endearing. This is a problem but we’ll get to in just a moment WHY all these touching moments are a problem.  So naturally things don’t go that well for Jay as Duke has a tape of the film sent to him “My shrink was right: GOd does hate me!”

Naturally kiss of death is bad and valrie is bad in it and Jay is left uncertain what to do, but eventually decides he has to do what he feels is right,.. though he does take a picture of her while she’s sleeping. “In case you do leave”

So in a tender and heartbreaking moment Jay is honest, the movie does suck and she’s not good but he does compliment her, for her personality not her body despite his skeevy behavior and say she could get better. Instead when he arrives home.. she dumps him to his face and leaves never to be seeen again while he assumes she’ll come back. And that’s the issue it’s GENUINELY hard to tell if we’re supposed to side with Jay. On one hand he genuinely loves her and does the right thing and on the oth er he’s kinda creepy. It’s a mixed tone that just sorta hurts thing and something the series DID fix after this, as it found a better ballance of the guy being pitable while also still being an ass and ONLY usually being punished when he does something actually wrong, the only exception being Dial M for MOther which is easily the weakest episode of the series. The episode does close on a really funny moment as Jay’s dispondent because “I’m sitting on top of a volcano of rage and I don’t knwo where to direct it”. Marty mentions a new Sylvester Stallone movie where “He plays a concert pianst who” And jay dosen’t even need the rest of that to shout “To the multiplex!” The man is back

Final Thoughts for Pilot: This episode is not bad. It has it’s flaws as I said, mostly in tone, but the series would iron that out and it’s still a great pilot that organically introduces the entire main cast in one episode and really gives us the full idea of who Jay Sherman is. It’s also REALLY funny, as the series should be and it would get better, but i’d still put it over some more awkward first episode like Letterkenny’s “No Reaosn to Get Excited”, even with it’s brilliant ending or Bojack Horseman’s first episode  whose title is way too long to put here in an article that’s already long as hell about about to get longer. But like those series this pilot worked pass the awkwardness and the result is a damn good series. but if you want a better idea of what it became.. wellllllll

Sherman, Woman and Child: So yeah as you can tell JSUT by contrasting images a few things were changed up between seasons, part of it at network instance. The designs were softened , the color palette was brightened with jay being the most noticably alterted between seasons. 

The execs wanted jay a bit warmer, so his face was given wider more expressive eyes and was also scrucnehd down a bit. He was also made slightly less of a jackass, with his elitisim toned down a bit and his creepeir moments gone. For instance he no longer had a split personality/imaginary secretary named ethel. That was actually a thing. It didn’t even really change Jay as a person, this very episode mentions him not liking the Lion King, and he’s still snooty, he’s jusst not as punchable about it and that was for the best.  But the cringe comedy in general was taken down a peg and replaced with more fun weirdness, which wihle present in season 1 really pops more here, especially with Jay’s dad who sadly dosen’t show up in this episode, but at various points dresses up like El Kabong, puts on the mask from the mask (”He did the same thing at Nixon’s funeral”), and blows up famous works of art while babysitting. But yeah things get a bit more surreal like the simpsons from season 4 onward, ironically enough given these guys left to make their own show, and it’s to the show’s benefit. 

But besides a lighter tone, they also wanted two things to hook viewers in: A permenant love intrest for Jay, and an adorable kid character. The former.. was acutlaly quite resonable, as i’td both give jay a “win” as it were, allow the cast to have another femlae character and give him someone else to confide in besides Doris or Jeremy, to give those characters a break. The other was less so and we’ll get into why when we meet her. 

This episode really is a second pilot, reintroducing about half of the main cast. Marty, Elanor, Margo and as I said Franklin are all absent. But their reintroduced soon enough with the fourth episode in both broadcast and dvd order, and my personal faviorite “A Song for Margo, is entirely focused on Jay’s parents and sister, while Lady Hawke has marty breifly at the start for broadcast order and he’s in the frmaing device for Sherman of Arabia in dvd order. So the characters all get a proper reintroduction to new audiences, but it was the right call to NOT shove them into this one, still introducing new people to the new cast, but letting the two new additions to it breathe and get properly intergrated into this universe.. well more Alice than Penny but we’ll get to that. It’s part of why, besides the genuine extra coat of polish aand seasonal changes I feel this is the better episode. 

So we open with Jay on his show and two parodies in a row. The first is a few good men but with Jack Nichelson making fun of Christan Slater for sounding like him even though. they honestly aren’t too similar other than both doing that pause thing a bit. So yeah not their best but the second segment makes up for it “The Nightmare Before Channukah” a parody of the nightmare before christmas that was so beautifully animated and funny, that they actually bumped it up to the season premiere.  But while the parodies are good Jay’s show is once again, this happened a LOT in season one, in jeapordy, being beaten by the Benedictine monk variety hour. Which while the Bendictine Monks are VERY much an artifact of the 90′s a choir of monks that somehow went mainstream, the whole segment is so absurd and wonderful it stands on it’s own and is still funny to me in 2021. Duke comes in anda fter trying to softball things shows the change I mentioned: He’s actually sorry the show is in danger and is genuinely sincere that he’s sad he’ll probably have to cancel it versus season 1 where he was ready to cancel it what felt like every other episode. And I prefer this, where he can still mess with jay or flex his power over him, but is more cordial with the guy and it allows more jokes between the two. 

So Jay’s not doing so good.. and during his crappy day he spots a 30 something woman and her young daughter struggling in the rain and stops his cab to help. And gets maced for it “MMM, Jalapeno”. Though Alice does apologize and Jay does understand as it is New York and she graciously takes the offer. It’s in the cab their properly introduced. Aliice thompkins and her daughter penny who in a great bit punches jay in the nose for not liking the lion king (”rex reed did the same thing”) and then kissing him on the nose in apology (”Rex did that too” And he acompanies them in.. and also gets conked on the head by a potted plant and put in a materinity dress. 

So we get to know Alice and what her deal is: Alice was once married to and supported the career of country star Cyrus Thompkins who was.. less than subtle in his music about how faithful he was

Easily one of my favorite gags of the series if in part for Pat Overall’s delivery. So she moved from Knoxville to New York to prove to her daughter a woman can make it on her own, and proves she’s smart, talented and driven she just needs a break. She seemingly gets one in a man in a bright white outfit who says “this is your ticket out of this rundown flophouse” only for him to cheerfully exclaim “Your being evicted!”... PFFFTT. Cue where the commerical would be

So during this lull in the action let’s talk about Alice and Penny’s voice actresses: Alice is voiced by Park Overall, though for some weird reason I thought she was voiced by Hollly Hunter. Dunno why. Park is an outspoken liberal, supporting my boy bernie sanders in 2016 and in general seems like a fascenating lady. Naturally like with Jay’s parents I know her from something more oddly specific, the sitcom Reba, as I did not realize she voiced alice depsite using a similar voice for her character there, Reba’s best friend Lori Ann.. And while Park TRIED her best.. the character didn’t work out: a combination of it being simply funnier that barbra jean tried to wedge herself into the roll and the fact Reba really didn’t need a horny abrasive sidekick meant the charcter had a very short shelf life and the audience had very low patience for her.  I did like her constnatly insulting Brock as he was not a good person andi t was nice SOMEONE besides Reba actually got to roast him on a regular basis. 

Penny was voiced by the one and only Russi Taylor, who sadly passed in 2019. She voiced Huey Dewey and Louie, Webby Vanderquack, Minnie Mouse, Fantasma, the imcomprable martin prince...

Among tons of smaller rolls. She’s sadly missed. We’ll get more into what they add or subtract from the show in a minute, as the next day at work Jay wonders how to help, though Duke’s interjection gives us two great gags: his “30 second workout” which involvees throwing jay around like a medicine ball and.. well this. 

The man is a legend for a reason. He earned that golden statue. So Jay TRIES slipping alice the money only to give it “To my good friend crazy postman”, and Alice refuses the money due to pride.. even if you know, she has a small child and new york is expensive but Jay finds a better solution, hire her.. even if it’d make it impossible for them to date. For all of one episode. What keeps the power dynamics from feeling EUGUUUUGGHH here is that Jay treats alice like an equal partner at work and dosen’t let their relationship really impact things outside of one episode, and dosen’t use his position to get into a relationship with her nor does she use being responsible for a turn in his fortune for hers. 

And yes turn in fortune, as a makeover and a change of attidue under Alice’s direction, which is utterly amazing to watch and wow’s duke and hte audience, wins back his fans and his job is secure. Duke meets alice and we get more great duke stuff. including something truly iconic...

I want bears who sing for me, doo dah, doo dah. But yeah things are well though Jay ends up admitting to Jeremy he can’t stop thinking about her “Her merest smile is like pedals of the empreror’s bathwater, BATHWATER I TELL YOU BATHWATER. “ So Jeremey encourages him carpe canum “Seize the dog”. He does so.. and the day but instead finds Alice with her ex Cyrus whose trying to win her back. Wuh oh.  Once the asshole leaves, and agrees to give her the night to think, Alice admits the only reason she’s considering it is she has a weakness: his singing melts her like butter on a bagle (”God i’ve been in new york too long”. )  Jay tries to talk her out of it at the critics meeting for “Dennis the Meance II Society” which involves Dennis pulling a drivebye on mr wilson.. why wasn’t this the second live action dennis the meance movie? WHY I ASK YOU. But Jay gets a good idea, as Alice TRIES to tell the asshole to get to stepping (And to see penny often, she’s not a monster), he works his evil song magic.. only for Jay to undercut it with his own amazing song on acordian. “Cyrus is just a virus, he wants to tie you down while your still young. Your potetial, is what’s essential, you could someday be another connie chung!” And that ultiamtely shows WHY jay is the better man. He just wants what’s best for her and dosen’t care if it’s him, he just wants it not to be THIS asshole. He’s not even trying to win her over, which a lot of these gestures creepily lead to. He just wants to help her be who she’s MEANT to be. And that’s why this works better: Instead of a fake relationship built on lust and someone conning the other person, it’s a real one built on genuine chemistry. Also Alice you know dosen’t just.. vanish after an episode but is a permenant part of the cast. I mean she does for the webisodes but we don’t talk about those. 

So our hero undercuts Cyrus one more time  Cyrus: “Loverrrr, without you there’s no other” Jay: Give him a chance he’ll do your mother....

I mean he’s not worng, So Cyus is sent packing and we get a nice romantic moment between the two. 

Final Thoguhts: Sherman, Woman and Child This one is truly excellent. It relaunchs the show on all cyllanders. And frankly Alice was a fine addition to the cast: her own fully fleshed out woman with her own personality outside of jay, who was tough, smart and a good counterpoint and confidant to Jay and it felt like she’d always fit. Penny on the other hand, apologizes to the late Russi Taylor who tries her best, just dosen’t work and feels ultra cloying and out of place in the series and unspurisingly is barely used after this. But overall a better pilot than the actual pilot was already pretty good and a fine pair of episodes. Check em out whenever the series eithe rgets on a streaming platform or pops back up on youtube as Sony’s struck it down... despite not putting it up anywhere i’m aware of. Seriously sell it to HBO Max or Disney I want a reboot. But for now this series is awesome check it out and until the next rainbow, it’s been a pleasure. 

[drvconiis]

         ──    *     𝑰 𝑻 ' 𝑺   𝑪 𝑹 𝑨 𝑪 𝑲 𝑯 𝑬 𝑨 𝑫   𝑯 𝑶 𝑼 𝑹 𝑺     .      and  i’ve  pretty  much  lost  everything  from  my  old  account  so  here  is  intro  one  out  of  two  because  i’m  a  sucker  for  references  .  as  well  as  a  couple  changes  and  details  about  my  son  but  without  further  ado  ,  roman  de  grimaldi  ‘erebody  .  let’s  get  this  shit  show  on  the  road  !

potential triggers : divorce , death , infidelity

          ▫     ◟     𝑹 𝑶 𝑴 𝑨 𝑵   𝑫 𝑬   𝑮 𝑹 𝑰 𝑴 𝑨 𝑳 𝑫 𝑰     ──     𝑡𝘩𝑒 𝑔𝑜𝑙𝑑𝑒𝑛 𝑏𝑜𝑦  

abstract .

ʻ   /   let  me  introduce  you  to  a  prized  member  of  our   lacrosse team & sailing team   ,   roman  ‘ rome ’  de  grimaldi .  this   cismale  scorpio   has  been  a  student  at  our  institution for   4  years  and  is  currently  a  22  year  old   senior .   through  the  halls ,   he  has   always  reminded  me  of   evan roderick  ,   but  there  is  always  more  than  meets  the  eye ,   like  the  fact  that  he  ruined  someone’s  marriage  and  his  father  paid  them  off  to  keep  them  quiet .  coral  cape  has  made  their  future  just  as  bright  as  their  smile ,   i  assure  you .  ʼ 

memoir .

     ❭      ──     rome  was  born  with  𝒖𝒏𝒕𝒂𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒅  𝒊𝒏𝒏𝒐𝒄𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆  ,  the  youngest  of  three  children  to  sensationalized  fairytale  couple  .  behind  closed  doors  ,  he  was  the  last  hope  for  the  broken  married  couple  ,  he  was  the  attempt  .  despite  the  messy  fights  and  heart  aching  words  ,  lucca  de  grimaldi  perceived  his  youngest  as  the  light  of  his  life  even  at  the  height  of  the  de  grimaldi  divorce  and  the  loss  of  custody  of  his  eldest  child  .  firenze  was  a  toxic  concoction  of  both  his  parents  but  roman  was  the  exact  copy  of  the  de  grimaldi  patriach  from  his  light  eyes  to  his  messy  blond  hair  even  to  his  cheeky  smile  that  seemed  to  work  in  his  favour  .

    ❭      ──     he  was  𝒕𝒐𝒐  𝒔𝒎𝒂𝒓𝒕  for  his  own  good  ,  while  his  brother  firenze  seemed  to  run  wild  amongst  the  halls  of  their  italian  estate  with  a  fierce  wildness  and  expensive  tutors  chasing  after  him  in  attempt  to  get  him  to  try  ;  rome  sat  on  his  father’s  lap  with  a  children’s  book  in  his  tiny  hand  and  smile  on  his  face  as  he  eased  at  the  sound  of  his  father  typing  .  even  at  a  young  age  ,  rome  and  lucca  were  practically  in  routine  with  one  another  as  the  youngest  de  grimaldi  would  enter  the  study  at  the  same  time  everyday  before  easing  himself  in  the  furthest  corner  until  all  the  school  work  the  tutors  gave  him  was  completed  and  in  a  need  pile  then  he  would  shine  𝒎𝒊𝒔𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒆𝒗𝒐𝒖𝒔  bright  eyes  at  his  father  until  he  found  himself  in  the  man’s  lap  .  most  of  the  time  he  had  a  book  but  there  were  rare  moment  ,  lucca  de  grimaldi  would  talk  about  the  new  research  the  company  was  looking  into  or  the  new  proposals  for  a  new  hospital  .  rome  fell  in  love  with  medicine  because  of  those  moments  .

   ❭      ──     lucca  de  grimaldi  cried  when  he  said  good  bye  to  his  youngest  son  at  the  tarmac  of  that  plane  that  would  ship  the  boy  all  the  way  to  switzerland  .  rome  at  the  ripe  age  of  six  seemed  to  understand  duty  better  than  most  kids  ,  he  didn’t  cry  or  cling  onto  his  father  or  brother  instead  he  only  seemed  to  smirk  and  promised  to  call  .  rome  had  always  been  the  perfect  elite  child  ,  he  had  refined  manners  and  seemed  to  speak  to  every  elder  in  perfect  politeness  and  never  caused  his  father  distress  but  he  had  a  𝒔𝒆𝒏𝒔𝒆  𝒐𝒇  𝒂𝒓𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒄𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒚  when  he  arrived  from  a  year  at  school  .  as  years  grew  the  personality  grew  ,  he  was  still  a  child  so  the  multitude  of  languages  he  was  expected  to  know  mixed  ,  there  was  a  lacklustre  about  him  as  he  grew  .  he  was  golden  but  not  in  the  same  innocence  he  used  to  be  .  he  was  merely  painted  gold  .

  ❭      ──     the  first  time  roman  de  grimaldi  really  screamed  was  at  the  sight  of  his  older  brother  falling  into  the  still  deep  waters  .  the  first  time  he  cries  himself  to  sleep  when  when  his  father  held  him  after  baring  him  with  the  news  his  brother  passed  .  the  first  time  he  stops  routine  is  to  sit  in  his  brother’s  bedroom  and  wonder  .  he  was  merely  ten  and  he  wonders  ,  he  seemed  to  have  that  never  ending  question  about  why  people  seemed  to  keep  leaving  him  but  he  never  asks  aloud  .  then  routine  continues  ,  and  each  year  as  he  grows  he  becomes  less  of  himself  and  more  of  a  facade  ,  a  mere  image  of  who  he  could  have  been  .  he  was  dubbed  the  heir  of  the  de  grimaldi  business  before  he  even  finished  elementary  school  ,  he  was  a  part  of  the  future  of  science  and  he  barely  even  hit  puberty  yet  .  there  were  expectations  ,  plans  and  rules  to  follow  .  rome  discovered  he  𝒏𝒆𝒆𝒅𝒆𝒅  𝒕𝒉𝒆  𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒓𝒐𝒍  or  he  may  just  fall  apart  .

 ❭      ──     rebellion  was  not  something  expected  of  him  ,  the  most  extreme  he  had  intentionally  hit  was  going  to  university  for  law  for  a  year  .  he  was  almost  disowned  by  his  family  of  medical  professional  but  everyone  knew  rome  lived  and  breathed  science  to  even  be  remotely  happy  with  law  .  his  next  rebellion  was  unintentional  ,  roman  like  getting  what  he  wanted  ,  he  𝒄𝒓𝒂𝒗𝒆𝒅  𝒕𝒉𝒆  𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒃𝒊𝒅𝒅𝒆𝒏  and  sometimes  he  succumbed  to  the  impossible  .  he  involves  himself  with  a  married  woman  ,  he  craves  the  secrecy  ,  he  craved  the  lack  of  plans  and  control  .  he  doesn’t  love  her  but  𝒉𝒆  𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒑𝒖𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒔  𝒉𝒆𝒓  to  believe  he  does  ,  to  feel  out  of  control  even  for  a  second  .  it  crashes  and  burns  around  him  and  he  remembers  why  there  are  plans  and  rules  in  place  .  𝒓𝒆𝒑𝒖𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏  𝒘𝒂𝒔  𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈  to  the  de  grimaldis  and  family  was  above  everything  .  his  world  doesn’t  crash  and  burn  but  he  ruined  a  marriage  and  left  a  woman  who  bared  her  heart  and  soul  to  him  .  he  didn’t  even  look  back  .  rome  learnt  that  family  was  the  only  important  thing  .

temperament .

          ♡       +       intelligent           ♡       -        manipulative           ♡       +       charismatic           ♡       -        controlled           ♡       +       logical           ♡       -        vain

muse .

          ──     ▫     draco  malfoy           ──     ▫     tony  stark           ──     ▫     derek  shepard           ──     ▫     bruce  wayne           ──     ▫     derek  hale

current connections .

        ──    *     𝑨 𝑰 𝑺 𝑳 𝑰 𝑵 𝑵   𝑩 𝑼 𝑺 𝑻 𝑨 𝑴 𝑨 𝑵 𝑻 𝑬     ──     skinny  love  .  it  was  just  supposed  to  be  a  hook  up  but  rome  found  himself  ravelled  in  something  he  hadn’t  felt  for  a  while  .  he  fell  in  love  with  aislinn  fast  and  hard  and  he  did  what  he  did  best  ,  he  ran  with  excuses  coming  out  of  his  mouth  but  he  can’t  help  stop  feeling  what  he  does  for  aislinn  .

       ──    *     𝑨 𝑹 𝑫 𝑬 𝑵   𝑹 𝑶 𝑪 𝑲 𝑬 𝑭 𝑬 𝑳 𝑳 𝑬 𝑹     ──     best  friend  .  it  started  with  a  boring  party  ,  a  ring  pop  and  a  marriage  proposal  while  the  rest  was  history  .  rome  and  arden  are  best  friends  ,  somewhat  platonic  soulmate  and  loving  parents  to  a  beautiful  dog  named  percy  .  they’ve  been  best  friends  since  the  moment  they  met  with  marriage  pacts  and  a  scary  attachment  to  one  another  but  if  there  was  one  person  rome  would  protect  with  his  dying  breath  it  would  be  arden  .

       ──    *     𝑪 𝑶 𝑹 𝑵 𝑬 𝑳 𝑰 𝑼 𝑺   𝑹 𝑶 𝑪 𝑲 𝑬 𝑭 𝑬 𝑳 𝑳 𝑬 𝑹     ──     acquaintance  .  due  to  rome’s  relationships  with  neel’s  sisters  he  couldn’t  help  but  be  around  the  other  .  it  was  no  mistake  that  they  weren’t  best  friends  or  even  remotely  close  but  it  there  was  one  talent  rome  could  provide  to  neel’s  it  was  annoying  and  teasing  the  boy  in  question  with  no  sign  of  relenting  .

       ──    *     𝑱 𝑼 𝑫 𝑨 𝑺   𝑪 𝑹 𝑨 𝑾 𝑭 𝑶 𝑹 𝑫     ──     study  buddies  .  rome  finds  solitude  in    the  library  ,  he’s  a  medicine  student  there  really  isn’t  an  hour  he  doesn’t  study  and  finding  people  to  simply  study  with  is  scarce  .  he’s  never  really  cared  about  the  whole  rich  vs  poor  overview  and  jude  sitting  with  him  and  studying  was  enough  to  barter  a  friendship  from  him  .  

       ──    *     𝑳 𝑼 𝑪 𝑰 𝑨   𝑹 𝑬 𝒀 𝑬 𝑺     ──     frenemies  .  they  aren’t  exactly  friends  but  rome  tolerates  the  other  ,  they  don’t  hang  out  or  openly  hate  one  another  .  they  tolerate  one  another  ,  isn’t  that  enough  ?

       ──    *     𝑴 𝑰 𝑳 𝑨 𝑵   𝑩 𝑰 𝑨 𝑵 𝑪 𝑶     ──     best  friend  .  rome  had  met  milan  at  a  young  age  of  a  boring  party  his  father  had  dragged  him  to  and  they  couldn’t  help  but  be  anymore  different  .  milan  finding  a  way  to  hide  himself  in  isolation  had  intrigued  rome  to  leave  the  group  of  people  he  had  been  charming  and  thus  a  friendship  started  with  sitting  silently  and  reading  with  one  another  .  it  didn’t  take  long  for  rome  to  start  treating  the  other  as  his  younger  brother  ,  he  didn’t  tell  the  other  much  but  he  loved  him  to  the  end  of  the  earth  .

       ──    *     𝑶 𝑷 𝑯 𝑬 𝑳 𝑰 𝑨   𝑺 𝑶 𝑵 𝑮     ──     academic rival . these two hated each other from the minute they sat in same class ; rome was never openly smart he preferred excelling in silence but that didn’t stop him from finding someone who held different outlooks than him and that person happened to be ophelia . if she said something aloud , he rebutted , if she had a high grade , he had a percent higher . rome had a superiority complex and he wasn’t going to let ophelia song diminish it .

       ──    *     𝑻 𝒀 𝑩 𝑨 𝑳 𝑻   𝑺 𝑶 𝑵 𝑮     ──     friend  .  it  was  friendship  at  first  glance  ?  honestly  ,  these  two  are  friends  at  the  slimmest  point  :  they  don’t  trust  each  other  and  if  they  called  upon  their  loyalties  it  probably  wasn’t  one  another  but  they  had  one  thing  in  common  .  they  loved  bitching  about  ophelia  song  .  that  was  how  the  friendship  started  from  bitching  to  trouble  these  two  seem  to  be  somewhat  friends  .

wanted connection .

         ──     ▫     𝚅 𝙰 𝙽 𝙳 𝙴 𝚁 𝙱 𝙸 𝙻 𝚃        ❭        it’s  chaos  times  three  ,  they  cause  trouble  alone  but  when  you  put  them  together  it  is  absolute  chaos  .  they  say  to  never  make  a  deal  with  the  devil  ,  what  they  really  meant  was  never  make  a  deal  with  one  because  you’ll  get  three  of  them  asking  for  your  soul  .                                             ❭    ❭    ❭     taken by tybalt song .     ▫     one muse(s) open

        ──     ▫     𝙱 𝙻 𝙰 𝙲 𝙺 𝚆 𝙾 𝙾 𝙳       ❭        a  tragic  hate  turned  to  love  turned  back  to  hate  .  it’s  the  story  of  first  love  and  the  innocence  of  it  and  how  disastrous  it  can  become  .  how  people  who  grew  to  love  one  another  can  find  themselves  back  at  point  zero  .                                              ❭    ❭    ❭     taken by none .     ▫     no muse(s) open

        ──     ▫     𝚆 𝙸 𝙽 𝙳 𝚂 𝙾 𝚁       ❭        you  can’t  be  rome  de  grimaldi  without  leaving  people  with  manipulation  and  deception  that  is  masked  with  a  charming  smile  .  maybe  they  were  fated  to  have  opposing  families  like  romeo  and  juliet  but  if  the  story  took  a  u-turn  and  romeo  was  actually  still  seeing  rosaline  while  stringing  along  juliet  .  it’s  almost  love  ,  it’s  almost  unrequited  but  most  of  all  it’s  most  definitely  leading  to  some  vendetta  for  vengeance  .                                            ❭    ❭    ❭     taken by none .     ▫     one muse(s) open

        ──     ▫     𝙱 𝙰 𝚄 𝙳 𝙴 𝙻 𝙰 𝙸 𝚁 𝙴       ❭        this  is  pure  hate  between  two  .  give  me  rivalling  families  .  families  with  decades  or  centuries  of  bad  blood  between  one  another  .  give  me  a  harsh  childhood  rivalry  where  they  can’t  help  but  hate  one  another  .  give  me  them  finding  every  reason  to  hate  the  other  .  give  me  young  potter  vs  malfoy  vibes  .  feel  free  to  keep  the  sexual  tension  .                                            ❭    ❭    ❭     taken by none .     ▫     one muse(s) open

        ──     ▫     𝚁 𝙴 𝙸 𝙽 𝙴       ❭        this  person  has  it  out  for  rome  ,  the  are  either  related  or  have  a  relation  with  the  marriage  rome  had  ruined  that  one  summer  .  they  know  exactly  what  happened  :  they  know  about  his  father  paying  them  off  ,  they  know  about  the  de  grimaldi  threats  ,  they  know  about  rome  leaving  the  woman  who’s  marriage  he  ruined  for  nothing  .  and  they  are  angry  .                                            ❭    ❭    ❭     taken by none .     ▫     one muse(s) open

       ──     ▫     𝙲 𝙾 𝙻 𝙻 𝙸 𝙽 𝙶 𝚂 𝚆 𝙾 𝚁 𝚃 𝙷      ❭        this  is  a  typical  teammates  connection  with  rome  while  his  extracurriculars  are  based  around  lacrosse  ,  sailing  and  latin  club  .                                           ❭    ❭    ❭     taken by none .     ▫     a fuck ton muse(s) open

       ──     ▫     𝙿 𝙴 𝙼 𝙱 𝚁 𝙾 𝙾 𝙺 𝙴       ❭        rome  is  smart  concerning  the  subject  of  s.t.e.m  and  that  makes  him  liable  to  have  a  few  student  he  tutors  but  he  doesn’t  do  it  out  of  the  kindness  of  his  heart  or  money  .  he  usully  wants  to  be  paid  with  something  he  could  use  for  his  benefit  .                                           ❭    ❭    ❭     taken by none.     ▫     two muse(s) open

       ──     ▫     𝙳 𝚄 𝙱 𝙾 𝙸 𝚂      ❭        this  is  rome’s  eldest  sibling  connection  and  they  haven’t  seen  one  another  or  spoke  in  eighteen  years  .  they  grew  up  as  complete  opposites  after  their  parent’s  divorce  while  rome  grew  up  opulent  and  affluent  his  sibling  grew  up  on  the  opposite  side  of  tracks  with  their  mother  .  cape  coral  may  be  the  place  they  see  each  other  for  the  first  time  since  they  were  kids  .                                           ❭    ❭    ❭     taken by none .     ▫     one muse(s) open

[itsdaggerandsheath]

An Introduction to Sex

               Everyone has an “introduction to sex”. The most of us are not born and raised in households where sex is openly talked or taught about, therefore we must be introduced to it in some way. Usually first by word of mouth from parents, friends on the playground, or maybe a school health class. Typically when it comes to parents and health classes though, you only learn about sex in terms of reproduction and looking at scary pictures of genitalia with STI’s meant to scare you into abstaining. Then, as you get a bit older, you may be introduced to sex as an “activity” through your friends, the Internet, porn, etc. And then, of course, you’re introduced to sex when you start having it, should you choose to. Everyone has different introductions to sex, but I feel the need to document mine because 1.) I feel that it will help explain why I’m so passionate about sex education if I document my experiences with sex from the very beginning and 2.) my “introductions” were hilarious, and since we’re in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wanted to write something with a bit of humor to hopefully make you laugh and provide you with a bit of a distraction from the end of the world.                So. Let’s start from when I was about four years old, when I began to learn about sex for the sake of reproduction. I’m not a parent, but I imagine there are times when parents say something horrible to their young children thinking “they won’t remember this when they’re older,” which is what I’m sure my mother was thinking when she was teaching me about sex when I was little. Unfortunately (for me) she was wrong, and I remember every…weird little detail.              I was a very curious child. I don’t remember why I was so curious with the idea of where babies came from; maybe I saw it as a joke on a TV show or movie or something. But for some reason, I was infatuated with the idea for as long as I can remember (perhaps this was an early sign that I was meant to pursue sex education all along). I was constantly asking my poor mother, “Mommy, where do babies come from?” And by constantly, I mean, probably every day. Even after she explained it to me, I would continue to ask for more details; I continued to ask her as the years went by because her explanation just didn’t make sense to me. Basically, what she told me (and remember, I was four) was that when a mommy and a daddy get married (marriage was always emphasized) and they want to have a baby, the daddy will give the mommy his “daddy juice” (yes, that is actually what she called it) and this “daddy juice” turns into a baby in the mommy’s belly.              It’s going to be very hard to type this all out without cringing.              Since I was four at the time, this answer made sense the first time I heard it. As time went on though, I found myself asking more questions. One time, I saw my cat outside “wrestling” with another cat, and a few weeks later, we had kittens; how had that happened? Why did the boys and men in my life face the toilet when they peed? Where did “daddy juice” come from and how did it get into a mommy’s belly to make a baby?! I demanded answers. (Now my only question is why the hell did my mom refer to semen as “daddy juice”?!)              I can’t remember where my mom got “The Miracle of Life” videotape from. Did we just so happen to have it? Did she rent it from the library or Blockbuster because I’d just kept asking? I’m not sure. All I remember is her handing me a video tape (I’m not that old, I promise) and telling me that if I watched and paid attention, it would give me some answers. By the time she let me watch the tape, I was seven years old and had some mild knowledge on reproductive anatomy; that females had vaginas and periods, and that males had penises and did not have periods, though this was the extent of my knowledge (granted, that’s more than most seven year olds know). However, this was enough for me to understand most of what was going on as I watched the tape.                Most.                Now, there’s pros and cons to me having seen this video tape. A pro is that my mom didn’t try to spin some story about how the stork delivers babies; she allowed me to know the truth. A con though is that my mother wasn’t the one who told me the truth: a video tape was. I can’t remember if I asked my mom any more questions after watching the tape or if any sort of conversation was had with me, but I do remember that she told me not to tell any of my friends about what I’d learned - presumably because she didn’t want me to be “that kid” who goes around and tells all the other kids about sex before their parents told them.                So, of course, I totally was that kid.                I remember being in my back yard playing on the swing set a few days later with a friend of mine at the time, and when I told her that I knew the secret to where babies came from, her eyes widened through her purple glasses and her mouth with several missing teeth fell wide open.               “You do?” She asked, lowering her voice, knowing that what we were discussing was top secret material.                In my second grade vernacular, I explained to her that babies came from “a boy putting his private part in the girl’s private part.”                “Which one?” My friend asked, referring to the fact that, from what we knew at the time, “girls have two holes” (we now know that females have three, but remember, we were seven at the time).                “I think the first one,” I’d said, referring to the vagina, as I didn’t know what a urethra was at the time.                This friend and I then made it our life’s mission to spread this new information to every one of our friends. Partly because it was rebellious and mischievous and fun, but also because I personally felt like it was something that my friends needed to know, because their parents were lying to them about where babies came from. I really was meant to go into sex education from the very beginning.               My mom never found out I’d told all my friends about sex, which was a sweet victory to me at the time. (She also doesn’t know that I have a sex education blog that I share with all of you, which is also quite the victory).                Then we get to how I learned about sex as an “activity” or something that people do “for fun”, which I’ll mostly discuss in Part 2, but I’ll give you a little taste of it here too. I’m gonna circle back to the idea of my mom saying things to me that she figured I probably wouldn’t remember as I got older that sure as shit, I did, and shutter at to this day. One such conversation went a little something like this when I was about eight:              “But how does the penis get into the vagina? Do you have to lay down or sit up, or…?”              My mom shrugged, “You can do it standing up…” She trailed before taking a sip of her coffee.              That’s an image I’ll never get out of my head.              My mom and dad got divorced when I was very young, to the point where I don’t even remember most of it. My mom didn’t date very much before she got married again to my stepdad over a decade after her first marriage had ended, but at the time of the conversation I’m about to document, she’d been in a relationship with a guy who for the sake of privacy, we’ll call Tod. To provide some context, my mom and Tod were pretty serious at the time, to the point where there was talk of moving in together and marriage. I was about nine at the time and suffered from really awful nightmares, so I was sleeping in my mom’s bed with her a lot and Tod never stayed the night (because my mom didn’t want her kids to see a man she wasn’t married to spending the night with her after she’d told us time and time again that married people don’t stay the night together, even though my dad and his girlfriend weren’t married at the time and they lived together, so I don’t understand why she shoved that down our throats so much when we already knew it wasn’t true). However, with the idea of my mom and Tod potentially getting married, my mom was trying to talk to me about sleeping in my own room again.                “You’re not gonna be able to fit into the bed with me if Tod and I get married and he’s sleeping with me,” She’d explained.                I’d shrugged, “I’ll just sleep on the floor.”               “What if we wanna have sex and we can’t because you’re in the room?”               “I thought you said Tod’s sperm didn’t work anymore.”               By this time, I’d learned the word “sperm” and as my mom and Tod had gotten more serious, there came the question of whether or not they’d have any more kids – my mom had me and my sister, and Tod had two children of his own, but would they want any together? My mom explained to me that Tod’s “sperm didn’t work anymore”, which I now assume means he got a vasectomy, and my mom was adamant about not having any more children anyway (this was a couple years before my brother came along; his dad was not Tod, so that’s a story for another time).                “Not sex to have a baby; sex for fun.”                Confused, I asked, “People have sex for fun?”                “Yeah, you didn’t know that?”                I was nine.                I realize I’m portraying my mother like she’s a horrible person, which she isn’t; I love my mother very much, these were just not some of her best moments…               So then, of course, I told all of my friends that grownups sometimes have sex just for fun. I had no idea how it worked, just that it was a thing that happened.               Then, I entered fifth grade, which was the grade that my school began giving us the talk in our health classes about sex. What this entailed was separating the boys and girls, the girls being taught this information by a female teacher and the boys being taught by a male teacher. Some of this information was actually quite useful; we learned about puberty, developing breasts, periods and period products (and how to use them), as well as what little anatomy we needed to know about when it came to sex for the purpose of reproduction. However, there was one fatal flaw.               I was sitting next to a friend of mine – the same friend with the purple glasses who I’d first told about sex when we were seven. Now, we were ten, and learning about a lot of things that we already knew about, which gave us a bit of an advantage, as I’d caught the flaw in the school nurse’s explanation of where babies came from. She did tell us that sperm goes into the vagina, finds an egg in the ovaries, and that the sperm and ovary will eventually form into a baby. However, she didn’t explain where the sperm came from! The fact that sperm comes from a penis and that, in most instances, pregnancy occurs from a penis going into a vagina, was never mentioned.              It was clear that she was intentionally not telling us this, which I immediately knew was wrong.              I was a little asshole at the time, and was this close to raising my hand and asking the school nurse “How does sperm get into the vagina?” even though I already knew the answer, when another girl raised her hand and asked the question instead, and it was obvious that she really didn’t know. My school nurse, her face turning as red as her bright red hair, then very quickly and hurriedly explained to us that sperm comes from a penis and (since we were too young to understand IVF) that pregnancy occurs when a penis goes into a vagina, and sperm leaves the penis and goes into the uterus through the vagina.             I was still an asshole though and dared to raise my hand and ask, “Is it true that people have sex for fun too?” I knew the answer to this question as well, and so did my friend sitting next to me; we just wanted to know what she’d say.            “Uh…y-yes, s-some people do it for fun, yes. There’s even a little piece of plastic you can put on the penis to prevent sperm from getting into the vagina, so you won’t get pregnant.”            This was news to me. That was all my school nurse said about condoms; she never even said the word “condom”. However, this didn’t faze me at the time. Instead, I simply looked at my friend next to me and we snickered together, like the little assholes we were.          As puberty came along, my curiosity about sex only grew. And do you think I got a good education about it in school? Nope. Not a bit. So where did I get my information from? Friends? No, I was the friend that was relaying the information. Porn? Not necessarily…         Fanfiction.         Yes, as much as it pains me to say it, I got a good chunk of my sex education from Fanfiction. And a bit of Tumblr and YouTube as well, but we’ll discuss that a bit more in Part 2…         In the meantime though, what was your introduction to sex like? Was it as ridiculous and cringey as mine? Did your parents tell you the truth about sex, or did they make up some absurd story? Please feel free to tell me your stories in the comments here or on my Instagram page @daggerandsheath                                                         I love you all and stay safe during this difficult time!

-          Dagger and Sheath                

[philcphobic]

[ TWO / THREE ] hello, KRIS again & this is my son CHOI TAEWOO ! he is the younger brother of @rnicohq & he Does Not belong here ... but here he is anyway ! he’s a memeber of WAIKIKIS and he’s the gang’s somewhat imcompetent thief. if you’d like to plot smash that heart & let’s create something beautiful !

[ TRIGGER WARNINGS ; ANXIETY, DEPRESSION ]

LIFE BEFORE GANG ACTIVITY !

he was born to a wealthy man and a beautiful, beautiful woman whom of which his father did not deserve … at all ! looking back on it now, taewoo doesn’t really understand how his mother could’ve fell in love with a man like him but she always told him that them meeting resulted in the best things in her life ( aka her children uwu ) and she wouldn’t trade that for the world !!!

he’s the youngest of three children, but some things aren’t meant to be. it just b like that sometimes. you see, taewoo was really young when their parents divorced, like it literally happened maybe a year or two after he was born !! unfortunately ... both of his siblings went with daddie dearest ...

so, now that he and his mother were on their own with little money to their names ( with absolutely no help from his father obviously ), they struggled financially. they stayed with his grandmother, and he began seeing less of his mom because she started working two jobs to be able to provide for the three of them.

as he grew up, taewoo always wondered why their father didn’t want to see him even part time, but that’s none of his business. he doesn’t really know why their parents just agreed to never see the children the other had, so he lowkey thought it was just always something about him specifically.

to ease his worrying, his mother always told him that their father was a bad man, and that his siblings ... wanted nothing to do with him ! they all apparently HATED him !! it made him feel ... really alone, because he would’ve liked to grow up with his siblings ... someone to teach him how to do this or that, or to hear experiences from so he knows what to do / doesn’t make the same mistakes ...

he would’ve liked to have someone to depend on other than his mom & grandma since he didn’t want to burden them.

he had heard nothing about his siblings; his mom was adamant on not telling him anything other than the fact she was mad at them ... ( this is important for later ).

on nights he wasn’t able to see his mom his grandmother always reminded him to do the best that he could in school so one day he could support his mom when she was too tired to continue working two jobs at night.

the most logical thing to do was not ask for help from anyone and let he and his mother suffer for a couple years … in turn, he worked his ass off in school to become one of the top students every year !!! however, this caused him to lack a social life since he always wanted to study, study, study ... he needed to do well, you know?

he thought if he wasn’t successful in school and didn’t eventually have a good job one day he’d be a disappoint to his mother who worked so hard for him day and night.

he also grew up resenting his father ( as he should ) & siblings since they seemed to have all the money in the world, right? he doesn’t understand why they couldn’t share !!! or try contacting him ! truth was ... grandma and mom probably blocked them out hardcore if they tried but ... taewoo wouldn’t know that; how would he?

they believed he would be better off without them. perhaps they were afraid that taewoo would get into trouble, just like his siblings did. they didn’t tell the young boy that nico disappeared from their father’s watchful eye when nico was in middle school ( taewoo was 6-8 years old !!!!! ) and that his sister also disappeared just a couple years after until several years later ...

his mother finally told him during his second year of high school, which is almost a decade after nico even went off to join his first gang ... you cannot imagine how upset he was because like ... how could she just choose to NOT tell him anything? those are his siblings ...

all taewoo had to go off of were photos all these years ... so when he saw & met nico after all this time ... instead of expressing his worry he ... let out his anger instead? he knows his brother means well now, but he is also blinded by LIES his mother told + he doesn’t really want to listen to his brother’s side either so ... taewoo is just being difficult.

it does not help that their sister is missing probably because of nico’s enemies ...

taewoo also knows it isn’t nico’s fault deep down, but he blames him anyway out of pent up confusion on his own feelings towards his brother being in his life a little more

( ANXIETY, DEPRESSION ) in all seriousness, taewoo ... struggles like ... a lot. he’s put so much on his shoulders and his heart is too soft to request for any help from anyone. it’s a lot of stress on someone young, and the worry that he’ll someday fail or that he’s doing this and that wrong constantly plague bis mind ... he underestimates himself a lot, and he overthinks everything to the point where it’s unbearable. he’s trying his best but he’s sinking faster than he’s climbing.

ENTERING GANG LIFE !

anyways, taewoo thinks he wants to be closer to his brother, and he thinks the only way to do so is by joining ... u guessed it ! a gang !!! however, taewoo also wants friends ... and since he’s never really had any before, he’s desperate ... so why tf not, right?

however ... taewoo is stupid, and met someone who wasn’t apart of rose golden and joined the WAIKIKIS instead !!! but it’s fine, because in the end he does get friendships out of it all, you know? he also hoped he could learn to be a lil more … independent? be more care free as opposed to scared of everything?

he lived his entire life in a bubble, protected from both the dangers and the wonders of the world because his goal was so straightforward. he was to do well in school, get a job that paid well so he would be able to pay his mom back for ( still, to this day ! ) working so hard to provide for the both of them; he’s never considered the option of stepping out of line in fear he’ll jeopardize his grades or something … like the nerd he is.

so he probably joined sometime after he turned 18? thank you jeno @guiltheavy for introducing him to waikikis ... even though rose golden was the goal, in hindsight, he doubts they’d accept him since he is not even close to being as wealthy as he could be to join them anyways ! plus the waikikis ... are just ... more his style ...

he really doesn’t like being in gang bc … you know … gangs do dangerous things but he’s glad that waikikis are like … super chill and not that … terrible per se. even though he’s been involved for a year you’re going to find him a scaredy cat ! super scared of doing anything dangerous — probably definitely squeaks when a gun is fired within 25 feet of him SFHJDSFND

he doesn’t belong in a gang and he knows it !!! but he’s still determined to … become one of them … even though he technically is one of them … he’s been assigned as a thief for the gang, but because of taewoo’s morals to be a good person, he’s somewhat incompetent. he’s successful in stealing, definitely, but he feels so bad he tries to return the things he’s required to steal half the time ... he believes the longer he’s in waikikis, the tougher he’ll become ...

uhhhhhhhhhh he’s a babie pls protect him ,

TAEWOO AS A PERSON !

although he doesn’t seem like it, being naive and pristine, he’s really intelligent. he lives with his nose stuck in a book, and he’s filled with so many facts that he could write his own encyclopedia. his knowledge allows him to have many different skills, despite not immediately displaying them to people ... ever. he’s got medical knowledge and he knows how to repair a range of things ... he’s not completely useless !

the thing about taewoo is that he likes knowing everything, so he learns as many things as his brain is willing to handle. first aid is something he was interested in for a long time, as he wants to one day become a doctor.

he is a university freshman studying biomedical science, and he takes school seriously. he puts school before his gang duties and no matter what, his education will ALWAYS come first. he would do anything for his mother, and he wants to succeed for her. he needs to do well in school or else he would just ... he’d be really sad ok.

in summary of taewoo, he’s 98% book smart and 2% street smart. he’s very much inexperienced and so, so naive ... but he’s trying to do better. he constantly says he’s willing to do dangerous things but he’s really scared if he actually has to do these said dangerous things … yes he’s an absolute mess.

pure to the point that it’s just sad. like i said before, he’s lived in this bubble his entire life with one goal in mind, and that did not include having even a tiny bit of a social life outside of one or two friends. like ... he’s never held anyone’s hand, never went on a date, never kissed anyone ( someone please kiss him !!!!!!!!! ), never got real hugs except from his family ( someone PLEASE hug him !!!!!!!!!!! ), never had a significant other …

don’t say any sexual innuendos around him, he will not get it !!!!!!

he’s trying his best,,, that’s what counts,,,

[satanseternalbenevolence-blog]

Memoirs of a Satan©

Hi, my name is Scott (You say, “Hi Scott”) and I am the new Satan. I have inherited the mantle and power of the Antichrist to do good in the World. Yes, you read that correctly, to do good in the World (more on this later). I don't know why I was chosen, maybe my core beliefs and understanding of humanity are the reasons why, or maybe I was just lucky. Either way, here I am, a 55-year-old raised Jewish (btw, the Jews don’t believe in Heaven and Hell) Atheistic Satanist from Los Angeles CA. I’ve often fantasized about having superpowers, but I never thought that I would actually have them, let alone become the most ultimate ‘villain’ ever!

Entry 1 I’ll never forget that day. The past few days the weather was beautiful, clear skies and temps around the mid-seventies. But by late Saturday night/early Sunday morning, a storm blew in from the coast. Pasadena, where my wife Beth and our two dogs Sophie and Sadie live, was expected to get up to 3 inches of rain, and after the 5+ years of drought we’ve had, 3 inches seemed like an ocean. I drove to work instead of riding my URB-E (Urban Electric motorized bike) to be safe. I work as a Security Officer at a Botanical Garden just south of Pasadena. I was at my post at the entrance of the gardens, under my huge orange Shademaker umbrella watching the rain pour down around me as I greeted the few visitors that come to the Garden on a day like today. A man walks up behind me and hands me a wallet and says that he found it in the desert garden and was told to give it to me. I thanked him and then went to examine the lost wallet. It was black leather, nothing special about it except for the fact that it was completely dry. As I opened it to see if there was any I.D. in it there was a number of credit cards in their appointed slots, and a card that read:

Hello Scott, you have been chosen to be the next Satan in this World. Do not throw away, give away, or turn this wallet into lost and found, it is yours now. You have every major credit card with unlimited credit to live on. More information will be revealed to you shortly. Your powers will go into effect in 24 hours. Hail Satan! Satan #30

You may be asking, how can you be Satan with all his powers and wisdom if you consider yourself an Atheist and don't believe in God or religion? The answer came to me that night. I slept like a rock (if rocks actually sleep), maybe it was the bowl of Dantes Fire I smoked before bed, but I was out when my head hit the pillow. In the dream I had, Satan #30 came to me as the devil character drawn by the artist Coop - red skin, pointy ears, horns, and goatee, and his signature cigar. He shared with me that yes, I was chosen because of my core beliefs and values and my understanding of humanity. He shared with me the history and understanding of this Being in the World. Man created religions and the Gods they associated with them. According to scriptures, God cast Satan out and gave him the power over this World. Since his power is in this negative realm, it is manifest as tangible and thus can make physical changes here. God is all speculative and invisible and does not have real power on Earth. Believers work themselves up into a frenzy because a preacher tells them that it’s the Holy Spirit working through them or they see the miracle of Jesus’ face on a piece of toast, but none of it is real. To quote the band Styx, “Welcome to the Grand Illusion.” The true paradox is that there has been more death, war, and destruction in the name of God, who is supposed to be the 'good guy' and Satan, the 'bad guy,' has been the one who brought positive changes.

The most important thing I was told to remember with this responsibility is to always be aware of how my choices and actions will affect future history. Yes, I can wipe out poverty and suffering instantly and make the ones who have been greedy and the cause of all the pain in the World pay for their crimes, but that wouldn't serve humanity in the long run. By manifesting such miracles I would be acting as a God and destroy the entity that is Satan. Giving the blessings of personal responsibility and cause & effect gradually will serve mankind in the long run. I'm what you might call a Spiritual, er I mean Satanic Lowrider.

I grew up in a very relaxed, reformed Jewish household. I went to Hebrew school after public school and studied for my Bar Mitzvah. In the Jewish religion, when a child turns 13 they are considered a man or woman after ceremonially reading from the Torah (holy scriptures) and collect lots of gelt (money) as gifts. Like most of my schooling, I squeaked by like the crackling voice of a young teenage boy. I was sent to the Rabbi’s office for disrupting the class so often you’d think we were having an affair. I would walk out of Temple singing the old McDonald’s commercial, “Scrambled eggs and sausage, yeaaaaa!” I was a bad Jew even then.

After my parents died at the end of my teens I became more spiritual and joined a non-denominational church called the Movement of Spiritual Awareness or M.S.I.A. I became a minister, chanted my tones, and did a lot of volunteering. I was really into it and thought that I had finally found my home and family, I was only in my mid-twenties. Everything was very ‘woo woo’ as I was sending the Light and ‘deflecting’ negativity. I was using all the lingo, “I ask for the Light of the Holy Spirit to surround, fill, and protect us for the highest good.”

As I grew into adulthood, worked a full-time job, got married, got divorced and lived on my own once again, the spiritual stuff faded from my life. I still wanted to believe that there was a God or Power greater than us but became disgusted by organized religion and their manipulative ways. Too many rules telling you how to eat, dress, and act (Fuck you, I like eating bacon!). I guess I was an Agnostic at this point. It took a couple of decades, but I finally accepted the fact that we are on our own, products of evolution, and proclaimed myself an Atheist.

When I met Beth at the end of 2003, I knew I had met my true Partner-In-Crime. As I was growing up in Culver City on the west side, Beth was going through much of the same family issues and cultural changes over the hill in North Hollywood. She also grew up in a reformed Jewish family and could relate to everything I went through as a youth. Although Beth does not like labels, she finally claimed the mantle of Atheist along with me. We call ourselves Deli Jews because these days we’re only in it for the food but still relate to our families as Jews culturally.

As I observed the changes in the World and started to learn the truth behind a lot of the things that society takes for granted - such as  thinking that our air is clean, our food is healthy, our legal system is fair, and our government is ‘For The People.’ I started to look at science as the truth and the way. Some people would call me a conspiracy theorist, but what is a conspiracy anyway? According to the dictionary, a con*spir*a*cy is a secret plan by a group of people to do something unlawful or harmful. Looking at the greed and manipulation of religions, governments, and corporations, I’d say there is a plethora of conspiring going on! So yes, I guess I am a good candidate to be the latest incarnation of Satan.

One of my first dilemmas was how to tell my wife that suddenly I am the embodiment of The Devil? "Hey Honey, by the way, you know that whole Satanist thing I'm into, yeah well, I'm Satan!" Actually, she was quite accepting of my new job title, especially the part about how our needs will always be met and we can live an easier life now. Part of the job description states that Satan's chosen family and loved ones will be taken care of as long as they respect the terms laid out by Satan. My siblings with receive the benefits of good health and enjoyment of life as long as they take care of themselves and don't rely on me to do it all for them. Here's an example - I may grant my brother good health and for every pound he loses, his family will also lose a pound until they all reach the healthiest weight for their size and body type. As long as they all continue to make an effort to live healthy through diet and physical activity the benefits will remain. If they choose to be lazy about it and expect Satan to just fix their lives for them, they will be on their own to deal with the consequences of the actions. That's pretty much how it works - take responsibility and step up to the plate and the blessings will be yours, choose to be lazy or arrogant, and karma kicks in.

Entry 2 Sure enough, 24 hours after I read that card from my new wallet, at exactly 12:00 noon, I have to vomit. So much for my half hour lunch. I spent the entire 30 minutes with my head in the toilet. At first, I thought it was my vertigo acting up again, but this was different. As I was puking I felt lighter, clearer, and freer than I have ever felt. I don’t know what was coming out of me, but I was glad to see it go. Once I stood up and washed my face, I felt like a million bucks! I thought to myself, that must have been my final initiation into Satanhood. So here I am, with the ability to affect people’s lives, and for lack of a better term change things in the physical world, but how do I do it? There was no instruction manual or advice from my chat with Satan #30 on how to do this. I kinda felt like Ralph Hinkley from the show The Greatest American Hero - here are your powers, you figure it out. I’m at work and now I am the latest Satan incarnate, let’s have some fun.

Part of my job is to make sure that people are wearing a paid admission sticker to enter the gardens. We close at 5:00 pm and stop selling tickets at 4:00 pm because it’s not fair to sell someone full price when they only have one hour to visit. Inevitably I get at least a few groups that come after 4:00 and want to come in. Here’s how the interaction always goes, I say, “Hi guys, do you have your stickers?” They reply, “What stickers?” I inform them that they have to have paid in order to pass this point, but we stop selling tickets at 4. “But we just spent X number of hours on the road to get here and we really want to see the Huntington gardens!” they exclaim. I explain to them that they should come back another day and plan to spend all day and that we are open from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm every day except Tuesday because we are closed. Before I can finish that sentence, they blurt out, “Oh we’re flying out of town tonight.” I always get frustrated because I hear this excuse over and over and over ad nauseam. Here they are with a smartphone in hand and they never thought to call or look up our website to find out what time we close?!? Today, I thought, let’s test out these new Satanic powers of mine <insert evil grin here>.

As I expected, at 4:15 pm a couple approaches, reads the sign on the front on my podium that reads ADMISSION REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT, and decides to confront me, “We just got here and reeeeeally want to see the gardens!” Me: “Sorry, but we’re closing in 45 minutes. I suggest you come back…” Them: “We’re flying back to Miami tonight. Can’t we just” At this point I thought, now would be a good time to test out my new satanic skills. I looked at them eyes wide, my mouth and left hand open, and then snapped them shut to simulate shutting their mouths with all the satanic power I could muster! Nothing happened. They kept talking but looking at me a little strange. Okay, my first attempt at summoning my new abilities didn’t quite work. “we promise we won’t tell if you let us in. We'll be quick, I promise. I just want to take a few pictures with my phone” “STOP!" I said firmly. Silence. “No, you cannot come in. Did it ever occur to you to pick up that smartphone you have in your hand and call here to see what time we were open until? Or look up our website? You show up 45 minutes before we close and it’s MY problem, what do you think, this is McDonald’s and you can have it your way?!?” This time they did stop talking, by the puzzled look on their faces and the impossible attempts at uttering a word, they couldn’t talk! So using my words of persuasion to command my power is one way of accessing it. Let’s find another!

I couldn’t get home fast enough. A gazillion ideas of what my powers were and how the hell I’m going to access them ran through my mind on my ride home. Usually, the 15 miles an hour of my URB-E didn’t bother me, but today I needed a rocket! Wait, I have super satanic powers, that  I - don’t - know - how - to - use. “Patience,” I told myself, I’ve got a lot to think about and fantasize about.

So this is the first time that Beth is seeing me with my new powers. She knew I was excited, but also warned me about going slow and keeping my satanic sorcery close to home and to not fuck with the neighbors (at least not yet). I stood there on our back patio ready to…I don’t know? Wave my magic wand? Point my finger with authority and intent? Use mind control? I started by thinking, WWSD - What Would Satan Do? Ah fuck it, how should I know? I’ve only had the job for a day, I don’t think I’m expected to know how to do it all by now. I decided to stop for now and go smoke a bowl of some fine Indica. 15 minutes later while laying on the bed with our dogs, I got it! Let go, detach, and relax your mind, then tell it what you want. Have two huge salads ready for Beth and I was what I thought on my way from the bedroom to the kitchen (all of about 30 ft.). By the time I stepped foot in the kitchen, Beth says uncontrollably, “WHERE THE FUCK DID THOSE COME FROM?” All I could do after looking at the beautiful salads on the table and turning my head to Beth was grin and wink ;-).

Over the munching and crunching of our scrumptious salads, we talked about how do I want to use these powers and do I want to go public with my new identity and keep in on the down-low. We both agreed that keeping it on the d-l would be the wisest and safest choice. I thought I’d start practicing locally, with my community - work, around town, and of course our neighbors. We love most of our neighbors, but there are some, let’s just say they could use a lesson or two about attitude and parking.

We live on a busy, main street that is our only place to park. The block is all apartments. Some of these neighbors own upwards of 4 or 5 cars and trucks! Not huge families, small families - parents and their two young kids, and couples. And, they don’t know how to park for shit - 3 feet from the curb, their back end sticking out, and parking in the middle of a spot that can fit 2 cars.

It’s a shame that there has been a rash of incidences of cars getting towed because they seemed to be parked in the middle of the street or on someone's lawn <insert evil grin here>.

Now, I know that part of the responsibility of being Satan is not just doing parlor tricks, so what else should I be doing with my newly acquired talents? The only one I can think of to ask is my predecessor, Satan #30. Before bed tonight, I took a long look at the tattoo I have on my left calf of Coop’s Satan that Beth and I got on our 10 year wedding anniversary. It was the first in a series of our tradition of getting a Halloween style tattoo each year to commemorate our years together. We were married on Halloween and love collecting tats, so this has become our anniversary gift to each other. Since #30 came to me like this version of Satan, I figured this would be a good way of focusing my energy on him before drifting off to sleep.

It worked. That floating, talking, cigar smoking little devil showed up ready to help. I found out later that part of your mitzvah (a good deed in Jewish belief) as a prior Satan is to assist the present torch bearer whenever they ask for it. My main question, aside from clarifying how to access these powers, was what is the best way to serve mankind (and not as a main course)? He reassured me that focus and a clear intent on what I want to create is the best way to access my powers, and to have fun with it (he forgot to mention that the first time we chatted). As far as how to be of service, his suggestion was to always think, how will this action benefit those involved? Even if my commandment is a form of tough love and is there to teach a lesson (as I did with the couple that wanted to enter the Huntington at 4:15 without paying), it must be for the highest good of all concerned. He also suggested I read the ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HELL - An Invasion Manual For Demons Concerning the Planet Earth translated from the demonic by Martin Olson that was originally written by the O.S. (Original Satan). It gives some good insights into the truth behind Humankind.

I woke up refreshed and ready for my new job. After a nice cold shower, it was time to get to work. If my family is to be taken care of during my tenure, let’s start today. Our dogs, Sophie (a pit bull mix) and Sadie (a short-haired, low-riding Dachshund) are two knuckleheads that can be stubborn sometimes. I want them around as my Hellhounds for a long time, so they shall have perfect health, ticks and fleas can’t touch them, and they are perfectly obedient. All Beth and I have to do, is calmly tell them what to do, and it’s done - no fuss, no stress (for us or for them). I took them for a nice long walk. Even though I could now walk them without a leash knowing that nothing will happen without my consent, I didn’t want to break any laws. I put their collars and leashes on but had the leashes floating up as if I was holding them (kind of like the invisible dog trick with the wire in the leash). And I stopped picking up their poop piles. Now the canine logs of excrement instantly turn into the perfect fertilizer for the grass or plant it lands on. Happy dogs, happy daddy!

When Beth got home, we sat on the couch after dinner and discussed what she and I wanted in terms of our physical health and appearance. Obviously, we wanted perfect internal and mental health, but how do we want our bodies to improve. Beth wanted to slim up, clear skin and strength to do what she loves - hiking, skating, and exploring the World. I chose to only have a minute amount of body fat and more muscle definition along with the strength to keep up with Beth. To not attract too much attention, I’m having this transformation happen gradually yet quickly over a period of about 6 months, most people don’t notice anything odd about changes that take place over a slightly extended period of time, plus it will feel more natural that way. To not have to worry about vertigo, hearing loss, and erectile dysfunction, AWESOME!

There is one group that I’m involved with that I think might like to hear this news, the Los Angeles chapter of The Satanic Temple. I’ve been a member for about a year and a half and really love where their heart is. TST is doing a lot of work nationally for Freedom OF Religion and Free Speech, as well as the constant struggle to separate Church and State. The L.A. chapter has put on some fucking amazing Satanic Masses as fundraisers and as a way for people who feel like outsiders in society to come together and be accepted. I knew that they would understand the terms of the way I am to assist them, and that fact that we are going to have a hellaciously fun time doing it! To give you an example of what the Temple of Satan believes, here are the Seven Tenets we follow:

One should strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason.

The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.

One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.

The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one's own.

Beliefs should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world. We should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit our beliefs.

People are fallible. If we make a mistake, we should do our best to rectify it and remediate any harm that may have been caused.

Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.

Quite a bunch of evil motherfuckers, huh? One of the things about TST that I love is the fact that they don’t worship the actual being known as Satan, they believe in what the literary character represents - freedom from oppression, knowledge, and fun, as opposed to the other literary character that so many sheeple blindly follow. Now they have the real deal, the definite article, the man-the myth-the legend - Me. How are they going to explain that? I’d suggest keeping this our little secret and have fun doing the good works that we do. They also use Satan and Satanism for shock value to demonstrate to not always judge a book by its cover - Satanist doing good in the World and believers in God doing horrible things in his name. Btw, Anton LaVey - poser.

I can’t help but fantasize even more about all the ways I can help people and right injustices without anyone knowing it was me. If I see someone being kind to another person, I might reward them by paying for his or her parking or picking up his or her tab at a restaurant anonymously. Maybe teachers who choose to teach the truth and not just the curriculum that they are told to teach and brainwash their students will be given the support that they deserve. I love to see children become curious and question why things are the way they are. Like training a dog with positive reinforcement, every time a kid helps another kid whom he or she doesn’t know well or stands up to a bully, they get an instant reward of some sort such as found money, a certificate of appreciation, or their favorite meal from their parents. If a driver steals a parking spot that someone else is waiting for, their car dies and has to be towed. My mind just goes on, and on, and on thinking of ways to be the best Satan I can be.

“Be all that you can be, become a Satanist!”

And just so no-one catches on, I’m going to do these type of things all over the World so it doesn’t look like wherever I am miracles happen. Am I starting to sound like a god or something? Maybe so, but I am Satan. Again, I love that fact that this demonstrates not to judge a book by its cover, that which we label as good or evil just might be the complete opposite. Positive chaos can be the perfect action to right wrongs and balance unsteady ground. What if people of different nationalities and economic levels came together and organized against tyranny and oppression? Hey, a Devil can dream can’t he?

There’s a trick I’ve always wanted to do. I saw it in the 1995 movie Powder about an Albino teenager with extrasensory perception and the ability to heal the sick. In one scene, the main character Powder is camping with a group of boys (I think it was the Boy Scouts or something like that) and their adult counselors when one of the boys shoots a deer with a hunting rifle. Deeply saddened by the event, Powder touches the dying animal with one hand and grabs the hand of one of the adults. What transpires is that Powder acted as a conduit so that the adult counselor could see and experience what the deer was going through as it takes its last breaths. It’s a true example of demonstrating empathy. I would love to experience someone acting like an asshole, insensitive, or being a racist dickhead and just shake their hand or touch their shoulder and have them feel what the person that they are picking on feels when they are treated that way (Seems like a very Jesus thing to do, maybe I’ll go easy on this one).

I’m not a sports fan, I believe that sports are another way for humans to stay divided, it’s that whole ‘us against them’ thing. But I do love wearing jersey’s, so I bought a hockey, football, baseball, and basketball jersey in my favorite colors - orange, black, and gray, with my name BERGER on the back and number 31 (get it?) on all of them. GO TEAM BERGER SATAN! Did I mention that I suck at playing sports? I grew up with asthma and couldn’t run, let alone play without wheezing and coughing my head off. I died inside during P.E. every time the coach would yell, “EVERYONE RUN A LAP!” Even now, I have no desire to jog, run, or chase a ball (I’ll leave that to my Hellhounds, Sophie and Sadie).

Entry 3 Date night with the Mrs., tonight we’re going to see DEADPOOL 2. We loved the first movie and have been looking forward to this sequel for a long time. As usual, we got there early enough to get some buttered popcorn and our seats before the 20 minutes of previews. We like to sit at the top of the theater in the back row if possible so we don’t have to listen to anyone talking or munching behind us during the movie. We found a couple of seats at the top on the left side, with no one sitting around us. The previews we’re okay, a few of them that I can never seem to remember when I leave the theater, I want to come back and see.

Just as the movie starts, these three Jugheads with enough candy and food to feed a small nation, sit down right in front of us. We look at each other with that knowing glance that a couple develops after being together for years. We silently decided to not say anything yet, to wait and see. Once they started feeding their faces they became a little bit quieter, since their mouths were full of junk food. But about halfway through the movie, the commentating and texting began. “Why the fuck didn’t he just kill the motherfucker?” “Dude, that's fucking stupid! He can’t be dead, and what’s with all this mushy love shit?” exclaimed two of them while the third kept texting with the clicking sound on his keyboard. That’s it, last straw, time to have some fun.

I had the scene in the movie stop, and Deadpool played by Ryan Reynolds breaks the fourth wall (in stage and film, that’s where the actor interacts directly with the audience), and addresses the three Jugheads. “HEY PEABRAINS, YEAH YOU, THE THREE STOOGES IN THE BACK WITH A SEVERE CASE OF THE MUNCHIES AND OPINIONS - SHUT THE FUCK UP OR I WILL COME OUT THERE AND TURN YOU INTO A SUB-HUMAN CENTIPEDE!” At first, everyone thought this was a joke and part of the movie, but this wasn’t a 3D movie and none of us were wearing 3D glasses either. When Deadpool reached out of the screen with both hands and his ‘avocado-had-sex-with-an-older-avocado’ face and came towards our noisy neighbors, at least two of them pissed their sagging pants and I think the third shit himself. They ran out of there embarrassed as hell holding their poop and pee stained pants hoping nobody sees or says anything to them. After clearing the air of stench and replacing it with a gentle floral fragrance, I allowed Mr. Deadpool to continue with his scene (only after Deadpool and all the theater attendees applauded the Jugheads departure). By the way, everyone at our screening of DEADPOOL 2 received a full refund and two free passes per person to come back to see another movie.

Entry 4 8:30 am. It's too early to listen to all the squawking going on in the trees around my post. From the sounds of it, you'd think I was in a rain forest and a predator was threatening the flocks. The only way I'm going to enjoy my coffee and start the day in a good mood is to quiet things down a bit. A little concentration and a mighty, "SHUSH!" and silence. Ahh, that's better.

I was reflecting today on people who rock the boat, specifically at their jobs. Maybe, the employees who challenge the system, question management, care about their jobs and speak up, are the smart ones and the ones to listen to. They see what’s really going on first hand (the boots in the trenches), and usually have very innovative solutions to these problems. The workers and management that play by all the rules, are calm and complacent all the time, and are just buying their time in hopes of a good pension to retire on, are the dangerous ones. The latter live in fear and would never rock the boat or go out on a limb, especially for their staff. The meek shall inherit the Earth if anyone would listen to them! Maybe now I can bend a few ears and make some changes.

I’ve got to stop listening to bands like Ministry on the way home, without trying I was hitting speeds upwards of 60 mph on my URB-E. Focus Scott and remember safety first.

Entry 5 I was thinking about the quote from the King James Bible, 1 Timothy 6:10, "For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” There has been a meme going around that states IF MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL, THEN WHY DOES THE CHURCH ALWAYS ASK FOR IT?. I found this to be a very good question. It sounds rather hypocritical to me - they preach the evils of the love of money, at the same time they keep asking you to donate it to the Church. I’ll bet that the Church's answer would be that they [the Church] are there to take the burden of the evils of money off of their parishioners. How fucking Christ-like of them.

Thank God Satan doesn’t have to ask for donations! I can’t see myself going door-to-door begging for change, “Hi, would you like to donate whatever you can to support your favorite arch-nemesis and fall-guy?” I’ve never liked the whole sales pitch thing. Even when organizations that I’ve been involved with called it ‘sharing your experience’ instead of what you are really doing which is selling goods and services, I was still hocking their wares. Isn’t Greed one of the 7 ‘deadly’ ‘sins’? Way to teach by example you cross-loving-self-righteous-robber-barons!

The Church asks for donations and tithing (giving 10% of your income), Jewish temples require payment to become a member, and Muslims are obligated to participate in a form of tithing called zakah. You can’t tell me that religion isn’t big business, this is a global money-making machine of ancient and epic proportions. Fuck the poor, praise the rich, and pray for trickle-down economics.

Entry 6 I woke up, made some deliciously strong Armenian coffee with smoked tea in the mix for an added flavor and caffeine fix, and started perusing Facebook. I started to feel discouraged by all the hate and religious rhetoric that is being vomited all over the internet these days. I hadn’t realized just how many people actually and wholeheartedly believe their chosen religion above common sense and logic. So here I am, the embodiment of ‘Evil’ on this planet, surrounded by a HUGE majority that believes that their chosen invisible god is the only one. I’m here to use my powers for good in the midst of this turmoil of political and religious power struggle which is purely manmade (kinda sounds like a comic book. I’m sure I can get Stan Lee to appear as a cameo in this nightmare of a reality, maybe as God himself and we can arm wrestle).

According to Wikipedia, Satan is an entity in the Abrahamic religions that seduces humans into sin. In Christianity and Islam, he is usually seen as a fallen angel, or a jinni, who used to possess great piety and beauty but rebelled against God, who nevertheless allows him temporary power over the fallen world and a host of demons. The Seducer, I like it! My thoughts on sin are that it is not negative, but merely human attributes. Seducing people to be the best self they can be (No, I am NOT plagiarizing the U.S. Army) sounds like a cool part of the job. Fallen Angel - well I am kind of a klutz, and I LOVE the term Host of Demons! I also like the name Satan because it only has two syllables. The Devil {3}, Lucifer {3}, Beelzebub {4}, they don’t slide off the tongue as Satan does.

I’m guessing that what I’ve been going through the last couple of days has been a ‘reflective time.’ It feels like I’m re-learning about myself all over again. I love the fact that part of the responsibility of being Satan is to keep yourself on the down-low, I call it Satanic Lowriding. The real magician behind the curtain, the master illusionist with a heart, the manipulator of mirth…Satan!

Entry 7 Sometimes I let the dogs poop in the house just so I have something to do that reminds me of the good ol’ days. They’re so well trained these days that it’s almost boring. Last night while walking them we passed a rather aggressive Chihuahua and it’s owner (is 'owner' not politically correct?), er, I mean person, that was so distracted by her cell phone that she didn’t even know her precious little pooch was acting like a terror. As we tried to pass, I had Sadie our Dachshunds eyes glow bright red and growl a low guttural rumble that meant, “GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY!” The Chihuahua got the message loud and clear, it yelped and curled up in a ball like a pill bug. Its person was easy, I simply killed the power to her phone, and then telepathically called her an evil demon and said, “Pay attention, Satan is watching you!” Of course, she dropped her phone in horror and looked around frantically trying to figure out who did this. When she looked my way, and I turned to grin at her with glowing red eyes to see her reaction - priceless!

Entry 8 I find myself asking, “WWSD - What Would Satan Do?” The Satan, Numero Uno Satanas, the OS - Original Satan, and how did he come to be? Did he just *appear* after his mention in the bible, or was it more organic like he was struck by a meteor particle? That must have been scary the first time he found out he had supernatural powers, “GOD DAMN IT, WHO THREW THAT ROCK?” Did he get tripped by a vagrant and cursed him, “May your feet fall off at the ankle!” and they did. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall the first time Satan read the bible. I bet Satan himself started a lot of the rumors and stereotypes about ‘The Devil’ throughout the Centuries.

At work, I was sitting there watching people shuffling around trying to figure out how to navigate the map of the gardens and what they want to see first. As they passed by, depending on their reaction to my greeting, I might make them lose their voice for about an hour or make some small physical improvement such as clear up acne, or even cause their clothes to fit them perfectly as if tailored just for them. I had a tour group of Japanese people act very rude towards me so I made them all speak Swedish for the rest of the day (that made my day a lot brighter).  

I know I’m supposed to do good in the World, but I can’t help but think that Satan was the Original Prankster. Maybe it’s that image of the devil with that gleam in his eye and that wink that says, “I got your back kid, let’s have some fun!”  

Entry 9 Aside from just my dogs, I can communicate with the other species of the animal kingdom. Sitting outside on the back patio of our apartment I was watching a crow on a power line cawing to the other crows in the area. He was looking for his murder (a group of crows is called a murder) which he became separated from. He must have sensed that I was looking at him because he stopped, turned his head in my direction and cocked his head to one side as if to say, “You understand me.” I nodded my head in agreement and calmly said, “Come here, my friend.” He flew down and landed on the back of the patio chair caddy-corner to me. We just looked at each other for a few moments as if we were two old friends who haven’t seen each other in years. I broke the silence by asking him if he knew who I was, he nodded and bowed his head in what I guess was a show of respect.

So I am able to speak English to animals and they understand me, and I understand them telepathically. I’m a real Dr. Doolittle! My new feathered friend cawed that he will let his murder know that I am here and to be of assistance to me and my family in any way they can. I smiled and nodded in appreciation.

Entry 10 Independent’s Day here in the good ol’ U.S.A. One tradition that I never quite understood was the annual hot dog eating contests where participants try to eat as many hot dogs as possible in a limited amount of time. The most famous of these contests are sponsored by Natan’s Hot Dogs on Coney Island in New York. Of course, small towns and cities all over this Nation have their own local competitions to see who in their community is the most gluttonous. Being the prankster that I am, I thought it would be fun to attend one of these displays of face-stuffing fun and hedge my bets, so to speak. Monrovia CA was having theirs in the park of the local library in the center of town. There were 8 contestants ranging in age from 18 to 70, both men and women. I chose the 70-year-old man who looked like a cross between Mr. Rogers and Ebenezer Scrooge. When the whistle blew the competing eaters started ferociously chomping on the pile of meat sticks in front of them. They had 10 minutes to eat as many of the 50 hot dogs in their buns placed in front of them with only water to wash them down. Of course, the younger participants started off strong, but then, thanks to me, my man started sucking down dogs like an alcoholic in a beer drinking contest. It almost looked like he wasn’t even chewing them, effortlessly letting those wieners slide down his throat. He finished his plate of 50 in approximately 6 minutes and then started reaching over to the plate of the girl next to him and started eating hers! The crowd was on their feet and going berserk! Part of the thrill for me was watching to look on the old guy's face as he was devouring the dogs in this meat-fest. Being the kind-hearted Satan that I am I made sure that the winner and all of the contestants had no ill effects from their gorging. HAIL THE HOT DOG!

I imbibed a little too much and tried to impress Beth by shooting bottle rockets out of my ass and spelling I LOVE YOU in the night sky. Good night.

Entry 11 It dawned on me that if word was to get out that I indeed was Satan and had these powers, I would be hunted by every religious whack-job on the planet. The fact that they had a physical target to blame all of the Worlds problems on, as well as their own personal shortcomings, would make me Terrorist #1. (I would make Hitler, Pol Pot, and Trump look like amateurs!) I’m sure I would hear everything from, “Children are starving because of you!” to “You’re the one who keeps taking my job!” even “The weather sucks today ‘cause of you!" If I was to get caught by these whack-jobs would they string me up and hang me, making me the ultimate martyr like Jesus, or would the military want to use me for their own evil doings? Now I know why I should keep my ministry on the down-low.

Entry 12 It’s hot as Hell today - pun intended. Temps here in Southern California hit 122 degrees in some areas, wtf? When did we move to Death Valley? I have a confession to make, I may be Satan Incarnate, but I HATE hot weather! Unlike old people from the East Coast, I will not be retiring in Florida. I’d be quite content living out my final days in Alaska (sans Sarah Palin and her dysfunctional clan), Canada, or the Highlands of Scotland. But since I was home here in Pasadena and off work today, I set the temperature in our hotbox of an apartment to a comfortable 68 degrees, turned off the ac to conserve electricity, and stayed in with my demon-dogs. They love when Beth and/or I am home with them, especially when I conjure up a big bowl of shaved ice for each of them.

Since we live across the street from the only Jewish Temple in Pasadena, I like to have fun with those obnoxious ‘chosen people’ who think that they are holier than thou. Tonight is the Sabbath. According to Jewish religious law, from sundown on Friday night to sundown on Saturday night Jews are supposed to usher in the Sabbath, or Shabbat as they call it, by going to temple, lighting candles and praying. Every Friday night it is impossible to find a parking place in front of our apartment because the temple goers have parked their Mercedes and BMW's in every available spot on the street. So to test their faith and teach them a lesson, I sent the most savory smell of bacon, ham, and shrimps-on-the-barbie to permeate throughout the temple. I’ll bet that the Denny’s on Colorado Blvd. will be filled with Jewish families ordering Moons Over My Hammy with a side of bacon and fried shrimp. You’re welcome.

Entry 13 - 9:45pm I decided to have some fun tonight. On the east coast, it’s 3 hours ahead of us here in California which makes it about 12:45 am. I used my Satan Sense to hone in on VP Mike Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to make sure these two faithful children of God are fast asleep. I then telepathically visited each of them in their bedrooms, waking them as I appear as their God Almighty complete with white hair and beard, white gown, and puffy white clouds surrounding me. “I AM ASHAMED AND DISAPPOINTED IN YOU MY SON!” I said in a deep, booming voice. “USING ME AS AN EXCUSE FOR YOUR FINANCIAL AND POLITICAL GAIN, DID YOU REALLY THINK THAT I DIDN’T EXIST AND COULDN’T HEAR ALL THE VILE LIES YOU TELL IN MY NAME?!? THERE IS A SPECIAL PLACE IN HELL FOR SINNERS LIKE YOU!” Both of their wives also woke up, saw, and heard me alongside their chicken-shit hubbies so there were witnesses. Jeff Sessions actually peed his pajamas, while Mike Pence started sobbing and apologizing like a little kid that got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Will it change their stance on policies? Maybe not, but it sure was fun!

Entry 14 A First Aid/CPR class might not be the kind of environment to play around with my powers, but this particular class needed a little levity. First of all the instructor was an egotistical stick-in-the-mud who has been teaching these training classes for way too long, it felt like he was phoning it in. I could tell that most of the other attendees were getting bored and frustrated, so I decided to lighten things up a bit. The instructor, I'll call him Joe, was going over how to approach a person (the CPR dummy) who is unresponsive. His dry example of how to get a response from the nonresponsive person was the perfect opportunity. Just as he was about to lean down and give the two breaths, I had eyes, that wasn't previously there, open and look right at him. The look on his face and the girlish squeal that uncontrollably blurted out of his mouth was priceless! And just as quick as the eyes appeared, they vanished with no trace of what he just saw. The whole class gasped in unison and then broke out in laughter. Needless to say, we were all sent on a break after that.

* I put the 'lo' in El Diablo (as in down-low).

Entry 15 All fun aside, there is a very real and present danger to society looming over the United States - Christianity. With Trump and his right-wing cronies in the Federal government, their push to bypass the Constitution and drive to make Christianity the official religion in the U.S., the need for the varied people of this country to come together and fight this fascism is critical if we want to halt another Holocaust of that scale and larger. Those in power (governments, religions, banks, etc.) have been using the Divide and Conquer method to keep us separated and fighting amongst ourselves for Centuries. They use everything from a Bipartisan System, to sports, and even how products and services are marketed. Almost everything is modern society is designed to divide us up into more factions. Even amongst the same groups such as race, gender and politics there is fighting and turmoil. They want to undo decades of legislation to protect 1st Amendment rights, freedom of religion, gay rights, as well as the right to assemble. As Satan #31, I feel a strong sense of duty to support this fight and protect as many people as possible. (Crap, this feels like the most daunting tasks I’ve ever had to do!) Secularism is threatened every day. There is a movement in the right-wing community called Project Blitz. Their goals are to inundate government on all levels with Christian ideals, promote Christianity in public schools, and flood society with Christian symbolism.

I think I’ll start by more actively supporting the efforts of The Satanic Temple financially to assist with their growing legal costs. Next, I think promoting the After School Satan program and Women’s Reproductive Rights campaign will be important causes to help spread locally and nationally. Free and critical thinking should be offered to every child regardless of economic class, culture, or gender. Women’s Rights are a given, women should be recognized, heard, and fairly compensated for their active roles in society. The more transparent this work, the more people will clearly see that these Satanists are kind, loving, and compassionate individuals.

Now it will be much easier to send mass mailings, emails, and text messages to politicians. THE PEOPLE WILL BE HEARD!

Entry 16 Today I donated a substantial amount of money anonymously and specifically to the Security Department where I work. I stated that I wanted all Security Officers to receive a 25% raise, permanent structures in the entrance pavilion to keep the officers that work there comfortable and protected from the elements, and free ice cream for all Security staff anytime they want. The only clue as to whom this contribution came from was a note attached that said, “From a concerned Member.” That ought to keep ’em guessing for a while <wink>.

While I’m still working there I perform little miracles when needed, such as making people with faux ‘Service Dogs’ feel guilty when they approach me trying enter or causing the make-up of a model to run horribly down her face when she tries to come in to do an unauthorized photo shoot. One day I heard a call on the radio that there was a photo shoot going on in the Chinese Garden so I sent a small murder of crows to dive-bomb them and disrupt their plans (now THOSE would be some awesome pictures!).

Entry 17 I just had an AH HA! moment. It’s time get back on the stand-up comedy stage and influence audiences to the truth about God, Satan, and religion (Oh yeah, among other things I’m a stand-up comedian). I can write comedy bits about God and Satan interacting with characterizations of God being mean and short-tempered and Satan being as polite as an English gentleman. This is going to be fun!

Entry 18 The 'doing good work in the World' is the easy part. The hard part is using restraint when the urge to be painfully vindictive creeps in. Sometimes people piss me off so much that I just want them to feel the wrath that their behavior creates. Oh, how fun and easy it would be to make somebody pay for his or her arrogance, aggression, and stupidity for the rest of his or her lives. I've been finding that doing good work doesn't mean laying down and letting the negativity of the World walk all over you but sometimes using uncomfortable acts to get people's attention and wake them up. For example, I would love to set those people on fire who say to me, "Oh, it's not that hot today!" while I'm sitting outside in the 100-degree heat under an umbrella that makes it feel like I’m in an oven. But I hold back, and simply kill the air-conditioning in their office (only for a day).

Entry 19 Today I found out what scares the Jeebus out of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Me. 10:00 am there’s a knock on the front door. After carefully peeking out the front window, I open the door looking like Tim Curry as The Devil in the movie LEGEND. Red face and body (ripped I might add), goat hooves, and huge black demon horns. As I spoke in a deep rumble, “Good morning ladies, how can I help you?” smoke drifted out of my nose and mouth. They hesitantly offered me a copy of The Watchtower, which burst into flames and ashes the moment it touched my hand. That was all these Jehovah-Loving-Witnesses could take! As they turned to run away, they tripped and started crawling over one another to get away. I guess their faith wasn’t very strong. At least they didn’t piss themselves as A.G. Jeff Sessions did.

Entry 20 I remember once when I was in my twenties, I was assisting in a personal growth seminar - Insight Transformational Seminars. I witnessed a woman go through what they called Crabbing. Crabbing is when a person is going through a great deal of emotional release and their hands contort and stiffen-up like a crabs claws.

I can only equate when parishioners of televangelists go into those spastic fits claiming that the Holy Spirit is working through them, to Crabbing. It’s all in their minds and emotions, there is nothing spiritual about it. When believers claim to be possessed by demons and one of these flamboyantly Christian preachers ‘exercise’ the evil out of them, well that’s just bad acting.

My dear reader, you have probably guessed that I would treat them to a real possession at this point. Yes, but not the way you might think. I was watching the popular faith healer and televangelist Benny Hinn on television and he was going through his usual paces of knocking down the congregation with the wave of his jacket, er, I mean the Holy Spirit, when this one man claimed to be inhabited by an evil spirit that made him growl and bark like a dog as he rabidly showed his fangs (teeth). Just as Benny Hinn was beginning to ‘exercise’ this poor lost soul, I possessed Mr. Hinn. “THIS IS ALL FAKE YOU IDIOTS!” I exclaimed. “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE DEVIL. I JUST WANT YOUR MONEY, AND STOP BARKING AT ME!” The ‘possessed’ man in front of me/Hinn and everyone in the television studio/church froze in silence. When I exited Mr. Hinn’s body I felt slimy like a snail. Of course, when Hinn regained consciousness he didn’t remember what just happened. The uncomfortable silence seemed to last an eternity until one of Hinn’s assistants whispered in his ear what just took place. Immediately the faux healer spoke up and assured the audience that there truly is a Devil and that it is more important than ever to $upport the Church. Sometimes you just can’t fix stupid. As for me, I need a shower!

Entry 21 I am offended that some people are comparing Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, the WORST President of the United States EVER, to the Antichrist. That idea lowers the bar way too much and gives this pee-brain moron extremely too much credit. The Angel that man has created to fall from the grace of their God in Heaven, the true Ruler of this physical realm (Satan), is in no way related to this pompous asshat! Cheeto-head also gives puppets all over the World a bad name. If Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, Lambchop, and Madame were here today, they’d be on the front lines protesting this ignorant poser. As Satan #31 in these troubled times, I’ve got my work cut out for me. With the internet, social media, and international spy’s mucking up information to the public, getting people to think for themselves and take better care of each other is going to be a quite a challenge, to say the least.

Entry 22 Just got my 6 6 6 morale patches in the mail! I’m a Beast, Baby!

Entry 23 So rock music is The Devil’s music, well DUH! Who has had the tastiest licks, best beats, and most heartfelt lyrics? A: The Devil’s music. Music began as a rhythmic form of communication. Drumming, dancing, and chanting were all primal ways of expressing emotions and stories; both joyous and tragic. This level of vibration came from the Earth, from humans, from Satan. God and his heavenly hymns are lofty and boring. I love all the controversy about rock musicians worshipping Satan, selling their souls, and making teenagers take drugs and kill people. I’m actually kind of flattered to be worshipped for my music, but the selling of souls is waaaaay out of left field. Maybe some poser of a record exec. was playing God by requiring bands to sell themselves out to his label, but I have yet to come across any ancient or recent purchased souls in my Satanic studies. Teenagers taking drugs and killing because of some richly theatrical rock band and their deeply poetic lyrics? Maybe a closer investigation into the kids home life and relationship with his/her parents and their beliefs would give more clues as to the behavior of their gothic little angel.

You see, none of it is real, NONE OF IT. It’s all illusion, a stage show, a prop. The ‘good’ - church/temple/mosque, morals, the saviors, the good-guy-in-white, and the ‘evil’ - Satanism, paganism, horror movies, rock concerts - all fake. Humans over the centuries have given these things power by labeling them as good or evil, usually to use extortion to control the masses. Often times if you look closer, you’ll see that it is evil and corruption in the good, and goodness and kindness in the evil (ie. Satan here to do good in the World). I know that this pisses off the religious-right to no end because they think that EVERYTHING has come from God. God doesn’t exist, man has created the doctrines that generation after generation has blindly followed. You’re welcome.

Entry 24 Looking at the triplex we live in, I decided we needed some upgrades. First I talked to Beth and our neighbors about me doing some upgrades to the property such as the landscaping and painting the place as well as little repairs here and there. They were all okay with it. The only one who knows how I’m really going to do it is Beth, the rest I’ll have to make it look like I’m doing the work (it’ll just get done a bit faster than usual). Second, I contacted the owner, Barbara. Barbara is an elderly wealthy widow who lives in Santa Barbara (how ironic). This property is basically a tax right off. She hates to put money into this property and only comes to see the place every few years to do a quick inspection and then raises our rent. I informed her that I will be happy to take excellent care of the building and grounds if she would cut all the units rent in half. She was aghast at first and wrote me off as a big joke. I told her to come to see her property in one month, and if she’s not impressed the deal is off. But, is she likes the improvements I’ve made we have a deal. She agreed, probably thinking that she just got some free work done on the apartment complex she owns.

The first thing I did was replace all the pipes with brand new, larger copper ones. Now none of us will have clogged and backed up sinks and toilets again, and we’ll have great water pressure. Next, I fixed all of the electrical panels with more wattage and fixed all of the outside safety and patio lights, and then added some solar panels on the roof to lighten our energy costs. For the outside, I had all the bushes and plants trimmed and healthy in our new drought-tolerant landscaping. The final touch was painting the building. I chose an earthy brown with a sage green trim, very California (faux) Craftsman. Just to make it look like I was working I’d put a few ladders, drop-cloths, and paint cans lying around and did the whole thing in about a week (so it didn’t look too magical).

The day of Barbara’s inspection. The look of shock and then odd approval was priceless. I simply explained to her that I had the time and experience to do this kind of work and since all of her tenants have been long-term renters, including us, and weren’t planning on moving any time soon, I wanted to make our apartments the most comfortable and pleasant as they can be. I had a document drawn up putting this agreement in writing which she signed without hesitation. Home is where the heart is.

Entry 25 Sometimes I like to badger Christians on Facebook that post things about thanking God for their good fortune or sending thoughts and prayers. I will pose the question, what if God had nothing to do with it and those things happened simply because they happened? Their righteous comments usually are full of, “God gave us free will” “It’s part of God’s plan” or “God has promised us our place with him in Heaven for believing and loving him.” The more I bring logic into the conversation, the more they sound like a broken record (for those of you who don’t remember vinyl records, when they got damaged or scratched the needle would get stuck on that part of the song and keep repeating), but God, but God, but God, but God, but God, but God… I figure if I keep mentioning logical things, maybe some of it will seep past their brainwashing into their subconscious and plant a seed of free thinking in that skull of theirs.

Time to get off the computer, go outside, and help a little old lady across the street.

Entry 26 Bad parenting lesson of the day - keep an eye on your children at all times. After witnessing countless parents stroll along casually as their little angels run far ahead of Mommy and Daddy, I thought a lesson in parenting was in order. Just to be clear - no parents were harmed during this eye-opening experience.

<In my best Rod Serling voice>Two young boys, about 5 year's old racing each other a good 40 feet ahead of their parents on a crowded walkway. As they approach me, I wave to them with a hello gesture and *POOF*, they're gone! Not really gone, just invisible. Physically they are there, you just can't see them. I can tell that the boys themselves were having fun with not being seen, playing tag and sneaking around people. Just to add to the mystique of their disappearance I made them silent. Not only could you not hear their voices, but you couldn't hear their movements either. Of course, I was able to see and hear them.

By the time the parents of these two little ghosts reached me, I can tell that they still have no clue where their boys are, moms eyes were glued to her cell phone playing Pokemon Go and dad was taking pictures. I motioned for the boys to come over to me. I instructed them to follow their parents for as long as they can until they stop and wonder where you are. At that point, I suggested that they give them a little scare, nothing too crazy, we don’t want to give them a heart attack.  Their screams will be my cue to make them visible again. I hope those parents learned their lesson!

Entry 27 Oh, thank Heaven, for entry twenty-seven. I’ve always wanted to have one of those Candid Camera types of shows where you do something or set up a scene to watch peoples reactions. Now I can do it anytime I like. I love being out in public, such as at a farmers market, a bar, or a restaurant. As I walk past people, I would say, “Hello, I am Satan” in their native tongue. It’s always more fun when my target is wearing a cross or some kind of religious pendant. I love doing this to cultures that are very religious - Spanish, Italian, and French are fun, but the best is saying it in Latin. I walked past a superfluity of nuns on the street the other day, I made eye contact with one of the nuns, grinned as wide as I can, and said, “Salve, Satanas sum,” then I winked and blew her a kiss. The look of horror on the other nuns was priceless, the beautifully embarrassed blush of the one I had my sights on floored me! HAIL SATAN!

Do you want to have some fun? Here are a few that you could try out yourself!

Hola, soy Satanás (Spanish)

Bonjour, Je Suis Satan (French)

Hallo, ich bin Satan (German)

Ciao, sono Satana (Italian)

Salve, Satanas sum (Latin)

Usually, once the person looks at me inquisitively and possibly asks me what I just said, I just look dumbfounded and say, “I didn’t say anything” in perfect English.

Entry 28 I've noticed a lot of pop-up churches around town lately. Signs for church gatherings and services at other established churches. For example, I saw signs for a Presbyterian Church service in front of a Korean Church. They must be renting the church for their own congregation. My question is this, how many god-damn churches do believers need? And there are new ones popping up all the time - The Calling Church, Cenacle of Faith, TLC Church, but my favorite church is the Jews for Jesus. To the J of J, I say, "Make up your fucking mind!" Is the United States government just handing out tax-exempt status like candy on Halloween to anyone who claims to be a Church?

For shits and giggles, I had bumper stickers made that say, "SATAN LOVES YOU MORE" and I take selfies with it in front of any house of worship that I come across. This was inspired by countering the JESUS LOVES YOU signs that religious fanatics carry around in public. I now have a HUGE gallery of these pics. Maybe I should make a coffee table book of them and sell them, then donate the money to organizations like the Planetary Society and the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Entry 29 I’m a huge star on YouTube, and nobody knows it. All of those videos of cars speeding down a street and suddenly get into an accident with what appears to be nothing - that was me. Putting invisible barriers in front of speeding cars is easy. Any video with an animal painting or drawing, me. All the paranormal shows and ghost hunters that experience garbled voices, cold spots, and an electromagnetic entity, yours truly. I love video editing, the way I do it.

Entry 30 My favorite saying these days, “It’s hot as Hades!”

Entry 31 Just for fun, I posted a photoshopped picture of a King James Holy Bible in a barbecue on fire. My Atheist friends thought it was funny, but I had some folks take quite an offense to it. I get it, burning a bible is akin to burning the America flag, two extremely revered objects that people kill in the name of. Would those offended feel better if I burned a copy LeVey's THE SATANIC BIBLE? I did it to make a point - they are just objects, physical things and nothing more. The value of these items is given to them by humans. I could take a 2 X 4 of wood and say that it is the most precious hunk of a tree on the planet and if I get enough people to believe me, then I have a sacred item - The Holy Post of Satan! If you burn my Holy Post, well, then you'll have kindling. If Jesus' bloody body hanging nailed to a wooden cross could be considered sacred, then so can my 2 X 4.

Entry 32 I wonder how many other Satans there have been, and what did they do? I feel like a new regeneration of Dr. Who but as Satan. This would be a fun trivia game that I could play by myself - look at world events over the Centuries and see if I can spot the ones that were facilitated by Satan. The Roman Empire? World War 1 or 2? Did Satan #30 leave me to deal with Donald Trump?!? (Satan never gives you anything you can’t handle)

Entry 33 San Diego Comic-Con International is the largest multi-genre entertainment and comic convention in the World, and a [relatively] safe environment for someone with actual superhero/super-villain powers to strut his stuff. Since getting in shape via the Satanic method meant that I could wear any lycra costume and look awesome. I chose instead, to go with the open shirt look of, wait for it…HELLBOY! Too obvious? Actually, it’s the perfect cover. When I make lasers actually shoot from a Stormtroopers gun, or make a kid dressed as Superman fly, they’ll never suspect HELLBOY.

I did it up right, morphed myself to look just like the Ron Perlman make-up from the movie, complete with oversized stone right hand and cigar (I love smoking cigars). I even smelled like roasted peanuts (hardcore fans will understand this). Personally, I chose this character because it just felt right.

Of course, Beth joined me, her hero of choice - Carol The Bowler from MYSTERY MEN. She looked great! She wore Dr. Marten’s, black jeans, the exact same jacket with the same patches on it, nail polish, dark eyeliner, dyed green hair, and without missing a detail - the enchanted skull bowling ball. Yes, I hexed her bowling ball prop so that she had power over it.

This was our first time attending ComicCon. It’s true, this convention has gotten huge and is mostly the entertainment industry buying and selling their next (they hope) billion dollar franchise. Regardless, the costumes of the Con-goers and hardcore fans are amazing! From toddlers dressed as the ‘mini-me’ of their parents' characters to the elderly wearing skimpy costumes that they probably shouldn’t be wearing, everybody looks fantastic and has fun posing with each other for friends and the media. One of my favorite groups that were there were the folks from Magic Wheelchair. They custom design motorized wheelchairs for kids with mobility issues. They do everything from an X-Wing Fighter from Star Wars to a Unicorn Princess, to a dragon or even a pirate ship, and they are all built by volunteers. The look on the kids' faces in their matching costumes was priceless (I’m such a big softy of a nerd).

Beth had everyone amazed at how she was able to make her bowling ball fly and control it. She was having fun flying the ball directly behind someone’s head and making it hover there like a balloon. When the unsuspecting character turned around, usually after someone near them told them to look behind them, they’d find themselves face-to-face with Carmine The Bowlers grinning skull. There were more than a few macho superheroes squeal like a little girl when confronted by his boney grin.

I kind of stood out also because I made myself 6’ 6.6” tall (Corny, huh?). I had the accent and dialect down pat. Some people started to think that I was Ron Perlman making a surprise appearance, even some of the event coordinators were on their cell phones trying to figure out who I was. One of my favorite things I did was to make people act in different ways as if they were hypnotized. I might have a guy dressed as Aquaman hiss and meows like a cat, or a Catwoman bark like a dog. I freaked out a kid dressed as Shazam!, when he started acting like the character trying to figure out how to fly, I made him levitate and then fly over the heads of spectators before gracefully landing in the same spot. (Speaking of Aquaman, I think I’ve got a man-crush on Jason Momoa) When I came upon the three guys wearing the Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin masks I couldn’t resist. I walked up behind them as they were dancing in front of a crowd and loudly exclaimed, “Well well well, what have we got here? The 3 Stooges!” I scared the holy dictator-shit out of them! “Kimmie, go suck a nuke. Don, ‘YOUR FIRED!’ And Pooty-Poot, stay out of our business!” The crowd went fucking wild! I love comic book geeks.

Entry 34 As often as I can, I like to go into a mixed neighborhood and wander the streets. Whenever I come across people, I like to just say hi, maybe ask them a question, and then shake their hand or pat them on the shoulder. Then when I do that to another person, I give them the power to experience some of what that last person I touched thinks and feels. You might say I’m sowing the seeds of empathy and understanding. No expectations, just spreading awareness in a friendly, social way. Imagine what could happen if in some of the poorer neighborhoods around Los Angeles the Latins, Blacks, Asians, Armenians, etc. start getting along and agreeing on things - shit’s gonna change real fast!

Whenever I travel anywhere I do this. I hope this awakening goes viral!

"He say I know you, you know me One thing I can tell you is You got to be free Come together, right now Over me” ~The Beatles

Entry 35 Welcome to Hell. I have found it, and we are all living in it. Yes, it is right here, our lives on planet Earth. Religion has convinced people for centuries that there is a firey place of hellfire and damnation that you will be sent to after you die if you have sinned while you were alive. Of course in some religions such as Christianity, there's always that loophole, or as I call it your 'get out of Hell free card.' Confess your 'sins' to a priest or donate a buttload of money to the Church and *POOF* magically you are saved! It's the oldest plot line in history - good vs. evil. There is always a hero and a villain, with their minions of angels and demons to do their bidding. This story of good/bad has been used primarily to control the masses. If you behave yourself, follow the scriptures of the religion you were brought up to believe, and don't question those in power, you'll go to Heaven. But if you think for yourself, question authority and choose to sin without asking for forgiveness from their savior, you're on your way to an afterlife of eternal pain, torture, and the repetition of your sinful ways (actually that last one doesn't seem too bad).

This existence we call life is either going to be our own personal Heaven or Hell. If you feel good about how your life is going, you could say life is like Heaven and you feel blessed. If you experience stress, depression, or anxiety due to the present state of the World at large, you are in your own personal Hell on Earth. What we, even Satan myself, choose to focus on will be how we judge whether we are living in Heaven or Hell. Don't get me wrong, I love the theatrics of Death Metal and Satanic Masses, but that's all they are - theater, entertainment, with lots of smoke and mirrors. The evangelicals love the drama as well, miracles and faith healing are two of their favorite things they use to exploit believers. Most religions use the image of Dante's Divine Comedy to scare followers into believing their rhetoric, which I find very comedic. I do love how organized Hell is. There are 9 levels called Circles of Hell. Depending on what your sin was, you are sent to the appropriate Circle. Lesser violations are sent to the upper Circles, while the hardcore sinners are sent all the way down towards #9. And then there is also Purgatory, which is a kind of 51/50 (72-hour hold) of purification before being allowed to enter Heaven. It seems like a lot of politics to me.

Entry 36 Part of the work that I do as Shaitan (word for Satan from the Quran) is challenging the stereotype of being the ultimate scapegoat for everything judged as bad. This act of not taking responsibility for one's own actions has been around as long as the good vs. evil plot line. It’s easy for people to pass-the-buck onto The Devil when things don’t go right or tragedy strikes. Geraldine Jones what famous for saying, “The Devil made me do it!” If this was true, I would have quite an impressive resume to brag about.

I love changing signs and billboards that blame The Dark One into blaming God’s Wrath. I saw a sign that read

GO TO CHURCH Or the DEVIL Will Get You!

So I fixed it. Now it reads

GO TO CHURCH Or God’s Wrath Will Get You!

Here’s a billboard that I saw

SHARIA LAW THREATENS AMERICA by UnitedAmericaCommittee.org

So I changed it to

GOD’S WRATHTHREATENS AMERICA by God.com

Do they want to play the fear game? I can play the fear game!

It has always seemed to me that when God doesn’t get his way or his followers don’t abide by his rules he punishes them, ie. the story of Noah’s Ark and the big flood. Satan doesn’t demand humanity to be loyal to him, he wants people to learn, think for themselves, and enjoy life. The people who invented God use fear and power to control their flocks, while Satan sings, "Come on people now, Smile on your brother, Everybody get together, Try to love one another, Right now” by The Youngbloods. Yes, it’s true, Satan is just a big ol’ music lovin’ mush bug.

Entry 37 My favorite actor to play The Devil on television is Ray Wise from the show REAPER. His mature, suave, and sexy look and demeanor was what I would want to be like if I was The Devil. Well, here I am, not exactly the Satan I thought I’d be. But it’s okay, I’m happy with how I look and my unique style. Again, like Dr. Who, each Doctor had his own unique style. I guess that goes for Satan as well. For a favorite movie actor as Satan, I would have to say Al Pacino in DEVIL’S ADVOCATE.

John Milton: Who are you carrying all those bricks for anyway?

God? Is that it? God?

 Well, I tell ya, let me give you a little inside information about God. God likes to watch.  He’s a prankster.  Think about it. He gives man instincts. He gives you this extraordinary gift and then what does He do? I swear, for his own amusement, his own private cosmic gag reel, he sets the rules in opposition.

It’s the goof of all time. Look, but don’t touch. Touch, but don’t taste. Taste, don’t swallow.*laughter*

And while you’re jumping from one foot to the next, what is He doing? He’s laughing his sick, fucking ass off. He’s a tight-ass. He’s a sadist. He’s an absentee landlord. Worship that? Never! Kevin Lomax: Better reign in hell than to serve in heaven, is that it? John Milton: Why not? I’m here on the ground with my nose in it since the whole thing began! I’ve nurtured every sensation man has been inspired to have! I cared about what he wanted and I never judged him. Why? Because I never rejected him, in spite of all his imperfections! I’m a fan of man! I’m a humanist. Maybe the last humanist. Who, in their right mind, Kevin, could possibly deny the 20th century was entirely mine? All of it, Kevin! All of it!Mine! I’m peaking, Kevin. It’s my time now. It’s our time.

Entry 38 I’m finding that even in Satanism there is angst and fighting between sects. It’s sad when even groups that truly want to do good in the world are corrupted by greed and power. Too many rules and doctrines end up working against the organization that is implementing them (see The Catholic Church). Here is another example of how the trickle-down effect doesn’t work. The people who occupy the upper-echelon want to stay at the top. Giving it away may sound Saintly, but I guarantee they would rather continue their comfortable, lush lifestyle than live like the majority of society. To soothe their guilty conscious, they donate scraps of money to charities that they deduct on their taxes.

If I become aware of this kind of selfish behavior, I like to make their generous ‘contribution’ check bounce, or their wire transfer fail. Not that I want to keep support from these charities, I would just rather them come from a more honest source, such as me.

Entry 39 Amorphophallus Titanum, aka The Corpse Flower. n. Latin: amorphos (without form, misshapen), phallos (penis), and titanum (giant). The flower gets its nickname from the pungent odor similar to rotting meat or a decaying corpse.

Lil’ Stinky as we call it at the Garden is quite popular when it blooms, which seems to happen anytime within an approximate 4 to 20 year period depending on the environment and conditions. The gardens become a media circus, and people waiting with bated breath to see and smell this natural wonder.

Just last week ol’ Stinky started to open, so the folks in the Botanical Department put it out on display and alerted the media. The biggest question of the week has been, “Has it bloomed yet?” When it does, hordes stand in line for hours to get a picture and a nauseating whiff of this infamous smelly penis flower.

I decided to take this display of [morbid] botanical beauty to the next level. I waited until Saturday to begin the facilitating process, since there will be more visitors, and there also happens to be a Members Summer Concert that night as well. Not only did Lil’ Stinky open, but grew to a size of over 20 feet in a matter of hours. Along with the size increasing exponentially, the odor intensified tenfold! Breathing inside the conservatory where it is housed and displayed, was almost impossible. About 1 in every 3 people lost-their-lunch, which just added to the death-like stench. They actually had to close down the viewing in order to clean up the mess and get some fresh air in there.

And, it was I that called the good folks at The Guinness Book of World Records. You’re welcome.

Entry 40 Often throughout my life, I’ve felt that one of my roles as this character I call me has been to act as a catalyst for change. Not necessarily earth-shaking events, but a change in policy, thoughts, or relationships. Many times when I’ve been involved in an organization, whether as an employee or a volunteer, major shifts take place during my stint with them. Sometimes it has manifested as a physical move to a different location or a change in policies. Roles and relationships change. I’m not saying that (up until now) I have consciously been making these shifts happen, but in hindsight, there has definitely been a pattern.

With the influence I have as Satan, this trend will continue, but more intentionally. Lately, I’ve been going to jails and prisons as a volunteer to simply talk to inmates and give them a chance to interact with someone other than fellow inmates and guards. Many of them don’t have friends, family, or a spouse to visit them. By being a neutral sounding board for them who doesn’t judge them is a great gesture in and of itself. I assist them a bit further by clearing their consciousness a bit more about life and the choices that they have made and why they are there. Sometimes this extra assistance bleeds over to some of the others incarcerated as well as some of the guards (oops, my bad).

Personally, I would love to see all of these for-profit prisons to go out of business. The less innocent people and low-offense (such as marijuana and drug abuse) folks are locked up, the more people in society to make positive changes in the world. Crooked politicians who are invested in these human money machines will be financially pinched hard by the loss of their inhumane investment.

Entry 41 God of the Bible (Old and New Testament) judges and punishes man, Satan accepts and supports Man in his efforts to enjoy and thrive in life. Just the simple fact that God is nothing more than a concept of man’s construct mostly used to control the masses, and Satan has been a tangible force doing good in the world says a lot. We are actually living in, as best as I can describe it, a reality that is more like the Upside Down from the series Stranger Things than we think. Here, people believe that God is good, Devil is bad. Yet there has always been more harm done in the name of God than anything that the Satanic Panic has ever yielded. Crucifixion, the Crusades, and the Republican Party are good examples of this. Whereas Witches, Pagans, and Satanists have been blamed for everything from bad crops to Smallpox, to the weather. Pills are good for you, but a plant is a drug. Priests are not Pedophiles, but Heavy Metal music makes kids kill. Trump is smart, while the press is fake news. Actors make good politicians, while kids who survive school shootings are called Crisis Actors. White is the new Black, and Brown is the new bad guy.

Don’t blindly believe everything that you’ve been taught your whole life. Do some research. Allow yourself the opportunity to see things through someone else’s eyes. Ask yourself, “What if what I know about something is the complete opposite?” What if Hell was a spa, and Heaven was a desolate, frozen and dead landscape? Be careful of labels.

Entry 42 Lettuce Prey. A favorite meme of many a Satanist on social media. There is a growing movement of Atheists and other secular groups that are attacking the concept of prayer to fix things such as natural disasters and ill-health. I just watched a satirical video about praying the gay away.

pray: verb - address a solemn request or expression of thanks to a deity or other object of worship.

Expecting an invisible being to adhere to your requests because you believe in them is as naive and childish as thinking that the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny are real. I’ve heard God described as not being ‘the Great Bellhop in the sky.’ Humankind has always seemed to place its faith in events and changes outside of itself.

So my question is this, what about the myths of people selling their souls to the Devil in exchange for talent, wealth, and power? Blues guitarist Robert Johnson supposedly met the Devil at the crossroads and sold his soul in exchange for being a virtuoso on the guitar, and thus made him a blues legend. I’m beginning to think that it really was The Devil that granted Mr. Johnson his extraordinary talents, as far as the soul-selling thing, I don’t know. If it’s true that humans souls are only their emotional reaction to things such as music, and that there is no otherworldly destination called Hell, maybe the Satan at that time was playing along with the whole Heaven and Hell story to bestow those talents to Robert Johnson simply because Satan loves the Blues.

I personally think the theatrics of pleading your case to The Devil and signing a contract with too much fine print, in blood, is very entertaining. Does it mean anything? Hell no! Plus, it would put you, as Satan, directly in the spotlight and might undermine your work to do good in the world.

Entry 43 I heard from Satan #30 last night in my dreams. He came through in the middle of a pee-dream (a dream that has some urgency to it in hopes of waking you up to go to the bathroom) where I was frantically trying to get somewhere on my URB-E but could never quite make it. There he was, at every stop that I thought had a bathroom. He was just checking on me to see if I had any questions or needed any assistance. I actually said, “Where the fuck is a bathroom around here?!?” He replied, “Down the hall on the right.” After acknowledging his answer with gratitude, the only thing I wanted to know was, am I doing it right? Was I doing enough with these Satanic powers? Should I kick it up a notch? Do I look good in red? He reassured me that I was doing great and reminded me to continue to have fun with this ‘work,’ actions speak louder than words, and [almost] always use caution. He then vanished, leaving me with a full bladder and a comforted mind.

Fully awake, standing over the toilet relieving myself and smiling. Today is going to be a delicious day!

Entry 44 "Now his holiest books have been trampled upon No contract that he signed was worth that what it was written on He took the crumbs of the world and he turned it into wealth Took sickness and disease and he turned it into health He's the neighborhood bully.

What's anybody indebted to him for? Nothing, they say. He just likes to cause war Pride and prejudice and superstition indeed  They wait for this bully like a dog waits for feed He's the neighborhood bully.

What has he done to wear so many scars? Does he change the course of rivers? Does he pollute the moon and stars? Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill  Running out the clock, time standing still Neighborhood bully."

I love the lyrics to many of Bob Dylan's songs, especially Neighborhood Bully on his INFIDELS album. These are the last three verses of the song. I can't help but wonder whom Dylan was thinking of as the neighborhood bully in this song, Satan? Is Satan really such a bad guy, or has he just been labeled as the Neighborhood Bully of the World?

~

Yesterday Beth expressed to me that I don't look like The Dark Lord and I agreed, I look more like Gimli from the Lord of the Rings with a farmers tan, the only things dark on me are my arms and face.

Entry 45 This entry I dedicate to the 45th President of the United States, no really, this is the best dedication. I know dedications, I've dedicated billions and billions of dedications for many many years. I got good dedications. I am the best dedicator ever.

Just kidding! That bloated-orange headed-fast food chomping-megalomaniac who is being referred to as the evilest man on the planet is giving Satan a bad name! Maybe another nickname such as Purgatory Pete, or Donald the Damned, or simply Scum of the Earth might fit him better.

I did give him food poisoning from one of his two Big Macs, and both of his Filet-o-Fish sandwiches (this is only one meal), 3 out of 4, I was feeling generous.

Entry 46 Thanks to centuries of religious doctrines, the vast majority of people on this planet are lemmings, blindly believing anything that their holy men, politicians, and advertisers tell them. They have been trained to obey, spend more money than they have (aka credit and loans), and feel overly righteous about their culture. How does one motivate folks to think for themselves and put their differences aside?

I could help promote Dan Barker’s book - GOD The Most Unpleasant Character In All Fiction. Mr. Barker basically uncovers and highlights the vast number of times GOD is jealous, petty, unjust; an unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously, and a malevolent bully in the Old Testament. This ought to open their eyes and get someone’s panties in a bunch.

After finding out in the news that Howard Lorber, the Executive Chairman of Nathan’t Famous Inc. (the makers of Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs) was hosting a fundraiser in the Hamptons for President Trump, I thought that tainting the production of some all-America hot dogs would be a good place to start to add fuel to this fire. Choke on it, Mr. Lorber! (Hmmm, I seem to be feeling rather wrathful lately)

Entry 47 And on His 6th and 7th days, Satan rested, because those were His days off from his day job. Not that I didn’t do any good deeds, I just chill-out the most on those days; smoke pot, do a bit of cleaning around the house, fix potholes in the street we live on, smoke some more pot, nap with the dogs, cook dinner, and wipe the sweat off of my brow.

Just thought of an awesome slogan to fit-in with today's generation - SATAN IS MY SUPERHERO. Maybe we’ll start with bumper stickers, then t-shirts, hats, and capes!

Entry 48 This is going to sound odd, but as of late I have decided to not continue as a member of The Satanic Temple. Wait, Satan doesn’t want to be a member of The SATANIC Temple??? Yes, it’s true. I found out that there was a power struggle going on between the higher-up and the local chapters, so following many other Satanists, I quit. Like the rest of TST expats, I still believe in their mission and the 7 tenets, but being a part of this organization is not working for me if you get my drift (Now THERE’S a statement that shows my age!).

I’ve learned about myself that I don’t seem to last very long in an organization.  I’m kind of a lone wolf in a way. I also tend to become a catalyst for change wherever I am. Just recently I have accepted this fact as well as fully embrace it.

Entry 49 If I ever start my own metal band, I’ve got the perfect name: SEB - Satan’s Eternal Benevolence (How’s that for getting personal?!?). I’ll be the lead singer, maybe I can get Robert Trujillo (Metallica) to play bass, Kerry King (Slayer) and John 5 (Rob Zombie) on guitars, and my cousin Rod Morgenstein (Dixie Dregs, Winger) and Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters) on drums. Oh sweet the sound. Our first single - Satan Loves You More is a counter-attack to the signs, Jesus loves you, that believers like to carry around.

Entry 50 Captains Log - August 20, 2018: I’ve seen more SATAN LOVES YOU MORE stickers all around town from Pasadena to Downtown Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, and all the way down to Redondo Beach. Your boy gets around! Almost like a subliminal message planting a seed in their subconscious, I’m letting them know that I am there for them.

Mikey ‘The Good Christian’ Pence has been spouting off lately again. He’s still pushing for creationism to be taught in public schools, wants the government to pay for gay conversion therapy, and hinted that condoms are ‘too modern’ and ‘too liberal.’ I guess my last visit as his Almighty God didn’t get through to him, time for a more direct approach. From now on, every time Mikey mentions God, the Bible, or utters the word Christian his ass from his tight little butthole, to his cheeks, and around to his tiny little pee pee will burn like the fires of Hell that he is so damn afraid of. I guess you could say he’ll be a real Royal Flush. He’ll look like the poster boy for Red Devil Fireworks. Matadores will yell OLE! and bulls will want to gouge him with their horns. Latin Americans will call him El Diablo (Wait, I take offense to that!). This ought to be fun to watch - the VP is going to go viral!

Entry 51 On my playlist these days:

PIG - The Gospel, Risen

FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH - And Justice For None, Got Your Six, War Is The Answer, The Wrong Side Of Heaven And The Righteous Side Of Hell

PINK FLOYD - The Final Cut

Entry 52 ’Hackers’ <wink, wink> deleted the credit card debt of hundreds of thousands of credit card users, mostly VISA, MASTERCARD, and DISCOVER. A good majority of AMERICAN EXPRESS cardholders can afford their debt so they can keep it.

A homeboy was pulled over on the side of the street having car problems with his lowered, gold Chevy Impala, so as I rode by on my URB-E I nodded to him and fixed his ride instantaneously. Without even questioning what just happened, he simply gave me a nod of approval and thanks. Maybe it was my motorcycle helmet with the three devil horns mounted on it, but there was a sense of respect at that moment.

Entry 53 I had another visit from Satan #30 last night, he was just checking in on me (WOW, the Satanic support staff is AWESOME!). I shared with him that I’m getting the hang of doing the Devil’s work and I wish I could do more. He reassured me that patience is one of Satan’s best friends, but to be very aware of Vampires. I asked him if Vampires actually existed, and he was extremely assuring that they did. He said that they have been on this planet as long as man has, and as man evolved so did they. Over time they have learned techniques to blend in with mankind and improve their tactics on how to not only survive but thrive. They’ve learned how to suck the life out of someone, yet keep them alive and craving more from their vampire. This species of vampires is one of the worst. The Latin name for these vile creatures is Vampires de Emotus, or more commonly know as Emotional Vampires.

Emotional Vampires, along with their close cousins the Mental Vampires, will suck the will to live right out of you. At first, they seem like a friend or relative that is going through some frustrating issues, but the moment you step in to help, they trap you and slowly begin torturing you with their long and drawn out monologues of woe-is-me. You want to escape their grasp, but guilt overcomes you and feeds off of your decency as a human being. *Note to self: unfriend 80% of my friends list on Facebook.

Entry 54 There is a small group of homeless folks that make camp by the Gold Line Metro Station on Allen Ave. I ride past them daily on my way to work. They recognize me and wave in appreciation of my acknowledging them. They are never hostile or beg for money from me, it’s like we are neighbors seeing each other around the same time each day. The most social of the group is a guy that goes by the nickname Chuckhead (I didn’t ask.) He’s a tall - 6’5”, broad-shouldered and bald rock of a man, and also one of the kindest and most genuine I’ve ever met. Chuckhead told me that he was a steelworker from Pennsylvania, but when worked dried up because of Trump messing around with tariffs, he moved out west. With no money and no permanent address, it’s been hard to get a job and find a place to live. He hooked up with this bunch as a way to always have somebody to watch your back and what little stuff you might have.

I set up accounts with Dominos Pizza, Vons, and Jameson Brown Coffee Roaster and have them deliver to Chuckhead on a regular basis. I explained to Chuckhead that I’m doing this to assist them in taking care of themselves while living on the streets. I simply asked that they use their strength find something to do for money, that is legal, and that they feel good about themselves for doing something for themselves.

Funny thing, people in trucks and vans started coming around looking for laborers to do yard work or help someone move, hmm.

Entry 55 There is a kind of Universal Knowledge that Satan has the ability to access. It's like tapping into a vast database of history and current knowledge, sort of like how the human subconscious records everything that a person thinks, feels, and experiences, but on an infinite scale. I started to notice that when I wondered about something I would get an answer. After a little bit of investigation, I found out that this is true and started testing it. Often. This is like having the fastest internet connection you could imagine but in your head.

Entry 56 The other day I watched a DIY video demonstrating how to make a magic [looking] wand from a chopstick using a glue gun and some paint. I thought, how fun would it be to have a cheesy little wand that I can do actual magic with. No one will ever suspect that a homemade magic wand made out of the finest disposable pine chopsticks would actually be able to perform real magic. I can make up wizarding sounding words such as, "Shutus Trapus" (to silence a person), "Vanisimo" (to make someone or something vanish), and "Gigglitis" (uncontrollable laughter) to command my powers.

I bet I could make some serious change busking as a street corner magician. I'll wear a top hat and cape to give me that old-time magician look. "Hocus pocus, alacazam - turn this girl into a man!" And poof, this cute little 9-year-old eating frozen yogurt, with a flash of light and a billow of smoke, instantly becomes a full-grown bearded man wearing tight jean shorts and a t-shirt that says, 'BEAR' on it. The best part was when she hugged her dad out of fear of the light and smoke part of the show, and they both realized that she was now a big ol' he. Of course, I turned her back to her original self when I distracted the crowd with an impromptu light-show across the street.

Seeing the looks of surprise and amazement on people's faces, and the smiles and laughter is the real reason I do this kind of stuff (but the pay ain't so bad either).

Entry 57 57 Varieties of Pickles" by the H.J. Heinz Company. That’s the first thing I thought of when I realized that I was about to start Entry 57. Heinz Tomato Ketchup was my absolute favorite condiment to smother all over my french fries, onion rings and scrambled eggs.

Since California is my home turf, I healed the San Andrea's Fault. Sort of like fixing two pieces a giant ball from pulling apart by using Super Glue. No more shakers, rattlers, or fear of California falling into the ocean. No 'Big One,' just peace of mind. I don't think anyone will notice, except for the geology geeks at Cal Tech.

Entry 58 I’ve developed my own style of stove-top cooking that creates food that is to-die-for. I take a skillet with a high edge (approx. 2”) and let it pre-heat for a minute or so, then I add one drop of cannabis-infused oil to the center of the pan. As flames rise around the edge of the skillet, I place my food; vegetables, chicken, or fish, in the dead center. The flames then envelope the tasty morsels and cook them to the point where the inside is cooked perfectly and the outside is charred deliciously for the best look and feel. I call this method Satan Flambé.

Entry 59 Whenever I’ve asked a believer in God where Heaven was, they would inevitably point to the sky. Okay, I get it, Heaven is up and Hell is down, but what I want to know is why does Heaven always looks like it’s just above a bunch of fluffy white clouds, seen from the window of a plane, in our atmosphere? Believers will argue that it is beyond space, but again I ask, why does it look that way? And how the Hell do they know? The bible was written by men Centuries ago, long before air travel, they would have no way of knowing what it looked like beyond the clouds. While I’m at it, which one of those lily-white-ass holy men knew exactly what a sinner would expect when they arrived in Hell? I think some scholars with some hallucinogenic plants and a great imagination had a field day composing the greatest piece of fiction man has ever created.

Entry 60 I often hear overly empathetic believers say, “Thereby the grace of God go I” when they see someone who appears less fortunate than themselves. I figured if they can use God as their fictional character of caring, I can use any other fictional character that I choose; “Thereby the grace of Ironman go I,” “Thereby the grace of Captain Kirk go I,” and my favorite, “Thereby the grace of Satan go I.”Try it sometime, it’s fun!

Entry 61 Mankind is a tough nut to crack. From the beginning of the human race, from small tribal villages to modern urban cities, man has been in love with power. Power over another person or people, power over the environment, power over the weather. To control others and profit from this behavior has become the Universal Dream. The negative side of greed - void of morals and value for life. This is the side of greed that sees other human beings as merely a commodity, a vehicle to exploit and discard. The positive side of greed is the motivation to do more and to want better for yourself and others.

I find that individually people are incredible, more than a couple and you start to get that group mentality. Groups can be dangerous because 1) they’re larger and more powerful, and 2) they can be more easily led to believe untruths. Groups become a generality, a race or culture of people, whereas one or two people are simply that, people. Fellow human beings with histories, families, stories, triumphs, and failures.

There is an insane amount of division between folks these days. Party lines in governments, religions, economic class, ethnicity, age, sports - it always comes down to us against them. We have been divided up and fattened for slaughter. My big quandary is how in tarnation am I going to do enough good in the World to make a difference? I already knew the answer to my own question - the only one judging me on whether or not I’m doing enough good in the World is me.

“What, me worry?” - Alfred E. Newman

Entry 62 The people that totally crack me up, but are extremely dangerous to society and the environment are those that claim to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. From Kondratiy Selivanov and Ann Lee in the 18th Century to the nutcases Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez and Alan John Miller of today, these extremists actually think that they are the embodiment of Jesus Christ. According to Wikipedia, there are 30 of these folks from the 20th and 21st Centuries alone. This is cosplay on a whole different level. I mean yeah, you'll find guys dressed as Jesus at Comic-Con, usually riding a T-Rex and sporting an automatic weapon, but they know that they are just playing around. To spout gospel, start your own cult, and take innocent people's money, and sometimes their lives are downright criminally insane.

Here are a few quotes from Alan John (AJ) Miller, head of the Divine Truth cult in Australia, "There's probably a million people who say they're Jesus and most of them are in asylums. But one of us has to be. How do I know I am? Because I remember everything about my life."

"Just a little over 2000 years ago, we arrived on the Earth for the first time."

"My name is Jesus and I'm serious."

This guy is a classic cult leader who has done his homework. He has plucked peoples heartstrings by calling himself Jesus. He uses the 5 common methods of mind control;  1. People are put in physical or emotionally distressing situations, 2. Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized, 3. They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic leader or group, 4. They get a new identity based on the group, 5.  They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives and the mainstream culture) and their access to information is severely controlled. Miller has mixed in scientific proof with biblical bullshit and called it Gods Truth. It sounds convincing, but come on, humans have only been around for 2000 years?!? (It's actually closer to 200,000)

*note to self: never be like that.

Entry 63 After a little research, I found out that only a handful of families own and operate the World Banks and are heavily invested in all of the Fortune 500 companies. Ah ha, so I’m not a conspiracy nut! This mafia of money has almost every major country in their very deep pockets. These money magnets figured out what makes the most money - destruction. If they create, allow, and promote any kind of disaster that will need fixing, they finance it and get fiscally fatter. War is easy, push some false propaganda about a country who doesn’t want to sell their resources to these world banks, send in a bully such as the United States to create a coup, and finance both sides of the war and the rebuilding of the country. The devastation of natural disasters is a major cash cow. Mankind has been messing around with controlling the weather [scientifically] since the 1940s. Cloud seeding is real. The larger and more powerful the storm, the more flooding and devastation, the sweeter the payout is for these robber barons. The mainstream media are puppets that they control to promote the fear-mongering and hatred that keeps people divided and fighting. To them, human beings are merely collateral cattle to do their bidding, over-populate, and die off in the slaughter.

And they say Satan is the evil one! If greed is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, these Bastards should be very dead (oh that’s right, the bible is just a book of fiction). I love to mess with their capitalistic system by hitting them where it hurts, in their wallets. I like to create boycotts of companies and products that are morally guilty and have safety issues and hazardous ingredients. Now you know why Walmart and Amazon stocks keep dropping like a lead balloon (Sorry guys, should be treating your employees better and paying them a decent wage to live on).

Entry 64 “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64.” - The Beatles

Today I was challenged by some dimwit visitor at work. He thought he was being funny by wearing his admission sticker somewhere hidden. When I asked him if he had his admission sticker he quite confidently exclaimed, “Yes!” When I asked to see the sticker he declared, “Don’t worry, I AM wearing it.” At this point, I was ready to have some fun. I very politely said, “Game on. Let’s play. If you truly are wearing that sticker, it will begin to burn through your clothing and brandish itself onto your skin. If nothing burns, you don’t have a sticker and need to go buy one, AND one for another person waiting in line. The fire has been lit, and the burning will commence in 5, 4, 3, 2,1…

It was like watching a live action cartoon, his face went from a smartass cocky grin straight to a look of horror and confusion. I found out real quickly where he stuck that sticker. After letting him jump around smacking his own ass like he was riding in a rodeo, I stopped the burning. As a parting gift, I left the sticker inked onto his skin as a permanent reminder of our time together. What can I say, I’m a giver.

Entry 65 I love the names of some of the fundraisers that Satanic groups come up with; SOLES FOR SATAN, MASTERBATIN’ FOR SATAN, MENSTRATIN’ FOR SATAN, SATANIC BLACK MASS, SATANIC STORY TIME, EXERCISING DEMONS, SPEAK OF THE DEVIL. I think there should be something for senior citizen Satanists - CONSTIPATED FOR SATAN, GRAMP’N FOR SATAN, or for the Jewish Satanists - SHALOMING FOR SATAN. HEIL SATAN for those dedicated German Satanists, and for the White Supremacist Satanists(?) I’LL KILL MYSELF FOR SATAN.

Entry 66{6} Via one of my favorite information source, Wikipedia, some Number of the Beast history and trivia:

In Kabbalistic Judaism the number 666 does not play any significant role as such. However, the perfect number 6 and some of its multiples (e.g. 36, 72 and 216) represents the creation and perfection of the world. The world was created in 6 days, and there are 6 cardinal directions (North, South, East, West, Up, Down). 6 is also the numerical value of one of the letters of God's name, associated with the Sefirah of Tiferet, which represents harmony, beauty, and cosmic balance. Rabbi Eliezer Horovitz, quoting the Vilna Gaon, mentions in his book Mosad ha-Yesod that the number 666 contains hidden within it exalted and lofty messianic potential, but does not explain any details of this conjecture.

Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the beast identified by the number 666 represents the world's unified governments in opposition to God. The beast is said to have "a human number" in that the represented governments are of a human origin rather than spirit entities. The number 666 is said to identify "gross shortcoming and failure in the eyes of Jehovah," in contrast to the number 7, which is seen as symbolizing perfection.

Seventh-day Adventists taking this view believe that the Mark of the Beast (but not the number 666) refers to a future, universal, legally enforced Sunday-sacredness. "Those who reject God's memorial of creator-ship—the Bible Sabbath—choosing to worship and honor Sunday in the full knowledge that it is not God's appointed day of worship, will receive the 'mark of the beast.’"

"The Sunday Sabbath is purely a child of the Papacy. It is the mark of the beast.”

Idealism, also known as the allegorical or symbolic approach, is an interpretation of the book of Revelation that sees the imagery of the book as non-literal symbols. The idealist perspective on the number of the beast rejects gematria, envisioning the number not as a code to be broken, but a symbol to be understood. Idealists would contend that because there are so many names that can come to 666 and that most systems require converting names to other languages or adding titles when convenient, it has been impossible to come to a consensus. Given that numbers are used figuratively throughout the book of Revelation, idealists interpret this number figuratively as well. The common suggestion is that because seven represents completeness and is associated with the divine, that six is incomplete and the three sixes are "inherently incomplete". The number is therefore suggestive that the Dragon and his beasts are completely inadequate. Another suggestion is that this number represents an individual's incomplete or immature spiritual state.

In 1989, Nancy and Ronald Reagan, when moving to their home in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles after the 1988 election, had its address—666 St. Cloud Road—changed to 668 St. Cloud Road. In 2003, U.S. Route 666 in New Mexico was changed to U.S. Route 491. A New Mexico spokesperson stated, "The devil's out of here, and we say goodbye and good riddance."The phobia has been a motif in various horror films such as The Omen and its 2006 remake. The number of the beast also appears in other films such as Pulp Fiction, The Doom Generation, End of Days, Bedazzled, and The Phantom of the Opera. Some women expressed concern about giving birth on June 6, 2006 (6/6/06).

I know that I should have waited until Entry 666 to lay all this Number of the Beast stuff on you, but I just couldn’t wait to share.

Entry 67 I have actually come to appreciate the creators of government, religion, and commerce. Their patience in their long-term goals of corruption and greed is unsurpassed. They knew even then, that control of the minds, hearts, and money of the masses would ensure them wealth and power. The Catholic Church has been molesting children for centuries, and followers to this day still believe that the Church is here to do good in the World. According to TIME magazine, the Catholic Church is worth somewhere between 10 and 15 billion dollars, and they don’t pay taxes on any of it! The naivety of a huge portion of the populous, for this long, is almost unfathomable. Countries have been spying on each other, keeping secrets, and starting wars not for the reasons the mainstream media tell us, but for private profit. And of course, major corporations know that enough money spent on lobbying and bribes buys you control of both governments and religion. The 'War on Drugs' is funded by the U.S. government. The U.S. military protects the poppy fields in Afghanistan, then supplies the drugs made from the poppy, and then uses the drugs as an excuse for police brutality and more drug-related arrests. Privately run prisons make a killing off of the minor drug convictions. None of this is new, they just keep getting better at pulling the wool over the sheeple's eyes. I guess you could say I am the fly in the ointment, the wrench in the system, the thorn in their side. I’m like the older brother sticking his finger an inch from his little brothers face while repeating, “I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you…”

Entry 68 It's officially Fall here in Southern California, which basically means it still feels like Summer. Daytime temps are in the 80's and 90's and humid in the evenings. It can be difficult to get into the Halloween spirit when the smell of suntan lotion fills the air and people are walking around in shorts and t-shirts. Here is Satan wishing for cooler weather <insert irony here>. I'm starting to think about what I want to be for All Hallows Eve. Since October 31 in Beth and my wedding anniversary, that night holds a special place in our hearts. Every year we do something fun and darkly-themed to celebrate our nuptials such as visit the Winchester Mystery House, take a trip to New Orleans or even go camping at a ghost town. But this year will be the first time I honor my love as Satan.

Entry 69 The yin and yang, the sex position, 96 to a dyslexic. The key is finding a balance. I'm finding out that I can't, and probably shouldn't try to save the world. A very wise supervisor once said to me, "Sometimes you've got to let it fail." This is a good reminder also to not draw too much attention to myself Satanic self. It's so easy to want to right every wrong, make every criminal pay for their crimes and be the hero, but I've got to remember - Satanic Lowriding (Satanic lowriding sounds like I'm riding around in a murdered out black Chevy Impala with red leather interior and hydraulics).

Entry 70 I have a confession, I like watching videos of people having huge pimples popped and blackheads squeezed. It's like a car crash, you don't want to look but you can't help it. Seeing the pus pulp of dead white blood cells and fresh red blood being pushed forth from the skin of their host makes me feel like I have the cleanest skin EVER! There is a woman on Facebook who goes by the name of Doctor POP that is a true artist at dermal cleansing. It's so beautifully sterile the way the patients are covered in surgical protectants leaving only the infected area exposed for Doctor POP to lacerate and squeeze like she's popping a champagne bottle with her latex covered fingers, true anatomic artistry.

Entry 71 Beth and I are not planning on having kids, but if we did, I'd like to use the names of the Devil to identify our little bundles of joy and also piss off the religious right. I just read an article about seven boys named Lucifer in England and Wales, how fun is that! Those towns are going think that it's an evil uprising coming to take over the World! I can just see our boy Lucifer burning up the streets on his skateboard, Satanas attending her first prom, and baby Beelzebub bouncin' 'round the room. My minion of misfit minors. I would teach our kids to be confident but not aggressive (unless it is necessary), to be proud of their names, and always keep their sense of humor. What will baby Bee's first word be, flies?

Entry 72 Last night I worked [security] for a wedding at the Garden. The usual big fancy set up with lots of staging, flowers, and rich people dressed to the 9's. The event was fine, until about 10:30 when a few of the neighbors in this wealthy suburb complained about the volume of the music coming from the dance floor. It was a beautiful celebration and everything was running smoothly until that visit by the police to turn things down, which did put a bit of a damper on the bride and grooms special day. As an anonymous wedding gift, I placed an invisible sound barrier around the property and told informed the DJ to turn it up. I asked my supervisor to step outside the gate of the garden near where the reception was being held to check the decibel reading. When she confirmed that it was quiet as a mouse across the street, we let the party rage on. The list of songs Mr. DJ was spinning from his laptop computer was an awesome mix of classic wedding tunes such as, "We Are Family" and "The Time of My Life, " to modern hip-hop. Mazel Tov you two crazy kids.

Entry 73 October 1st. Despite the fact that it is 95 degrees and sunny hasn't put a damper on my Halloween enthusiasm, as a matter of fact, it only motivates me more to find creative ways to celebrate All Hallows Eve. Since we are in Southern California and don't get the cool Fall weather with trees changing to a lovely Autumn orange and yellow, my image of this spooky time of year is that of an old western ghost town - dusty streets with tumbleweed blowing by, an old cemetery with wooden grave markers, and skeletons wearing cowboy hats and boots. Even though our apartment looks like we decorate for Halloween all year round, things get even more creepy during the last few months of the year. The 'Holiday Season' is a hauntingly beautiful time. Our neighbors have agreed to let me decorate the whole building, which means there will be a lot of traffic on our street due cars slowing down in amazement of our ghoulish display while expelling shrieks, ooo’s and ahhh’s. Time to start designing…

Entry 74 I had fun today at work doing nice, little, anonymous things for people. When I saw a co-worker with a handful of stuff approaching the reception door, I’d make the door gently swing open just as they arrived at the threshold. People would suddenly get great cell phone reception. Flowers would slowly fade from their original color to another hue, and then back. I even put a smile on a woman’s scowling face. Seeing the look of confusion convert to a pleasant surprise in her eyes was priceless.

Entry 75 Faux 'Service Dogs' used to really bother me when their obnoxious owners would get defensive when I would stop them to ask the two questions that, by law, I am allowed to ask, 1. Is it a Service Dog, and 2. What specific task is the dog trained to provide for their disability? The lying dog owner would always get agitated and blurt out something like, “Medical reasons” or “According to the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) you can’t ask me that” which just proves their dishonesty and arrogance. Now, I simply ask the dogs.

Today a couple tried to get in with not one, but two dogs. The white Maltese pups were on extending leashes held by the tattooed-shaved head-muscle shirt-douche with an attitude. When I asked him the questions he gave me the standard answers, they were service dogs and that I was not allowed to ask him the second question. I immediately looked down at the canines and asked them, “Are YOU Service Dogs?” to which they replied by telling me, “Service? We just want to run around, pee and poop!” They then both peed on their lying owners' legs and turn around to run back the other way. I politely look at him and said, “Service dogs huh? Get out and stop abusing a law that is for protecting the rights of disabled people whom legitimately need a dog to assist them through life.” He shot me a look of pure hatred that I found extremely humorous as they turned and stomped away, all the while his girlfriend never said a word, only rolling her eyes in embarrassment.

Entry 76 Typical of the church, they find something that people celebrate and enjoy and steal it for their own propaganda. I love a good haunted house, the more realistic the better. Hell Houses are the Christian haunted houses that show vignettes of the horrors of sinning - Anti-abortion, anti-drug, anti-free thinking, etc… The earliest hell house appears to have been created by Rev. Jerry Falwell in the late 1970s. The concept was picked up in 1992 by Keenan Roberts. His first Hell House was in Roswell, NM. Since then, he has become a pastor of the Destiny Church in Arvada, CO and sells Hell House Outreach™ kits to other churches. Included is a 263-page manual which covers everything from casting to publicity to instructions on how to make hamburger meat look like a fetus and where to store vats of blood. Roberts was once quoted saying that Hell Houses, "show young people that they can go to hell for abortion, adultery, homosexuality, drinking and other things unless they repent and end the behavior.” Can you believe this shit?!? Taking something fun like being frightened by gore and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night (which are healthy things to be afraid of), and scarring kids for life with these barbaric recruitment tactics.

There is a Hell House in West Hollywood, CA. I thought to myself, “How much fun would it be to visit their little moral macabre show and scare the Hell out of THEM?!?” So I did. It wasn’t very crowded, mostly parishioners of that church and their delusional families. I acted humble and quiet, waiting to see the horrors of modern life they were about to show me. In all of the rooms I went into, I changed the attitude of the actors to the enjoyment of the sin they were demonstratively demonstrating as opposed to the negative scare tactics of which they intended to portray. I had couples thanking God for the ability to get an abortion because of rape, men and women/men and men/women and women passionately making love, and one scene where a family was sitting around the kitchen table smoking pot and drinking wine and beer. For fear that anyone would see this gross display of carnal pleasure, this Hell House closed almost immediately after I left the premises.

Entry 77 So the story goes that back in the heyday of Rock and Roll on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood there was a drinking club made up of musicians known as the Hollywood Vampires who hung out at the famous Rainbow Bar on Sunset Blvd. next door to the Roxy club. They acquired the name Hollywood Vampires because they were only seen at night and quite often were drinking red wine. Fast forward to 2015. Three friends - Alice Cooper, Joe Perry of Aerosmith, and actor/musician Johnny Depp get together and decide to form a band to honor their dead drunk friends from rock and roll's past, and aptly name the band the Hollywood Vampires. Along with some of the best session players in the biz, the Vampires totally shred on songs by their friends from bands such as The Who, Led Zeppelin, T-Rex, and many others. I have been listening to their debut album non-stop for a couple of weeks! Alice Cooper being the rock and roll patriarch of the group owns the stage with his commanding prowess, while Joe, Johnny and the rest of the band rock the hell out of the songs of their fallen compadres. Never stop rockin’!  

Entry 78 I’m sort of happy that the folklore character Krampus is becoming more popular, at the same time I’d hate to see such kind-hearted ally become the victim of over-marketing. Krampus, in European folklore, looks like a fur-covered half goat/half demon. He plays the bad-cop to Saint Nicholas’ good-cop. While ol’ St. Nick rewarded the good children with toys, Krampus punished the bad kids by beating them with a birch switch, gathering them up in his wicker basket he wears on his back and tosses them into a special place in Hell. I’m tired of seeing all the faux goodwill towards man bullshit around Christmas time, and then it’s back to displaying our prejudices and hate to each other.

Entry 79 Not surprising, I support the supposed ‘War on Christmas.’ Of course, there is no War on Christmas, it’s just the extreme right-wing Christians that feel threatened because there are other people who celebrate the Winter Solstice differently than they do. Everything has to be “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays.” They get their Jesus loving panties in a bunch when Starbucks’ holiday cups don’t look Christmasy enough. They actually think that December 25th is the birthday of their fictional savior. Oy Vey.

Christmas lights on churches can’t seem to stay lit for some reason <wink wink>. People who display giant crosses as part of their Christmas decorations tend to find them inverted each night when they turn on their retina-burning light displays. Hypocrites who complain about Starbuck’s cups but continue to buy their coffee find that holding that not-Christmas-enough cup is impossible because it is hot as Hell in their sacred hands (making McDonald’s coffee seem like an ice bath).

Every time a choir sings, a demon gets their wings.

Entry 80 I think I’m going to take it easy for the rest of the year and wait for the overly sponsored Tournament of Roses Parade on New Years Day. Maybe I’ll hex the floats so that none of them stall or breakdown on the parade route. Happy New Year!©

[samoyeddaniel-blog]

Fake Boyfriend Pt. 2 | Fuckboy! Ong Seongwoo

genre: angst & fluff

member: Ong Seongwoo (ft. Yoon Jisung)

requested: yes

a/n: thank you so much for the many requests for me to make the part 2! So here you are! Because so many people asking for this, I'm really worried that it might not meet your expectations, but I hope you like it anyway!

warning: language, implied smut (there’s no actual smut though, because I can’t write smut). I don’t know what else, but yeah, things around that.

summary: your family kept pestering you to get a boyfriend so Seongwoo ended up becoming your fake boyfriend to stop them.

Part 1 | Part 2 (completed)

It'd been a month since the wedding and the last night on your Jeju trip was the last night you met Seongwoo.

As soon as you got back home, you resigned from your job and find a new one to avoid meeting Seongwoo. He sent you texts and called you everyday, only to be completely ignored by you. But after a week or so, he stopped trying to contact you. You wanted to snort and said in disappointment, that's it?

He didn't even stop by your house when he knew where you lived. He gave up too quickly when he hadn't even properly apologized for treating you like shit. Did you even mean something to him?

Yena and Jisung hadn't come back from their honeymoon, so you had to admit you got a bit lonely without them here, without Seongwoo. Shaking your head fervently, you thought, it's not like I want to see him anyway.

Well, you did think that. But your heart didn't stop from missing him every second. You often found yourself hovering over your phone screen, itching to type a message to him, asking how he was doing, thinking whether you had been too harsh towards him. You only managed to stop yourself when you nearly tapped the send button.

Your little pride couldn't take it if you were the one to send a message first. He was the one who did wrong, why would you need to text him first? He was the one who needed to apologize, not you. With that mindset, you continued to avoid texting him first. He needed to work a bit harder than this to earn your forgiveness. Besides, what he had done to you was intolerable. This was a given.

A month passed since the wedding and the couple had come back from their honeymoon. You went to visit their new house to help them with moving their things. You didn't expect that Seongwoo would be there, innocently showing up in front of you after a month not seeing you at all as if there's nothing wrong between the two of you. You turned on your heel immediately when you spotted him, only to be stopped by Yena.

"I know what he did is horrible," Yena said, squeezing your shoulders to calm you down. "But give him a break okay? He only wants to talk to you. Listen to him first, then you can leave." She turned to look at Seongwoo who was staring at nothingness. You followed her gaze. "He's been... I don't know... off lately. This must have been bothering him a lot. I heard from our friends that he hasn't gone to a single party since then. Jisung also said none of his friends saw him in any night clubs either. Can you believe it? Seongwoo the party boy? Not attending parties for a month?"

You stared at Seongwoo for another minute and saw that something was indeed odd. He didn't have the light he used to have in his eyes. He no longer had the occasional playful grin on his face. His expression was gloomy and he spaced out a lot. This was not the Seongwoo you knew.

You sighed and threw your hands up in surrender. You knew this was going to happen sooner or later. There's no way you could avoid him forever. "Fine. Only talk, okay?"

Yena nodded and went out of the house with Jisung to buy food, leaving you and Seongwoo to have a private talk alone. You took a seat on the couch where he was sitting and waited for him to start the conversation. He was staring into nothingness, presumably zoning out again. When no one talked after a few minutes, you cleared your throat awkwardly, the silence suffocating you.

"Well? I heard you don't do parties anymore," you began, glancing at Seongwoo to make sure he paid attention to you.

Seongwoo took a deep breath and leant back in his seat. "I'm feeling too awful lately to attend any parties. And about us..." He paused and gulped nervously. "I don't even know where to start."

Trying to be patient with him, you held yourself back from storming out of the house, remembering your promise with Yena to talk to him. "They're not going back soon. Take your time. I'm listening."

Seongwoo was hesitant before he said, "This might sound like an excuse to you, but I have a reason why I don't do relationships."

You almost scoffed, but made it just in time to stop yourself. "And why is that?"

"You know that my parents are divorced, right?"

You remembered when you asked about his parents when you visited his house, he told you that they're divorced and quickly shrugged it off as you tried to ask more things about it. "Yeah. I think you mentioned it to me before. Does it have something to do with that?"

Seongwoo nodded slowly, his eyes filled with sadness. "My mom cheated on my dad. She got married again with her superior at work right after the divorce."

"I'm sorry," was the only thing you could say. You didn't know he'd been hiding this from you for such a long time when you thought you already knew everything about him because you'd been friends for a decade.

"Don't be," Seongwoo said with a weak smile. "I should have told you earlier. Before... things happened. Anyway, after my parents divorced, I don't believe in committed relationships. Or either, I don't want to believe, afraid of ending up hurt just like my dad. That's why I started playing around, leaving before I got attached. I'm just a coward that's scared to get hurt."

You stayed silent, waiting for him to continue.

Seongwoo looked at you in the eye. "And then you came. I always find myself get drawn to you, so I panicked. I slept around even more and partied even harder just to get over you. But I failed and you don't know how scared I am to lose you. Yeah, I know I'm selfish.That's why I agreed to the fake dating thing. It's the only way I can know how it's like to have you while I don't have to be in a relationship with you. But the longer I spend time as your fake boyfriend, I can't help myself but want you all for myself. And when the desire to be in a relationship with you got stronger, I panicked and planned to get over you again by going back to my old habit. I'm really sorry that I did that to you. I regretted it a lot. You're nice and you don't deserve all that shit. I'm just too afraid to start a relationship."

Giving him a warm gaze and a smile, you tried to understand how he felt. You tried to imagine how would you feel if you were in his shoes. Suddenly, all the things he did were understandable. What he did was still wrong, but he had reasons why; what happened to his family scarred him. And now that he opened up to you, you started to understand him better.

"I think I can understand you, Seongwoo," you said. "We all are afraid to get hurt. But if you find the right person, you will be able to get through everything together and be happy. If you're too scared to try, you'll never know whether that person is right for you."

"I'm sorry, Y/N. I'm just not ready," Seongwoo said, burying his face in his hands.

You tapped his shoulder reassuringly. "It's alright. You can start by viewing relationships differently. And," You pouted, "stop sleeping around, will you?"

Seongwoo let out a light chuckle and it brought a smile to your face. He patted your head and said, "If you haven't noticed, I haven't been playing around for a month now and that's a record." He looked at you fondly before continuing, "Will you wait for me, Y/N? Until I'm ready?"

"Well, I'm not sure. If you take too long, I might be taken by someone else," you teased.

He laughed again and you didn't realize how much you liked the sound of it. "I miss you a lot," he said softly.

You gave him a smile. "Me too."

Then you heard someone knocking on the front door, so you reluctantly left the couch and opened the door to find the married couple standing behind it.

"Why would you knock on the door of your own house?" you asked incredulously.

Yena playfully slapped your arm. "Come on. We don't want to walk in on you when you two are in the middle of "something"."

"Yena!"

***

"I still can't believe that last year you would go as far as fake dating your best friend to shut me up." Yena shook her head, looking disappointed at you.

You rolled your eyes. "You just wouldn't stop worrying, so I couldn't help it, okay?"

You were now in Yena and Jisung's house to celebrate their first wedding anniversary while reminiscing last year's event in Jeju. They also invited Seongwoo, but he's nowhere to be seen. You hadn't met him at all since your last meeting a month after wedding last year. You wanted to give him time and space he needed to think, so you decided it would be better to not see and contact him at all, but now that it'd been around a year since then, you wanted to see him badly.

You heard from Jisung that Seongwoo now worked with him in his company. And that he had changed so much. He would rather stay up late to work overtime than attend parties, which would have sounded impossible for the party boy Seongwoo. Sometimes, Jisung was worried that he would overwork himself. Hearing that, you too were worried.

"No need to worry," Jisung suddenly said to you and you realized you had spaced out on them. "He's fine. And he's coming."

You offered him a smile. "It's fine if he's not coming actually."

After a year passed, you weren't sure whether Seongwoo still had feelings for you. It's totally possible that he'd moved on to someone else. You're not dating him anyway. He's free to date anyone he wanted if he had changed his opinion about committed relationships.

Then you thought your heart jumped out of your ribcage when you heard someone knocking on the door. Yena laughed at your reaction and you blushed out of embarrassment.

"See? He's coming," Jisung said and went to open the door. You were too impatient to wait and followed him to the front door. Yena, still laughing, walked behind you.

The door was opened to reveal Seongwoo in a suit holding a bouquet of flowers and the view took your breath away. You missed him so much and seeing him standing in front of you looking very handsome certainly didn't help. It took all of your willpower to not hug him right there right now.

Seongwoo didn't get to say anything before Jisung and Yena went out of the house and locked the house from outside. The lock sound distracted you from Seongwoo and you quickly tried to open the door, but of course, it was locked.

"Take all the time you need. We'll be back in the morning. You're welcome," Yena chirped from behind the door and you heard them walking away from the house.

Silence fell upon the two of you after realizing that they really had left you two alone, locked up inside their house. You two just stood there, right by the door, awkwardly stealing glances at each other.

"Hi, Y/N. Long time no see," Seongwoo finally began.

You were barely able to hear him over the loud sound of your heart beating. "Hi, Seongwoo."

Seongwoo offered you the bouquet of flowers he was holding. "This is for you. I hope you like it."

A smile crept into your face as you couldn't hide your happiness. "Thanks. It's beautiful, Seongwoo."

Returning your smile, Seongwoo said, "Let's go inside. They won't come back until tomorrow. You heard her."

You nodded and followed him to the living room, taking a seat next to him on the couch. Your eyes were fixed on the bouquet of flowers in your hand as you tried to calm yourself down. But it seemed impossible when he was sitting so close to you. There were so many things you wanted to ask him. However, at the same time, you didn't know what to say. It'd been so long since you last saw him.

"So, how have you been, Y/N?" Seongwoo broke the silence.

"Fine. Work is busy like usual. How about you?" you asked.

"I've been missing you all the time, so I bury myself in work to take my mind off you," he said, staring at you lovingly. "I miss you, Y/N."

"Me too," you said, relieved knowing that he still had feelings for you.

"Can I kiss you?" Seongwoo asked nonchalantly and caught you off guard. You hadn't expected the question you gaped at him, eyes wide with surprise.

Soon, you recovered from the shock and remembered the last time he kissed you and how the kiss hurt the two of you.

You sighed and shook your head. "No, Seongwoo. If you're still not ready, we better-"

Seongwoo shut you up by pressing his lips against yours. Distracted from what you're talking about, you melted into the kiss and kissed him back. You missed kissing him and how amazing it felt. You and him. It'd been something you'd been wanting for years. So you reluctantly pulled away when you realized what you were doing.

You smiled sadly. "No, Seongwoo. We can't do this again. You know what happened last time. I can't risk-"

"I'm ready, Y/N," Seongwoo cut you off.

"What?"

He took away the bouquet from your hand and placed it on the coffee table. Then he took both of your hands in his.

Staring into your eyes, he said, "I saw couples get hurt and break up, but I also saw couples get married and live happily. I'm willing to take chances and try it with you. I want to be happy with you. I want to find out whether you're the right person for me. I'm ready to try because I love you so much, Y/N. So, will you be my girlfriend?"

Tears rolled down your cheeks as you leant closer to him and kissed him again. You wrapped your arms around his neck, trying to believe that this was happening. It felt surreal that he was asking you out. It was something you never imagined. You were crying again when you kissed him, but this time, it was tears of joy.

After he broke off the kiss, Seongwoo asked carefully, "Is that a yes?"

"Yes, you idiot." You smiled from ear to ear, wiping your tears from your cheeks.

Seongwoo was about to close the gap between you to kiss you again when his phone rang. He took out his phone and opened the message he got. You too looked at the screen; it was from Jisung, but it was most likely Yena using Jisung's phone to message him.

Don't fuck on our bed, please. Use the guest room. Have fun.

"What the hell?" you said, cheeks reddening from embarrassment.

But then Seongwoo shoved his phone into his pocket and jumped to his feet. He suddenly lifted you up with both hands and you quickly wrapped your arms around his neck, holding on for dear life.

"What are you doing, Seongwoo?" you asked in confusion as he continued walking. "Where are we going?"

Seongwoo smirked at you. "Guest room of course."

a/n: thank you so much for loving the story! I hope this makes sense and hope you guys like the ending! Tell me what you think!

[sending-the-message]

My mom never forgave me for breaking her uterus. by AnonymouslyCreepy

My mom never forgave me for breaking her uterus. I think that’s why she won’t give back my baby.

I had my daughter when I was seventeen. I wasn’t ready to be a mother. But who’s ever ready, really? My mom promised me she’d help. “Don’t get an abortion. We got this.”

I believed her too. My mom’s only 37. She always had a ton of energy so I knew she’d be able to chase after an infant when the time came. She was vibrant and smart and charming. I always thought Mom deserved more than she got out of life. See, my mother couldn’t have kids after me. I messed her up somehow. Secondary infertility, I think, is the official term.

After I gave birth, my mom convinced me that I should still get an education. So I lived at home with my mom and baby Nora and attended community college at night.

It was a great set up, really. But two years in, my mom announced she was kicking me out. She claimed I stole her painkillers. My mom has always been a little high strung. These kinds of accusations came up a lot. I was used to it by then.

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll stay at a friend’s house. But I’m taking Nora with me.”

Mom went nuts when I said that that. She threatened to have me arrested. She’d tell police she found coke in my room. She’d black her own eye and say that I punched her. She’d say I was abusing Nora. Who would they believe?

My mom had a point. She had credibility. My stepfather had been chief of the police department before he died. They had a great marriage and they were a very social and well-respected couple. Everyone knew my mom. Everyone liked her. She taught elementary school. She exuded patience and sweetness. She was able to sound sincere when she needed to and firm when appropriate.

That’s why when she left my biological father and remarried only two weeks after the divorce was finalized, no one judged her. My dad killed himself after that, but my mom convinced everyone that he was an abusive alcoholic. I overheard her telling a neighbor that, while was devastated by what happened to her ex-husband, she couldn’t say she was shocked given his “demons.” I was angry with my mother after I heard her say that. I missed my father so much I thought I would die too. But my mother told me that my dad never loved me — that he really killed himself to get out of paying child support. I was only seven and, although I didn’t know what child support was, I figured if my mother said it, then it must have been true. My mom said it was alright though because she’d found a new man to take care of us. And wasn’t I happy about that?

In all honesty, my stepfather was a good man. He was kind to me and he never argued with my mom. Except at night time. I didn’t understand what they were talking about back then. Now I know that my mom was going through some sort of IVF treatment at the time. My stepfather’s health insurance had paid for it at first, but I guess didn’t work, since no baby came. Apparently treatment is expensive and insurance stopped paying after a while. My mom wanted my stepdad to take out a loan so they could try again. He refused and, eventually, everyone stopped talking about it.

On the Fourth of July, my stepfather died. I was eleven. He was on the deck barbecuing with my mom, and I was inside watching tv.

When I heard my mother shrieking I rushed through the kitchen and out through the sliding door to where she was standing with a set of tongs in her hand, looking down. I still can’t stand the smell of charcoal. My mom said he was swatting a bee away and had fallen down the steps. Broke his neck on impact.

It was just the two of us after that.

I admit that I started to feel sorry for my mother then. Two dead husbands. All she had was me. And I wasn’t overly bright or athletic or talented. But I gave her a grandchild. That I was able to do.

And now she won’t give her back.

My first mistake was leaving that first night my mom threatened me. I should have just let her call the police. But I figured she’d cool off by morning. She couldn’t really mean to keep me from my own kid. I’d stay with my friend, Lauren, for a day or two, and everything would blow over.

Well, the next day, my mother informed me via text that she planned to sue for full custody of Nora. I’m not fit, she said. I’m too young to take care of a baby. She’d woken up with Nora in the night when she was sick. She’d fed her and clothed her and read her stories. Now that Nora was two, she needed a stable parent.

“But she isn’t yours” I texted back. “I’m her mother.”

“You don’t know what a mother is”, my mother replied.

That was the last text I got from her.

That was alright though. We’d let a judge decide.

I was smart enough to lawyer up. There’s a nonprofit in my area that helps women in my situation. Free of charge. My mom has more money - she was able to get a better lawyer. But at least I wasn’t alone.

I was nervous though. I had never been to court before. Much less for anything that would affect my entire life. What if my mom was awarded full custody? What if I am unfit?

As I sat in court, I avoided looking at my mother. I fixed my eyes on anything I could except for her. The bailiff’s shiny black boots. The court clerk’s blown out ’80s hairdo. The judge’s name plate. Honorable Saul Oliver Mann. I tried looking at the judge himself but quickly changed my mind. His eyes were onyx-colored. They reminded me of charcoal.

I can’t tell you much about the hearing. It was a blur. I know by the end it was decided that my mother and I would split custody. My lawyer said we could appeal, but I said it was alright. As long as I could see my child.

I remember the day the bell rang. I rushed to the door. My baby was here. Finally.

But when I opened the door to the condo and looked out, I saw nothing. I sighed. I had thought ding dong ditch went out of style decades ago. I happened to look down. And that’s when I saw the package. I figured it had to be for Lauren. I picked it up and saw my name on the postage. That was odd because I hadn’t ordered anything, and very few people knew where I was staying.

But I took the box inside and put it on the table. I grabbed a steak knife and used it to saw through the tape. Finally I got the thing open and had to dig through about a half pound of newspaper to get to whatever was inside.

I think that’s when I screamed. I’m not entirely sure, since I passed out almost immediately.

Lauren must have found us when she came home from work. Poor girl. No one should come home to that. She managed to call the police and the paramedics. I remember waking up at the hospital. Apparently, after I came to, I had to be tranquilized. That day is kind of blurry too.

Lauren sent me a letter a few weeks ago. Although she had to take antipsychotics for a while just to function, she’s doing a lot better now. I’m glad for her.

Unfortunately, the authorities never found my mother. Or the other half of my daughter.

My new roommate Stacy tells me none of this is my fault. But Stacy’s sixth identity, Meghan, thinks I’m at least partly to blame.

I don’t care much what Stacy or Meghan think. I just wish Stacy would stop coughing up her meds so she could get better. I keep telling her the nurses will catch on eventually. She calls me a hypocrite though since I’m storing my own meds like a junkie.

I at least have a good reason though. If I save enough of the pills, I’ll be able to see my baby again.

[snowlessknitter]

Uncle Angelo: Please, I’m begging you as a man of the cloth!

Dorothy: Now I know how Jessica Hahn must have felt.

Welcome to another edition of “snowlessknitter Explains the a Golden Girls Joke”!

In this scene from the episode “My Brother, My Father”, Dorothy’s uncle Angelo (played by Bill Dana, who was added as a recurring character after the actress who played Sophia’s sister Angela, Nancy Walker, retired) who was supposedly a Catholic priest, was begging for Dorothy to sleep with her ex-husband Stan (and Dorothy and Stan were pretending to still be married for Angelo’s benefit, as not to upset the “priest” with news of their divorce). Ultimately, it was revealed that Angelo never actually entered the priesthood due to falling for the booty of a Sicilian beauty named Filomena; he only pretended to be one so that he wouldn’t break a promise he made to his mother on her deathbed. Turns out Angelo never liked Stan to begin with, he’s a yutz.

So, in order to understand the joke, let’s set up a little background:

Before we talk about Jessica Hahn, we have to talk about Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye LaValley married in 1961 after meeting at a Bible college in Minnesota the previous year. (A Bible college is a Protestant Christian-affiliated institution that usually focuses on seminary studies and preparing students for ministry.) They ended up dropping out of college after marrying so that they could pursue careers as evangelists. In 1966 they began working for the Christian Broadcasting Network, which was founded by Pat Robertson (yes, that Pat Robertson), and their entertainment-based approach to ministry helped to grow the fledgling channel’s viewing audience. They left CBN in 1972 over philosophical differences with Robertson, and then helped to launch another televangelism network, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, before launching their own network, the PTL Television Network (PTL being an acronym for “Praise the Lord”) in 1974. Two years later, PTL’s parent company changed its name to Heritage Village Church & Missionary Fellowship. Around this time, the company started purchasing properties in South Carolina to develop into a theme park and resort complex called Heritage USA.

From Jim Bakker’s Wikipedia article:

In 1979, Bakker and his PTL ministry came under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for allegedly misusing funds raised on the air. The FCC report was finalized in 1982 and found that Bakker had raised $350,000 that he told viewers would go towards funding overseas missions but were actually used to pay for part of Heritage USA. The report also found that Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker used PTL funds for personal expenses. FCC commissioners voted four to three to drop the investigation, after which they allowed Bakker to sell the only TV station that he owned, therefore bypassing future FCC oversight. The FCC forwarded their report to the Justice Department, who declined to press charges, citing insufficient evidence. Bakker used the controversy to raise more funds from his audience, branding the investigation a "witch-hunt", and asking viewers to "give the Devil a black eye".

A confidential 1985 Internal Revenue Service report found that $1.3 million in ministry funds were used for the Bakkers' personal benefit from 1980 to 1983. The report recommended that PTL be stripped of its tax-exempt status but no action was taken until the Jessica Hahn scandal in 1987. Art Harris and Michael Isikoff wrote in The Washington Post that politics may have played a role in the three government agencies taking no action against PTL despite the evidence against them, as members of the Reagan administration were not eager to go after television ministers whose evangelical followers made up their base.

Here’s where Jessica Hahn comes in. In 1980, she was working as a church secretary. She alleges that on the afternoon of December 6, 1980, Jim Bakker and another pastor working for PTL, John Wesley Fletcher, drugged and raped her in a 15-minute encounter in a hotel room in Clearwater, Florida. Bakker and Fletcher both admitted to having sex with Hahn, but claimed that the encounter was consensual. In 1981, Fletcher was defrocked by the Assemblies of God (the Pentecostal group the Bakkers belonged to) for alleged homosexuality. Fletcher pleaded guilty to perjury for his role in the Hahn scandal and was sentenced to three years probation in 1990. Fletcher died in 1996, reportedly from AIDS. The Hahn incident wasn’t made public until 1987, when reports of multiple scandals involving the Bakkers surfaced, in which it was revealed that Hahn had been paid $279,000 in hush money (with the transaction handled by Roe Messner, who was a church builder and property developer who would later go on to marry Tammy Faye after she and Jim divorced in the wake of the scandal) and that Jim Bakker had been keeping two sets of books in order to hide his financial indiscretions. Jim Bakker resigned from PTL as a result. The Charlotte Observer published several articles exposing the organization’s fundraising activities between 1984 and 1987 and found the following (from Bakker’s Wikipedia article):

Bakker and his PTL associates sold $1,000 "lifetime memberships", entitling buyers to an annual three-night stay at a luxury hotel at Heritage USA, during that period. According to the prosecution at Bakker's fraud trial, tens of thousands of memberships were sold but only one 500-room hotel was ever finished. Bakker sold "exclusive partnerships" which exceeded capacity, raising more than twice the money needed to build the hotel. Much of the money paid Heritage USA's operating expenses, and Bakker kept $3.4 million.

This led to a 16-month grand jury investigation and in 1988, he was indicted on eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy. A 1989 trial found him guilty on all 24 counts. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison and ordered to pay a $500,000 fine, although the prison sentence and fine were later voided on appeal (although his convictions were upheld). His prison sentence was reduced to eight years, and he was released on parole in late 1994 after serving five years in federal prison.

Tammy Faye had divorced Jim in March 1992, while he was still in prison, and married Roe Messner the following year. She remained married to Messner until her 2007 death from cancer. Jim remarried to Lori Beth Graham (herself a former televangelist) in September 1998 after knowing each other only 50 days. They are still married today and she is frequently seen on his current TV show, The Jim Bakker Show. Bakker no longer preaches the “prosperity gospel” that made him famous in his early career and now is an apocalypticist. He focus most of his preaching on the “end of days” and has been selling doomsday supplies through his ministry, although his recent claims during the coronavirus pandemic have earned him a lot of scrutiny from state and federal governments alike and he claims his ministry is now on the brink of filing for bankruptcy.

As for Hahn, she pursued a career in modeling and acting for a while after the scandal, including posing for Playboy and being in a brief relationship with comedian Sam Kinison. She would make guest appearances on Howard Stern’s radio show for the next two decades, but ultimately retired from show business and now lives on a ranch outside of Los Angeles with her husband, former stuntman Frank Lloyd.

If you’re interested, the ABC series 20/20 put together a wonderful documentary special of the Bakkers’ rise and fall, which can be seen here. I don’t know if this is viewable outside the United States.

[mermaidsirennikita]

Book Roundup -- April 2017

I completed by challenge of reading 50 books in 2017.... today.  Admittedly this is usually a pretty low bar for me, but I don’t wanna go any higher than 50 just in case I suddenly get super fucking busy or my speed-reading powers deactivate.

Anyway.  Most of the books I read this month were honestly mediocre to poor, but I did discover two books towards the end of the month ( “Feast of Sorrow” and “Crazy Rich Asians”) that not only introduced me to new authors but pretty much thrilled me.

So, without further ado:

The Night Mark by Tiffany Reisz.  3/5.  Still mourning the death of her first husband, Faye ends up divorcing the man she married for convenience and heading to coastal South Carolina in an attempt to resume her former career as a photographer.  After learning the local legend of a lighthouse keeper’s ill-fated daughter in the 1920s, she accidentally ends up in the water--and wakes up in the body of Faith Morgan, said ill-fated 1920s girl.  This book is definitely a romance novel, and it’s a lot of fun.  As with any romance novel, there are some random choices that are kind of done, and the plot is somewhat convoluted, and the time travel aspects of the plot don’t always make sense....  But it was fluffy.  It made me happy.  It made me homesick, for that matter.  If you’re looking for a quick, somewhat mindless read with some nice sexual tension-filled scenes, go for it.  (If anything, I feel like this would have been improved with a few more sex scenes.  To be honest.)  It’s note quite peak trashy time travel romance novel a la Jude Deveraux’s Knight In Shining Armor, but it’s good.

Love for Sale: A World History of Prostitution by Nils Johan Ringdal.  4/5.  A non-fiction history of prostitution spanning from ancient myths to the present day.  The book does a good job of covering the East and West--though more attention is paid to Europe than anywhere else, Asia gets a good amount of attention.  At certain points, it does get a bit dry.  But it does the job, and is very interesting and informative.

Alex, Approximately by Jenn Bennett.  4/5.  In this YA contemporary, Bailey moves to California, not telling her Californian longtime online penpal, Alex, that she’s done so.  (She has confrontation problems.)  Upon beginning a museum job, she falls into a love-hate tension-filled relationship with security guard Porter, not realizing that he--of course--is Alex.  This is pitched as a modern-day You’ve Got Mail, so I don’t think that’s a spoiler.  Honestly, I was so pleasantly surprised by this book.  I was beginning to think that YA contemporaries just weren’t for me anymore, and something about the chemistry and characters in “Alex, Approximately” just got me.  Certain dramatic backstories were a bit much, but ultimately the chemistry between Bailey and Porter sold this book for me. They felt like actual teenagers who were actually into each other, and lately I feel like the YA I’ve been reading is too sugary to accurately portray that.  Overall, this is a definite summer/spring rec from me.

Marriage Most Scandalous by Johanna Lindsey.  2/5.  This was a pretty typical historical romance bodice ripper, about this dude who killed his best friend by accident in a duel years back?  And is now a sort of mercenary detective type?  So years after said accidental murder, his father’s ward comes a-knockin’, all grown up and such, and she thinks his dad is being targeted by someone evil.  Of course they have to pretend to be married to figure out what’s afoot, and you can take it from there.  I don’t think I like Regency bodice rippers as much as I do like... Viking romances, or Highlander stories.  I feel like bodice rippers should be set in “rougher” times so the extreme fuckery going on is easier to dismiss as part of the fantasy.  Plus, idk, some viking dude capturing the self-insert heroine and teaching her the ways of erotic love is just sexier to me than a dude named Sebastian having a secret identity as the Raven.  I never said I wasn’t problematic.

Literally by Lucy Keating.  1/5.  Annabelle is in the midst of upheaval in personal life when she meets the perfect boy, Will--and finds out that she’s actually the main character in a story by the author Lucy Keating.  K.  This could have been good, but it’s pretty much ruined as soon as Lucy Keating introduces herself.  She’s referred to as Lucy Keating for the whole book; Annabelle thinks about how beautiful she is and her cute clothes; she’s all ambiguous and strange and self-adoring.  This was one of the most uncomfortable, awkward books I’ve ever read.

The Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli.  3/5.  This YA contemporary is about Molly, a girl whose insecurity about her weight--and inevitable comparisons to her beautiful twin, Cassie--has her constantly crushing on people that she finds unattainable.  After Cassie falls head over heels for Mina, Molly feels pressured to like Will, Mina’s cute and sweet friend.  But she also likes--perhaps more genuinely--Reid, who is, like Molly, overweight and maybe a bit uncool.  This is less a romance--or I was less interested in the romance--than a story about Molly and Cassie growing up and apart.  Molly’s insecurities are driven in part by her comparing herself to Cassie; at the same time, the main reason why she doesn’t want to like Reid is that she thinks he’ll pull her further from her twin.  That’s a super interesting, real conflict.  The romances I found less compelling.  The book includes a lot of diversity, but at a certain point it did feel a bit... checking the boxes-esque?  Like, Molly thought back to this boy she crushed on, and specified that he was a trans boy even though it added nothing to the story and really served more to set him apart, in his two paragraphs of page time, as “special” compared to the cis boys Molly had crushed on.  I get what the author was going for, but it came off as a bit awkward sometimes.  Overall however, this is a very earnest and sweet read.

Given to the Sea by Mindy McGinnis. 2/5.  Khosa is the latest in a long line of women “given” to the sea--she’s destined dance into the sea as a sacrifice to prevent it from swallowing up her homeland.  Before she does that, of course, she needs to give birth to a daughter who will follow in her footsteps.  Trouble is, Khosa is afraid of being touched.  Aaaaaand that’s pretty much what I got from this.  The story has an interesting mythology and I liked the sort of writing style McGinnis was going for, but that’s it.  I kind of debate even giving it a 2/5 for that.  There were too many narrators (Khosa, the prince type guy she met, and his adopted sister I got but there was one guy whose presence as a narrator I never understood) and the plot was very... vague.  I got that Khosa was doomed to be sacrificed and needed to get knocked up, but everything else was extremely hard to understand.  And I was trying.  I really tried.  It just never got there for me.

The Perfect Stranger by Megan Miranda.  2/5.  I really enjoyed Miranda’s previous thriller, “All The Missing Girls”, but this one just... numbed me.  It seemed like a much more standard “what happened to the missing/dead person” story than “ATMG” was, and it never clicked.  

My Sister Rosa by Justine Larbalestier.  4/5.  Che (yes, named after THAT Che because his parents are The Worst) is a teenager moving from Australia to New York.  Also, his little sister Rosa is fucking psychopath.  Rosa has been wrong since she was a baby, but Che is the only one in his family who acknowledges this--ironically, because his parents are always occupied with hippy-type projects that are meant to save the world.  Che knows exactly how dangerous the unfeeling Rosa is, and how easily she manipulates everyone around her.  And of course, she catapults the family into disaster.  This book was pretty chilling at times.  For that matter, it actually had explanations for things that bothered me--why Che’s parents were so shitty, for example.  Threads like those would have been dropped in another book, and I appreciate Larbalestier following up on them.  It’s a really effective thriller; perhaps the most convincing part of it is how much Che loves his sister, despite everything.  The book isn’t quite scary, but it is creepy--and quite sad at points.

The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi.  4/5.  From 1968, a serial killer terrorized the hills surrounding Florence.  The killer would spy on couples parked to have sex--a common practice in Italy, where people usually didn’t leave their parents’ homes until they married--shoot both of them, and often mutilate the women’s bodies in a sexually motivated manner.  There have been a number of suspects, some of which have been convicted then exonerated.  Italian journalist Mario Spezi had been following the case for decades when he met American thriller novelist Douglas Preston.  Forming a friendship, the two began researching the murders, leading to both of them tangling with the Italian authorities (including the prosecutor who botched Amanda Knox’s case; and if you didn’t think she was innocent before you read this book, you probably will after).  The book is divided into two parts--that detailing Mario Spezi’s investigation of the murders as they happened, and then what happened after Preston got involved. Preston describes Florence and the unique Florentine attitude well, but honestly I got frustrated with him a lot.  He seemed so ~shocked~ that the Italian authorities didn’t function in the same way that they do in America.  I figured that out pretty quickly after landing in Italy for my year abroad, and I was 20 at the time.  Also, like...  it wasn’t hard to keep my head down.  I get Preston’s motivations, but his story is less interesting than Spezi’s, which isn’t surprising.  Am I 100% sure that they found the true killer?  No, but their guy seems more likely than anyone else who’s been a suspect.  This is a very gripping, very interesting true crime story that I definitely recommend.

Feast of Sorrow by Crystal King.  4/5.  Thrasius, a young Roman slave, is bought by the patrician Apicius due to his exception skills in the kitchen.  Apicius wants to become the gastronomic adviser of Caesar Augustus, and he believes that Thrasius is his ticket to fave.  What follows is the decades long saga of Thrasius as he helps his often-capricious master and bonds with Apicius’s family, particular his master’s wife, Aelia, and his daughter, Apicata.  But Apicius’s ambition and hunger for renown knows no bounds, and he drags Thrasius and his family into the depths of Roman politics with him.  So this book was actually a really, really compelling read.  King has a talent for description, and as a recurring backdrop of the drama is cookbook(s) that Thrasius is helping Apicius put together... I got hungry fast.  King also has a talent for creating that sense of the Roman world, beyond the famous people.  She created an environment that felt real and everyday to me, while at the same time keying in the drama when she needed to.  I will definitely be picking up her next book, especially if it’s historical fiction.  I couldn’t put this down.  With that being said, there were a couple of things that kept this from being a 5/5 for me.  One was Thrasius’s romance with fellow slave Pallia--it felt very plot-device-y to me; I mean, you do need to give Thrasius a motivation to stay with his master even when he’s a dick (beyond his own life) and yes having him fall in love with a woman brings in the possibility of Babies as an added motivation, but also...  I kinda wish that Thrasius had fallen in love with a dude.  His chemistry and sex scenes with Pallia felt super forced, but his scenes with other men were more... interesting.  Towards the end of the book, the melodrama got dialed up a little too much--like I know it’s not Feast of Sunshine and Daisies but holy shit.  Some fact-checking proves, though, that King did her research and the goriest parts of the book did happen.  So overall, I’d highly recommend this to anyone who wants to read an entertaining novel of Ancient Rome.

The Last Neanderthal by Claire Cameron.  3/5.  This novel takes the perspective of Girl, a young female Neanderthal who, due to a sudden turn of events, ends up alone in the wilderness with Runt, a strange young  boy her family adopted.  At the same time, it tells the story of Rose, a pregnant archeologist who has discovered two unique skeletons and is racing against the clock to finish her project before her baby comes.  This is very much what you might call a feminist read--it’s about different aspects of women’s lives, how much has changed, how much... hasn’t.  What I found particularly interesting was the look at sexism--particularly towards women who choose to become mothers--in the academic world of archeology.  Unfortunately, I can’t say I super liked the book because Girl’s side was... well, kind of a downer.  It’s realistic, but strict realism doesn’t always make the best story; and at any rate, who knows how realistic it is? We’re talking about Neanderthals here.  Also, I feel like some people will really appreciate the degree to which Claire Cameron describes things, but like.  Dude.  Once we start talking in detail about the smell of a Neanderthal’s cervical fluids, I’m kinda out.  But I gave it three stars because it is well-written and it is an interesting angle to take, it’s just not for me.

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan.  5/5.  American Born Chinese (ABC) girl (but not really) Rachel Chu has been dating the charming Nick Young--her first Asian boyfriend--for about two years, and finally agrees to spend the summer with him in Asia as he stands as the best man in his friend’s wedding.  Nick is charming, kind, and handsome--also, he’s mega-rich, as Rachel only discovers upon arriving in Singapore and meeting his family, including his formidable mother Eleanor.  Nick hails from not one but two different elite clans in Singapore society, and not only is his mother plotting against no-name Rachel--so are all the women who want to get their claws into him and his bloodline.  There are several different, super-interesting subplots going on too, but that’s the main story.  And it’s great.  This book is the perfect blend of insightful social commentary--from someone who would actually know what’s he’s talking about, rather than an outsider white author--and catty drama.  Rachel is probably not the most interesting character here, but she’s supposed to be the good girl, and she’s not bland.  She’s smart and sticks up for herself, even if she’s a bit naive.  Nick is a decent guy, if not perfect--he’s ignorant to the complications of his own world because... it’s his world, and he’s a man and therefore not privy to many of the machinations the women perform.  The two most compelling characters are Astrid, Nick’s beautiful cousin who’s just beginning to recognize the cracks in her marriage, and Eleanor, his mother.  Eleanor is AMAZING, the perfect mom from Hell without being a caricature.  Her concerns go over the top, but they stem from a valid place, especially when you take cultural norms into consideration.  Also, she’s being played by Michelle Yeoh in the movie so... I’m hype.  Loved this.  It was one of my longer books of the month, but I sped through it in two days.

[realrhythmskrp]

DISPATCH, (04/19/17): BKB Entertainment has officially released information about leader and main vocalist, Kim Wonseok, on PARAL/L’s official website! Wonseok is a ‘90 liner and has been beloved by fans since his debut in 2011. Find out more about Wonseok below!

I, KIM WONSEOK, have read and understand the terms and conditions as my position of LEADER and agree to honor the standards that are to be expected of me as an employee of BKB ENTERTAINMENT.

OOC INFORMATION

Preferred name: Ji

Pronouns: she/her

Timezone: GMT+1

Other muses: N/A

Password (for reservations only): dangerous

Skype: N/A :c

IC INFORMATION

Faceclaim: Lee Kikwang of Highlight

Name: Kim Wonseok

Stage name (if applicable): N/A

Idol concept: At first, his concept was supposed to be that of a ‘church oppa’ – with the kind boy next door vibe. That, however, conflicted with the controversies he soon got wrapped up in so it was quickly changed to something more fitting (and thus believable): the grandpa. Still kind, still caring, but also stereotypically straightforward yet measured. Wonseok welcomed the change because he no longer has to feel like he’s wearing a mask most of the time, since the new concept is much closer to his real personality. Of course there are tweaks here and there, a lot of things held back and plenty of feigned smiles but that is inevitable in the business. While never entirely relaxed, he is no longer on edge everytime a camera is around and can thus show a more natural side of him, which allows jokes to come easier too and has overall increased his popularity. If he’s honest, he thinks some of the controversies could have been avoided if the company had introduced him as the grandfather from the start, as people would have known not to misunderstand his dry and occasionally cynical comments. Or maybe it wouldn’t have changed a thing – he’s not so naive as to believe that the public won’t find a reason to dislike someone no matter what they do.

Birth date and age: March 30th, 1990 – 27

Company name: BKB Entertainment

Group Name (if applicable): PARAL/L

Group Position (if applicable): leader

Strengths:  His biggest strength no doubt lies in his vocal prowess. Naturally gifted with a unique but pleasant voice, he is said to possess 'caramel vocal chords’, which he has been rigorously training since his early teens. Thus, he has acquired stability in both lower and higher registers and can usually belt out notes without any straining whatsoever. After all, his vocals are the one thing the public most often praises him for.

Although most of it happens behind the scenes, Wonseok’s leadership qualities are notable as well. Half a decade into their career, the group is still his top priority and he believes the secret to their lasting success is maintaining harmony among the members, which is what he works towards at all times. Here, he’s always trying to keep every member’s best interest in mind to find a common goal for everyone. He also firmly believes in solving problems as they arise as not to let a wound fester.

While his sense of humor is what got him into most of the controversies he was involved in so far, it’s also the only reason why he always gets invited on variety shows again anyway. Cynical, witty, honest and dry, he’s a valuable asset to any talk show – as long as it isn’t geared towards children, anyway.

Despite everything, he is highly motivated to keep going. Making music is still what he wants to do for a living and that knowledge helps him pull through whatever difficulties he faces in the business more easily, be it working without a break for months or enduring the hate he receives.

Weaknesses:  Tying in with his affinity for talk formats, he is an exceptionally bad match for shows that require body gags, aegyo, or anything else of the sort. It’s embarrassing, in his opinion, and a field he gladly leaves for the other, younger members. Acting falls into this category too and is hence something he has little to no interest in doing (with the exception of musicals!).

Of course he is not a bad dancer, per se, just not much of a natural either. PARAL/L’s choreographies are never easy and he certainly doesn’t mess them up, but that requires hours upon hours upon hours of practice every single time, so staying behind at the practice room and pulling all-nighters to avoid messing up has become a habit.

Generally not a negative trait but very much so for an idol, Wonseok is a bad liar - to a large part also because he despises doing so. As such, he is sometimes too honest. There are only two options: he either doesn’t mention something at all (be it scandals or secrets), or he tells the truth.

For someone who spends as much time worrying about the feelings of other people as he does, he’s not in tune with his own. He has a hard time opening up to people and tends to internalize everything. Sometimes, it actually takes him a while to figure them out because he is too focused on something else at the time. For example, he could get into a fight with his little sister in the morning, then go to work like nothing happened and only feel bothered by it at night, once he settles down.

Positive traits: diligent, empathetic, quick-witted

Negative traits: stoic, self-conscious, workaholic

PERSONAL HISTORY

1 year old and resolute - “That boy will grow up to be just like his father. Stubborn as a mule.” Baby Kim Wonseok is yelling over everything his grandmother is saying and foolish as people are around children, his family is taking it as a good sign; one of strength and energy. He’s just hungry but that isn’t nearly as impressive so no one wants to hear it – and he keeps yelling.

7 years old and calm - “You’ll run for school president, right?” His mother is not so much asking as she is demanding as they’re sharing the dinner table for once. He’s in elementary school, an only child, his father is a surgeon and his mother is a lawyer (and no one knows how and if that works). Ironically, little Wonseok is the one they expect to do great things. His father comes home and goes to sleep. His mother comes home and nags. Wonseok comes home and does everything. Cooking, cleaning, his homework, then studying. “We have your nanny for that,” his mother scolds him often. What she doesn’t understand is that it is the only time of relaxation he has, doing menial tasks and not using his head for once. As long as he performs well and remains in the top three of his school, she doesn’t care very much. She just likes complaining, he thinks and lets her. Her job is stressful.

10 years old and empathetic - “You don’t understand. You’re part of the most perfect family of Gimhae,” his best friend reprimands him during one of their regular joined study sessions, which they’re using for games more often than not. His parents are getting a divorce and he’s right – Wonseok doesn’t know what that’s like. His parents are still together somehow, though he doesn’t see much of it except for when they all go to church together on Sundays. In fact, his mother is currently pregnant again. He doesn’t know the feeling of losing one’s anchor, of having to let go one or the other, of fearing a change that will make everything different and weird and wrong. He doesn’t know it but that doesn’t mean he can’t help and offer to be at least one constant.

12 years old and bold – “You’re scary, like one of those ruthless businessmen in dramas my mom likes to watch.” Again, Wonseok can count on his best friend to call him out. His baby sister is the sunshine of his life and he can’t help but feel like he’s her parent more than their biological ones. Measured by the amount of time he spends with her and effort he puts in, he is more than they will ever be. At home, he is bright and caring and buzzing with energy. Outside, he’s become quiet as he has lost sight of everything but academics and the things his parents deem important and worthy of his attention. He doesn’t speak much and it’s been a long time since he’s last made a new friend – since he’s last spoken to anyone without needing anything from them or vice versa, actually. His best friend is right, undoubtedly, and Wonseok decides that he doesn’t want to become a robot and signs up for choir instead of the math athletes.

14 years old and tired - “We get that this is puberty. Your rebellious phase. We paid for vocal and piano lessons; we were understanding. But an idol? Out of the question. Snap out of it, Kim Wonseok.” His mother means well, he knows, she just likes complaining. She’s worried because it is an uncertain future, not one of the most stable and secure careers out there and she thinks he’s cut out for more than that. Not the first thing about how he feels more alive on stage than he ever has off it or how he’s finally coming out of his shell again reaches her ears. Feelings aren’t something they talk about in this household. His mother means well, he knows, but people can do the worst things with the best intentions.

16 years old and headstrong - “We’ve never interfered in who you choose to spend your time with but that Jaeyoung is below you, son. You don’t want that to reflect badly upon the family, right?” His father dislikes Wonseok’s best friend because he’s gay. Of course he does, as the loyal church-goer he is, pretending to pray to a God he really doesn’t know anything about. At this point, he is beyond caring. He’s had enough. This is it, he thinks and packs his bags, bids farewell to his beloved little sister who doesn’t understand what he’s saying and leaves behind his hometown for the uncertainty that is his future in Seoul, his happiness in music.

19 years old and determined - “When are you coming back?”, his sister asks and he can’t answer. Time passes and not much changes. Wonseok has never quite found back to who he was before the expectations and responsibilities but he’s happy nowadays. His career isn’t going anywhere since he signed with BKB Entertainment three years prior but he’s not one to give up easily or be knocked down by harsh words during an evaluation. This is the path he’s chosen and he’s going to walk it all the way to the end, wherever it may lead, so he sweats and bleeds and smiles through it all.

21 years old and hardworking - “And today’s Winner is… PARAL/L, congratulations!” Finally, he has debuted as the leader of PARAL/L and is met with an overwhelming amount of success right away. It’s hard to grasp and he tells the others not to let it go to their heads while carrying on like nothing has changed himself, staying behind to practice whenever they don’t have a schedule and sleeping almost exclusively in the van that brings them from one show to the next. On the inside, he’s feeling it all but he’s the leader and he knows that it falls to him to make sure everyone stays focused. This is only the beginning, after all. He wonders if his parents are watching.

24 years old and mature - “It makes me so angry that they keep misunderstanding things just for the sake of making you look bad!” His sister has read news articles about him before he has bothered checking them. They always say the same thing anyway. Usually, people like him for his sense of humor and the way he jokes around with people, always teasing, a bit gruff but never malicious. Wonseok never minces his words but he makes sure not to hurt anyone’s feelings nevertheless. At least he tries to, since that is the last thing he wants. Netizens are not as forgiving as his colleagues who raise an eyebrow at him, then see his grin and laugh along with him. Netizens like to think he’s mean and perhaps narcissistic. They don’t care that there are a thousand scenes proving the exact opposite. It’s not the first time this has happened, so he swallows his feelings and doesn’t comment on the issue. That method has proven effective. It’ll blow over; it always does.

27 years old and unchanging - “You’ll go solo afterwards, right?” His mother is not so much asking as she is demanding. Same old. After he has become successful, they have deemed him no longer a shame to the family and accepted him back as one of their own. Wonseok doesn’t blame them for the people they’ve become; he doesn’t like it but it isn’t entirely their fault either. The future, once again, is uncertain now that their contract is ending soon – only one more year until the big decision. Personally, he’s very attached to the group that has made his dreams a reality and the friends who have stayed with him throughout it all, but not so much the company that treats them as marionettes rather than humans. His journey is not at an end, that much he knows for sure, and making music is still his happiness and his dream. In the end, it will depend on what the others want to do. Ideally, Wonseok would like to transfer to a different label as a whole, as PARAL/L, but he would never force the others (or anyone) into something they don’t want for themselves.

[theconservativebrief]

It’s been a decade since Lehman Brothers collapsed, careening America deeper into the Great Recession that led nearly 9 million Americans to lose their jobs. Many politicians and economists tout our strong recovery since the financial and housing collapse and lost jobs, with the official unemployment rate tumbling to 3.9 percent. But the proportion of men who were working last month was more than 4 percentage points lower than it was a decade ago.

It’s not news that the percentage of men working has been declining for decades. The male labor force participation rate — the term of art used by economists — declined by about 5 percentage points in the 28 years before the Great Recession. But that rate fell sharply after the financial crisis, dropping by nearly the same amount in the decade following. Now, about 69 percent of men are part of the labor force compared to about 86 percent in the early 1950s. Including the unemployed, just 66 percent of men are working. (Meanwhile, the rate for women, which had steadily increased until 2001, is now 3 percentage points lower than at its peak, and 2.4 points lower since Lehman declared bankruptcy.)

The idea that our economy no longer has a place for a certain slice of the American male population has fully permeated our national consciousness. Working-class white men, often without decent (or any) jobs, have been endlessly discussed as the constituency that propelled Donald Trump to the White House. But the reality is much more complex than that. Non-working men of all races, millennials, over 50, middle- and upper-middle-class men, and formerly incarcerated men all make up this group.

I talked to hundreds of them, as well as the women in their lives and the professionals trying to help them, for my new book, Man Out: Men on the Sidelines of American Life, to understand who these men are, why this has happened, and what happens when men don’t work. I came away convinced that not working has had and will continue to have profoundly negative effects on not only these non-working men but our entire society.

All told, as many as 20 million men between their early 20s and late 60s, plus 2 million men behind bars, are neither in school nor retired nor working.

Take Lorne, a middle-aged man in the Midwest with two degrees, who lost his job in information technology during the Great Recession (I changed all the names in this article to preserve anonymity). He hasn’t “dropped out” of the workforce, he said emphatically: “I’ve been kicked out.” When the subject of available low-wage jobs came up, he said that he’s not “culturally suited for them.” Lorne is angry — at human resources departments that he says “discriminate” against him, as well as toward women, journalists, and society in general.

Lorne may fit the stereotype of many Trump-voting men. But I also spoke with guys like Yates, a former partner at a law firm in the Northeast who quit his job in his 40s. Although he became a stay-at-home dad, he did not look for work, instead depending on his soon-to-be ex-wife’s income. He got into trouble with the IRS, abused prescription drugs, and became addicted to pornography; eventually his wife divorced him. He is one of many in the well-educated, relatively well-to-do category.

There are plenty of young men who aren’t working either — of civilian, non-institutionalized American men between the ages of 21 and 36, at least 21 percent aren’t working compared to just over 12.5 percent between the ages of 35 and 54. Ben, an unemployed 20-something in Maine, lives with his parents, who “scream and yell about what will become of me,” he said. He feels ashamed and depressed, and spends his days on the internet or playing his trumpet and harmonica.

Mark, a young man in Arkansas, repeatedly dropped out of college and quit the odd jobs that he took to get by. He currently isn’t working and isn’t looking to work. Both of them spoke to me about fears that they would never get on a career track or find a life partner. “A long-term relationship is not worth my trouble,” Ben said. “Marriage is dead to me.”

I also spoke to many women whose husbands didn’t work. Many of them told me about not only increased emotional and financial stress but also problems including alcoholism, porn addiction, and increased anger from the men in their lives.

Then there were men who fit into an often-overlooked category of the unemployed: formerly incarcerated and currently incarcerated men. Jack, who was released from a New York prison at age 51 after spending 15 years behind bars and having lost many of his prime working years, is now looking for jobs without success. Due to decades of mass incarceration policies, he is one of about 17 million to 20 million formerly incarcerated men in the United States.

Despite “ban the box” laws requiring employers not to ask potential employees if they were ever in prison, it is easy for human resources departments to discover these men’s pasts. As Jack said, a company that had posted a job opening found about his record and told him, “We’re not really looking for anyone.”

Did these men drop out, or were they pushed out of the workforce? This is hotly debated. Progressives cite stagnant male wages, automation, and outsourcing “pushing” them out. Conservatives tend to see a moral dimension: The work ethic has declined, men have “dropped out,” and they turn to government benefits, wives, and families to support them. Both explanations are partly correct, although the degree to which one or the other is the major factor differs among individual men.

Regardless of the reasons, having one of the lowest male labor force participation rates among developed countries has many consequences. Given traditional beliefs about “masculinity,” men who fail to “provide” too often suffer a host of psychological ills. Non-working men are much more likely to overdose on drugs — men account for two-thirds of the three-quarters of a million deaths from all types of drug overdoses from 1999 to 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They’re more likely to die by suicide too. More than 33,000 men died by suicide in 2014, a nearly 50 percent increase since the late 1990s and 3.5 times the number of women who died by suicide in the US, the CDC reported.

The absence of 20 million male workers translates, by some calculations, into more than $1 trillion a year in annual GDP. Since we’re talking about some $600 billion in wages not paid to these men — and remember that the wage gap means that the lost earnings of male workers are higher than that of female workers — it means up to $90 billion lost in Social Security and Medicare taxes alone.

It is troubling, while overall marriage rates decline, that not being married correlates with a 5 percentage point lower labor force participation rate for men between the ages of 25 and 54. President Obama’s last surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, called loneliness America’s biggest public health hazard: One-third of men between ages 15 and 64 lived alone in 2012, 50 percent higher than in 1970, while the proportion of women living alone has remained fairly stable. This differential is largely caused by the sharp increase in numbers of men not living with minor children.

A decade out from the financial crisis of 2008, non-working men are one of the groups that continue to suffer hidden from view. On the policy side, we need to equalize access to a good education, increase training and apprenticeships, raise wages or provide wage subsidies, and expand unemployment insurance and other parts of our safety net.

Culturally, we need to teach values like responsibility and hard work, and reduce the tolerance in society and popular culture for “bad” behavior. We cannot descend into the maelstrom that the Roman historian Livy called a time “when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.”

Andrew L. Yarrow, a journalist and historian who has also worked in public policy, is the author of the new book Man Out: Men on the Sidelines of American Life, which addresses many of the challenges and problems of millions of American men.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

Original Source -> I spoke to hundreds of American men who still can’t find work

via The Conservative Brief

[enzaime-blog]

How I powered through 15 months without a heart

New Story has been published on https://enzaime.com/powered-15-months-without-heart/

How I powered through 15 months without a heart

Larry Lewis literally lost his heart on a July day a few years ago, but with his optimism and determination — and the expertise of the cardiac-care team at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute — the retired Marine Corps staff sergeant and educator is going strong today.

“On that day in 2013, I had a plane ticket to attend my wife’s family reunion,” Lewis said. “I was supposed to fly to the event after one last heart test. By the grace of God, I never got on that flight.”

For seven years, Lewis had been suffering from fatigue, insomnia and tenacious head colds — problems he knew were connected to his heart’s slow decline. When cardiologists conducted that test at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, they determined he was suffering from complete heart failure.

Eight days later Lewis went into surgery to have a device implanted in his chest that would take over the job of pumping his blood. But when the surgeons removed a portion of his heart they discovered cancerous tumors in it that had been at the root of his health problems. To make things worse, the cancer had already spread to his lower intestine, diminishing his chances of survival.

Not one to be counted out, however, Lewis is living today at his home in Victorville, California. He has a new donor heart, he’s cancer free, and he’s in excellent spirits.

Larry Lewis chats with his surgeon, Francisco Arabia, MD, surgical director of the Mechanical Circulatory Support Program.

“Cedars-Sinai provided the boost of confidence for me to get through this,” Lewis said. “I knew the hospital’s reputation, and as I got to know the doctors and staff I realized that everyone was a consummate professional.”

But there was more to his survival than trust in his expert caregivers.

“I never felt that I had a chance to fail — it was not an option,” he said. “I’ve had to fight my whole life. That’s my personality.”

Indeed, the same steely resolve he tapped to pull himself from death’s door at age 50 had empowered him decades earlier to free himself from a potentially ruinous start to his adult life.

“I was ‘that’ kid, and I should be a statistic,” Lewis said of his teen years. “The places where I grew up and the situations that I was in. … Well, several people I knew then have been in and out of prison. Several are dead.”

Lewis was not born into a life on the edge of crime. His dad was a Navy man, his mother a stay-at-home mom. The family lived in Oakland, California, and his parents had a clear vision for their four sons, whom they sent to private school.

“My parents only had ninth-grade educations but they had unbelievably high expectations for me and my brothers,” Lewis said. “My mother was a beast with education.”

But when Lewis was barely a teenager, the family disintegrated. His parents divorced. His dad moved to Southern California with the two oldest boys. Shortly thereafter his mother suffered a stroke.

“At 12, 13 years old I grew up,” Lewis said. “I paid the bills. I went to the store with the food stamps. And we moved from the Oakland hills to the Oakland ghettos.”

Ridiculed by the kids on his new block for “talking proper,” Lewis had to learn how to play by the rules of the street. His mother eventually moved away to get care for her illness.

“I lost my identity because I didn’t have older brothers or a father to identify with any more,” Lewis said. “I was doing all the things you think teenagers do in the streets.”

He recalled a day when he was 18 and talking to a friend about what they were going to do for money after high school graduation.

“My buddy said, ‘I’m going to start slinging hard'” — selling drugs. “I said, No, I’m going into the military.

“I didn’t have anyone telling me I needed to do this, but I knew I had to escape the inner city. My father and brothers were military, so it was the family business. I had the presence of mind and the foundation to get out.”

Lewis would spend the next 20 years in the Marine Corps, where he served as an aircraft maintenance data systems analyst, a victim advocate for domestic violence, and a substance-abuse counselor.

After the end of his military career, Lewis threw himself into being an educator and teaching young people his brand of optimistic resilience. Already acting as a youth director at his church and a coach of sports teams, it was a natural transition to pick up a teaching credential and then master’s degrees in curriculum and instruction, and educational leadership.

“There are not enough African-American educational leaders — especially men,” Lewis said. “My job is to fight for kids who can’t fight for themselves. I understand the dynamics of their lives. I know that if those kids have an opportunity to thrive, they will.”

From 2000-11, Lewis was a teacher, assistant principal and eventually a principal in the Adelanto School District in San Bernardino County. His medical condition forced him to retire in 2011 from his position as principal of Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto.

Then came that critical July day in 2013.

After surgeons removed his heart, they implanted a SynCardia Total Artificial Heart. The device helps the sickest of the sick, replacing the lower chambers of the heart (the ventricles) and all four valves. An external driver powers the implant, enabling it to pump. It is a remarkable, temporary therapy for patients who might otherwise die while waiting for a heart transplant.

Yet, the device could do nothing about the fear Lewis was feeling.

“I was uncertain about my future and uncertain about my ability to come back from heart failure,” he said. “I felt fear, but I wanted independence. I was going to have to earn that.”

Lewis lived for 16 months with the SynCardia device. He said he drew strength from his faith, his love for his wife and children, and his desire to work again with young people.

He was actually back in the hospital at Cedars-Sinai when he got one of the most emotional phone calls of his life.

“They had a donor heart for me, if I chose to have it,” Lewis recalled. “I certainly chose to have it!”

When he awoke after his heart transplant, he felt a profound difference.

“When you wake up, you just know that you’re alive. You’re attached to about a thousand wires, but through it all you can feel that, in fact, there is a heart that’s beating.”

Lewis plans to continue mentoring youth. Although retired from teaching, his fond memories of serving students from myriad backgrounds has inspired him to start a group called My Brother’s Keeper through the church where he is an ordained deacon.

“The idea is that, yes, I am my brother’s keeper,” he said, “and I do have a responsibility to help the next young man to be successful, to navigate life and to move forward.”

Lewis said he also feels a responsibility to the donor heart beating in his chest:

“I need to make sure that I’m positive in the things that I do, to honor the person who I got the heart from.”

[taekwondorkjosh]

This is just something I put together because I’m freaking out and thought this might help me process things. do not reblog, please.

abuse, manipulation, mental and physical illness, and financial drama below

When I was really little, my mother and father had some money troubles. According to my father, my mom routinely went and spent his money on irrelevant stuff, instead of paying for groceries, bills, etc. I don't know how accurate that interpretation of what happened is, but its entirely possible that the Irrelevant stuff was stuff for the children, just not stuff we needed. Trips to amusement parks, toys, movies, new shoes when we had perfectly good shoes already, etc. I know this is likely the case because my mother told me stories of how HER mother would do that too. Instead of important stuff, she spent money on little stuff to make us happy in the moment.

This post isn't to debate whether or not that is an appropriate parenting tactic or life strategy. Its too establish that my mother has always had trouble managing her money responsibly. Eventually, it got so bad my father was on the verge of bankruptcy, so he divorced my mother and sued for custody. He lost, and for a few years my three older siblings and one younger sibling (the first three from a previous marriage and the younger sibling my full sibling) lived with my mom until her life came crashing down. She lost everything.

My dad got custody when I was in second grade. I finished second grade and then my dad bought a house, the house I live in to this day. My younger brother and I went to live with him, while the other three stayed with my mom and her previous husband (who had by now pulled his life together enough to help with his kids). I saw my mother every other weekend and on wednesdays for dinner.

Every few visits we went to my Aunt and Grandma's house instead of spending time with my mom doing fun stuff. My mother, myself, and my brother would clean my mother's sister's apartment, taking care of them as best we could. It wasn't particularly fun but we loved our family and helped with.... marginal complaining.

My aunt and I had a very powerful connection. We liked a lot of the same things, and she even got me into a lot of stuff that I still love today, primarily martial arts. When I was seven, my mother signed me up to attend tae kwon do at the school that my aunt was helping out at, and it was amazing. I don't remember much of my childhood, but I know I loved it, even if it was difficult towards the end. Black belt testing is tough hahahha.

After I got my black belt, I wanted to take a little break. I was ten years old and wanted to play around a bit, and my dad took this as an opportunity to get me to do other stuff. I didn't return to tae kwon do until high school, where my connection with my aunt grew much stronger.

I spent three to five hours, six days a week at that tae kwon do school with my aunt. Eighteen to thirty hours a week in her company. Some weekends I would go over to her house and hang out, spending the weekend with her.

I spent a fraction of that with my mother. Saturday afternoon to sunday night, thirty six hours, every two weeks. In a month, I'd spend between 72 and 120 hours with my aunt, and 72 with my mother, if I didn't spend a weekend with my aunt. I loved my aunt.

By the time I was in high school, though, my mother turned her life around. She found a steady job and a good apartment, and had divorced her third husband, an aggressive and dangerous man with some bipolar condition. I was little I don't remember, only that he would sometimes get very, very angry. The point is, that she was doing good.

The three of us started spending mroe time at my aunt/grandma's house. It was getting bad. Two older women with a SLEW of physical disorders and an army of cats, crammed into one thousand square feet? NOT good. It was a terrible mess, and we all came together to turn it around. My mom and my aunt got a joint bank account, so that my mother could help them manage their funds, and IMMEDIATELY she got them a new apartment, found homes for several of the cats, got them insured and healthier (my aunt got all new teeth!), and even managed to get my aunt several job offers.

An then, college. I spend a few years putzing around, and one day I catch my aunt going over bank statements at tae kwon do. She's confused by some of the expenditures on there. Alright, fair.

This starts a huge conflict. According to my aunt, my mother owes her thirty thousand dollars, spent on stuff that my aunt does not have or has no recollection of authorizing. This money was spent over the course of the last 10 months, from when the bank account was made to the 'present' day. 10 months, and my mother somehow stole 30k AND turned my aunt and grandma's lives around.

My mother's rebuttal: all but 2k of that 30k is accounted for. Presents for the nephews/grandchildren, authorized by my grandmother, new clothes for my aunt for a job interview, that's the new fridge, that's a one thousand dollar loan that my mother borrowed, with grandma's approval, and paid back three hours later (banks are weird like that), gas money for the trips over to their apartment to clean cat shit off the tile floors, lunch after cleaning their toilets, etc. It was all stuff like that, with a recurring theme: my aunt wasn't the one who said "Do it," grandma was. The 2k that was left was just stuff that my mom didn't have receipts for and couldn't remember, and my mom would have paid that back if my aunt asked for it.

But my aunt demanded the full 30k. She refused to accept "but grandma said so" because grandma didn't remember that. What my aunt also refused to accept was that grandma was going senile and had been for a few years. Maybe she forgot? HOW DARE YOU BLAH BLAH BLAH it was awful.

So my aunt brings my mother to civil court and charges her. Touts all this evidence and claims that she's an invalid and has lived in a fugue state for the last few years due to pain medication and, well, pain. She claims that my mother was taking advantage of her, stealing from her, risking her life by putting her in financial jeapordy.

This is garbage, because A) my aunt was working at tkd with me EVERY DAY FOR THIS PERIOD OF TIME, B) my aunt managed to pull off straight A's at LBCC while they got a certificate in something, and C) HER LIFE IS SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER THAN IT WAS BEFORE!!!

My Aunt's annual income, including tae kwon do and Grandma's pension, was around 40k. HOW DID MY MOTHER STEAL ALMOST AN ENTIRE YEAR'S WORTH OF MONEY, AND STILL MANAGE TO GET YOU INTO A BETTER SITUATION? Its all a load of bs, its lies, its slander.

My mother loses the civil case. She has to pay back my aunt 15k. Alright. Fine. Its over with. Its far more than my mother should have to pay but its done.

My Aunt then charges CRIMINALLY, and brings the whole thing back. My mother is unequipped to handle this, we do the best we can, and manage to bring down the multiple felonies my aunt is trying to charge my mother with down to a misdemeanor theft charge. One thousand hours of community service and we're good to go.

Unfortunately, the misdemeanor theft doesn't exist, so my aunt's lawyers file the paperwork as a felony anyway. My mother now has a felony on her record, owes 15k dollars, and has to somehow do 1k hours of community service while working a full time job.

Now, by the time this all goes down my aunt has quit tae kwon do, she is no longer working there and hasn't been for some time. I see her occasionally, as I still have a relationship with this woman, until the criminal charges are brought up.

I immediately tell my aunt to back down. She refuses. I sever ties with her and we're done now. I focus on my relationship with my mother, trying to help her as best I can to deal with this mess.

My relationship with my aunt was severed five years ago. A few months later, the trial is over and my mother is struggling to deal with the repercussions of all of this. Its been half a decade, and we're finally turning shit around. My mother has almost paid off my aunt. She's back in school to get a bachelor's degree while working and bringing in six figures (when combined with her husband's income). We're doing wonderfully.

Then I get an email this morning from my aunt. She wants to let us know that my grandmother is sick in the head (senility alzheimers, idk), she likely does not have long left, and wants to see us before she forgets who her family is.

I do not know how to process this. This rambling post is my attempts to fully understand what has happened, and to give context to anyone who wants it. I don't know how to do this. I don't want to just leave my grandmother to die, broken and alone, but I also don't want a relationship with my aunt. My grandmother through my mother under the bus, supporting my aunt completely in all of this, and is just as much to blame as my aunt.

But.... still. I don't know what to do.