phyrebird

[phyrebird]

there’s a lot of evidence that the iliad and the odyssey were actually composed by a variety of poets through an oral tradition rather than just by one poet, so what if the homeric texts are actually just a very long game of D&D

[phyrebird]

In the near future, you are making dinner because you are about to meet your girlfriend’s dad for the first time. All you have in the kitchen is cooked frozen steaks. In walks your girlfriend and her dad, Gordon Ramsey.

[phyrebird]

The Turkey Story

 So it’s 2000, and my family drives from fucking California and like three blizzards to get to Ohio for thanksgiving, becuase my grandparents are moving into a nursing home and it’s their last holiday in that house.  So its a bit bittersweet but ultimately a good thing.

Since it’s their last holiday there, the family pulls out all the stops when it comes to dinner, all the Russian desserts come out, as does the Lethal Bacon Mashed Potatoes and the horrible candied yams dish because not all expressions of love are good, even if they are sincere.  In the spirit of going all-out, Uncle Bobby smokes a Turkey.  

Uncle Bobby started cooking as a boy scout by tossing foil-wrapped potatoes into a campfire and has been addicted since, and now has a hand-made smokehouse in the backyard where he makes various cured meats and other delights.  He seasons the turkey in the traditional manner, but he and grandpa have a shared passion for a spaicier mesquite-style bird, so Bobby makes a Cornish Game Hen seasoned that way, for them.

Then Bobby has a Brilliant Idea.  He realizes that he can stuff the turkey (once it has been smoked) with regular stuffing, and there is still plenty of room for him to put the game hen inside THAT, and stuff the game hen becuase why not?  He confers with Mom, and she explains how to cut open the turkey so there’s  dramatic reveal as the stuffing and game hen come out.  It’s Genius.

Except, of course, that my Aunt Sue is attending, Uncle Cliff slouching after her.

So the day of the dinner, tensions are running a bit high, between the marathon cooking, the kids all being trapped indoors due to aforementioned blizzards, and Uncle Cliff deciding that the best way to amuse himself is by hiding from the adults in the basement, getting drunk and rambling about how various ethic groups were destroying America.  Being that I had close Muslim friends that were leaving the country becuase of 9/11, I was near tears from this nonsense and ready to fight a man roughly five times my size.  

Sue, for some reason, keeps coming down and defending him, or telling us we’re rotten children for ‘attacking’ him, becuase she Must Stand By Her Man, even if her man is a hefty bag of feces with an ugly mustache.

My sister eventually bolts upstairs to tattle and my grandfather limps down to the basement and brandishes his Hip-Bone Cane, hands rock-steady in spite of the Parkinson’s slowly taking over him.

“Firstly Cliff, It may not be my roof much longer but while you are under it you will be civil, or I’ll beat your skull in.  Also, dinner’s ready, everyone go wash up.”

We go upstairs and sit down, and do the traditional “Name one thing you’re thankful for” as the bread gets passed around the table, and things calm down a bit.  Bobby brings out the Turkey and everyone goes OOH becuase it’s really pretty, them Mom carves it open so that the stuffing spills out dramatically along with the game hen and there’s an appreciative gasp all around becuase it looks cool.

Only Sue KEEPS gasping, in utter horror, before getting up and clasping her hands to her face ala Edvard Munch and shrieks-

“OH MY GOD IT WAS PREGNANT!”

We all stare at Sue.  We all look back at the fully-dressed-cooked-and-stuffed birds that in no way had any internal organs in them or ever gave live birth. Then we all looked back at Sue, trying to figure out where to begin but since she’d been trying to justify Cliff’s behavior she was pretty much free-associating conspiracies and scandals now, and just kept going.

“IT WAS PREGNANT MY GOD WE’VE COMMITTED AN ABORTION WE’RE ALL GOING TO HELL FOR THIS, I’M SO SORRY JESUS-” She goes into full pearl-clutching gibbering horror at this point and falls back into her chair like it’s a Victorian fainting couch only it’s a shitty chair from the Eisenhower administration so it collapses and she slams into the floor, sobbing and kicking her feet like a toddler.

Everyone watched for a moment before my Mom sighs heavily and starts carving and serving the turkey while my grandmother mouths “she’s not coming back”.   

Cliff, reactions delayed by about six beers, finally notices his wife is on the floor and tries to pick her up, falls on his ass himself.  They are assisted by Dad, who is saintly patient man and less immune to this jacknapery at that point. I am stuffing dinner rolls into my face to keep from laughing at this grand spectacle and it’s not working.

“I CAN’T EAT IT, I REFUSE TO PARTAKE IN THIS BARBARISM-”  Sue begins but Dad puts on his best Kindly Father voice (he went to seminary school long enough to learn that before getting drafted but that’s another story) and assures Sue that she need not eat, or even be in the room if she wants.  She nods, placated by being the center of attention again, and Dad goes in for the kill.

“I wouldn’t want you to go hungry.  Can I make you some Eggs?”

“That would be lovely.” Said Sue, joke flying over her head like a boeing 747.  I recall watching my grandmother nearly choke to death on the green beans over that, and everyone pointedly trying to avoid talking about anything poultry-related while Sue sat there and ate the most ironic scrambled eggs in the history of mankind.

Shortly thereafter, Cliff threw up in the sink and they went home, and the party got underway properly, with Grandpa raising a toast to Mom and Uncle Bobby “For marrying well, for a change” “Pregnant Turkey” has been an Ohioan thanksgiving staple since then.  I’ll see if I can hit Uncle Bobby up for instructions but if you decide to make it 1. you HAVE to shriek “OH MY GOD IT WAS PREGNANT” when you carve it open, or it’s not authentic and won’t taste as good 2. Share the pictures with me.

If you enjoyed this story, help me avoid unnecessary employment so I can tell more by donating to my Tip Jar

[phyrebird]

Okay, so here’s the story about the pumpkins:

My friend got married yesterday and we missed the wedding because of work but we made it to the reception. Because its mid-September and the reception was in a nature center (awesome!) there was a little bit of a fall theme. Not overbearingly, but the tables all had these tiny pumpkins. 

So they’re cleaning up at the end of it and we’re still hanging out because we haven’t seen these people in forever and we can talk until three in the morning when we get together. All of a sudden, the Maid of Honor hands us a tiny pumpkin. 

“Take one.”

“Um… okay?”

“Take another.”

“….?”

“It is my duty as Maid of Honor to make sure that the guests leave with an uncomfortable number of tiny pumpkins.”

So it turns out that she’d gotten a bunch of them for a Halloween party last year and after the party was over her mom threw them into the compost heap thinking that would be the end of it. But what she didn’t seem to realize was that if you put pumpkins in a compost heap- it grows more pumpkins. It grows pumpkins exponentially. Serious mathematical anomaly pumpkins. 

So this year she has even more tiny pumpkins and she figured it would be a good idea to have them as decor for the reception. BUT- she would still have to throw them out at the end of the day and no matter where you throw them you are doomed to have a ridiculous amount of tiny pumpkins growing SOMEWHERE at your fault. 

So everyone left with at least two tiny pumpkins and that’s how we made friends with the Maid of Honor. 

[phyrebird]

Things I have learned by joining the local Methodist Church’s coffee & knitting circle (where I am the only person under 60 years old):

How to double knit very, very quickly

Mrs. Jonson on the third pew won’t mind her own business, bless her heart. And she buys her pies pre-made for all the church functions.

Ways that women cheated the system in 1950s Texas to get into college and start careers. Including a memorable “He told me I wouldn’t last a week, but then 6 years later, I had to let him go because his production was way down.” *drinks sip of coffee*

We Might Be Conservative But Gosh Darn That Trump Bless His Heart He Doesn’t Know Anything About God Or Texas

And On That Note, God And Texas Are The Only Good Things Left In The World. Erin Write That Down.

How to rescue a dropped stitch and make it look like it never happened

Public schools and inclusive, desegregated education will single-handedly save the world

Sharing recipes is a sacred bonding and community-building tradition that rivals the greatest political negotiations and land deals in history

“It’s better that you prefer girls honey, the Boyfriend Curse doesn’t apply to your girlfriend and a lovin’ god’ll keep on a-lovin. You better make that girl a sweater.’” 

(Boyfriend Curse = knit a sweater for a boy and he’ll leave you when you finish it)

Mrs. Barbara’s husband cheated in ‘76, resulting in a divorce. She thought it was the end of the world because her youth had already passed, but now she’s an engineer and married to a kind, good man who she met when she went back to college in ‘79.

“The only things you can trust in are God, your good sense, and the wisdom of those older women you grew up admiring. The rest is crap.”

[phyrebird]

Forever indebted to @mostlysignssomeportents for this one. 

[phyrebird]

[phyrebird]

i walk into starbucks and order a pumpkin spice latte with 13 shots of espresso. i tell the barista that i intend to transcend humanity and become a god. i ask for no whip cream

[phyrebird]

so last night my nightmare was that i was doing adult stuff writing checks, and in the part of the check where you say the amount of money in words, i wrote “fifty dollars fucking exactly”, and then spent the rest of the nightmare stressing about whether the bank takes checks with cussing in them or not

[phyrebird]

Seattle Is Full of Cryptids

So I’ve been writing some trashy vampire fiction as stress-relief during finals, and it accidentally turned into a major world-building exercise and potential Novella and???  I dunno but I want to share some thoughts.

First, some universe specific things:

Vampire cannot “turn” Others without significant effort and/or a specific ritual.  being a bitten by a vamp is no more going to make you one or it;s thrall than being bitten by a st. Bernard is.

Monsters and Cryptids explicitly exist, but most of the world’s governments deny that they do for… reasons.  That I will get into later but probably have to do with tax law.

The two main characters so far are Marion “Red Charlie” Charleston, a vampire turned back in 1890 who made his fortune during the prohibiton era doing aggravated bootlegging for Roy Olmstead, and Alex (Alexander Byron Chesterson Jr.) who is more or less Marion’s live-in tech sspport/tax shelter.

OK, so onto the worldbuilding

Seattle is like, THE city to live in, if you want to be an Urban Cryptid

If you’re a vamp, the weather means you can go outside during daytime fairly often, or emerge dramatically from the fog p much whenever.

Not to mention a a high population of Vegans, which probably taste much less bitter due to the lack of dairy.

If you’re a were-whatever, it’s literally a half-hour drive/ferry ride to some of the densest, most isolated forest in the US so you can go bananas during your shift.

Aquatic or ocean based cryptid? PUGET SOUND IS RIGHT THERE.  Just stay away from the Orcas, they’ll fuck you up.

Bigfoots are the locals that complain about urbanization while getting fancy-ass coffee and exchange beard-grooming tips with the local hipsters.

There is Werewolf/vampires-that-prefer-to-shift-into-wolves/Vamps-that-prefer-to-shift-into-bats/Werebat Discourse and it is INTENSE

ok it’s not quite Seattle but THERE IS ABSOLUTELY A DRAGON ON MOUNT HOOD AND WE DO NOT FUCK WITH HER.

There are Kelpies, but mostly out in the san juans and rich neighborhoods where people are less suspicious and better marbled.   Most of the time though, they get into dumpsters and more than one Marion has run out of the house with a slipper at 2AM to keep them from knocking the garbage cans over.

cryptid-only bars warded against humans, not out of safety concerns, but OH GOD HIPSTERS ARE SO ANNOYING.

Forks is like, 2 hours away and everyone int he community HAAAAATES the twilight series- less about the interpretation of vampirism and were-persons, but OH GOD THAT’S NOT HOW RELATIONSHIPS WORK.

DO NOT  get them started on 50 shades, which takes place in seattle proper.

Mothman has SO. MANY. BRIDGES. TO. HAUNT.  and a part-time job as a cook at  Dick’s Drive-In.  She makes the best milkshakes.

[phyrebird]

you know what’s always bugged me? when a character is faced with some magical two headed being or some shit and one always lies while the other tells the truth and to figure out which is which the character’s like “which one of you is the liar” or something like bruh literally all you gotta do is be like “what’s two plus two” one of them’s gonna say four and the other one is gonna say 83 or some shit. there you go. answered. go on with your magical quest to defeat david bowie. 

[phyrebird]

Favorite Friendships - Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble

[phyrebird]

Comic strip artists from the 40’s draw their characters while blindfolded

[phyrebird]

[phyrebird]

“Here, put on this blindfold.”

Ted the Animator: “…I’m sorry?”

Carl the Animator: “Don’t be. Grab this dart, I need to pick a color.”

Ted the Animator: “I’m so confused.”

Carl the Animator: “Dartboard in place. Ready?”

Ted the Animator: “No! There’s nothing more dangerous than ‘sharp objects you can’t see’ plus ‘Carl telling you to do something.’”

Carl the Animator: “I moved at least 70% of the fragile things. Just throw it.”

Ted the Animator: “…oh, goodness, here goes…”

Ted the Animator: “…did I hit anything?”

Carl the Animator: “Beautiful! Narrowly avoided Lime Green, and barely hit the edge of Bright Blue. Blue it is, then.”

Ted the Animator: “I’m afraid to take the blindfold off.”

Carl the Animator: “Aaaaaaaand done. It’s beautiful, fear not.”

Ted the Animator: “…what.”

Ted the Animator: “What… what is… why….”

Carl the Animator: “Good choice, that. Lime Green would have looked weird. Blended in with the hands.”

Ted the Animator: “…why is the pig blue.”

Carl the Animator: “Maybe we should get creative on the chickens, too….”

Ted the Animator: “WHY IS THE PIG BLUE, CARL.”

Carl the Animator: “The same reason this scene has a bank executive dressed up as a green monster with purple hair in a business suit chasing chickens and teenagers while riding a pig through a rentable-for-dances barn.”

Ted the Animator: “…which is?”

Carl the Animator: “Because it can.”

[phyrebird]

first day of college in media: “Please open up your textbooks to chapter three because I expect you to have already read the first two chapters in preparation for starting this class”

first day of college in reality: “We’re going to spend the next hour slowly and thoroughly going over every page of the syllabus because I strongly suspect at least half of you assholes don’t actually know how to read”