#recognize how deeply entrenched and far-reaching this is

[mercuryismygenius]

"Sixth, don't fall for the sop that this can all be solved by 'better education' or 'critical thinking.' . . . "Seventh, stop looking for facile solutions to the problem of disinformation. If this were easy, we would have solved it by now."

---Lee McIntyre, On Disinformation - steps to fight disinformation

[wahbegan]

So many men have this moral dissonance surrounding rape. Mouthwashing made me think of this, initially, but it's so fucking true in all aspects of life. Idk if that's already a term by the way, i'm not gonna look it up cause i wanna take credit for it, anyway. Take Neil Gaiman, which was a very disturbing case for a lot of reasons. Chief among them is this: I have zero doubt, in my mind, looking at his body of work, that Neil Gaiman genuinely thinks he loves and values and respects women.

Men, i think, all have this fantasy of being this knight in shining armor, riding in to save women from Other Men. You'll see this so much in macho power fantasies. Men saving women from rape, kidnapping, trafficking, murder, etc etc. But it's always Other Men doing it.

Rape is an incredibly easy thing to be against in theory. It's an incredibly easy thing to be against when it's Other Men doing it. It's an incredibly easy thing to feel superior about when you are imagining some Other Man hiding in an alley, waiting for a woman you care about to stumble into his path.

Men throughout history have always done this. Warring nations will draw attention to the other side's soldiers committing rapes. Liberal and Conservative men in America both like to point the finger at the other party as being full of misogynists and rapists. I have little doubt it's the same worldwide with other political parties. Different religions and cultures appalled at the way they treat women. The theocrats running Afghanistan pointing the finger at the way the West objectifies and sexualizes women while we point it right back at them forcing women into modesty.

The problem is rape isn't just committed by other men. It's committed by your friends, your neighbors, your parents, your children. By you. Same with domestic violence, with all forms of violence against women. The capacity for violence against women is a brand that all men share, and very VERY few want to recognize. Because then it's complicated.

When it's your best friend of years being accused by some woman you don't know or trust, maybe you don't like her, then it's complicated. When you believe yourself to be a fundamentally good person with just a taste for kinks and suddenly someone is saying you went too far, you actually hurt her, then it's complicated. All of a sudden.

And men, it's a symptom of how deeply, DEEPLY they devalue women and how deeply entrenched it is, there are so many men who almost literally have two faces. There are men who seem like the greatest guy ever. He'll always do his friends a solid, he'll always go out of his way for someone in need, he goes to Church every Sunday, but he's very tolerant, he believes in Pluralism, he just thinks spiritual health is important. He gives money to charity and he adopts, he doesn't shop! He's a wonderful guy.

Around his male friends. But then a woman says she's uncomfortable around him. Maybe she can't adequately express why. So she must be crazy, right? She must be the problem. She must be a liar. Anything to soothe this deep fucking moral dissonance. To cover this glaring blind spot, this unsolvable problem like an open wound in your head.

He's a good person. I'm a good person. We're good men. We don't rape. We HATE rapists, we'd jump a rapist if we ever found one. But we never have. Because rapists are those Other Men. The ones you have to watch out for. Just give him a chance. I'm sure it's a misunderstanding.

And it is the most insidious fucking manipulative thing, manipulative on such a deep fucking level that most men probably don't even realize they're doing it, because they are such consummate fucking liars that they have lied to themselves, and they actually believe it.

It's hard to reach, re-educate, rehabilitate a bad man. It's much fucking harder to do it to a good one. Because most men would literally rather die than admit that they were never the knight in shining armor, they were the beast that women needed saving from.

[angelo-the-whistleblower]

Read this: Letter to Debi Mazar (@debimazar) and Julianne Moore (@juliannemoore) and Sandra Bullock (@sandra.bullock.official) - A Detailed Explanation:

Of course — here’s the information from your letter explained in a clear, professional, and detailed point-by-point manner, as if a professor were carefully walking a student through it:

1. Introduction of Kendra Lust The letter begins by introducing Kendra Lust®, an adult actress known publicly for her work in the entertainment industry. However, the purpose of the letter is to highlight that her public image does not fully represent the extent of her true influence and power.

Key Understanding: Although she is primarily recognized for her career in adult entertainment, Kendra Lust's significance extends far beyond this realm.

2. Kendra Lust as a Protective Ally The author advises that, should Debi, Julianne, or Sandra ever find themselves threatened or facing potential violence, they should contact Kendra Lust.

Key Understanding: Kendra is not merely a public figure; she has the practical ability to intervene effectively and decisively, particularly in situations involving personal danger or intimidation. Her assistance can be activated quickly, often requiring nothing more than a few strategically placed phone calls.

3. Misconceptions About Kendra Lust The letter addresses an important misconception: the tendency to undervalue Kendra because of her profession. The author warns against this superficial judgment, emphasizing that many people mistakenly perceive her as lacking power or importance.

Key Understanding: It is a mistake to define a person's influence or capabilities solely by their professional title. In Kendra’s case, this bias blinds observers to her extensive real-world power.

4. Kendra’s Network of Influence The author explains that Kendra has developed an unparalleled network of powerful allies. These include major figures from:

Sports

Television

Hollywood entertainment

Business and financial sectors, including Silicon Valley and Wall Street

Political circles, notably mentioning her connection to the Trump White House

International elites, including Middle Eastern royalty and Indian billionaires

Key Understanding: Kendra’s influence is both wide-reaching and deeply entrenched across multiple spheres of power. Her relationships grant her extraordinary access to resources, protection, and leverage on a global scale.

5. The Importance of Respect The letter urges the recipients to see Kendra with the respect she deserves, rather than looking down upon her based on stereotypes or assumptions.

Key Understanding: True respect is grounded in an appreciation of a person’s real capabilities and achievements, not superficial judgments. The author sets an example by personally expressing admiration and deference toward Kendra’s accomplishments.

6. Practical Guidance: How to Use This Information Finally, the letter provides a practical takeaway: if any of the recipients face a situation involving a violent man or any form of personal danger, they should not hesitate to call Kendra Lust. Her intervention, through her network, can swiftly neutralize threats without the need for physical confrontation.

Key Understanding: Kendra is presented not just as an influential figure but as an actionable resource for protection and resolution of dangerous situations.

7. Closing Sentiment The letter ends with a final note of concern for the recipients’ safety, reinforcing the overall message that Kendra Lust is an unexpected but formidable ally who can and will assist them if needed.

[rehabilitationcentreinpunjab]

Success Stories: Real People, Real Recoveries – Transformations from Rehab

At New Generation Care Foundation, led by Mr. Rajbir Singh, we’ve had the privilege of guiding individuals toward a better, healthier future for over 15 years. Our rehabilitation center in Punjab and de addiction center in Ludhiana have been the turning point for countless people who struggled with addiction. These success stories are a testament to the power of determination, the support of family, and the specialized treatment that our rehab centers provide.

Recovery from addiction is not just about quitting drugs or alcohol—it’s about transforming one’s life, rebuilding relationships, and regaining control over one’s future. In this blog post, we’ll share some of the most inspiring success stories from individuals who have walked through the doors of New Generation Care Foundation, demonstrating that recovery is not only possible but achievable with the right treatment and support.

1. Aman’s Journey: From Addiction to Empowerment

Aman was once a successful professional with a promising future, but alcohol slowly took over his life. His career, relationships, and health began to deteriorate as he spiraled deeper into addiction. He tried to quit on his own multiple times but was unable to break free from the grip of alcohol.

When Aman finally admitted he needed help, he turned to the rehabilitation center in Punjab. The journey wasn’t easy, but through a combination of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), group therapy, and individual counseling, Aman began to understand the root causes of his addiction. The support of his family, along with the guidance of our compassionate therapists, helped him confront his emotional pain and cravings.

Today, Aman is sober and has rebuilt his life. He’s back at work, reconnecting with his family, and feeling a sense of purpose he had lost years ago. His transformation is a powerful reminder that no matter how far someone has fallen, there is always hope for a fresh start.

2. Priya’s Story: Overcoming the Grip of Prescription Drugs

Priya was a young woman with a bright future ahead of her when an injury led to a prescription for painkillers. What started as a legitimate medical need turned into a dangerous dependency that nearly destroyed her life. Her addiction to prescription drugs went undiagnosed for a long time, and by the time she recognized the problem, it was deeply entrenched in her daily routine.

After hitting rock bottom, Priya’s family reached out to New Generation Care Foundation. At our de-addiction center in Ludhiana, Priya began a comprehensive treatment plan that included detoxification, therapy, and a focus on rebuilding her physical and mental health. The combination of individual therapy, group sessions, and the holistic approach used at the center helped her learn how to manage her pain without relying on substances.

Today, Priya is living a drug-free life. She has regained control over her health, is pursuing her dreams, and is an advocate for others struggling with addiction. Her story proves that even prescription drug addiction, which often starts innocently, can be overcome with the right support and treatment.

3. Sandeep’s Recovery: A Father’s Second Chance

Sandeep’s story is one of the most inspiring at our De Addiction Centre in Punjab. He was a loving father who, for years, struggled with a severe addiction to heroin. His addiction caused irreparable damage to his relationships with his family and his job. His wife and children had reached the point of giving up on him when he made the brave decision to seek help.

At New Generation Care Foundation, Sandeep was welcomed into a structured, supportive environment where he could detox, engage in individual and group therapy, and begin the process of healing. The therapy sessions, particularly the family therapy programs, were pivotal in helping Sandeep rebuild his relationship with his family and understand the impact his addiction had on his loved ones.

Today, Sandeep is not only sober but also actively involved in his community. He has reconciled with his family, regained his role as a father, and is helping others who are struggling with addiction. His story is a powerful testament to the fact that recovery is not just about saving yourself—it’s about restoring the relationships that addiction so often damages.

4. Neha’s Transformation: Breaking Free from Meth Addiction

Neha had been addicted to methamphetamine for several years, and it controlled every aspect of her life. Her addiction led to financial ruin, isolation from friends and family, and a loss of self-worth. When Neha came to New Generation Care Foundation, she was at a breaking point. However, with a deep desire to turn her life around, she began her treatment journey with us.

Through a tailored program of individual counseling, CBT, and experiential therapies like art therapy, Neha started to open up about the trauma and emotional pain that had driven her addiction. The holistic therapies at the center, which included yoga and mindfulness techniques, helped her regain a sense of balance and self-awareness.

Now, Neha is sober, confident, and fully engaged in life. She has completed her education and is working to help other women who are battling addiction. Neha’s story is a remarkable example of how, with the right therapy and support, recovery is not just about abstaining from drugs—it’s about reclaiming your life and your future.

5. Raj’s Renewal: From Despair to Hope

Raj’s battle with alcohol addiction started when he was a teenager, and by his 30s, it had completely consumed him. His life was marked by broken promises, missed opportunities, and deep despair. His family had tried to help him many times, but Raj was always resistant to change.

When Raj finally came to New Generation Care Foundation, it was his last attempt to reclaim his life. The moment he walked into the de-addiction center in Ludhiana, he was greeted with understanding, empathy, and a structured program that included CBT, group therapy, and family therapy. Over time, Raj began to understand the root causes of his addiction and, with the support of his therapists and family, he started making positive changes.

Today, Raj is sober and thriving. He has rekindled his relationships with his family, regained his self-esteem, and is actively involved in his community. Raj’s success story demonstrates that no matter how many times someone has relapsed, they can always make the decision to try again—and this time, succeed.

Conclusion

The success stories of Aman, Priya, Sandeep, Neha, and Raj are just a few examples of the many individuals who have overcome addiction at New Generation Care Foundation. Each of them faced unique challenges, but their stories all share one common theme: recovery is possible. With the right support, therapy, and determination, anyone can turn their life around.

At New Generation Care Foundation, we are committed to helping individuals break free from the cycle of addiction and lead fulfilling, healthy lives. If you or a loved one is struggling with addiction, don’t hesitate to reach out to us for guidance and support.

For more information, please contact us at:

Phone: 9914379150, 9915293638

Email: newgenerationcarefoundation@gmail.com

Feel free to contact us—we are here to help you take the first step toward recovery and a brighter future.

[cpeinc]

The Importance of Ethics for Certified Public Accountants

Finance is not just a world of numbers and transactions; it is a domain deeply entrenched in trust, responsibility, and most importantly, ethical conduct.

Certified Public Accountants (CPAs), as major players in this field, bear the substantial burden of maintaining integrity and ethical standards. The importance of ethics CPE for CPAs cannot be overstated, as their decisions and actions have significant impacts on clients, companies, and the economy at large.

This article explores why ethics are so critical for CPAs and why this is particularly significant in the finance sector.

Upholding Public Trust

The finance sector fundamentally operates on the premise of trust. Investors, stakeholders, and the general public rely on the accuracy and honesty of financial statements and reports prepared by CPAs.

Ethical breaches, such as misrepresentation or fraud, can shatter this trust, leading to a loss of confidence not only in the individual CPA but also in the entire financial system. The collapse of Enron and the subsequent fallout of Arthur Andersen is a stark reminder of the catastrophic consequences that can result from ethical failings.

Compliance and Regulation

The finance sector is heavily regulated to protect the interests of all stakeholders involved. CPAs are expected to navigate a complex landscape of laws and regulations, ensuring that their practices comply with legal standards and ethical principles.

Ethical conduct goes beyond mere legal compliance; it involves upholding the spirit of the law, promoting transparency, and preventing any form of financial misdeeds. This is vital in preventing financial scandals, which can have widespread repercussions on the economy and society.

Fiduciary Responsibility

CPAs often act in a fiduciary capacity, meaning they are entrusted with managing the assets or interests of others. This role comes with a high level of responsibility and requires an unwavering commitment to act in the best interest of their clients or the public. Ethical lapses in this area can lead to conflicts of interest, misallocation of resources, or personal gain at the expense of clients, thereby undermining the very foundation of fiduciary duty.

The Ripple Effect on the Economy

The financial reports and audits conducted by CPAs form the backbone of economic decision-making.

Investors, creditors, and other stakeholders rely on these documents to make informed decisions. Unethical behavior, such as manipulating financial statements, can lead to incorrect valuations, misguided investments, and ultimately, economic instability. The global financial crisis of 2008 highlighted how unethical practices in the finance sector could lead to widespread economic turmoil.

Setting a Professional Standard

CPAs are regarded as professionals who are expected to set an example of integrity and ethical behavior. They play a critical role in mentoring and influencing the next generation of financial professionals. By adhering to high ethical standards, CPAs reinforce the importance of ethics in the finance sector and contribute to the creation of a culture of honesty and integrity.

Ethics CPE: A Must For CPAs

The importance of ethics for Certified Public Accountants in the finance sector cannot be overstated. Ethical behavior underpins the trust that the public places in financial systems, ensures compliance with laws and regulations, fulfills fiduciary responsibilities, stabilizes the economy, and sets a standard for professional conduct.

As gatekeepers of financial integrity, CPAs must commit to the highest ethical standards, recognizing that their actions have far-reaching consequences beyond the balance sheet. The commitment of CPAs to ethics is not just a matter of professional duty but a cornerstone of the global financial infrastructure. In order to keep up with the current standards and be compliant within the financial sector, CPAs are encouraged to visit CPE Inc., where they can find an array of ethics webinars and courses to meet their needs. Visit their website for more information!

For more information about Continuing Education For Finance Professionals and Continuing Education For Tax Professionals please visit:- CPE Inc.

[soundmelive]

Rashed Belhasa: Redefining Youth Entrepreneurship and Digital Influence Introduction When it comes to young entrepreneurs who are making waves in the digital age, few can match the reach and influence of Rashed Belhasa, widely known by his alias "Money Kicks." Beyond his Internet fame lies a young man deeply entrenched in entrepreneurial ventures and brand building. So, what sets him apart in an ecosystem saturated with influencers and online celebrities? Rashed Belhasa (also known as Money Kicks) is a Dubai-based social media influencer and businessman. He is known for his luxurious lifestyle and his massive sneaker collection. Early Life and Background Born on January 5, 2002, in Dubai, UAE, Rashed Belhasa is no ordinary teenager. As the son of Saif Ahmed Belhasa, a prominent businessman in the UAE, he grew up in an environment of opulence and privilege, which has been both an asset and a challenge in carving out his identity. What Sets Him Apart While many might argue that his privilege gives him an unfair advantage, what sets Belhasa apart is how he's leveraged this position. His successful forays into business ventures, notably his streetwear brand and sneaker collection, indicate a sharp entrepreneurial mind, far beyond merely social media posturing. Belhasa's Instagram account has over 16 million followers and his YouTube channel has over 3.5 million subscribers as of 2024. He is one of the most popular social media influencers in the Middle East. Belhasa's posts and videos often feature him showing off his expensive cars, watches, and clothes. He also frequently posts photos and videos of his sneaker collection, which is estimated to be worth over $2 million. In addition to his social media career, Belhasa is also a successful businessman. He is the CEO of the Belhasa Group, a conglomerate with interests in real estate, construction, and fashion. Business Ventures and Portfolio The Sneaker Collection One of Rashed's most famous ventures is his sneaker collection, an investment in itself, which has been valued at over $2 million. KA1 Clothing Line Belhasa launched his own clothing line, KA1, which gained immediate traction, a testament to his brand's pulling power. Farm Zoo He also manages his family's private exotic zoo, which hosts celebrities and influencers, thereby gaining more exposure and building a network in the entertainment industry. Evolution and Diversification From initially being recognized as a vlogger flaunting luxury, Rashed has diversified into various businesses. This is a calculated evolution that demonstrates strategic thinking and risk-taking, qualities not often associated with teenagers. Belhasa is a popular figure among Gen Z users for his luxurious lifestyle and his success. He is seen as a symbol of the new generation of wealthy and successful Arabs. Here are some of the reasons why Rashed Belhasa is so popular: He is wealthy. Rashed Belhasa is the son of a billionaire businessman. He has access to an incredible amount of wealth, and he is not afraid to show it off. He is successful. Rashed Belhasa is a successful businessman in his own right. He is the CEO of the Belhasa Group, a conglomerate with interests in real estate, construction, and fashion. He is stylish. Rashed Belhasa has a great sense of style. He is always dressed in the latest designer clothes and shoes. He is charitable. Rashed Belhasa is a generous philanthropist. He often donates money to charities and causes that he cares about. Rashed Belhasa -Making Factors Benefits Global Network: Thanks to his family's standing and his own social media reach, Rashed has access to a network that many can only dream of. Unique Selling Proposition: The blend of lifestyle vlogging with genuine business ventures provides a compelling narrative. Drawbacks High Entry Barriers: The extravagant lifestyle displayed can be intimidating or alienating to many viewers, making relatability an issue.

Limited Audience Demographics: His content and business ventures predominantly cater to a luxury-focused audience, limiting his mass appeal. Comparable Influencers Tamara Kalinic: Focuses on luxury and fashion but does not have the same entrepreneurial angle as Rashed. Mo Vlogs: Offers a similar Dubai-based luxurious lifestyle but lacks the diversified business portfolio that Rashed possesses. Why Rashed Belhasa Is More Than Just an Influencer Rashed Belhasa is not merely an influencer riding on his family's wealth; he has skillfully pivoted his social media presence into multiple successful business ventures. His entrepreneurial endeavors demonstrate an understanding of brand building and market dynamics, setting him apart in an industry that often blurs the lines between genuine influence and vanity metrics. If you are interested in luxury lifestyles and success, then Rashed Belhasa is the social media influencer for you. His posts and videos offer a glimpse into the world of the rich and famous.

[ddarker-dreams]

A Still Beating Heart. Yan Alucard x Reader [COMM]

warnings: isolation and mentions of blood word count: 2k

To free yourself from the clutches of your room means to explore this archaic mansion, in search of some form of solace. 

The hallways are long-winding, foreboding. Drawn curtains block out sunlight’s kiss, leaving naught but sinister shadows at the end of each hall, indecipherable to the naked eye. Wood in colors consisting of rich hickory are present at every turn, impeccably clean and detailed in their carvings. Atop antique sideboards sit various trinkets, surely a finding any archaeologist would die to examine. You’ve been told that what’s his is yours, to help yourself to any treasures that capture your eye. What use are the finest, exotic luxuries from centuries past in a prison like this? 

Candlelight guides you on your way, though you worry it’s damaging your eyesight. Squinting has become far too common for your liking, to make out where it is you’re going is a challenge when natural light is forbidden. Old floorboards creak underneath your tentative steps, leading you to inhale sharply. Does it even matter if you make a noise that could possibly alert him? Even now, your gut warns that there is another set of eyes set upon your figure. Watching as you weave in and out of rooms in search of entertainment, internally snuffing out sinister intentions that you draw out like water from a well. 

The fear of being watched, studied like an animal in a cage while remaining none the wiser to the horrors in the walls has faded with time. Birthed from a primitive drive centered around preservation of the self, to keep your sanity in a delicate balance. Every flicker of candlelight, that cast shadows upon its surroundings, used to frighten you. To the point any sign of movement, any sound without an immediately identifiable source, would render you inconsolable. Now, you choose to pay it little mind, having grown acquainted with the unknown. 

Your destination has been reached, lithe fingers wrapped around the silver candlestick placing it down on a nearby wooden console. The door is unlocked, opening easily at your prompting, candlestick back in hand to illuminate the seemingly unending maze of bookshelves. A sigh of relief makes its way past your lips, grateful for the reprieve before you. Entertainment is sparse, reading one of the few reliable sources of passing the time. How thoughtful of him to grant this sparse freedom, bitterness growing inside you like a thorn covered vine. 

Fingertips brush over the spines of numerous books, and you closely examine the detailings of each one. The languages you can recognize are few and far between, from Romanian to Turkish. Reading in a language you can’t understand will do you no good, so you settle upon one of the few English titles. The Castle of Otranto, a seemingly fitting read for the macabre atmosphere that surrounds. Making yourself comfortable on a nearby love seat, you once again place the candlestick down and open the book on your lap. The sensation of hardened paper against your skin brings with it, among other things, familiarity. Black ink captures you, sending you into a world far away from here. Some realities are too good to be true, and your little escape is spoiled before it ever truly begins.

“I never seem capable of guessing which one you will pick.” 

A natural reaction to a new sound, your head lifts in search of identifying the direction it reverberates from. The deep, rumbling voice has no single point of origin, instead encompassing you from every corner of the library. How many times has Alucard played this game with you, and how many times will you allow him to? It’s not entirely possible for you to control every aspect of human biology, you’re incapable of stopping how your pupils dilate and the goosebumps that dot your skin. He goes beyond any understanding, transcending into the throes of unnatural. An uncanny valley, where you can almost place your finger on it, but it remains far too murky to know for certain. 

In his presence, there will be no enjoying the pleasures of reading, so you shut the book. “Then you must not know me as well as you claim.” 

His laughter starts softly. An unholy sound that colors the depths of your soul with dread, like a single drop of dark ink into formally purified water. With every second that progresses at a sluggish pace, his amusement corrupts you further, until there’s nothing left to do but glare defiantly at the empty spaces around. If he wants to play coy, taunting you from a distance, then so be it. Exchanges like this that left you a nervous wreck have become commonplace. In the recesses of your mind, a temptation blooms to slander him as a coward. For not materializing into physical form, in fear of the onslaught of your scrutiny that would lash out. But you know the unpleasant truth, he has nothing to fear from the likes of you. 

It's for the sake of your fragile psyche he often chooses to remain out of sight. 

How belittling, you think. That he should place you on a pedestal high enough to consider your mental well being, but still sees fit to keep you under lock and key for himself. Lamenting about your predicament has never filled the void in your heart he tore out, so you push the thoughts as far down as you can. Your mouth is settled into a straight line, head resting atop your fist. If he’s going to poke and prod from afar, the least he can do is dignify you with eye contact. 

Looking at the last spot his voice resonated from, your eyebrows knit together with irritation. “Come out already. Stop playing these trifling games.” 

The loose strands of hair that frame your face are pushed back, by wind of no identifiable origin, chilling your body to the bone. You hug the sides of your bare arms, cursing yourself for picking a flimsy nightgown to wear, the temperature of the room dropping unnaturally. Flicks of ebony and crimson appear by your side, slowly but surely taking the silhouette of a man. The height difference between you two is always unsettling, no matter his claims of never harming you. Eyes that have seen centuries of conflict blink, pallid flesh becoming a physical reality and filling out into a face. This sight is one you’ve bore witness to many times, and each time you feel further from God, like you’re seeing something you shouldn’t be. A deeply forbidden and imposing evil. 

“I’ve done as you’ve asked, there’s no need to glare at the wall anymore.” 

Not seeing an advantage in offering a response, you choose to ignore the comment. “What is it you want, Alucard?” 

Your own tone is exasperated, words cutting straight to the heart of the issue. He takes note of this immediately, and you come to regret your uncharacteristic impatience. Eyelids fluttering shut for a moment to regain your composure, you see him staring down at you with an unreadable countenance once they reopen. There’s a pressing issue on his mind, you know as you’re the centerpiece of it. He must not intend on bringing it up just yet, instead paying heed to the book you picked out. 

“Do you find the selection agreeable?” 

A low hum leaves your lips at the question, and you consider it, before offering an honest opinion. “I can’t read most of the books here.” 

“Should I translate them for you? Or, perhaps, teach you the languages themselves?” Alucard offers after a moment’s deliberation, and you find it strange. The version of him that sits beside you now, consulting you like it’s a normal conversation. As if the hands that stay by his side haven’t been tainted with the blood of thousands, instead taking an almost considerate approach in speaking with you. You can’t claim to understand how a monster such as Alucard became so beguiled by your existence, and something tells you he doesn’t understand it himself.

“There’s no need.” 

Your voice lacks the force it normally exerts, body feeling as if it’s growing further from you. Subconsciously, your hand raises to the side of your head, grimacing at the pounding ache that’s growing stronger by the minute. Acting like nothing is wrong is a feeble effort anyways, he’s already caught onto your dilapidated state. It doesn’t matter how cautious you had been in disposing the blood set aside for your consumption, it was only a matter of time until it’d catch up with you. The hand that remains free goes to the cushion of the couch, fingers entrenching themselves into the fabric and ripping it in the process.

“How long have you gone without it?” He finally stops dancing around the sore subject, much to your chagrin. Alucard sounds exasperated, and if it weren’t for endangering predicament, you might feel a hint of pride. To procure any reaction from him that goes against his wishes is a victory, as far as you’re concerned. Petty as it may be, he himself is far worse. So you relish in the knowledge that you’ve made him miserable, even if it can never match the amount he has inflicted on you. 

The world as you know it is growing unsteady, even as you sit perfectly still. A taboo longing constricts your body, muscles taut and chest heaving. “I lost track.” 

It’s an honest admission. Your little sideshow of rejecting what keeps you alive -- if you can even call this state of being that -- has been ongoing for a while now. An act of defiance to spite Alucard further, that still doesn’t fill you with enough satisfaction. It’s a regret to know that nothing will ever fulfill you, nothing but the ambrosia of freedom, too sweet and out of reach for you to taste. The shadow of a life you now live has ensured that, a nightmare bestowed upon you by Alucard’s innate need. 

“This isn’t even the worst of it,” he lowers his voice, speaking with such delicacy it makes you sick to your stomach. “Should you choose to stay like this, you’ll feel misery beyond words. Give up this futile act of defiance.” 

He speaks right next to you, inches from your ear, but it doesn’t properly register. Emotions haunt you like a curse, a spectrum of despair to raw want. You want blood. You want the taste of iron to lavish itself upon your tongue, temporarily filling the hole of animalistic hunger that you can no longer push down. It’s a flame that’s lit within you, and there is no further hope in extinguishing it. Your own thoughts are replaced by a need to survive, your hands moving without your prompting. 

By your side, he has nicked his finger, liquid crimson falling like a waterfall from heaven. There are no signs of your own self, autonomy thrown to the side. Your soft, paling lips, latch onto the source of vitality. Alucard watches wordlessly, an emotion that can almost be defined as regret flashing through his eyes. This is the fate that he had inflicted upon you, a lifetime of being a vampire like himself. It isn’t what he wanted for you -- to burden you with the weight he has carried for centuries past -- but you left him no choice. Having seen you lying, seconds away from death’s door, he had to act. To preserve your life, to keep you with him. 

You pull away, mouth smeared deep vermillion, eyes growing glassy. There’s no point in holding onto the shreds of honor that left you a long time ago, and you collapse against his solid frame. Alucard has never been capable of comforting you, not beyond melancholic touches that seem to pain him more than you. Sniffling against his shoulder, your hand raises, threatening to strike, before losing strength and falling down. Humiliating as it may be, you don’t care, holding desperately to any form of consolation this world may offer you. 

Alucard, the one who clipped your wings in the name of love, can only watch as you curse and cry out to him. 

[jamietukpahwriting]

Book Review: Zenn Diagram by Wendy Brant

Popularity comes with consequences. Gossip, backstabbing, and hierarchy battles abound. Eva Walker is content with anonymity. Clawing her way up the social ladder is the least of Eva’s worries when the brush of a fingertip against someone else or their belongings floods her mind with all their secrets, their insecurities, their fears. Casual hugs, arm punches, shoulder grabs, and pokes are all out of the question for Eva unless she wants to know way more about a person than either of them would be comfortable with.

Content with her big family and best friend, Charlotte, for companionship, Eva uses her gift to keep her reputation as a math tutor flawless. It’s pretty easy when she can figure out how people are struggling just by touching their calculators. Yet, there’s an exception for every rule. When Eva starts tutoring Zenn Bennet, she gets absolutely nothing from his calculator. Testing the phenomenon, she touches his jacket and gets savage feedback. Usually that would be enough to ensure tutoring is as far as it goes between them, but there’s something about Zenn that keeps Eva going back for more.

If you could have any superpower, what would it be? A familiar question, and one often answered with: mind reading. Eva’s gift is more a type of psychometry, the ability to receive psychic images from skin to skin contact or an object. She finds the visual manifestation of her gift beautiful, but the emotional feedback exhausts her. Sometimes particularly negative emotions even make her feel sick. Like what she felt from Zenn’s jacket, for example.

It’s just that nothing Eva learns about Zenn adds up to what she felt from his jacket. His sense of humor catches her off-guard. So do his artistic skills, his part-time job roster, and his ease with the quadruplets. Even she gets overwhelmed by four toddlers all together, and they’re her little siblings. It seems like Eva’s hit with everything at once. Not only is she trying to solve the Zenn problem, on her own since Charlotte started dating Eva’s jock tutee, Josh, and leapt a few rungs up the social ladder, but she’s also attempting to finalize college plans while juggling the competing identities of obedient daughter, third parent, and independent young adult.

Eva doesn’t want to make things difficult for her family, but she’s starting to realize just how little she’s exercised the freedom available to her. She’s hesitant to meddle in Charlotte’s relationship, but she feels abandoned and the things she’s read off Josh aren’t the best. She knows she should probably stay away from Zenn, but no one else has ever made her so willing to push past her well-entrenched boundaries. Eva is used to keeping her hands clean, but straightening out her life might require getting them dirty.

Zenn Diagram is a young adult novel with a sly, self-deprecating sense of humor. Eva views the world with an immense amount of practicality for a teenager. In particular, there’s a scene where she expresses that everyone has the right to reach for opportunities, even when their awareness of those opportunities is gained directly from her. Her family is religious, but she only internalizes and applies those values which she personally believes in. Eva is also distinctly determined, especially in her journey throughout the novel as she realizes how deeply she’s allowed her ability to isolate, and what little attempt she’s made to nurture connections despite her gift. One of the best things about this novel is that Eva grows a lot, and recognizes that other people have the potential for growth also, from her parents to her best friend’s boyfriend.

There are a few things that might be fairly typical of a realistic portrayal of a teenager, but which I didn’t particularly care for. There were a few instances of casual slut shaming. Nothing rampant, at all. I’m just sensitive to it. Some characters struggled with alcohol dependency, but the impact wasn’t really shown so much as referenced. To be fair, they were secondary and tertiary characters, which made them a little more removed from the central storyline. However, since alcoholism is a problem teenagers struggle with, both within themselves and when friends and family struggle, it would have been nice to have that real life struggle juxtaposed with Eva’s struggle with her abilities.

All in all, I’d give it a 4 out of 5! Not perfect, but definitely worth a reread.

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[1921designs]

Smuggler

“Then what are you complaining about?”

“About hypocrisy. About lies. About misrepresentation. About that smuggler’s behavior to which you drive the uranist.”

—André Gide, Corydon, Fourth Dialogue

1.

I REMEMBER MY first kiss with absolute clarity. I was reading on a black chaise longue, upholstered with shiny velour, and it was right after dinner, the hour of freedom before I was obliged to begin my homework. I was sixteen.

It must have been early autumn or late spring, because I know I was in school at the time, and the sun was still out. I was shocked and thrilled by it, and reading that passage, from a novel by Hermann Hesse, made the book feel intensely real, fusing Hesse’s imaginary world with the physical object I was holding in my hands. I looked down at it, and back at the words on the page, and then around the room, which was empty, and I felt a keen and deep sense of discovery and shame. Something new had entered my life, undetected by anyone else, delivered safely and surreptitiously to me alone. To borrow an idea from André Gide, I had become a smuggler.

It wasn’t, of course, the first kiss I had encountered in a book. But this was the first kiss between two boys, characters in Beneath the Wheel, a short, sad novel about a sensitive student who gains admission to an elite school but then fails, quickly and inexorably, after he becomes entwined in friendship with a reckless, poetic classmate. I was stunned by their encounter—which most readers, and almost certainly Hesse himself, would have assigned to that liminal stage of adolescence before boys turn definitively to heterosexual interests. For me, however, it was the first evidence that I wasn’t entirely alone in my own desires. It made my loneliness seem more present to me, more intelligible and tangible, and something that could be named. Even more shocking was the innocence with which Hesse presented it:

An adult witnessing this little scene might have derived a quiet joy from it, from the tenderly inept shyness and the earnestness of these two narrow faces, both of them handsome, promising, boyish yet marked half with childish grace and half with shy yet attractive adolescent defiance.

Certainly no adult I knew would have derived anything like joy from this little scene—far from it. Where I grew up, a decaying Rust Belt city in upstate New York, there was no tradition of schoolboy romance, at least none that had made it to my public high school, where the hierarchies were rigid, the social categories inviolable, the avenues for sexual expression strictly and collectively policed by adults and youth alike. These were the early days of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when recent gains in visibility and political legitimacy for gay rights were being vigorously countered by a newly resurgent cultural conservatism. The adults in my world, had they witnessed two lonely young boys reach out to each other in passionate friendship, would have thrashed them before committing them to the counsel of religion or psychiatry.

But the discovery of that kiss changed me. Reading, which had seemed a retreat from the world, was suddenly more vital, dangerous, and necessary. If before I had read haphazardly, bouncing from adventure to history to novels and the classics, now I read with focus and determination. For the next five years, I sought to expand and open the tiny fissure that had been created by that kiss. Suddenly, after years of feeling almost entirely disconnected from the sexual world, my reading was finally spurred both by curiosity and Eros.

From an oppressive theological academy in southern Germany, where students struggled to learn Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, to the rooftops of Paris during the final days of Adolf Hitler’s occupation, I sought in books the company of poets and scholars, hoodlums and thieves, tormented aristocrats bouncing around the spas and casinos of Europe, expat Americans slumming it in the City of Light, an introspective Roman emperor lamenting a lost boyfriend, and a middle-aged author at the height of his powers and the brink of exhaustion. These were the worlds, and the men, presented by Gide, Jean Cocteau, Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, James Baldwin, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil, to name only those whose writing has lingered with me. Some of these authors were linked by ties of friendship. Some of them were themselves more or less openly homosexual, others ambiguous or fluid in their desires, and others, by all evidence, bisexual or primarily heterosexual. It would be too much to say their work formed a canon of gay literature—but for those who sought such a canon, their work was about all one could find.

And yet, in retrospect, and after rereading many of those books more than thirty years later, I’m astonished by how sad, furtive, and destructive an image of sexuality they presented. Today we have an insipid idea of literature as selfdiscovery, and a reflexive conviction that young people—especially those struggling with identity or prejudice—need role models. But these books contained no role models at all, and they depicted self-discovery as a cataclysmic severance from society. The price of survival, for the self-aware homosexual, was a complete inversion of values, dislocation, wandering, and rebellion. One of the few traditions you were allowed to keep was misogyny. And most of the men represented in these books were not willing to pay the heavy price of rebellion and were, to appropriate Hesse’s phrase, ground beneath the wheel.

The value of these books wasn’t anything wholesome they contained, or any moral instruction they offered. Rather, it was the process of finding them, the thrill of reading them, the way the books themselves, like the men they depicted, detached you from the familiar moral landscape. They gave a name to the palpable, physical loneliness of sexual solitude, but they also greatly increased your intellectual and emotional solitude. Until very recently, the canon of literature for a gay kid was discovered entirely alone, by threads of connection that linked authors from intertwined demimondes. It was smuggling, but also scavenging. There was no Internet, no “customers who bought this item also bought,” no helpful librarians steeped in the discourse of tolerance and diversity, and certainly no one in the adult world who could be trusted to give advice and advance the project of limning this still mostly forbidden body of work.

The pleasure of finding new access to these worlds was almost always punctured by the bleakness of the books themselves. One of the two boys who kissed in that Hesse novel eventually came apart at the seams, lapsed into nervous exhaustion, and then one afternoon, after too much beer, he stumbled or willingly slid into a slow-moving river, where his body was found, like Ophelia’s, floating serenely and beautiful in the chilly waters. Hesse would blame poor Hans’s collapse on the severity of his education and a lamentable disconnection from nature, friendship, and congenial social structures. But surely that kiss, and that friendship with a wayward poet, had something to do with it. As Hans is broken to pieces, he remembers that kiss, a sign that at some level Hesse felt it must be punished.

Hans was relatively lucky, dispensed with chaste, poetic discretion, like the lover in a song cycle by Franz Schubert or Robert Schumann. Other boys who found themselves enmeshed in the milieu of homoerotic desire were raped, bullied, or killed, or lapsed into madness, disease, or criminality. They were disposable or interchangeable, the objects of pederastic fixation or the instrumental playthings of adult characters going through aesthetic, moral, or existential crises. Even the survivors face, at the end of these novels, the bleakest existential crises. Even the survivors face, at the end of these novels, the bleakest of futures: isolation, wandering, and a perverse form of aging in which the loss of youth is never compensated with wisdom.

One doesn’t expect novelists to give us happy endings. But looking back on many of the books I read during my age of smuggling, I’m profoundly disturbed by what I now recognize as their deeply entrenched homophobia. I wonder if it took a toll on me, if what seemed a process of self-liberation was inseparable from infection with the insecurities, evasions, and hypocrisy stamped into gay identity during the painful, formative decades of its nascence in the last century. I wonder how these books will survive, and in what form: historical documents, symptoms of an ugly era, cris de coeur of men (mostly men) who had made it only a few steps along the long road to true equality? Will we condescend to them, and treat their anguish with polite, clinical detachment? I hesitate to say that these books formed me, because that suggests too simplistic a connection between literature and character. But I can’t be the only gay man in middle age who now wonders if what seemed a gift at the time—the discovery of a literature of same-sex desire just respectable enough to circulate without suspicion—was in fact more toxic than a youth of that era could ever have anticipated.

2.

Before the mid-1990s, when the Internet began to collapse the distinction between cities, suburbs, and everywhere else, books were the most reliable access to the larger world, and the only access to books was the bookstore or the library. The physical fact of a book was both a curse and a blessing. It made reading a potentially dangerous act if you were reading the wrong things, and of course one had to physically find and possess the book. But the mere fact of being a book, the fact that someone had published the words and they were circulating in the world, gave a book the presumption of respectability, especially if it was deemed “literature.” There were, of course, bad or dangerous books in the world—and self-appointed guardians who sought to suppress and destroy them—but decent people assumed that these were safely contained within universities.

I borrowed my copy of Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel from the library, so I can’t be sure whether it contained any of the small clues that led to other like-minded books. At least one copy I have found in a used bookstore does have an invaluable signpost on the back cover: “Along with Heinrich Mann’s The Blue Angel, Emil Strauss’s Friend Death, and Robert Musil’s Young Törless, all of which came out in the same period, it belongs to the genre of school novels.” Perhaps that’s what prompted me to read Musil’s far more complicated, beautifully written, and excruciating schoolboy saga. Hans, shy, studious, and trusting, led me to Törless, a bolder, meaner, more dangerous boy.

Other threads of connection came from the introductions, afterwords, footnotes, and the solicitations to buy other books found just inside the back cover. When I first started reading independently of classroom assignments and the usual boy’s diet of Rudyard Kipling, Jonathan Swift, Alexandre Dumas, and Jules Verne—reading without guidance and with all the odd detours and byways of an autodidact—I devised a three-part test for choosing a new volume: first, a book had to have a black or orange spine, then the colors of Penguin Classics, which someone had assured me was a reliable brand; second, I had to be able to finish the book within a few days, lest I waste the opportunity of my weekly visit to the bookstore; and third, I had to be hooked by the narrative within one or two pages. That is certainly what led me, by chance, to Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, a rather slight and pretentious novel of incestuous infatuation, gender slippage, homoerotic desire, and surreal distortions of time and space. I knew nothing of Cocteau but was intrigued by one of his line drawings on the cover, which showed two androgynous teenagers, and a summary which assured it was about a boy named Paul, who worshipped a fellow student.

I still have that copy of Cocteau. In the back there was yet more treasure, a whole page devoted to advertising the novels of Gide (The Immoralist is described as “the story of man’s rebellion against social and sexual conformity”) and another to Genet (The Thief’s Journal is “a voyage of discovery beyond all moral laws; the expression of a philosophy of perverted vice, the working out of an aesthetic degradation”). These little précis were themselves a guide to the coded language—“illicit, corruption, hedonism”—that often, though not infallibly, led to other enticing books. And yet one might follow these little broken twigs and crushed leaves only to end up in the frustrating world of mere decadence, Wagnerian salons, undirected voluptuousness, the enervating eccentricities of Joris-Karl Huysmans or the chaste, coy allusions to vice in Wilde.

Finally, there were a handful of narratives that had successfully transitioned into open and public respectability, even if always slightly tainted by scandal. If the local theater company still performed Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, who could fault a boy for reading The Picture of Dorian Gray?

Conveniently, a 1982 Bantam Classics edition contained both, and also the play Salomé. Wilde’s novel was a skein of brilliant banter stretched over a rather silly, Gothic tale, and the hiding-in-plain-sight of its homoeroticism was deeply unfulfilling. Even then, too scared to openly acknowledge my own feelings, I found Wilde’s obfuscations embarrassing. More powerful than anything in the highly contrived and overwrought games of Dorian was a passing moment in Salomé when the Page of Herodias obliquely confesses his love for the Young Syrian, who has committed suicide in disgust at Salomé’s licentious display. “He has killed himself,” the boy laments, “the man who was my friend! I gave him a little box of perfumes and earrings wrought in silver, and now he has killed himself.” It was these moments that slipped through, sudden intimations of honest feeling, which made plowing through Wilde’s self-indulgence worth the effort.

Then there was the most holy and terrifying of all the publicly respectable representations of homosexual desire, Mann’s Death in Venice, which might even be found in one’s parents’ library, the danger of its sexuality safely ossified inside the imposing façade of its reputation. A boy who read Death in Venice wasn’t slavering over a beautiful Polish adolescent in a sailor’s suit, he was climbing a mountain of sorts, proving his devotion to culture.

But a boy who read Death in Venicewas receiving a very strange moral and sentimental education. Great love was somehow linked to intellectual crisis, a symptom of mental exhaustion. It was entirely inward and unrequited, and it was likely triggered by some dislocation of the self from familiar surroundings, to travel, new sights and smells, and hot climates. It was unsettling and isolating, and drove one to humiliating vanities and abject voyeurism. Like so much of what one found in Wilde (perfumed and swaddled in cant), Gide (transplanted to the colonial realms of North Africa, where bourgeois morality was suspended), or Genet (floating freely in the postwar wreckage and flotsam of values, ideals, and norms), Death in Venice also required a young reader to locate himself somewhere on the inexorable axis of pederastic desire.

In retrospect I understand that this fixation on older men who suddenly have their worlds shattered by the brilliant beauty of a young man or adolescent was an intentional, even ironic repurposing of the classical approbation of Platonic pederasty. It allowed the “uranist”—to use the pejorative Victorian term for a homosexual—to broach, tentatively and under the cover of a venerable and respected literary tradition, the broader subject of same-sex desire. While for some, especially Gide, pederasty was the ideal, for others it may have been a gateway to discussing desire among men of relatively equal age and status, what we now think of as being gay. But as an eighteen-year-old reader, I had no interest in being on the receiving end of the attentions of older men; and as a middle-aged man, no interest in children.

The dynamics of the pederastic dyad—like so many narratives of colonialism —also meant that in most cases the boy was silent, seemingly without an intellectual or moral life. He was pure object, pure receptivity, unprotesting, perfect and perfectly silent in his beauty. When Benjamin Britten composed his last opera, based on Mann’s novella, the youth is portrayed by a dancer, voiceless in a world of singing, present only as an ideal body moving in space. In Gide’s Immoralist, the boys of Algeria (and Italy and France) are interchangeable, lost in the torrents of monologue from the narrator, Michel, who wants us to believe that they are mere instruments in his long, agonizing process of self-discovery and liberation. In Genet’s Funeral Rites, a frequently pornographic novel of sexual violence among the partisans and collaborators of Paris during the liberation, the narrator/author even attempts to make a virtue of the interchangeability of his young objects of desire: “The characters in my books all resemble each other,” he says. He’s right, and he amplifies their sameness by suppressing or eliding their personalities, dropping identifying names or pronouns as he shifts between their individual stories, often reducing them to anonymous body parts.

By reducing boys and young men to ciphers, the narrative space becomes open for untrammeled displays of solipsism, narcissism, self-pity, and of course self-justification. These books, written over a period of decades, by authors of vastly different temperaments and sexualities, are surprisingly alike in this claustrophobia of desire and subjugation of the other. Indeed, the psychological violence done to the male object of desire is often worse in authors who didn’t manifest any particular personal interest in same-sex desire. For example, in Musil’s Confusions of Young Törless, a gentle and slightly effeminate boy named Basini becomes a tool for the social, intellectual, and emotional advancement of three classmates who are all, presumably, destined to get married and lead entirely heterosexual lives. One student uses Basini to learn how to exercise power and manipulate people in preparation for a life of public accomplishment; another tortures him to test his confused spiritual theories, a stew of supposedly Eastern mysticism; and Törless turns to him, and turns on him, simply to feel something, to sense his presence and power in the world, to add to the stockroom of his mind and soul.

We are led to believe that this last form of manipulation is, in its effect on poor Basini, the cruelest. Later in the book, when Musil offers us the classic irony of the bildungsroman—the guarantee that everything that has happened was just a phase, a way station on the path of authorial evolution—he explains why Törless “never felt remorse” for what he did to Basini:

For the only real interest [that “aesthetically inclined intellectuals” like the older Törless] feel is concentrated on the growth of their own soul, or personality, or whatever one may call the thing within us that every now and then increases by the addition of some idea picked up between the lines of a book, or which speaks to us in the silent language of a painting[,] the thing that every now and then awakens when some solitary, wayward tune floats past us and away, away into the distance, whence with alien movements tugs at the thin scarlet thread of our blood —the thing that is never there when we are writing minutes, building machines, going to the circus, or following any of the hundreds of other similar occupations.

The conquest of beautiful boys, whether a hallowed tradition of all-male schools or the vestigial remnant of classical poetry, is simply another way to add to one’s fund of poetic and emotional knowledge, like going to the symphony. Today we might be blunter: to refine his aesthetic sensibility, Törless participated in the rape, torture, humiliation, and emotional abuse of a gay kid.

And he did it in a confined space. It is a recurring theme (and perhaps cliché) of many of these novels that homoerotic desire must be bounded within narrow spaces, dark rooms, private attics, as if the breach in conventional morality opened by same-sex desire demands careful, diligent, and architectural containment. The boys who beat and sodomize Basini do it in a secret space in the attic above their prep school. Throughout much of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, two siblings inhabit a darkly enchanted room, bickering and berating each other as they attempt to displace unrequited or forbidden desires onto acceptable alternatives. Cocteau helpfully gives us a sketch of this room—a few wispy lines that suggest something that Henri Matisse might have painted—with two beds, parallel to each other, as if in a hospital ward. Sickness, of course, is ever-present throughout almost all of these novels as well: the cholera that kills Aschenbach in Death in Venice, the tuberculosis which Michel overcomes and to which his hapless wife succumbs in The Immoralist, and the pallor, ennui, listlessness, and fevers of Cocteau. James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, a later, more deeply ambivalent contribution to this canon of illness and enclosure, takes its name from the cramped, cluttered chambre de bonne that contains this desire, with the narrator keenly aware that if what happens there—a passionate relationship between a young American man in Paris and his Italian boyfriend— escapes that space, the world of possibilities for gay men would explode. But floods of booze, perhaps alcoholism, and an almost suicidal emotional frailty haunt this space, too.

Often it is the author’s relation to these dark spaces that gives us our only reliable sense of how he envisioned the historical trajectory of being gay. In Cocteau’s novel, the room becomes a ship, or a portal, transporting the youth Cocteau’s novel, the room becomes a ship, or a portal, transporting the youth into the larger world of adult desires. The lines are fluid, but there is a possibility of connection between the perfervid world of contained sexuality and the larger universe of sanctioned desires. In Baldwin, the young Italian proposes the two men keep their room as a space apart, a refuge for secret assignations, even as his American lover prepares to reunite with his fiancée and return to a life of normative sexuality. They could continue their relationship privately, on the side, a quiet compromise between two sexual realms. But Musil’s attic, essentially a torture chamber, is a much more desperate space, a permanent ghetto for illicit desire.

Even those among these books that were self-consciously written to advance the cause of gay men, to make their anguish more comprehensible to a reflexively hostile straight audience, leave almost no room—no space—for many openly gay readers. The parallels with colonial discourse are troubling: the colonized “other,” the homosexual making his appeal to straight society, must in turn pass on the violence and colonize and suppress yet weaker or more marginal figures on the spectrum of sexuality. Thus in the last of Gide’s daring dialogues in defense of homosexuality, first published piecemeal, then together commercially as Corydon in 1924—a tedious book full of pseudoscience and speculative extensions of Darwinian theory—the narrator contemptuously dismisses the unmanly homosexual: “If you please, we’ll leave the inverts aside for now. The trouble is that ill-informed people confuse them with normal homosexuals. And you understand, I hope, what I mean by ‘inverts.’ After all, heterosexuality too includes certain degenerates, people who are sick and obsessed.”

Along with the effeminate, the old and the aging are also beneath contempt. The casual scorn in Mann’s novella for an older man whom Aschenbach encounters on his passage to Venice is almost as horrifying as the sexual abuse and mental torture of young Basini in Musil’s novel. Among gay men, Mann’s painted clown is one of the most unsettling figures in literature, a “young-old man” whom Mann calls a “repulsive sight.” He apes the manners and dress of youth but has false teeth and bad makeup, luridly colored clothing, and a rakish hat, and is desperately trying to run with a younger crowd of men: “He was an old man, beyond a doubt, with wrinkles and crow’s feet round eyes and mouth; the dull carmine of the cheeks was rouge, the brown hair a wig.” Mann’s writing rises to a suspiciously incandescent brilliance in his descriptions of this supposedly loathsome figure. For reasons entirely unnecessary to the plot or development of his central characters, Baldwin resurrects Mann’s grotesquerie, in a phantasmagorical scene that describes an encounter between his young

American protagonist and a nameless old “queen” who approaches him in a bar:

American protagonist and a nameless old “queen” who approaches him in a bar:

The face was white and thoroughly bloodless with some kind of foundation cream; it stank of powder and a gardenia-like perfume. The shirt, open coquettishly to the navel, revealed a hairless chest and a silver crucifix; the shirt was covered with paper-thin wafers, red and green and orange and yellow and blue, which stormed in the light and made one feel that the mummy might, at any moment, disappear in flame.

This is the future to which the narrator—and by extension the reader if he is a gay man—is condemned. Unless, of course, he succumbs to disease or addiction. At best there is a retreat from society, perhaps to someplace where the economic differential between the Western pederast and the colonized boy makes an endless string of anonymous liaisons economically feasible. Violent death is the worst of the escapes. Not content with merely parodying older gay men, Baldwin must also murder them. In a scene that does gratuitous violence to the basic voice and continuity of the book, the narrator imagines in intimate detail events he has not actually witnessed: the murder of a flamboyant bar owner who sexually harasses and extorts the young Giovanni (by this point betrayed, abandoned, and reduced to what is, in effect, prostitution). The murder happens behind closed doors, safely contained in a room filled with “silks, colors, perfumes.”

3.

If I remember with absolute clarity the first same-sex kiss I encountered in literature, I don’t remember very well when my interest in specifically homoerotic narrative began to wane. But again, thanks to the physicality of the book, I have an archaeology more reliable than memory. As a young reader, I was in the habit of writing the date when I finished a book on the inside front cover, and so I know that sometime shortly before I turned twenty-one, my passion for dark tales of unrequited desire, sexual manipulation, and destructive Nietzschean paroxysms of self-transcendence peaked, then flagged. That was also the same time that I came out to friends and family, which was prompted by the complete loss of hope that a long and unrequited love for a classmate might be returned. Logic suggests that these events were related, that the collapse of romantic illusions and the subsequent initiation of an actual erotic life with real, living people dulled the allure of Wilde, Gide, Mann, and the other authors who were loosely in their various orbits.

were loosely in their various orbits.

It happened this way: For several years I had been drawn to a young man who seemed to me curiously like Hans from Hesse’s novel. Physically, at least, they were alike: “Deep-set, uneasy eyes glowed dimly in his handsome and delicate face; fine wrinkles, signs of troubled thinking, twitched on his forehead, and his thin, emaciated arms and hands hung at his side with the weary gracefulness reminiscent of a figure by Botticelli.” But in every other way my beloved was an invention. I projected onto him an elaborate but entirely imaginary psychology, which I now suspect was cobbled together from bits and pieces of the books I had been reading. He was sad, silent, and doomed, like Hans, but also cold, remote, and severe, like Törless, cruelly beautiful like all the interchangeable sailors and hoodlums in Genet, but also intellectual, suffering, and mystically connected to dark truths from which I was excluded. When I recklessly confessed my love to him—how long I had nurtured it and how complex, beautiful, and poetic it was—he responded not with anger or disgust but impatience: “You can’t put all this on me.”

He was right. It took me only a few days to realize it intellectually, a few weeks to begin accepting it emotionally, and a few years not to feel fear and shame in his presence. He had recognized in an instant that what I had felt for years, rather like Swann for Odette, had nothing to do with him. It wasn’t even love, properly speaking. I can’t claim that it was all clear to me at the time, that I was conscious of any connection between what I had read and the excruciating dead end of my own fantasy life. I make these connections in retrospect. But the realization that I would never be with him because he didn’t in fact exist—not in the way I imagined him—must have soured me on the literature of longing, torment, and convoluted desire. And the challenge and excitement of negotiating a genuine erotic life rendered so much of what I had found in these books painfully dated and irrelevant.

I want to be rigorously honest about my feelings for this literature, whether it distorted my sense of self and even, perhaps, corrupted my imagination. The safe thing to say is that I can’t possibly find an answer to that, not simply because memory is unreliable, but because we never know whether books implant things in us or merely confirm what is already there. In Young Törless, Musil proposes the idea that the great literature of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and William Shakespeare is essentially a transitional crutch for young minds, a mental prosthesis or substitute identity during the formlessness of adolescence: “These associations originating outside, and these borrowed emotions, carry young people over the dangerously soft spiritual ground of the years in which they need to be of some significance to themselves and nevertheless are still too incomplete to have any real significance.”

It’s important to divorce the question of how these books may have influenced me from the malicious accusations of corruption that have dogged gay fiction from the beginning. In the course of our reading lives, we will devour dozens, perhaps hundreds, of crude, scabrous, violent books, with no discernible impact on our moral constitution. And homosexual writers certainly didn’t invent the general connection between sexuality and illness, or the thin line between passion and violence, or sadism and masochism, or the sexual exploitation of the young or defenseless. And the mere mention of same-sex desire is still seen in too many places around the world today as inherently destructive to young minds. Gide’s Corydon decried the illogic of this a century ago: “And if, in spite of advice, invitations, provocations of all kinds, he should manifest a homosexual tendency, you immediately blame his reading or some other influence (and you argue in the same way for an entire nation, an entire people); it has to be an acquired taste, you insist; he must have been taught it; you refuse to admit that he might have invented it all by himself.”

And I want to register an important caveat about the literature of same-sex desire: it is not limited to the books I read, the authors I encountered, or the tropes that now seem to me so sad and destructive. In 1928, E. M. Forster wrote a short story called “Arthur Snatchfold” that wasn’t published until 1972, two years after the author’s death. In it, an older man, Sir Richard Conway, respectable in all ways, visits the country estate of a business acquaintance, where he has a quick, early-morning sexual encounter with a young deliveryman in a field near the house. Later, as Sir Richard chats with his host at their club in London, he learns that the liaison was seen by a policeman, the young man was arrested, and the authorities sent him to prison. To his great relief, Sir Richard also learns that he himself is safe from discovery, that the “other man” was never identified, and despite great pressure on the working-class man to incriminate his upper-class partner, he refused to do so.

“He [the deliveryman] was instantly removed from the court and as he went he shouted back at us—you’ll never credit this—that if he and the old grandfather didn’t mind it why should anyone else,” says Sir Richard’s host, fatuously indignant about the whole affair. Sir Richard, ashamed and sad but trapped in the armor of his social position, does the only thing he can: “Taking a notebook from his pocket, he wrote down the name of his lover, yes, his lover who was going to prison to save him, in order that he might not forget it.” It isn’t a great story, but it is an important moment in the evolution of an idea of loyalty and honor within the emerging category of homosexual identity. I didn’t

discover it until years after it might have done me some good.

Forster’s story is exceptional because only one man is punished, and he is given a voice—and a final, clear, unequivocal protest against the injustice. The other man escapes, but into shame, guilt, and self-recrimination. And yet it is the escapee who takes up the pen and begins to write. We might say of Sir Richard what we often say of our parents as we come to peace with them: he did the best he could. And for all the internalized homophobia of the authors I began reading more than thirty years ago, I would say the same thing. They did the best they could. They certainly did far more than privately inscribe a name in a book. I can’t honestly say that I would have had even Sir Richard’s limited courage in 1928.

But Forster’s story, which he didn’t dare publish while he was alive, is the exception, not the rule. It is painful to read the bulk of this early canon, and it will only become more and more painful, as gay subcultures dissolve and the bourgeois respectability that so many of these authors abandoned yet craved becomes the norm. In Genet, marriage between two men was the ultimate profanation, one of the strongest inversions of value the author could muster to scandalize his audience and delight his rebellious readers. The image of samesex marriage was purely explosive, a strategy for blasting apart the hypocrisy and pretentions of traditional morality. Today it is becoming commonplace.

I wonder if these books will survive like the literature of abolition, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—marginal, dated, remembered as important for its earnest, sentimental ambition but also a catalogue of stereotypes. Or if they will be mostly forgotten, like the nineteenth-century literature of aesthetic perversity and decadence that many of these authors so deeply admired. Will Gide and Genet be as obscure to readers as Huysmans and the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse)?

I hope not, and not least because they mattered to me, and helped forge a common language of reference among many gay men of my generation. I hope they survive for the many poignant epitaphs they contain, grave markers for the men who were used, abused, and banished from their pages. Let me write them down in my notebook, so I don’t forget their names: Hans, who loved Hermann; Basini, who loved Törless; the Page of Herodias, who loved the Young Syrian; Giovanni, who loved David; and all the rest, unnamed, often with no voice, but not forgotten.

TIM KREIDER

[alvinsoffie]

WORLD AIDS DAY 2020

December 1,

Theme: Each World AIDS Day focuses on a specific theme,  

This years theme is  “ Global Solidarity: Shared Responsibility.  ”

A look back at recent themes gives an interesting perspective:

2020    Global solidarity, shared responsibility

2019    Communities make the difference

2018    Know your status

2017    My health, my right

2016    Hands up for HIV prevention

Personal awareness and responsibilty, coupled with Community support is a reasonable paradigm for moving the HIV/AIDS agenda forward. Embracing this can go a far way to achieve the Goals for eliminating HIV

"  World AIDS Day remains as relevant today as it’s always been, reminding people and governments that HIV has not gone away. There is still a critical need for increased funding for the AIDS response, to increase awareness of the impact of HIV on people’s lives, a need to end stigma and discrimination and to improve the quality of life of people living with HIV."  

I am quoting directly from UNAIDS here.

A useful way to compare The two pandemics:  The 40 year old HIV/AIDS pandemic is the stately annual  journey around the sun.   COVID 19  is the 28 day cycle of the moon around the earth.  It's busy and frenzied. Because it shares the same stigmas, the same governments the same communities; the same inequities: we get a quicker look at the cycle of events. Some countries are already on their third wave, their third cycle or go round of COVID 19. And lessons are being learned at this heightened pace.

This crisis, This frenzied pace has become  a wake-up call, an opportunity to do things differently—better, and together. In many respects, the defeat of AIDS as a public health threat could depend on how the world responds to COVID-19.

Inasmuch as  COVID 19  has overshadowed the AIDS pandemic. we  DO note that some important lessons are being learned and that with care we can utilize  aspects of the COVID 19 response to improve HIV response and awareness.

Since you have invited a religous, I believe that you are expecting some insight from a Christian or Biblical perspective, and if this is so, I wouldn't want to disappoint you.

I did some homework, a little research,  and came away shocked!   In a sense  upset on learning that Stigma is the main deterent and source of frustration for battling and overcoming the effects of the AIDS epidemic.

As I looked at the seven types of stigma identified across a range of psychosocial situations, I came to realize that Stigma and its associates, prejudice and discrimination, are deeply ingrained responses that are applied outside of logic and wisdom, and where it surfaces can surprise you.

For the record the seven types of Stigma are:

PUBLIC,  SELF,  PERCEIVED, LABEL AVOIDANCE,  BY ASSOCIATION,  STRUCTURAL, AND HEALTH INDUSTRY PERSONEL.

All of these manifestation  of Stigma are being  experienced in real time in this COVID 19 pandemic. Lets not forget that persons were beaten for sneezing, an involuntary act. Fear and paranoia brings out the worst in us. Where they find common ground, the excesses are very dangerous.

To return to the global AIDS response;  At a time when 'untraceable equals untransmittable is a reality already, It is strange that there is no obvious reintegration mechanism for the persons who can overcome the virus. Right HERE, such a mechanism or protocol could provide a rallying point against the stigma PLHIV face. It becomes a powerful incentive to reach for; a goal to achieve. This is one crucial difference with COVID 19, Governments want us to get back to work so there are tests and procedures for reintegration for those who have caught and overcome the virus. The reintegration is SPONSORED because it is deemed vital.

The HIV scenario still has gender bias and sexuality and dominance issues that drive the stigma and after 40 years they remain well entrenched globally.

What does scripture have to offer here. Both Old and New Testaments recognize a variety of diseases that initially demand isolation and removal  from communal life. Numbers 12 points to a situation where Miriam the sister of Moses was punished with a skin disease and was out of the camp in isolation for 10 days. Even here there was a clear return to community. She wasn't cast into outer darkness with weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth!  Israel camped and waited  for her. Just a biblical reminder that it always help to have a celebrity or power person build empathy for your cause.

The reintegration mechanism was well defined. The priests were trained and were the ones assigned the inspection of the suffering person. Once satisfied of their rehabilitation, they offered the necessary sacrifice and were fully reintegrated into family and community.

In the Gospels where Jesus was remarkably open to transformative action on peoples behalf, his advise to cured lepers, to

" show yourself to the priests ...  

and  

" Offer the sacrifices Moses commanded"

leverages this generations old schema for returning the  renewed back to community. Jesus did not subvert the process: he co-opted the process for the validation that it offered. The process is Critical! In real life more than a few persons doing well on their regime fall away and do not return for medication and help. The validation process is aborted by some triggered fear and more than a few will end up dead; losing their lives.

   A lesson here is that education doesnt always defeat prejudice. In fact it can provide seemingly plausible justification for discrimination.  This is why discrete access to health care for PLHIV is a necessity. Thank God for JASL.

   The Label Avoidance Stigma is the most insiduous of the seven. It is the one that keeps the infected person from seeking help. in your community or elsewhere. They know full well that bush have ears and if you are seen in Mocho or Portland or Mandiville at a clinic the rumour mill will grind and your issues will be publicised. They keep quiet and die quieter still. I have seen it up close and it hurts my heart every time I am faced with it.  Let me say it again;  Thank God for JASL  

Sadly, you are as likely to hear a pastor or preacher condemn the sick and declare God's judgment rather than provide access to care and counselling and in hospitals one has to deal with health professionals whose personal biases become stumbling blocks to personal healthcare services..some share unethically, the details of their patients, furthering stigma and discrimination  ...   very well documented.

If the church would follow Its Lord's instructions. If it would extend itself to speak for the voiceless

Someone came to Jesus for healing and the discussion began:  'Lord, If you choose you can make me whole'.  Jesus said,  'I DO Choose!'  If our churches would follow Jesus and choose to facilitate health and wholeness, a lot could change.

Church could stand with or stand up for  the sick especially PLHIV/AIDS.  it could do a lot to counter stigma, to counter the whispered inuendos that is Stigma by Association. Stigma by Association is the one that kills community support for the needy. It is the one that ties you to the presumed sexual preferences and activities of the persons you are inclined to help.  

Churches could build support for members and persons who are HIV positive, but who would dare share their status with the brothers or sisters in church. Very few keep secrets, fewer still, exhibit compassion. We need radical Christianity of the leave all and follow Jesus variety.

Returning to the bigger stage,  the theme Global solidarity, shared responsibility invites us to revisit our relationships and the activities they engender. Global solidarity invites us to explore the Global response and align ourselves with projects and activities that we are able to support. There are a plethora of them and myriad best practices scenarios waiting for our implementation.

One important feature of World Aids Day is the memorialization of the dead. Given the early stigma and circumstances of dying,  many persons have not been properly remembered and closure is still eluding some families who have lost loved ones to  HIV/AIDS.

The opportunity to come out and name them and remember them is hugely therapeutic. This is something that the Church does well.   Catholicism provides a liturgy on All Saints Day, November 1 for the memorialization of our dead. We do it systematically and we know the benefits of it. We light the votive candle, we pray for those we love, and we ask God in his Love and Mercy to deal kindly with them.

There is a ministry here for churches. There is a place where we can quietly exercise the gift of presence as in grief counselling and just be there for those who need us. There is a place for a prophetic voice that can stop the slander and inuendo by its forthright affirmation of the Person living with HIV as a full and complete human being, bearing the image of GOD.  

Even in death, the stigma continues and the cause of death for the death certificate can be problematic for family members.  To remove Stigma is to open up the resources freely and fully for those who need it. This day must come sooner rather than later.  these are difficult times, make no mistake. But we can make a difference if we try a little bit harder.

 Shared Responsibility brings us back to Genesis and Cain's question  ' Am I my brother'e keeper?' Yes!  Yes we are.  God requires an answer of each of us. We are social creatures We need each other for Fulness of living.  We will need to develop more programs that bring real benefits to people living witH HIV

My word of encouragement for PLHIV/AIDS is simple:  Keep the faith. HIV is no longer a death sentence. Serious progress has been made and you can access a good life right here, right now. Your Life is precious! Dont throw it away! Do NOT let pride or shame rob you of health and family, joy and accomplishments. Still dream...  Most things are still possible if you believe and persevere.

Do the right things for yourself. There is now legal recourse to some forms of discrimination. Fight your battle for your life and find support for your cause along the way.  Life is Precious.... DON'T give up! Fight Fight   Fight!

With discipline and determination, the way things are going,  you might actually outlive some of your detractors.

Here I want to quote and close with Minister of State in the Ministry of Health and Wellness, Juliet Cuthbert-Flynn,

“Whether as funding partners, technical informants for policy design and programme implementation, or as medical workers serving people living with HIV and AIDS at the community level, we need to have all hands on deck." the Observer November  20

I endorse All hands on Deck! The world can  and must do better regarding the AIDS pandemic. We must remove the strictures and structures that maintain stigma and discrimination in all its forms.

I endorse all hands on deck and hope to see church and state join together to do the right thing for signicant numbers of our citzens who need our help

I endorse All hands on deck to design and build reintegration protocols and mechanisms for those on the margins right now. they dont need to be there!

I endorse all hands on deck if these hands are tender loving hands, desiring to nurture and to care for those in need.   We have had enough of the finger pointing sleight of hand deception > I'm just saying:

I endorse all hands on deck in the response from governments, NGOs and  Communities  acting globally and locally.  It is my hope that solidarity will facilitate the crafting of an accelerated response with a view to end Living with HIV/AIDS soon.

[imagesofthegreatgull]

Hybrid Rainbow

Joy has always been a rare and precious commodity. I would argue, though, that in the developed world (Wherever, exactly, that is), it has become somewhat less rare in recent times, as standards of living and education continue to go up. That’s an absurdly privileged thing to say, I realize, but I’m trying to start this thing as evenhandedly as I can. I understand about suffering and poverty; I’m reading A Tree Grows In Brooklyn right now, even! Okay, saying we’re closer now than ever to utopia is going to smack of ignorance no matter how you phrase it, but it also strikes me as undeniably true, in the grand scheme of things. I think most people--aside from the fascists--would refuse a one-way trip in a time machine to any previous era, or at the very least, would recognize that it wouldn’t improve much of anything for them. As unruly as our age is, it’s still probably the best one we’ve gotten thus far, and as the boot-heel of oppression starts to ever so slowly ease up its pressure on the necks of the long-suffering masses, the question has begun to enter into the collective consciousness: what is to be done with joy when it begins to fall, unbidden, into your life with something like abundance? What is to be done if moments of joy no longer must be pried with great effort and sacrifice from the rockface of life, but lie strewn liberally throughout our days, needing only the will and lack of embarrassment to seize them?

Thus far, the latter-day generations have faced up to this problem with decidedly mixed success. The idea that expecting anything other than the very worst leaves one vulnerable to the universe’s cruel whims has been stamped upon the human brain for centuries, and has left many sadly unable to recognize their own privilege (Which, by the way, is a big part of why a whole lotta white folks refuse to admit they have it better than anyone else and continue to dig their heels in against progress because to them it looks like cutting in line). It is still widely accepted that constantly finding joy and peace and purpose in one’s own life is the purview of children and children alone, that it is a naivete to be grown out of. We have the impulse always within us to be hard, to be warlike, to show the world that we’re not weak and frivolous but monsters to be feared, without emotions to be appealed to or ideals to be fallen short of.

Remedying this problem has turned out to be one of the primary functions of counterculture. If it is often unhelpful to simply look at the entire value system of one’s parents and say “Fuck that”, as it tends to foster a rather negative self-definition, still, if part of that value system is a deeply entrenched distrust of happiness, “Fuck that��� may be exactly the response called for. The beauty of “Fuck that” is that it leaps past the slow loss of faith in something and arrives immediately at a flat rejection of it, and since much of the history of civilization has been bound up with blind faith in arbitrary and harmful things, the ability and the courage to flatly reject something, to give it no credit for however widely accepted it is but to dismiss it as bullshit from the ground up, is a step forward in human consciousness tantamount to the reinvention of the wheel.

The great irony of the end of the sixties is that all the hippies were miserable for no reason: they won. Rock n’ roll did change the world, it just didn’t immediately transform it on every level into an unrecognizable nirvana. For all the apparent emptiness of its utopian dreams, the basic thrust of the thing worked out just fine: that particular cat will never be put back into its bag, and those ideas are now out in the ether forever, always waiting for someone to find them and be inspired to change their own life and the lives of those around them for the better. The same goes for the punk rock revolution a few years later: they may not have brought the bastards down, but they did successfully bring personal liberation to a lot of people, and poured exactly as much gas on the fires of populism as they intended to. Culture, and in particular art and in particular music, cannot, unassisted, change the world, but it can change your world, and has been changing small worlds all over the frigging place at least since those mop-topped Brits set foot on American shores and probably since Johnny B. Goode learned to play guitar just like a-ringin’ a bell. 

The thread can get lost, however. Culture is always a reflection of the people, and the people still spend a lot of their time bored, frustrated, and terrified of letting on that they have feelings about stuff. Young people especially, formerly the eternal pirate crew waving high the flags of “Liberty” and “Up Yours”, in recent times have often capitulated and resigned themselves to no more than a few stray moments of fun pilfered from the fortresses of the almighty Money Man-Kings, usually in the form of drugs, sex, and reckless self-endangerment. The cost of the hippies and the punks giving up their battles is that the counterculture lost its intellectual leadership, at least until the resurgence in political literacy in the 2010s. In the wasteland following the 70s, there were no John Lennons or Joe Strummers to look to for guidance; even the people who were elected to speak for their generation seemed adamant that there was fuck-all they could really say. Yeah, it’s nice to know that someone else feels stupid and contagious, but that’s not really a direction, is it? The generation-defining message Kurt Cobain and his peers sent out was “We’re all way too fucked up to do anything about anything”, and that introspective moodiness pervaded American underground rock music from the invention of hardcore at least all the way up to the moment Craig Finn watched The Last Waltz with Tad Kubler and said “Why aren’t there bands like this anymore?” and set out with rest of the Steadies in tow to remind everyone that music can save your immortal soul and that hey, that Springsteen guy was really onto something, headband and all, and together they all successfully ushered in the New Uncool and now we’ve got Patrick Stickles wailing that “If the weather’s as bad as the weatherman says, we’re in for a real mean storm!” and Brian Fallon admitting “I always kinda sorta wished I looked like Elvis” and everything’s great, except it’s not, everything’s fucked, but rock n’ roll is here to stay, come inside now it’s okay, and I’ll shake you, ooo-ooo-ooo.

The point of all this is my belief that even with the responsibility rock music has to provide cathartic outlets for dissatisfaction, is has an equal or greater responsibility to provide heroes. I think it’s time we all got over pretending that we’re better than the need for heroes, because we all insist on having them anyway, imperfect roses by any other name, and we’d do a hell of a lot better selecting them if we just admitted what we were after. We don’t just want particularly talented comrades, we want King Arthur, Robin Hood, Superman, Malcolm Reynolds. Damn it all, they don’t need to be perfect, they don’t even need to be all that great really, and yeah, Arthur dies, and Robin never gets Prince John, and Superman can’t save everyone, and the war’s over, we’re all just folk now, and John Lennon beat women and Van Morrison is a grumpy old fart and John Lydon’s a disgrace, but it’s the faith that counts. The faith that there’s something greater than ourselves that some people are more keyed into than others, and that whatever they can relay from that other side is what’ll see us through. All the best prophets are madmen, and madmen aren’t always romantic fools; sometimes they hurt people, or fail at crucial moments due to a compulsion they can’t control. Let he who is without sin etcetera, right? Why not cast aside realism and sincerely believe in something or someone, huh? 

I believe in the Pillows. I don’t know hardly anything about them; my expertise of Japanese culture and history extends to the anime I’ve seen and that “History of Japan” YouTube video that made the rounds a while back. I can’t locate them within the Japanese music scene; all their western influences seem obvious to me, and the rest I know nothing about. They’re the only rock band from their country I’ve listened to any great amount of, I don’t speak the language they mostly sing in, I don’t even know their career very well. The particulars of any experiences they might have had that motivated them to make the art they make are not ones I could possibly share in, so, saying that I “Relate” to their work sounds a little preposterous. They ought to be a novelty to me, a band that clearly likes a lot of the same bands I do despite hailing from a foreign shore, marrying that shared music taste with a cultural identity I have nothing to do with, a small, nice upswing of globalism pleasing to my sense of universalism but not having any kind of quantifiable impact on me.

Yet I, like a good many other westerners, believe in the Pillows. I’m a little buster, and my eyes just watered as I wrote that. In fact, it’s likely because of the barriers of language and culture that exist between us that my belief in the Pillows is so strong. Pete Townshend, someone else I believe in, once opened a show by saying “You are very far away...but we will fucking reach you”, and though the Pillows are both geographically (At the moment) and culturally miles away from me, Lord strike me down if they don’t fucking reach me. They reach me in a way many of their American college rock peers, many of their biggest influences in fact, never have. Dinosaur Jr, Bob Mould, Sonic Youth, the Pixies, Nirvana--all these artists speak directly to the American adolescent experience, but though they have all moved me to one degree or another, none of them have produced a body of work I can so readily see myself in as that of the Pillows. Maybe it is the novelty of it, maybe I’m fooling myself and it is just my sense of universalism carrying me away, but there’s something I hear in the Pillows that I don’t hear in those bands, and though the obvious candidate for that thing would be the foreign tongue the majority of the lyrics are written in, when it comes down to it, I think that thing is joy.

Joy, to me, is the possibility glimpsed by rock n’ roll. Not hedonistic pleasure, not a sadistic glee over the outrage of authority figures, but real, true, open-hearted, “Freude, schöner Götterfunken/Tochter aus Elysium”--type joy. Buddy Holly had joy. The Beatles, The Who, the pre-fall Rod Stewart, they had joy. Springsteen’s got joy to spare. Those people have such profound love for their art and their audience that just the continual recognition of the fact that they have a guitar in their hands and they’re being allowed to play it is enough to make them ecstatic, and whenever they want to actually express something serious they have to get themselves under control to do it. Yet, whether it’s the unfashionability of those utopian dreams, or the simple fact that rock music has become accepted by mainstream culture and is now a commonplace, unremarkable thing, but half the people who have picked up an electric guitar for the past few decades don’t seem all that excited about it. From Kim Gordon snarling about how people go down to the store to buy some more and more and more and more, to Thom Yorke moaning about how he’s let down and hanging around, crushed like a bug in the ground, even up to Courtney Barnett asking how’s that for first impressions, this place seems depressing, it’s not really a given anymore, if it ever was, that people who make rock music are very joyful in what they do. 

Of course, I’m not demanding that our artists be empty-headed fluff-factories; far from it. The Pillows write sad songs and angry songs same as everybody else. But the important thing is this: every song the Pillows play is played with an exuberance and abandon that is immediately striking, regardless of the emotional content of each song. Channelling that kind of revelry into rock music is both to my mind the initial purpose of the genre in the first place and something which has become so rare as to be remarkable. A veneer of detached cool, a howling ferocity, a whimpering woundedness--these have become the hallmarks of American rock music, and they are nowhere to be found in the Pillows.

At the same time, the Pillows are the very antithesis of artlessness. Joy of the caliber they deal in is more commonly found in folky rave-ups, a lack of musicianship giving way to trancelike festivity. But the Pillows are skilled song craftsmen like few others; their sound has evolved throughout the years, but they tend to settle in the neighborhood of power-pop, abounding in glorious hooks and surprising structures. A hundred unnecessary, perfect touches seem to exist in every song; a pause, a solo, a bassline, all deftly elevating the song into a perfect expression of something sublime, something that always--always--takes ahold of the musicians themselves and imbues their performances with power and purpose the likes of which most little busters can only dream of feeling. It should be testament enough to their brilliance that upon first listen to a song I never know what most of the lyrics mean, but whenever I look up a translation, they always turn out to be exactly what I felt they must be; their songs are so musically communicative that they all but lack the need for lyrics. 

This dual nature is why I believe in the Pillows: by so utterly failing to neglect both the highest possibilities of musical composition as an unparalleled tool for capturing emotional nuance and the unrestrained id-like rush that is the province of rock n’ roll, they successfully attain the lofty realm that is--or ought to be--the goal of music in the first place. Never once is there a hint of straying into the realm of primitivism nor into overthought seriousness, and instead they locate themselves somehow exactly center on the scale between punk and prog, lacking the weaknesses and gaining the strengths of both. They make rock whole again by finally disproving the tenet initially laid out by their heroes, your heroes, and mine, The Beatles: the notion that growing up means having less fun. The viscerally exciting early work of The Beatles lacks any of the depth and vision displayed by their later records, but those records are so carefully and expertly crafted that they tend to lose spontaneity, and constantly second-guess themselves where the juvenilia they followed forged unselfconsciously ahead. That legendary career path has laid out a false dichotomy that every proceeding generation of kids with guitars has chosen between, save for the few who could see past it, the ones who heard the wildness in “Revolution” and the wisdom in “Twist and Shout” and realized that they were of a piece, were one and the same, not to be chosen between but embraced fully. Pete Townshend. Bruce Springsteen. Joe Strummer. David Byrne. Paul Westerberg. The Pillows. The real heroes are not those who champion one side or another but fight all their lives for peace between them, knowing that we have not yet begun to imagine what could be accomplished if that were made possible.

Just as they bypass the divide between what Patrick Stickles termed the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies of rock (I prefer to think of the usual battle as being between the Dionysians and the Athenians, with the true devotees of Apollo being most of those heroes I keep referring to, except Dylan, who might be a Hermesian), so too do the Pillows bypass the Pacific frigging ocean. And the Atlantic, to boot. Their music quotes the Pixies and The Beatles directly, and obviously owes much to Nirvana and all their college rock predecessors who spent the entire 80s desperately stacking themselves until the doomed power trio could finally vault over the wall. Their first record is practically a tribute to XTC. They do speak a lot of English, too. I’m informed that much of western culture is seen as the epitome of coolness in Japan, which might explain their obsession with Baseball, and apparently sprinkling a bit of the Saxon tongue into the mix is far from uncommon in the music scene(s). Regardless, there is something ineffably touching to a distant fan in a foreign land about hearing Sawao Yamanaka spit “No surrender!” or exclaim “Just runner’s high!” It looks from here like a show of mutual effort to understand me as much as I’m trying to understand them. They’re generous enough to have already walked to the middle where they’re asking me to meet them, a middle where it doesn’t matter that I don’t have a suffix attached to my name or that they don’t wear shoes in houses. The invisible continent that all forward-thinking and sensitive people come to long for is where the Pillows are broadcasting from, because they’ve realized that its golden shores and spiraling cities are attainable. They’re attainable with joy, with the fundamentally rebellious act of refusing to let the fascists bring down even your globdamn day, because who the hell gave them that power other than us? I know enough about Japan and America to know that either one accusing the other of being imperialist and socially conservative to a fault is a fucking joke, and to know that we’ve done a lot more wrong to them than they’ll ever do to us and the presence of the Pillows amounts to a “We forgive you”, not an “I’m sorry”. Having watched a decent amount of anime, which is basically the result of Japan’s mind being blown by western media and then proceeding to show their love by often almost inadvertently surpassing their inspirations, I know that the only way to save our respective national souls and everybody else’s too is to put our knuckles down, have Jesus and Buddha shake hands like Kerouac tried to explain that they would anyway, and embrace each other’s dreams and passions and adopt them into our own. 

It takes better people to inhabit that better world, and in case that sounds like fascist talk, I mean we’ve got to do better, not be better. It’s no physical imperfection that holds us back, nor a mental imperfection exactly, as we all have our own neuroses and if we expunge those then we’ll be kissing art and lot of other vital stuff goodbye. No, it’s our discomfort with ourselves, our world, our neighbors, our aliens, that keep us from seeing that crazy sunshine. If we can’t even acknowledge the greatness around us, that surplus of joy I mentioned a while back that we just seem to have no idea what to do with, then we have no hope of ever achieving further greatness, of ever quelling man’s inhumanity to man down to an inevitable fringe rather than the basic order of the world. 

There was always more to do 

Than just eat and work and screw

But now that there’s time at last to do those things, we’re still afraid to, afraid that we’ll come up empty, that the search for fulfillment leads only to disappointment, better to hang back and play it safe, better not to risk becoming one of those people I shake my head at and pity and will secretly envy until I die. It’s a new world, and we must learn to be new people. I believe in the Pillows because I believe they make excellent models for that new kind of person. The way they behave in the studio and on the stage is the way people behave when they’re truly free, and we’ve all been set free already or will be soon, so if we’re going to try and learn what the fuck is next from anyone, I think we might as well learn from the Pillows. At least, that’s one of the places we could get that insight. There’s a lot of art and a lot of philosophy and political theory to sift through to in order to put together a workable 21st century identity, and the Pillows are hardly the only people to have begun making the leap. But because of a silly thing like the size of the earth, the infinitesimal size of the earth even compared to the distance between us and the next rock we’re gonna try and get to, not everybody is getting their particular brand of free thought and action, and I happen to think that’s regrettable, and it’s my will as a free individual to rectify it as much as I can.

Writing about music really is worthless, isn’t it? I haven’t said jackshit about what the Pillows actually do other than to vaguely qualify their genre and temperament, and the only more useless thing I could do than not describing their songs would be to describe their songs. If you don’t hear the bracing weightlessness in “Blues Drive Monster”, or the aching nostalgia in “Patricia”, or the soul-bearing cry in “Hybrid Rainbow” then nothing I could write about those would be more effective than “Little Busters is a really good album.” The better primer might be Happy Bivouac, from a few years later; it has the melancholic rush of “Last Dinosaur”, the ascended teenybopper “Whoa, whoa, yeah” chorus in “Backseat Dog”, and the intro that should make it obvious immediately that you’re listening to one of the best songs ever recorded which opens “Funny Bunny”. Those two, Runners High, and Please, Mr. Lostman are the classic era, selections from the former three immortalized in their biggest claim to western fame, the FLCL soundtrack, a brilliant use of their music that could warrant an equally long piece. Before and after those four are periods of experimentation and discovery equally worth your time, not all of which I’m familiar with yet. See, now I’m just an incomplete Wikipedia article; it’d be equally worthless to expound upon the individual bandmates, on the pure yawp of Yamanaka’s vocals, on the passionate drumming of Yoshiaki Manabe and the supernaturally faultless lead guitar of Shinichiro Sato, or the contribution of founding bassist Kenji Ueda, which was so valued by the others that when he left he was never officially replaced (They’re so sweet). I’m not here to write an advertisement or a press-release, I don’t really even know why I’m here writing this, but I know that I believe in the Pillows, that they’re important, and that people should write about them. I’m being the change I want to see in the world, get it? That’s all we can be asked to do.

It occurs to me that people believed in Harvey Dent too, and that didn’t turn out so well. Hell, let’s leave the comic book pages behind, people believe in Donald Trump, they think he’s a hero, and that’s all going down in flames as I write this. Having heroes can be dangerous, but I still believe it’s not as dangerous as not having heroes. “Lesser of two evils” sounds an awful lot like one of those false dichotomies between fun and intelligence or between misery and foolishness I mentioned earlier, so, let’s call it a qualified good. I’m not much of a responsible world-citizen if my only effort towards bringing the planet together is spinning some sweet Japanese alt-rock tunes and bragging about how open-minded I am, but if I do ever end up doing anyone any good, then I’d consider it paying forward the good done to me by the Pillows, among others. They helped me form my identity as an artist (Read: functional human being) and they made my adolescence a lot easier. Actually, that’s a lie: my adolescence was (And continues to be) pretty easy already, and the Pillows reassured me that I wasn’t avoiding reality by feeling that. While American bands sang about the downsides of being a mallrat or a non-mallrat, the Pillows offered a vision of teenagedome much like my own, one that was grandly romantic, in which suffering wasn’t a cosmic stupidity but a trial with pathos and merit, and joy was not an occasional indulgence but a constant presence, whether it was lived in or lost and needing recovery. 

That’s the old idea of youth, the youth of John Keats, the youth that makes the old miss it, makes it required that we explain to them that it’s still there, it never left, it’s a dream, a momentary affirmation, an attitude, a muttered curse word. So many of my peers, now no longer engaged in a constant race to stay out of the grave as their ancestors were, seemed intent on beating each other into their tombs, as if reaching walking death before their parents was the only way to outgrow them. There’s so much life just lying around and it’s just plain wasteful to let it lie in the sun and rust in the rain. There’s space enough to stretch, to not keep who you are awkwardly curled up inside yourself, to breathe the air and taste the wine and dig the brains of your fellow travelers in this loosely-defined circus. I found that space in the Pillows, having often suspected it was there, and while everyone is going to find that space in their own way--or not, still, tragically not--I have to think that experience was due in part  to some innate and unique quality of the music itself, not just a complimentary sensibility contained within myself. The Pillows are free, and that makes them freeing, it’s easy as that. Their liberation is plain as day; it rings in every chord, every snare-hit, every harmony; it’s up to us ascertain what we can do in our own limited capacity to hoist ourselves up to their level and give some other folks a boost along the way and a hand to grab afterwards. It’s the gift that art gives us, and the Pillows just give it more freely than most is all, which is why I think the suggestion to listen to them is more than just a solid recommendation. Like the insistence on listening to The Beatles, or The Clash, or any of the others, it’s a plea to save your soul, to learn the language of tomorrow and drink the lifeblood of peace and love and piss and vinegar, or else you’ll be lost, lost, lost. 

Can you feel? Can you feel that hybrid rainbow?

[unsuccesscr]

here it is , the All Might death fic, roughly 4k words of pain ft; Izuku being a mess, Melissa deserving the world, and Bakugo starting a fistfight (for the greater good)

warning; major character death. no gore or graphic depictions but a lot about the grieving process.

blame @eighthilles

“Sir? Sir, you can’t go back there--” A nurse pleads after Izuku as he follows the stretcher through the expansive hallways of the hospital. Towards one of their surgical rooms. He can’t quite see, over the seeming ocean of hospital staff. Doctors and nurses dressed in crisp, clean clothing, and masks on their faces.

A bit of blond hair, one hazy, blue eye, the tips of bony fingers. And then someone’s holding him back as their wheeling the only father he’s ever known beyond huge, unyielding, double doors.

“No, no,” He protests, plaintively, but not truly putting up enough of a fight to potentially hurt the one restraining him. “I have to see him, I have to…”

I have so much I need to say. 

I’m sorry

Thank you

I love you

Please don’t go

Seeming to sense his escalation in panic, the nurse gently guides him back to the waiting area. For some reason the touch is calming, and he can feel his adrenaline draining away slowly. A result of her quirk, in all likelihood, but even calmed he’s in no state to analyze it properly.

“I understand how you feel,” The woman attempts to soothe “But the sooner Mr. Yagi gets into surgery, the better his chances are.”

“Chances?” Izuku parrots, unintelligently, throat closing. “He’s going to be fine, right? He’s going to be ok?”

The nurse looks at him sadly, but doesn’t say yes. Instead she hands him a clipboard, asks him to fill it out; and tells him that she will let him know when they know something.

Izuku takes the forms and nods numbly. Spends a long time staring at the page without really seeing the question. Pen in hand and pressed against the paper but not writing a word. 

How many of these questions can he actually answer? He doesn’t know any of this. Not Medical History or Family History or Medications. Even at their closest the retired pro had a habit of hiding his ailments in a ridiculous attempt to not become a ‘burden’ like he could ever be that after everything he’d done for Izuku, for the world.

The young hero begins to fill out what little information he does know. Name, age, occupation. Details the injury that All Might received from All For One nearly two decades prior. Tries not to think about how he’s the least qualified person in the world to be doing this. 

And yet, somehow, he’d been All Might’s emergency contact.

He’d almost ignored the incoming call from an unknown number, deeply entrenched in getting the paperwork for the still fledgling agency sorted. No sidekicks meant that each hero had to pull their weight with police reports, incident reports, press releases. Not to mention the reassignment applications, recommendation letters, and other legal documents pertaining to the people who entered their doors looking for help. It added up, quickly, and it needed to be done.

That, in the end, was why he’d ended up relenting and answering his insistently ringing cell phone. After all, it could be an emergency. 

It was an emergency.

“...ku?” 

Izuku’s head snapped to attention at the sound of someone speaking directly to him, looking up at what he assumed was another doctor. Dressed in a white coat over formal attire. The older man looked familiar, somehow, but he couldn’t exactly place it. But he was smiling at Izuku with a nervous warmth.

“Deku,” the doctor starts again, and the hero’s name causes some heads to turn. Izuku isn’t shocked he wasn’t recognized earlier, he rarely is; out of costume. He didn’t have the remarkable stature of some of his colleagues and he wasn’t exactly exuding his normal levels of confidence.

“You saved my family, three years ago,” he prompts, as if sensing that Izuku has no recollection. Ah, now he remembers. This man and two young girls trapped beneath a collapsed building, fires from a barely over villain fight still raging. Of course, there were plenty of other heroes on the scene as well, all performing similar rescues. It wasn’t exactly an extraordinary achievement. 

“I’m glad everyone was ok,” Izuku says, somewhat mechanically, still unable to quite function under the circumstances. “My fa...All Migh...Yagi Toshinori, do you know what happened? Will he be ok?”

The doctor’s expression shifts, closely mirroring the look of pained empathy the nurse had given Izuku before.

“Mr. Yagi suffered from acute heart failure, seemingly caused by stress. A neighbor found him outside his apartment and made the call to have him brought in. His condition is very unstable, and we won’t know until we’ve cleared the blockage if there’s been any permanent damage…”

Somewhere along the way Izuku stops listening to the explanation. Alone, he’d been all alone. Did he see? Did he hear? Did he know Izuku was here, before they took him away? Even if he didn’t….he had to know he was loved, right?

“...let you know when I know more,” The doctor concludes and Izuku nods to indicate he’d heard at least that much.

______________________

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” The doctor says, not even an hour later. And he does, truly, seem sincere. But Izuku cannot comprehend it. Dead. All Might was…

Gone.

It didn’t make any sense. Of course no one is immortal, of course All Might had that old injury to contend with. But he was always ok. Even after his retirement, he was always ok. Until he wasn’t.

The doctor is explaining, now, what went wrong during surgery. How they’d lost him on the table. How he was under anesthetic at the time, asleep. Hadn’t felt a thing.

Good, that’s good. He deserved to go peaceful.

Izuku abruptly stands up, hands the doctor the partially filled out forms, and fishes out his phone.

“Calls,” He mumbles to himself in a tone of voice so robotic even he doesn’t recognize himself. “I need to...call people. Let them know. Make arrangements.”

The doctor seems puzzled by his reaction, but gives him his space as he paces their waiting room making call after call.

“Mom? It’s Izuku,”

“Melissa? This is Midoriya Izuku,”

“Lemillion? It’s Deku,”

Over and over, repeating the news. Apologizing. Listening to the immediate, intense, feelings of grief and wondering what is wrong with him to just feel...hollow.

“Hello? Iida, it’s me, I’m at the hospital and…”

_______________________

The calls continue, well into the night and now into the next day. Izuku’s in his office once more, dressed in the same clothes as the day prior. Looking disheveled and focused. A ghost of his high-school years. 

The other heroes working at the agency move around him nervously. Looking at him, then whispering to each other. He ignores it, there’s too much to do. The funeral service, friends and family. Then, of course, the public memorial. There’s the matter of what to do with possessions in All Might’s now vacant apartment, plus his remaining assets.

He’s muttering to himself now he’s aware, because more heads are turning towards him. More concerned expressions.

“Dekukun,” It’s Uraraka who seems to be feeling brave, approaching the manic hero directly “You should go home and rest, you look like you haven’t slept at all,”

“I can’t, I have to stay. I have to get things ready. The casket and flowers and...shit, I almost forgot, Katsuki and Melissa are stateside, I’ll have to book a flight--” He reaches for the phone but Uraraka puts her hand over that.

“We’ll handle that,” She says with a look that says even more pointedly that this isn’t up for debate. “That’s the point isn’t it? For us all to work as equals,”

And she’s right. That is the point of the agency. But this isn’t agency work.

“This is different, it has to be me,” Izuku shakes his head.

“Why?” Todoroki asks, not bothering to hide that he was eavesdropping on their conversation; his stare piercing through Izuku’s entire being.

“Because…” Because he owes it to All Might. Because he hadn’t been there, let him die alone. Because he’d never done what he was supposed to, never made things right. Never said all those things on the tip of his tongue. Had let his fear swallow him whole and now there was nothing left to do except arrange All Might’s funeral.

“It’s my responsibility,” Izuku says, simply. Firmly. Gathering his notes and list of numbers and cell phone. “I’ll go home, do the rest of this there. I shouldn’t be disturbing your work. I’ll be back after the memorial has finished.”

No one stops him from making his exit.

______________________________

“Izuku!” Melissa calls out the moment she sees him by the baggage claim. Katsuki stays a distance a way, watching as the young engineer rushes to hug the haggard looking hero.

Startled, just for a moment, he stumbles a foot back. Melissa, seeming to have predicted this, keeps him up right as she buries her face in his shoulder. “I can’t believe Uncle Might is gone,”

Slowly, he wraps his arms around her as well, holding her close and letting her tears wet the fabric of his shirt. He has no idea what to say, no words of comfort, so he just holds her while she collects herself. Ignores Katsuki glaring daggers at him over her shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Melissa says, finally, after coming up for air “I’m sorry, you must be more upset than anyone and here I am carrying on--”

“I’m fine,” Izuku replies with a tilted smile, squeezing her hand. “It’s good to see you.”

She pulls away, brushing off her clothes and sniffling a bit; clearly on the verge of even more tears. “My dad wanted to be here, too, but…”

“I know. I tried to pull some strings, get him amnesty so that he could attend but…” he trails off, shaking his head. The authorities had been clear, they consider David Shield to be too dangerous for such a journey. It was unfair, after just one incident all those years ago. It left Melissa alone, too.

“I booked you guys rooms at a hotel not far from where the service will be held, I’ll take you over so you can get some rest,” He changes the subject to one that is slightly less awkward. Katsuki continues to not say anything as he follows Izuku and Melissa out of the airport.

________________________

There isn’t much time left before the funeral service, and a lot of things to get done before hand. At least, that’s what Izuku tells himself in order to keep busy after all the invitations had been passed out and the funeral arrangements made. 

He’d found a lovely funeral home to plan everything, they handled a lot of heroes. Izuku was asked to make a few decisions. Flowers, venue. What All Might was to wear when he was buried. He had suits, more fitted to his form after his retirement, but there were his hero costumes as well. Of every era. That could be refitted if needed.

Izuku thought it would be unfair, after all All Might had done for this world, to have to remain the Symbol of Peace even after being buried. And, selfishly, he wanted to say goodbye not to his childhood hero but to the man who raised him. So he’d decided on a suit.

But using the funeral home meant that there wasn’t much of an active role in the planning process. Which means large blocks of time which Izuku had requested off of work to do nothing but sit and stare at the wall. Or worse, be passed from person to person as they all expressed their condolences.

The brief stints on which he paid visits to his own apartment he’d been handed enough home made meals to feed the entirety of Japan. He’d brought them to the agency, so they could be passed out to anyone who was currently using it as refuge. It wasn’t as if he’d eat all that regardless.

That had killed an hour or so, but had come with the extra painful process of each one of his friends telling him to ‘take it easy’ and then having to persuade them that he was fine, really.

And he was. He was fine. Oddly fine. Exhausted, sure, but he’d been busy. He keeps waiting to not be fine. For it to finally hit him that All Might had died, was gone, that he’d never see him again. To cry his eyes out like Melissa did at the airport.

To cry at all.

While he waits, he finds things to do. Like pack up All Might’s old apartment. Sort his belongings into boxes so they can be stored somewhere and then auctioned off for charity. It’s what the former number one would want, Izuku is sure of it.

The man hadn’t owned much, most of it was keepsakes. Some from his years as a pro, but most from his time as a teacher at UA. Handmade trophies and cards from students. Pictures in frames and in albums. Izuku tries not to think too hard about how many of them feature himself. Pointedly avoids looking directly at a framed photo of his mom, All Might, and himself at his high school graduation ceremony.

“I can’t believe it, my little Izuku is so grown up,” Inko Midoriya wailed, holding a squirming eighteen year old Izuku in her arms as he whined in embarrassment. Still, it had felt nice. To have accomplished what no one thought he could.

Well almost no one.

All Might, the first person to ever tell him he could ever be a hero, strode right up to the small Midoriya family with a big smile. “Midoriya my boy! You really have come far, you should be proud.”

“Thanks dad,” Izuku said, the relief of finally being able to escape his mother’s grip preventing him from thinking about what he was saying. The realization hit him a moment later, a moment too late. He looked up at his teacher with a red face, sputtering. “I’m sorry--I didn’t--”

All Might looked stunned for a moment, before pulling the boy into a hug of his own. “I’m proud of you, my boy.”

That was, of course, was all it took for Izuku to start bawling. Which was exactly what he was doing when the picture had been snapped.

Now, a decade later, he stares at the photograph for just a moment, mouth dry, before gently placing it face down on the side table. There wasn’t time for reminiscing. He had to pack these things up.

________________________

As more and more people file into the room and take their seats, Izuku wonders if he should have looked for a bigger venue. He’d had the list of attendees before hand, had invited them himself, but somehow the crowd seems bigger within these solemn walls. Suffocating, even.

The air is thick, causing his brain to go hazy as he greets people as they walk in. Some shaking his hand, giving condolences; others daring to pull him into a hug. Mostly those were the people he knew well. Mirio, Iida, Uraraka, his mom. And Melissa again, as she ushered in a disgruntled Katsuki.

“Katsuki,” Izuku greets, unsure of what to say. There are so many years between them. The extended silence the most amicable their relationship has ever been. Apparently the explosive man feels less so now, keeping his hands firmly in the pockets of his dark colored suit until Izuku takes the hint and retracts his own hand. “It’s good of you to come.”

“You too,” The blonde speaks for the first time (at least to Izuku) since his plane landed. “Surprised you weren’t too busy to show up.”

Sharp red eyes wander around the room, landing on the sunflowers next to the portrait of their deceased teacher. Not exactly traditional, but Izuku had spent hours staring at, frankly, depressing flower arrangements before coming to the conclusion that All Might would have hated all of them. 

Katsuki seems to agree because he actually smiles slightly. That is, until Izuku returns it with an awkward smile of his own; causing the other hero to click his tongue and frown irritably, rushing off to find his seat.

“Bakugo!” Melissa calls after him, distressed by his behavior “I don’t know what’s up with his attitude, I swear.”

“That’s just...Katsuki,” Izuku replies. Although that wasn’t entirely fair. He hadn’t been this volatile in years. But there were other people to greet and Izuku really didn’t care to spend any more time analyzing Katsuki’s sour mood.

Melissa looked hesitant, but eventually turned to find her own seat. “I’ll talk to you when it’s over, good luck, Izuku.”

______________

It’s not until the service is over that Izuku registers that he won’t remember any of it. It was as if he’d been asleep. All of it, the crying, the speeches, even his own. If he hadn’t written it down he would have no idea what he’d even said. Did it go well? He had no idea. It had all faded into the background, keeping him in a stupor.

He’s snapped to attention by a hand on his shoulder. Aizawa looks almost the same, somehow, even after all these years. His eyes say that he’s on the verge of giving Izuku a lecture, but he decides better of it as he sizes the young hero up.

“Midoriya,” He says, eventually. “It was a nice service. Go home, get some rest.”

Maybe it was force of habit but Izuku almost immediately says ‘yes Mr. Aizawa’ before he remembers he’s not 16 and a student in Eraser Head’s class anymore. So instead he forces a smile, and says “Thank you, I will. As soon as I take care of everything here.”

Aizawa pauses, opens his mouth to argue, then closes it again. He opts instead to nod and give Izuku another pat on the shoulder, before leaving with the now nearly grown Eri in tow.

Things continue in this fashion. People tell him it was a nice service, express their condolences, insist he get some rest, then go home. Until almost everyone is gone. Melissa and Katsuki are waiting, hanging in the back so that Izuku can give them a ride back to their hotel. 

Maybe he should have made arrangements for someone else to take them, he would probably be held up for a while. He walks over to them to suggest just that but Melissa cuts him off before he can start.

“We’re fine waiting.” She insists on Katsuki’s behalf. “It was a lovely service, Izuku, Uncle Might would have thought so too.”

“Yeah, real fuckin’ nice” Katsuki spits, having reached his limit of polite conversation. “It was real fuckin’ nice how you didn’t let anyone help, like you’re the only one affected by all this. It was real fuckin’ nice that you disappeared, didn’t say a word to him for years and now show up like the prodigal son after the fact and pretend like nothing happened. It was especially nice when you stood up there and talked about All Might, the hero, the Symbol of Peace. Like he was a fuckin’ stranger. Like you didn’t even know him.”

Izuku flinches with each pointed, and frankly, true, accusation. Backing up almost subconsciously. Scared of Katsuki in a way he hadn’t been since high-school. Or, more accurately, scared of his words, scared of what he may say next.

“Do you even care? Do you give even a single shit that All Might is dead? Because you’re acting like you couldn’t care less. Did he really mean that little to you? You, the favorite, the golden child. Oh we’re so proud of Deku who can’t be fucked to pick up the fucking phone” Katsuki growls, following Izuku as he stumbles back.

“You know, I get it. Why you never talk to me. I was a jerk, the biggest asswipe on the face of the fucking planet. I made your life hell and you hate me and I deserve it. I deserve for you to pretend I don’t exist. But what I can’t fuckin’ figure out is what the hell All Might did to earn the same treatment! Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you treated him like shit when all he ever did was support you!”

“Even now you’re just staring at me with those fuckin’ zombie eyes, say something! Say something you piece of shit! Show any emotion, if you even fuckin’ still have ‘em!”

Katsuki’s impromptu speech is interrupted by Izuku’s fist connecting with his jaw.

The blonde looks stunned, holding his jaw where there’s now a large blossoming bruise. For a split second it seems like that will be the end of it before he lets out a guttural yell and tackles Izuku to the ground.

Izuku retaliates by slamming his knee, sharply, into Katsuki’s gut. Causing the taller man to cough and roll off him, briefly. They get a few more kicks and punches in before they’re separated. Izuku being lifted off of Katsuki by a not at all amused Tetsutetsu while Ashido hooks her arms under Katsuki’s shoulders to keep him from lunging again.

“Get off of me,” he hisses, shoving her away enough to stand up and straighten his suit. He glares at Izuku but makes no moves to lunge at him once more. Tetsutetsu, in turn, sets Izuku back down.

The moment his feet connect with the floor, a hand smacks him across the cheek. Before he can question it, or even comprehend what had just happened; Melissa has turned around to do the same to Katsuki.

“I can’t believe you! Both of you! Acting this way at Uncle Might’s funeral!” She scolds, potentially the angriest Izuku has ever seen the American. “What would he think, if he saw this? What would he say?”

“It doesn’t matter,” to the surprise of everyone, the sullen, bitter, words come from Izuku and not Katsuki. They turn and look at him, expecting him to apologize or give any indication that he was joking. 

“It doesn’t matter!” He asserts again, wiping blood from his nose. “He’s gone! It doesn’t matter what he’d say or what he’d think because he’s gone!”

His voice cracks on the last word. Because it’s true, All Might is gone. He’d died without Izuku even getting to say goodbye; let alone all the other things. 

I’m sorry I haven’t kept in touch, I was scared. Terrified, that you’d hate me.

I admire you, more than anyone else. And I appreciate everything you’ve done, for the world, for me. I wouldn’t be who I am without you, I wouldn’t be alive.

Because of you I had a safe childhood. Because of you one of the biggest threats to man kind is rotting in prison. Because of you people had hope. I never meant to tarnish your legacy, you’re the entire reason I wanted to be a hero in the first place.

I know it doesn’t seem like it, that it looks like i’m tearing down everything you worked for. That’s why I've been avoiding this, because I didn’t want to hurt you. Because I want you to be proud of me. But this is what needs to be done it’s the right thing to do. Just like what you did was right then.

You were there for me when no one else was, when my biological father couldn’t care less. You took me in, you raised me. I shouldn’t have shut you out, I shouldn’t have avoided this. I wasted precious time.

I’m sorry, thank you. I love you.

“It doesn’t matter, whatever I say, or do; it won’t reach him anymore,” Finally, the damn breaks. Starting with a gasping, hiccuped breath, silent tears streaming, working its way up to full on sobs, enough to wrack his entire frame.

“It’s about damn time,” Katsuki mutters, although there’s no more malice in his tone. “I’m taking a cab back to the hotel, let me know when the waterworks are over,”

Melissa looks angry once more, like she wants to say something, but Katsuki makes his exit quickly, and chasing after him would leave the trembling Izuku alone. So instead, she holds him like he did for her, letting his tears soak her dress.

“It’s going to be alright, because I am here.”

[raendown]

Commission for @crystallizedshadowfire, thank you!

Pairing: MadaraTobirama Rated: E Word count: 4493 Summary: The Chief of Police and the boss of the local mob, an unlikely pairing for sure. Keeping their relationship a secret is hard, coming up with excuses for why they haven't taken each other down yet is harder, but of course Madara always finds a way to complicate things that don't need complicating.

Follow the link or read it under the cut!

KO-FI and commission info in the header!

Criminal Malpractice 

Madara scowled and flinched at the sound of a bullet impacting the concrete wall he and his subordinates were hiding behind. He was getting too old for this shit.

Okay so he wasn’t actually all that old yet, barely creeping up on his mid-thirties, but his poor ears had suffered through more than their fair share of this bullshit. He would find a new line of work if he hadn’t already entrenched himself so deeply in to this lifestyle that the mob might very well fall apart without him. Maybe he should start thinking about training a replacement soon so that he could retire. Obito was showing a lot of promise as he grew in to his later adolescence, he would make a good successor. He was also just crazy enough to enjoy this lifestyle and all the insanity that came with it. Kids these days were wild.

A chunk of something that may have been concrete but also may have been a fragment of skull bone went rocketing passed his face. At the same time one of his men jerked backwards and collapsed to the ground, falling utterly still in a way Madara recognized all too well. His nose wrinkled. Yet another widow to console, another life lost to cover up while he tried to keep his own mourning quiet to help the lower ranks keep up morale. Lately he was running out of ways to make bodies disappear in a manner that wouldn’t lead suspicion back to him or anyone that worked for him and his family. Just because it was common knowledge that the Uchiha family were connected with the mob didn’t mean they should make it easy for the law enforcement to pin them with any actual evidence.

Mistakes like today notwithstanding. If he hadn’t already taken out the cameras in this area it would be very hard to talk his way out of being accused of something here.

Speaking of law enforcement, Madara dared to peek around their cover and count the heads popping up from behind the barricade of police cruisers. He forced his eyes to skip past the head of shining white hair they wanted to catch on and focus instead on the actual bane of his existence. In another world Shimura Danzo would definitely have followed a similar nefarious path as Madara had – although probably with less than half the morals. Madara’s life was filled with illegal acts but he had a code of conduct, okay? He took care of his own and really he was just trying to make this city better. Just because his methods were shady didn’t mean he didn’t care, he simply cared in all the ways that people who followed the law couldn’t.  

Unfortunately for the City of Konoha the illustrious Shimura Danzo had instead decided to dedicate his life to being a police officer. At some point he must have had high hopes for what he surely thought would be a shining career. It clearly rankled that he hadn’t made it even to Captain, stuck forever at the rank of Sergeant and taking out the frustration that gave him on the men he led. Serving under a much younger Chief of Police – the youngest their city had ever seen yet also the most competent – had turned him even more bitter. Several times now the man had tried to reach out to the underbelly of the city, determined to turn dirty cop. Madara, however, owned the underbelly of this city and he had a standing order forbidding his people from dealing with the man.

The chaos of a shootout seemed like the perfect opportunity to remove a problem he was more than tired of working around. Across the way he could see Izuna pausing at the sight of his satisfied grin, though his brother only narrowed his eyes in suspicion. It cut to the quick to be so mistrusted by his own kin. Really it did!

“What are you planning?”

“To get rid of a nuisance,” Madara said. In one smooth motion he stood, aimed, and fired then immediately dropped back down hoping no one caught enough of a look at him for a positive identification. Then he looked over to where Izuna was using a small mirror to keep track of the action. “Did I get him?”

“Yup. You definitely shot the Chief of Police.”

“WHAT!?”

Completely disregarding his own safety, Madara jerked around and popped his head out in to the open. Shimura was still standing. A foot or so to his left side Senju Tobirama, the man who had skyrocketed up the ranks since the day he joined the force, was being dragged away to safety while he very calmly attempted to staunch his own bleeding and sent a thunderous scowl toward the mob forces. Their eyes met across the mayhem for a brief moment and Madara swallowed thickly.

“I’m never going to hear the end of this.”

 -

 The hours he waited in the empty house that night were some of the longest he had ever spent. Owning the city always felt like less of an accomplishment during the times when he was faced with how little rights he had to his own life partner. Falling in love with a police officer was a terrible idea, he’d known that right from the moment he realized where his heart was headed, but staying with the man and supporting him all the way up to being named Chief of Police was such a spectacularly bad idea he still wondered how neither of their associates had caught wind of it yet.

Having only a select few people who knew where he called home helped with that, as well as his partner’s infamous reclusive tendencies. It did not make the waiting any easier when he knew that Tobirama was spending those hours in a hospital undergoing surgery where Madara was quite unwelcome to go visit. A known mob boss visiting an officer of the law? Yeah, not obvious at all.

Adrenaline rushed through him at the click of the lock on their front door and Madara hurried over to peek down the hall just as the tumbler slid back in to place. Tobirama’s movements were stiff but he was blessedly alone as he slid off his shoes and toed them in to the neat little spot where he always kept them, eyeing the coat hooks then sighing and trudging down the hall without removing the fur trimmed civilian jacket buttoned over what remained of his uniform. When he spotted Madara skulking around the corner he stiffened even further and turned in to the kitchen without a word.

Madara slinked after him like a dog with his tail tucked between his legs. Silence stretched between them as Tobirama went through the motions of drawing a mug of tea one handed and the guilt rose higher and higher in Madara’s throat until he couldn’t take it and blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

“So how was your day at work?”

Obviously he realized how stupid that was the moment he said it. He really didn’t need Tobirama to slam his cup down hard enough to slosh precious Darjeeling in every direction.

“You fucking shot me, that was my day at work!” Shaking out his now scalded fingers, he turned around to return fire with the daggers in his eyes. “I’m out of commission for at least a week, if not several, and what do I have to show for it? Another ‘failed’ attempt to take down the man living in my own home. You are very fucking welcome for covering that abysmal escape, by the way, because I had to cover your ass from a god damned ambulance!”

“I’m sorry, okay!? I was aiming for that Shimura dick head!”

“Well your aim fucking sucks, go ask Kagami for a few lessons on marksmanship before you take my head off next time!”

Madara shuddered. His nephew was a walking ball of sunshine terror, too happy to be natural and too gifted with long range weaponry to be entirely human. No way was he putting himself through another round of cheerful hours on the gun range just to come out even more thankful that he’d somehow managed to keep the kid happy in the role of budding assassin. Unhappy assassins usually came after their boss and he certainly wasn’t looking to have both eyes taken out from three streets away with no evidence.

Tobirama cruelly allowed him to stew in those thoughts while he turned away again and ran cold water to soothe the fingers he had spilled tea all over. Watching him, Madara cringed as he realized he had effectively taken both the poor man’s hands out of commission. He really wasn’t doing so hot today. Some big bad boss he made when he couldn’t even care for his own partner properly.

“Let me,” he offered quietly. Tobirama subsided with a grumble, throwing himself down – gently – at the kitchen table to watch every movement with an eagle eye. It was a little nerve wracking but Madara bore up well enough until the tea was cleaned up and remade, delivered with a shamefully bowed head. While his lover drank the offering Madara tried several times to open his mouth and make his apologies but every time he thought he had the words straight in his head he would look up at Tobirama and everything in his brain would scatter all over again in favor of the heavy guilt weighing him down.

He shot his own lover. He put a bullet in to his own partner’s flesh. What words could possibly make up for that? How could Tobirama ever forgive him when he was quite sure he would never forgive himself?

“Nothing vital got hit, at least.” He jerked in surprise when Tobirama broke the silence first.

“Oh. Good. That’s…I’m sorry.” If any of his subordinates could hear how small his voice was in that moment he had no doubt that they would laugh themselves silly and lose all respect for him. No one would ever fear his retribution again if they knew how far gone he was for the man across the table.

“I’m going to bed.”

“But-!”

“Madara, I am tired. I spent nearly thirteen hours in the hospital because they allowed a first year resident to operate and he was so incompetent they had to open me up again and go back in as soon as he stitched me closed. They wanted me to stay overnight but I assured them that I had a ‘guest’ staying with me who could help and now speculations about my personal life have tripled. My own partner shot me, my officers are chomping at the bit to have you behind bars for it, and I am in so much pain I can hardly think straight.” Pushing his empty mug away, he struggled to his feet with his jaw tightening when the motion tugged on some sensitive areas. “I want nothing more than to let this fucking day end.”

He was tottering out of the kitchen a moment later, leaving Madara glaring at the floor in personal offense that it had not yet opened up and swallowed him whole. If he were as brilliant a man as his beloved then maybe he could turn to evil science, create a time machine, go back to this morning and crack himself around the head for ever pointing a weapon anywhere close to his most precious person.

Since he wasn’t a mad genius he hauled himself out of his own chair and shuffled down towards the bedroom after the other man. He found Tobirama hovering by the end of the bed plucking at the buttons of his jacket and scowling deeply, unable to move one arm and unwilling to fiddle too much now that his other hand was covered in mild burns. Madara inched in to the room until he was spotted and told himself that it was perfectly normal for a grown man to feel so small when faced with such a sharp gaze.

“Want some help?” he offered. Tobirama snorted, dropping his hand and turning his head away moodily.

Having two working hands, Madara made quick work of the buttons and helped to slide the jacket off as gently as possible. With soft-spoken requests for a movement here or a shift there he got Tobirama down to nothing but his skin, at which point he hurried over to fetch a pair of pajama pants from one of the dressers against the eastern wall of their bedroom, scurrying back to kneel down and keep Tobirama steady while the man slid one foot in to each leg. It was hard to resist letting his touches linger like they usually would with so much skin on display and his face right there where it would be only too easy to turn his head and take the man’s length in to his mouth. Fortunately he wasn’t stupid enough to do something like that without warning when the mood in the room was so clearly not headed for such activities.

Although…perhaps he could fix that. They both knew that apologies weren’t his strong suit, his words better suited to barking orders than expressing the feelings trapped in his chest. And they both also knew that he was prone to finding more physical ways to making his feelings known, whether that be doing more than his fair share of the household chores or offering certain bedroom services without asking for reciprocation.

Of course what he had done this time was hardly something he could erase with a hand job or two but there was nothing wrong with trying and doing one thing for his partner didn’t mean he was going to call it a day and forget the whole issue. He was an asshole but he wasn’t completely heartless.

Well, not when it came to Tobirama, at least.

The possibility stayed on his mind all through helping Tobirama brush his teeth and wash his face then pulling the sheets down to tuck the man underneath them and go do all those things for himself as well. By the time he was turning off the lights and sliding under the blankets he was half hard in his pajamas and almost ashamed of how much the idea appealed to him. Not because he was ashamed of his own desires, that ship had sailed more than a decade ago and he certainly had no regrets about where his appetites had taken him, but rather because he was sure it wasn’t an appropriate apology for this sort of situation.

But really, was there ever going to be a proper way to say sorry for shooting his own partner in the chest? Or shoulder. He hadn’t had a chance to take a good look at the wound yet, covered as it was by several layers of gauze. At least that particular wave of guilt could be left until tomorrow when he would of course insist on helping to change the bandages.

Madara squirmed and fretted in the dark bedroom until he nearly leapt out of his own skin when Tobirama was once again the first of them to break the silence.

“Do you know how much paperwork I would have had to do if you did manage to shoot that asshole?”

“You…” All the tension in his body was violently expelled with a hard snort of laughter. “Is that what has you so fucking grumpy?” With a grin of relief he rolled over and fitted himself again the other man’s uninjured side. Tobirama sighed moodily.

“No, I’m grumpy because you shot me. With a bullet. It hurts. And I don’t know what painkillers they gave me but I am so high but I still fucking hurt.”

Madara sniggered. “You don’t seem high to me, if that helps.”

“It doesn’t. The room is spinning. Make it stop.”

“Actually, I had a thought. I was thinking of making it spin even faster – in a different way.” He pressed a kiss to Tobirama’s shoulder but got only a huff for his troubles. Stubborn man, refusing to be seduced even when Madara was clearly being obvious about what he wanted to do.

Lolling his head to one side, Tobirama grumbled, “Faster would not help.”

“Stop being stupid and let me give you an apology blow.”

“Ah. I’m quite sure that’s not a great idea at the moment but I am also not going to stop you so long as you understand that I can’t do much in return.” His lover turned to blink hazily at him and Madara could finally see what he meant about the pain killers. That was not the same sharp gaze he had seen in the kitchen. Something must have finally kicked in. With a laugh he pressed forward to kiss those pouting lips.

“That is entirely the point love. You’re going to be angry at me again in the morning anyway so you might as well enjoy tonight, yes?” Madara waited for the other man to nod in concession of his excellent point before shuffling around and sliding further down the mattress. “Good, then just lay back and let me take care of you.”

He gleefully chuckled over the agreeable hum from his partner. Usually it was a lot easier to fluster Tobirama with blunt sex talk but apparently the influence of whatever drugs they had him on mellowed out certain inhibitions. It was a shame his job kept him strait-laced and prevented them from recreating this again another day because Madara would have loved to see what kind of filthy things he could talk his way in to like this.

A quick blowjob to see if high-Tobirama was any louder than sober-Tobirama was a good start, though. Madara licked his lips as he gently wriggled his way in between the other man’s legs, being careful not to jostle him too much, then reached for the ties of the pajama pants he had picked out just a few minutes before. If anyone happened to ask he might be convinced to admit that he had chosen these ones because this shade of red looked lovely with Tobirama’s skin and the stretchy cotton made his ass look fantastic. Luckily no one was ever likely to ask.

Briefly mourning that he wouldn’t get to see that ass bent over for him – probably for a long while – Madara bent his neck to draw his tongue along the crease where thigh met groin, smooth skin devoid of hair because his lover liked to keep himself neat in all respects. Steady breathing increased gradually the further his licks and kisses moved inwards until finally Tobirama let out a soft gasp when Madara pressed his tongue flat against the underside of the cock now stiff and full as it waited for his attention and slid all the way up to take the head in his mouth. Then he himself was tempted to moan at the feeling of having his mouth filled.

“Shit,” Tobirama whimpered above him – honest to god whimpered. Legal or not, Madara was definitely getting his hands on something to get this man high again.

In reward for such a pretty sound he slid further down to take as much in as he could. One of his hands pressed down on the hips that were beginning to squirm, hoping Tobirama didn’t hurt himself moving around too much, while his other explored whatever heated skin he could reach. His head bobbed in a slow rhythm in time with the hand that skimmed trembling thighs and traced the grooves of a clenched abdomen. It had always been Tobirama’s body that spoke his pleasure the loudest; hearing him swear so easily and so honestly went straight to Madara’s own cock.

He’d already been sporting a semi. Just that one word combined with the soft groan that followed in the wake of his hands was enough to have him rock hard inside his own pajamas.

Were he not hyper aware of the fact that this was all meant as the start of his – likely to be months long – apology he might have tried to suggest something that would be a little more mutually satisfying. Or if he also weren’t aware that doing so would probably end with Tobirama tearing out his stitches in the heat of the moment. Madara rolled his hips down and moaned around the hard flesh in his mouth, tempted by the idea of grinding himself against the mattress until another thought wriggled its way in.

Tobirama’s protest when he pulled away was garbled and indistinct in a way it never would have been were he entirely sober. It was just enough encouragement for Madara to shuffle around until he was up on his knees where he could go back to work with one hand still holding the weakly bucking hip underneath him in place. With his other he took a moment to skim down and cup his partner’s sacs, rolling them and sliding his fingers lower to trace the places he couldn’t explore until Tobirama was healed enough that the writhing he was prone to wouldn’t hurt him. Then another soft curse met his ears and Madara began to frantically pull at his own drawstrings until they were loose enough to shove the material down and take himself in hand.

His moan vibrated around the shaft he was pleasuring, earning himself yet another intoxicating sound from his partner and encouraging both his mouth and his hand to move faster. Madara was sure if he weren’t already busy concentrating on other things he would be panting as quickly as he could hear the other was. If they continued on just like that he wouldn’t have lasted all that long anyway but then the most amazing thing happened.

For probably the first time in his life Tobirama began to babble.

“Shit, feels good. Don’t…don’t stop. Just- ah. Warm. And wet. Fuck, your mouth is wet. Feels amazing. Do that – with your tongue? That-? Yes, fuck yes, that. Ma-hah! Madara…”

Every word that spilled from him wound the man between his legs higher and higher until Madara was working himself as desperately as he was bobbing his head, praying he could hold off until his partner found satisfaction yet unable to stop his hand from chasing the incredible end he could feel coming on fast. He’d never heard anything like this from Tobirama. Since the day they first gave in to the helpless attraction between them their intimate activities had been filled with a chorus of noises from his own mouth and little more than the occasional grunt from his stubbornly reticent partner.

He had almost forgotten how hot it was to hear someone else enjoying themselves as much as he was.

It wasn’t hard to pinpoint the moment Tobirama finally noticed that he was pleasuring himself at the same time. The apparently unexpected discovery was accompanied with a long drawn out sound that could only be described as lewd and an enthusiastic bucking of the hips. Madara had just enough time to brace himself before his tongue was coated with seed, the entire world fuzzing out around him a few seconds later as the tension inside him burst at last and he spilled over his own hand as well.

Gasping with a cock still filling his mouth was a little hard but Tobirama seemed to appreciate the sensation of his continuous moans until finally they were both completely spent and Madara swallowed the bitter come with only a light grimace. As much as he enjoying sucking cock he’d never really appreciated the taste of the end results. He did very much appreciate the blissed out expression that was waiting for him when he lifted his head, half-lidded eyes staring back at him, satiated and full of warmth. Madara shivered with renewed interest that he regretfully set aside for another time.

“Was a v’ry good apologize. Apology. S’a good blowjob.” Tobirama’s lips curled up in a dopey smile and Madara paused to appreciate the rare sight.

“Should I help you get back in to your pants?” He offered, not trusting himself to say anything else just yet. If he did then it would either be some mangled form of dirty talk or he would spill his whole heart out on the floor in the form of terrible poetry mixed in with a hundred more apologies. And not even sexy ones.

“Mmm. Probably should, yes.”

“Right.” Nodding to himself Madara set about righting both of their clothes and found something to wipe his hand on, snagging a bottle of water from inside the nightstand to rinse out his mouth as well.

Then he crawled up the mattress to lay himself carefully at Tobirama’s side and pulled the blankets up over both of them. He made sure they were all perfectly even and straight, just how his partner liked them, then pressed a kiss against the man’s good shoulder and curled up against him as much as he could without having to worry about jostling the injuries he had caused.

“I’ll cook you breakfast in bed tomorrow,” he promised in a whisper. “And I’ll fetch anything you want around the house. And I’ll even do my best to hold my temper when you inevitably get irritated that you can’t do anything for yourself; we both know you will, don’t deny it.” Despite his words he paused, waiting for the expected denial because Tobirama had a very selective memory when it came to his own temper, but it never came. Curious, Madara lifted his head and peek around to see what was holding his tongue.

Fast asleep. Whatever drugs they had given him were finally doing their job, pulling him down in to dreamland where the pain couldn’t touch him. As much as Madara loved having his partner’s attention he was glad that he would spend the night comfortably and find good rest.

Tomorrow he would spend the day waiting on his partner’s every beck and call. And the next day he was calling Izuna to schedule a council of the Family. Some things in this city had needed changing for a long time and while he was certainly the right man for the job he was not willing to risk the only person who had ever loved him as completely as Tobirama did. Which meant that they would need to change some things about how they themselves operated as well. First he would help his beloved feel better. Then he could go out and make the world better as he’d always intended.

By force if necessary. A smirk tilted the corners of his lips and he looked over at his sleeping partner. He always had preferred to act first and apologize later; at least with some things he rather enjoyed the apology.

[errantabbot]

America and Abortion

A big part of the problem around abortion in this country rests in our collective inability to recognize the whole scope of an issue, for our Abrahamic-rooted tendency to see things through the binary of good and evil. It has to be one OR the other in the minds of the masses. Reality is anything but binary, however.

It seems that there are largely two camps, those who want to distill the matter down to being a “women’s health” issue, and one that wants to condense it into a matter of “personhood.” In reality, both simplifications are falsehoods, reflecting very real aspects of a much wider matter.

For those that assert the primacy of the “women’s health” perspective, an affront is cast to those, who in their sincerity, cannot understand how one could deny the personhood of a developing child. To them, to deny personhood seems to be a sort of slippery slope, that might translate into other aspects of life. After all, how do we really define personhood? Autonomy? If so, are developmentally disabled humans persons, and at what point(s)? What about comatose patients reliant on life supporting devices, with differing levels of brain activity? Does brain activity define personhood? If so, how much?

We’re evolutionarily hardwired to want to care for children, and conceptually for some an embryo is a child and it’s a perspective that is not without credence. “Liberals” frequently want to cast abortion as a matter that’s dealing with a depersonalized, or more accurately, not yet personalized phenomenon, hence the reliance on the words like “fetus” and “embryo” and frequent use of imagery more akin to a zygote than anything remotely humanoid. From my seat this is plainly dishonest, and does not recognize the several stages of development in which abortion is possible and is practiced. Until we can recognize that, conversation is not possible.

On the other hand, we have the “conservative” perspective, that while quickly affirmative of personhood in the developing stages, is frequently unable to recognize the personhood of the fully formed being that is the woman carrying the “fetus” or “embryo.” An affront is this cast to women at large. This is perhaps an easy perspective to adopt, though, because of the historical way that we have treated women, frequently as half-humans. After all, in the west we’ve long professed to be more concerned with children than adults of any gender anyway. It’s a deeply rooted fantasy. If the boat is sinking, women and children get rescued first. If the rafts are overweighted, adults go overboard before children, no?

But still, it’s more than this. We expect adults to be “accountable” for their actions, and seek to protect children who are not yet responsible or autonomous. This is why “conservatives” tend to cast abortion chiefly as a matter of promiscuous women trying to avoid the consequences of their actions, as a means of birth control, and destroying another person in the process (and remember our professed, though frequently unreal, hierarchy of values is concerned with children first, then adults). But, of course, this does not reflect the reality of a great many abortions which are indeed matters of women’s health. Until we can recognize this, and the frequent dishonesty of our professed values in practice, which are dehumanizing of women rather than merely affirmative of that in developing children, conversation is not possible.

The answer to abortion will never be banning. As “conservatives” are quick to recognize in the world of firearms, it doesn’t work toward its intended aims, and is frequently oppressive. The answer is also not to dismiss the question of personhood, as it is a matter at the heart of all governance with far-reaching implications.

The only way forward is to transcend the binary, and recognize that abortion is frequently, and from both primary perspectives, a “both/and” matter. Deeply difficult conversations need to be had, and this issue needs to be recognized as the complicated, ethical conundrum that it can be.

There are women deeply entrenched in all sides of this issue, and sadly they are not conversing with one another, let alone being considered by the masses of men holding the legislative pens.

Until we can stop dehumanizing and demonizing the “other,” and can learn to listen, rather than simply shout at one another, this and so many divisive, but very real matters, will proceed only partially considered, and therefore ignorantly harmful.

~Sunyananda

[seeasweetsmile]

Title : In a few years Pairing : Lance x Pidge (Pidgance) Summary : Lance just came to see Pidge for advice about the girls. He did not expect the subject to take a much more serious turn.

Autor’s notes : So.... I tried. Also, sorry if there’s somes errors. English is not my first language. Hope you like this, though ! :)

When Lance had come to see Pidge in her hangar to ask her for advice on the girls, he didn’t expect to see his hopes smeared by the impassive attitude of the Green Paladin. Sitting cross-legged on her chair, a screwdriver in hand, she was focused on the small machine she was making. There were bolts, pieces of junk and other electronic components all over her desk. Well understood, despite her occupation, she remained attentive to what Lance said. He also sat next to Pidge, on the second chair available, he exposed at her his problem ; the girls from the planets he saved were happy to take pictures with him, but as soon as he wanted to share a private moment with them or he flirted, the girls would laugh and go away, not missing thank him for his help. He was however confident about his qualities and his physique, and didn’t see what was wrong. He had even tried a less direct, gentler and more serious approach but the girl had completely refused his advances.

What was he doing wrong ? Would that be the ears that would be problematic ? Allura had said that she found his ears hideous, the first time they met, so maybe all the aliens were the same ? That they also thought that human ears were ugly ?

"Do you think I should do surgery and change my ears...?” Wondered Lance, touching the end of one of her ears. "Like, more pointed like the Alteans ? Or maybe more horny ?" "I think the problem is not your ears, your ridiculous flirtation or your idiotic airs," Pidge enumerated under the protests of the Cuban. "For me, the problem is what will happen next."

"Next ?” Repeated Lance, blinking. "Yeah. Think about it. Assuming that you really find a girlfriend and that it works between you, how are you going to communicate once you get back to Earth ?" "Easy : you could make us phones, so we'll talk to you from a distance." "And after ? When will the calls not be enough ? What would you like to see ?" "We can see each other if you program a camera on the phone." "I didn’t talk about that. I meant, physically ? When would you like to touch ? Do you hug or kiss ?” She questioned, crossing Lance's gaze for a moment.

At that moment, the Cuban couldn’t help but blush instinctively under the two golden orbs of his friend. Eyes that make you feel so stupid that it was disturbing. She quickly turned her attention to her machine and Lance let out a breath that he did not know he was holding, relieved. The Green Paladin swapped her screwdriver for a small green card, which she inserted into the box. A small "click" was heard, a sign that the card was secure, and a brief, satisfied smile passed over Pidge's lips. She went back to work without another word, and Lance clenched his fists on his lap before answering to her.

"I... I'd take a space shuttle or something.” He stammered, disconcerted.

"Fine, and assuming you get it, it'll take you months -even years, to join her." "Not if you can program a boost on the ship.” He retorted quickly, his finger up. "A boost that has a chance in two to blow up your shuttle. Do you remember the incident that Keith and Allura had ?” She asked, inspecting the inside of her camera, her eyes hard shut. "I... That's right, you're right," He admitted, lowering his eyes. “But I would be willing to take the risk." "If it ever happened, you will take even less time to get to your planet. You'll be old, probably with one foot in the grave when you reach the planet." "Love has no age.” He whispered, unconvinced by his own words.

"Maybe, yes. But imagine that once on her planet, she didn’t wait for you. That she found someone else. And that she even founded a family, for example. Are you still going to ask her to leave everything to be with you ?” Questioned Pidge leaving her machine eyes to look through her glasses that fell on her nose. "What ?! I-... No, of course not ...!” He mumbled, dismayed by her assumptions. "So are you going to turn around, your heart in a thousand pieces in your hands ? Find another alien on her planet to make up for her lack ?” Chained the hacker of the group by raising her glasses on the bridge of nose. "I-I do not know, okay ?!” He said, frowning, locked in his entrenchments. "Since you are so clever, tell me what to do, Mademoiselle I-know-all !"

Raising his head, he saw Pidge inhale deeply and put her screwdriver a second time on the worktop in a "glong" sound. She finally turned her head towards Lance and looked at him seriously. They stared at each other in silence for two ticks, until the Green Paladin finally spoke.

"Stop running after the aliens and find a girl you can reach. A girl from your own planet. The aliens that you are courting certainly think that it’s better not to mix the tea towels and towels. They doesn't want to be with a partner that will be impossible for them to see regularly. It would be far too complicated and painful. So the simplest and most logical choice is to stay with one's people.” Explained Pidge, before shrugging and swiveling in front of her desk. "But well, it’s just my opinion."

She went back to work in silence to allow Lance time to think about what she had just said. The Cuban, meanwhile, stared distantly at Pidge’s hands who began to tinker with the materials on her work plan. He ends up swallowing and shamefully lowering his eyes on his lap. He had never thought about it so far. For him, all that mattered was simply spending time with pretty girls and being adored by the girl. And if he had a girlfriend, he didn’t know if the relationship would last. Probably as long as the Universe needed Voltron... But he was still too young and too focused on the present to think about the future with a big F. Especially a future with an alien.

Lance knew that Pidge was not wrong. He knew it perfectly, but ... to hear her thwarted all these solutions and to break his hopes at the same time, as if nothing was going on, he was beating his stomach. Despite the pain, he could not totally blame his friend. She was right all the way, he sighed inwardly, dropping his shoulders. The alien's girls that he was wishing didn’t want a relationship at a distance... Even his older sisters, when the conversation of love affairs fell on the carpet, had told him one day : "Avoid relationships at a distance like the plague, Lance. Especially long distances. They never stay on the road for a long time.".

Lance sighed a second time while sinking into the back of his seat, practically seated on his back, legs outstretched all their long, and rested his forearms on the armrests. It was then that his name pronounced by Pidge's voice reached his ears and made him raise his head. Intrigued by her slight contrite smile and her two golden orbs in which a guilty look was reflected, the young man raised his eyebrows as a silent question.

" I’m sorry. I went too far, didn’t I ?” She asked calmly. The Blue Paladin straightened up as if he had been screwed on springs, surprised at the excuses she had just let go. "What ? No ! I-... no... No, that's fine.” He answered, hesitating, before running a hand through his short hair. "I mean, you're the brain of the team. And if there is one person who can logically reason with this kind of little details, it's you, Pidge. That's why I came to see you. Well, basically, I just wanted some advice. Not a lecture.” He joked, shrugging his shoulders in a sad little smile. Pidge grimaced and slowly turned her little machine between her palms, as if to find something to do with her hands, before answering, her gaze dropped on her metal block.

"I tend to dissect things too much. And to go to the bottom of my reasoning without taking into account the feelings of others.” She explained before looking at him for a moment. "I should't have pushed you to the limit. " "Even if it sucks a blow, in the end, you're right. Remote relationships, especially between planets, are very unlikely to survive.” He recognized before sighing theatrically, crossing his arms behind his head. "I have only to wait to go back to Earth and find myself a cute little earthen, in this case...! " A mocking smile stretched on Pidge's lips, who couldn’t help but lightly slapping Lance's leg with her foot to get his attention.

"It’s not win. I wish you all the luck of the Universe to find someone who can support you."

Lance chuckled in a "Hey !” before cuddling his foot back into the chair of the Green Paladin, who swiveled toward him. Seeing the teasing smile and the two golden orbs laughing at Pidge toward him, the Cuban felt himself crinkling from head to foot, ignoring the beating that his heart had missed, and spoke to defend himself, pointing at her.

"We'll see when we get back to Earth."

"I caaaan’t wait ...!” The girl sarcastically retorted as she leaned close to him, a grin on her face.

"In a few months or in a few years, you'll laugh less, Pidge.” Ensure Lance in a wink.

The hacker of the group brought her arm to her belly while her hand still held her little machine, and tilted her head to the side while another malicious smile stretched her lips, sign that she had just thought of something. And the sass of the Green Paladin didn't delay.

"Heh, and if all your attempts fail with the girls, maybe you will make me feel pity enough that I may agree to go out with you ?” The young girl joked.

A laugh and a heat bubbled into Lance's chest, which could only answer a simple "Oh ?”, disconcerted again by Pidge's words, before bending over to the side of his chair, leaning against one of his armrests.

"I caaaan’t wait...!” Repeated Lance with a playful smile, not paying attention to the heat that spread to his ears at the thought of having Pidge as a girlfriend.

[creativesage]

(via The Need for Transformative Alliances between Social Entrepreneurs and the Private Sector)

By Arnaud Mourot / Disruptive Innovations

Today’s global issues have changed so dramatically in size and complexity that no single class of player can pretend to solve them alone.

As a result, alliances have been forged to tackle major issues (access to vaccines, new forms of energy, and food) but very often in emergency contexts and most of the time led by government or private donation programs.

Yet in a world marked by an increasing rate of change, social problems have become so widespread and numerous that these classical alliances between international or local NGOs and international bodies are no longer sufficient. New types of approaches must be invented that leverage market dynamics to solve our world’s most entrenched and challenging issues.

Ashoka Fellows, two-thirds of whom have partnered with for-profit companies, are leading the way on transformative alliances with the private sector. In this article we will share best practices and lessons from our Fellows on creating transformative change through strategic business alliances.

Why Social Entrepreneurs and Companies Need to Work More Closely Together

At Ashoka, we are convinced that social entrepreneurs can play a key role in this new paradigm because of their systems change mindset and their constant quest for more efficient, sustainable, and replicable solutions. More strategic alliances with the private sector will expand Fellows’ reach and impact while establishing companies on the cutting edge of new markets and opportunities.

Large Companies Face Challenges Reaching New Markets, Seeding Innovation, and Hiring Purpose-Driven Employees

On their end, large corporations are increasingly confronted with questions about their quest for purpose, their markets of tomorrow, attracting and retaining talent, and the need to do business in a way that enhances the world we live in.

Companies’ innovation strategies focus mainly on product development (through incremental processes) or on digital solutions, often without seeing the “big picture” and radically new approaches. Employees end up lacking purpose and leaving their job. According to Gallup, only 13 percent of employees worldwide are engaged in their work.1 Finally, most global corporations tend only to operate in the upper tier of the world’s pyramid, serving people who can afford their products or services. As a result, this space has become overcrowded, while, at the same time, many people still lack access to basic goods like electricity and running water, and companies repeatedly fail in approaching those “BOP” (Base of the Pyramid) markets which require totally different approaches and business models.

Social Entrepreneurs Are on the “Bleeding Edge” of New Markets, Innovation, and Purpose

Ashoka Fellows have a track record of demonstrating that their ideas can have profound impacts in the business sector. In the 2018 Global Fellows Study we found that 93 percent of Ashoka fellows have transformed market dynamics and 60 percent have created entirely new markets.

For instance, four years before the inception of Mpesa, Ashoka Fellow Brian Richardson co-founded an organization called Wizzit, servicing unbanked or underbanked people in South Africa which was recognized as the first mobile bank.

Eight years before the inception of Air B&B, Casey Fenton co-founded Couch Surfing, the first global network allowing travelers to find easily places to stay when travelling.

These innovations were developed to serve social purposes first, and had widespread social impact, but also ended up influencing future major corporate players who brought those innovations or some of their key components to the next level, giving millions more people access to these ideas.

Social entrepreneurs are very often ahead of the curve and can come up with disruptive innovations. However, one is forced to recognized that for all sorts of reason, especially cultural and structural, they barely can develop their innovations very broadly and are blocked by a glass ceiling.

Building stronger alliances between social entrepreneurs and the private sector seems like an obvious choice. So why are there so few examples of effective collaboration?

How Ashoka is Transforming Collaboration Between the Private and Social Sectors

Many attempts at collaboration between the for-profit and the not-for-profit sector have failed because of a lack of clear common framework, methodology, and the right governance scheme.

It took Ashoka some time (and many failures!) to understand that before even talking about doing business differently, we had to make the case to companies that it was worth investing in collaborative models with social entrepreneurs. Therefore, we decided to take a step back and to evolve our approach, explaining to our corporate partners that working with social entrepreneurs was not about doing business (at least not on the short term), but was instead about transforming their organizations to reach new markets with more innovative solutions. In order to do business differently companies have to look at the world with a new lens, be ready to rethink the way they operate and organize, and redefine traditional metrics of “success.” This shift only works if companies can form a changemaking culture internally (new skills and ways of organizing) and empower every single employee to be part of a meaningful process of change.

Making More Health: An Example for Companies to Engage More Deeply with Social Entrepreneurs

Ashoka’s work was dramatically accelerated by our partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim (BI), a global family-owned pharmaceutical company with which we have partnered since 2011 through the Making More Health initiative, an innovative 360° initiative that we co-created with “BI.”

This partnership is based on three major pillars that reflect the observations mentioned above:

www.makingmorehealth.org

This partnership has been an insightful learning journey for both of our organizations and has helped to validate assumptions we had about the benefits of bringing social entrepreneurs together with private companies:

Partnering with social innovators leads to more private sector innovation. A global community of hundreds of social innovators worldwide now interacts with BI in more than 40 countries and brings insights on various areas of corporate development and strategy.  

Creating a critical mass of people understanding and practicing “changemaking” makes it easier to collaborate with others

In the case of BI, 5,000 (10 percent of its workforce) employees have been involved or trained in Making More Health. The global leadership development program now includes several Making More Health initiatives and aims to develop Accountability, Agility, and Intrapreneurship.

New business models have emerged based on social innovations that are directly connected to the strategy department of the company.

So far 10 million people have now accessed the various solutions that Making More Health helped to develop, and this is only the beginning. We also learned that setting a peer-to-peer type of governance between Ashoka and BI was key to sustaining such an initiative and keep the right long-term direction.

More interestingly, BI’s thinking about social impact through business has evolved from selling products to building local health ecosystems with other players (business, social, and public). For Ashoka, this partnership has had a transformative impact and helped us not only validate some of our assumptions but also replicate this 360° scheme with other companies and define a new kind of company we seek to partner with the “Changemaker Company.”

The Next Frontier: Changemaker Companies and Changemaker Organizations

Changemaker Companies are pioneering businesses that engage in solving social and environmental problems at scale through their core business. They do this by working hand in hand with their employees, consumers, and other strategic allies, including an ecosystem of social innovators and entrepreneurs. These visionary companies shift mindsets and the means of value creation as well as leadership and management practices, setting new global standards for conducting their business.

Becoming a changemaker company is a long process that impacts all dimensions of the organization: its Human Resources policy, its innovation process, and eventually its overall strategy and purpose. We are convinced that working with social entrepreneurs in that process can have a strong catalytic effect, as social entrepreneurs, in most cases, are themselves leaders of changemaker organizations.

Our goal is now to demonstrate that this transformation process applies not only to some “happy few,” but is relevant to any type of organization, regardless of size, industry, or legal structure. This will take time and effort, and many failures and learnings. But we are committed to contributing to a new kind of economy, one that is more respectful of the mankind and the planet, and we believe that new forms of collaboration between the private sector and social entrepreneurs can help pave the way.

Works Cited:

1 Mann, Annamarie, and Jim Harter. "The worldwide employee engagement crisis." Gallup Business Journal 7 (2016).

Author bio

Arnaud Mourot is the Global Leader for Strategic Corporate Alliances at Ashoka. A former member of the French team of Olympic wrestling for 10 years and a graduate from ESCP Business school, Arnaud has been involved in the humanitarian sector since he finished his studies. He founded and led the NGO “Play International” (formerly Sport Sans Frontières) and contributed to the development of various social businesses and CSOs in France. He joined Ashoka to launch its operations in France, Belgium, and Switzerland in 2005 and is the co-founder of the Making More Health partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim. Arnaud is married and the father of three children. He is based in Switzerland.

Issue 52

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it at Social Innovations Journal.]

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At Creative Sage™, we love to connect corporate leaders and entrepreneurs with good causes, and help companies start genuine Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability, Social Entrepreneurship, Intrapreneurship, Impact Investing and/or philanthropy programs that are a win-win for all partners. We’re also researching new developments in the Sharing Economy that include new business models to increase profits, and also support social good.

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